Introduction
Why do I feel that I am ready to advance to grade 11? That’s a pretty hard question for me to answer. I feel there are many many reasons for this, much too many to include in a single presentation. So, I have chosen the most important reasons to share. This year I feel I have grown a lot both as a learner and as a person. Looking back through my TPOLs and MPOLs since 8th grade, it’s surprising to see just how much I’ve grown. I look forward to looking back next year and see how much I’ve changed. For this year, I’ve decided that the best way to show my learning is by setting goals for myself.
Goal #1: Be Passionate in My Work
Something that I feel I lacked in for a lot of this year’s work was passion. For a majority of the projects that we did (not all of them, but a lot), I didn’t find passion in them. This made them difficult to enjoy, and didn’t allow me to motivate myself to work on them. Some projects, such as our Seattle video or Destination Imagination, I was passionate about because of the basis of the project. Both inspired me from the get-go, so I put more passion into them. What I would like to change for next year is to find passion even in projects that don’t inspire me. For example, in our Very Reactive science unit, the project pitch did not inspire me enough to stay interested in it. This meant that even though I worked hard on it, it still didn’t allow me to really enjoy what I was learning. To change this for next year, I will allow myself to find joy within certain parts of an assignment. I could have changed my focus slightly to a certain reaction that I was more interested in, or even just researched more information that I was curious about.
Goal #2: Look Deeper
Throughout my learning this year, I feel I have only been skimming the surface. There have been a lot of projects that I’ve been very curious about, but I haven’t looked deep enough into them to fully understand the bigger picture. There have been some projects, such as my Who Am I project for maker that I feel would have been much more useful to me if I had looked more in depth and really put in external research. I didn’t know what post-secondary programs I would be interested in, so I chose one somewhat randomly that looked interesting to me. Overall, this project was quite helpful, but it would have been better had I thought thoroughly of it.
Goal #3: Take My Time
I have a habit of rushing through assignments that I’m not interested in and not thinking through them enough. This means that I’m less invested in my final product then I’d like to be. I want my work to not feel like something I just want to get over with. I will work towards this by working on homework early so it’s not rushed and by putting more thought and effort into it.
Reflecting on This Year
Overall, I feel that I did most of my best work this year, and I am looking forward to what’s to come. Although these goals aren’t S.M.A.R.T. goals, meaning that they aren’t measurable, I still chose them like this because they are goals of what I want to improve on. I don’t believe that I can ever reach these goals fully, which helps me to motivate myself to try just a little bit harder.