Grade 9 has come and gone, the only thing left is my tPOL. For those of you who don’t know, a tPOL is a way for PLP students to reflect on the year, the different projects, how they progressed as a learner, as well as plan and set goals for the next year. A tPOL is sort of a sequel from the mPOL. An mPOL is a reflection of the year so far, a tPOL is a presentation on why we feel ready to progress to the next grade. So, without further ado, welcome to my Transitional Presentation of Learning!

We all know this year has been an interesting one. It started out normal, but 2020 was a completely new experience for everyone. Lets begin before the pandemic, and focus on my mPOL. At my mPOL I mainly focused on falling behind in work. I credited this to losing interest and/or not being interested in the topic. Now, half a month later, I am happy to say I have evidence of improvement in that area. The last humanities project of grade 9 was about WWI. This was a pretty easy project to be interested in for me, just because WWI has been and still is one of my favourite topics to learn about. I think I progressed further from there though, by contacting my grandmother and finding info about a family member who participated in WWI I was investing myself even more. I even managed to link my work to another of my interests, WWII. By choosing the Treaty of Versailles as my topic to research, I was able to link my research to other things i had learned before about why WWII started. I think this project was one of my best and favourite projects ever, from what we were learning to what I managed to produce as my final project. 

Another example of finding an interest in a project would be the Blue Sky project this year. Throughout most of 2019 and part of 2020, I had been brainstorming ideas for blue sky on the hope that we were going to do Blue Sky this year. This let me find something I was actually interested in, and find a problem I wanted to solve. In grade 8, my Blue Sky project was rushed, and not much thought was put into what I decided to do. I was now ready for Blue Sky with a lot of ideas I was ready to do. But then COVID-19 struck. Since we couldn’t meet in person, we had to do Blue Sky separately at our houses. There was even a surprise twist! I don’t know if my teachers had planned to use the UN Sustainable Development Goals from the get go, or if they added it later, but I thought this new condition would ruin the ideas I had. I was completely wrong. Using the UN Sustainable Development goals let me add even more ideas to the idea I had chosen to go with. My original idea was to make an ice pack specifically designed for the knee area. After the Un Sustainable Development Goals, my idea was to make a recyclable ice pack with a safe gel inside that was also designed for the knee. I had managed to keep my interests alive in the project, and build from them. I think this shows massive growth since my mPOL. The Ben from 2019 probably would have given up and found a different idea to work on. 

Even this tPOL for example. As I’m writing this post, I’m noticing that because I’m talking about my interests, it has come very easy to me and I haven’t gotten stuck on a topic or gotten bored (which is a problem for me when writing posts). I am engaged in my work, and that is making my work much better quality. 

Covid-19 threw a wrench in my year. Following my mPOL, I was doing very well. I was caught up in everything (unfortunately that is rare), and the start of 2020 was going pretty good. Ive mentioned before that I have good and bad “streaks” in school. I can be doing really well, then something disrupts that and I fall behind. Covid-19 was a disruption in a good streak. I think the biggest disappointment this year for me was how far I fell behind in scimatics. Scimatics has always been the biggest challenge for me in school, starting in grade 8 to now. Quarantine magnified this challenge for me, and I began to fall behind and just straight up not do the work. This of course wont be acceptable in grade 10 (it wasn’t great now), so the biggest goal for me in grade 10 is, don’t fall behind. I think I do fairly well in the other PLP subjects, so I feel like grade 10 should be a scimatics focused year for me. 

Let us end off this post on a good note. Some of my favourite projects this year have the Take Your Kid to Work Day, This Land is Us, The Great War, The Story Strikes Back, and Revolutions Through the Ages. I think these projects were my best work this year and I must say I like talking about the topics. I really enjoyed Take Your Kid to Work Day. I have never done much research about architecture, so being able to go see an architect at work was really cool. I enjoyed making the video about my day, and it was really interesting to see all the different jobs there were in an architectural firm. I really feel like I learned a lot from this project and it reflects in my video. 

This Land is Us was the first project of grade 9, and it was very fun. Of course, any project is fun when you get to go to Alberta for 7 days, but it was very interesting to see different peoples perspective on the world, and their views. I loved seeing a whole new part of Canada, and seeing how that area has affected the people who live and visit there. Ever since we focused on worldview and how different things can shape it, I have been interested in different places and how the circumstances there affect the people lived there. A lot of this is credited to this project. I learned a lot from this project and i enjoyed it too.

Video making in quarantine was an interesting experience. In the Witness to History project, I couldn’t go out and get footage of other people playing basketball, so I had to salvage footage from my camera roll and ask my friends to record themselves playing basketball. I also had to go film myself playing basketball, which I think is a first for me. There has always been someone filming me or I am filming them, and filming myself meant I would take long shots and go through it later on to find the good clips. It was also the first time I had conducted an interview over the phone. It was really an interesting experience, since I cant see them I couldn’t see facial expressions, and while conducted other interviews, the body language of the interviewee was very helpful in understanding what they were talking about. 

All in all I see the quarantine as a positive experience. It was a nice way to challenge ourselves with online learning, and see how we could cope with sudden new surroundings and a new environment. It was an educational experiment, so to speak. I do have a lot to improve on though, and quarantine was a wake up call that online learning is challenging for me, and I am going to need to work on it through the summer in preparation for grade 12.