TPOL

Hi and welcome to my Tpol, my final presentation of learning for this year. Today I have to answer the driving question of “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”. So, let’s get right into it, starting with my thoughts on certain subjects and projects. For humanities, there was a project which really stood out for me, which was the Star Wars project we did for the Winter Exhibition. I had a great time with this project, and I think that this is one of my best examples from humanities. This project involved writing a short story, which we would then combine into chapters of our overall story. We used a lot of different competencies during this project, and I think I did well because the topic was so engaging. We also got to present our work at the Winter Exhibition, which was an added bonus, which you can read about here.

Another project that I think is a good example is Destination Imagination. I definitely improved from last year, which is for a couple of reasons. This year I got a subject I was more experienced in, Improv, and a good team as well. We did alright at the regionals, but we got to reflect on some of the core competencies afterwards, one of which was about seeing things from another’s perspective. This helped me consider the other actors in the scene, and made it easier to give them openings. This strategy helped give us a new direction to go in, and I think it is one of the reasons that our provincial performance was successful. You can read more about my DI experience here.

A project that I think shows some places where I can improve is the Scimatics project Metaphor Machines. In this project, we had to create a Rude Goldberg machine that represented the scientific method. Overall I did decent on this project, but there were a few competencies I didn’t do as good as I could on. I kept getting distracted with other things and leaving parts of the project for the last minute, and I think that ended up hurting some parts of the project. You can read more about the project here.

Now that I’ve finished talking about the subjects, I’m going to talk about some of the goals I set at my MPOL earlier this year. The main goal I set for myself was to stop procrastinating. Unfortunately, although I did improve a bit, I don’t think that I have met it yet. I learned that I am a great procrastinator, and sometimes I just blitz through assignments right before the due date. Obviously that’s not a good thing, so I’ve been trying to avoid it, but I do find myself doing it every once in a while, so while i don’t think I was completely successful, I do think that I am improving. Another thing that I keep doing is where I get stuck on something, and then I kind of give up and get distracted by something. I’ve been trying to combat this by taking breaks every once in a while to refresh my brain so that I can come back at problems with a fresh start, and it’s definitely helping, but I haven’t fully eliminated the problem yet. Something that actually surprised me is that I usually have a negative mindset towards assignments that are confusing or large, because I start to feel that it’s a hopeless task. Obviously it isn’t, and I have to trudge through them all the same, but it makes the experience hollow and once I do finish, I don’t really feel like I got anything out of it. I’ve been trying to combat this by just reassessing the situation and taking things on with a more positive mindset, and I definitely think it’s helping.

So, in conclusion, I’ve learned a lot this year, and I’ve done a good job most of the time, but there are definitely some times where I could have done better. However, now that I have more experience dealing with these problems and I know the effective strategies to combat them I can smash them next year. So, my answer to the driving question is “I will use the strategies I have learned throughout the year to combat any familiar problems that I come across next year.”. Well that’s about it for my Tpol, thanks for listening.