Another Tpol, How much more can I take.

Hello everyone welcome back.

It’s that time of the year again where I am required by my school to make and present a Tpol. You may have noticed that there was no Mpol blog post this year and that is because, well I don’t really know why but we did something different this time.

This Tpol will be in a new kind of format, if you have read my others then you might realise that I usually go over the best and worst of each subject however this time I will be answering this driving question “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviors have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” And then I will also be using these 3 success behaviours to tell a story about my learning journey throughout this year, the behaviors I chose are Ownership and responsibility, Contributions and Preparation (this is technically 2 but I feel the need to talk about both).

But first, before I get into the depths of my grade 10 adventure I will go ahead and help future me with his presentation. “Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Now that’s out the way I’ll get into it but warning, this post is not for the faint of heart, I will be sharing my honest opinions on both how I feel I did this year but also my thoughts on this year’s projects. This is how the post will go. I will go over each success behavior and choose the projects that I think show my learning best for that behavior, then after I’m done with those 3 I will give my answer to the driving question.

Okay I promise I’m actually staring now.

Ownership and Responsibility 

At the start of this year, I went into school thinking every project would be laid out for me and what I had to do would be clear but this was not the case. This year I feel I got a taste of what PLP will be like in later years. The first project I think showed me this was our Peas in a Pod(cast) Maker project. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went into this really excited because I would learn how to be like everybody on the internet, and it was really fun but it introduced to me something really new to me. This project was simple, create a podcast about a topic of your choosing, but that’s where the new concept came in. It was a podcast based on something I got to choose. This was honestly difficult for me at the start because I’m not super great and coming to decisions but I finally came to a conclusion that I knew I wanted to do. As a British person in Canada, I sometimes say words and my friends look at me like I’m speaking a different language, and that’s because I am. In England, there is a newish language being developed which is essentially a lot of slang called roadman. If you want to know more about this listen to my podcast.

But now onto why this links into ownership and responsibility. This all showed me the start of having agency over my learning. Up to this point, we hadn’t had this much creative freedom but this project we got to choose what essentially the whole thing was and this was a big step forward for me because once I found out what I wanted to do this helped me actually be engaged with my learning. This is a big thing for me because I have ADHD which means I struggle to focus on things I don’t take an interest in but if I get to choose what I have to focus on it makes school just that much more bearable.

However having all this freedom hasn’t always been a positive for me, my example of this is our PGP project Back to the Future. In this project we were simulating the process of applying for a job, but with a PLP twist. We went through the whole process of making a resume and cover letter but when it came to the interview it would be a shark tank-style pitch of ourselves. 

If this sounds interesting here is the blog post.

As I stated earlier I sometimes struggle with making decisions about myself and one of those that has been most prominent in my life is deciding my career. I have always struggled with this so when I learned about this project it’s safe to say I was afraid. This project also felt very rushed especially since most of the class was on a band and choir trip the previous week so we didn’t learn about our end goal until the week it was happening. Because of all this combined stress I ended up needing an extension (thank you Ms Madsen) but this just shows that having too much control over something can lead to feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing. I think this also displayed my growth as well because once I had gotten an extension I locked myself into learning mode and figured out what I was doing and how I would do it all in one night. In previous years I would have just procrastinated and barely scraped by but my growth through this year has taught me what I’m capable of based on time limits. In my opinion, almost all of our projects this year have felt extremely rushed or unplanned but that’s not all bad. While I may have lost a few years of my life due to stress I also learned that I’m more capable than I once thought.

Contributions

 

This is an area that I feel I have struggled with this year and most other years of my schooling. As I’ve spoken about I struggle to really care about something if it doesn’t interest me so when having class discussions about what we’re doing I don’t often have any input to give. There isn’t really one project that displays this but if I had to choose there are a few I would say show this more than others but the one I’m going to talk about is the project This is Us in Humanities. Here is the blog.

This project was all about Canadian identity but as I’ve made it very clear… I’m not Canadian. So as you can guess I really didn’t have anything to say about this project. In this project, we had a lot of discussions about different history and aspects of Canada which I honestly felt quite left out of. This is something I dislike about the education we are given in Canada, we focus so primarily on Canada that we don’t learn about things going on in other places in the world. When I came here I knew nothing about Canada and I feel like going into high school I was just expected to know things I hadn’t even heard about. This often makes it a struggle for me to understand and participate in class discussions because it feels like a lot of my previous knowledge is invalidated because every project needs to involve Canada somehow. It feels like Canada is so focused on teaching about itself that a lot of kids here don’t know anything about the rest of the world unless they go out of their way and learn about it outside school. This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to participate in class.

