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.

It’s that tPOL time of year again! I think I’ve changed a lot over the past semester, and I’ve made some discoveries about myself as a learner.

Last semester, for my mPOL, I talked a lot about how I had improved from grade 8 by doing most of my work in class and being able to keep from stressing about it and letting it impact my life outside of school. Now, looking back on the whole year, I can confidently tell you that the second semester did not work out as well as the first.

At the start of this semester, I went to Mexico for a gymnastics competition. I was only gone from school for two days but it impacted two entire projects. I missed the launch of Frankenstuffies, and I was already behind. We were expected to almost be done our stuffy, but I barely knew what the assignment was. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because I would’ve had lots of extra time to catch up. Instead, I let it get to my head.

This semester, I discovered that I cannot let myself fall behind, because if I do, I let it snowball and suddenly I’m a whole project behind. For Frankenstuffies and Building a Nation, I was constantly a step or two behind.

You might be asking, “what do you mean by letting your work snowball”? Well, what happens is I get all stressed over it even though I’m barely behind, and because I’m stressed, I start procrastinating getting my work done, and suddenly two days behind turns into two weeks behind.

How did I solve this problem? Well, by the time we got to the end of Building a Nation, I was only a few days behind. So when the weekend between it and the next project, I got down to business. I finished everything and went into Dulce Et Decorum Est with a fresh mindset, ready to enjoy the project like I did with other projects in the first semester.

How can I prevent this happening in the future? I think it’s important for me to fix my mindset. I need to stop having this idea that doing my work at home is harder, or slower, or impossible. I need to be able to take it home and have it be just as good as at school. That way, if I miss a day for whatever reason, I don’t get so completely, helplessly behind.

That was a bit of a downer, but now that I know this about myself, we can look to a future where I’m on top of my work all the time. We can also look at my accomplishments from this year.

First off, I was really proud of my book from the Power of Geography project for humanities last semester. I put a lot of thought into it and also spent some time making it look good, and I really think it turned out well. I think it was one of the best things I worked on this year. I also thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and I was actually invested on how it went, which included putting some real thought into it. Here are some of my favourite pages from it:

I’m also really happy with all the photos I put into it.

Something else that I’m really proud of that’s more recent was my final product in our project called Building a Nation. It was a board game representing Nationalism and the history of the Confederation of Canada. I found the project pretty interesting and I enjoyed making a board game. This is what the finished product of our board game looked like:

Finally, we had our World War I project, which we put on show for the exhibition. For this, I painted a mural to represent poetry created in WWI. I mostly wanted to do a painting to step out of my comfort zone, as I’m not a super artistic person and don’t usually do things like paint. I’m happy with how my painting turned out, even though it definitely could’ve been better if I had more experience painting. But I think I ended up getting what I wanted, which was trying something new for a project. Here’s what my piece looked like:

That’s a wrap of my 2023 tPOL! Thank you for coming/reading my post!