Now that I’m going into grade 11, I’m really starting to feel the pressure, especially because the consensus that society has made is that grade 11 is when everything really starts to matter. But luckily, this year has started to prepare me, and I think now I have the knowledge and skills to actually do the level of work I want to do. In this blog, I’ll be talking about how I got those skills and learned all that new stuff specifically through the lens of three success criteria of a PLP learner. The segments I’ll be mainly covering are conduct and integrity, self-regulation, and agency. I want to tell the story of my year in a more chronological way than others, so I’ll be trying to demonstrate how I grew in different areas over the course of the year. Here’s the success behaviors of a PLP learner just for some context the ones marked are where I think I’m at right now.

Looking back on my year, I think it could be likened to a 2k or an 800-meter race. I started off strong, really strong. I was really able to put my full 100% into each project, even if we had multiple going on at once, just like in a 2k where the start always feels good and you feel confident. Then, I managed to keep up throughout the start of the year with only a bit of fatigue because of all my activities outside of school. Just like the halfway point of a race, I got into the groove but was a bit tired. If I had to give a percentage for my work, I’d probably say I was still trying 100% but was only able to show 90% in my work. Around the last month of school was when I really started to struggle. I’m not sure why. I think it’s like the part of a race where you’re almost at the finish line but not sprinting yet, and you start to really feel tired and might slow down quite a bit even if you’re trying as hard as you can. If I were to give myself a percentage, I would say I was still trying 100% but really was only doing 80 or 70% until the very last project (Back to the Future), which I’ll talk about later. I think that project was like the sprint for me, where I did as much as I could and really drained myself doing that, but it was worth it for my final project. Luckily, now I know that this happens to me because it’s happened every year I’ve been in PLP. So now I can avoid and be mindful about it so it doesn’t happen to me next year.

**Conduct and Integrity:**

The best project to help me explain the start of my year and how I improved my conduct and integrity would be my podcast project, where I made a podcast about the most important cars in history while still making sure I wouldn’t say anything to upset anyone and also making sure I would follow all the copyright laws so as not to get in trouble. A big part of conduct and integrity is showing leadership abilities, like setting a good example of a learner and supporting the community for each project. I think for my podcast project, I set a really good example because when creating each episode, I booked a local studio in advance and spent over two hours working on recording and editing each episode, all to have a project I was happy with. Because the podcast project was at the start of the year, I’ve had a sort of example to aim for, of what a successful project should look like for me.

**Self-Regulation: (Who Are You Going to Be)**

At around the halfway point of the year, we did a project asking ourselves who we are and who we wanted to be. Creatively, the name of this project was “Who Are You Going to Be.” At the start of the project, I was a bit skeptical, but I quickly got into the idea of self-reflection, and even now I’m still really into the idea of thinking about who I am as a person. Now you may or may not be thinking, how is this connected to self-regulation? So let me tell you how. In PLP, self-regulation is broken up into three parts: focus, balance, and self-care. Because the project was about learning about myself, I got to assess myself, which meant I realized what kinds of things distract me and what things help me focus, like working in a quiet space alone. I want to be completely honest, and that means admitting that even with the help of this project, I still really struggle with balancing my social life, activities, and school. I’m not sure why, but I think I just sign myself up for too many things without thinking. So for next year, I want to try and think more before promising myself something. Lastly, one of the things that I think I’ve always been good at but had heightened by this project is “self-care.” I think I always treat myself well and am able to seek help when I truly need it.

**Agency: Spring Exhibition**

Over the course of this year, my agency has really been going through a lot of ups and downs. From using Things (the app) religiously to not using it at all, I really want to get back into it because it was such a useful tool that kept me on track, but I just stopped checking/using it. Other than my use of Things slowly degrading over the year, my agency in every other area I think has been really good for what I can achieve. My highlight project that shows pretty much how my agency has been throughout the year would be the project “Back to the Future,” where we continued the strain of self-reflection work we did earlier in the year. But instead of who we wanted to be, we thought about what we wanted to do. Because agency is all about being responsible for yourself, this project was perfect to learn more about agency while also utilizing it to complete the project. The final project of the year was for the PLP exhibition, where we had to pitch ourselves to a public audience with the premise of why we would be a good addition to a workplace. So I made an interactive game where guests would hit a guy (target), then I would help the guy get up to show how I enjoy helping people. To create my game and the rest of the work I presented, I needed to use the agency I had and the agency I had just learned about. I took responsibility for my work and what I needed to do. I set goal points to achieve throughout the project to reach the final deadline. The big area I think I can grow on is asking for help when I need it because I think I made the project a bit too hard for myself. But other than that, I think my agency has been really good over the course of the year, excluding the last month.

I know that’s a lot of reading, so I want to thank you for reading all that, and I especially want to thank my teachers for giving me such a great year where I was able to learn and grow as a student and a person. Also, I want to thank my teachers for putting up with my work for the past month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great morning or evening.