"Flawless" - Disney Reflection by Pallvi

Disneyland...how to describe my experience in one word, FLAWLESS. The Disneyland Leadership Retreat, a four night/day trip to Anaheim, California was probably the highlight of my high school experience. Going with members of Student Council, Dance Teams members, and other leaders throughout the school It’s safe to say we always had a leadership role placed in front of us, whether it was waking up on time or going to our meet-up place on time. All along our trip we managed to spread a positive vibe to those around us (ex. After the World of Color Show in California Adventure on our way out of the park we randomly started singing frozen songs like "let it go" and "do you wanna build a snowman?") This trip has taught me a lot about pushing yourself and being you… 2 things that go hand in hand.

One experience that I’m going to write about took place on our 2^nd day in California Adventure Park.  During the workshop we were told to balance objects while going through a series of obstacles and in the beginning I was really focused on not dropping my object (which I balanced on my head). While doing I became so invested in worrying about not dropping it, which didn’t work because it was dropping multiple times. After we stopped halfway we were told that we had to hold 2 objects and I looked around.. and decided to help out a friend that look a little more worried than me. I walked over to my friend and helped her through it. I’m not saying that the objects didn’t fall they did. But when my friend and I went through the obstacles, walking downhill, or maintaining balance I tried relating it to life and saying to not worry and to keep going because in life sometimes you’ll need to be able to struggle and go out of your comfort zone in order to succeed. Near the end, two other friends started jumping on the net web and my friend started saying not to do that and to stop, but I told my friend to keep going because sometimes in life people will try to get on your nerves  and stop you from getting to your dreams and it’s important to learn to maintain your balance and keep going.

Basically this obstacle course was an analogy for life.  You need to keep going and no matter what others try doing to get you off balance, whether its in an activity or In real life, it’s important to stay firm to what you believe in. This is one of the many things that I learnt in Disneyland.

I’m super grateful that I, a student at Sullivan Heights secondary got an opportunity to go participate in a leadership workshop in Disneyland, learning about leadership, something I love to do while making memories that will last a lifetime.

Thanks so much to all administration and ESPECIALLY Ms. Becker, thanks so much for putting the time and effort into this trip I can’t put into words how grateful I am. I think other students should definitely have the opportunity to go onto these trips. (:

"I AM POSSIBLE", by Dominique

A lot of people will tell you that there were events that really changed them as a person.
Whether that was meeting their favourite celebrity, talking to inspiring people or just soaking up an experience, it changed them.
For me, this trip really did that.

I'm a confident person most of the times.

But when things outside of school started happening over the past little while

(I'm fine, I promise ☺ ) 

I lost that confidence and started replacing it with doubt.

This lead to negativity

which lead to many other things.

The workshops really helped with that. 

Particularly when Kimmi, our Disney Youth teacher, 

told us to draw out our dreams and write out what she was about to say next. 

I wrote down "I AM POSSIBLE" 

but in actuality, she spelled the word

"I M P O S S I B L E". 

It really had me surprised, 

but it also got me thinking. 

My mind; like all the self-conscious minds in the world, 

was consciously scared, worried and horribly doubtful. 

Meaning that whenever I thought about it, 

I was doubtful,

I was scared 

and I was a worry-wart. 

But unconsciously, 

or naturally without even thinking, 

I'm confident,

positive 

and wonderfully and fascinatingly ready for anything. 

It made me realize that, maybe, I AM able to do things. 

I AM able to reach my dreams. 

I AM possible. 

What happened next was a blur of fireworks and water shows.

Now, this feels like this ended too suddenly,
but I’m not sure what else to write.

I just know I’m happier now.

