March 5

WDYM IM ONLY HALFWAY DONE

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Vision Mission Values

Vision: “The best person I can be at my graduation is a learner that can focus and has strived to be the best person without taking shortcuts. I want to be someone who can handle a post secondary education and be able to collaborate outside of a school setting.”

Mission: “I will improve how I work with others and make the most out of the environment and our work. The way that I can make a group better is by bringing my physical and artistic skills to the table. My skills can help bring creativity to our projects and physical displays in exhibitions. This makes a group’s multitasking easier, for example; one person focuses on something they can do, while I build, draw, or think about anything we need to add, which saves us time in the long run. I want to keep myself accountable and help build on my focusing and resilience. I want to be able to not get discouraged by setbacks or mistakes I make during the process.”

Values:

Reflection and Changes

Focusing Exclusively on the last sentence in my “Mission”; I have not quite met this goal.

Lately I’ve gotten very discouraged when I come across any obstacle. This is an issue mainly with my self esteem. For example: during writing assignments I get very caught up in the fact I have less work done or that my work isnt as good as others people. I make everything an unspoken competition with the people near me and I constantly lose. I get upset over not understanding the work or not thinking of a good opening sentence so I get stubborn and stop doing it entirely, this closely resembles something I believe is called “learned helplessness”.

Theres a video out there explaining what it is really well but to sum it up, a teacher gave her students a sheet with 3 anagrams. Half of the class had easy words like rat(art) or lime(mile), while the other half was given impossible words. The last word on both sheets were the same, but the side that had the impossible words weren’t able to get the word/gave up while the other side of the class had all managed to get the word.

As for the vision, I believe I’m on track to become the person I described, I know I’m able to collaborate outside of a classroom. I’m on my way to be someone who can actually take their own accountability, an example is flight training and ground school.

Looking at my values, I feel like I’ve been able to hold up most of what I set for myself. Even though it’s not always in BCFP or humanities, I’m usually engaged, answering questions and adding to discussion whenever I can. I’m able to take care of myself and not get buried in work even though my schedule can be overwhelming at times. I take mental breaks when i need them and lock in when it’s necessary.

Something I know I need to work on is my agency. I’ve somewhat mentioned in other areas that I need to work on my agency and my accountability. I know that I’ve definitely grown in this area but I’m nowhere near the place I want to be. I can be very lazy with my work, once I’ve handed it in I’m not touching it, I’ve been on a steady decline in my energy with school all year and its really hitting me all recently. As I’ve mentioned, setbacks are very discouraging and I have not been accountable for my work lately. I used to stay at school after choir until 5:30 some days just working on math homework. This habit has unfortunately fallen apart and most days I don’t finish my math homework by the next class, which can get me super behind since new work is being assigned every class.

By the end of this year I want to really be able to be accountable for my work and my life without much parental support. This is mentioned in my “Values” under agency.

Thank you for coming and listening to my mPOL, I appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your day to listen.╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

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February 19

Anthropology Artifact

For this project PLP 11 made a collaborative craft document featuring a deep dive of each of our chosen artifacts. Our teacher sent this document to the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) as a resource they could use. My chosen artifact was a curved knife from the Musqueam nation.

We started this project by analyzing different branches of anthropology then we had a quiz on them (I scored 15/15). After our quiz we chose our artifacts from the MOA website, just looking at British Columbia alone there are over 10,000 artifacts available to choose from. Even though there were a lot of choices, many didn’t have significant information or had a lot of repeats (ex. Spoons). My first choice was a beautiful amulet

Unfortunately the amulet didn’t have enough information so I chose a curved knife. The curved knife had information and enough backstory to research it

After we locked our choices in we made a smaller craft document with basic information and sources with related information, you can see mine here: https://fourteen-crows.craft.me/hNuak7JMyLMlKB

We were added to a craft document to create our own personal page which you can also see here: https://s.craft.me/qubstpVChbFSQ1

I could have done better during this project, I didn’t manage my time wisely and I was super burnt out during a lot of this project. This all led me to rush the last elements of my page and not give my best work. To avoid this happening next time I can ask for help around me to help get me started

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November 29

“Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am”

What an explosive way of starting the school year with the project I’ve been looking forward to the most

*(drumroll)*

 The Manhattan Project!