Sorry for the big rant but I told you I would share my opinions.

I feel like I am improving on contributing in class as I grow up because I’m realising the fear I have of getting things wrong isn’t as big of a problem as I think but I will still admit this is one of my big struggles in school. 

Preparation

This is focused on both me preparing myself inside and outside school and there isn’t one major project for this as well but I will be referencing a few projects I did this well in. At the start of this year and the rest of my life I’ve always been just kind of living in the moment and winging it which has worked for me so far but now moving into the harder years I am realising I’ll need to prepare for things and revise or work outside school too. As much as I may hate doing this I will admit it has helped me greatly and here are some examples of how this has helped me.

A big one for this is something I previously mentioned which is our back to the future project. I already stated how I used the extra time I had been given to my best ability and that didn’t happen without a little planning and preparation beforehand. 

Another Huuuuuge thing that required a whole ton of planning was destination imagination, here is the post for it.

This year we had significantly less time than we did in grade 8 which meant it required a lot of planning for meetups outside school hours especially since we had cross-grade teams. I was really proud of myself for getting through this as me and my grade 10 friend Kira took charge and instructed our team pretty well. I think I did especially well seeing as I missed the first performance due to being sick I had to push through the pain I was in due to getting shots and vaccines the day before the final performance but I made it and I think we did pretty well. I think this really showed how I’ve improved my planning skills greatly this year.

That’s all 3 behaviours so it’s time to drive that question. Just as a reminder, this is the question I’m answering “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” In my honest opinion, I don’t think I’m ready for grade 11, that’s a really big number and I don’t want to be in my second last year of high school. But with all that in mind that’s how I felt about grade 10, and look how much I’ve grown since then. I think even though I’m scared of next year I’ll be able to manage it and make it through just like I did this year. I think this has proved to me that I still have so much to improve on and now I know I’m fully capable of doing anything I want to (with the right motivation of course). There are a whole lot of ways I think I’ve improved this year that won’t fit into a 7 minute presentation or a blog post but the last thing I want you to know is.

I think grade 8 me’s jaw would hit the floor if he saw how far we had come.

Thanks for reading. See you next year?

Dragons, Sharks And The Worst Of All, Responsibility

Welcome back to my blog everybody, did you miss me?

Today I’m here to talk about our most recent PGP project and that is ‘Back to the future’. If your thinking..

“Wow they must have gotten to watch the movie” you would be wrong. I know very sad, this was much to the dismay of me and my classmates especially when we found out we would be watching a movie for the first few classes and it wasn’t the one our project was named after. However, the real reason our project was named this was because we would be thinking about what we want to be in the future and more importantly how we will get there.

So our driving question this time was “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” And this scared me quite a bit honestly, because I actually have no idea what I want to be or want to do when I’m older. Nevertheless, I realised that maybe this project could help me find that out for myself (have you ever heard of foreshadowing)? So now we know what the project is all about it’s time to find out what the end goal for this project was. We learned that we would be doing a Shark Tank/ Dragon’s Den type pitch about, get ready, drumroll

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Ourselves! Now this may sound confusing and I thought that too, but it’s honestly quite simple. We would be pitching ourselves as a product and marketing why we would be good in a work environment. It’s essentially a mix of a job interview and an infomercial. This sounded scary at first because I don’t know how to think positively about myself -I’m a teenager in a first world country that’s impossible! But, lucky for me I have friends and family who like me (I hope) so that’s where I started to look for positive things about me and how I can work effectively.

But first let’s go through everything we did in this project in a reflecting sort of a way. As I said we started out with a movie and it was called “The Dead Poets Society”. It was a pretty good movie (very sad) and I would recommend it, “Oh Captain My Captain 🫡” (that one was for my teacher reading this).

I think we watched this movie in order to learn and understand that we can do whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. I think it helped me learn that different perspectives on different matters can lead to different thoughts on how things should be done. Everyone’s thoughts are their own and valid. Overall this was quite helpful and I found myself reflecting on it throughout the project.

 Between this and the final projects we did a few different activities to learn about ourselves and how we work effectively – such as thinking about and writing out the skills we posses, making goals that would change aspects of our lives and how we could get to them. Setting goals I always find hard but I’m getting better at it. We were also learning about different types of skills and about the 7 habits of highly effective teens and completing a bunch of tests on Myblueprint, (a website that helps you with all kinds of education and career pathing techniques). If you’re interested in this for yourself you can look here.

