It’s that time of the year when I get to present all of the learning I’ve done from the beginning of the school year. This is my final mPOL, as next year, I will hopefully be attending university. So far this school year, I’ve gone through 3 different projects in humanities, and another project in PGP and with that lots of learning has happened.

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Humanities

In humanities, throughout the three projects we’ve completed, there’s so much work that I’m proud of. In our first project, where we learned about totalitarian regimes, I created a video about censorship in China to help me answer the driving question.  The driving question for this project was “how does dystopian literature act as social commentary?”

In our second project, I worked with the rest of my class to create a horror movie. Although I felt like our final product didn’t fully answer the driving question, I was proud of the amount of work I spent editing and the valuable skills I developed in the process.  Our driving question for this project was “Why is horror an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?”

In our third and final project, we created a children’s book to teach feminism to kids in kindergarten. It was interesting learning about feminism and then bringing it down to a level that is fun and presentable for a younger audience to understand. In the end, my group was able to produce an amazing book that was enjoyed by the kids.  The driving question for this project was how do we encourage children to support women’s rights?

Each of these projects has opened my eyes to different habits, systems, and skills that I’ve grown on and need to improve on. They have taught me to approach challenges with a positive mindset, to continuously learn and grow, and to always strive for excellence in everything I do. Overall, these projects have been a valuable learning experience and I want to share some of the positives and the negatives.

I’ve stuck to my habit of doing a bit of work every day. This is something I wanted to start doing last year and it helped me greatly. I get a start on work every day and instead of rushing to finish it all on the final day, I have something to work with already that is almost complete. It’s a habit I’ve used throughout every PLP project as well as other classes in school. I’m able to work at a consistent pace and avoid the stress of having to complete a large amount of work in a short period.

While this is a great habit to have, I’ve found that this habit slowly has grown weaker over time. Sometimes I have a greater workload than other times, but I do the same amount of work as if I had a small amount of work to complete. Doing a bit of work then gives me validation to go do something I’d rather do since I’ve already done a bit of work. Procrastinating has been something I’ve struggled with throughout all my time in high school. I’ve tried many different methods to crush this bad habit such as eliminating distractions, working in a quiet area, setting timers to work than to play, time blocking, and so much more. I’ve never found a solid system that I could stick to that worked for me.

I’ve always found that I work best late at night. It’s almost like something triggers in my mind that I need to complete this before I go to sleep and that’s what motivates me to get stuff done. This is terrible as it either leaves me with sloppy work that was rushed or I am sleep-deprived and unable to function in class in the morning. I need to start holding myself accountable.

Through completing these projects, I find that when I get to be creative and have the freedom to choose what I want to do, I get the work done with more efficiency and with a lot higher quality. I found this true in almost every project that I’ve completed so far in humanities. The best example of this would probably be the PLP horror movie project. I found that learning to edit a horror movie and going through the process of editing was fun rather than work. A way for me to possibly crush my bad habit of procrastinating would be to try incorporating or focusing on specific points of my work that I enjoy. That way, it’ll motivate me to learn and I’ll want to complete the work instead of just leaving it to the last minute. It’ll give me more time to review my work and look over it so I hand in a final product that is of high quality, while also not losing sleep over it.

A positive skill I’ve developed throughout this year is my communication skills. Although in almost every PLP class we communicate in groups, I felt I grew the most during our horror movie project. Working with a large team was something I did before last year for our Macbeth movie, except this time, we didn’t have the wise and film-experienced grade 12s. Instead, it was just our class working with one another to complete a 20-minute horror film that presented a comment on our society.

While I was on the editing team, I found that I greatly improve my communication skills and analysis of others’ critiques. Throughout the entire editing process, I would always send drafts of the movie back to the director and producer to receive critique. We would communicate dates to meet during the tutorial to give feedback in person, and I would receive feedback online. I constantly had to take in the critique and use my judgement as an editor to decide if that would be the right move or the wrong move. It was important for me to follow what the director was telling me to change, but also to use my best judgment and communicate when I thought something wouldn’t work. This experience has been a big step toward improving my group work skills.  It’s also taught me how to make the most out of the critique given.

Something I’ve realized from completing multiple socratic seminars during this year is that it’s something I just don’t believe I can improve at. I’ve tried going into them with a positive experience, but during them, I’m never able to contribute other than by listening. I understand that the idea of the Socratic seminar is to help go deeper on topics that we already have learned about by discussing together as a group, but it’s something I’m still not comfortable doing, and don’t believe it’s something that I’ll ever get good at.

PGP

I found PGP to be an extremely helpful course this year. I got to polish up my resume, listen to some talks from some amazing people, and participate in an exhibition. I’ve grown a lot through that class and overall it greatly helped me in my preparations for university.

I was proud of the final product that I created for my project during this course. I created my lock box that was inspired by the
book I read called Quiet. The book is an exploration of the idea that introversion is a valuable and undervalued trait in modern society, where extroversion is often celebrated. This is an example of something that I created that demonstrated what I do when I’m working on something that I enjoy. I was working hours every day to build the circuit, design the box, and troubleshoot errors. I was very proud of how I performed during this exhibition, and I want all of my work to reach this standard.

 

Learning Plan

Now, what does everything I’ve brought up have to relate to the learning plan that I completed at the beginning of the year? As I’ve written in my learning plan, I discuss the issue that I had about leaving work at the last minute. This also relates to what I talked about in my learning plan about taking the time to reflect and complete neat and careful work.

I discuss in my learning plan how I always want to keep a positive mindset while completing any task or doing any work. I believe that way, I’ll give stuff a chance and will complete higher quality work or learn more in general. This is something I’ve done with everything in PLP so far and I feel that its improved my overall experience in class.

Any Questions?