Category: POL

MPOL 2023

quinnLeave a comment

Wow the school year is halfway done, I’m in disbelief. I feel like we just started the first semester. Since we are halfway done our semester we have a classic PLP event, the MPOL (Mid Year Presentation of Learning). Since this is my seventh or eighth POL (presentation of learning), Im not going to explain it, but you can go read one of my previous posts where I explain it in depth here.

Intro: Why are we so destructive. From the time we can walk, we our knocking toys down, and p over. Throughout history people have spent huge amounts of resources in order to destroy each other’s villages, towns, and cities. As our societies evolved so did our ability to destroy. Fire became gunpowder, then dynamite, then firebombs. Finally we came up with the ultimate destructive power, the atomic bomb. While it destroyed ended the lives of tens of thousands of people, and flattened cities, why should we care? Intro Alt: Destruction, it created the world we live in today. Rich forests, cut down to build our towns and cities. Lush meadows plowed to create farmland to feed us. Wild rivers, dammed to power and irrigate our cities. Every amenity we take for granted today required something to be destroyed to make it. But at what point does this destruction become to much. I think we can all agree we need to cut some forests down to build our houses, or convert some of our coast into ports and industrial zones. But how about when we have to destroy these same amenities of others, even cause them suffering. How about when it requires killing them. How about 150,000. This was the price we paid to end the Second World War. The destruction of two entire cities, full of innocent people. There were children Body: Evidence 1: The explosions of the atomic bomb were not the only important part. The invention and construction of these bombs were incredibly taxing economically, environmentally, and socially. The extraction of uranium is incredibly destructive both to our health and the environment. Uranium is both radioactive as well as chemically toxic. Mining it often leads to contaminated water sources which can ruin ecosystems as well as our health. So why do we use such a powerful resource, which can take such a toll on the environment to extract, just to destroy each other? Evidence 2: There is no better example of our destructive capabilities as humans then the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings are incredibly significant in our history. They killed well over 100,000 people, Brought and end to WWII, and changed the future of warfare. These bombings were more complicated then being good or bad. Did the positives outweigh the Negatives? What even are the positives and negatives? These are all questions we must ask ourselves when were considering the implications of Nuclear Weapons in warfare. Evidence 3: Nuclear Weapons undoubtedly changed warfare forever. In the last 75 years there has not been a single large scale conflict between major powers. While this seems like a good thing, we need to consider why is this? Could the destruction of an eventual conflict between these two powers destroy our whole planet? Conclusion: So why is the manhattan project important. I think it is because it is the perfect representation of our destructive nature and capabilities. It was. a project with the sole intent of developing a bomb capable of killing millions. Is the potential destruction of us as a species worth the peace we’ve had in recent years? This is why we need to care, so we can answer questions like these, and hopefully use the positive technologies developed by the manhattan project, and leave the destructive ones in the past.

This has been a strange year, at least in terms of PLP. This is the least amount of PLP courses I have ever taken. When I look back at the year I feel like we haven’t done that much yet, even though we have done quite a bit. I think its because of PLP’s slower progression compared to my other academic courses. Even thought there is a logical reason as to why there has been slow progression in this course, I still feel like I FAILed. Also going through my assignments I don’t have very much media I can include in this post. Most of our projects were in person presentations, these styles of assignments don’t leave me much evidence of my work.

Now I didn’t truly fail at people however I don’t think I worked up to my full potential either. Ive missed a bunch of my last two projects to factors I have no control over. I dont think my Macbeth project was anywhere near as good as it should have been. I think I need to prove my strengths in our current Cold War project but at the moment I’m a bit behind in that project as well. Over the next 5 weeks of this term I need to pull together this Cold War Project into something I’m truly proud of, something which showcases my strengths and potential as a learner.

My greatest accomplishments since the last POL weren’t in PLP courses. Many of my other accomplishments, helped me develop skills which I can use in this course. 

My first accomplishment was my completion and high mark (at least for me) in chemistry and precalc.

I spent a lot of time working on these two courses in the last semester. They were two of the most challenging, and complicated courses I have ever taken. While they taught me how to calculate the zero of a parabola, or analyze the bond structure of an organic molecule, the most valuable thing they taught me were study habits. During the busiest weeks, I was spending around 4 hours a night on just those two courses. Spending all this time studying really helped me figure out some study routines, and methods which work for me. This semester I’m going to try to use them while working on PLP assignments. 

I have begun to realize that many commonly suggested methods of study don’t work well for me. I’ve heard so many people suggest that you should take frequent breaks while studying. This doesn’t work for me. In order to effectively complete work I need to get on a roll, in general that means a 1-2 hour period with no breaks and then an extended break. This gets a lot easier If I’m interested in the subject. Sometimes I can work for 3-4 hours straight on subjects Im super interested in them. I also need to work while its quiet. I can’t effectively compete work while theres people coming and going from my house, or talking even in another room. My least efficient work times are at school though. I can’t focus on most assignments at school, particularly assignments which require a lot of thinking. One other little study method for me is to work in cold environments. Kind of random but it actually helps me a lot. 

In order to apply these methods to PLP, I am going to have to adapt them. The most important factors are focusing on making my topics interesting, making sure I can work in a flow state while doing my work, and starting my work after exercising and eating. Over the next semester I will be dedicating 1-2 hours later in the evening to just PLP work a few times a week. The best times to do this work will either be in the evenings when my brother is at volleyball, or later in the night (after 9pm). At both of these times the house is very quiet and I can easily get homework done without interruption.

Another one of my accomplishments was my drastic improvements and dedication to my wildlife photography. If you’ve been following this blog you know I’m super into wildlife photography, last spring I did a podcast on it for a project (go check out the post here). Since then I would say I have improved a ton. I’ve spent hours talking to pros, and other amateurs about all sorts of topics. I have learned so much, and have been able to utilize that learning to improve my work in so many ways. The dedication, learning, and perseverance I have learned in the last few months could really benefit me in PLP. 

  • A bald eagle looking for fish from its perch
  • A wood duck enjoying an evening nap

Above you can see my images from spring last year, and below our my images from this winter. You can see the technical and compositional improvement between the two sliders.

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Now obviously I’m not going to be mentally capable of treating school the same way I treat wildlife photography. The only reason I can spend so long, in brutal weather conditions shooting animals (with my camera), is because I’m truly passionate about it. I wont be able to spark the same passion for PLP. I do think I can trick myself into being passionate about certain projects by incorporating these topics I am passionate about, such as conservation, ecology, and animal behaviour into my projects in some way or another. I am currently doing that in my coldest war project. It’s not sparking my passion the same way the podcast did though. My podcast was the work I was most proud of, and that’s because I actually cared about. Now obviously I care about all my schoolwork, but I don’t necessarily care about the content, I just care about completing it to a certain standard. With the podcast I actually wanted people to hear it, Ive even considered continuing it for a second season, or revamping it. I need to find that passion in more projects this year.

Another goal for the last half of the year is to improve my blog. I want to make this a place I can use as a portfolio when applying for university. In order to improve this I will need to work on the main format of my page, as well as going back and recategorizing old posts. I will try and record more media when

My main goal for the next semester is to be more invested in my work. I want to be creating assignments I am proud of, assignments I want to share with the world. This will require me to be more efficient with my time and find ways to keep myself involved in my work even when I’m not super interested.

TPOL 2022

quinnLeave a comment

Hi everyone,

The year is almost over and summer is about to start. Before the year ends I have one key assignment. TPOL (Transitional Presentation Of Learning) this is similar to my MPOL (Mid year Presentation Of Learning) However TPOL’s are more focused on recapping the whole year and discussing how I can achieve growth in the next school year. 

This school year was are third year in a row of adjusting to a new schedule, rules, and challenges. We finally moved past COVID which is so exciting! We also were once again allowed to compete against other schools in sports. One of my favourite experiences this year was being apart of the Seycove Junior Boys Basketball Team. We had a tough season but there was a few great games in there and I got a lot better. Another great thing about COVID restrictions lifting was the reinstatement of field schools. We had the opportunity to go to Loon Lake Lodge. Even though we barely left Vancouver Loon Lake was an amazing experience. I cant wait for more field schools next year (New Mexico 2022)! 

Loon Lake was incredibly beautiful

One of my biggest goals this year was Consistency. I often get extremely focused and invested in certain assignments and completely neglect others. This became quite a problem early on in grade 10 and caused my average quality of work to go down. I have got better at this throughout the year however I still need to keep working on this into next year. One thing I need to focus on is making sure I deliver consistent high quality work throughout a project. This was evident in project Podcast. I would say episode 1 and 2 were my best episodes and episode 3 was my worst. I dont think the quality suffered to much but I definitely could have improved episode 3 and 4. Below you can check out episode 1 (top) and episode 4 (bottom) to see the difference. Next year I will focus on continually delivering consistent work throughout a project. 

One goal which I achieved in the last semester is growth. This is evident in both my school work and extra curricular. My best work from this semester, podcast, zine and Portrait, is much better then my best work from the last semester, political party project, Romeo and Juliet and our memorial proposal. One place I really saw growth was the difference between my work for the winter exhibition and the spring exhibition (will be linked once posted). My presentations were more clear, my product was better, and our area was decorated better. All in all, I am quite proud of the growth I have achieved this semester.  

