I, like most people, was under the impression for most of my life that success looks like this: Like anyone who thought they understood the pathway to success, I decided to let it guide my life. Since there appeared to be only one pathway, I reasoned that if I focused all my effort on academics, gave 100% to everything and took control of anything that didn’t meet this vision I would reach success. Unfortunately, often this approach led me far from it as I would work poorly with a team, would often miss the criteria and had a terrible work/life balance. For a while, I didn’t know of any alternative and so I continued this method through all the struggles. Now that I am in grade 11 however, and have started to expand my view to my future, life outside of school and my personal desires, I have come to understand that success looks more like this: Success isn’t a single point, but a multi-tiered process that requires consideration of a much larger perspective. If I keep my focus narrow, I won’t be able to adapt to the ever changing and complex world around me and will struggle to find success in multiple facets of my life. I need to consider the big picture of the purpose of school, the value of my current life, and what this will all mean for my future. I started the realize this around the time of my mPols, which is why I decided then to make this the focus for the rest of my year. If you recall, my learning goal for the rest of the year was to: Over the past four months, I feel that I have not only achieved this goal but taken it to new heights with many opportunities to take more action arising. I have broadened my perspective about the power of the work we do in PLP, worked to create a life with a balance between my schooling and my personal needs, and have taken leaps and bounds toward my future goals. And, because of all of this…

Considering the big picture seems like a nebulous goal, so how have I actually realized it? Find out through the evidence below: (Click on the header to access the post) The Macbeth Unit was one of the most exciting and ambitious of the year. Not only did we get to explore one of the most acclaimed Shakespeare plays in traditional PLP depth, but we were also tasked with recreating it as a class movie. Despite the advent of quarantine preventing this unit from fully being completed, it was an excellent learning experience none the less. The unit started out like any other, with individual analysis work. Through this, not only did I learn how to effectively back up any claim with evidence but also how valuable considering the big picture will be long-term during a project. We were tasked with watching three cinematic retellings of Macbeth along with exploring an interactive version of the play. This would be the basis for our TWIL blog posts, our QUEST assessments and eventually our film. Keeping these end goals in mind, I took notes specifically on competencies and things relating to our driving theme of appearance vs. reality. It took more work than just taking standard notes, but but doing this I found I had plenty of material to draw off of for my TWILS, QUESTS and as my role as competencies manager (more on that later). Individually, I kept my eyes on the broader picture of the project decently, but where I really succeeded with doing this was with the group work. As our class got started on making the movie, great ideas were coming from every direction but in this excitement the competencies of the project were being lost. We were going to make a great film, but we would need to communicate ideas related to the competencies and collaborate to work them into our film in order to achieve the big-picture goal of the project, which was to build understanding of these competencies. In trying to think of a way to solve this, I remembered the work habit I have been using over the last year which I talked about in my Atomic Habits Post, called the criteria method. This method makes the big picture of the project, the competencies and criteria, as the foundation for everything else, and I decided I could apply this here. To do this, I took responsibility of the competencies by inventing the role of competencies manager. Through this role, I facilitated communication between different departments on how they could collaboratively build a stronger understanding of the competencies, held one on one discussions about them, and made tweaks to the script with permission from the screenwriter. However, because the competency manager position did not have power over the departments, I worked alongside the ideas of my classmates and with their schedules instead of imposing my own. Through this, I not only helped others communicate and collaborate to build an understanding but did so myself as I built an understanding on what it truly means to be part of a team. Looking back on it all, I am glad I took on the role of competencies manager. I am proud that when I saw a need, I took the responsibility to forward not only my own learning but the learning of the rest of the class. Through it, I learned how to truly synergize and act as a mediator as I didn’t have the responsibilities of a leader for once. I also learned how to make connections and string together many seemingly unrelated concepts. Reflecting on this all now, it was considering the big picture of school that allowed this incredible growth to happen. I kept in mind both the initial purpose of the project with the competencies and soon learned that a hidden purpose of it was to teach us how to collaborate as one big team. Without keeping a greater perspective in mind, I don’t think this would have been possible Like I mentioned at the beginning, success doesn’t just come from work and academics; it also is found in your personal life. Unfortunately, personal life can often take the back seat when your work or school is urgent and demanding. Like I’ve mentioned again and again in previous posts, a good work/life balance is something I have been striving for since grade 8, but have had a lot of trouble achieving. That is, until this year. The picture above is a representation of my understanding of the book Atomic Habits that we explored throughout this year. I am really proud of how it turned out (especially in the mechanics and in how I revised it into a digitalized version on my blog being mindful that my readers may be interested in trying it out themselves). However, I am even more proud of what I have done with my understanding of the book outside of school. I learned that you can get big results by making multiple little changes, and have been applying this concept a lot being mindful that I need some big changes in my personal life. I do 30 minutes of spread out exercise everyday, 10 minutes of meditation and five minutes of yoga. I do a weekly review every week were I reflect on the failures of the past week to build knowledge on how I can improve in the future, and do a monthly review every month to make sure I am on track to meet my big goals. I have developed a new work habit of taking a five minute break outside after every homework session, because I know that in the big-picture of my work day I can get more done this was as I will be more focused. I read every night for five minutes and keep this up by collaborating and communicating my progress with my accountability partner Ms. Maxwell, and go driving once a week to practice for my driving test. All of these actions may seem small, but they have led to incredible results like being able to drive on the highway, learning tons of new words and being more in shape than ever. Now yes, I owe some of this success to the techniques that I learned this year from Atomic Habits. For example, I do daily workouts that are 10 minutes because this is the mark where I feel my muscles working without getting exhausted, which demonstrated the goldilocks rule, and have habit stacked my reading onto my nightly routine habit. However, I don’t think that this knowledge is the only reason I have found great success this year. I think another key part is that I have been considering