Unfortunately the project was not what it should have been, this year we didn’t get to do a field school in a related area (ex. Los Alamos), which was the whole reason I was excited for this project. Seeing the photos from last years grade 11s made me so jealous and eager and its almost entirely the reason I stayed in PLP, but I digress.

During this project we learnt how to use a Zettlekasten and smart brevity and put all our notes in that format. These formats didn’t particularly work with how I have my notes and assignments organized in craft, so I mostly ignored them once I could (If I could explain what they are I would).

After taking all of our notes in class we put them into a smart brevity format and handed them in. Once we did that we then chose the topic for our animation and started to storyboard and plan it. Our topics had to show how the manhattan project affected the world, for good or for worse. My topic was about the reaction of the bomb and how it led to discoveries in science and how that effects the earth today.

Initially we had one week to animate a 1m 30s (minimum) video. If you’ve ever drawn or animated you know thats almost impossible to do alone, but after multiple sleepless nights and a lot of shortcuts, I handed it in on time!… Just to find out we got a week long extension. 

Here’s my animation since I’m sure you’re DYYYING to know

After that extra week I was hoping our videos would be shown to the class, which they never were. That really bummed me out because some elements of my animation were references only some of my friends would get.

The project wrapped itself up very quietly as we transitioned into our next project

Category: Humanities | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 17

Least favourite part of the year…

It’s tpol time, the pol of t’s, the transition presentation procrastination of learning.

This year we filled out a checklist of behaviours we demonstrated this year and im mandated to choose 3 to display.

From Agency I chose  the “Accepting Feedback” section.

I chose “Consistently: Accepts feedback and makes revisions”

I think I’ve grown in this area this year, I know that in previous years I didn’t change a lot when it came to revision from peer critique. This year I’ve learnt to trust the opinion of my peers and consider what they say whether it be on my presenting skills or my work.

In humanities for example, the Pechakucha project from Seattle. The feedback I received from teachers and classmates on presenting and slide layout taught me how to better present my learning (with how I present or build my presentation).

In maker my improvement would be shown with Destination Imagination. During the whole process of building and creating we had teachers checking in on how we were doing and what our plan was, often getting advised on good/bad ideas. With the feedback and critique we received from our teachers we formed a better story and presentation, getting us 1st in provincials.

How I can improve: .Theres not many things I can improve on in this area, I can keep their perspective in mind or ask a larger audience instead of a small group.

The second behaviour I chose was from “Conduct and Integrity”

For respect I chose “Consistently: Respects the rights and opinions of others;
always listens when others are speaking”

This applies to both humanities and maker. I definitely think this is a skill that I’ve improved on this year. Along with this coming from maturity, I do think that I’ve also put in an effort to change and respect who may be speaking or presenting. I do not have recorded evidence of this in a project, but I know that I’ve had my fair share of “be quiet” in the past. This year I’ve noticed a significant decrease of teachers telling me to be quiet, whether this is a result of my ADHD meds or understanding why I shouldn’t be talking if someone else is, I still have changed no matter what and I’m proud of myself for learning how to shut my mouth after 16 years.

How I can improve: I can encourage my friends to pay attention more or I can properly listen to what the speaker is talking about.

The last behaviour I chose was from “Self Regulation”

For balance I chose “Rarely: Often overwhelmed by commitments and finds it difficult to manage balance between outside activities and school“

This applies to both humanities and maker. The reason I chose this was because I’ve picked up a lot of choirs this year and finding a balance between choirs and homework was really hard. Usually after choir I would stay at the school and do my work, usually working from 4:30 to 5:45, I didn’t have much time when I went home because I usually had some sort of chore and then dinner, the only time would be sometime after I showered, but my wifi gets turned off at 11, preventing me from staying up doing homework. This year especially I definitely had regressed from last year with less of a drive to do homework and less care about my work being in on time. I also started prioritizing math and science over my PLP work, leaving me extremely burnt out for most of the year because of how long I take on my math. Even when I had free time, I would procrastinate out of stress which led to me being more stressed which started the procrastination cycle again, so I tried my best to not remember my work and only use class time.

