mPOL 2025 

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.

Yet again were doing this a little past halfway through the year but lets reflect on this 5/8 of the year!

The first project of the year (as you can imagine) was not my best work of grade 10. Entitled “the world needs more Canada” we had to create a multi paragraph composition which is essentially an essay with a different name. Although not being bad work by any means the first project after summer break ends is always going to be slightly sub-par (for me at least.) Sometimes you just need to ease into the school year, ya know? If I were to re-do it I would probably just try to make it sound more professional. I find that a lot of my writing has a conversational aspect to it and sometimes its just not the place for it and I need to really keep that in mind when I’m writing something important and professional. Below is a link to the multi paragraph composition but we haven’t really done any essays since so I don’t have much to compare it to. 

Why the world needs more Canada essay

My favourite project of the year this far is “swipe right for tragedy” which is the Romeo and Juliet modern parody project we just recently completed and It also is a good demonstration of my attempted academic comeback. There wasn’t too much actual learning “evidence” from this project because a big portion was reading the play and the other part was writing the parody but regardless I can still reflect on it. I have really tried to lock-in so to speak when it comes to my school work and the old me would’ve probably just looked up a summary of the play but I actually did the reading and I almost enjoyed it too! The creation of the parody was the most fun I have had at school in a while and I really liked doing it. The worst part of this project is the fact that I wasn’t there for the actual presentation of the play because I was very sick. Other than the part that I missed the day that the whole project was working towards it was awesome! 

I think that in the past my work has always been just kinda there in the way that it just wasn’t very interesting and tedious to read or watch. This year I have really tried to care about my work even if I’m not interested in or passionate about the topic and I think it’s showing a little bit. As I look back at things like my podcast about why the world needs more Canada or my business card I notice that Im getting better with every project instead of kinda just saying in place like I was in grade 9. This is of course not to say that I don’t have good and bad moments and that every single piece of work is better than the last but just the overall all quality seems to be increasing. As an example of that I would like to compare my WW2 essay to the Louie Reil essay I did at the end of grade 9. 

Ww2 essay

Louis riel multi-paragraph composition

Mentor for a day was the careers project I just did before the one I am currently on and I am proud of the work I did for it. The point of the project was to shadow and interview someone who has a job you are interested in and I chose firefighting because that is something I can definitely see myself doing. Although I couldn’t shadow a firefighter for a full day I still got a tour of the fire station and an interview which was just as great. I think my work was pretty solid across the board for this project, we did a smart brevity note that I am pretty content with and the audio reflection I made is definitely the best audio I have created for a project thus far. It’s a lot easier for me (for everyone I’m sure) to put out better work if I’m actually interested in or intrigued by a topic for a project and since I literally got to choose what career to write about my work came out pretty good. I think the smart brevity was professional and clear and the audio reflection didn’t actually hurt my ears to listen back to. Linked below are both the smart brevity not and the audio reflection 

Firefighting smart brevity 

How can I continue to grow in my collaboration with others? I personally don’t mind working with others, in fact I even prefer it sometimes. I feel for the most part I’m a pretty easy person to work with and I try to listen to others’ ideas even if I don’t necessarily agree with them but we can all improve, nobody’s perfect. Going forward I would like to maybe give my trust that my team members will do there part a bit more because sometimes I can get annoying by constantly bringing it up until they do it.

Well this year (so far) has definitely been a learning journey and I (almost) can’t wait for to see what the rest of the year has in store academically for me!  

Have you ever had to build a machine that climbs up a rope for no particular reason? Well I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago when I got assigned the engineering challenge for destination imagination. Now that the regional tournament has come and gone its time to reflect and think forward about the provincial tournament coming up in April. 

In the beginning we were lost, my team and I had no idea how we were going to create something that followed the rules of the challenge because we weren’t even fully sure what the rules were AFTER reading all of them. To be honest my teammate Caelum did most of the building of the machine itself with design ideas from the team but the physical creation and most design was by him. Once we had a finished product the first time we realized it didn’t fit the rules and had to re-build the way it connected to the wire it was supposed to climb. One of the other engineering challenge groups built a replica of the wire setup and we were able to test out our machine that way. Getting the final machine to work was probably one of the less challenging aspects of DI compared to the other stuff. 

Our story was a really strange poorly formed idea in the beginning but through talking about it as a group a proper story started to form. Our challenge required the story to be about a circus so obviously we had to include that in our story. We settled on the idea that circus performers down on their luck in desperate need of money were going to steal a diamond from robbers that had just previously stolen the diamond from some transport trucks. Sadly I have no idea what the appraisers and audience thought of our story because during the performance some of my teammates broke out in laughter and we couldn’t finish the performance. I think if we got through the whole story calmly and composed it would’ve been a big hit. 

