Another Year Another mPOL

jacksonc Other 0 Comment

Hi and welcome to my 2024 mPOL. As always I have to start with the POL 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.

Over the start of this school year we were doing a lot of stuff focused around personal productivity and happiness. The personal productivity part is something that I think is the most important for me and I learned a lot from it, what worked for me and more importantly what didn’t. This and more we did to answer the question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?” 

When doing the personal productivity we tried a lot of different strategies, many of which involved my calendar and lists. This is where I started to figure out what worked and didnt work for me. I found that when I had every single minute of my day planned out it seemed a lot more stressful and overwhelming, especially when we added the daily things check ins. I have a very busy schedule and when I just continually get notifications about the next thing it seems overwhelming and unmanageable. I find what works best for me is to have only some of the key things that aren’t part of my normal schedule on my calendar so I don’t forget them. I’m a creature of habit so I will rarely forget when I have something that I have every week. 

Last year I talked a lot about how the things I needed to work on the most were procrastinating and the amount of stuff that I was taking on. This year I found that my procrastination has gotten quite a bit better, still not perfect but better to a point that I dont think it’s holding me back. My problem this year is how much I’ve taken on. I’m the kind of person that wants to do as much as possible and I want to be as well rounded as possible but the problem is sometimes it backfires when my schedule changes and suddenly I’m triple booked three days a week. This is something that is really important to myself that I fix for next year, with the classes I’m taking being significantly harder. 

How much stuff I was taking on started really becoming obvious with Destionation Imaganition. DI is one of those things that, if you’re group isn’t all working at 100% from the start you are going to be in for a rude awakening later. My and my group, Matteo, Mika, Allie, Jack, and Jasper, started off really strong. We went through multiple different brainstorming sessions for the design of everything and how it would all play out. The problem started when I went to Seattle for the Cray Cray Yay Yay project. During the time I was away the rest of my group was supposed to have gotten a good chunk of the building of it all done. What I came back from the trip to was a big wooden outline that was for the frame. Me and my group really had to buckle down and get the work done. I ended up pulling 2 or 3 almost all nighters to work on DI as well as catching up on other school work plus work and basketball. I even ended up staying at the school until around 7-7:30 the day before the DI tournament to do as many of the finishing touches as I could. Sadly I wasn’t able to make it to the first DI tournament but luckily there was a second date that we were a lot more prepared for and even won a special award for. 

So the question is, how am I going to improve going forward? Anyone can say that they are going to improve but don’t always follow through on it, myself included, so how will I manage my schedule and school? My grade 11 year is lining up to be one of my more chaotic ones with a few grade 12 classes as well as classes I haven’t talken before. My plan for the rest of this year and going into next year is to prioritize school. That was a big part of the problem and a big part of where the procrastination has come from in the past. I was just not as motivated for school as I was the rest of the things going on in my life. Next year is going to be a big part in determining if I get into university and which one I can get in. Getting into a good university is very important to me and I’m seeing now more then ever that it’s going to take a lot of work and sacrifice to get there. I’m going to have to make some tough decisions in the upcoming months to decide what I can continue doing the same way, what I have to cut back on, and what I have to stop doing all together. 

Who am I

jacksonc Humanities 0 Comment

Who am I? This is a question that we should all keep asking ourselves and what better way to do that then with a project. 

First of all, I am not the most qualified person to be giving advice on this because the question “Who am I?” Is one that I’ve been struggling to answer for a long time. Throughout this project I did however start taking the right steps to answering this. 

A big thing that helped me in answering this was reading a book about someone inspirational, in my case the Trevor Noah Born A Crime, and analyzing it. I found it especially inspirational because he came from really harsh beginnings and still was always able to make light of a situation and make the best with what he had. The book was full of quotes that I was able to relate to, but my favourite one has to be “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most.”