My portrait from the spring exhibition

Along with growth balance was another one of my major goals. This meant giving myself an adequate amount of time to practice my other hobbies. I got better at that this semester and it really helped me focus on my photography. I got a lot better at shooting wildlife, and started learning about studio photography. This balance actually helped my school work. Notably being able to include my photos in my zine, as well as use my knowledge of photography for my podcast. Even though I got better at balancing my school and extra curricular this semester. I have a long way to go if I am to achieve the grades I want next year.

This school year has been a strange year and I feel like both everything has changed and nothing has changed. I did well this year but I want to do much better next year as grade 11 is very important for your future. See you in September!

MPOL 2022

quinnLeave a comment

Hi everyone,

And they’re back, Presentations of Learning. After being cancelled last year due to COVID we have to present to our teachers and parents our learning goals, progress, and accomplishments this year. This year has been tough for me. Between a lack on consistency across projects and various classes. Ive also have found that COVID has caused group work to be incredibly difficult. I’m hoping that a lot will change after this omicron wave and once the next semester comes around. I know everything is up in the air right now but I hope next semester everything looks more normal. 

This doesn’t really relate to anything. Just a photo I took on a field trip to the Punjabi Market.

I would say my biggest in school accomplishment this year has been the leap I have made in terms of writing. If you look back on my older blog posts you’ll will notice the improvement. My writing is so much more polished now then it was a year ago. I think this happened because of the amount of different styles of media I have written over the last few years. But I really noticed the jump at the start of this school year. Why, I can’t say exactly, but I believe its because of the fact that I put more effort into the actual writing now compared to my previous research and fact heavy approach. It was mostly a mindset shift which happened at the start of the year. I realized that being able to communicate your point with specific powerful information, was more important then having tons of information and facts and trying to tell your story that way. I still have a long way to go as a writer and I will continue to improve that with every project I work on.

The work Im the most proud of this year is my exhibition project. I think I did a really good job at designing a good memorial idea, as well as did a good job pitching it to visitors. I was proud of how my group pulled together even though we had troubles coming up with an idea and working designing the memorial. I definitely think we could have been more organized and used our time better but in the end the video turned out great. 

My groups memorial Proposal

I’m not very proud of my election project video. I don’t think we accomplished the task. The video was not very well made. We overall needed to work much harder to find a good objective and name. I wasn’t super into this project and neither was my group. That was probably why we didn’t really think much through. Such as filming a video about poverty and wealth inequality on the waterfront of deep cove. 

Looking through my work I notice a few key things. First of all the difference in quality and care of work is astounding when I’m interested verse not interested. Just look at my blog post on why we need to change the election system verse my party video. You can tell which one I was interested in and which one I wasn’t very quickly. Also my strongest work is always done at the end of an assignment or project. I believe I need to fail once or twice to find a solution that works for me. This can be problematic on short deadlines though. A great example of this was our Romeo and Juliet Video linked below. A lot went wrong in that project. One of our group members got COVID. We also missed out on three classes for this project so our schedule had to be compressed. We also realized half way through filming that our vision was way to ambitious and we had to cut it down. The final product is a little bit rough but I think we demonstrated growth and learning. I’m also really proud of the police siren effect idea and execution.

I’ve thought a lot about whether or not my work is up to my standard this year. Now I’ve began to question how important having a standard is in the first place. Because what my standards are is an ever changing, complicated question. It depends on a number of factors, my group, the amount of time I have and how interested I am in the work. A good example is during the winter I see the lowest quality output of group work. One reason is I have less time, the Basketball team occupies most of my evenings which prevents me from staying late after school. Overall I need to find an acceptable standard to work towards in this next half of the year. 

This video is a great example of the standard of work I would like to consistently be at. I think it was a unique idea, I had a lot of fun making it. As well as it was engaging to the viewer.

Now this year has been incredibly frustrating in so many ways. Obviously Omicron pretty much ruined the winter term of school. Also the weather has been terrible in every way. Finally, PLP and school in general has been really frustrating. I have found a lack of consistency in homework and expectations between not only all my classes, but between every project. I don’t know what to expect in terms of homework. I also have found there have been wildly different expectations for work output, and quality of work on every different project. However, I do understand that COVID has been tough on everyone, and I know delivering consistent results across projects from a teaching end is tough. 

I have three main focuses for next semester, consistency, balance, and growth.

Next semester I will focus on having a consistent, quality and output of work. This will require me to push through projects I don’t want to do. A good example of when I did this was in my Romeo and Juliet project. Our group fell apart but I think working together we did a good job of doing a project none of us wanted to do. Another part of consistency is going to be comparing my work to other work I’m proud of to make sure it meets my standards. 

