TPols:)

Hey people of the world! Today we are exploring a little something called ‘TPols’! Now you may remember MPols which is similar to TPols, except MPols was the Midyear Presentation of Learning and now it’s Transitional Presentation of Learning. Transitional because each grade is transitioning to the next. Ms. Willemse specifically told us to choose something different this time around, saying to not follow the usual script like saying that you didn’t think the course would be fun or teach you anything but then it actually did and you loved it. No, Ms. Willemse wants more so thats what I tried and hopefully accomplished. I created a board showing how each event in the past year connect with the concepts of teamwork, hard-work, persistence, and paradigm shifts. I hung it up in my room so that it will always remind me of how these 4 things can effect my life greatly.

MATH:

This year was quite the year for Math. We covered everything from Integers and Order of Operations to Algebra and Linear Equations. Term 3 was the best part of my year for math and science. In math, we started Algebra which has been a big part of my life. I joined a program called Kumon 5 years ago, and by grade 5 I was doing algebra equations. I loved solving for x and plotting lines on a graph, thought at sometimes I got a bit frustrated, I still loved it. We received the first assignment and I could feel the excitement ignite inside me. Another thing I love to do is compete against people, my parents probably know this the most. I love to be timed and race against others, or being put under pressure to finish an equation. I think that sometime my behaviour can get out of hand or, in other words, I get way to involved in making sure I win. Something I want to do about that is tone it down a bit and be conscious of my actions and behaviour when I am in that position.

We went over the topic of Surface Area and Volume, which was probably one of the most difficult areas. Since I was in elementary school, I’ve always had a problem in this field. This year I was so l was lucky to get a teacher who really understood how to get through to the student, well to me at least. Mr. Thomas was quite thorough in explaining and was always there if anyone needed help. Since I personally had trouble understanding, every time we got an assignment I would work with Mr. Thomas and my parents to help me better understand. My actions in term 1 and 2 were not the same. I had just begun high school and was still learning how things worked around here. I was too afraid to ask for help, thinking that my teachers or parents will think I am not a very smart student. I have learnt through making mistake after mistake that this is not true. If you need help or clarification, get it! Don’t be afraid to ask whatever questions you want, thats what teachers are there for! This was probably one of my most biggest lessons that I learnt throughout the first year of grade 8, especially in math.

SCIENCE:

Science has never been my favourite subject but it is definitely one i enjoy. This year we covered some complicated topics like tectonic plates to living things and the cell and electromagnetic radiation. Not going to lie but the tectonic plated unit felt like eons ago. We talked about the tectonic plate and its components, types of plates, how an earthquake is caused and even watched videos on big earthquakes that happened in the past and present. At the end of the unit we did this huge research assignment about an earthquake that we chose. I chose the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake. It was truly traumatic to hear the stories and I really connected with this assignment emotionally and educationally. But as the end of the term neared, I went off track and got distracted with my freedom and technology that surrounded me. Most of term 2 was not so good, I didn’t hand in most of my work and if I did, you could tell I didn’t put much effort into it. It wasn’t quality work and you could tell. Being distracted by my phone and apps on my iPad were starting to affect my everyday life and other classes. The minute I came home I would have to finish that last 5 minutes of Netflix or quickly respond to my Snapchats.

My term 2 report card was probably the worst I’ve ever gotten on my marks which made me take a step back and really look at the person I’d become. I was especially not doing so well in Science and I know that it isn’t one of my strongest areas but I really wanted to improve for term 3. Thats when my parents jumped in, and disciplined me harder than ever. It finally hit me, that I was failing my most important subject, mainly Science. So as a family we decided with a lot of negotiation that everyday I would leave my phone at home and go to school. I think that was the best decision I’ve ever made. I started noticing that I was becoming more interested in my work and less interested with what was going on on instagram.