 

Similarly to the book, interviewing a person that was inspirational to me helped me reflect on who I am. I decided to interview my grandpa because, growing up, he was always someone who stayed positive. Even after he developed Alzheimer’s he stayed positive and continues to tell the stories of him growing up because those are the ones that are permanently engraved in his mind. He has a lot of stories that I can relate to and use to reflect on my own life.

So when it comes down to it, who am I? This is something that I’m going to continue to work on answering everyday because who I am will always build up. To simplify it, I am the combination of past experiences, role models, lessons, and challenges that I have faced and experienced. 

How We Apologize

jacksonc Humanities 0 Comment

Hi and welcome back to my blog! We just finished up with our Winter Exhibition, and it was an eventful process. We were focusing on the art of apology and how they are kept alive through memorials. This was all to get to the final product of, as I mentioned earlier, the exhibition where guests got the chance to vote on their favourite memorial model that we built. The driving question for this project that kept us going was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today?”

At the start of this project we were separated into three different groups with three different subgroups, all at random. The three main groups were the groups that were officially apologized to by the Canadian government due to discriminatory laws from the past. These groups were the Japanese Canadians, the Chinese Canadians, and the Sikh Canadians. I was put into one of the three the Japanese Canadian groups with Silas, Jasper, and Callum. Once grouped, the research began. Between individual research and class lessons from Mr. Hughes, I had pages of useful notes that helped me throughout the project. If you want to skim through them you can here. 

Armed with more notes and new knowledge that I knew what to do with, we began work on our memorial model. Our group decided to build a fishing boat that had the words Property of Japanese Canadians with the word Japanese crossed out. This was to represent how Canada stole all the Japanese Canadians possessions and sent them to internment camps. At our table we also had an interactive slideshow, a poster with a timeline, an informational slideshow playing in the background, and a trivia game where people could win prizes. Overall, I think our station turned out very well, with us also doing very well in the voting. 

So, how can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today? Well as we learned there are many ways to keep a memory alive. Weather it’s through storytelling or a memorial, as long as people are seeing and/or hearing about it often they are bound to think about it. Part of the memorial was determining where it would be placed, which is a vital part because the more people that just happen to pass it in their everyday life, the more people that might stop and read about it and think about it. 

Canadian Contributions

jacksonc Humanities 0 Comment

Hi and welcome back to another blog post! The last project that I just finished working on was called Saving Juno Beach. It was a project about World War 2, specifically Canada’s contributions, with the end product being as essay. 

After learning about WW2 and different ways that Canada contributed, the next step to the final product was the brainstorming/starting the research.  This is the step where we wrote down all the information that we found relevent to the topic of Canada’s involvement in WW2 and started sorting it out as well as starting to look into more details. I organized mine so that there were the 3 clear topics for my body paragraphs with different subsections that have even more information coming off them. I found that this was the best way of doing it because it made it really easy once I actually started the body paragraphs since I could just reword it and I more or less had them.

Once my final essay was done, I got feedback and was able to make revisions. My feedback didn’t have any major issues, just minor things that were definitely easy fixes. Once I made those changes I had my completed essay, which you can view here. 

If I were to do this project again, there are a few things that I would have done differently. The main thing would have been to have finished my first essay draft sooner so that I would have been able to get more feedback. Like I mentioned earlier, the feedback was nothing major but I think a second set of eyes would have caught any more mistakes and other things that needed to be changed. 

Dulce et Decorum Est

jacksonc Other 0 Comment

Welcome back to my blog! It’s that time of the year again for an exhibition. This was our final one of the year. The driving question for the project was based around contrasting narratives, me and my group were specifically focused on the contrasting narrative of the traditional women compared to the WW1 and post WW1 women. For it I built a replica of a WW1 hospital, the place where women could work on the frontlines for the first time. This and more all went into the final and main thing, the exhibition.

The main part of this all was building of the replica hospital. This was a process that took multiple class times plus the better part of a night to complete and get to a point where it looks good and I was happy with it. The reason I built the hospital for the exhibition was, like I said earlier, it was the first chance women had to work on the frontlines. The traditional women, the pre WW1 women, was expected to be this stay at home mom that only worked as a teacher or a nurse until married. WW1 was the big tipping point where, since the men were away at war, the women got the chance to step up and prove themselves. They got the chance to vote for the first time, if their husbands and sons were at war, they started working in jobs like in factories that were previously male dominated, and they got their chance to work on the frontline for the first time in the hospitals. This snowballed and continued to grow even after the war ended. 

Finally, the day of the exhibition arrived, and I was excited to present my project to a group of people. The exhibition was held in the library, which all of grade 9 had to transform into our own WW1 museum, and each student had their own table to display their work. I set up my cardboard replica of the WW1 hospital, along with the card explaining it. As people began to arrive, I explained my project to them giving similar points to what I saying earlier. 

Overall, the PLP end of year exhibition was a success, and I was proud to showcase my project alongside the rest of PLP. The planner I had created for the cardboard replica of a WW1 hospital was an essential tool in the building process, helping me stay organized and efficient. Through the process of constructing the replica, I developed an appreciation for the WW1 women and what they went through. And finally, presenting my work to people and sharing what I learned was a very rewarding experience that’s always a highlight of the exhibitions.

My 2023 tPOL

jacksonc Other 0 Comment

Hi, and welcome to my 2023 tPOL. Before I begin I have to, as always, make the POL 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.

The first thing that I want to bring up as example of why I’m ready to move on to the next grade is my learning plan. Within my learning plan there are a few things that I would want to further change since my mPOL. During my mPOL I focused mainly on wanting to set a higher goal for myself and aim for an extending instead of an accomplished. While this is still a change I want to keep, there are other aspects I would also change if I were to do it again. The first thing would be to also change my goal for careers to an extending instead of an accomplished. With the level of work that I can produce I feel that I need to aim higher with my goals so I can set an expectation for myself of what I should be doing. Even though I have been doing a pretty good job of meeting my goals, I think that I could be a lot better at meeting them, and meeting them on time, if I stuck to the habits that I had wanted to set for myself. This semester especially, I have been having trouble sticking to the habit I wanted to set of having a time where I would just get work done. I have a busy schedule that changes a lot which made it very hard to find a time that worked every day, making it hard to get in the rhythm of it. Next year, I want to try a lot harder at making this work so that I can do a better job of meeting my goals. 

If I could’ve gone back there are a few things that I would’ve changed with the work that I did this semester, the main one being, and I know that I keep repeating this time and time again, not putting my work off to the last minute. I repeat this all the time but I’ve noticed that this last semester, which has been a lot busier for me then normal, I’ve been pushing work more and more. A good example of this, and how I’m working on it, was the Frankenstuffies project. For some parts of this project that I found less important I would put off till the last second, or even just do it late, but for the parts that I knew were important and hard I was able to sit down and put in the work. When we had to film the trailer and I committed to doing stop motion I knew it was going to be a challenge and that it was going to take a lot prof time. Knowing this, plus the fact that I genuinely enjoyed doing the stop motion, I used all my class time to the best of my ability as well as making time to do it at home. This really reminded me that when I enjoy something and think it’s important I will really focus in and get an end project I’m happy with and I think that if I can find more ways to incorporate things that I enjoy in my work it’ll deter me from putting it off.

Even though there have been many things with my work that I’d I wish I had done different or changed, there have also been positives in my work. I think that taking and using feedback is one of my strong suits. I believe that I demonstrated this in all my projects this year, but one of the outstanding ones was the Case For A Nation project. With all three of the keystones I got feedback while working on it, after I was done it, or both. All the feedback that I got from peers and teachers I was really able to apply and make changes. For example our first draft of the game was very plain, didn’t have enough information, and was overall lacking in various areas. After a few rounds of feedback from a few different people, I was able to make the changes that it needed to be a good project that I was fairly proud of. This project was also good for helping me with my collaboration skills. This was a partnered project and my one problem when I’m in a group is that I tend to take control. I think that I did a good job working with my partner, Jessie, and making sure we both had an equal say.

So why do I think I am ready to advance to the next grade level. Well, I believe that I have shown growth in most areas, and if not growth then an understanding of what I could’ve done differently. I believe that I can consistently produce an extending level of work, even if I’m putting off my work. There are many examples that show this, but these examples are some of the best ones. I look forward to continuing my growth as a learner over the next few years. Thanks for reading my tPOL and listening to why I’m ready to move onto the next grade. 

Just Another mPOL

jacksonc Other 0 Comment

It’s that time of year again where I do a mPOL. As always, I must start with making the POL 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.

At the end of last year, I did my tPOL. In it I talked a little about how one of my biggest problems is procrastination, which still is still the case but for a different reason. Last year my problem was more with how I managed my time poorly while this year is more with the shear amount of things that I have taken on. I am the kind of person that joins many many things and fully commits to them, in other words I bite off more then I can chew. I have always had a problem with this but I feel that it has become more apparent this year, at least in my eyes. Because of how much stuff I have going on, it’s less of a question of if I can manage my time, it’s more a question of if I have the time at all. This leads me to procrastinating things that I don’t find as important so I can try and give the more important things my time. 

Me biting off more then I can chew does have some benefits, for example the work that I hand in. I think a good example of this was the asexual reproduction comic that we made in science. In this we were tasked to make 5 different comics on the different ways of asexual reproduction. At the start of this, I planned out to make each comic with detailed drawings, an interesting story line, and more. The problem was that this was a lot for me to do, especially with other things that were going on, inside and outside of school. So I ended up putting it aside and doing other things that I thought were more important. When I finally came back to it, it was late to hand in and I didn’t have a lot done, so I had to do easier versions of what I originally planned. This is something that I found helps my work because when I try and go big on a project and end up having to dumb it down, it still ends up better then if I had started small and built up on it. 

 

 

Another thing that I want to work on this year is my learning habits/systems. In my learning plan (which I’ll talk more about later). In my learning plan I said that I wanted to get into the habit/system of doing my homework in shifts (20-30 minutes of work with no distractions then a 5-10 minute break with rewards for myself when I get things done). I find that this strategy really works for me and helps me get into the right mindset to get work done, the only problem being finding enough time at once to sit down and get stuff done. I find that I only normally have less then 1 hour at a time, unless it’s a bit later at night, to get the work done. This makes it harder to stick with this habit/system so I have to work extra hard this year to be able to stick with it. This may prove to be a challenge but I think it will pay off in the end. 

One thing that I think I have been doing well with this year is FAILing then learning from those FAILs. As you may know, fail stands for first attempt in learning, and I think one of my strengths has always been my ability to learn from my mistakes and improve on them. A good example of this was the Power of Geography ebook. This was something that I FAILed in a lot, and was still able to take criticism and learn from my mistakes to make it something that I am proud of. In my first draft or two, my ebook looked very messy, had too much writing compared to the photos I had, and even the photos themselves were poorly edited, if even. Through the feedback I got, and even my own personal opinions, I was able to pinpoint specific things that needed work and fix them. I was able to cut the text down to a manageable amount, I was able to lay everything out in a more visually appealing way, and the thing I spent the most time on, I was able to edit all the photos to something that I was at least somewhat proud of.

Looking back, there is always stuff that I’d want to change within my projects and work that I hand in, and an amazing example of that was with my first film documentary. This was a project that I more or less had to do most of the work last minute on it, due to the interview portion. I ended up sending out emails to around 3 or 4 different people and/or groups. The ones that responded mainly said that they couldn’t. This lead me to only really being able to plan out my video and get bits and pieces of the B-roll. Thankfully on pretty much the last day possible I asked Mr. Hughes for an interview and he was able able to do so. Once I was done with the interview, I still had to get more clips of B-roll, now that I knew what specifically I needed. I was able to get some revisions the next day for my documentary, but there is still a few things that I would want to change. My biggest thing looking back that really needed to be changed was the part where I actually talked about avatar. I think that it was too sudden and too short to make a lot of sense. I think I could have given it more of an introduction at the start of my documentary to give it more context and not make it seem so out of place. I do think that if i was to go back to it now and edit more and revise more, I could make it a lot better. 

