TPOL’s 2019

This school year is coming to a dramatic close and it’s time to reflect on how the year went for myself. It’s TPOL season people.

A TPOL is a Transitional Presentation Of Learning. For this post, I’ll be answering the question “why do you feel like you are ready to advance to the next grade level?” I’ll be going over some highlights and lowlights from the past semester and going over some of my learning traits.

For me, my third term is always my worst in terms of grades. This is probably because golf season picks up just after spring break. I get distracted from working consistently and I always fall off a little bit. It’s been hard catching up because I miss lots of school for the golf team. I noticed this happening last year as well where the last 2 months become more and more of a struggle for me. I just want it to be summer when it is clearly not looking like it. I let golf become a priority over schoolwork and then it costs me in the long run because my projects aren’t being finished the way I want them to look because I didn’t have enough time to get the look I wanted.

I think that this year I’ve been able to manage my time in the third term a little bit better. My goal from last year was to finish all homework before going to play or practice golf. Although I cannot say I’ve held true to this goal, I’ve improved slightly for sure. I’m more aware of the work that I have to do and the scale of the project or assignment at hand. So, for example, I’ll go home and do a bit of work, then go practice for an hour at like 6 pm then come back home and finish whatever work I may have. This is different from last year where I’d just go to the golf course for 5 hours after school then grind homework after that. I’m happy that I’ve been able to stick to that and I think that my grades will be better in the third term this year.

Let’s start off with some positives. I believe that my best class this year was humanities. Humanities this year was a good class for me and I really enjoyed it. I feel like my best blog posts were humanities posts and that I was able to express myself best when writing these posts. I really like having a rubric to know what to put in my posts. Nearly all of my work has been handed in on time and I feel like a lot of my best work has happened in this class. A good example of this work was the heritage minutes. I really enjoyed this project and it was fun acting in it and going along with the learning process. Give my post from that unit a read here.

In any case, I believe that a lot of my best work seems to have come from humanities in the past term. I always seem to be the most caught up out of all my classes.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a “worse” class, but in some classes I found myself struggling a little bit. Although I was able to maintain the grade I wanted, it wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be. I wasn’t focused in class and found myself handing things in late. This class was scimathics. I think that I wasn’t committed as a learner to this class and I had a bit of a closed mindset about it. I found myself not getting work done in class and then prioritizing golf over scimathics work which goes against my rule. It’s like at some points I didn’t care. When I did show effort, scimathics proved to be really easy for me. I just need to commit to this class and make sure to prioritize it with my other classes above golf.

If a visitor were to come into the PLP classroom and ask to see my best project from the third term, I would show them my World War 1 video about the battle of Vimy Ridge. I think that I put my best work into this project. It was a long unit and we had 30 classes to to all the preparations for our videos. I did all the steps from research to storyboarding then to writing a screenplay. I thought that I did a good job making revisions on the project as well, which is a large component of PLP. If you want to watch my final product, here it is.

Some of the lighting was a bit questionable, yes.

A new class this year for us was PGP. At first, I wasn’t too excited about it. For the first few months, I really wasn’t too engaged with the whole thing. I wasn’t really on board about the goal setting unit. I think that the time blocking unit helped me out more in terms of how I live my life and how I do it. It’s helped me lots of times with homework and also my school schedule. Using Things and calendars helped me for sure this year. The 7 habits also helped me out somewhat, but I think that time blocking was the most important for me. Here’s a post summarizing the course.

A couple things for me to work on and really improve my learning for next year.

For one, finding balance. I think that this idea is going to be really important for me. If I’m able to find a consistent balance between sports and golf and my schoolwork, I’ll be able to be a much more consistent learner. It’ll be much easier for me to get stuff done in time and I’ll have nothing on my mind.

Another thing for me is to complete all my revisions. Often on a final draft, I’ll get the feedback and just forget about it. Normally, the next unit carries on and I’ll just forget about it or not have all the revisions completed. Putting all my revisions into a final draft will make my blog posts much better and more completed.

Now, to answer the final question. I believe that I’m ready to advance to the next grade. For one, my work has been fairly good this year. Even if I procrastinate a little, I feel like this has been my best year in terms of grades in a long time. I surpassed my expectations from the end of grade 8 for grades. I think that I need to fix up my time management skills for next year because grade 10 is going to be more work than this year so I need to be on top of my work even more. Another reason I deserve to pass this grade level is my blog. I put a lot more work into my blog this year and I feel like I have a good explanation and reflection in each post.

It’s been a great year with lots of memories made. Grade 9 was a fairly good year for me and I can’t wait for next year.

Signing off for grade 9,

nik