Another key focus is balance. I’m often busy between sports, school, and social events. If I don’t keep a good balance I feel extremely overwhelmed. This is extremely unproductive and my quality of work suffers. Next semester I need to find a balance and flow of work which suits my style of learning. In general I put out my strongest work close to deadlines. I think when I get a sense of urgency it forces me to step up and do my best work. I generally need to large amounts of work at once. Breaking it up into small chunks does not work for me as I never achieve a good work flow. One strategy Ive found to be effective is to do a smaller bit of work related to my topic and then that leads me straight into the main work. 

Balance includes making sure I have time to do my hobbies. One of them is photography. This is a shot of a black turnstone I captured over winter break.

Finally I need to continue to grow. I don’t think I grew as learner as much this year as I could. This one much like consistency will require reflection on past work. I want to feel that my work I did during this semester is not on the same level as the work I will do next semester. In order to achieve growth I will need both consistency and balance. 

To wrap things up I would like to improve my consistency in my work, as well as to continue to work on my writing. I’m proud of my communication, presentation, and writing skills. I hope to continue my improvement as a learner in this next year.  

TPOL 2020

quinnLeave a comment

Hi everyone,

We are now wrapping up the 2019-2020 school year. This was grade 8 for me. Terms 1 & 2 were fairly normal terms but term 3 was the odd one. As you all know the coronavirus pandemic has forced most cities to go into lockdown. This has made term 3 very different and challenging. But as we did in the middle of this school year, we are doing another presentation of learning. 

We’ve completed many projects since our mpols. I think I have completed all that work to the standard set by our teachers. I’ve found it more difficult during online schooling though. It’s tougher to be motivated to do your absolute best on assignment when your trapped and bored. Although, the biggest challenge I’ve faced is organization. I often turn in assignments late because I haven’t organized myself well enough. The other reason for this is I’ve found it hard to prioritize during this period. I often don’t know what I should do next and I spend to long on one thing which isn’t due for a couple of days and then I don’t have enough time to do the assignments which is due sooner and I just get really stressed and everything ends up being late. What I believe I need to do fix this is time block my calendar and list assignments based on priority in the app things. 

This is the app things

One of my biggest accomplishments this year was my improvement in blog posts. If you check one of my blog posts from the student blogging challenge, or my Oregon post you can see they aren’t nearly as good as recent blog posts, such as my argh matey, or DI blog posts. 

Overall I have achieved my academic goal for this year, straight A’s (except for art, but that doesn’t count). I made that a goal as that was what I got in grade 7 so I wanted to keep that up. I also think getting straight A’s shows commitment to academics. In order to achieve this I had to complete all my assignments close to the best of my ability. I also needed to show a growth mindset. One great example of this was in my it’s the end of the world project where we needed to sing a song. That was not something I wanted to do. I was very nervous but I kept an open mind and I think I did a good job. 

If you read my mpol post you will remember that I had to come up with a learning goal for the end of the year that goal was “how can I use the resources I have to improve my productivity and keep a good school/life balance?” I have made a few steps towards that goal but I still think it’s my learning goal for next year. During the second term I got better at maintaining a good school/life balance. But during quarantine it all kind of blurred together. One the things I got quite good at using by the end of the second term was the app things. I would organize all my work and know when it was due so I would have less stressful nights working on an assignment due the next day. I did not use things very effectively over the last few months which is one of the main factors to my lack of organization. 

This year we learned about advertising and religion at the start of the year. Then we moved onto some eras in history. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, and the colonial times in New France. We used so many methods of presentation throughout those projects. From songs, to stories, to keynote, we learned how to use text and speech to communicate. I feel I have done a good job in Humanities this year. I believe my best project was my Middle Ages project. 

Throughout Scimatics we have learned tons of interesting things. Such as, graphs, surface area and volume, cells and diseases, and molecules. My best work in scimatics this year was either in our molecules unit, or in our Ultimate design challenge. 

This is my model of a surfboard for the ultimate design challenge

Maker has consisted of many different types of projects. We went from learning about growth mindset, and how to use our iPads basic features, to blue sky’s, and then the most challenging of all, DI. I learned many valuable skills in Maker but I think my best work was in our Blue Sky projects. I studied my topic intensely and learned many skills, and my design skills improved a lot. Another thing maker especially has taught me about is how to handle lots of pressure and stress. Thank you exhibitions and DI for teaching me this.  

PGP is one of those subjects you don’t really notice your doing a lot. I think we haven’t learned much about PGP since the mpols though.

To summarize this blog post, I still need to work on my time management and organization. I have learned a lot this year and have a lot to be proud of. I will look back at this year and be like wow, I learned so much in grade 8. That wraps up this year of learning. I will still have a couple of blog posts coming in the next week or so.

 

My learning goal is the same for next year as it was for the end of this year: “how can I use the resources I have to improve my productivity and keep a good school/life balance?”