Howdy partners! It’s me Jordyn, back with a very important, very special post about my…. (drumroll)… mPOL!!! An mPOL is a presentation where you stand in front of a teacher or two as well as your parents and talk about what you think you could improve by the end of this school year and how that will help you grow as a learner. In the presentation I will show at least one example of my work from each subject, maybe not my best, and then talk about how I could improve this work, as well as things like learning habits and ethics. WARNING: This is going to be a very long post!!

There is a certain driving question we have been asked to answer through out this mPOL. “How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?”I will answer this question with everything below.

I would like to discuss the first ever unit we did in Humanities8, Advertising!! First if we take a look at the before and after photos of my deep cove and Oregon advertisements that already shows a lot of improvement.

But what you don’t see is all of the hard work it took to get to this point. After the first Advertisement we did, we had our work critiqued by our teacher and the people in our groups. The first time around it was easy to take in, we all new they were terrible anyway! But as we got deeper into the unit and after more and more drafts, it was a little bit harder to take the criticism. Me, being the creator of my advertisements, I thought they were great. I thought “Wow, this is amazing, I couldn’t possibly need to do any more work, it’s perfect!” But it sure was a surprise when I came to school the next day and was told to go back and revise my work… FOR THE TEN BILLIONTH TIME!! Sometimes it was really frustrating when there was something I thought looked fine, but everyone else saw it as a flaw I needed to fix, I just thought it would make it look worse and couldn’t handle the criticism. This would happen because of a terrible habit I have. I got so used to getting good grades in grade 7, that I couldn’t handle the fact that I would get lower than an A. I know it sounds ridiculous but it’s true. This is a habit I really, really, really need to break, especially when I am working in a group. This is something that will help me progress as a learner because I can work on it and that helps you grow. I eventually created the ad that I liked, the teacher liked, and that my group liked, you need to find that perfect balance between what you like and what others like, I’ve learned that. I think a good work habit that I got into for this particular project was taking notes on what people said to fix and then take those notes and using them to better my project. Another habit that I actually got into because of this project was, when I look at an ad now, I can tell if it is a good ad or a bad one, if it is trying to appeal to pathos, ethos, or logos, or even how the ad was made. I think that is pretty cool because if it wasn’t for this unit, I wouldn’t know any of that.

The Art of Advertising

The next topic I will get into is our Religion and Worldview unit. We had a few small projects incorporated into this one big one. The first one we did was our Worldview video. For this one, I didn’t have many issues other than one. Time management. We got assigned this project at the beginning of some random week that I can’t remember, and me being me, a little bit of a procrastinator, I was like “Oh! It can’t be too hard to write a WHOLE script and create a WHOLE video where the whole entire thing was illustrated and animated by me in just one weekend!” But I was wrong, very, very wrong. It was very difficult to create this video in that amount of time. But I pulled it all together in time for school the next day with a pretty good project. I had to revise only once and then it was exactly how I wanted it to be. The lesson I learned form this project is to manage my time better. The next part of the project was to create info graphics. There was a bunch of information we learned before we started which you can read about in my “A Religious Worldview” post. If you look at the comparison below, the change is amazing and that is what my group thought as well, but just like Advertising, most people don’t see the work that goes into it. I have to admit, looking back at this work, it probably isn’t my best. This was a group project as well where we did almost everything together so it was a bit harder to do what I wanted, I had to do what others wanted to. This is one of the things I talked about earlier and I think because of this project this habit did get a bit better, but as always, I can definitely, one hundred percent work on it. We came up with a successful infographic that I was happy with, my group was happy with, and our teachers were happy with. I think for this particular project, I learned a lot about team work. I learned that it takes a lot to be working in different houses one night, and then the next day you have to manage to bring it all together and make it work! Also, you really have to make the work even and do the work you were assigned or else you are letting the team down. I think even just this first major team work project we have done has taught me soooooo much and helped me progress as a learner.

A Religious Worldview

Ok, so that pretty much concludes the humanities section, now lets move on to Maker. Now if you remember from my “I Can’t Do It…. Yet!” Post, Maker is a class where we learn things we need to know for PLP but don’t learn in our other classes. The first unit we ever did in Maker was Growth and Fixed mindsets. We learned a lot about the science behind it, experiments people ran, listened to videos and pod casts, and did lots of work! At first, I was REALLY confused. I didn’t understand what a mindset was at all, so I kind of developed a work ethic that involves taking lots and lots and lots of notes from the videos we watched and then studying them later and racking my brain for background knowledge and then locking all of the information in my brain. Each class, because of this work ethic, I started to understand more and more until.. our final project! The selfie project. You can read more about the selfie project in my mindset post, the link will be posted below. The selfie project was an awesome project that we did that involves setting a long term goal. To me, the purpose of this project was to help you take your first step in fulfilling a growth mindset. I think overall I did a good job on this project, except for choosing fonts and colours. I had this problem in the advertising project as well. I had my picture all ready to go, edited and cropped, and then it was time to add text. I just could not choose the right font, the right size, or the right colours. I think I spent to much time worrying and had too many options to choose from. Something I can do to help me in the future with this problem is to narrow down my choices, pick 2 or 3 fonts that I am interested in and then just choose one, same with the colour, as long as they both match the theme of my photo. This is a minor problem but it is still worth the effort to help my growth.