All of these were different ways we learned to apply our skills to new environments and back up our abilities with examples.

The final thing we had to do before the actual Pitch itself was learn about writing resume’s and cover letters, and oh boy are there a lot of different marks to hit and a whole criteria I didn’t know about. Now I can’t share my resume and letter with you because they happen to contain some information about me that I would like to keep private but if you out there and ever have to make a resume or cover letter I suggest getting help from somebody who has done it before.

But before we go into the big bad boss of the project I’m going to talk about what I learned about myself throughout this whole process. I realised that me being funny is actually something useful in the work world. I understand that being funny alone won’t get me a job however, I now know that it’s an aspect that people look for, most companies these days don’t just want a perfect efficient work robot that can do everything they need to, they want to hire people who can learn what to do well and also be friendly and a joy to have around the office. Another thing I learned is there are a few career paths I didnt consider beforehand that actually might suit me pretty well, like being a stunt performer. I had thought about it before but was scared about getting hurt however, I now realise that I would get to travel the world and have fun with people I know and I would just have to know what I’m doing and how to be safe, which there are courses for and professionals to help with. I recommend you check out the personality quizzes and some of the other ones on Myblueprint because you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself and your possible career paths before.

Now after all this it was time for the thing I had been dreading, The Pitch! As we were building up to this I missed a week of school as I was on a trip to whistler with my choir and band, (we had an amazing time but we also missed quite a bit of work) which left me less time to prepare than I thought I needed. But nonetheless I worked hard to prepare myself for this pitch and even though I needed to get an extension I still learned some things about myself while preparing and performing my pitch. Like being aware of the impact of scheduling issues. Also another thing I realised is that I’ve always thought that I’m terrible at public speaking because it terrifies me to my core. However, while preparing I realised even though it scares me so much I can fake being confident relatively well. I think this is something that PLP has taught me to do as the teachers constantly push us outside our comfort zone and have us performing tasks I would usually be scared by. Don’t get me wrong they still terrify me but I do them anyway and then reflect on them to learn how I can do it better. I think this really showed in my pitch as when mentioning some of my weaknesses I brought up public speaking and one of my Dragons said that he wouldn’t have guessed that I was a nervous presenter if I hadn’t mentioned it. Another thing I learned is that I can learn lines and points pretty quickly which is a valuable skill to have. This links me into a reflection that I made during my pitch about myself that one of my Dragons noted that I did well. I have ADHD, and the crowd goes mild. The Dragon said many people included they had this condition yet I was one of the only ones who noted how this can be helpful as well as a hinderance. This is what I said about my condition:

“I have ADHD and with the help of my medication I can ditch the bad parts and harness the benefits, I can produce high quality work, can multitask and I am an extremely quick learner.  The hyper fixation element of my ADHD means I can focus on things with great intensity and learn a lot about something in a relatively short amount of time. This means that I can be a really diverse employee.”

At the start of this project I was worried because I came into it not knowing what I wanted to do as an adult and now I realise that I have left still not knowing what I want to do, but that’s the thing, I did learn what I want to do. It’s nothing specific like other people who know exactly what job they want and how they will get there. My goal for when I’m older is to find out what I want to do with my life! I want to explore and try many different career options, I want to find out what I like through trying them out. I’ll see what aspects from different careers I like and combine them to find the perfect job for me. I realise this will take a long time but I’m okay with that because it sounds fun trying lots of jobs and at the end of the day I will have to work for a long time when I find the right thing so it’s got to be good! So that’s the main thing I learned from this whole project that’s it’s ok not to know as long as you’re open to looking, exploring and finding. And here I look back to my Dead Poets and say I understand that we as young people can do and achieve whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. If you had told me at the start of the project I would find out this of all things I wouldn’t have believed you. However I think through learning about the different ways you can find a job it has just come to me that exploring my options is something I want to do. (Sorry if that last part was a little hard to understand it’s just hard to put my feelings into words, I’m sure you’ve had that happen before)

So now to come back to the driving question “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” I feel like I’ve answered this in my last paragraph so I’ll keep it short. I’m going to use the newfound skills I now know I have to find the jobs that suit me and my personality the best and taking time to do this is ok!

Thank you for reading this blog, sorry there weren’t any pictures but I didn’t really have any that I could add that wouldn’t be just a photo of text, but just because you stayed you can have this photo of my dog

Thanks for reading, Good Morning, Good afternoon and Goodnight.