TPOLs – June 2018
“Thank the gods for music”
It’s a true cure to extreme stress.
Welcome to my TPOL—
Every year, we do this terrifying presentation we call our TPOLs.
The normal student version of this is a SLC.
This right here is my TPOL. Where I am going to review my entire year in 8ish minutes.
We started off our year with a trip to Calgary.
We learnt a bunch about the history of Canada there, and we also got to see some pretty cool things while participating in Beakerhead.
Oh and it was a road trip through the Rocky Mountains… no biggie.
We went to places such as;
–The Last Spike at Craigellachie
–Cave and Basin in BANFF
–Drumheller
and
The Enchanted Forest
In each place we learnt a bunch of new information.
We did challenges that were generally really fun and often stressful, but a good laugh later.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt on this trip is that when you plan, you have to make room for mistakes.
We made multiple videos during the trip that taught us that no matter how much planning happens, it will only get so far.
No matter how much planning I did, nothing went 100% to plan.
And that was okay. We got things done anyways.
Metaphor Machines was a big project for us, because it was a mix of three of our classes (Math, Science, and Humanities).
In humanities we learnt about the socials side of things;
The story behind the revolutions, the way the metaphors of our machines will work, etc.
In scimatics, we did the math-science side of things;
Building and planning our projects, and then using electricity to make it work.
Star Wars, The Exhibition Strikes Back—
Every year, we do a little… preview of what June holds, in December.
It’s stressful (just ask Alivia), but fun.
This year, I was away for most of the exhibition project.
I was away, and returned to Vancouver, literally two days before the exhibition. It was… not an experience I would want to do again. LIKE EVER AGAIN.
I had to do all of the virtual stuff while on vacation (not fun. Pools are 10,000% more inviting when you can’t use them). And then I had to create everything once I got back.
It was one of the only times my organization actually went pretty well. There were some things I forgot to actually organize, however everything I did plan, went to plan.
Always be ready for the worse, and then surprise everyone.
“Get in the boat”. What a fraise.
DI is always a very educational experience. Wether in an actually academic way or not, we always learn something new.
This year, I worked with Lauren, Maggie, Jessie, Melanie and Alivia to create the best musical since Hamilton.
Okay… maybe not compared to Hamilton… but like a minor musical, sure.
DI, no matter the stress, is always one of the best ways to make people work together. We always work together to make the best DI performance we can, and this year I was very proud of the outcome.
One night when I was laying in bed in Ottawa, I was ambushed by my very excited group members. We had come in FIRST PLACE in our part of DI.
I have never really been prouder of a project I had participated in until then.
While this was not my most academic project ever, I did learn I can last a full 20 minutes in a house with cats before dying.
Sometimes when we do projects, we don’t learn the most from the actual information, but for the knowledge of making a human connection and working it through.
In this project, I learnt that communication is key. Always.
In any project, you can see that communication is what makes the progress move.
In this project we lacked the communication that caused us to film very late into the project, and caused me to enter a house with cats that caused me to be sneezing and blocked up within 15 minutes. I survived 20.
Something I’m Proud Of—
This year, at the beginning, I was much more turtled.
I didn’t stalk up as much and I was scared a lot more of talking to people. Recently though, I have been trying my best to put myself out there.
I participated in the “Talking to the educators” presentation a few weeks ago and I am really happy that I did. I have always been scared of talking to people, but I know PLP well, I am part of PLP and I have the information. I was able to talk to the educators, without too much fear of messing up. I just answered questions, showed some examples and did what I could to help the specific person I was talking to.
The thing I think I had the most growth with this year is absolutely my public speaking, and just speaking in general.
Yes, I still get nervous, yes I do have to breath before I present to calm down still. However, I don’t totally freak out.
Something I Want To Improve On—
Priorities and Concentration.
Recently, I have found that my concentration and priority skills have gone out the window.
I don’t know if it’s just because it’s June and its inane all around and organization is not an option, but still.
I have found myself going off forgetting to pay attention to something, and I assume thats just June stress, but I would also like to work on my organization skills.
I have worked on them since December by using a whiteboard calendar to keep track of my events and homework. And it worked for a long time, but I durning May and June, I have totally forgotten to do it. Which is unfortunate. I hope to keep it up next year and I plan in finding ways to keep track of maybe smaller chores and such as planning through next year.
This has been this year with my calendar:
