Hi, I’m Erin and welcome to my blog! I am in grade 11, and a PLP student at Seycove Secondary. This is my blogpost for my mPOL.

What is an mPOL?

mPOLs are what we do in PLP instead of parent teacher interviews, they are a 7 minute presentation directed by the student and presented to our teachers and parents. MPOL stands for mid year presentation of learning. Before we start we also have to make the 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.”

The Manhattan Project

The first project we did this year was our project on The Manhattan Project. We learned about the creation, and the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For one of our final presentations of this project and our learning we had to deliver a four minute speech to the class. For me this was a challenge. I have never just done a speech. If I have presented something there has always been a PowerPoint or a poster board to go with my presentation. I have never been good at public speaking so this was a challenge and something entirely new for me. I did stutter a few times and talked a little fast but I did it. I said what I wanted to say in my speech and for my first attempt at a presentation like this I think I did well. The one thing that stuck with me for this project was my why. I couldn’t answer my own driving question. My question was simply why. I knew why, and had learnt why they dropped these bombs through a political and war pointe of view. However my question was still why, why could do this to these innocent people? This project was so impactful and powerful. It has left something on me and a question I will never forget.

The Cold War

After The Manhattan project I wanted to talk about a project we are currently doing and have just started. The Cold War project. It’s not in order of when we have done these units however I feel The Manhattan Project and our Cold War project have so far gone together. So far in the Cold War project we have talked and learned about what a “Cold” War actually is and what happened in that war. I have done some focused research and work on NATO. I found the topic of NATO rather interesting as it’s a very continuous topic. It was created back in 1949 but it is still around today. It has grown so much since when it was first created. I don’t have a whole lot to talk about on this project as we only just started but so far I think it’s been going very good. We watched a movie, “Bridges of Spies”, that explained a lot of what was going on. I think this connects to The Manhattan Project as a big part of it was the why for me. The movie showed the human feelings that were there between the lawyer and the spy. Even though this Soviet spy was not on this American Lawyers side, they still cared for one another. They were both genuinely kind humans who were stuck in the middle of this Cold War. It took me back to the thoughts I had during The Manhattan Project. So many innocent people stuck in these wars.

Macbeth

In our project about Macbeth we focused a lot on timeless themes. Timeless themes are themes and topics that we as humans will forever be able to relate to, therefore making them timeless. Some examples are themes like love, death, power and corruption. These Timeless themes are what Shakespeare and the creators of “Avatar” really focused on and wrote a lot about. For Macbeth at the winter exhibition we were given a lot of freedom on our project. We had to perform a scene from Macbeth and create our own adaptation. For my scene adaptation I decided to perform a contemporary dance. I think it was very cool that I got this much freedom to turn this project into something I love to do. I think it really helped me expand my knowledge and thinking on Macbeth. I really had to understand the emotions of the characters in this scene and think about how they were thinking and feeling, so I could turn the scene into movement.

Growths and Goals

I think some of the growths that I’ve had this year have been in public speaking. I think that The Manhattan Project and Macbeth have really helped me improve in that area. The new experience of giving a speech to an entire class, and performing dialogue in front of an audience. I think I’ve improved in that area a lot.

I think one of my main goals for the rest of this year is to continue working on my spelling and grammar. I find that I still do tend to make a lot of spelling mistakes. I think that’s something that I will just always be working on over the years. Another goal is along the lines of time ma game time skills. I am organized with a planner and I do plan my schedule out. However I find that there are some times where I could be using my time more efficiently. I have breaks in my schedule where I could and should be doing something like homework but I’ll find that I won’t and will wait till a later time to do it. So I also want to try and stay on top of that.