Hello everyone! It is that time of the year again, time for a tPOL. Here are some of the key points of mine!

In this presentation of learning, we have been given the task to show how we represent 3 different success behaviours. Agency and two others. So I decided to choose Communication and Collaboration, and Self-Regulation. Here is the document that we were given. 

So I will quickly describe them for you guys, so pretty much success behaviours are things we aren’t graded on, but things that will help us get better grades. For example, Agency is the most important because it is all about getting the work done, but the others are all very helpful bonuses.

Here are some Agency goals that I have for next year:

1. I want to be able to ask my teachers, parents and peers for help and accept and revise their feedback if it is applicable by midterm next year. I will achieve this by asking my “feedbackers” to look all my stuff over!
2. I don’t want to hand anything in late, all school year. I will achieve this by putting Things notifications for the night before, and doing my best to have it done the night before, but if it can’t be, it will be done by 9:00. 

These will help me very well currently, and in the future!

Here is another goal for Communication and Collaboration:

1. In every group that I am in I want to be the one who is responsible. I will do this by taking charge of the group and focusing on highlighting everyone’s ideas.

It is very important to get good at leadership, as shown from a little expert from my Dragons Den pitch:

Other than my physical fitness, rowing has taught me many soft skills that I am sure I will use later in life. Some great examples are leadership, communication, and teamwork. Whoever is bow seat in a scull, or boat, is responsible for the boat. I prefer using the word responsible instead of in charge, because I feel like good leadership isn’t just about telling people what to do, it is helping them get there, and being ultimately responsible for what they have done. Anyways, leadership is very important to experience, because you get to understand the responsibility that the leader has. 

Do any of you guys have an image you think of when you think of balance? Here is the one I think of.

If we do a little Apple Pencil magic, we can see how my life balances out right now.

Anyways, thank you everyone for reading my short TPOL post, I will see you all later!

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! Today I will be talking with you guys about a project I did recently called Back To The Future ➡️. In this project we were focusing on Habits of success, Planning resources, Skills assessment, Representing yourself publicly and personally, Employment marketing. 

All of these also helped us with the end goal in mind of pitching ourselves to two “Dragons” in a sort of mock job interview. Have you seen Shark Tank or Dragons Den? It was like that, except we pitched ourselves for 7 minutes, and then there was 7 minutes of discussion. Mine went really well, but I will tell you about it at the end of the post. 

The first thing we did in this project was look into our skills, interests, and personalities. To do this, there were various activities, including doing some quizzes to discover our personalities, and which jobs would best fit us. Here is a link to those quizzes. In the end, some of the different skills they said I had were manual dexterity, numerical ability, and verbal ability. I don’t think I specifically learned anything about myself, as I already know myself very well, but it was interesting to see what the quizzes thought of me. Here is a short paragraph I wrote on my thoughts of the test.

I feel like I agree with everything, except some of the jobs. Maybe they would be best for me, but I know that some of them I don’t want to do, and I want to do others. Also, there’s that thing that for a job you either get it because you want the money, or you like it. Preferably it would be both, but I think I would prefer the money so that I can do my own fun things outside of work. I specifically agreed with the jobs that were Other Professional Occupations In Therapy And Assessment, Program Leaders And Instructors In Recreation, Sport And Fitness, and Recreation, Sports And Fitness Policy Researchers, Consultants And Program Officers. I have always wanted to be a doctor, and I think they meet my values very well.

After we learned about ourselves, we looked at how we are going to get there. We looked into the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, which highlighted different habits that will help us to where we want to be. Here is a link to the different habits that the PLP teachers put together for us. I highly recommend reading it, it is very helpful, and even if you only start with one of the habits, I guarantee that it will help you. 

Next, we learned about how we market ourselves for potential employers. We wrote a cover letter and a resume, both of which I will attach here.

Cover Letter

And last but certainly not least, is the pitch to the dragons. We started with this basic document, and ended with a full-blown, 7 minute pitch, and I think everyone was actually happy with theirs. In preparing for the pitch, I asked myself a lot of questions that I thought the Dragons would ask, and came up with good answers for all of them. Honesty, I didn’t really learn a lot about myself when preparing, or after. I think that I know myself very well.

Here are the feedback forms the dragons gave me. I am quite happy with the feedback I got! The experience of pitching to the Dragons was great for the future, because it taught me that practice really pays off. Even if you only practice once a night for a week, you do get pretty good at it.

I’m glad that Mr. Scheewee said I would be a definite hire! I think the reason for it was all of the different examples I gave. I used rowing, PLP, piano, climbing, etc. The skills and examples I learned and gave in this pitch will be very helpful in applying for jobs in the real world. When an employer asks questions to give examples, I believe that I can give a sophisticated answer.

