January 2025 – Alexia’s Blog

Winter Formal

Thursday December 12th, 2024

EVENT PARTICIPATION:

During the winter formal I was one of the people responsible for working at coat check and for relieving people during the event so that they didn’t do the same task for four hours straight.

Before Event:
Morgan and I were stationed in A110 and got with the teachers and discussed our plan of action. We began by prepping before the grade 12s arrived, which means opening the bags for the coats and writing down the numbers on the pieces of tape. We also arranged the desks in rows and put pieces of tape on the ends so that we knew which bags were in the rows (for example, row 1 was the furthest from the door and it contained the bags number 1 – 20-something). I also helped a little with last-minute decorations because I arrived early, but Grad Council didn’t need much more help at that point.

During Event:
As the event began, my job at coat check was putting the numbered wristbands on people’s wrists and placing the pieces of tape on the bags after Morgan had assisted the person in putting their items in the bag (the wristbands correlated with the numbers on the bags).

Once we were done with coat check, we went to go take over for others. My time was primarily spent running around and doing odd jobs, especially upstairs in the casino area. I moved chips from the playing tables to the center exchange table, shuffled cards for some of the teachers that didn’t have leadership students assigned to them, and brought drinks and tissues for the people working in the casino.

As the event went on, Vy and I began preemptively cleaning up. We began tossing out garbage and picking up decorations that had fallen, and we spent a good portion of time going around with garbage bags and collecting cups, cans, and plates (with one bag being cans and the other compost)

After Event:
Morgan and I returned to coat check, where Morgan would ask the grade 12s what number was on their wrist and Ms. Kim and I would run to collect the corresponding bag. Once all the items had been returned to their owners, we rearranged the desks back to how they were prior to the event, and removed the extra desks from the room.

Additional Leadership in December:
I participated in all the Spirit Week Days (photos below) and also helped clean up the stage after the Talent Show because I had an off block, and because I’m a music student I was comfortable with cleaning up equipment and instruments.

EVIDENCE + CURRICULAR COMPETENCIES:

Alignment with Course Goal:

My course goal was to become more involved in the planning of events. This, however, was not am event where I could do that because it was entirely orchestrated by Grad Council, but it did give me plans for our winter formal next year (which I intent to be involved of the planning of). Throughout the nights I was making note of what I thought went well and what didn’t go well for future reference and use – not only for the next winter formal, but also for other potential leadership “party” events (like if we choose to run spring fling this year).

Example 1:

Action:

Frequent job switches during the event and doing odd jobs

Connection to Competency:
Theme 1: Principles of Leadership and Teamwork – Recognize why it is important to be a team player

Explanation:

I believe that it’s important to not grow complacent during these events and allow yourself to grow comfortable stationed in a certain place (for example, the lovely AC’d rooms with the food), and instead ensure that things are running smoothly, but more importantly that others can do their jobs do the best of their abilities, as well. That is why I kept myself in a floater position (essentially moving the entire event) so that I could continuously go to places where I was needed. Sometimes I would be needed to do some jobs up at casino (drink drinks, shuffle cards, etc), and sometimes I would do other things like keep an eye on a room while the assigned leadership student stepped out for a few minutes to do something. The early start to cleaning up was prompted in the first place because I noticed a massive section of the decorations up in the casino area had fallen from where they were up on the wall, and they were blocking people’s path in the already cramped area, so I thought yikes! better get that out of the way and then proceeded to continue cleaning up.

Example 2:

Action:

Prep work done just before the event began and people came to coat check

Connection to Competency:

Theme 2: Self-Awareness and Personal Leadership – Identify strategies to aid oneself with stress and create environments that prevent and reduce stress.

Explanation:

The prep work that was done before the actual event started was a key step in this; setting our organization methods and pre-opening + pre-writing all the things we needed was a good strategy, because it meant that we weren’t overwhelmed and frantic while doing our jobs, because we didn’t need to worry about lack of preparedness. This is what I whole-heartedly believe was the key to our success, because without it we would have had significantly more work to do. Doing the work before is always better, because you’re doing all the same work you would end up doing anyway just without any of the stress.