Wow, only one more year left of school! It’s a strange feeling, I feel like it’s gone by so fast, yet so slow. My lack of experiences from grade 8/9 thanks to the pandemic has certainly been a different experience. But we’re here to talk about this year not, not all of high school (at least yet…) 

This year was supposedly “back to normal”. Yet there’s not really a normal when all 4 years of high school have had drastically different schedules. It was quite the adjustment to go from 2.5hr classes to 70 minutes (although a welcome one). Within about a month of the year starting I became more overwhelmed with schoolwork then ever before. In order to overcome this challenging and high volumes of work across all my classes I had to come up with new methods. It took some trial and error but by about January I had figured out how to manage the work in 3 challenging courses (PLP, Chem, Pre Calc). I used some of the methods we had worked on in PLP over previous years, to do lists, time blocking (although this didn’t work for me), and goal setting. 

However despite these successes in January my school work kind of went down hill for the next 2 months. I felt extremely uninspired, and overall just tried to coast through school. This had the biggest effect on my PLP work. For some reason I managed to keep on top of my BCFP, and my Bio work without much trouble, but even thinking about PLP just exhausted me. I was considering dropping the program, but then our Stories of Hope Field Study came up. I had started the project off quite frankly not caring at all about anything related to it. However when we were down there, I remembered some of the reasons I liked PLP in grade 8 and 9. I came back more inspired in all of my classes, in particular PLP. I did take a while to put my footage together into my video. That’s on me but we have all discussed why that project was a bit of a FAIL on all of our ends.

One thing I did learn a lot about this year, and really helped my school was using craft. I began to realize the potential it has in many projects. I personally don’t use the linking feature as much as the teachers encouraged us, but I do love how easily it allows me to connect ideas in my notes. I even did my spring exhibition project primarily in craft, you can view it here. Or you can view one of my writing projects here.

In this last project I began to feel more inspired again. The project felt more personal to me, it made me more motivated to do my work. I think I leveraged my personal strengths in a way I hadn’t since project podcast in grade 10. Going into Grade 12 I will need to remember why this project was so much more effective and meaningful then the rest. I will use the strategies I learned this year to stay on top of all my work, and not neglect my PLP work when I get lots of work in other courses.