In term 3 we started living things and the cell which was very very very interesting to me. I would come come and spew tons of facts and what I learnt in school about the living body! People started telling me I was more fun to talk to without my phone and even I noticed improvements of mine throughout term 3, especially in science. During living things and the cell, we went over the topic of diseases and even did a presentation on it. My group chose Hantavirus which is a disease spread through rats or fecal matter of rodents. People in my class wanted to be in a group with me because they knew I was going to pay attention and actually do the work. Lastly we covered the topic of electromagnetic radiation and slowly eased into talking about vision, the components of the eyeball, and how we perceive the world through these amazing balls in our eyes. Mr. Thomas taught us all about infrared, ultraviolet and everything in between. Our last science 8 class was spent dissecting sheep eyeballs which was a different experience, to say the least. I was partnered up with holly and noah. Noah did all the cutting into the eyeball but holly and I helped with cutting the fat and I even held the pieces of the eyeball one by one! Overall Science 8 had its ups and downs for me and right now I feel its going straight up and I hope it all pays off in the end.

PGP:
Personal Growth Plan was a crazy one but probably the most different of any course I’ve ever taken. Going into it, I was a bit skeptical because it was a new territory for me. I went into it with the mindset of ‘wow there are so many great people here with creative ideas how am I going to survive’. We dived straight into with the introduction to the course where we talked about habits of mind and different kind of mindsets people could have. We developed a PGP Mind Road Map which is essentially focused on which habits of mind each grade should try to have. The grade 8s, for example, were directed towards being persistent, managing impulsivity, thinking and thinking, striving for accuracy, thinking and communicating with clarity and precision, creating and imagining and innovating and thinking interdependently.

Now achieving all of these things is basically impossible, at least for me. I still believe that amounting to those heights is a lifelong journey and that I will always be learning how to do these things. PGP was my kick starter for me to start me on my path to success. Keeping the habits of mind, in mind, we started to read a book called ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens’ by Sean Covey. Stephen Covey, Seans father, wrote a similar book but directed towards adults and older people. I used to read a lot when I was younger but when I transitioned into high school I stopped because I had no time and suddenly sleep was very valuable to me. I chose my technology and music over reading, so when Ms. Willemse said we were going to be reading a book I wasn’t very excited. She said ‘it would be very hard to half-ass your way through this part of the course’, literally. Ms. Willemse said that she’d highly recommend us reading it instead of just guessing and reading summaries. I was 99% sure I was not going to read it, honestly.

My mother found out about this book that we were reading and immediately took interest because she had read Stephen Covey’s book. So everyday she’d take all my technology away and make me read the book. I would read the book without actually reading the words. I understood what he was saying and the stories that he was telling until Sean wrote about this boy who lived in not a good area. This boys brother was killed by a gang. Everything that he would do felt wrong and he felt guilty about his brother. So one day he decided to take a gun and go find the people who killed is brother and kill them. He found them and just as he was about to shoot, he stopped and thought about what he was doing. This would affect his whole life and affect many others. In the end he decided to walk away from the situation and went back home. I learnt through that one story that whatever you do, whatever decision you make, it affects everything that comes after. Some last for a lifetime.

From that point onwards I started to pay attention to every little detail because it was some really good material and advice. He answered some questions that I’d been asking since grade 6, he also wrote about kids who, I realized, had gone through the same thing as me and it made me feel like I wasn’t alone in this world. He started getting into the main part of the book, the 7 habits. Which was the focus of our next project. For every part there were at least 2 or 3 habits he talked about, and every time we finished a part we had to complete a part of a workbook that was given to us and submit a creative review. Once we were done all the parts and finished reading the whole book we moved on to something called ‘Time Machine’. I knew from the start that by just hearing the name it would be something really cool, and it was. I wrote a whole post on it if you want to go check it out click *here*. We were required to make something (physical or digital) that we wished our past self would have known based on 1 habit. I chose habit 7, Sharpen Your Saw, which is basically about continuously renewing yourself particularly 4 main things: Brain, Body, Soul, and Mind. I chose to portray in a board game. I was and actually still am surprised at how well the end product turned out. My parents were a huge help in building the whole thing but I came up with the rules and concept.

