Tagged: tPOLs

Time for tPOLs!

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! This year is coming to an end which means…drum roll please….time for tPOLs! tPOLs (Transitional Presentation of Learning) is a student led conference where the student presents to their parents and teachers what they learned, what they improved on and what they’d like to continue to improve on. Different from mPOLs, in your tPOLs, you discuss how you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level. You can visit my tPOLs from last year here and my mPOLs from earlier this year here. So let’s get started shall we?

Maker

At my mPOLs, one of the goals that I wanted to focus the most on in maker was continuing to improve on my movie making and editing skills. So, I decided to choose my Witness to History project to talk about. This project wasn’t just a great project to do but I found that it served as a great example of the fact that I’m continuing to improve my movie making skills because I think that this was the best video I’ve made this year. I had a little animation going on, some great angles and shots, I had some old clips of life before COVID-19, my music sounded pretty good compared to the little experience I have with GarageBand and everything that I had to say was really well put together and not too long.

Since I’ll have so much time on my hands this summer, I want to get even better at movie making; I still have lots and lots of clips from my trip to Costa Rica during winter break earlier this year that I have yet to edit and put together. Maybe even making my own music to go in those videos so I can become more experienced with GarageBand to prepare for next year. 

Humanities

At my mPOLs, I discussed how I’d like to continue on improving my writing skills, since that was something I struggled with since the beginning of grade 8. And although I have come a pretty long way and improved a whole lot, there is still plenty of work to do in terms of my writing. But, if you look at my first blog post compared to my most recent, you can see that I had gotten way better at reflecting on what I had done in my projects and had also improved on my introductions and my conclusions. One of the projects that I decided to talk about was The Great War. I was pretty proud of the writing I had done in the book pages I did because it was just the perfect length, it was really well put together and well detailed. I was also happy that I had started to use better vocabulary in some parts of the book that increased the quality of the writing in the book. Since I struggle a lot with using better vocabulary because about half of what I say or write consists of words like: like, a lot, lots, definetly, etc. This summer, since I’ll have lots of time on my hands, I will be doing lots of reading and practicing essays to continue improving my writing. 

Scimatics

At my tPOLs last year, I had the goal of eventually starting to write notes from lessons down in some sort of notebook. Because for me, it helps me process information way easier. Which I actually have started to do for the past month or two ever since we’ve been doing online school. I have been making lots of notes from the khan academy lessons and quizzes that we’ve done for our time is money and meiosis models project.

In my mPOLs earlier this year I talked about my problem with perfectionism and the fact that I would always go back to my work and tweak and tweak it. Honestly, if there weren’t any deadlines, I would be tweaking my work non stop till the end of time. I got a whole lot better at that this year especially in the last month or so with all my work for that matter. I figured out that the best way to avoid tweaking my work for hours on end was distracting myself. Wether it was going for a run or a walk outside, cleaning my room, or spending time with my family. Which also got me off of my devices which was great.

PGP

I believe that this year was a great turning year for me. I had last year, where I focused a lot on adjusting to a fully English school as compared to a fully french one. But now, in grade 9, I’ve focused on my studying habits and finding out what works best for me not to mention just always trying to better myself and how effectively I work. But, as there is always room left for improvement, I would like to focus on certain habits from the 7 habits which is what we’ve been focusing on the last couple months in our PGP course. Although I do need to use and constantly remind myself of all of the habits in the 7 habits, I’d like to focus on habits 2, 6 and 7; Beginning with the end in mind, synergizing and sharpening the saw. 

In terms of beginning with the end in mind, as I am moving into grade 10 which I still cannot believe to this day, this is the first year of high school that universities look at. Therefore, I’d like to start getting into things and volunteering for things that I’m interested in. Wether it’s the BC SPCA to see if I’d like to do something like that or even just help out at a local veterinary clinic. I am still not too sure what I’d like to be interested in, but for next year, I’d like to focus on trying new things and figuring out what I’m into. 

For habit 6, synergizing, I’ve had some projects where I have worked very well with my group members and some others not so much. To improve on this habit, I would start to find a way that I could do better on working with all of my classmates in projects. 

For habit 7, I realized that when you really think about it, habit 7 is really what life is all about because, you should always try to better yourself and go up instead of down. So, to improve on this habit, I will take the time this summer, as I will have lots of time, to set and achieve goals and eventually become my very best self. 

To conclude, I have found this year to be a pretty successful one, I have learned lots and worked hard and am looking forward to next year where I’ll be able to start a new year with all of the wisdom I have now so that way, I can strive for an even more successful year in grade 10. Now I’d like to finish off my tPOL with a simple question. I have talked about some work habits that I thought I should work on such as my perfectionism and synergizing with classmates, what are some work habits that you’ve observed that you think I should work on or try to improve?

 

tPOLs!