How I can improve: I can find a better way to regulate myself while I’ m stressed so I can properly do my work or I can make a better schedule that gives me enough time for homework, even if it means cutting out time with friends.

How does this help me answer the driving question (How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?)

I think these show my improvement this year along with the improvement I want to make next year. The goals that I want to set for myself for next year are all to do with my focus and work drive, like giving myself time to do homework or actually doing homework at home, prioritizing homework, making sure I get things in on time, and generally being more organized. Specially because next year is going to be harder with more difficult classes so I know I need to change my behaviours to succeed for next year

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April 8

I’m so DI-DONE!!!

So DI just ended once again. If you don’t remember what DI is or this is your first time hearing it, here’s a quick summary:

Destination Imagination is a non profit organization that hosts a challenge that anyone with a group of friends can join. Theres are different challenges that you can choose from, their subjects are engineering, arts, improv, science and technical. Different age categories get scored differently and have some changes to rules.

We didn’t have the option for improv this year so i chose technical since the challenge was to make a working pinball machine sized up. This year we were grouped with the grade 9s so we had to meet them and pretend to like them (thats a joke I loved my group). My group consisted of James Streeter, Max Naiman-Bobroff, Ryan Burnett, and my 1 other grade 10 teammate Keenan Houlihan.

We started working in our groups in mid January, only 3 months away from regionals. We were panicked and didn’t quite know what we were doing, so naturally we put it off until February.

Our story was about a foster child running away and getting lost inside of the labyrinth in Greek myth. As hes walking he encounters multiple different characters, he meets a dying man that warns him about the maze and its dangers. As our main character walks, he meets the Minotaur who starts to fight him. As the main character starts loosing, (drunk) Dionysus enters and splits up the fight, introducing himself as the main characters father. He explains where he has been and then gifts him a Molotov cocktail to use against the Minotaur. Dionysus walks off as the character progresses into the maze as he meets the maker of the maze; Daedalus. He makes a deal that he would let the main character leave after he plays daedalus’s pinball machine. He plays, gets the master sword, and leaves the maze, ending the story.

The roles were:

Ryan as the main character

Keenan as the Minotaur

James as Dying man and Daedalus

Myself as Dionysus

Max as nothing because he couldn’t come to the performance

 

By the time regionals came around, our solution was barely working. We went into the performance expecting nothing, here’s kinda how it went:

The story was going great but we get to the pinball machine and nothing was working. The ball kept getting stuck and we needed to touch it to get it to work, the silence was loud and we couldn’t get scored on our round because we kept touching it.

That performance was rough but surprisingly we got 3rd (out of 4 teams)

But of course, the story didn’t end at 3rd.

The day of provincials.

our instant challenge was at 11:30. It went really well, we were making the appraisers laugh, we knew we did good.

We modified our machine so the ball wouldn’t get stuck and i modified to sword to look more like the Mastersword from Zelda. Everything went well during the story, i forgot a few of my parts which led to me not being able to give him the Molotov, But everyone was laughing at what i was doing and saying.

The pinball round went great! The ball didn’t get stuck and we had a stick that i would use in case it ever got stuck. Once it did inevitably get stuck, i picked up the stick and called it me “godly powers” pretending to use magic on the ball to get it unstuck. I was narrating most of what was going on and it seemed like it worked really well! Nobody touched the ball that would end the round, and it wasn’t awkwardly silent!!

The scores were in and we were gathered in the gym.

Third place was announced. It wasn’t us. I started getting worried.

