Hope is seemingly essential to climb a mountain. This is something I learned in our most recent project. It was a project about defining things like hope, resilience, and adversity. Throughout it, we looked at various stories of hope and saw what we could learn from them. Our final evidence of our learning was to finish a video detailing a couple of stories of hope and what you learned from them. The driving question was “What lessons and inspiration can we draw from the stories of individuals and communities that have faced tragedy and overcome adversity?”

My very cool Dad, climbing a very cool mountain!

I found this project pretty difficult, I ended up being away for a pretty large chunk of it, however, I still think there were some positives. One of those positives was the revisions I made on my various assignments, but particularly my blog post. At the start of this project, we made a blog post defining what we found a story of hope to be. My initial work was OK, I put quite a lot of thinking into it, but it just wasn’t a very good blog post. However, I took the time to revise not  only the format (adding links, photos, and things that hold the post together), but also some of my answers to what a story of hope was, as well as bringing some real life examples into my post to expand my thinking. I think it ended up being a much stronger product, that actually showcased the time I took thinking. The other part of this project that I think was very strong, was my personal connection within my video. I chose mountaineering as my topic for my video, it’s a branch of climbing, that I don’t necessarily do, but is connected to the sport I love. This allowed me to really connect to my topic, and get a bit of an understanding of what the mindset of mountaineers is really like. It also allowed me to interview my father, who is a pretty experienced mountaineer. I generally think when I have a more personal topic, my passion for the topic really shines through when I talk about it.

However I still think there were some pretty big flaws in my work in this project. My timeliness this project was pretty poor, I was away for quite a lot of this project, but I often let the littler things slip under my view, which then caused the bigger things like this post, or the video to be late. This is something that shouldn’t be happening by grade 12, so even though there’s only one project left, it’s something I want to work on. The other thing that I think I could have improved on in this project was my extending of my learning. Because of the issue I talked about before where I lost track of the little things, and then had to catch up on the big part of this project, extension kind of just got swept under the rug for me this project. For some reason, I just felt like I was always rushing to finish the next mile stone this project, and I didn’t keep very good track of the other things I needed to do. Although, I think I was very actively participating, thinking, and extending my learning in class, I didn’t properly show that out of class. And for this final project, I really want to take the extending opportunities that are given to me by the teachers, and use them. As I think it’s important to push my thinking in different directions other than exactly what the project is talking about.

Reinhold Messner, a climber known for mental control.

Finally, the suspense is over and done with, and you get my wildly exciting answer to the driving question “What lessons and inspirations can we draw from the stories of individuals and communities that have faced tragedy and overcome adversity?” The lesson that I learned from hope and the overcoming of adversity from mountaineers, is that Hope is an incredible tool for controlling the mind. A calm and realistic optimism allows you to navigate complicated situation’s, and place belief in realistic possibilities. It allows you to move past fear, and test your limits. Personally, this project has helped me a lot with my Climbing. Being able to believe a climb is possible, and have hope that I can do it, has been incredibly beneficial to my confidence in completing climbs. This mindset of hope is incredibly useful in all aspects of life. Being able to believe and put faith in things is an important first step to getting something done, even if it seems difficult.