I can’t do it….. yet!

The next “unit” we started, we are just half way through. It is called Destination Imagination. D.I. is a worldwide challenge in which you choose a category (technical, scientific, engineering, fine arts, and improvisational) and a certain challenge corresponds with each one. I don’t usually start talking about a unit half way through but I think it is kind of important for this particular one. I won’t give to much detail because there will be a post coming. I chose the improvisational category and got given the challenge of presenting an improv skit that includes a culture and cultural treasure, two explorers, an unusual place, and a plain white bed sheet. In my group we have been preparing by doing loads of research and practicing improv. This is another huge teamwork project so there is a lot of relying on each other and getting your work done when you said it would be. D.I., even though we are only half way through, has already helped me with my growth as a learner. It has already taught me so much about teamwork, responsibility, improv, preparation, and time crunches. I think that is pretty crazy! So far, as a group this project isn’t going as well as I want it to go. We are coming last in a lot of instant challenges (little mini challenges that happen really fast that you get points for) because of our performance. A lot of instant challenges include performing, and we haven’t been doing so well which is bad because our Destination Imagination challenge is actually performance based. So we really need to work on extending our performances, working quickly and efficiently, and working together as a strong team. Eventually all of these components will come together and we will be successful at the tournament. This has been a very important project for me so far!

Now moving on to Scimathics. I explained what this subject was in my last post about science, so if you want to learn more about it, you can go ahead and read it, the link will be below. I will talk about the science portion of scimathics first. We have done one major unit in science so far, the kinetic molecular theory. We learned a lot about particles and matter in this unit and how to go back and forth between them which I didn’t know much about before. I was partners with the wonderful Lucy, she has an amazing work ethic that I aim to use by the end of the year. She was an amazing partner to work with and very hard working. Because the video we made was mainly stop motion, we had to take lots of photos that are meshed together to make a video. I think one thing that could improve the video and my skills by the end of the year is working on my steady filming. It is something I have always wanted to work on, my filming and photography, because it is something I really love to but I haven’t quite figured it out yet! Other than that little issue the project was great!

Coconuts and Matter🌴

Last but not least….. MATH!! We have done one major project in math, it was very major, and very crazy!! I was in a group with people I had never worked with before which was a bit of a challenge. We weren’t working together very well, we kind of split into two groups, and that resulted in us completely messing up. Once we started to all work together we figured it out and actually exceeded! I learned so much about teamwork from this project, it’s seriously, not even funny! I learned that for it to work out, you all need to work together and then you will succeed. I also learned to think outside of the box in this project. The first attempt we did, we used normal, plain old triangular prisms (if you would like to learn more about this project read my “The Door is a Bore No More” post, the link will be posted below) and we didn’t’t have enough surface area. So what we did was we decide to actually cut the top of the shape open to add almost double the surface area of what we had before. Our group never would have done so well if it wasn’t for thinking outside of the box. A work habit that I got into through out this project was writing down all of our calculations in a neat, orderly-fashion so that when we needed to look back at our calculations, it wasn’t all jumbled and hard to read.

The Door is a Bore No More!!🚪🎉

I haven’t been in PLP for very long at all, it has only been half a year, but what I have learned in that time is just…… amazing, absolutely amazing. If we look back at the driving question I asked at the beginning of the post, “How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?” It’s a pretty hard question to answer, especially if I had been asked that at the beginning of the school year. If I had been asked that at the beginning of the school year, I might have had an idea of what to say, but nothing compared to the lecture I could give now!! By looking back at all that I have accomplished this year, maybe not all my best work, I can see just how much I still have to learn because of what I know now. Because of Humanities I now know I need to continue to work on becoming more accepting of the constructive feedback I get from my peers and teachers. I discovered the right words for something else I need to work on, balance. In my classes, Balance, to me, means an equal quantity of wants from everyone, equal quantities of what I want for a project, equal quantity of wants from other group members, but also from the teachers. From Maker, I learned to take proper and helpful notes that are the information I need to know for the project I am focusing on, but I still have lots of room for improvement on this skill. I also started to learn more about themes, colours, and fonts, I learned how to match colours, and choose proper fonts according to the photo. D.I. Has taught me so much about teamwork, more than any other project I have ever done, through out the year, I still have lots of teamwork skills I can work on. In science I learned that my camera skills actually aren’t that great, I need to learn to hold the camera steady to help me progress. And last, in math I learned to work more as a team and to think outside of the box, those things really helped me through out the project.

All of these things are F.A.I.L’s. A F.A.I.L. Is a first attempt in learning. All of the things I have mentioned in this post helped me gain knowledge, but they also showed me just how hard I need to continue to work in order to reach my goals and aspirations. When most people think of failure, they probably think of it as a bad thing. But when I think about failing, I embrace it and take it as an opportunity to learn. Now I am not saying to go out and look for failure, because that would just be bad, but when you do fail, don’t be upset, just look at the bright side. Learn from your mistakes. I am where I am today because of the support of my friends, family, and most importantly my teachers. My plan for progression as a learner involves, accepting failure, being open to constructive criticism, and becoming more of a team player. All of these things will contribute to my growth and success as a learner.

~Jordyn 😁