It’s time for tPols! The main reason I’m excited is because summer is coming soon. Just because summer is in a week doesn’t mean that school isn’t on right now, so I need to do this presentation. The topics I am going to focus on 3 main areas. Goals and self-assessing, my at school work, and balance. Just to be clear the balance part isn’t like Karate.

 

Driving Question

“How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?”

I’m going to take a different approach to this driving question than most of my classmates are. I’m going to be showing evidence for ways that I’m not ready for grade 10.

 

Goals and self-assessing

The whole idea of this area of my learning, is being more self sufficient. The first part of this idea is setting goals for yourself. This is something that I have not done enough of recently. It leaves my work scattered and unorganized. The best example I can think of is my project about Poland. The final product was a video about nationalism in the country you were doing. My final product came together like a puzzle without a photo on it. In the end it worked out but it wasn’t fun. 

Self assessing is something that goes hand in hand with this. Goal setting is for the start of the project, and self assessing is for throughout the project. Building upon my Poland project, having points I could self assess would have at least given the puzzle a vague photo.

By goal setting and self assessing could use a lot of work, and it’s something that I am looking forward to improving next year.

 

Work at school

Trying to take advantage of the time I have in class with teachers is something I don’t do enough. The time at school is useful because it gives me a distinctive period of time to work on one thing, but the most important part is having teachers there. The access to teachers is the main reason we are in school and not just at home. 

The work I do doesn’t really change at home or school, which is a bad thing. The are obviously certain projects, or parts of projects, that I should just put headphones on and work, but not all. Other projects would be much better if I received more input from teachers.

The other part of having time to work on projects at school is the actual time. The most recent project I did, the WW1 comic, was one of my best projects, but it took a lot of time. I don’t even know how much I worked on it, but it would have been much smoother if I had put more work into it at school. It would have relieved stress, and I would have produced a better product. 

Balance

The only thing I even need to say is my comic. I mentioned before how it took a lot of work, most of it was at home. This was horrible for managing working on it, and doing other things in my free time. The closer it came to the due date, the more stress and time it took up. 

Another good example was my project on was the winter exhibition. The final project for it was a giant Rube Goldberg Machine, and it was something we were working on in class. It eventually became something that I had to work on and think about at home. Like the comic, this was a problem with balancing my free time or other projects with the winter exhibition project.

There is another good example of how balancing my work at school and time at home can be better. During DI, in the beginning at least, we were doing all the work in school which was really nice but it eventually lead to the problem of not having the amount of work needed for the competitions. This meant that I needed to work on it a lot at home the week before the competition.

Conclusion

I have definitely improved in areas like preparation outside of school, or accepting feedback and improving upon it, but I wanted to look at the driving question a different way.

Now this is going to be an interesting way of looking at the driving question. Now of course there are PLP Success Behaviours that I have improved in and has prepared me for grade 10, but that’s not the most important part to me. The success behaviours that showed were I was really bad have helped me prepare for grade 10 more. They haven’t thought me new things, but they have shown me what I need to improve on and build upon in grade 10. That’s what has prepared me, not being prepared and showing me what I need to do better.