Goodbye Grade 9.

Tpolating into summer baby!

I’m feeling rushed going into writing this, because I’m exhausted from the last week. Trying out for a high level climbing team, last day of training with my competition team, and a long shift on Saturday, not to mention the Spring Exhibition last week – I’m just done now. 

Well enough with excuses, I have to get some writing done. 

Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?

I find it so hard to reflect on grade 9 without thinking of myself as a different person because of how different I am, how different I feel and how different i think. 

How have I changed for the better

Despite the amount of words I amount use to explain this compared to how I have changed for the worse. I feel that a lot more went into How do I change for the better.

Since the start of the second term I’ve made it my goal to try as hard as long as I see a good reason to. I go into more detail of the negatives of this. But their there are also many positives.

In more quantifiable examples I have definitely seen great improvement in my climbing since I made this goal. Trying hard can be seen as putting time into something or simply putting more effort into something. Either way there’s good reason to try hard. 

For one you’ll be proud of your work after the fact, proud of how hard you worked, and secondly you will have done something. 

If I am trying hard, I am very confident that I will finish, no matter what I set out to do. 

Summed up – mental strength to achieve what I set out to do definitely improved this year.

And even though my example below is not referring to school, I am applying this new strength at school on a daily basis.

How have I changed for the worse

I have adopted the idea that everything that I do HAS to have purpose behind it. One quote that stuck with me that music is only as good as the purpose behind it. Maybe laziness made me use this quote for whenever it suites me, but I started to think that work that I don’t think has purpose behind is useless. I only wanted to put effort into projects which I either enjoyed or would learn from. If work didn’t meet one of these criteria it was useless. My problem is that I might sometimes miss the reason and the purpose behind the project as I only take it by its face value.

The key problem with this ideology is that I have very biased judgement. I could easily use this excuse to try and get away from doing any work. If there is some thing which I wouldn’t want to do it would show in my work. My engagement was off and just having this mindset was holding me back as a learner.

Summed up.

                   Positives – Mental strength to achieve what I set out to do

                   Negatives – Not setting out to do much.

Clear Communication

Throughout grade 9, the most important thing that I’ve learned is how to express my thoughts and Ideas through different mediums.

I have never been good at communicating clearly with others. Turning my thoughts into reality was a process I didn’t work on. Thanks to Engineering 9, I have definetly improved my communication skills.

In engineering especially, since every project was a two person project, I had to learn how to communicate my Ideas to a partner. 

During the last project, I was with Dylan. Despite us being great friends, I found it really hard to work with him. Dylan took really long to finish his draft, and I had been following others’ lead for the first two projects, so I didn’t quite know how to start without somebody who knows what they’re doing telling me how.

Desires for next year

For next year, I want to manage to stay on task for the entirety of my projects, and to hand more things in on time. At some point someone told me that I can’t lose marks for handing assignments in late so I used that as an excuse to not do work. but thats not entirely true because teachers can decide not to grade assignments if they are handed in too late. 

Handing in my work on time has its benefits too. My dad always says that the hand in my work on time so that I don’t have a nagging feeling that I’m not done. But when I have homework to do, I don’t really care. I’m just focusing on what I’m doing anyways. 

Thank you for reading my Tpol!