Bonjour tout le monde, it seems as though another year of PLP has flown by and it is time for yet another tPOL. As with most PLP work there is a driving question that I must answer in this post, and that question is: Why do you feel like you are ready to advance to the next grade level? And what better way to answer that question then to first reflect on the goals I had set for myself earlier in the year at the mPOLs. Now, just by reading my mPOL post it should be extremely obvious what I’m going to be talking about but I’ll give you the basic run down anyways. Earlier in the year I was struggling with doing more thinking about what to do then actually doing so my goal for the rest of the year was to use different strategies to understand and solve a problem so I could stop thinking about it and just do it. This is still a problem that I deal with a lot but I believe that I’m getting better at that as well as other areas of school as well. So with that, why don’t just get right into the projects.
First, I’d like to talk about Maker or the more recent project that we did in Maker: Witness to History. The reason for that is because it directly connects with what I was talking about for my mPOLs and it’s always nice to start off on a high note. My work in this project was the definition of thinking on your feet, although I had the main ideas for this project planned out from the get go the smaller details that really made this project special came when I was actually making it. If you don’t know, this project surrounded the creation of a video that focused of the Covid-19 pandemic’s affect on our communities. As I’ve said before, my problem a lot of the time is that I get stuck in my own head and can never come up wit one idea. But in this particular project I decided enough was enough and I would just start editing the video with my rough script and my minimal ideas of what I wanted it to look like. I actually found that by being able to just try out different ideas whenever I came up with them to see if they work I was able to keep my head clear and just focus on the editing itself.
Next up is Science with the Metaphor Machines project that we did right before spring break. But instead of talking about my work ethic like I did in the last one I’d like to look more towards teamwork and how I have improved on that front significantly. As you may remember from reading my post about the Winter Exhibition I had a lot of trouble working with my team and managing everyone and everything. But I’ve been working on my teamwork and I think that besides DI, the Metaphor Machines project was a a pretty great example of my growth as a teammate. The end result was that I ended up almost being the manager of the team, I would figure out what needed to be done and assign people to do it, as well as working with my team in general to come up with ideas. But it didn’t start out that way, actually quite the opposite. None of us were really talking to each other and our ideas were never that good. It wasn’t until the proper group work started with the actual taking of the machine that we started feeling like a team. I ended up taking the leadership role and by working together with my teammates we did a pretty good job in the end.
But not everything can be rainbows and sunshine so next I’d like to talk about may be not my best work but I still need to reflect on it. The project I’m going to be talking about is Let’s Get Riel from Humanities. Like I said before, this may not be my best work but it’s what I learned from it that really matters and what I’ve been working on in later projects because of this one. As I’ve said before I’m not the best at working with others, especially in small groups, and this project was no different. My partner and I did not communicate unless we had to and it lead to our final product to be an interesting mishmash of ideas for our final product and is one thing I still need to work on. Sadly, it’s been hard to do that with quarantine but I’m still working on it whenever I can like in our Bluesky project when we’re brainstorming ideas. The next thing that I learned a bit about and what I needed to improve on was the way I came up with ideas. Before this project I was still doing the thinking instead of acting thing and it ended up leaving us with those jumbled messes of ideas. So I’ve been trying to get my ideas down and try them out instead of going over them in my head forever. And after the Witness to History project I was able to figure out exactly how I was going to do that.
For the final subject we have the Like Terms Project for math. The reason I chose an older project is because it goes back to what I talk about in my mPOLs and how I directly used my reflection there to help me with this project. This specifically is in reference to my talk about the Correlation vs. Causation Project and how I jumbled the presentation and how I wanted to present things. Because of that reflection I was able to come up with the idea to put notes down for what to talk about instead of a whole speech I had already prepared and ended up building off of that for our presentation about Like Terms. For our presentation we had written a short one or two line phrase that we based what we talk about on so the structure of our presentation was still there but if we went a bit of script it still worked and the presentation stayed on track.
So to answer the question: Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level? It’s all of the reason I’ve just showed, I’ve been able to use previous project to reflect on and make choices about the next one that will help me in the long run. But that doesn’t mean I’m perfect, I still have short comings and forget things that could help me from other projects. However, I think the main reason I’m able to move to the next grade is because of the ability I’ve picked up to know when I’ve messes up and to build off of that than to just think well I did my best and move on.