Once again, it’s the time of the year for Mpols or Midyear presentations of learning. In this blog post I’m going to be going over highlights of my school year so far and then later on switching my focus to the future with goals, improvements and questions I have in mind for my learning. The goal of this post is ultimately to help answer this question:
“What is my learning goal that I want to reach by the end of the school year and how will I meet it?”

To start to get into this post I thought I would talk about my humanities class. The way I see it, there is more or less two sides of humanities, the literature side and the history side. I want to focus on the history side first. I’ve learned a lot about history this year from WW2 in our Manhattan project project to the 50’s in beat poetry project. Personally, my favourite was the Manhattan project because of the field school and the enriched learning that comes along with that. On that trip, in that project and throughout my whole school year in general, one thing I took away from this more history side of humanities is comparison. I found that my ability to accurately and effectively compare topics has improved vastly. In beat poetry we compared beat poets to each other and to modern times and as well. In LOTF our entire project was based around taking lines from a book and comparing them to our society as metaphors.

The next thing I want to touch on is logically, the more literary side of humanities. So far this year we have done so much that it is hard to wrap it all up. One highlight for me is definitely the Winter Exhibition and performing the poetry I wrote. I really liked this because it’s not something I would be able to do in the average class. Throughout the whole beat poetry project I felt that my teamwork skills improved a lot. I don’t think they were necessarily bad before but with such a large group it can get difficult to stay connected and I thought I did well in that aspect of that project. One thing I’m really proud of that more of a mix of history and literacy is my Manhattan book. Even though the timing on everything could use a little work I felt my end product was something I could show to people and be very proud of. This is partly because I had to redo a large portion of lost work and after it’s been done I can honestly say I made a better book because of revision I did.

 

 

 

After reflecting on my past work, it’s time I talk about the future and what I have planned for my learning. At this point there are lots of technical skills I want to improve on but to a certain degree that’s on me and something I have to pursue on my own. Things like editing, filming and writing are always going to be important but don’t really hold a candle to a deeper and more personal inquiry. One thing I want to do this year, is keep my head above the water. I think I’ve done a pretty good job so far but some moments stand out where I did feel piled up in hindsight. During our bio of a beat mini project is an example where I was juggling one too many pins. Eventually one drops and in this case, it happened to be that mini project. That work would be an example of something I am not as proud of but something I learned a lesson from instead. Because of the nature of schools low and high intensity weeks it can sometimes feel insurmountable when looking at this pile of homework, or studying, or whatever it is. My plan around this is to be more in touch, to know if I can do said assignment, worksheet, etc, the day before or not. This way I can get a head start and maintain the same workload between my classes but at a more even pace. This topic leads to my finishing question which I feel is a crucial piece of this puzzle.

Question: What are steps I can take to become more constantly involved in my learning?