Hi and welcome to my 2024 mPOL. As always I have to start with the POL declaration.
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.
Over the start of this school year we were doing a lot of stuff focused around personal productivity and happiness. The personal productivity part is something that I think is the most important for me and I learned a lot from it, what worked for me and more importantly what didn’t. This and more we did to answer the question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?”
When doing the personal productivity we tried a lot of different strategies, many of which involved my calendar and lists. This is where I started to figure out what worked and didnt work for me. I found that when I had every single minute of my day planned out it seemed a lot more stressful and overwhelming, especially when we added the daily things check ins. I have a very busy schedule and when I just continually get notifications about the next thing it seems overwhelming and unmanageable. I find what works best for me is to have only some of the key things that aren’t part of my normal schedule on my calendar so I don’t forget them. I’m a creature of habit so I will rarely forget when I have something that I have every week.
Last year I talked a lot about how the things I needed to work on the most were procrastinating and the amount of stuff that I was taking on. This year I found that my procrastination has gotten quite a bit better, still not perfect but better to a point that I dont think it’s holding me back. My problem this year is how much I’ve taken on. I’m the kind of person that wants to do as much as possible and I want to be as well rounded as possible but the problem is sometimes it backfires when my schedule changes and suddenly I’m triple booked three days a week. This is something that is really important to myself that I fix for next year, with the classes I’m taking being significantly harder.
How much stuff I was taking on started really becoming obvious with Destionation Imaganition. DI is one of those things that, if you’re group isn’t all working at 100% from the start you are going to be in for a rude awakening later. My and my group, Matteo, Mika, Allie, Jack, and Jasper, started off really strong. We went through multiple different brainstorming sessions for the design of everything and how it would all play out. The problem started when I went to Seattle for the Cray Cray Yay Yay project. During the time I was away the rest of my group was supposed to have gotten a good chunk of the building of it all done. What I came back from the trip to was a big wooden outline that was for the frame. Me and my group really had to buckle down and get the work done. I ended up pulling 2 or 3 almost all nighters to work on DI as well as catching up on other school work plus work and basketball. I even ended up staying at the school until around 7-7:30 the day before the DI tournament to do as many of the finishing touches as I could. Sadly I wasn’t able to make it to the first DI tournament but luckily there was a second date that we were a lot more prepared for and even won a special award for.
So the question is, how am I going to improve going forward? Anyone can say that they are going to improve but don’t always follow through on it, myself included, so how will I manage my schedule and school? My grade 11 year is lining up to be one of my more chaotic ones with a few grade 12 classes as well as classes I haven’t talken before. My plan for the rest of this year and going into next year is to prioritize school. That was a big part of the problem and a big part of where the procrastination has come from in the past. I was just not as motivated for school as I was the rest of the things going on in my life. Next year is going to be a big part in determining if I get into university and which one I can get in. Getting into a good university is very important to me and I’m seeing now more then ever that it’s going to take a lot of work and sacrifice to get there. I’m going to have to make some tough decisions in the upcoming months to decide what I can continue doing the same way, what I have to cut back on, and what I have to stop doing all together.