Hello, and welcome to the first presentation of learning for this decade. This is the third presentation of learning I have done, and hopefully one of many more. The driving question for this presentation is “What is your learning goal that you want to reach by the end of this school year, and how will you meet it?”. In this presentation I hope to show you where I’ve exceeded in my learning, failed in my learning, and what my goals and plans for the future year is. Now this year has been a pretty good year for me so far. The work we’ve been doing is pretty fun and I think I’ve been doing fairly well with it. I’ve been struggling a little bit to get some work in on time because of the amount of extra activities I’m doing. But I always get things in eventually, although that is something I’d love to work on. I’ve had several projects I am very proud of this year, but there are some parts that I think you would have fixed. Now you’ve had a brief little intro to my school year so far, let’s jump into my first subject humanities.

“What is your learning goal that you want to reach by the end of this school year, and how will you meet it?”

Humanities I would say is a pretty strong subject for me. I always do pretty well with the humanities projects and I usually enjoy them and engage in them quite well. The project I have to say I am most proud of this year would be our most recent Star Wars project. Now this might seem like quite an odd project for me to be proud of, as both my parents will know that creative writing is not my strong suit. But that’s actually what made me quite proud. I am not a person who is naturally talented at creative writing, but I really stuck with this project and gave it my all. I came in early to school to see Ms. Willemse, I got both my parents to read it, and I asked for as much feedback as I possibly could get. To make it as good as I possibly could. I think it really showed my drive to do things well, and improve my skill set on things that I am not that good at. It was also really good for me to do something that I find really hard. Because I get very frustrated when I find things extra difficult, and it was good for me too put in a lot of effort, but also not waste my time by spending hours trying to make it perfect. On the flipside there was a project I was not so proud of this year. It was the most recent TikTok project we just did. I didn’t manage my time very well with this project and I think I ended up handing in several things late. When I did these things I think they were up to the minimum requirements, but I don’t know if I really did my best to go above and beyond. It wasn’t that I didn’t find the project engaging, in fact I was very interested with the idea of nationalism, and I also really liked Tik Tok. It was simply my bad use of time. I would leave things to the last second and then finish them as fast as I could, instead of developing the best possible answers, I was just trying not to hand things in late. This hasn’t really happened in the other humanities projects I’ve done this year, but I would like it to be a trend that dies. I definitely need to utilize my time blocking skills better, and when I time block I need to stick to that plan and get things done. That’s going to be one of my big goals this year, because I know I’m going to procrastinate at times, I mean who doesn’t. But I want to try and use better so that I don’t end up wasting as much of it. I don’t think realistically that I’ll be able to eliminate procrastination from my life, but I can definitely try my hardest to plan, time block, and use my time better.

Teemto Pagalies was a criminal. Exiled from his home planet because of his romance with the planet’s princess. He now resides on the desert planet of Tatooine as a junior member to the largest gang on Tatooine, the ‘Swoop Gang’. As he lugged boxes at the gang’s ship yard, his strange alien body sweated under the twin sun’s blistering heat. Pablo and Teemto had been lifting boxes for what felt like ages and they were both feeling extraordinarily tired. "I need a break," he said as he sat down on one of the boxes. His mind started to wander as he took a drink of water. "I miss her," he said to Pablo. "Aw man, are you still talking about that darn princess? You haven't seen her in years!" Pablo exclaimed. "I know, but all I want is to see her again! Her father had no right to exile me," Teemto was practically yelling at this point. "It's ok man, you'll get back to her someday. " All of a sudden Pablo's watch started beeping violently. "Oh crap, Jabba wants us," he said. Teemto started to worry. Pablo and him had only joined the gang a couple of months ago. He had absolutely no idea what Jabba would want with two newbies! However he swallowed his worry, he could show no sign of fear to Jabba or he would be crushed, literally. So he stood up and put on a brave face and although he was trembling inside he said, "All right, what are we waiting for. Let's go see the Hutt…" ************** Several Hours later************** Luckily the meeting with Jabba had gone well. They were to search for a deserter of the gang, and kill him on sight. They were very excited to do something other than carrying boxes, which meant they had jumped straight to the task. "Where do you think he went?" asked Pablo. "Off planet if he's smart," Teemto replied. They were walking through the market in downtown Mos Espa, the most crime-ridden city on Tatooine. Teemto was walking down the street when he heard a slight crunch under his foot. Normally he wouldn't check what it was, but today he was feeling a little spooked. Mos Espa was notoriously sketchy and being in the gang had made him paranoid. He lifted his foot carefully and a piece of tattered paper stared right back up at him. As he reached to pick it up, he read its message aloud, "Calling all pod racers to an epic race! Enter your name to race! Win 50,000 credits if you come first! Register at the nearest government building!"He was unimpressed, in a angered voice he spoke again, ”Garbage! Who would risk their lives on such an idiotic race?" , "Us, we have to race!" Pablo exclaimed. "I'm entering us both right now, Imagine what 50,000 could do! You'd impress Jabba so much! The next government building is only a 5 minute walk away." Pablo then proceeded to walk at an alarming speed to the building with Teemto lagging behind him. They got to the building and Pablo rushed in, Teemto stayed outside and waited. Pablo came out of the building about 10 minutes later, seeming fairly excited. They started to walk away as as Pablo explained what happened. "We're entered to win a spot in the race! There's only 600 people in the lottery right now so we stand a chance!", "Oh goody," Teemto said dryly. "I'd just love to waste my life pod racing." "Don't be a bummer," said Pablo. "Come on let's go patrol some more, we've got a traitor to catch." Teemto and Pablo left the crowded market, they spotted a strange man dressed all in black stepping into a land speeder, and as Teemto walked away he couldn’t help but feel that the man seemed oddly familiar…

