Hey guys and gals!
Welcome to my final Midterm Presentation of Learning. It’s been a long and hard road but we’ve finally got here. After four years of midterm reflections, I’m here and ready to give it my all.
Looking back at my first Mpol, I noticed it never really stated any goals or aspirations I had for my learning and that sort of saddens me. I find for most of my educational career I create goals but I don’t always check back in on them to make sure I am still working to meet them. That’s why my learning goal, for my final year of high school, is to follow through on four important goals I have identified in past Mpols and add two more.
My past goals for my learning include, but are not limited to:
1. Do a better job at time blocking my work (2017, 2018, 2019)
2. Incorporate more visual and interactive items (tech) into my assignments (2018)
3. Practice good teamwork (2017 and 2018)
4. Stay focused on the “Driving Question”
I know I might be criticized for copping-out by restating these goals, but they are as important today as they were in previous years to my learning and I still need to work on them.
I want to walk through what I’ve already learnt so far this year, that relates to a few of my past goals that I have for my learning.
Opening chronologically – I am going to take us back in time, waaaay back to July and August of 2019, when our work for Term one really began.
We were asked to choose a book to read over the summer of 2019 and report out on it when we got back to school.
This is when my old nemesis, time blocking, reared its ugly head.
Full disclosure: I chose the book that was the shortest. And I found out, the hard way, that short does not mean an easier read.
I had worked on time blocking last year, after extensive “training’ on the subject. But I got a little tripped-up when I had to “time block” reading the book during my “summer of firsts” it was my first summer off from cadet camps and my first summer working full time, at a job, that paid me money. What I just want to say about my learning with this assignment was that time blocking, I discovered, is just as important during the school term as it is during your holiday time, especially if you have a book assignment based on a bit of a hard book. Time blocking is a way of life. I get that now. I really do.
Next I want to focus on my Taming of the Shrew project.I truly enjoyed the learning behind this project because I really love plays. I found that actually going to the play at Bard on the Beach helped me digest the themes and content far better than just reading the script. While this did not necessarily teach me about my learning style, it did confirm for me that I tend to understand themes and remember events better if I see them in action, like in a play.
I was actually quite proud of the work I did in my group. For those of you who may be a bit fuzzy on the details of the project, I was in a group of three that was tasked with rewriting and animating Act 4 of The Taming Of The Shrew in the time of the 1940’s.
I was especially proud of the animation I created for this assignment. I feel like I took my animation skills one step further in this assignment.
This reflects my past goal for my learning of incorporating more tech (video, animation, etc.) into my assignments.
While most of the animation projects, that both me and my classmates have done in the past, do not coordinate the movement of animated characters’ mouths to the words being spoken, in this project I worked hard to have the characters mouths move during their lines. Since it would take an inordinate amount of time to fully animate a mouth sequence on each character, I had to cut some corners and use the built in mouth animations the app provided me. That’s not to say this didn’t take some time. I spent hours editing in order to make it all work and the end result does the job intended.
Next I want to talk about my Women of History blog post. I am really proud of this post because I think I did a good job of staying focused on the theme/ driving question of “what are the expectations and perspectives of women in the given time periods (of the work we are studying)”. So I looked at this question in the time period of The Taming of the Shrew and women in WWII. I am proud of my work in this unit because I had a real “ah ha” moment when I discovered that the power struggle that exists for women in WWII was not that different from the power struggle Kate had in The Taming of the Shrew. I was able to come to this realization because I stayed focus on the driving question. That’s right, I said it, I STAYED FOCUS ON THE QUESTION. Thank you.
Now I’d like to share something I’m slightly less proud of, but not for the reasons you may think. This is, of course, our class horror movie.
This was a very interesting project and I have to say I probably learned the most, at least about human behaviour and project planning, from this project. It was a real roller coaster ride and I am still not sure exactly how I feel about it but I can say that I really had to work on my past goal of “practice good teamwork”. This project saw a lot of my classmates stressed, sometimes confused, aggressive and sometimes be out right jerks. At the beginning of the project, I was exited to work. Unfortunately as my classmates and myself got more and more stressed, I found that my enthusiasm was lacking. I would mostly say thats due to the negative environment created and so I decided to just go with it but I also decided that I would not put up with anyone being a jerk. I am not sure how successful I was at practicing good teamwork but I know that I was aware, right from the beginning, of trying to do so and while I might not have always been successful, I sure tried. I remembered this learning goal from past years.
In the end I plan to keep these goals and hopefully by my FPol I can show how I did it.