Hello, my name is Daniel Boglari, and welcome to my end of year presentation of learning.
I’d just like to say that this is going to be a little different than other presentations you may have watched, and this might be quite unexpected for some of you, especially my parents.
Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about the mandatory presentation of learning statement:
“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.”
I’m not really sure how to break into this comfortably so I’m just gonna start.
I am not a happy person, at all. I feel excruciatingly lonely all the time, and the only time I can say I’m actually happy is when I’m laughing. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I actually felt proud of myself. I’m very much bipolar in how I experience joy.
But you might be wondering. How on earth are you not happy Daniel? Aren’t like perfect at school and really smart and great at climbing and really nice to everyone? How could you possibly be depressed? Well, I really don’t know to be honest. Even though I have a 100% in all three PLP subjects, I’m the school champion for the University of Waterloo Math Competition, I have friends, I’m notably athletic and have success in sports, but I’m still never truly proud of what I achieve. To me everything I’ve done is just meeting expectations, and everything I haven’t yet achieved is just expectations I haven’t met yet. And I know this is wrong. I know that thats not how I should be thinking. And thats not even how I think. Its how I feel.
The criteria that they gave us for this year’s TPOL was to pick three success behaviours that you want to talk about throughout your year of learning. This year I most definitely build skills through the learning I did at school, but today I want to do something different. Instead of talking about my school experiences and how they build my success behaviours, I want to talk about how they were build by my personal life. I honestly think that what I have happening outside of school is what allows me to be as successful as I am, and so I believe thats what I should focus on for this TPOL.
Ownership and Responsibility
At the start of grade 10, I had a plan. My goal was to be happy. In the summer of grade 9, I identified that my life was not going the way I wanted it to, and that I needed to make a change. I took it into my own hands to better my life. I started working out more, I tried to eat healthier, I tried meditating, and stopped watching youtube in my free time. It was actually pretty well timed with the PGP project we did at the start of the year, which was focused on self-improvement.
Around Christmas time, I went more extreme. I stopped playing video games altogether, I stopped eating sugar, I started getting up early, and I started limiting all external sources of dopamine. I’ve been taking cold showers every morning for the last 4.5 months, and I’ve been feeling a bit better about myself. It hasn’t solved all my issues, but it’s been making me feel a bit happier with who I am. It feels more pure to Daniel.
Figuring out how to take things into your own control is such a valuable skill in academics. Having learned to take control of my personal life has made completing tasks less stressful and with less struggle. Its humbling. Being able to admit that it’s your fault that something is going wrong is the first step to fixing it or making it better next time. Last year, I was constantly handing in late assignments, but this year I only hand them in late when I know that I need that extra time to make that assignment the best reflection of myself as I can.
Focus, Balance, and Self-Regulation
The biggest thing I learned this year wasn’t in school. It was from my friends. One day around February or March I was sitting and talking with my friend Christian on the front steps of his house. We were talking about what it means to be successful, and he said something thats changed how I live. He told me that in order to be happy, I need to actually do things that make you happy. To work extremely hard, but to play even harder. To do things that make your life interesting.
I’ve always had the mindset that you need to work and work and work and then you’ll be happy once you’ve achieved the things you want to. But I’ve realized that I probably wont be happy regardless. Even if I achieve lots, I’ll still be missing something, and that something is having fun.
Lately I’ve been getting better at balancing how I spend my time. Sometimes I need to focus on school, work, or training, and when I’m not, I focus on having fun. It’s making life so much less stressful. For example, I wrote a lot of this TPOL the day before I’m presenting it. I spent all morning focused on getting it done, so that in the afternoon I could focus on having fun.
Enthusiasm
I’ve also noticed the more time I’ve spent having fun, the more cheerful I’ve become. This year I’ve made so many new friends that I never thought I would get along with, and I’ve become increasingly social.
A large part of this is to do with how I feel depressed. When you feel sad or angry all the time, it can be hard to look for things that make you happy. But the more you do, the better you become. Over the last few months, I’ve really learned how to find small things to be happy about. Sometimes during lunches at school I’ll walk down to strathcona beach, either with a few friends or by myself. And I’ll just walk around and appreciate the small things. The way the wind blows in my face. The warmth of the sun. The feeling of cold water on your skin. On days where it feels like everything’s going wrong, I’ll still try and find a small thing to be happy about.
One Last Thing
There’s one last thing that I want to talk about before I go.
I am an extremely deep thinker. It’s to the point where I can’t live my life properly. I constantly overthink every situation I find myself in, and I’m always contemplating my decisions. It’s something that makes my life miserable a lot of the time. But it’s also my biggest skill. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse. This year, the best work I’ve done has been my blog posts. By a mile. I put a lot of effort into them, and they almost always have a purpose outside the project. Whenever I write them I always try to learn something that I didn’t learn in the project, through the process of writing. By ability to think deeply and reflectively has taken me so far in PLP. The number of projects that I’ve excelled at because of my ability to think in ways that others can’t is huge.
Even though it makes me depressed and miserable on regular intervals, I don’t wish for this to go away. It’s a part of me, and I’m grateful for it. It’s taken me to places that I could never dream of going. The side effects are just challenges that are yet to be overcome.
I’m going to be honest, I put nowhere near the same effort into this assignment as I would on a regular blog post. I didn’t practice my presentation at all. But sometimes I honestly just need a break. Being an extending student doesn’t mean that you’re exerting yourself 100% of the time. Sometimes knowing when to take a break is important, because then you can spent your energy on being the best person you can possibly be in the areas of your life that matter to you most.
Thank you for listening, reading, or however you experienced this.
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