December 2019, it was an exciting and action filled month for me. My grade 8 basketball season was just underway, and PLP workloads and stress levels were rising to levels I had never seen before. The prep for our first exhibtion was taking up all of my remaining time after Basketball. Fast forward to my tenth exhibiton in June 2024 and the exhbition still came at a busy time, grad events which we’ve heard about for the past 5 years were finally happening, yet I still had an exhbition. Well every exhibition is stressful, after 5 years I feel far greater equipped to prepare, present, and adapt in our exhibition prep.
Looking back, It’s impressive how much we’ve grown since those first months of grade 8. Both from a literal sense (I was 5’1 then, now I’m 6’2), and from a figurative sense. Over the last half decade my friendgroups have changed, I switched sports, my values have evolved, yet I’ve spent this whole time in PLP. While every year the teachers manage to throw a curveball or two at us, there is a sense of familiarity I have in these classes. This familiarity has aided me in becoming a better student and learner, as well as given me a class where I have a good idea as to the expectations and workload.
Onto our last exhibition, in typical PLP fashion it was not what anyone would’ve guessed we were doing. We were doing a “comic-con style panel” on self improvement books. I read a book called: The Brave Athlete, Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion, by Leslie Patterson and Simon Marshall. The book was pretty interesting, it discussed a variety of strategies for athletes to improve their mental strenght and clutch perfomance, as well as outlining why this was important. If you want to learn more go visit their website linked here, or just read the book. While I enjoyed the book I did outline some of my critiques and issues with it in my mini book report. I was dissapointed by the lack of examples of teamsports or non endurance sports found within the text. As an athlete I can learn from examples of athletes in any sport, however it is far easier to attach useful meaning to these ideas if they are of a teamsport or ballsport. As I was writing the book report, we were also working on a final essay project, doing these side by side allowed me to implement some of the writing strategies I had learned from Mr May during the aforementioned project.
Our first major assignments of this project was the author bio. This is honestly a great assignment to show off all of the skills I’ve developed in the past 5 years, we had to format it oursleves (This might have been the most revisited skill throghout my whole time in the program), write it in an engaging and brief style (smart brevity), and bring in plenty of media and links (the PLP secret sauce). With a few minor revisions this bio was ready to go, you can check it out here.
Driving questions are one thing we’ve had in every PLP project from grade 8 to grade 12. While I’m sure I will see these in some of my classes next year, knowing how these work in to an overall project hopefully will set me ahead. Our final driving question was… “What can we learn from authors about achieving personal and professional success?” We can obviously learn how they achieved this success, we’ve all heard of the stories of the extra regimented and discilpined lifestyles these authors have built. Many of us want to build these habits, the best way to learn from these authors is if they breakdown the psychology, struggles, and triumphs they experienced.
Thank you to my teachers for the 5 years of support, I wouldn’t have come this far in my studies without you. Thank you to my parents for supporting me through highschool, even when I wouldn’t let you help me out. Thank you to my peers for all of the crazy memories we made, whether it was doing things which were absolutely, safe, responsible, and legal on twin island, or putting up with the craziness of the teachers on field studies with me. Thank you everyone!
Quinn Smilgis, signing out