Hello! And welcome back to my blog! Once again! Now I think I’ve only got about 2-3 blog posts left that you will see within the next week or two! This blog post is about my tPOLs, if you don’t know what that is click here to see my mPOLs. But, basically, it stands for Transitional Presentations Of Learning (and mPOLs stands for Mid-Year Presentations Of Learning). tPOLs are a presentation to your teacher and parents for you to explain to them what you have learned, what you’d like to change, what you liked and how you think you are ready to advance to the next grade level.

Over the course of this year, I changed ALOT! At the beginning of the year, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to a fully English school (since I was coming from a fully French one) where everyone knew how to write way better than me. My English writing had minimal meaning as in, I didn’t have a very good vocabulary and my grammar and fluency was not very good. Also, I only knew a few people going to school with me. But, now, I am much more confident when writing my English and it is a lot better,  I have learned to adjust to a fully English school and also made lots and lots of new friends along the way.

In my humanities class, I feel like my writing really improved (just like I said in my introduction). I was pretty impressed by my writing skills when I was assigned to write a paragraph just like the Crusades paragraph from our It’s The End Of The World project. Here it is:

At the beginning of the year, I was also not very good (and always super nervous) of public speaking. When I did, I would always be reading from what I had as notes. This all really changed especially when I was presenting my Winter Exhibition. I don’t really know why, but all of a sudden, I had all of this “confidence” come to me and I did pretty darn well presenting my project that night :).

To improve and work on over the summer, I’d like to still practice my writing by reading lots, perhaps starting a journal and/or just writing a whole lot.

In maker, I think that the project I learned the most in was Destination Imagination. Even though it was super stressful, it was definitely worth it and an amazing experience, I actually really miss it. Destination Imagination allowed me to increase my creativity to the next level (even from just using cardboard and duck tape). What really helped to get everything together was having more than one head in the solution for the problem.

Which also brings me to teamwork, I learned to work really well with groups, to not be too controlling of my team members (which I might still have to work on a little bit) and to split tasks equally. Not to mention, my team compared to the start of DI and the end, our teamwork really improved, the more time we spent together the less we would talk over each other and argue (usually with the pressure of an Instant Challenge). I think that I still need to work on being less controlling of my group, to always remember that you can never go to “all out” and to never underestimate myself.

In scimatics this year, even though we didn’t do many projects, we did do many super exciting activities and have many super interesting discussions throughout the year. The section that caught my eye the most was our section on Electromagnetic Radiation. I was super interested since I’ve never really looked into that subject, ever. When we did all of those cool activities; using light and reflecting it off of different mirrors and creating a rainbow was super fun and exciting to do!

I was pretty proud of myself after doing the eye-dissection of a sheep’s eye because I was not as grossed out or as scared as I thought I would be. Don’t get me wrong, I was still kind of grossed out and all but, still, it could’ve been worse. Anyways, I think that I did pretty well in that section and I’m super excited to present my telescope project at the spring exhibition! It’s going to be awesome!

Just like everything else, there is always room for improvement! I would like to start bringing a notebook (a real one not digital) because I remember last year when I did that (because I did nothing really digital)  and I remembered things a lot easier so for next year, I am going to start doing that to make remembering what I learned a lot easier.

Now, for our last subject of the day, PGP! Now in PGP, there were lots of things that I found useful and maybe, others, not so much. Personally, I found that Things and TimeBlocking was super helpful for me to keep track of my to-do’s, reminders, etc.

I think one reason that Things works really well for me is that I don’t like to see unopened notifications on my iPad. So, when I look at Things, it’s a reflex for me to tap on it to get rid of the notifications. But, in order to remove them of course, you need to complete a to-do. So, that motivates me a little bit to get that stuff done! Also, time blocking has gotten me to stay on task most of the time and to keep track of my super busy schedule.  I think that I did very well this year based on how my level of productivity increasing throughout the year!

At the beginning of the year, I, of course, was not productive whatsoever; I remember last year, procrastinating so much that it took me a coupl of ofe hours just to complete a few pages of math homework. Now, I can finish even more homework way faster.

That’s why, for my PGP Time Machine, I represented my past self (as procrastinating peter) and my present self (productive Penney) this also kind of reminded me of some arguments I had with my younger brother this year. Now for things that I’d like to improve on, starting at the beginning of the year, next year, I’d like to create a notebook and at the end of the day, everyday, write down what I learned in each subject everyday, this will force me to be paying attention at all times and to never drift off in class (or as much).

Now, this leads to our final conclusion. The driving question for tPOLs was: “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”. Well, like everyone, I know that I have developed many skills that I certainly did not have at the beginning of the year that have prepared me for next year, I have become way more productive, my team working with other people (not just in my class) but other people, even strangers (I recently went to this camp where we had to solve all of these cool mysteries and I was with a bunch of grade 10s and 11 strangers and was pretty dang proud with myself), most importantly, I have learned to take my failures and mistakes as learning opportunities because, one, no one’s perfect and two, how are you supposed to learn without making mistakes? This was a great year and an amazing experience! I really enjoyed it!

Thanks for listening!

Thanks and I’ll see you in my next blog post!