Second place was a tie. Oh god neither was us. I lost hope in getting the podium

The best instant challenge. I was crossing my fingers, knowing we deserved it. They called our team and we were ecstatic. We were walking back to our seats.

“First place goes to Labyrinth Legends” what? Mid stride we turned around as they were calling us back. We got first..? We walk back while cheering amongst ourselves. We didnt expect to get anything higher than third. They hand us the metal trophy, mounted on granite.

 

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March 15

A Crazy Presentation

We just finished another project called “Cray Cray Yay Yay” where we studied crazy people and their effect on the world, not literal crazy people but people who were called crazy for an idea they had.

We started this project with the apple “Think different” campaign. We got to choose a person featured in the video to make a “mini pecakucha” on.
If you don’t know what a pecakucha is, it’s a presentation with the format of 20×20. 20 seconds each slide for 20 slides.

For my “mini pecakucha” (20 seconds for 10 slides)  my options were pretty limited since most people were chosen to pick before me. I ended up picking Thomas Edison to present on. When I tell you that this presentation was SUPER rushed I mean it, I wasn’t finished my slides and quecards until maybe 10 minutes before my presentation. I was literally rushing to finish my slides in Math.

Our final piece of the project was a full pecakucha in a group of 3-4. My group was Chris, Callum, and Jasper, our topic was “think different” so we focused on how these ideas were new and different at the time and how it was considered “crazy”

Before we fully started working on the full presentation, the teachers brought most of the class to Seattle to really understand where a lot of these “crazy people” came from and their stories. We visited some pretty well known places like the MoPop (Museum of Pop Culture), Microsoft, The Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Climate Pledge Arena (not for a hockey game unfortunately), and The Museum of flight, along with some less Seattle famous places like ifly.

Last night we presented our full pecakucha with our groups. We have been working on this project for almost 2 and a half months so I’m pretty happy it’s over now.

Here’s what happened during the presentation:

What went well

  • All of our slides were completed and approved by the teachers
  • We didn’t get behind or ahead at all, every time we practiced we were always a little behind our photos, but during the actual presentation we did really well with timing. If we messed up during any part of our slides the improv or what we said put us back on track really well. A few last sentences were rushed but it mostly stayed on track
  • we were really well memorized on our scripts, we didn’t stutter over many words.

What didn’t

  • I feel like our tone could have been better or some of us could have been louder for sure. I know a few people sounded a bit monotone at some parts.
  • our stage presence could have been better I guess? I feel like we looked frozen aside from me and Chris’ hand talking
  • coordinating what to wear better since not everyone was wearing black formal clothes

How to improve

  • Practice. Practice. Practice. We were told it shouldn’t sound like you’re reading a script or that it’s fully committed to memory because you want it to sound like you or sound “conversational”. I felt like I was still messing up a few words or sentences, not going in the direction I wanted them to.
  • eye contact, I definitely remember looking at the slides or anywhere but the audience so I want to work on that
  • Not part of the presentation but the work I put into the group, I definitely am not proud of the amount of work I put in and I feel really bad to Chris and Callum for putting so much work in for me.

How did I contribute

  • I put some doodles and extra drawings on the slides.
  • info about some people and photos for the slides
  • ideas for our thesis and notes

How the field study helped me learn

  • One of the topics in my notes were about Kurt Cobain. Since he was from Seattle, Nirvana had a whole section to itself that talked about its upbringing, history, behind the scenes, etc.
  • helped me connect to the project, driving question (Why does it take a crazy person to change the world) and ideas

Extra photos and videos from the project

a few photos of me Ofc 😌💅💅💅

Huge thanks to my team mates (check out their blogs at Peter Steele fan club  Christians Portfolio Callum) and the teachers that arranged the event and brought us to Seattle❤️❤️
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February 29

Halfway!

“How do crazy people change the world?”

We’re halfway through our project called “Cray Cray Yay Yay” where we study and talk about crazy people whose ideas revolutionized the world. Some of us went to Seattle to really experience the topic. Our teachers thought it would be great to write a small essay of things we learnt. My Thesis was “Crazy people create crazy things with multiple uses in mind to bring their innovations to the masses, and allow them to evolve over time.”