The final thing that I’m going to talk about is my learning plan and what I could maybe even change. I thing that this year, for the most part, I have done a good job at keeping to the goals that I set for myself on my learning plan and getting the proficiencies that I wanted. There are always a few exceptions were I found that I haven’t done my best work or met the goals I set for myself, but I thing that for each subject overall I have been keeping on track. Something that I think would be a good thing for me to change would be to change my goal to an extending in humanities. Since humanities will be my only PLP class next semester, I think that I should set my goals a bit higher in it. Humanities it also not my best subject so I think that setting a higher goal might really help me try and understand it better. 

In the end, I think that this has been a fairly successful semester, but still with room to improve. 

What’s Your Story?

jacksonc Maker 0 Comment

Hi, and welcome back to another blog! This is my first one for maker this year and it was on a really fun unit, film and goal setting! In this project we were given a book to help us with our goal setting called “What do you really want?” We also made a series of videos to help teach us the different aspects of film. In this post I will include the three different videos that I made, as well as various activities from my goal tracker, like my goal ladder. This was all so we could answer our driving question, “How can I use my video skills to tell a story?” 

Goal tracker

Our goal trackers were more or less a journal of sorts that we would do our activities in. I think that the two most important things that we did in our goal trackers were our goal ladders and talking about SMART goals. A SMART goal stands for specific, measurable, actionable, relatable, and timed. This is important because a SMART goal is more or less the essence of what every goal should be to help you to achieve it. The other thing that was major was the goal ladder. This is something that I will talk more about later. 

Videos

For each video, there was a specific aspect of film that we were really trying to incorporate. The first video was about us learning out main tool, Clips, and it was also about what inspires me. This was probably the easiest of the videos, only because we could just use videos we already had. I think I did a good job at getting all the necessary information across but my story aspect of it could have been a lot better. 

Check out the video on Cam’s YouTube channel here

The second video that we did was our silent film. The main focus for us was the shots and angles that we used. To make this video, me and my group, Cam and Makenzie, took a story about someone achieving their goals from the book, and put it into an Old-Timey style with all the angles we had learned. We decided on doing a story about a kid and karate, that I think turned out very well. The one thing that I think we could’ve done better would have been to make certain parts, like the train montage, a bit longer and showcase more of the angles that we needed. 

The final maker video that we made was about how to set goals. It was also about us using all of our skills that we’ve worked on throughout the project to showcase a story about, you guessed it, goal setting. In this video me and my group, Tom and Evangeline, took a story about one of us achieving a goal and keyed it out onto a storyboard. We then spent the next day or so filming and editing until we had a product that was ready to be presented. To end this all off, our class had a mini viewing party where we watched all the group’s videos. The main thing that I think we could have done better with the video would have been to have our goal ladder clearer and more of a main part. 

Goal ladder

My goal ladder something that I did within my goal tracker. In my goal ladder, I chose a SMART goal from my goal tracker and really broke it down. I had to lay it out in 10 different steps with dates on when I wanted to get each step done. The goal that I decided to do was to build a home gym in my garage. This goal is fairly short term, since I could get it done in about a month or two. The only problem that I’ve ran into with my goal so far, is that I haven’t had enough time to start it properly. I’ve done the first 3 steps, but not thorough enough. 

In the end, I think that I did a good job of using my videos to tell a story. I learned about how different angles can really help get different things across, like using an angle to make a scene more dramatic. I also learned about, and was able to make, storyboards. A storyboard is an amazing way of planning out your story to make it easier to know what you’re doing, instead of just going in blind. My best example was the final we did. In it, I was able to use all of our strategies to make a video with a clear story. 

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