If you want to know more about my board game in its full entirety, go check out my time machine post! PGP ended with the last meeting, where we all shared our creations to other students. My group had a rap song, a comic book, and my board game. I am proud to say that I think I worked hard and that I deserve an A for this course.

MAKER:

Oh boy. Here we go. Your probably wondering ‘what in the world is Maker?’, well that’s exactly what I thought at the start of the year. To be honest I still don’t know. I always just describe it as Language Arts but in reality its much more than that. We did so many different things starting with how to use apps on our computers to our final project BlueSky. Each one of us had one summer to learn our way around iPad but there were some apps we couldn’t quite figure out so the first couple weeks we spent talking about them and Ms. Willemse or Mr. Hughes would demonstrate how to use them. After we were familiar with each app and how it works we started our first project. Building this very blog your reading right now! If you’ve been here from the start, you remember SBC or Student Blogging Challenge. It was one of the first thing I posted on here. Each week there would be a different challenge that we would write about, and if you got your work in early the creators will respond to your post! It was pretty cool but after a short 10 weeks the challenge was over and now we are waiting for next year. Photography was our next quick unit, in which we went over concepts like angles and different types of shots you could take. We did an assignment where we experimented this on the front of our school and on our fellow students! It was a really fun experience and I’m still using those skills to film music videos and assignments today! In humanities we started a religion unit and we had some of it overlap into maker with religious documentaries and keynote slides, just small stuff like that.

This next one was, boy, a doozy. We were introduced to a worldwide competition called Destination Imagination. We were sorted into 5 groups, each with its own concept. We had a medical group, an improv group, a mechanical group, a fine arts group and physical group. I was in the improv group and our team name was 1-800-IMPROV-FOR-KIDS, which I think is a pretty cool name. Don’t be fooled by the great name, when we started we sucked. Each of us had very strong personalities and we did not know how to blend it together to create a really good group. I would want to take lead but someone else would want to be the leader as well and it got very confusing. As regionals got closer stress became high anxiety but we practiced so much by that time, even at home we would practice tragedy and comedy but I myself still was not confident with myself. But I learnt that when you are acting you have to really embrace the whole act and put your whole heart into it otherwise you can tell that your not really into it. Now I just substituted the word ‘act’ with your whole life. Everything you do should be with your whole heart and you should be proud with whatever you put out there. I think my whole experience with the Maker class I could say that I’m happy with what I have put out there and that I feel I should get a good grade.

HUMANITIES:

This was probably the most packed-with-information class EVER! When I look back at this whole year I realize that there was a drastic change of topic from term 1 to now term 3. But everything we talked about had something common, a common theme if you will. Worldview. Our driving questions would always involve how we look at the world and what we can do it. Advertisements were first on the list, in which we started in the classroom but soon flooded into our community. We were sorted into groups and were told to pick a deep cove business and ask them if we would design an ad for them. I knew this was going to be a challenge because I wondered how many businesses would say ‘yes’ to 13 year olds making an ad for their boomin business. Some groups got shot down 10 or 11 times, all by different businesses. Ryan Chowne, who was in our group, had some ties to the gelato business down at deep cove. When I heard about this I was like ‘Perfect!’, no hassle, they are definitely going to say yes if they know Ryan! Surprise, they said no. I felt weirdly devastated, I felt like we were being left behind and every group was moving forward with their ads and we were still here. So we started to bring other businesses in mind and think about asking them when Gelato Express emailed Ryan that they would accept our offer and we could interview them. At this point I felt a piano had been lifted off my chest. It felt so relieving to finally be moving forward. We went through, what felt like, a thousand revisions but when we all had something that pleased Ms. Willemse, the class fo PLP 8 took a little field trip to Pound & Grain, a digital creative agency. Every group took their ads to get critiqued by actual ad-makers. That was a cool trip. They showed us all the websites they created, who they partnered with to make ads, how they would make the ads, how they come up with creative ideas and much more.