This is what i wrote:

Example 1: Planes/Plane Models

Planes and the different models and their uses. Military planes and spy planes were made and used from the First World War, constantly being researched for safer and more efficient models. Taking an old war plane like the Albatross or Fokker and comparing it to a newer military plane like the B-21or the F-35 Lightning, you’ll be able to see the change and understanding of its design. Other planes that have evolved in design and their use are freight planes that deliver foreign goods and mail and commerical flights that carry people from city to city. 

Example 2: Music

 Music and how it has evolved into many different genres is based on things like culture (like traditional music or instruments), age, social circles that influence or share interests, and different artists giving their music its own creative flare or spin. Examples of its evolution has evidence dating back to 35,000 years ago. Humans have always been making sounds and music as a way to share an express themselves, from grunts and hitting rocks together to classical piano with complicated sheet music to an app on a laptop and a microphone in someone’s closet.

Example 3: Art

Just like music, evidence of art has been around just as long, if not longer than music has. Art has constantly been evolving and its inspired many people like Picasso, Micheal Angelo, Van Gogh, and not as well known artists. Art has evolved from finger paintings in caves made from flowers and spices to beautiful oil paintings in cathedrals and museums. Most of the artists with famous paintings never expected to be recognized by historians, a lot of artists wanted to tell a story and do what they enjoyed doing without really benefiting much. Art is interpretation, it can inspire and evolve into different shapes and forms (like glass) with time, art went from cave paintings to biblical images to a banana taped to a canvas, who knows what it will be next.

Personal Paragraph:

Crazy people inspire many around the world, theyve inspired me with their creations and personality. A “crazy person” that changed music I particularly like was Kurt Cobain, his ideas and morals were different from the music at the time, he did so much against the norm (on purpose or not). He didnt care about what people thought of his music, if people didnt like his music he wasn’t going to change his music, instead he would wait for people to change instead. Im not a huge fan of his music, but I still agree that Nirvana took the world by surprise.  

Work Cited:

Museum of flight tour, Museum of pop culture, previous projects/assignments

Category: Humanities | LEAVE A COMMENT
December 1

A long overdue post

Even though this project happened in September. I feel like this blog post came at the right time, since I have been dealing with a lot lately, and maybe not focusing as much on things that are best for my health. It’s been a topic of discussion in my house, so this gave me a chance to reach out to my parents to discuss something new, rather than things that didn’t work so well in the past. In the end, we came up with a contract, which I’ll attach a screenshot of below.

In the past, most of what I tried to improve was screens and sleep. In a way, it’s the same now, but with a new approach. Before, when my parents have tried to improve my sleep health, they forced me to bring them all of my electronics every night at a certain time. This didn’t work very well because on my end I’d be angry, and on their end, they felt bad for not showing trust in me to just put them away in my room. No one really ended up winning.

Part of the thing we agreed on this time was a balance of freedom and accountability. For them, they know that a fully strict approach doesn’t really work with me. And for me, I know that if I’m trying to make big changes, I need to be held accountable or I might not follow through.

The first part of the conversation was talking about what hadn’t worked in the past. Next, we talked about how they’d love for me to just have no screens at all, but that it’s not realistic. So, finally they brought up incentives, and that even though I’ve been tired a lot of the time, I still didn’t have much of an incentive to change things. They said they’d love something that incentivizes me putting all of my screens away before 10:30 and not touching them again until my alarm goes off in the morning. Their first thought was money, but they wanted to hear from me. I told them that with my stressful schedule, it’s hard to wake up in the mornings, especially lately, and the incentive I wanted was to take a personal day once a month in order to give myself a break.

Eventually, we settled on a weekly payout, where the daily average gets higher if I do more days in a row. If I do one or two days, it amounts to 2$ a day. If I do three or four days, it comes out to 7$ a day. If I do all five days in the schoolweek, I get 10$ per day. The other things is that I can’t ask for money anymore, and this is going to be where my money comes from. The last thing is that there will be a payout each time I read a full book. I will try.