Hello everyone! I’m going to start this post with an introduction to the project we just did, called Cray Cray Yay Yay! In this project we were all about answering the driving question, Why does it take a Crazy person to change the world? To answer this, we went to Seattle in the best PLP trip yet! I feel like every year as the program condenses more and more I get closer to everyone which makes it overall a better experience.

Apart from answering the driving question, the other main goal of this project was to create and present a Pecha Kucha to our parents. The Thursday before Spring Break we presented them and I was very impressed on how they went! But how did we get there? First things first, we learned all about the Apple Crazy Ones campaign. After, we all picked a crazy one from a list in a fun spin the wheel format!

Next, we created a mini Pecha Kucha about those Crazy Ones! Mine was about Einstein, who I find very inspiring. Because it was a mini Pecha Kucha, there 10 slides 20 seconds each. We presented it in front of the entire class and I was very proud of both mine and most other people’s final products. I was VERY thankful it didn’t have to be memorized that time😂.

Then, we went to Seattle! It was so much fun and I loved every minute of it. I enjoyed how the teachers planned it so that every little place we went could be connected back to our project and driving question. While we were in Seattle, we wrote an essay! I made a different post about it which you can read here!

And finally, with the understanding and learning of the big steps and many different little steps in this project, we moved on to the big event. The topic we got was how business is done differently in relation to the Apple campaign. We decided to do three different businesses we saw on the trip. The businesses were Dicks Drive-In, Boeing, and Amazon.

I believe that it is obvious why Boeing and Amazon were chosen, but you can see why Dicks was here. Just look at those employee benefits!

Now to the cray cray thing I did. In front of most of the parents in grade 10 PLP, I introduced my section of the Pecha Kucha by saying “Let’s talk about Dicks.” I got a massive laugh when everyone realized it was about Dicks Drive-In.

IMG_8289

That is the video if you want to see it, and don’t worry! The laughter came after the video ended. Anyways, thank you so much for reading, and sorry for the late publish, because I was away when this was assigned with no access to technology so I only had the chance to write it today. Thanks!

DI. The word the strikes fear into the heart of any PLP learner. Or maybe…. Not? Destination Imagination, informally known as DI is a worldwide competition that students from all over the world compete in. It teaches us teamwork, collaboration, communication and above all time management. Two weeks ago, we competed in the regional tournament, coming in last place, which I think has taught us a whole bunch.

There are many reasons for this. First of all, we did not work and rehearse nearly enough leading up to the performance, we probably did about 10% of our work in the first 5 or so weeks and 90% in the last week. Our challenge was to create a pinball machine with an action/adventure story. It was called Pinball Heroes, and it was the technical challenge of this year. If you would like to read more about our challenge, you can do so here.

I think I did pick the challenge best for me, even though I may have picked the most difficult one. For our action-adventure story, we chose the Mario Brothers. In my random group, I got Magnus, Izzy, Jannik, and Logan. We all worked together decently well but could definitely improve on our communication.

Throughout the project, I felt like I was a good leader, being one of the two Grade 10s on the team. I organized meet-ups, to-dos and homework. I also worked on the pinball machine with Magnus and the three machine modules. I also worked on fixing the grammar in the script.

The biggest thing I learned throughout working in DI regionals was practice practice practice! It is the single most important thing almost ever for work. From practice comes work ethic, and communication, because when you practice, you can find out what goes wrong and communicate with your team on how to fix it, which takes work ethic!

On April 6th, which is a LOT sooner than I thought it was is DI provincials. My team and I are going to take a bit of a break during Spring Break, then come out swinging and come first in provincials!

Thank you so much for reading this short post, and I will update you after provincials!

Hey everyone, I wanted to show you this essay I worked really hard on. I think that I did very well, because I spent a lot of time revising and rewriting it. The project we are doing right now is “Cray Cray Yay Yay”, in relation to Apple’s “Crazy Ones” campaign. The driving question for the project is “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?” This essay is meant to help us answer that question.

The Essay:

What makes people and businesses “crazy”? Crazy ones are the ones who inspire people by breaking the glass that humanity sets up. Celebrating these individuals and businesses is crucial because they all represent the forefront of innovation and inspiration. They one hundred percent earned the name “Crazy Ones” – the gems of humanity who not only inspire us but also transform the world through their spirited actions. 

One extending business that embodies this spirit is Dick’s Drive-In. Famous for its exceptional treatment of employees, Dick’s stands as a shining star of responsibility and kindness. They pay their staff well above minimum wage, provide free medical and dental insurance, and even offer free meals for employees and their families (source). What makes this business even crazier is that all those are at entry-level jobs. Despite these many expenses, Dick’s is still affordable, with some of the lowest-priced food options in the United States. But just how does Dick’s keep this up? By managing costs and adjusting prices, they’ve maintained their affordability while keeping their extraordinary worker benefits. Furthermore, the fact that they stay open until 2 am helps many late-night workers get off shifts.

