tPOLs!

Hello! And welcome back to my blog! Once again! Now I think I’ve only got about 2-3 blog posts left that you will see within the next week or two! This blog post is about my tPOLs, if you don’t know what that is click here to see my mPOLs. But, basically, it stands for Transitional Presentations Of Learning (and mPOLs stands for Mid-Year Presentations Of Learning). tPOLs are a presentation to your teacher and parents for you to explain to them what you have learned, what you’d like to change, what you liked and how you think you are ready to advance to the next grade level.

Over the course of this year, I changed ALOT! At the beginning of the year, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to a fully English school (since I was coming from a fully French one) where everyone knew how to write way better than me. My English writing had minimal meaning as in, I didn’t have a very good vocabulary and my grammar and fluency was not very good. Also, I only knew a few people going to school with me. But, now, I am much more confident when writing my English and it is a lot better,  I have learned to adjust to a fully English school and also made lots and lots of new friends along the way.

In my humanities class, I feel like my writing really improved (just like I said in my introduction). I was pretty impressed by my writing skills when I was assigned to write a paragraph just like the Crusades paragraph from our It’s The End Of The World project. Here it is:

At the beginning of the year, I was also not very good (and always super nervous) of public speaking. When I did, I would always be reading from what I had as notes. This all really changed especially when I was presenting my Winter Exhibition. I don’t really know why, but all of a sudden, I had all of this “confidence” come to me and I did pretty darn well presenting my project that night :).

To improve and work on over the summer, I’d like to still practice my writing by reading lots, perhaps starting a journal and/or just writing a whole lot.

In maker, I think that the project I learned the most in was Destination Imagination. Even though it was super stressful, it was definitely worth it and an amazing experience, I actually really miss it. Destination Imagination allowed me to increase my creativity to the next level (even from just using cardboard and duck tape). What really helped to get everything together was having more than one head in the solution for the problem.

Which also brings me to teamwork, I learned to work really well with groups, to not be too controlling of my team members (which I might still have to work on a little bit) and to split tasks equally. Not to mention, my team compared to the start of DI and the end, our teamwork really improved, the more time we spent together the less we would talk over each other and argue (usually with the pressure of an Instant Challenge). I think that I still need to work on being less controlling of my group, to always remember that you can never go to “all out” and to never underestimate myself.

In scimatics this year, even though we didn’t do many projects, we did do many super exciting activities and have many super interesting discussions throughout the year. The section that caught my eye the most was our section on Electromagnetic Radiation. I was super interested since I’ve never really looked into that subject, ever. When we did all of those cool activities; using light and reflecting it off of different mirrors and creating a rainbow was super fun and exciting to do!

I was pretty proud of myself after doing the eye-dissection of a sheep’s eye because I was not as grossed out or as scared as I thought I would be. Don’t get me wrong, I was still kind of grossed out and all but, still, it could’ve been worse. Anyways, I think that I did pretty well in that section and I’m super excited to present my telescope project at the spring exhibition! It’s going to be awesome!

Just like everything else, there is always room for improvement! I would like to start bringing a notebook (a real one not digital) because I remember last year when I did that (because I did nothing really digital)  and I remembered things a lot easier so for next year, I am going to start doing that to make remembering what I learned a lot easier.

Now, for our last subject of the day, PGP! Now in PGP, there were lots of things that I found useful and maybe, others, not so much. Personally, I found that Things and TimeBlocking was super helpful for me to keep track of my to-do’s, reminders, etc.

I think one reason that Things works really well for me is that I don’t like to see unopened notifications on my iPad. So, when I look at Things, it’s a reflex for me to tap on it to get rid of the notifications. But, in order to remove them of course, you need to complete a to-do. So, that motivates me a little bit to get that stuff done! Also, time blocking has gotten me to stay on task most of the time and to keep track of my super busy schedule.  I think that I did very well this year based on how my level of productivity increasing throughout the year!

At the beginning of the year, I, of course, was not productive whatsoever; I remember last year, procrastinating so much that it took me a coupl of ofe hours just to complete a few pages of math homework. Now, I can finish even more homework way faster.

That’s why, for my PGP Time Machine, I represented my past self (as procrastinating peter) and my present self (productive Penney) this also kind of reminded me of some arguments I had with my younger brother this year. Now for things that I’d like to improve on, starting at the beginning of the year, next year, I’d like to create a notebook and at the end of the day, everyday, write down what I learned in each subject everyday, this will force me to be paying attention at all times and to never drift off in class (or as much).

Now, this leads to our final conclusion. The driving question for tPOLs was: “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”. Well, like everyone, I know that I have developed many skills that I certainly did not have at the beginning of the year that have prepared me for next year, I have become way more productive, my team working with other people (not just in my class) but other people, even strangers (I recently went to this camp where we had to solve all of these cool mysteries and I was with a bunch of grade 10s and 11 strangers and was pretty dang proud with myself), most importantly, I have learned to take my failures and mistakes as learning opportunities because, one, no one’s perfect and two, how are you supposed to learn without making mistakes? This was a great year and an amazing experience! I really enjoyed it!

Thanks for listening!

Thanks and I’ll see you in my next blog post!