Have you ever wondered why your brain works and why it’s so difficult to have relationships? During the past week my class spent a few hours a day learning about ourselves, and I know that may sound weird but we learned about how we think and create relationships with one another.

This year in PLP the whole grade 9 group went on a 5 day trip to loon lake, here’s a few things we did and learned while we were there.

When we first arrived we all met in the gym, after a while of getting organized we were assigned our rooms and were sent up to the dining house for dinner. At dinner we would all get assigned seats 

The first day we learned about what types of leaders we are, the types we’re modeler, Challenger, inspirer, enabler, and encourager, I was an enabler. We figured this out by answering 30 questions from a scale of 1-5, the questions would be a statement and your number would be how much you agree with that statement, 1 being that doesn’t apply to me at all and 5 would be that applies to me all the time. This lesson was our first step into learning about the uniqueness in ourselves.

The second day we learned about our social needs and triggers, we were asked to think about situations that push you away (threat)  and situations that pull you toward (reward).  We wrote down a list of about 5 things for each category, then we learned about our natural reactions to social situations. Something I found interesting in this lesson was that our social needs are like survival needs and that’s why some people get social anxiety. 

The third day we learned about our passions and the things we love, we went into partners and took turns asking each other “what do you love” repeatedly until we both had around 20 things each. It helped us learn more about our values, then we made lists of what we’re good at, then we would see if any of the things matched up. Then we sorted our lists into a table with 4 categories, the first was things that we like to do and are good at, the second was things we are good at but don’t like to do, the third was something you like but aren’t very good at, and the fourth was something you aren’t good at and don’t like.

On the fourth day we learned about emotional inteligance, we all were given 5 cards and went around the room finding people that we thought deserved the card we had, the cards would say things like “self control” or “empathy” and we would give those cards to the people we thought fit those things. It helped us learn more about ourselves and what other people see us showing.

And on the fifth and last day we learned about our own diversity and what we can and can’t control, we had a picture of 2 categories, internal dimensions and external dimensions, and we were asked to circle 3 of the words inside each catagory that we thought about a lot. The internal dimensions had things impacted by only you like your age, your abilities and the way you express yourself, while the external dimensions focused on things impacted by you and others, the things listed in external dimensions were like your relationships, your language, and your appearance.