This years DI couldn’t have been more different than the grade 9 one for me. I wasn’t able to make it to the tournaments in grade 9 so I had no idea what I was in for but that honestly wasn’t the biggest difference. Last year We had a lot more time to prepare but a lot less class time to work on it. I spent a lot of days after school working on our solution last year but this year I was un available to meet up outside of class for the most part. I honestly don’t even know how it really turned out for us last year but this year I feel like I contributed more than just doing whatever my teammates told me too like I did last year.. 

Being one of the grade 10’s on the team since we had done it before we were expected to fill in the leadership role of of the group and I feel like in some situations I definitely did that. During our presentation the appraisers didn’t set one part up right so our machine broke mid performance and I had to fix it whilst we were preforming. I also had to explain how the machine worked to the person in my group who was going to use it. Although not leading too much I still think I demonstrated leadership a bit. 

DI was certainly an experience and its not over yet! See you soon when I have to write one of these after the provincial tournament. 

How can learning from others career journeys help shape our own? Well i mean it took me about five weeks to figure out so lets see how quickly I can explain it to you. 

The whole point of this project was to shadow someone in a profession you are interested in for a day and conduct an interview to find out more about the job than you learned in your research. I actually found this project quite useful and helped me decide if firefighting which I was already interested in could possibly be the career for me. 

This project was pretty straightforward forward and that I liked about it but at the same time finding someone to shadow was in my opinion and many other’s (at least I think) the hardest part of the project, in fact I didn’t confirm my interview until the first draft of the podcast was already due. Regardless I think the majority of this Project was still pretty good. 

After we chose the profession to shadow we had to write a smart brevity note on said profession so that if we didn’t already know anything we wouldn’t be going in with no base knowledge. It was nothing new because we’ve done smart brevity before but it was still useful to help understand more about firefighting. If you’re interested the smart brevity on firefighting is right below this paragraph.

https://carrots-show-toc.craft.me/zPU3rHnyzKIp4E

One skill that defiantly improved during this project is my professional formality which I had to use to write an email to my “mentor” asking for the interview. Actually talking to someone in person has never really been hard for me but reaching out through email I am absolutely awful at it because I just really haven’t had to do it much. Those skills will come in handy especially when applying for jobs. 

The end product was a “audio reflection” NOT a podcast. Im kidding, it was pretty much a podcast but it didn’t have multiple episode so we weren’t allowed to call it that. We have done lots of podcasts things in the past six months so it wasn’t much out of the ordinary but compared to the others this one had significantly more of the interview Instead of one sentence snippets. My garage band skills have developed even more this project but there is only so much garage band you can learn. The script on the other hand did help with my writing skills a bit. We write a lot of scripts but every time they get a bit better so I see the appeal although I do find them tedious. The podcast is right below if you would like to listen!

I know I said that the podcast would be linked below but I don’t actually have access to it yet so maybe come back soon! 

How can learning from other career journeys help shape our own? We can learn from others career journeys by listening to their stories and applying their lessons to our own lives, at least that’s what I got from this project. 

This project really helped with my communication skills among other things and for that I’m grateful. Im not trying to leave you with a boring goodbye but thanks for reading and come back soon!   

Was this project on Romeo and Juliet “to be, or not to be” well, lets find out. I would just like to start by saying i know that quote is not from Romeo and Juliet but I thought since it was a pretty famous Shakespeare line it would work just fine. 

The most recent project in my Humanities 10 class was entitled “swipe right for tragedy” and it focused on Romeo and Juliet. For the project we read the play and then created a modern parody that tied into our local community. It was a really fun project that gave us (the students) mostly total control over the final product and I’d say it came out pretty well. 

The thing we did for most of the project is read the play witch I thought would get boring but we started acting it out and that made it fun. We had comprehension tests to make sure we were actually doing the reading we were supposed to and they were kinda annoying but I get why we had to do them, it would be very hard to create a parody if no one knew the original. We also had a few small writing activities about the traits of the characters but those weren’t too bad. 

After we read the play we pretty much right away got into groups and started writing the parody. I was in the group assigned to act 5 (that was the one I wanted) and this was my favourite part of the project. Writing the script and coming up with other elements of our play was very fun and although I usually don’t like Plays and drama I thought it was really fun. Speaking in front of people has never really been a problem for me but speaking smooth with rhythm is something I do struggle with and I think this project definitely helped. Going forward I will definitely be using these skills, especially with the amount of presenting we do in PLP. 

This might be my favourite project of grade 10 so far and I’m actually sad its over but I’m exited to use the skills I learned in the future. And with that “bid me farewell” (also a Shakespeare reference not from Romeo and Juliet.) 

What role did the conflict of World War Two play in shaping Canadian identity? Well it… actually.. we will talk about that in a little bit. 