Reflections, by Shiraz

I learned so much on this trip. Walt Disney was an amazing visionary in his field. He was a pioneer in imagination, an idea seemingly foreign to people of his era. He created the first amusement park of his area, the first animated full length feature, and created a huge corporation that has lasted for decades. However, there were many struggles that he had to overcome. He lost the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was a huge loss for him. To resolve this, he changed Oswald's features, to create Mortimer Mouse, who was a popular hit. He only had a limited amount of space to build Disneyland, but he solved this by using forced perspective. This made Disneyland look way bigger than it was. When people told him he couldn't do it, he had the courage and confidence to prove them wrong. Walt stood for 4 values. Confidence, Constancy, Curiosity, and Creativity. He showed this with 4 lands representing the 4 values. He left a legacy of inspiration, creativity, and imagination. All of which still impact us, even to this day. He is a role model for me, and for the rest of youth my age. I am so grateful for this trip. It taught me things in ways that I will never forget. Thank you, Mrs. Becker!! :)

My Disney Experience, by Nimrit

From Tuesday, April 29 to Saturday, May 3, I travelled to Anaheim, California to be part of the Sullivan Heights Disneyland Leadership Trip. During this trip, we participated in the Disney Youth Education Series, and we learnt about how to be a good leader, responsibility, and teamwork.

The first day’s activities took place in Disneyland and were focussed on "What is a Leader?” We spent time to finding out what qualities we have that make us a good leader and how together, we can come together to become a strong team. We discovered the 4 C's; Courage, Confidence, Curious, and Constancy. Our group leaders told us about Walt Disney’s philosophies and how they helped him become a successful leader.  We went on rides, played games, wrote and drew pictures, and had discussions to help explain and find out more about being a strong leader who can inspire people to do the right thing and lead others by example.

On the second day, we went to California Adventure Park and completed activities that were geared towards creating our own brand name and overcoming difficulties we face. We learnt and examined these skills by looking at how Walt Disney managed to create the Disney brand. For example, even though he lost the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he didn’t give up. He worked with his brother and created Mickey Mouse and continued to build a successful animation company. During the day, we went on The Tower of Terror to see how elements of the T.V. show “The Twilight Zone” were incorporated into the ride. We also went through the Up Jungle Gym to prove to ourselves we can complete challenges and even if we do fail, we can pick ourselves back up and try again. We also went on the Soar’ in Over California ride and learnt the background of how it was designed by Mark Sumner. He created the prototype for the ride out of an Erector Block Set and had one day to give his sales pitch reasoning why this should be the design of the ride. That night, we watched the World of Color Show in front of California Adventure. It was amazing and was one of my favourite parts of the whole trip.

On the third day, the whole group participated in a scavenger hunt to test the leadership skills we developed and to see if we could apply them to certain situations. For example; teamwork, confidence, preparation, and organization were big components of this challenge. Everybody was split up into groups and given a list of 100 things to take a picture with, such as, characters, rides, certain foods, and much more. In the end, our group didn’t win, but we had lots of fun and learnt a lot about ourselves in the process! At night, we watched the fireworks and Fantasmic, which were two outstanding shows that Disneyland puts on every night.

When I look back and reflect on the trip, I can easily say I had an amazing time and I learnt a lot about being a leader and myself. This was an experience of a lifetime and sharing it with the wonderful people I did is something I will never forget.

And just remember, "You are never too old for Disney."

Two Stars and a Wish

Looking back on our trip, it's time to think about our highlights (our "stars"), and also our remaining desires ("wishes").  We all had different things that we loved, and different outstanding desires - most of which are in the category, "if we only had more time....."

Mrs. Becker

Stars: 
1.  Touring the Spirit Collection at the Museum of Natural History
2.  Seeing Once with Arthur Darvill, and then meeting Arthur Darvill
3.  Late night walk along the South Bank
4.  All conversations and jokes with students - including turfing, pleasant geese, cloudballs, dough balls, yew nork, games of telephone, "Three little birds", "Bohemian Rhapsody" and more.

Wish:  I wish we had more time in Cambridge.  Our guide David was so great and I wanted to learn more! I also wanted to go punting, walk across the bridge of sighs and take a million more photos (and bring my full camera battery - not just leave it at home).