For our second subject of the day we’re going to talk about maker. Now this term has been a term of videos. I think at this point we made around 12, and there are several of them I’m proud of, and then there are ones that I am not so proud of. I think I had one really big fail in terms of videos this term. And that would be my run project. And my run video I worked with two other people and you want to say we didn’t work great together. We had horrible communication, we didn’t schedule anything, and we never got work done, we just goofed off the entire time. This project was very disappointing, and I do genuinely think we could’ve made a much better product if we had figured out how to work together. Luckily we have another really big maker project coming up and that would be DI.

DI Where teamwork is tested…..

In DI this season I really want to take what I learned from the failure in my run video, and put it into DI. In this DI Season I’m going to work much harder with communicating with my team, using Basecamp, and keeping the silliness levels lower. I know it’s sometimes pretty hard to stay serious especially when you’re working with your friends, but it’s something I’m going to work hard on in this term. Teamwork is a huge part of PLP, and if your team doesn’t work the project you’re doing well almost always end up failing, I can say that from experience.

My FAIL run video.

For our third subjects today we are going to talk about PGP. PGP has not been a super big course for us this year as we have only done really one major thing for PGP. The thing we did was a blog post about managing our impulsivity in Alberta. This post I think went fairly well. I managed to reflect on the core competencies, and share my ideas pretty well. As we do more PGP stuff throughout this year I’m going to try and keep the same quality of work and hopefully increase my quality of work through a different projects. I want to use the PGP skills we learned last year like time blocking, and planning much better in the next two terms. Hopefully will get more opportunities to build on the skills that we learned from last year. But if we don’t the goals set for PGP this year is really just to utilize time blocking much better so that I don’t waste so much of my time doing useless things. I need to use the Calendar and Things app much more than I already do so that I can get things done.

  • What I should do

For the final subject of the day we have scimatics. I think I’ve done pretty well at Scimatics  so far this year and I’ve had one project that really stood out to me. This project was the chemistry stories project. I had kind of mixed feelings on this project. The project itself was very fun and I loved getting to make an animation. but chemistry itself was a really hard subject. Sometimes I couldn’t always understand what was going on, and it required extra research of my own to figure out what was happening (this was because of sometimes me missing something, or I just didn’t understand). But it was very frustrating to not always know or understand what was happening. Luckily I used techniques I have learned in class throughout last year, like 3 before me, the amazing tool of hank green and the internet, and rereading the textbook to help me understand what was happening. In the end I managed to pull together a video I was very proud of, but I know as the math and science will get harder in the next couple years I will have to get used to not knowing or understanding everything right away, and using different techniques to help me learn. I’ll have to figure out some ones that work really well for me, but so far the many YouTube tutorials have seem to always work the best.

In our final paragraph I don’t want to talk about a subject, I want to talk about my work habits and goals. My goal at the end of last year was to improve my writing, and I think I’ve achieved that. If you look at my first ever blog post you can see the difference and improvement in the writing from then to now. I have a much stronger vocabulary, use evidence, and in general more entertaining writing. I have also put a lot of effort into improving my creative writing in the Star Wars project. But this year I want to be a lot better about handing in work on time and managing my time better so that I can get things done. This will require me using time blocking much more and using things to its full capabilities to help me from doing everything at the last second and producing lower quality work. But the other thing I want to for this year is to manage my perfectionism and the controlling part of me. Sometimes I can become very obsessed with trying to get my work perfect, if there’s something I feel I’m not good at I will spend hours trying to make it flawless, sometimes resulting in tears. This is something that I could definitely use working on especially before DI where I have to get many things completed, and work with others. The problem with this problem is I have no idea how to fix it. I have always been like this and I could use some help in figuring out how to solve this problem. So my question for you today is…

What strategies can I use to curb my perfectionism so that I can work better in groups, and in general?