The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) is another crazy thing that attracts the eye. When you first see the museum, you immediately notice the remarkably different architecture. What surprised me when I went in, was the fact that it seems the same on both the outside and inside. Unlike many traditional museums that may lose appeal after just a small amount of time, MoPOP uses interactive and interesting exhibits that will leave visitors star-struck for hours. This different approach to curating stems from the museum’s founder, Paul Allen, whose massive collection forms the backbone of MoPOP’s exhibits. By using diverse and interactive exhibits, MoPOP challenges the traditional museum model, redefining what art and culture mean (source).

Boeing demonstrates the huge potential of starting a risky business. This is because many people did not want to change or weren’t sure how the “airplane” thing was going to play out. Boeing was founded by two friends, with the company originally focused on mail delivery before switching to passengers (source). Boeing’s commitment to innovation and kindness toward customers pushed it to the front of aerospace engineering, leading to it being one of the biggest names in commercial aircraft manufacturing (source). Today, Boeing’s name is interchangeable with quality and reliability, proof of its long-lasting legacy of pushing boundaries and being crazy.

These “Crazy Ones” have majorly influenced me, inspiring me to use innovation and think outside of the box. Their kindness serves as a guide in my life, motivating me to be kind and reach for creative solutions. In conclusion, the “Crazy Ones” tell us that being crazy means daring to be different, fixing things that aren’t broken, and shattering the glass humanity sets up. While I continue on my journey throughout life, I know that if I have courage, innovation, and a commitment to excellence, we can definitely change the world.

That’s the essay! I will see you all in my next post which will hopefully be sometime in Spring Break, after a special presentation we’re doing. More on that later!

Bye and thank you!

Who am I gonna be? This is the question we were asked throughout this project, and what we were supposed to have answered by the end.

In this project, everyone read a book, and the one I read I found very inspiring. The book is an autobiography called An Ordinary Man.

The reason I found this book inspiring, is because I want to be like the man in the book. I don’t want to be a hotel manager or anything, but I do want to be able to control and use my emotions and words like he did in the book. This will help me so much later in life, especially when I get angry.

To answer the question Who am I gonna be, I would like to tell you a bit of a story. I’ll tell you this first, don’t watch either video until the end.

A little while ago, a video popped up on my radar, which was called “The Most Unexpected Answer to a Counting Puzzle”. Pretty much, two blocks, both with a mass of 1kg and are sitting on a frictionless plane, with a wall to their left. One 1kg block comes with some velocity from the right, with the other 1kg block stationary. All of the collisions are perfectly elastic, which means there is no energy lost. In that interaction, there are three collisions.

Now, let’s say the block on the right has a mass of 100kg. There are 31 collisions. 10,000? 314 collisions. Does anyone see the pattern here? Let’s do one more. If the right block has a mass of 1,000,000 there will be 3,141 collisions. So now, does anyone have any idea what the pattern is? For a mass of 100,000,000kg, how many collisions will there be? Let me know in the comments if you get it correct!

Possibly……

???

No, no not that kind of pie… π there we go. So for a mass of 10,000,000,000kg, how many collisions? 314,159!!! CRAZY!! So why is this? The answer is very, very complex and difficult to explain, so I’ll let you watch this video instead.

Why does that story answer the question?

It shows who you are gonna be by what you enjoy doing. I like physics, so I may be a scientist. But then again, I might not.

That’s all for today, thanks!

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my blog. We just had one of our two major exhibitions! This Winter Exhibition was especially fun because our project was extremely successful. The project that we did was called the Ology of Apology, and we made memorials!
My answer to the driving question:

How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?

I think to not repeat it, we need to learn about just like we learned it the WW2 project. As Canadians, the stereotype is for us to over apologize. Sure, it could get a bit annoying, but over apologizing is way better than never apologizing. It’s kind of like the saying: better late than never! Another answer to the driving question is what we were making – memorials. Memorials are a great way to apologize and remember different events in our history. There’s only one thing I wonder about memorials – Why aren’t there any memorials about good events in history? There memorials about people, but not events. It is amazing to look and learn and remember the bad stuff so that history doesn’t repeat itself, but we should also be proud of what we’ve accomplished as Canadians. We do have a memorial for allowing gay marriage, but nothing recent.

In the project, there were three different groups, and three groups within those groups. They were chosen randomly, and I was grouped up with Jupiter, Keaton, and Kadin. As I stated previously, the goal was to make a memorial that commemorated one of three groups. The Canadian Sikhs, Chinese Canadians, and Japanese Canadians were chosen because they all played an important role in our history but they were also majorly discriminated against. My group got the Chinese Canadians, and we learned all about them through research and some of Mr. Hughes’ talks (lectures, anyone?). I took a whole bunch of notes, and you can see them all here, which is also where I kept all my work for the project. 