Janey

Stars:
1.  Westminster Abbey (see her post here)
2.  Stonehenge
3.  Natural History Museum

Wish:  I wish we could have gone to Oxford as well, but that leaves more to see what I go back! (hopefully not too long from now because I miss it so much already)

Harleen

Stars:
1.  Wicked
2.  Mini "parties" we would have in my room

Wish:  I wish we had more time so we could have visited France.  Overall I have no regrets, I had a fabulous adventure.

Kimmi

Stars:
1. One of my favourite moments was waking up early to go to Stonehenge for the spring equinox. It was a memorable day since we literally woke up just minutes before leaving because our alarm clock wasn't working so we rushed out the door with our "take out" breakfast.I enjoyed seeing the vast countryside on the way to Stonehenge. Once we got there it was really cold and windy which just made it more memorable. The stones were really beautiful and the view was just incredible. It felt very special being there since you could only go and touch the stones 4 times a year.I loved that people were celebrating and singing because of the spring equinox. It was a very happy and joyous occasion which everyone could be a part of. The tradition of singing and dancing there really stood out to me and all the people were really open and wanted you to join in and be a part of their culture. Being at Stonehenge was a day that I will never be able to forget.
2. The London eye was nothing but beautiful. I was very excited to go on the London eye because I took so many pictures of it through the whole trip and was really curious to experience being on it. The half an hour ride went by really fast by just appreciating the breath taking views of the Big Ben, houses of parliament, Windsor castle and many other incredible buildings. I really enjoyed taking pictures with my friends with the exceptional backgrounds of London. The London eye was an unbelievable visual of central London in just thirty minutes!

Wish: I wish we were able to go to Madame Tussaud's Wax museum because I really wanted to see all the wax figures of celebrities. I also wish I could have seen more Broadway/Opera.  I really enjoyed Wicked and Phantom of the Opera and wish I had time for more.  However there's always next time!

Harjot

Stars:
1.  Going to windsor castle
2.  Bath

Wish: Go to Madame Tussaud's wax museum

Harsimran

Stars
1.  Turfing
2.  View from the top of the London Eye

Wish: That there had been no clouds the day we were at Stonehenge so we could have seen the sunrise.

Shelby

Stars: 
I enjoyed the while trip so it's difficult for me to pin point just two. If I had to pick, I'd say that Stonehenge was one of the highlights for me. It was such a unique and once in a lifetime experience and also really fun. I also really enjoyed touring Windsor castle and Cambridge. I like the castle because you could tour inside of it and see how past monarchs lived. I like Cambridge because of the town and the university. It was so gorgeous there with magnificent architecture.


Wish:  My wish would be more time there! There is so much to see, and though we did a lot, I would've liked one more day there. Hyde Park would've been nice to see as well as more time at Camden Lock Market, but there's never time for everything!! I'm just glad that we were able to accomplish what we did with the time we had.

Mr. Dewinetz

Stars:
1.  Rene's Jokes
2.  Unlimited Breakfast Bacon
3.  Dough Balls

Wish:  More impromptu sing-a-longs

Manroop

Stars:
1.  Phantom of the Opera and Wicked
2.  Stonehenge

Wish: I wish we would have had the opportunity to go on the Boat Tour on the Thames and to the Wax Museum.

Serena

Stars:
1.  British culture in general; especially the diversity at Stonehenge and how people of many views of life came together to sing and dance into the equinox.
2.  Cambridge University.  That Uni is a place I wish to one day attend, and it was nice to see what I could be getting myself in to.

Wish:  A wish I had would be to have more time to enjoy the everyday things whilst in London.  The trip was fast paced, but then again, London is a cast environment that can't be seen in a vastness of days.  

Harpreet

Stars:
1.  Making new friends/strengthening old friendships on this trip through all of the experiences we had.
2.  Being able to experience everything with my friends, like learning to ride the rube properly (after we almost fell the first few times) and later learning to "turf" (tube surfing), competing to see if we could manage to say in one spot balanced while the train went from station to station.

Wish:  A wish I have is that we would have had more time London experiencing the city with everyone; even though we had jam packed days in the city I still wish we could have had more.

