Hello welcome to or back to my blog!
As you can tell from my title this is not a regular post this is my mPol! As a refresher you may remember that mPol means “Mid-year Presentation Of Learning.” You may also already know that PLP chooses to do these instead of parent teacher interviews, before I begin I will say the PLP mPol declaration.
“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”
I would like to start off by saying that I have grown so much as a learner in the past year. I have done so many things outside of my comfort zone, especially these presentations. I am glad that I am stepping out of these comfort zones and sometimes it can be scary but I am glad I’m doing it, jumping out of my comfort zone is actually one of the reasons why I joined PLP.
To start off I would like to say that I have recently seen an mPol presentation from a grade 11. She talked about how she created big standards, impossible standards, over time for her work. When I saw her presentation it made me face the fact that I also set really high standards for myself as well and that I am very self critical to myself when I get a grade I wasn’t striving for. I realize that it’s an unhealthy habit so for this mPol I want to talk about that and some healthy habits I want to try. I will also acknowledge some of my strengths and stretches during some of my projects.
I have done some research and it says that managing your time is really big to help with high standards and I struggle with that. I think before I try a lot of different habits I need to get better at managing my time. I ask some people how they manage their time and they say things like “I do my homework as soon as I get home.” Or “I have different routines to help with my time management.” I have tried different things to help like trying to do homework as soon as I get home or setting routines like others do. I now realize that I struggle most with distractions.
One habit I saw to help with distractions said to take regular breaks to keep and increase focusing. I think I’ll try this when I get overwhelmed with homework and that way I have a reward for not distracting myself and a break.
I also found another healthy habit I might try with future projects. I’ve done a bit of research and I have found that I should write down or keep track of “wins.” I thought it was a bit weird at first but I think I will try to see how it works and give it a trial run. I think it will end up being successful because I won’t be dwelling on mistakes but praising myself for the good things I’m doing. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be learning from my mistakes I just won’t keep reminding myself about them in an unhealthy way. One example of this happening might be a project in maker.
VIBRANT VIDEOS
This is a Maker project, the driving question was: “How can I use my video skills to tell a story?”
In this project, Vibrant Videos, we learned about shots, angles, filming, rough drafts, etc. like last year. We made some videos as well as making a “SMART” goal ladder. On a personal note this project wasn’t one of my favourites and it didn’t interest me as much as “Finding Fun with Videos for example.”
During this project I didn’t do as well as I was hoping to. At the time I was a bit upset about it but now I can recognize that everyone make mistakes. I tried really hard to get the mark I wanted but sometimes it can be difficult to express that when you are in a group for some assignments.
Looking back on the project I feel like I could have talked to a teacher about how I was feeling with the groups instead of being super critical and beating myself up. It wasn’t all bad though, some assignments felt better then others for example the goal ladder.
I got to choose what the goal would be about and we got to make a personalized goal ladder towards the end. I’m really happy with how it turned out and even though I was hard on myself for this project I’m happy I enjoyed some of it.
If you would like to read more about this project click here.
HANDLE WITH CARE
This is a Science project, the driving question was: “In what ways have human beings impacted the delicate cycles within our ecosystem and how can we lessen our impact?”
In this project we learned about ecosystems, bioaccumulation, magnification, Earths spheres, different cycles (I specifically did the carbon cycle), and more.
Personally this was one of a few of my favourite projects so far this year, but that isn’t why I chose to talk about this project. I chose to talk about this project because even though I really enjoyed the things we were learning about I still had trouble with managing my time and getting distracted. I feel because I was more interested in the project I did better then Vibrant Videos.
In the end I have accomplished so much. I know I need to create more of a growth mindset towards improvements and lowering that invisible bar. I need to decease the amount of distractions and take away the fixed mindset. I’ll try these new habits as well because I think it will help me out with lowering my standards and focus more on the process. This will be hard but I’m up for this challenge to make myself a better learner. Thank you so very much for reading cya in my next post!
