For those of you that aren’t in PLP, there was a new course added to our timetables which would be after school from 3:15 to 4:30. This course was called the “Personal Growth Plan” in this course, we would analyze each-others learning, personality traits, and figure out habits to drop and habits to pick up to help up become the best person (and learner) we could be.
We were first introduced to this incredible book titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens”. It had multiple sections that really opened up my eyes to myself and what kind of person I am, probably the main takeaway I had from this book was “looking at the man in the mirror”. Reflect on yourself, Take a look at who you are, and then make that change! Just like the Michael Jackson song!
In these after school sessions, we would take part in exercises held by the teachers that would help us pick up new habits to help us learn better and to become better people overall.
One of the main things we have been working on in PGP this year is time blocking. With time blocking, you are able to easily organize your day to help you be as productive as possible and to help your day be lot less stressful. Personally for me, I have found time blocking to be very effective, I have time blocked every school day on my phone and it has helped me a tremendous amount.
One of the things that I know now that I really wish I new before I took this course was how to look at yourself in the mirror and how to analyze your everyday habits to figure out if you should keep them or not, one example of this was when I would first walk into school I would not really talk to anyone, I would be quite antisocial and it would end up putting me in a bad mood most of the time. When I took a look at what was happening I realized that if I put in a little more effort in the mornings to get conversations flowing, it would really help me be a better person throughout the day.
Just recently we were given our very last assignment to wrap up our school year and a whole year of taking the PGP course. For our last assignment we were tasked with creating an artifact that would show our classmates and teachers the main thing we learned from our PGP course. This artifact could be virtually anything. A painting, podcast, musical piece, diary, pretty much anything you could think of.
Since I am quite experienced in filmmaking and editing, I thought my best course of action would be to create a video. In my video, it would be set up as a “Day in the life” video that would show me before I read the book, and after I read the book. In my video, I focus mostly on organization. In the beginning of the video, I get up late, am late to school, and am generally unorganized but after I read the book and had guidance from my teachers, specifically time blocking, you can see that I do much better and am more organized and productive throughout the day. If you are interested in my video you can watch it below.