AEP Blog #1.1 “Bye bye, google meet?”

 Salutations dear readers, Ms Disa and the invisible internet alien that haunts the cupboard at night. 

Gosh! It has been such a long time since Ive written a blog. My fingers are rusty and my brain is flat. I suppose I dont have a good way to convey how much my life has changed these past few months. New experiences and new chapters, new plots and new challenges! 

Thats right, welcome to school year 2022-2023! With a huge twist, now face to face! 

After all the grueling 2+ years of staying inside my humid room, shuffling between dozing off or hurting my eyes, all the way to mastering the use of many websites just only when I heard that we won’t really be prioritizing them anymore. With a fully blown hybrid class environment and subtle covid precautions brings a whole new scenery for FIS veterans and FIS welcomers. 

To introduce myself again, Im Ayesha! Nice to meet you. 

When it comes to self introduction, I cant help but ponder over what I can provide as a student, as a daughter and as a friend. What are the qualities I wish to share with others? In the end I can only come up with just a few words and details that almost every student would share. Their birthday, age, nationality , hobbies or what not…

Differences are hard to notice when you’re talking about yourself, but differences in other people feel easier to spot. We would think about how the lockdowns have changed us, perhaps physically, mentally , and spiritually. If you were to ask me, then I believe that I became a weirder person. Well, thats what my sister said. Im proud of my accomplishments even if they may not seem like accomplishments to others, they do for me and I think thats what matters the most. 

Well let me start again, 

Nice to meet you, Im Ayesha! I wear the hijab with pride and share my world through art. The world I see not so clearly, but full of colour and people that share different experiences that you can always learn from. Im a person who finds joy in many forms of art. Topics like writing, music, maths, painting or even just the art of speaking is something I wish to master as well as the previously said topics. Im not the best in practical academics. I procrastinate and laze around, forgetting my to-do list left in my bulky pen case. 

One day, I was sitting in my couch waiting for sanity to come save my day. I was nervous, sweating and shaking unlike my sibling who’s sitting in the other side of the sofa, her face was gleaming with “IM EXCITED!” . A paradoxical dynamic if you’d as me. I was excited per say because I was finally able to not rely on my sluggish wifi in hopes to make me actually understand what my teacher is talking about. My sister on the other hand was super hyper because she would finally be able to meet her friend’s she has been waiting to meet for so long! In my case I was only excited to see a few which Im very thankful to have the privilege to meet them a lot more than usual. (Props to you Dilara!) Its just, the assessments might be able to take over me just like they did in online classes, although right now its not as bad as I expected! I just hope I can keep it up.

My debate friend told me months before the orientation that some of hew classmates will come to FIS. I got to see them in the first day and they were very nice! I felt glad that I knew everyone within the first week of school. Thankful that I didn’t have to go through an awkward phase of not being able to approach someone just because I didn’t know their name. 

Here we are now, in the 3rd week of school still getting used to the whole “face to face-hyrbrid” classes. I feel like the same new me. A different yet similar person, a changed one but still the Ayesha that everyone knows. 

Now for AEP! 

Allowing myself to suffice for a class that I wasn’t able to bring my entire focus on during the online classes because of countless difficulties was frankly not an easy job. 

Except thats what I thought. 

When I entered the classroom in the 4th floor, reminiscing the times I used to walk in those same hallways with my classmates and go down the stairs to fill our stomachs and chat around. I took a few steps until I saw the rose door. A door that I haven’t seen for so long, the art and AEP room that I remember going to each week is finally right in front of me. Greeted by the same teacher who makes you tensed up but relaxed at the same time, engages you with her fun aura and overall allows you to feel safe in her classroom. Thats right, Ms Disa! 

During our first week we did some brain work. Which is what we call, “Remembering what we learnt”

We did this in miro which we were already well versed in. The new students, Huda and Alisa got the hang of it really quickly! Which was great. We didn’t use the smartboard that much that day, relying on our devices to help us make comments and posts about what we did before. Being able to recall is a very vital element in making your brain work! So it acted as our fuel to start the school year. 

The week after that we started to use miro for simple vocab. This type of vocab is used in describing graphs. Words like decreasing, increasing, staying the same. We gave all the synonyms we could and slashed the ones out which cannot be feasible to describe changes in a bar graph. Then we did what I like to call a “Diagnostic test”. We had to write an essay in the span of 15 mins with the topic of describing the bar graph that was given to us. I think in that moment, I wrote the worst essay Ive ever seen in my entire life.Not to mention the chicken scratch handwriting I haven’t dared to improve during the 3 month break. 

Currently, I am spending this AEP lesson for writing a blog. Once again, with my rusty fingers and flat brain. Surely, I wish for a better output next time, but for now this is what I have. 

Thats all for this blog. See you!