Ms. Mulji

Stars:
1.  All the grew history behind the architecture 
2.  The drive through the countryside enrolee from Bath with the quaint villages

Wish:  To have had more time to explore the area and shops by Shepherd's Bush

Qudrat

Stars:
1.  The broadway show "Wicked" (it was perfect!)
2.  Stonehenge (Once in a lifetime chance to be there eon an equinox!)

Wish: I wish we had more time to spend in the two science museums  

The beautiful, inspiring, peaceful, and scintillating Cambridge

If I could start my education again, I would want to go to Cambridge.  Everything about Cambridge was awe-inspiring to me.  From their beautiful old buildings, sense of tradition, deep rooted history in science, cobblestone streets, the winding river Cam, and of course, their small schools, one-on-one advisors, and dedication to breaking the mould of what hoop-jumping education can look like.  I was all ready to sign up for my next degree - in anything - right there and then.

And I saw the apple tree.  The tree grown from the one in Newton's orchard.  The tree that helped Newton articulate his law of gravity.  One piece of what makes him the greatest physicist to date.  The tree was right there.

And the offices, and grounds, and buildings, and books, and churches, and microscopes, and instruments.  The smell of old University buildings reminds me of the history they hold.  Oh the people who walked those halls.  Newton.  Rutherford.  Bohr.  Hawking.  I felt inspired.  I just wanted to sit there and take it in.

Cambridge University is made up of 31 colleges.  They don't specialize in any one thing, and you don't apply to any one degree program.  You just apply to ONE of the 31 colleges.  You can't apply to more than one.  The biggest of them has a total of 1300 students - undergrads and grads combined.  That is, the BIGGEST of the Cambridge colleges is smaller than Sullivan Heights.  With old classic buildings, history and amazing professors, the possibilities are endless.  We visited two of these 31 colleges - Trinity (home to Isaac Newton) and King's College.  Both were beautiful and awe-inspiring.  David, our amazing guide, took us through the details of the school and its history, and really brought it all to life for us.

After our tour and a quick lunch, we sought after a bus station to take us west out to the famous Cavendish Laboratory, that I talked about in my post here.  We had tickets to attend a lecture on modern Physics, but due to the long walks, trying to figure out the bus system, and the struggle for 17 people to eat lunch in under 30 minutes, we missed it and had to settle for wandering through the building and checking out the general Physics demonstrations in the building at the Cambridge Science Festival.  This didn't turn out to be too bad though - because upstairs there were cabinets and displays full of items that you would normally find in a museum.  Tons of artifacts from the early days of Chemistry, the original electron microscope (cut in half so you could see the inside) and much more.  I wandered through the Physics labs and wondered what it must have been like to get a Physics education HERE.  Honestly, I felt intimidated.  And inspired.

Following our time at Cavendish, we took a 30 minute stroll through the country along the back paths towards another of Cambridge's MANY buildings - the Sir Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematics.  Here we had tickets for a lecture by Professor Ian Stewart on the Mathematical Patterns that caused animal markings (such as leopard's spots or zebra's stripes).  Biology and Physics - perfect for me, right?  WRONG.  You see - as much as I was excited and wanted to set a good example - I had been up since 6am (and it was not 3:45pm) and already logged 12 km of walking, and then was placed in a room that was SUPER hot.  So instead of really "hearing" him, I was just focused on staying awake.  And I wasn't doing a very good job.  Then again, neither were many of the students.  So as much as we were hoping for an amazing, jaw-dropping, one-of-a-kind, Cambridge lecture, this experience fell a little flat.

But all in all, Cambridge was amazing.  I wish that we would have had more time there, more time with our guide David, who was outstanding, more time to see more of the colleges, the Wren library, and more of the history of this great place.  But there is always next time.