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October 9

This is us

Hey welcome back! this summer was long and this project felt longer, but I digress. This project was all about learning about other peoples stories. We started by reviewing a little bit about the confederation and we learnt a little about the charter rights. We chose topics that represent canadian identity

The topic I chose for the canadian identity was canadian films. The driving question I made for myself was “How is film part of our identity?”. I made my own need to knows and I did my own research on the topic so I could eventually present it to a small group. The groups we were put into had a similar topic at first, then for the second group it was unrelated topic. So for my groups I had Jackson, Charlie M, Daniel, Frankie, and Luca . For the second group I was with Keaton, Keenan, Ronan, and Sofia. (Un)Fortunately I was at outdoor school for councillor training that weekend so I couldn’t have done much research other than the 2-3 days we had in class so I felt a little behind when we had to present. I think the second presentation went better than the first though because I felt like it went smoother and I kinda knew what I was doing there.

The project didn’t end there though, we held a human library. A summary of a human library is it’s basically a bunch of people talking about their stories and experiences in their own life. The person I brought was my step-grandpa. He grew up in Bulgaria and he lost his thumb while climbing so he avoided the draft. He then went on what he called “a permanent vacation”, the government let him go on a vacation to Greece and he just never went back to Bulgaria. He then had 3 options on where to immigrate to and (like I mentioned earlier) the 2 places he wanted to go to most accepted him and he chose to go to Saskatchewan, Canada instead of South Africa. From Saskatchewan he then moved up to Yellowknife in NWT where he just barely scraped by with his wife. He now owns a company and is pretty comfortable where he is in life now.

Other people of course brought who they could and who had a unique experience as a canadian (or something like that). Of course if I had the photos that Charlie took at the time of writing this I would use them but the timing is just unfortunately off and this is due tomorrow so I’m not waiting. Anyways have a nice day, Byyyyeee.

Category: Humanities | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 19

Ugh

I rather slam my head into an actual pole than do this but anyways, welcome to my grade 9 tPOL. Since theres an introductory paragraph i have to say, I’m going to put it all here because theres no way it’ll fit on a cue-card. Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner. Anyways, just like its (just as bad) counterpart, the mPOL, I will be going over my learning and my growth this year, and what I can do differently next year. 

First I want to talk about how I’ve overcome some of my academic weaknesses over the year. Since most of my PLP classes ended after the mPOL, I’m mostly going to talk about humanities. Some weaknesses I’ve overcome (or improved on) are, being shy about my work around my academically smart friends, asking more questions to teachers and my classmates, and paying better attention to the lesson.

Some weaknesses I still need to work on are pushing myself to help in group work. The most recent example I can think of is for the WW1 project I definitely let my group do all the decision making and planning. I let them do this because I much rather be told what I need to do with instructions instead of telling others what they have to do. Overall for that issue I think it stems from my ADHD or another problem to do with my mind that I don’t quite understand at the moment

Small Things I want to improve next year would be being more active on basecamp and Showbie so that means checking my grades or following the lesson on basecamp instead of Doing whatever else. I think I definitely could improve if I tried to follow along or check my work more. Another thing I could do would be sitting down and doing my homework after school every day, I started the year doing that and it made me feel so good being responsible and actually getting my work done but its slowly faded out by the time we got back from Alberta. The last thing I could maybe start doing is not call out even if it’s an appropriate time to (like the Canadian history project we did with the debate over confederation [I REALLY WANTED THAT CAPITAL MAN])

I realized by now while writing this that I haven’t even mentioned the driving question. The driving question for tPOLs are “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?” I feel im ready to move on because I feel like I’ve improved enough in my weaknesses and I’ve possibly even refined some of my strengths like my optimism and overall good vibe in teamwork. Along with the growth I’ve made in humanities im also ready to meet new people i can work with and get to know next year.

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