Welcome back to another Mid Year Presentation by yours truly, Samuel Scheewe. Today’s topic will be about me, and my learning this year in the PLP 11 Cohort.
This year had been quite a difficult, but also very rewarding year for me as a student. I found the transition from grade 10 to grade 11 a huge jump in academics and homework amount. I’ve also found the work this year just really good quality work, and I’m very proud of it. Most of it anyways. So listen carefully, I’ll be telling you all about my life at school.
Typically in my Mpols in the past, I’ve described work I’m proud of, not proud of, and areas where I need improvement. But this time, I’m going to mainly focus on growth. I’ll talk about how much I’ve grown this year, and where I want to grow even more. Here we go folks.
My Growth As A PLP Learner
I think that in my PLP career the skill I’ve grown the most in is leadership. From being the quietest kid in the class to one of the top students, I feel that I’ve grown as an evident leader in my PLP Class. Even more so in the last year or so. This is something I’ve been working on for a long time, and I believe I said so in my MPol exactly one year ago. I wanted to become a better leader as a student, and I feel I’ve done so. I’m still a fairly quiet person, that’s just who I am, but my leadership skills shine through different aspects of my work and behaviour. To give you examples of this, I’ll talk about the two main projects we’ve done this year. First off, we’ve got the Manhattan Project Project.
This was a really fun project for me. For the most part, I was engaged and interested to learn more. This unit was based around our field school down to Hanford, which was one of the best short field schools in my opinion. We went down there with the sole purpose to learn as much as we can in 4 days, and gather enough video to make a short 5 minute film about the Hanford site. And, as you may or may not know, I really like filmmaking and editing video, so this project was going to be great.
I feel I demonstrated my leadership when I took the lead on this project in my group, which consisted of myself, Parker, and Ethan. We had a lot of work to do, and we worked well together. I was one of the main directors, actors and the sole editor of the 5 minute video by the end of the project. Not to steal anyone’s thunder though, I totally didn’t mind taking more responsibility than I would have if I was in grade 8. Our finished product was finished before any other groups video in our class, and in my opinion, blew all the other ones out of the water. I was and still am extremely proud of this project, and the way I stepped up to take more responsibility. My leadership is evident in this project because I heard feedback from my classmates that they really liked our video, and asked me for tips on how to make theirs better.
And after the Manhattan project, we lead our studies right on through the 1950’s and multiple different forms of media to get to my all time favourite project in my PLP career. This project was the most recent PLP project, our Carousel Of Communism.
In this particular project, I stepped outside my comfort zone and volunteered myself for one of the largest roles possible – the guide. I think I did this because I wanted a challenge, or I didn’t know how much talking I would have to do. Either way, it was something new to me because I’ve vowed to never be an actor. But even before the actual night of the exhibition, I found myself constantly brainstorming, and putting out ideas for the project with my classmates. I feel that even though I wasn’t a DRI, I was at least the equivalent of a prince in our chain of command in our class. I was constantly being surprised at just how well everyone worked together, and all the work we had done so far. I grew as a leader here because as a guide, I had to lead a group of random people through our exhibition, and also my classmates during our acts. I’m super happy that I took a role as a guide, even if it was a challenge because it made me a better version of myself and I would have regretted it if I hadn’t.
Growth For The Rest of the School Year
So the driving question for this Mpol is “How are you going to progress as a learner before the end of this school year?” And for me, I want to progress even more as a leader.
I will do this by forcing myself to do a lot of time blocking and time management. This comes from our new course this year called PGP, otherwise known as our personal growth plan. I’ll use the benefits of timeblocking to my advantage, benefits I still have to discover. Like a lot of PLP students, I was reluctant to use the techniques described at our PGP meeting such as timeblocking and weekly reviews. I’m just beginning to wrap my head around how it all works and I think that if I put in the work to start it off, it will reward me long term.
I would like to use the strategies of PGP to help my work become quality that I’m proud of every time. I want to be a leader where my work sets a standard for our class, and it should be something I’m happy with, and be finished on time. I still need time to get my PGP weekly reviews up to date, and remember to constantly be adding to my calendar so I don’t forget important events. Another mini project inside of PGP is my Dream Board. This is a collection of photos of places you want to go, things you want to have and who you want to be in the future. Below is mine.
This is meant to help us envision our future to help us strive to get there. This will be a constant reminder for me to stay dedicated and to put in the work so there can be a reward.
So, for the rest of this year I want to be able to use techniques given to me by my teachers, who want me to succeed, to my upmost benefits to create work that inspires the people around me, and makes me proud. That is how I will grow as a learner for the remainder of this year. It will take focus, determination and discipline, but I want this to work, and I’m willing to work for it.
So, thats the end of my MPol 2019.
Overall I’m really enjoying myself in PLP this year, especially the projects we’ve done so far. Our next project has to do with video creation, something I’m skilled in, and so I’m looking forward to seeing how will use my timeblocking and leadership to influence the final product.
And that’s all for this MPol, I hope you enjoyed and I’ll see you again at the end of the year.
See You