The very, very first thing we did when we came into class on the first day that the project was due to begin was read this paragraph on the body rituals of the Snaidanac people. I thought it was very interesting, but then I realized, what is Snaidanac backwards?!? CANADIANS! I thought that it was crazy, and it was also very interesting because most of it is true. A little bit exaggerated, yes, but true. 

After that we had to make our own memorial out of LEGO about something that we think doesn’t have a memorial built after it. As you can see in this photo, I built mine to commemorate people who have died in waterfalls. After that, we learned about Othering and Upstanding, and had to write a paragraph about it. Again, you can see all this work in the link above.

Eventually, when we started work on our memorial, we decided to do something really different. We thought everyone would do something simple and like other memorials, such as a boat, train, or other objects. We decided to do both a train and a pickaxe, but have glow in the dark words written on them. The idea was that in the daytime, it would show how the Chinese Canadians were sadly treated as more tools than people. In the night though, when everyone looked the same and you couldn’t see them, it showed all of the different words that described how they were feeling, such as pain, discrimination, hunger, etc. I personally loved this idea, and it turned out fairly well!

Anyways, I thought I did quite well in this project, I felt like I led the group, organized, and put in a lot of work. I felt like I led my group, because I told everyone what to do by when which was helpful. Here’s a few photos of our part of the exhibition, enjoy!

Thanks for reading, see you in the next post!

Hello everyone! This is a special post, in which I will be reflecting on my work, kind of like an MPOL or TPOL. This is actually called the PrePOL, which we were supposed to present to our parents, but we didn’t have enough time, so we just had to make a post about it. 

My answer to the driving question: What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being? Well first of all, there are many, many strategies that we can use. Task managers such as Things can be very helpful. It can also help a lot to create a Calendar. In this project, we had to use both of those tools. Here are a few screenshots of my before and after of both of them.

As you can see, before I started using them, I had nothing in there! After, I had everything. From my activities to my schoolwork, I really improved on my well-being and project management. I think that my favourite thing about Things, is that you have all of your stuff in one place, it is easy to access through widgets, and it has so many different options for organizing things to do. Calendar is just great in general, you can have a widget on your Lock Screen, and it is super easy to use. 

So what worked for me? What will keep me doing this? And what will I need to drop to be a successful learner? I LOVED the daily activities, and I need to keep doing them. I think also getting into the habit of checking Things and Calendar at the start of each day is fantastic. I think that having stuff in both my Things and Calendar to update both of them can keep me doing this, especially if it is repeated both daily and weekly (Weekly to-do’s!) I don’t believe that I need to drop anything, but if it is something, it can be going climbing when I don’t absolutely have to. During a big project, I think I could cut my climbing down to 2 days or 3 days a week. 

I believe that I achieved proficiency in this project, because I did everything that was asked, and I did revisions whenever needed. I really need to make sure that I read the criteria every time before I hand it in, because I have a bad habit of just handing it in with the stuff my teachers explained in class. Sometimes, there is an extra little part of it that I miss, and I get either a mountain climber or revision. 

Anyways, that’s all for today, I hope you enjoyed my mini POL. Have a great rest of your day!

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. Today I just finished a project called Save Juno Beach. It was about the Canadian impact on WW2 affected the outcome of the war. The final product of this project was an essay, and since I had never written a proper essay before, I was quite worried. Although I do think that I did quite well on it! Most of my work from this project can be found here.

The first thing that we did was watch an expert from Saving Private Ryan, a movie about WW2. The purpose of this was to show how horrible WW2 was, and get it in our minds what we were learning about. We also watched some videos “Condo Videos” in which some people wanted to build condos over Juno beach, which was the beach that Canada invaded in D-Day. To reflect on this, we did an “I think” and an “I feel”. Most of my work from this project can be found here. You can click the link above to take you there. 

The next assignment that we did was called PEE practice. PEE stand for Point, Evidence, and Explanation. Our question was “What were the worrying trends that led to WWII?” My answer is in the same link as last time. Next, we did historical significance about WW2. I thought I did well in this, and added good detail. Here it is!

After that, we did our essay brainstorming, which I did not add a lot of detail into. I could have done a lot more, but since I already had an idea of what my essay would be about, I didn’t think I really needed to. This is also accessible by the link. Next, we were really getting into our essay writing! We started with our thesis, and mine got approved first try! “It is important to learn about WW2 because of how much sacrifice went into it, as well as how much it changed our politics and way of life.” That was my thesis. 

After that, we did some more essay prep stuff until we finally got started on the essay itself. I thought that I did very well on it, but when I got some peer critique, they pointed out some clear mistakes. I repeated this a few more times, until no one could find any mistakes. Finally, my Mum read the essay in which she fixed a few things, then it was ready to hand in! It is in the same link as last time. 

Thanks for reading this blog post, and I hope to post another thing soon! Until next time!