For our most recent humanities project we focused on Juno Beach witch was the beach the Canadian soldiers fought on while the Americans were at Omaha during the battle of Normandy. To honor the Canadians who fought there the Juno beach centre was created. A few years back a French developer tried to buy that area and  he was going to get rid of the centre. Luckily that is no longer but it shows us what could happen and the fact that so many people were outraged shows us just how many people are and were effected by World War Two. 

I thought that the entire project was very interesting and I definitely had fun learning more about the war but i do understand that it is not for everybody, especially some of the more graphic details of the atrocities that happened. I thought for the most part that the work I created was pretty good and something I could be proud of. I do have to admit that the smart brevity note I made was not entirely correct and there is always room to improve everything but the most room to improve was definitely that note. 

Smart brevity- the economy and the advancement of tech 

The main thing we made was a “Zine” full of an easily consumable and visually appealing version of the essays we wrote. Mine was definitely a struggle to finish, I was having serious trouble getting the formatting to work and then I went away for two weeks and did have access to the Zine but I’m happy to say it has finally been completed! I was frustrated by that but I’m proud of the work I put forward. I thought the idea of the Zine was very interesting and a cool thing to do for this project. 

(Zine yet to come)

What role did the conflict of World War Two play in shaping Canadian identity? World War II shaped Canadian identity by fostering a sense of unity, strengthening its global reputation, and instilling confidence in its independence through shared sacrifices both on the battlefield and at home. World War Two had horrible atrocities but in that way it was good for Canada and my essay talks more about that. 

Ww2 essay 

This project was my favourite one thus far and I really enjoyed learning about how my country contributed to the war. Although there were some difficulties I still am proud of the work I made and hope to do more projects like this in the future! 

TPOL 2023. 

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am 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.

My TPOL will reflect my entire year of learning since September. I think I have come a long way since September. My work has improved so much as well as my ability to learn. I’m a much better student than I was at the start.

At the start ill admit that my work was less than accomplished but as the year went on the standards got higher but my work got better. As a comparison one of my first project the outsiders and my latest the ad for HMSC are right below. 

There are a few things in PLP that frustrate me. For example when we have substitutes that don’t know anything about what we are doing. Something else that frustrates me is when we are not informed about an assignment for an example is when we get assigned something and then not told what it is before its due. For the most part I like the way PLP is formulated but I had a bit of a difficult adjusting at first. 

If I were to change something about the work I have done in grade 8 it would be the drawing portion. Whenever drawing is an element in a project I try to do good but the fact is I’m not super skilled at drawing and thats something I would like to get better at. If I had to change something I would redo all the drawings I’ve done that are linked to a project. Again its not that I didn’t try but the drawings could use some improvement. 

What does my work reveal about me as a learner? In all my work I tend to get right to the point and form more basic sentences which you could also see in my notes. My notes are just whatever was stated or whatever I read with barley any context. Its not the best way of retaining knowledge but i find the simplicity really helps me learn. If someone else were to read my notes I don’t think they could make total sense of them. I think this system works for me but I can’t see it working for someone else unless of course the are the ones righting it. 

One of the projects I’m least proud of is geek out page (below) it met the standers at the time but looking back I realize how truly bad it is. There is just so many spots I could’ve done even the smallest bit better. Also I would just like to point out how bad my old blog theme was. It was way to hard to find anything and although it had pages the pages were hidden in the bottom left corner, over all just not a good theme to pick. The geek out page is about something we are fond of or do a lot. I chose physical activity which id like to say a know a fair amount about but I wrote virtually nothing on. With 100% guarantee I know I could’ve done it so much better. 

The blog… The blog is something I have been working in since the start of school. For every project we do we have to write a blog post reflection. So far I have 11 posts. Each of these posts was better than the one before. I think thats a great example of growth in my learning. As well as the content of each post the grammar and dialect in each post has improved significantly. At the beginning I was forming very basic sentences with bland words. It sounded like a robot had written it. I know some of my posts as the year were a bit choppy but for the most part my blogs have evolved to a higher quality. Another thing about the continuation of the blog post throughout the year is length. The length of each post got longer and more information enriched. You can really see the progress of my learning in the blog. I think I’ve come a far way since the start of the year and I think the best way that has been documented is the blog. 

Why do I think I’m ready for the next grade level? I think I have matured not only as a learner but also a person.  I am continuing in PLP for grade nine so it wont be as much as a massive change as it would be if I were switching to main stream. Throughout the year my work has gotten better to a point where I would say I’m ready for grade nine. As well as being completely able to meet the expectations my work might even exceed expectations ever so often. Now for a second I want to stay away from the facts and go more to am I mentally ready to move on? The answer is obviously! I know I’m not always the most mature person but I can pull my self together when it counts. I know I’m ready for grade nine because of how I’ve evolved throughout the year and completed my grade eight learning journey. 

Well, like my grade eight year this post is wrapping up and its some mixed emotions. I have made many new friends this year and with those friends, memory’s. I am happy to say this year has been great and I cant wait to make more memory’s after the break.