On the train at Kings Cross, ready to go to Cambridge

Trinity College, including Newton's apple tree, and our group 

Kings College, Trinity college Chapel, and the Cambridge Senate Buildings

Kings College Chapel

Cavendish Lab

Sir Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematics

Museum of Natural History

I love the Museum of Natural History.  The first time I went to one it was in NYC.  I couldn't understand why scientists could possibly want to go to a museum with "history" in the title (sorry historians!) - but then I entered in.  And I saw the natural world organized and unfolding.  I saw wonders I could only dream or read of, and everything started to make more sense.

Not all of our group was as equally enthused about London's Museum of Natural History.  I can only assume one part because the name of the museum doesn't inspire awe in scientists, as I had already learned, and another part pure exhaustion.  So when given the option between sleeping in, and leaving at 9:30 for the museum, only 6 students were willing to get out of bed. Lucky for me I got to spend my day with those awesome 6.  And we had fun.  We explored, we engaged, we ran from room to room, power-walking through the museum hoping to catch a small glimpse of everything before we had to leave to meet the other group for the London Eye and dinner.  And so Janey, Shelby, Harpreet, Harleen, Qudrat and Harsimran joined myself and Mr. Becker on our journey through time. We saw volcanoes, experienced an earthquake, walked next to and under giant fossils of dinosaurs, whales, giant crocodiles and bugs.  We saw jewels, and moon rocks and 500 million year old fossils - one of the first.  And this was cool.  Supercool.  But not nearly as cool as the Spirit Collection.

When I was researching the museum online, I came across a free tour they offered of what they called the "Spirit Collection."  I didn't know much about it, except that it contained specimens from Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.  As a biologist, I couldn't pass up the chance, and the rest of the group were interested in going as well.  We went to the front dead right away to ask about the tour, and we managed to get the only 8 tickets left for the day.  In addition, the tour was only done in groups of 8, so we managed to get a 'private' tour out of the deal.  After lunch we made way over to the far corner of the museum to meet our guide.  He then proceeded to take us on a 30 minute behind the scenes tour.  The BEST part of the museum that I didn't know existed.  They have 7 floors, making up the majority of the museum, with rooms on end, filled with lockers and cabinets, filled with jars, filled with various plants and animals species.  Almost 80 MILLION specimens.  The sheer number was enough to blow my mind.  We only went through a couple rooms on 1 floor of the building.  We couldn't open up the lockers, which were organized by phyla (I can only imagine how awesome this would be for a Bio 11 class when learning about taxonomy!), but could look at a sample of the jars they had placed out for the tours to see.  We then went into a larger room with huge tanks with steel lids and mini-cranes handing from the ceiling to remove these heavy heavy lids.  These containers held much larger organisms - elephants, gorillas etc.  I wanted to see inside desperately,  but respected this part of the museum as a working research facility.  They have a giant squid in full view as well as pieces of a colossal squid, and around the corner we could see large jars full of monkeys, armadillos, turtles, sharks, and more.  Scientists can sign these out like books for research and take them out of the jars and investigate them in the neighbouring room that looks like a morgue.  I wanted to spend days listening and learning and watching.  And I wanted to open and look inside every cupboard on all 7 floors, if only I was allowed.  And I wasn't the only one geeking out.  This by far was the highlight of the day, and one of my highlights of the trip.

After our time at the Museum of Natural History we ran next door to the Science Museum.  Home to more recent scientific treasures such as the Apollo 10 command module, unused lunar excursion model, and the highlight for me, the original DNA model developed by Crick and Watson.  We had less than 1 hour to explore this museum, which was a shame.  It didn't help that there was very few elevators and the museum was poorly laid out.  There was 5 floors, but most elevators didn't connect more than 3 of them.  It was also skinny and narrow, which meant running back and forth from one end to another to find stairs - except those didn't go up all 5 stories as well.  As a group we were getting frustrated that our limited time was being eaten up by poor museum planning.  And we almost missed the DNA model - we were lucky to find it on the way out the door.  We were so busy soaking in the science, that we were rushing to meet the other group at the Eye.  We sat on the tube with sore feet recalling all the cool things we had seen and lamenting the fact we just didn't have more time.  So on behalf of me and my science nerd partners-in-crime - it was an outstanding day!