Ice Breaker Session

First things first, let me clarify the reason for even having the ice-breakers in the first place. After the first session, i received feedback from not just one source, but quite a number of freshmen who mentioned that it was a little scary and intimidating, that they were plunged into learning a piece right away. Some mentioned that there were insufficient icebreakers too, and everyone just played their own instruments without really knowing anyone.

And hence the ice-breaker session on Tuesday. It would have been much easier to just leave things as they were and let practice go on as per normal, but a few of us felt that perhaps beside from just playing music, the freshmen ought to get to know each other and us seniors a little better. Personally, i felt that our batch took way too long to gel together as one, and I was hoping it would happen a little faster with this batch. However, the one risk that we took was that no one knew how the interaction would turn out, as Zway mentioned, every batch might be diff from the other. But it was a risk I was willing to take to avoid pple getting turned off by the "prac after prac and song after song" kinda thing. So 1 prac off to just get to know one another better wasn't going to disrupt stuff i guess. Moreover, we did in fact get to know a few of the freshmen better, and i observed that towards the end, they were a little more comfortable with the seniors and their peers. I wouldn't say that the session had gone to waste - the games were there just to cater for a situation whereby all of them were enthusiastic enough to participate, and well, looks like they weren't! But it's ok, we could always try that another time. Nonetheless, i think they still enjoyed the pizza session, the informal jamming session, and the talk cock session with a few of us at the concourse!

Asking them to volunteer to jointly organise something for everyone during the term break was just a suggestion - I fet that it would have been great if a couple could volunteer, get their batch together and come out with something. It would have given them a hand at being involved in the club, and maybe a sense of ownership from the start. I dun think they would view us a bunch of seniors who don't know what to do. If we were like that, we would have also asked them to do our exchange proposal. The last time the seniors asked our batch for volunteers to do some club writeup, a few of us did volunteer to take up the task. And although no one volunteered there and then, Gerald and David have actually discussed with Jiakai last night and they said they are willing to come out with sthing during the hols. Hopefully, this would act as a platform for them to gather their batch to work together. So we have our first 2 volunteers already!

And yup, this batch is pretty good, I've great faith in their ability and hopefully, they'll be at our level by early next year.

Yc.