What This Blog is About

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog! Who am I, you ask? Well, I'm just a normal teenage girl who is currently enrolled in the IB program. Never heard of it? This program is universally recognized and compared to the Ontario curriculum, it compacts 5 years of school (Grade 9-first year university) into 4 years of high school. Another very important thing that distinguishes the IB program from other programs is the dropout rate! During these 4 years of the program, approximately 60-70% of the students dropout before the end of Grade 12. This statistic is based on my school but from what I've heard, other schools' dropout rates aren't that much lower, if not higher.

So what's the purpose of this blog? Well, before I answer that question I'll have to provide some more detailed background information for program (if you're an IB student yourself, you've earned yourself the right to skip this paragraph and jump directly to the next). The IB program really focuses on helping its students become well-rounded by encouraging them to get involved in activities outside of the classroom. Thus, one special requirement of the IB program is the completion of 150 CAS hours,that are equally divided into three categories - Creativity, Action and Service (notice my blog title!). Students are to complete these hours in 2 years, their junior and senior years of high school. Not only do we have to get signed letters proving the completion of hours in a certain activity, we also have to write CAS journals on a frequent basis reflecting our thoughts or emotions after having participated in a certain CAS activity. What activities you do is completely your choice; track and field, math club, volunteering in a hospital, painting masterpieces - these are just 4 of the thousands of different things that you get to pick from.

Anyways, so back to the original question regarding the reason of starting this blog. Everyone has their own learning approach, am I right? For me, I dislike writing journals on Microsoft Word and even an extremely fancy notebook wouldn't be able to capture my interest for more than a month. That's just me. I've tried keeping a written journal many times in my life so far but none of them survived for longer than a month. However, it was fortunate for me to discover an interesting aspect of myself - I enjoy blogging! I kept another blog http://yuanlingyuan.blogspot.com/ for a year and a half now, blogging on a biweekly basis. Thus, the true purpose of this blog is to help me stay motivated for my CAS journals! I'll be blogging here on a biweekly basis as well, or even more frequent. A blog is a public journal and since I'm not afraid to share my feelings with everyone, this is the perfect way for me to keep a "journal" until graduation in 2012. Plus, I won't even have to worry about misplacing or spilling tea on my journal book! How awesome is that? :)