Expectation:
Ever since my brother entered his grade 11 year (which seems like an eternity ago), I had heard and felt the warnings of the grade 11year. It was “the year that mattered” “the year that defined you”. It was “the hard year”. Now imagine grade 8 me, sitting in quarantine, thinking about what I was going to do with this thing called life, watching Kobe Bryant interviews about greatness, and feeling overwhelmed with the idea that school would transform into a time sucking, fun draining, and stress polluting place in three years.
Reality:
As much as the memes that dictate society will say is truth, reality was not all to varied and I sit here feeling a unwavering validation to my thoughts in my first year of high-school. It was tough. Honestly, I don’t think it was a surprise; I new I had high expectations for myself, and I knew I was going to push and fight to achieve them, but I didn’t realize what I would have to face having the expectations that I did.
School has always been important to me but this year my connection with my learning made new place in my heart. I don’t think that I can properly reflect on this years learning with out talking about what happened at home but it is difficult. Kona my dog had been with me since I could remember and she had been helping me through things just as long but a couple months ago, despite her unremarkable resiliency and her unbreakable demeanour, her age had caught up to her and she began to rely on us for help. It wasn’t easy to see my best friend slowly fade and all I wanted to do was to be by her side like she had been by mine all these years. I didn’t want to do homework or really anything at all. Yet I sit here feeling nothing but accomplishment in this year. Today I want to talk about what going through this has meant to my learning, and what this year has offered for growth as a person and as a learner.
Kona was pretty sick throughout my Stories of Hope project. I had struggled to stay on top of deadlines for this project, and to construct clear ideas. I couldn’t seem to move in my thinking because of how hard it was to accept what was happening in the moment, yet through many revisions and changing my ideas over and over again right up to the due date, I managed to continue in this project. It was not easy to feel confident in my work. Despite or maybe because of what was happening, I still had the over-achieving yearn of making meaningful work. I still wanted to see a straight path towards completion but what I didn’t know is that there was much too much fog to see which way to go. I ended up making 3 story boards, 3 or 4 screen plays, and I still managed to feel unsure after two drafts of my final video. Everything was late that project. Still, I continued; revising, thinking, changing, tweaking, editing, and making a work of thought that I could feel proud of.
When Kona was sick, doing work was the last thing I wanted to do. I managed however, to find a kind of balance that is quite rare. It was the kind of balance that blurs the lines and makes the scale four dimensional. I was able to find not meaning, but life in my schoolwork during the hard time. It was a way to accept the passing of time and the fact that life continues despite my heart stopping. I was able to honour her in a way through my work. Honour how hard she fought every day for us and how much I love her.
Every project this year meant a lot to me. It was the the conclusions I made, the comfortability with life I gained, or the altruistic knowledge that I learnt about myself and the world around me. This year has been difficult for many reasons but I still cared. I still cared about what was important to me, and I perused it. I made a lot of sacrifices for my learning, I wrote a blogpost in my car during spring break just to finish a project strong, I memorized Shakespeare and connected it to who I am, I learned how to look deeply into the horrors of history and find peace and understanding, I connected the Cold War to joy and happiness, but what stinks with me the most about this years growth, is my ability to connect every project to help me sort through life. In my work on the Manhattan project^2 it was finding understanding through patterns in human psychology and in history, or in my Macbeth performance it was expressing hope and safety through the beauty of life in the face of an overwhelming crisis, in our project on the Cold War I faced the fears of loss through telling the story of a soldier who turns away from conflict because he realizes that he was not scared because of what was happening but because of what might happened to who he loved. All of these project had helped sort through things all the while making deep and meaningful conclusions about the topics at hand.
the soldier who returned happy
Throughout the year and honestly throughout high school I have been searching for a balance of all the interests I have. Like the process it didn’t seem achievable until it suddenly did. This year has been hard for a various amount of reasons, but one thing that I has prevailed throughout the year is my constant an un relenting drive to continue. I think partially it was influenced by the contrasting difficulties of what “continuing” ment, but I managed to finish and make truly meaningful conclusions in every project. Looking back is a confirmation of the fact that the meaningfulness that I try to achieve is not a pressure but just who I am and what I want to do.
This year I had the goal in my learning plan of communicating the ideas I had. In my MPOL I wanted to achieve impact. I had talked about the systems that I wanted to change in order to achieve that and I did. Through the dedication that I put to Kona, even though I was not able to fully mentally commit to school, I was able to push myself to continue even when things felt “wrong” or “not good enough”. I knew that I had to push through hesitation in order to get things done and do so at a high level and I knew that even when I was scared, unsure, or overwhelmed, I was able to fight that just by continuing. That lesson is a valuable life lesson as well. I realized that sometimes the most important thing is to just t continue doing. It was like a resistance. I continued revising, thinking, studying, all driving by the trust that there is something stronger out there; there is a way to deal with this. I learned that that it could mean dealing with the fear of nuclear warfare or with the weight of climate change or with how I am going to go to basketball 4 days a week, have a Chem, math, and bio test as well as hand in keystone 2 before the weekend hits all while holding love and care for the world and people around me.
There’s not many schools where you’re able to really dive into what matters to yourself and your education let alone programs. In PLP, we are often given opportunities to expand our learning beyond the classroom but this year in particular, we are able to expand our learning in a way that was going to make change within our community. At the beginning of the year in my learning plan, and I talked a lot about how I wanted to use the learning in the work that I put in the school to actually help the world around me. This was no easy task because it’s hard in the limited time you have in school to make change let alone reflection what you want to be changed, but In this project I was given the opportunity to take connections and deeper understandings that I had formed and make something out of them. For the spring exhibition I came up with the idea of incorporating Garden Based learning into our school district. I created a strong, thought h explanation on it’s importance, how it will be implemented and why it is needed in our Community and I am actually going to presented it to the school board as something that can be incorporated. I know its a bit cliche but I believe that this wast the the learning, thinking, and work I have been doing flowering into something buetiful and fragrant. Like I say about the GBL, it is not just about horticulture but understanding the connections between the dots, and gaining a complex understanding about how the world works. This project was a culmination of all my learning because my learning has shaped me and this idea was shaped by me.
This year was growth to be proud of. I received so much support from the people and loved ones around me and I can not help but feel great full for the teachers that have supported me and my ideas all the way through. I feel ready for next year, yet how do I conclude this year when things seem so un figured out and unfinished? I guess I will not know when this year concludes because like history, things don’t end, they just change.