The dreaded SLC has arrived, apparently a roast fest of gigantic proportions that is designed to make people cry. At least that’s what I heard from the other people who have been through it. Below will be a showcase of what I have done over the time I have been in PLP. The 3 blog posts that I show will answer the questions,
1. What was an assignment that you were proud of.
2. What was an assignment that showed your learning.
3. What was an assignment that showed an example of your growth mindset.
A reflection of my most enjoyable time in this course, the visit to a real nuclear reactor at Reeds University.
The assignment that I was most proud of was definitely the PLP exhibition somewhere around the beginning of this year. The project is about the major events that Canada went through in World War I. The whole class was split into many different groups which all researched a topic regarding an event. My team chose to cover the events before Canada went to war.
The reason I was very proud of this project was because of how the entire class pulled together in time for the exhibition. To be honest, my group really did not have an idea of how things would look and we did not have time for a dry run of what we were going to present as the audience moved through the exhibition. At the last minute, Tom suffered a head injury which led to me taking his place as Robert Borden who had a major talking role. My entire group acted and delivered a spectacular performance considering the circumstances. It was extremely cold because a side door was open exposing us to the frigid night of January. My group stayed on task with little complaint and went through the night without a single hitch. The rest of the entire exhibition was excellent to as I heard the enthusiasm that went into every performance by every group. This was definitely an example of snatching victory for (not that far away) from the jaws of defeat.
This next assignment really showed my learning. This topic of this assignment was to ask a question about Canada’s situation along the beginning to the end of World War I. Me, being the history nut of the 2 world wars really wanted to know how Germany fared after being oppressed by the allied forces of World War I. This was of course not about Canada but I had already written more than half the post by the time I contacted Ms. Willemse to ask for permission to stray from Canada so she gave me permission.
The Effects of the Roaring 20’s and The Great Depression on Germany
To be fair, I knew some of the facts about the question that I asked myself but I wanted to delve deeper and learn more of the smaller details and other bits of history to how Germany was hit by the after effects of World War II. The major thing I took away from this project was to learn about the smaller bits of detail before and after the event being researched. It’s an excellent way of improving the understanding of the topic in all aspects and also gives the edge when other history nuts challenge me to a duel of who knows more!
The final assignment will answer the question of what my growth mindset is. The assignment I have picked for this is the recent movie we are trying to produce. This movie is based on the Shakespearean act of “Macbeth”. Since we were studying World War II at the time, we decided to give the movie a World War II spin to it. The project was not a great success but I took away from it a very important lesson that will display how I want to grow my skill in the future.
The growth mindset that I have constructed was influenced by when the failure of this project became apparent. It was the need to improve on my leadership skills. I would like to state that the failure of this project in the end fell down to me as I was in charge of seeing it to completion and that is why I am working to improve my leadership to make sure this never happens again. As I worked through this project, I realized that while people listened to me respectfully and seemed to follow direction, it seemed that the directions were not executed well or not at all. I believe it to be them not having enough respect for me and that I did not have enough of an air of command which motivated people to do things not for the sake of just doing it, but for the assignment and for all of the class. I will encourage growth in this area through taken the lead on more group work that does not require that many members and be very diligent on how I carry myself around them.
Goals
I have already set a goal in my growth of mindset part but there are 2 others. One is to become more proficient in all the small programs and tools that this course provides to make learning and organizing so much easier. I became aware of this from the movie project. I was using a very inefficient method of marking down the availability of the crew. When Maria stepped in and provided a new solution to the delays in filming, she also came with a google form that was easy to fill in and everyone did it in no time. I see some challenge seeing all the settings and using the programs to their full ability. I plan to achieve this by looking through all of the google tools and asking other PLP students on what they use. My final goal is to see if I can work up a reputation in like Marley has but not in the way that she over achieves in all her assignments, but by showing how I leadership and problem solve much better than what I can do now. I plan to achieve this through taking the lead in other projects and preparing for the problems that come.
This SLC definitely took a bit of time to write but luckily everything was in my learning portfolio so I simply needed to connect all the dots for this to work. I hope this shows how I have grown in this course how I will continue to grow as I move further into the year.