Hi everybody, it’s that time fo the year again. Yes, you guessed it, tPOLs! Now this time I’m going to do things a little different. Normally I like to pick out 5 or so projects and bring up the small good elements and the small bad elements. However for this year it doesn’t make sense to do that when I’ve grown in so many different ways. Although I’ll painting talking about positives, negatives, and goals, it won’t be written nor formatted the same way.

Now when I look back at this year I see a lot of failures, of course as humans we like to see everything wrong with what we’ve created. But more specifically what I mean by 

failures is times where I made a major improvement from draft to draft and learned something. A great example of this I think is my DI performances from Regionals to Provincials. When my DI group first started none of us really did that much. We mostly thought something along the lines of, “well we’re improv so we don’t have to do anything until the day of.” While this is somewhat true in the fact that we don’t have to build anything or memorize lines, what we realized after regionals is that you really have to work hard to be good at improv. You can’t just wing it even though that’s what everyone assumes. Between the two tournaments we started taking everything a lot more seriously and we came out with a second place victory. While I’m frustrated with my past self for not trying as hard from the get go, I learned my lesson and will now always remember to put 100% effort in from the start. Another good example of this is the Student blogging challenge. Although I never made drafts or did critique on these they really helped me open my mind to blogging. Before I was never a big fan of writing my blog posts and I would just write what I did for each unit and what I learned separately. After doing this project I was much more open to the idea of blogging not just school things. I wrote a post about my vacation and even one a board game convention I attended. This project, although small and not very important, was super cool for me and I now enjoy blogging a lot more. This is my vacation video I made just for fun. ⬇️

One thing that was a hit and miss for me this year was PGP. Although a lot of it turned out to be really useful and I can’t imagine not using anymore, there was also some work that I didn’t put 100% effort into and I felt I didn’t need. The productivity part of PGP was really the best for me. I love to keep things organized and lay things out so time blocking and using Things was a life changer. The main thing that wasn’t a huge success for me was the What Do You Really Want novel. When reading it I skimmed a little and I wasn’t totally into it. To be honest I’ve never been very into goal setting. Normally I just have dreams and if I achieve them good for me. Or if I do have a set goal I kind if follow the goal ladder but I do everything mentally in my head. I completed all the forms and I did work pretty hard on them but I wasn’t fully engaged in them. I think I just ran into a subject I wasn’t that excited about and so I lacked a bit of motivation while completing the forms. My PLP Time Machine. ⬇️

Speaking of lacking motivation, since around Spring Break I’ve found myself in a bit of a funk. Now what I’m about to say sounds a little narcissistic, but it was only a funk by my standards. I still finished all my work, produced good quality projects, and was a solid group member. However, I fell behind and was handing work in late, I wasn’t passionate about what we were learning, I wasn’t that happy with what I was making until the final product, and overall I just kind of lost interest in school. By the end of the year this escalated into a lot of stress, which I did eventually manage to get through. One thing I will say is this is a big learning experience for me. I went through lacking motivation for the first time, and juggling tons of things, and just feeling like there was too much to do in too little time. But I got through it. In my future I will for sure go through the same thing and now I’ve done it for the first time I know its ok and its human. My biggest problem with it this time was still setting my expectations too high. I was expecting myself to be at a standard that was unreachable with the amount of things I was doing. As a result of this I had some very stressful and crazy weeks, but I think I’m coming out of it now. This summer I have a French online course and a planning 10 online course to work on so hopefully if I am disciplined enough to work on that throughout  the summer I can bring that attitude to grade 10. I’m through the worst of it and I’ve come out of it as a stronger and wiser person. I am also very happy with my blue sky project as I feel like that has got me back into my groove. I really love making something I’m passionate about and I’m very excited for my donut carrier to make history.

So as you can tell this tPOL is a lot more negative than a lot fo my other blogs and I think I’m just being really hard on myself right now because that’s the headspace I’m in. But if I think about it looking back over the year I made some really cool things, I led a lot of groups well, and I painted good grades. Some projects I’m particularly proud of are my chemical stories project, my workplace safety project, my live event video, and just all my video making in general. Making videos is something I love to do and I think I really showed my talents this year. Now looking forward and how I will transition into next year is simple. Get my enthusiasm back. I dropped a few of my outside of school activities and set myself up in a way to make next year very enjoyable. By taking French online it’s give me open blocks to do more electives, non-homework classes, I will be doing podcasts, I assume, which is a brand new thing I’m excited to explore, and I’ll get the chance to be in classes with a few more of my outside of PLP friends. As long as I can keep myself mentally happy I think I can be excited to learn again and feel more engaged. I’m very excited for summer but grade 10 too. Overall I think my grade 9 year was mostly strong and I made some really cool things, but lets hope I can make grade 10 even better!