One thing about me: I love bragging about my teaching skills. First off, I was my brother’s first math teacher. I successfully taught him trigonometry when he was in fourth grade, and I’m quite certain that his mathematical abilities will surpass mine anytime now. In fact, being a teacher was the first job I ever considered. I believe that being a teacher can directly impact people’s lives by helping them understand teaching content and connect to the real world. Therefore, whenever I had the opportunity to become a teacher of any sort, I jumped at the chance.

This time, as a Model United Nations executive member, I volunteered to take on the role of being the new MUN members’ teacher. As I vividly remember my clueless self figuring out the MUN procedures during my first conference, I decided to make a completely new MUN curriculum for those who were starting from scratch. Throughout the past few months, I worked on slideshows that could systematically present the complicated procedures in MUN. Every week, I would meticulously plan out the teaching material for the next lecture day and use supplements such as worksheets to help bolster the understanding of the subject. Below are some teaching materials I made for the new MUN members.

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This year, I’ve had the honor to be part of the planning team for Spirit Week. Below are my planning process and reflection!

Planning the Themes and Activities

Within two weeks of discussion and planning, we (the house committee) decided on the themes and activities, featuring new themes such as Beach Day, Twin Day, House Battle Day, and Formal Day. To make planning more efficient, I allocated each activity to two people in the committee. Here is one of my planning documents:

Creating the Online System for Selfie Assassin

Since I was mainly in charge of Thursday’s selfie assassin, I had to devise an online system whereas students and teachers can submit their selfies in order to eliminate their victim. (The object of “selfie assassin” is to take a selfie with someone in order to “assassinate” the person.)

First, I made a google form for selfie submissions. This step was relatively simple because all I had to do was to obtain the high school roster from the IT office and organize them into the drop-down menus.

After connecting the form to a spreadsheet, I played around with coding functions on google sheet to make the system less manual. Using the array formula, I connected the name inputs from the google form to the houses of each student, pasting them in a separate column as shown below.

Then, I used a countif formula to compile the statistics into another spreadsheet where I can periodically check everyone’s game status.

In order to help students visualize the results, I utilized the pivot table function to display the number of kills made by each house. This graph was embedded on the house website for students to easily access the results.

The biggest obstacle I came upon was how to automatically eliminate the victim from the online system. I didn’t want to be manually deleting the names of the victims from the drop-down menu; therefore, I ended up using the script editor so the google form can automatically delete names from the victim’s column. After a weekend of testing and research, IT WORKED! As they say, “All of the biggest technological inventions says little about intelligence, but speaks volumes about laziness.”

Drafting Emails

Over the week, my job was also to constantly draft emails in order to keep the student body informed and raise the school spirit. To appeal more to students, I tried to use a casual and fun tone while drafting the emails. Here are some of the emails I drafted for Spirit Week.

Overall, the planning process for Spirit Week was exhausting but rewarding. We saw a 20% increase in student participation compared to last year; it all paid off when students joined us in our activities with overflowing enthusiasm! In the future, I hope to utilize my organizational skills and constantly challenge myself in planning more activities at KAS.