First, lets go back to the start of the year and look at some of my goals.

The biggest theme with my goals was communication, as at the time I thought it was the biggest thing to improve on. In hindsight I was right, but reality is always far more complicated then just saying it. Before we get into that, lets look at some of the positives of the year.

Communication with Peers

• Was chosen DRI for the project and tried my best to coordinate with everybody both on the field study and at school.
• Was one of the most even workloads of any group project
• Truly a colaborative final project, in which each section went through many revisions and changes by all members before finding footing.

Balance in Group Projects

• Specifically in group projects I relied and trusted on other people to complete their work, which significantly lessened my overall tasks list.
• Rarely took entire nights of homework to complete tasks meant for others
• Worked on the sections I was actually interested in.

Resilience

• This year I felt very stressed and overwhelmed with a lot of the projects, especially the more open ended ones.
• Despite these challenges I was still able to create high quality work.

  

  

Diving Deeper

Enthusiasm

When writing this TPol, I had honestly forgotten what we did for many of these projects. This is accompied with a general dislike or indifference to some of the final projects. Looking back, with the exception of the great debators project, I don’t know if I’m proud of any of the work I created. This is not saying the work isn’t good or high quality. Going through them again, I think a lot of the work i’ve done this year was quite good, but at the time I’m simply not very proud of them. I can think of two reasons for this:

1. I’m a perfectionist with insanely high standard levels for my work. Most of the time I finish a project not feeling like I met those standards. I think I have been getting better at stopping before going down a rabbit hole, but I can’t help but feel like I’m giving up when I do.
2. I have a terrible time doing the project. A lot of times I don’t have a deep personal connection to the project, and end up disliking doing the work, which carries over into the final product

Final Takeaways:

I don’t know what I’m doing

and I find it hard to find confidence in that

• I feel like I overthink work even more than I did before. This may have worsened due to the open-ended nature of many of these projects, and the increased stress surrounding grade 11.

Communication/Seeking Help

• The obvious solution to this problem is to check in with progress more, however there are some caveats
  • The check ins and criticing of work can be a source of stress in the first place.
  • This means checking in with a teacher only makes sense if I have work to show, which is the source of the problem in the first place.
• It boils down to the fact that I’m still scared of failures. Even though I understand they don’t necessarily influence my grade, they still represent extra work that I’m trying to avoid.

The Great Debaters was one of the projects I actually feel proud of this year.

• This could be due to the fact it had built in times for revisions, which relieved the pressure of making it perfect the first time.

All in all this year was a struggle to get through. While I didn’t meet all of my goals, I did have a good baseline of habits that let me keep a relatively high level of work, with further improvements in managing group projects.

Thank you for Listening