Our final ad was ‘Italy on a Cone’ which I think is pretty good for 8th graders. We took our skills and talents to Oregon, USA where we made ads for businesses there. Pretty much the same process, we got sent back for revisions and finally when it was perfect for Ms. Willemse we could move on to our next units. We dived straight into our Religion unit which was one of my 2 favourite units in humanities we did this year. We studied 6 main religions but shined a spotlight on each for a week or two. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Sikhism varied in their own way and each had their own unique way of looking at the world. Naturally, each group got a religion to scratch the surface and dig deep into the concepts of religion. Ours was Islam. I knew a bit about this faith beforehand so I brought my facts to the table and we did days and days of research. By the end I felt like I knew too much about it and wanted to try researching and other religion, but we all know there was not enough time for that. Our final, end product was crazy but it was really good and I knew that from the start it was going to be amazing no matter what because I had an amazing team first of all, and because we all knew our information like the back of our hands. I could count on my team which was comforting and I know they could count on me to get my work done.

We started talking about history and eventually started to talk about the Crusades and how religion and worldview ties into the infamous battle. Ms. Willemse had us read a book called ‘The Book of the Lion’ which was all about one boy: Edmund, a young apprentice, and his life during the time of the crusades, but the plot line behind Edmunds life was about why the Christians and Muslims were fighting and what they were fighting for. Ultimately they were fighting over the land that they both considered holy, which was Jerusalem. We started connecting this to our worldview and how it affected us today. A triple Venn diagram kicked us off and we slowly transitioned into a song called ‘Its the End of the World as we know it’. Our task was to rewrite the lyrics to fit our worldview, mine was about how my childhood had ended and I’d entered the big leagues of high school! Our driving question was always in the back of my mind, how had transitioning from elementary school challenged my worldview?

I had some technical problems which slowed me down a bit like getting the soundtrack into GarageBand to sing over it or exporting it to showbie. I fixed it with asking my friends and other students, by asking teachers and using my resources to figure out my problems. Feudalism was introduced to our vocabulary along with it the history of explorers and from then on starts my second favourite unit of all time. We made it more fun by each group choosing an explorer and creating a comic book about it. Vasco de Gama was ours, and boy oh boy was he an interesting person. He is famous for being the first European to discover India by sea but there is much more behind the scenes, which is exactly what we had to dig up while making our comic books. My group consisted of 2 other people, Zoe and Brenton. Surprisingly this project went pretty smooth and I had no major problems.

We continued this unit and watched a movie entitled Captain Phillips which is about an American captain who was shipping cargo and their route passed Somalian territory, and pirates boarded their ship and threatened them for money. This was a real life story and it was absolutely heartbreaking to watch. We talked about the camera angles, the acting, the scenario as a whole and how this is what most explorers went through and may still be going through today. I started to take this unit seriously at this point, it got real. So we came ‘anthropologists’ and studied the culture a little bit more and that transitioned into talking about what life was really like in a colony. This is best part.

PLP 8 picked up William Shakespeare’s play: The Tempest and started to watch it. Every class we would try to get as many scenes in and finish the play so we could get to the juicy stuff. Suddenly, we had a new driving question: How can we use Shakespeare’s play the tempest to represent colonization in New France?. Piece by piece we studied the history of New France and the which different colonies got into conflict, what wars and treaties took place and how it was all related to each act in The Tempest. Ms. Willemse broke the news to us that we are going to be acting out the tempest with the history of New France IN FRONT OF OUR PARENTS!!! Devastating, I tell you. But it was alright in the end, but first why don’t we talk about how we got there shall we.

This is my overall slideshow of the year and I’m going to explain a bit about my board over here.

Wow that was long. If you made it this far go get something nice for yourself, you earned it. Thanks for making it down here and reading this whole thing.

~Malaika:)