Dear Ms Bagley

My family is absolutely most definitely the weirdest humans I know (In a positive way of course). My father Howie is the goofiest person with plenty of dad jokes and nerdy references up his sleeve and he is constantly perfecting each one. Examples include referencing movies such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, as well as the rock band “Talking Heads”. His humor has rubbed off on me most definitely. My mother Rose is the heart of the family, without her I doubt we could do what we do on a daily basis. She takes great interest in my education, and always gives aid when I need it. Mums very reliable that way. I have three other younger siblings, two of them has started at MAC this year. My younger brother Will is one of the coolest kid I know, he plays the Violin and Saxophone, he is also is a brilliant cook. My youngest brother Lachlan and younger sister Sienna are twins and as you can probably imagine together they are extremely loud. Lachlan has taken on the job as being our family comedian and started creating his very own memes with assistance from myself. Sienna is very clever and we both have an interest in reading, she is also who I share my room with. She is my safe person, I go to her when I need support and she does the same but with myself. Finally, we have our family pets, Tintin the Cat is named after the comic book character from The Adventures of Tintin (my absolute favorite comics ever) but what is most remarkable he is a spitting image of the comic character although he’s a cat. Annie is a Bernese Mountain Dog and although the size she is the least intimidating dog ever, she always has a grin and a wagging tail and is the most gentle dog ever. In her oldish age, she is still all action.

In April im heading off with a group of students from MAC to Nepal for a month, I’m extremely excited about it, I still can’t believe I’m going with so many great people. Through this experience I’ve got to know my team very well, our group (Team 1) are the young ones. In our team there are eight Year 11 and only three of us Year 12s. For this trip we’ve been doing a lot of group and individual fundraising. As a group we’ve done a movie night, a quiz, sausage sizzles and we will be doing some fundraising at the upcoming A & P show. For my individual fundraising, I’ve been working in a packhouse doing some factory work. The last December- January season was my second year working there and making up boxes for packing cherries. After the season finished about one and a half weeks ago a got the news that I’ve been promoted to a supervisor which is pretty cool. Outside of school and work I do 420 sailing, I LOVE sailing when the wind has a large wind speed, not so much when it is calm. The reason behind that for me is that the rush of adrenalin you get and how your extinct suddenly kicks in when you have the risk of capsizing in strong winds, in light winds my extinct doesn’t exist and I’m a bit of a clumsy mess. It’s rather embarrassing

This year for the first time I’ve set my goals in a little notebook, the first of them being to enter the Eureka! competition and make a short educational film on New Zealand’s Earthquake risks and ways we can adopt ideas to create a more sustainable system to decrease New Zealand’s vulnerability, I know that you will be able to help me with some of the film techniques and I hope we can discuss this further. My second goal is to complete Year 12 with only merit & excellence credits and subject endorsements in three of my six subjects. My third goal is a difficult one for me, I have terrible time management and I am very unorganized and this often accelerates my stress levels. I want to become healthier in the way I approach to school work and to actually complete homework or tasks in the time limit I’m given.

My relationship with English is very up and down, some areas I’ve done very well others not so. I’ve been told by my previous History teacher that I have a very peculiar method of writing and it is very difficult to understand most of the time. That is something I want to get your opinion on and as the year goes by I hope to have developed a more understandable writing style. I absolutely love formal essays and I find them a great opportunity to show what I as an author believe. The Year 11 significant connections formal essay was right up my alley, I was passionate about it as we had a freedom of choice and the texts I picked to analyze challenged me and gave me something to really think about and to top that all off I got the mark I very much wanted. On the other hand what I struggle with is speeches and gaining the confidence to speak publicly, I’m typically very quiet and I feel very overwhelmed speaking. This is something I want to get over and I know that you will be able to support me through that process. Overall in English, I am aiming for an Excellence subject endorsement and I plan to focus on English more than what I have done in the past as I am pretty confident I will be doing English at level 3.

Sincerely

Yasmin Christian

P.S My favourite food is definitely couscous salad with avocado, feta and olives