My Mpol post
Through the start of this year I have been learning a lot. I learned less about the subject of the projects than I did about how to actually do the projects. The only thing I learned about that doesn’t make me not learn about how to do the projects is math even though in math the project is the subject. If you want to know a lot about math go to the end.
The first thing I think I really learned about was time management and always having time for homework. So lets start with Maker. At the start of the year we did the Big Life Journal. The big life journal was very fun and only got difficult with the last few chapters where there was a little bit more thinking involved. It was about what you want to be when you grow up and how you will get it. So logically I didn’t do it well and I kind of learned my first big lesson, time management. Every two days, or every maker class one chapter was due. Because I go climbing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I only had one evening to work on it and a lot of the time the evenings were already take up by stuff I do with my family like going on walks until dinner and then bedtime. This can even reflect on now where I have a friend from Mexico over and we spend most of the weekends and after school outside. The day before my Mpol presentation we went skiing from school time until 10pm and I didn’t do any homework at all. On Sunday we went hiking for 5 hours and because we had a late start and I only did homework in the evening. But that’s not all. I procrastinate a lot. When I have time to do work I think about playing games and doing other stuff instead. In the morning I play with lego, and in the evening I sit around and look at it along with my other toys or play computer games. I know I really shouldn’t but it’s not like the assignment is due tomorrow.
Time management is definably something I need to and will continue working on because in almost every project I do, I procrastinate up to the last second because I want to just enjoy myself instead of doing the homework I know I’ll have to do sometime anyways.
The second thing that I learned about except this time I succeeded at it was my Growth Mindset. I think this is because I already had a growth mindset before, or at least that’s what it felt like. I’m always open to learning new things. It’s fun to figure out an equation or solve a problem and that’s fun. That’s why I’m good at having a growth mindset. But this is about what I want to improve and not what I’m already good at. In my growth mindset I still need to improve some things like being open to different ways of solving problems and different styles. For example I’m not that good at writing in some more philosophical ways. I like everything to be strait forward and there being a straight up answer for everything. PLP has taught me that in most scenarios it’s not that way and you need to plan ahead a lot.
So because of those two factors and a few more minor factors I decided to make my question: “How can I improve my learning from mistakes?” Or more or less “How can I effectively learn from my mistakes?”
Because throughout the last few months I made a lot of mistakes. I made them because PLP was teaching me and showing me things and ways to do things that I had never before done. A good example of that is the sciematics book about plate tectonics and tectonic plates which I had done wrong in many ways, the first of which was that my book wasn’t interesting and second because I didn’t include enough of my knowledge about tectonics in it even though I fully understood the process of all of the tectonics from how earthquakes can form to how and why Hawaii is slowly moving South-East. Having not done something like a book for kids about scientific subjects before (looking back at it I know what I should have done and what I will do better next time) I didn’t really know how to write it.
There is one last thing I want to talk about and it’s something completely different. It’s PGP. PGP is one of the funnest school projects I ever did. Not because of what the work was, but more majorly about how we did it. We went to Oregon and I learned a lot about a lot of different things. To this day I don’t entirely know what the project was about and why it didn’t feel like so much work but I can take my guesses and most of the time my guesses/hypothesis’s are correct and on track. I think that most of all the PGP project was to find out how well we worked, how efficiently we used our time, and to piece together this puzzle which is our class in PLP (kind of like a bonding activity).
I have a goal for this year of PLP, well actually I have two. The first one is to use my time more wisely and efficiently and the second is to not play any video game by my birthday. Lets start with the first goal, using all of my time efficiently. I chose this goal above all others because it’s one of my worst habits. Playing, talking (I’ve already stopped messaging) and not doing schoolwork with my friends during class is hard to resist and so is just giving up on the homework I’ve got to do and just reading or playing video games. Would you rather be writing a blog post about your school year and what you want to do, or read a nice book while enjoying a great tasty drink of your choice (in my case either milk or fruit tea(rum with fruits and then boiling water added to it) which are both yummy). See? No one likes to work except those people, and at least for when I’m in PLP I need to be one of those people. I just need to motivate myself with some message like if you don’t do your homework Satan will get you or something along those lines. Now onto stop playing video games, which is just mental effort, but I have better things to do like reading books.
One last thing, which is math. I want to exclude math because it doesn’t really fall into what PLP stands for. It’s straightforward and easy to do unless you don’t learn the equations or have a fixed mindset. I myself am good at math and love learning new equations. In grade six I had a teacher who didn’t teach us anything about math and then I learned what I should’ve learned in a whole year in just three weeks. It was thrilling and fun. But most of all straightforward. In math you don’t have to learn a lot of names and it’s all just numbers which couldn’t be more straightforward if you did all you could to make it. So all in all, I like to do math and it’s my favourite subject which doesn’t involve sports.
I don’t know which message you get from that but what I’m sending is that I’m learning how to do things and when I crack the code or figure out the secret, and I will do that, I’m going to make PLP be one of my best learning experiences ever, and I’m going to make it count.
