Hello everybody and welcome to my 9th presentation of learning. By now I would’ve hoped these would be easy, and well, they somewhat are. Presenting is much easier than it used to be, but grade 12 hasn’t had a whole lot of school work to talk about so, here goes nothing.

Unit 1

I’m going to do this presentation of learning much different from how I always have. Instead of doing “the good”, “the bad”, and whatever else it was. I’m just going to walk you through the work I’ve done this year. So starting out with the first unit, which was Taming of the Shrew. My blog post for it is here. Anyways, this was an interesting unit for me. A shakespearean classic, and animation. Shakespeare, completely not my thing, animation, I hoped would be my thing, yet it really wasn’t. A brief explanation of what the project was, was that in small groups we had to take an act of Taming of the Shrew, and adapt it to a new time period, and create an animated movie of it. My group consisted of Alex, Sofia, and Chiara. I thought our group worked well, as we all had our tasks, and the workload was very similar. However I had some issues with the animating, as I tried to use the top software I already had because I couldn’t help myself. To shorten the story, it was too hard for me and we had to go to other software, with not much time left in the project. I believe our video turned out good, but not great. For what my initial expectations were the video wasn’t all that good, but I really forgot how hard it is to do something you’ve never done before.

After talking about most of the negatives of the project, there were some big positives too. As I feel I’ve talked about in the last 7 presentations of learning. I really do feel that my voice in our video is really good. When it came to reading our script which had plenty of Old English/Shakespearean words, I didn’t even hesitate. I truly a very proud at how good I believe my voice sounded in that video, and that I was able to speak a language that I don’t speak well enough.

Unit 2

Moving onto the 2nd unit of the year, our horror unit. Blog post can be found here. Now this was a very interesting unit. Lots of good and bad. So a brief description on the unit, as a class we were required to create one horror movie. Supposed to be about 20-30 minutes long. We were put into roles of a real movie production. It was supposed to give us a good feel of how the real world worked. It definitely did that, as we all found out what happens when a movie doesn’t get finished. Anyways, as you would know if you had read my post, my job was head editor. This meant when we failed to film everything, I had a lot of work to do. Unfortunately I was really struggling at figuring out how to turn what we had into a story. So after talking with some of the higher ups, we decided a trailer would be the best bet. I made a trailer and sent it off to the music editor and our visual fx guy, and let them do their work. The end result isn’t something I am particularly proud of. However I am still proud of the effort that we all put in to trying to make something amazing. We ran out of time and our organization was off, but everyone wanted to make something and we weren’t far off doing it.

The other thing that I’m really proud of in this unit aside from the project, is my writing. During the learning portion of the unit, we watched multiple horror movies and had to reflect on them with a blog post each. I personally feel that my first 2 horror movie posts were some of if not the best blog posts I’ve written. I was truly able to communicate exactly what I wanted too. I truly felt that they were entertaining blog posts to read because of the way I wrote them, and of course my situation of not really liking horror movies coming into the unit.

Unit 3

Now onto the final unit we have done so far. Blog post coming soon. This was our unit focused on significance and the song We Didn’t Start the Fire. The task was to explain why one of the things/people mentioned in We Didn’t Start the Fire was the most significant. I very predictably picked Joe DiMaggio (historic baseball player). This was a very interesting project for me. It once again proved the point that I am still significantly better at working on things I want to work on and enjoy working on. I feel like I did really well in this unit, mostly because I could focus heavily on a baseball player and baseball itself. My project looked heavily at Joe DiMaggio’s famous hit streak, and then how such a thing was possible. To prove to people that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports, I took a couple friends of mine down to the batting cage, to see what speeds they could hit. For my presentation I took one specific pitch which featured a friend hitting a 69mph equivalent fastball. I talked a lot about the physics of how much time it takes to see the baseball and in turn hit it.

The thing I think I did the best in this project was present in front of the class. We ran into a few technical difficulties with the Apple TV prior to my turn. Which meant I had to have my iPad plugged into the computer instead of right in front of me. This specifically meant I didn’t have my presenter notes. It didn’t actually matter though. I was well prepared and knew lots about my topic, so I was just able to present off of memory and feeling. As it seems to be a theme with these presentations of learning, I believe that presenting has been another thing that I have mentioned countless times in these. Yet I just believe it’s something that I am constantly improving at.

Other Classes

Since we haven’t done a whole lot of variety in PLP so far this year, I wanted to briefly talk about some of my other classes. The big one being Physics. This year I have really been putting in the effort to do well in this class and it really shows. After getting a high 70s mark at the end of grade 11, I wanted to do better to give myself the best chance at getting into Brock University. I am currently getting a 99% mark in Physics 12. I had the 100% going for a solid amount of time until I got a couple marks off on a lab. Anyways, I’m very proud of how I was able to take a class I should be strong at, and actually get the mark I’m capable of. With other classes, I took Pre-Calculus 12 over the summer at summer school, to try and get that class out of the way and in the bag. I was very on par with expectations there, getting a high 70s mark. The last class I want to talk about is French 12, which I took online. After a painstaking 6 months. I have finally finished the course at a decent 99%. This was a classic course where it took a lot to get through because I really just didn’t want to do it. I’m glad I did do it though as it became a big class in getting into Brock.

With the success I’ve had this year, I have been accepted into the program I’ve basically been dreaming of for 2 or 3 years. That now brings me to my goal for the rest of the year. Since I’ve been accepted with so much time left in the year, it would be very easy to just slack off for the rest of it. I don’t want to do that however, my goal is to maintain my 90s average across my academic classes. The high grade will help me with getting scholarships, as well as give me priority when it comes to not being in a double room at university. To do this I want to maintain or increase my current PLP mark which was about 89%. I need to keep working hard and want to work. I think I can do this, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the year.