Year 8 GROW Day

We started off our GROW pastoral Day with breakfast and decorating tote bags in a messy and imperfect way, trying not to think too much about what we were going to do, as the day was all about making messy, imperfect actions.

There were bright, neon and even sparkly fabric pens to choose from, and there were plenty of different designs that came out of it, showing the different interpretations of the task. Later on in the day, we were given a piece of  blank paper, and were told to write a story in 10 minutes. The twist was that half of the year got a piece of paper with information on it (that the best ones would be published in a Year 8 Folio) and the other half just had blank pages. The story could be about anything we wanted and we were told to write down any thoughts we had throughout the process. The point of it was to see if knowing that the stories would eventually be published somewhere would change what we wrote about in the story, or if we tried to make it more ‘perfect’. I was given the sheet with the piece of information on it, and it turns out, I did write something different than what I was originally planning, as I thought the language had to be sophisticated, or the story had to be more interesting based on the people who were going to see it. It was very interesting to see what people came up with, based on if they had the piece of information or not, and if they just went for it or planned out what they were going to write.

After lunch, we listened to a talk from the comedian Anna Morris, and met the characters that lived in her head, which included Penny Perfection (an obnoxious character who thought they were above everyone, and only made negative comments) and Susie Self-Esteem (a confident character who encouraged us to ignore Penny Perfection). We were also told about her experience at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where she performed a skit called ‘It’s Got to be Perfect’ about a ‘bridezilla’ who wanted everything to be exactly as planned on her wedding day. She rehearsed the skit to perfection the first night, but as the festival went on, she relied more on improv, and got the crowd involved. She described the event as ‘chaos, but people laughed’ which inspired me to think about not having to be perfect all the time, and just having fun. It was a huge success for her, and even when the critics started to get to her, she continued to perform, and on the last night, there was a queue down the road to see her show. This was very inspiring, and taught me that no matter how perfect or imperfect something is, if you have fun while doing it, it’s always worthwhile.

After that, we did a workshop with Anna, where we created an ad that showcased a product that made you more or less perfect. Our group made a hair product that made your hair more beautiful, but also had some very alarming side effects! This was so much fun, and when I was performing the skit to the rest of the year, I was just enjoying myself, and not worrying about what other people would think.

I think I can speak for the whole of Year 8 when I say that this GROW day was inspiring, helpful, and above all, perfectly imperfect!

Yasmine G, Y8