Tpol

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another presentation of learning. This is my second one this year and hopefully I can improve even more last time. This presentation has a new driving question , Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level, and I’ll tell you, a little later. Now in my last post I said several goals for me to achieve for the rest of the year. Let me tell you, because we’re not here to lie, I have achieved them. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying, because I most certainly have. But I still have a long way to go, and hopefully today will help me share with you what my plan is and how I’m going to move and develop those goals for the future.

Ah humanities, probably our most difficult subject and one of my personal favourite subjects. Our work this year in humanities has been incredibly interesting. My goal for my impulse was to improve my writing specifically in humanities (as it’s our kinda English class) and I think I’ve been doing pretty well. With our creative writing project earlier in the year, and the many projects that have involved writing since then, I’ve been getting a lot of practice. My personal favourite example of my better rating, with in our recent World War I project. For this project we had to write 4 to 6 book pages in a factual style, and I really think it went well. I was able to keep my rating fairly concise, not using too many big words or running sentences. And although the sounds like a fairly simple thing to do, writing like this is not particularly easy for me and I was proud of my final product. However as I move into grade 10 I know that essays become far more common. So I think I need to work towards learning to write my opinion, and being able to support it well. We’ve had some practice in the various projects we’ve done this year, but not nearly enough for me to have my skill where I’d like it to be. So my final goal for moving into grade 10 for humanities is to improve my ability to write my opinions using evidence to support them.

Maker is one of our strictly PLP subjects, where we use the Apple Pencil and iPad to create things we wouldn’t be able to create normally. It is also for me a very enjoyable subject, and a subject that I set a very large goal for at my Mpols. My goal was to try to curb my perfectionism so that I could do better at the upcoming Destination imagination project. Now this one I think I was further from succeeding at. I gave it some effort at times, but it was really hard for me to unclench at other times, and I’m pretty sure it caused some arguments. I don’t know if I’ll be getting another chance at this next year’s DI so I’ll have to keep my goal for all future maker projects and not just necessarily DI. Apart from DI I have one other project that I’m very proud of. This was my witness to history climbing community video. I think this video really showed the culmination of all the skills I’ve learned so far this year in maker. I took a lot of the videoing, editing, music creation, and interviewing skills we’ve been practising all year in our various different projects. I think my video shows just how much I learned about all of these things throughout the year and in particular, editing. I spent hours perfecting, refining, and editing down that video to get it shorter, snappier, and easier to watch. It was the perfect example of my video creation skills, and it’s one of my favourite final products of the year.

Scimathics is our mixture course of maths and science, it’s one of our hardest courses, and is where I produce some of my best work. This year is very much different then last year, we did a less projects last year, so the switch to learning this way in math and science was a big change. I do however think one project what is an example of my (i think) good work in Scimatics this year. This project was the metaphor machines project. During this project we built a large Rube Goldberg machine and use it to represent the scientific method. The reason I think this is such a good example of my work was because it not only included science and math related work, but I think it was also example of me picking myself back up after failure. You see I missed two or three lessons at the start of this project, which meant I feel pretty behind in the learning aspect of it. What this meant was I had to do a lot of the learning myself or get help from my friends. I think it was a good example of instead of me just falling behind and losing interest in the project, I motivated myself to fix the problem and learn the material so that I could participate alongside my team. I hopefully will continue this standard of work for next years Scimatics and produce even better work too. It’s one of the most important courses if you want to be a fully competent person, and I look forward to gr. 10 where I will learn even more.

Work habits, yikes. See I thought I was doing pretty well with my work habits before coronavirus hit. I’m a pretty reliable student, I hand most stuff in on time, and even when it’s late it always gets in (there’s a few exceptions). But being in quarantine has seriously harmed those habits, I have been struggling. I’ve been handing in a lot of stuff late recently and even sometimes forgetting to send in things at all. I spend way too much time focussing on certain pieces of work, and then I try to start other things and lose my focus instantly. Not to mention I waste plenty of time on other things. Now it probably has something with being cooped up and not having any activities to look forward to, but I think it probably comes down to me being a little lazy, and leaving everything to the last minute. So it is pretty safe to say that I need to get a grip before we get back to school, because there’s no way I will be able to do well in grade 10 unless I can snap out of it. However I think I may have a solution. The one thing though that i’ve been finding helpful lately is lists. Not things, or reminders which never seem to work for me, but physical hand written lists. Whenever I see the list because it’s always there, not tucked away in some app on my iPad, I always feel the need to check it and tick it off. That’s why I think having it there in front of me, and has been really helpful in getting me motivated and finishing things. So I think My solution for next year will be to start doing other things that can get me excited and motivated, to get a bit more routine back in my life with school, and my goal will be carry around a physical planner everyday to create lists and jot things down so that I can get myself finishing things.

Well folks the finale is upon us, and now we must return to the essential question we asked at the start of this post “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”, and I’ll tell you. I think I’ve grown a lot this year, I’ve matured more as a person, and learned just a little bit more about myself. But I think I also learned more in the sense of knowledge base, I’ve done many interesting and informative projects this year and I’ve learned a lot more new skills in many different areas. I’ve also pushed myself a lot this year whether it be developing skills I’m not great at, like creative writing, talking and interviewing people who I might not know, like many of the business owners in Alberta, taking opportunities to improve my public speaking and try something new, like the conference I spoke at the other day. Still this doesn’t mean I am without flaws. I still need to focus on getting in work on time, keeping from getting frustrated when things don’t always go my way, and working in groups after these few months of mostly self directed projects. But the way I see it these are all perfect examples of goals I can set, and achieve as I enter grade 10. It’s the perfect motivator To keep my trying hard in grade ten, and a great topic at next years Mpol. So my answer is I am ready to move on to grade 10 in many ways. I know what goals I want to set to improve, I know I’m ready to learn even more, and I’m exited for new experiences and opportunities, and being able to take them on. That’s why I’m both ready to advance to the next grade level, and exited for it too.

Thanks for listening!

Holly