This year I’ve accomplished so much more then I ever thought I was capable of, and I’ve genuinely surprised myself time and time again with the work that I’ve produced. As the year has progressed I’ve seen myself evolving not only as a high performance learner, but as both a leader and an individual.
To showcase some of my most notable accomplishments, I have prepared examples from my portfolio that best demonstrate the learning I’ve undertaken so far this school year. In addition, I will introduce goals that I have set for myself for the remainder of this year and outline my plan for achieving these goals.
I want to start off by talking about The Manhattan Project and my “History In 5: Women of Hanford” video. The Hanford Video was my first real taste of the P.L.P. program. However, ironic as it may seem, still to this day it is my proudest and most well renowned accomplishment. I am proud of this project not only because of the final product, but of how much work I put into it and how much I actually learned throughout the creation process.
Going into it I had no idea what to expect as it was my first major project, but my group consisted of Zakaria, Marley, Michael, and Jayden, four past, experienced P.L.P. students, and working with them really played to my advantage. We all worked very cohesively as a team and I was able to learn a lot about what it takes to make a good movie, how to film, and things like camera angles, lighting, and audio through watching them film, conduct interviews, and edit their videos. However, without even knowing it, they taught me something much more valuable then how to use a damn iPad. They showed me what it looks like to be a motivated P.L.P. student and the type of sustained effort it takes to produce a sufficient final product; I still carry those crucial lessons with me today. I remember, 6 short months ago, writing our scripts in our only free time in order to film on sight, running around the reactor trying to find the best places to film, and making the whole tour bus wait on us just so we could finish all our interviews. Yeah, we put in an immense amount of time and effort. But in the end it wasn’t our unprecedented work ethic that fuelled our success, it was our cohesive dynamic and willingness to cooperate, which allowed me to walk away feeling optimistic and proud of my work as if I’d been in the program since grade 9. Not a lot of people can say that they’ve presented at a school board meeting, but I can, and that’s something I don’t take lightly.
The next thing I want to talk about is my growth as a learner from the first day in September until now. As this is my first year in PLP, the whole concept of inquiry based learning is still fairly new and it’s been really tough for me to adapt after going through three years of normal school.
I remember being so frustrated while making my first blog post. I didn’t even know what a blogpost was supposed to be or even look like, and when I asked other people they just expected me to know. So long story short, I spent an entire weekend creating my first post, only to figure out that my friends spent a mere two hours. Even now I still struggle with writing my blogposts, but since the beginning of the year I’ve noticed a large difference in my growth as a learner and I’m getting faster and more efficient each time. As the year has gone by, both my writing and creative thinking skills have improved immensely and to show my growth, below is my first inquiry blogpost compared to a more recent one that I published in January.
Right off the bat it’s easy to identify some clear differences between the two. My first post was short, unoriginal and it lacked depth as I was still struggling to grasp the whole idea of a blog. But if you fast forward four months time, you can really see the difference in quality and attention to detail. In my “Fashion 101” post I included in depth explanations, cited photos, an original creative visual, and I reflected well on the whole creative process. However, I think this is only a small glimpse into what I’m capable of and I believe that I will keep improving as the year goes on.
Finally, the last piece of work I will be presenting is something that represents my growth mindset as a learner. As I mentioned earlier, this is my first year in the P.L.P. program and let me tell you, nothing has been smooth sailing. Time and time again I’ve encountered many setbacks. But like anything new, I know If I make mistakes I’m bound to only learn from them.
When it comes to looking at one of my early posts, “The German Start to The Great War,” it’s easy for me to identity many reasons why it’s not my best work. When looking at the video closely, there’s a lot of things I could’ve done differently to make it better. I filmed all my shots vertically, my audio was rough as I recorded the beat and my voice at the same time without a mic, the transitions weren’t smooth, and the overall presentation could’ve been edited a lot better with more filler clips. To be blunt, it looks like a grade seven put this video together and its easy for me to admit that as I know My growth mindset has come such a long way since October. But to my own credit, my lyrics were accurate and I had a lot of fun collaborating with the boys to make some dank rhymes. If I were ever to create a similar post to this again, I know I would take a lot greater care to detail and I could create something a lot better that’s actually worth watching.
When it comes to setting my goals for the remainder of the school year, i contemplated long and hard over the past couple days and finally came up with three things that I want to achieve as a student. To start, I want to step out of the box more and challenge myself to adopt a leadership role in the classroom. All my life I have thought of myself as a natural born leader and I know that if given the chance I could make a large impact as I’m motivated, focused, and meticulous, yet social and understanding. I honestly think I could’ve been a great producer for our Macbeth production, however, I shied away from the role as I was worried I lacked the experience. My second goal is to work on being more productive and less of a perfectionist. I always find that it takes me an unnecessary amount of time to complete my work and I know as life goes on I will only be forced to juggle more and more. So my plan to confront this is to stop editing and reading through my work after every new sentence, and just let my ideas flow as they come. I found in the past that when I get on a role I produce better quality work and it’s a lot easier for me to focus. Lastly, my third and final goal for this school year is to make an effort to talk to and get to know every single person in the class. In any classroom setting, I believe social connection and interaction is just as important as intellectual awareness. However, when I look around our classroom I notice most people only interact with certain individuals and I aim to change that to create a more friendly and cohesive work space for everybody. No matter what were stuck together for the next year and a bit, so we may as well get comfortable with each other and make the best out of our high school experience.