the big picture. What I mean by this is that I would find doing things like meditating useless if I just focused on the short-term because I wouldn’t be seeing results, and would likley stop doing them. I would also see my work as way more important as it puts more pressure on me in the short term, and would likley do that in favour of my personal habits. Since I have been keeping the big picture of my life in mind however, I have been able to keep up these habits consistently and and am starting to reap the results. It is because I am not just being mindful of my immediate life, but of the broader perspective of where I will be in the future that I am succeeding. I am really proud of myself for taking responsibility to be living the life I want to life this year. It is so much easier to just go with the flow in the short term, but by challenging and revising the systems that I had set up and followed for so many years I know I will be better off in the long run. I am not only improving myself though, but also my relationships with my family, friends and the world around me. This is because I now have more time to spend with them, more energy to care about them, and more time to get out there and make a difference! Despite having the opportunity to share our work through blogs and exhibitions, it only truly dawned on me this year that our work can have an impact beyond the classroom. For the last three years of PLP, I had been focusing solely on the grades, not caring as much if I learned the material or what my work would be capable of doing after it was completed. To me, it was a task to complete and I was not mindful of how important it could be my future self and for the world around me. Like I said however, this all changed this year: This book is now what I consider some of my best work of the year. It was am artifact created for one of my Think and Create posts based off of the topics of racism and hate that we were exploring in our We Shall Overcome Civil Rights unit. It keeps in mind the concepts we explored through history, and then connects them to modern day racism along with what an everyday person can do about it. Not only am I proud of how well the book turned out, but how in this chaotic time of quarantine I was able to keep up a good work ethic to complete it. What really makes this book stand out to me however is how in making and using it I considered the bigger picture of the future of world I’m living in and my personal life. What I mean by this is that this book is meant not just to demonstrate my understanding, but to share it with others in hopes they can gain the same understanding and make a change. By considering this bigger impact that my work can have and being mindful of current times (e.g., modern racism), it has not only given this book a new depth but will also hopefully help it shape the future world that I want to live in, which is one without racism. The other way I used this book to consider the big picture was in applying for a scholarship. Ms. Willemse posted an opportunity for our class to apply for an award that focused around creating artifacts that could counter hate. Upon viewing this, I instantly realized that my book, with a couple of tweaks, would be an excellent artifact and that I could fill out the rest of the application with ease as I had already learned about a lot of historical hate in our unit. For example, one of the focuses of this scholarship was explaining the value of testimony, and because I had explored material such as the testimonies that Emmet Till’s mom made after his death, I felt like I understood the topic much better. This was one of the first times that I could directly apply something other than math or specific skills from school to the real world, and because of all the work I had already put in in school it allowed me to excel. I was also, once again, able to use my work to hopefully make an impact in the bigger picture of my future by applying to something that would help fund my post secondary education.

It is kind of scary to ask myself the question “am I ready for grade 12?” Bringing it up reminds me that I am coming to the end of high school, of my public schooling and of my childhood. As intimidating as it seems however, I know that I am ready for two reasons. The first can be proven with all the evidence above, which is that I know how to consider the big picture of school, life and the future. I understand that keeping the overarching purpose of a project in mind can teach you new skills and allow you to achieve it no matter what happens, like with our Macbeth Unit. I know how to keep the end goal of a work life balance in mind with my habits now, and that everything I am learning currently can be used to shape a future that I want to live in. It doesn’t matter what obstacles I will face in grade 12, because I know if I consider the big picture in these three areas like I have been this year, I will be able to overcome them. The second reason why I know I am ready for grade 12 is because of the growth that considering the big picture has allowed me to make this year. At mPols, I said “My goal is to make considering the big picture to be a part of my daily routine”, and to do this I put together a three part system of definition, implementation and reflection. The first step in this was to recognize where potential areas of big picture thinking would be, and I used a mind map to do this. It originally looked like this… But now, it looks like this… I also said that I wanted to take actions toward the big picture and that I would track them in my progress tracker: That now looks like this… I then said that I would reflect on my progress in every blog post I wrote for the rest of the year with short PGP summaries. I have achieved this with eight posts and eight summaries: This system that I outlined in mPols has allowed me to do incredible things. With the big picture of my future in mind, I have applied to multiple scholarships, scheduled meetings with politicians to discuss my career path and planned out my university applications. By being mindful of my current life and the world around me, I have gone on multiple trash clean-up outings to help the environment, gotten more sleep than I have in years and been at a new all time level of balance. As for school, I have prepared myself for the criteria of my grade 12 classes, learned how to study smart for exams next year through research and have honed in on subjects that I think will be useful for my future. All of these actions came from my big picture thinking habit tracking system and all have prepared me for next year. With this growth and my new knowledge combined, I know that I am ready. I have come leaps and bounds this year, but there is always more to work on. I think the most obvious can be recognized in this post; making my blogs shorter. I came to a realization during my Atomic Habits Reflection Post that the flaw of my “criteria method” is that everything in my head ends up on the page, relevant or not. To solve this next year, I am putting a 2000 word cap on all my posts, no exceptions. This year I have also been working to communicate with the teachers about my work to gain an understanding of how to reach my target goals, and feel I have been successful in doing this. However, when I have been given feedback without looking for it I have noticed that I am often not open to it. My goal for next year is to be open to all feedback, because whether I use it or not what’s the harm in considering it? I am going to do this simply by reminding myself this is a priority over my set vision and try not to set my vision to early into a project. Being open to feedback won’t help me though if I am not listening, which is why I am making my final goal to be to listen better in class. I often notice that I am not listening because I am too preoccupied with other work or thinking about it. To fix this, I will stop doing other work when I am being talked to when the information is relevant and will remind myself to be more mindful of the class I am in and the moment.