Grade 12 has been already more overwhelming then I could ever have imagined. Finding a way to manage the workload from assignments and tests, PLP projects, Applications and scholarships, while also having after school activities and grad events has not come easy to me. I still have been finding myself stressed not being able to Finnish anything right up until the deadline.
Goal Moving Forward:
My goal for this year is to apply the skills I learned last year in PGP to make time for what’s is truely important.
This blog post will take you through the three units we did this year and what I took way from each.
Shrew You!
Shrew you! was our first unit this year. We worked a lot on developing our writing and good historical perspective and literacy analysis skills.
What I was most proud of in this unit was my final draft of my classic essay on The Taming of the Shrew.
Is The Taming of the Shrew a Classic?
My final draft was considered accomplished by my teacher Mrs. Willemse.
This year we have been using the proficiency scale for marking.
As you can see, accomplished means that I was able to demonstrate complete understanding of the topic in my writing. What I can improve in my writing to push it towards extending would be, to support my points by adding much more specific details and quotes. I’ve found my writing is never long no matter the topic, so by explaining my thoughts in more detail will help my writing grow.
Monster In The Mirror
As you may recall last year for our winter exhibition we did a class project called Carosel of Communism that was an interactive experience all about the 50s. The class worked really efficiently together as we managed to have all the elements ready and set up for the exhibition.
This year, just like the past grade 12s, we attempted to make a horror film reflecting on a social issue.
Unlike my essay and the past class project I would not consider this film accomplished.
The team and individual efforts, were not strong and we didn’t manage to meet are deadline or even criteria. I absolutely did not do my best work on this project and really regret not taking the opportunity to be a leader.
My role in this film was the costume designer. This was not a role I intentionally wanted or felt like I should have been given. This role didn’t excite me because due to the fact that our movie was set today in a highschool all I had to do is put together “costumes” for high schoolers.
What I did enjoy about my role is that I was able to be apart of the art department by helping make decisions and create the set.
Other than my role as costume designer I was one of the main actors in the film. Even though being an actor in our film was not something I even considered I’m very glad now that I was put in the role of Barbara. Having to memorize a script and act it the same scenes around 4 times each in front of my classmates definitely helped me gain confidence that would later effect my presentation in the next project.
We Didn’t Start The Fire
Finally the last unit that I am still finishing my blog post for was about “What Makes an Event Significant?” Once Ms. Maxwell shared with us the Billy Joel song, “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, and explained to us the high level of independent we had I knew this was my kinda project.
The range of topics for this project was very diverse. For the most part you had a choice in choosing a political figure, musician, medical advancement, or an athlete. All where greatly significant in there own way, so you could take this project into any direction most likely suiting your own personal interests.
I decide to choose the topic “vaccines”
I thought this personally was a great choice because it was a harder topic that I didn’t know much about compared to music and other arts. If researching this topic wasn’t hard enough, the media I created combined art, animation, and geography. I won’t go into much detail of the reasearch and drafts I did for this project but I will talk about the presentation.
I was very nervous about doing this 5min presentation. I’ve never been fond of public speaking, so once I was scheduled to present third, right after a student in my class who seriously enjoys it, things weren’t looking good. Once it came to the dreadful presentation day all the work I put in to my slide show cutting down my presentation and making sure I prounounced Jonas Salk correctly must have paid off because my teacher was very impressed with it.
Moving Forward
From this year so far I have three main takeaways:
- I should aways give myself enough time to put a much detail and thought out into my work.
- If I’m not growing or excited about what I’m doing for an assignment or project I need to take the initiative and find away to push my learning.
- I should remember that this program is like no other and I am lucky to have been able to be apart of it. Therefore every project, assignment, and unit that is thrown at me in the next few months I should take advantage of the fact that I get to create and present personalized detailed work.
Question
The questions that I’ve struggle to answer myself are:
How can I make a conscious decision, when I have multiple assignments and such on my plate for an upcoming week, about where I should initially put my time and energy?
What should be my top deciding factors of importance in my workload?