My Last Tpol

Hello Internet, Hello again Miss McWilliam, Hello again parents. Welcome to my LAST EVER TPOL…. Oh god I’m so old. Before we get into anything, you know the drill. 

“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.”

We also have a new driving question “Why am I ready to move on to the next grade?” But I’ll answer that later.

Now that that’s out of the way we can get into my VMV’s that I made at the start of the year, so first we have my.

Vision:

My vision from the start of the year was “My vision is to be confident in social situations and be able to add valuable content to class discussions. I will be able to absorb information and use it in other ways, and even use it outside the classroom.” I think this one is great and I actually feel like I have accomplished it, to prove it I have this project to show you. Macbeth. In this project we had to be very confident and sociable, because it was all about acting and analyzing Shakespeare as a class, meaning I would have to read the script out loud, add my input to the conversation, and act out as a character of my choice for a video. This was especially important because we had to get insight into the minds of the characters to portray them in between scenes. This perfectly fits my vision, and I think I’ve fulfilled it pretty well. I added to class discussions and made a large knowledge network that helped me keep track of my thoughts. If you would like you can watch my video here, but try not to judge my attempt at a Scottish accent. 

Mission:

My mission was, “I plan to contribute to every one of my classes by providing at least one thing per class, whether it be a question, an idea or an answer. I want to do this because I believe I can bring new opinions to the table, as someone who has lived outside the country, I have two pretty different experiences and perspectives on how to live life. I think this is a valuable asset to have as I can give unique critiques and answers that some others might not think of”. Unfortunately, I don’t think I entirely completed this one, but I definitely did better than I did in any other year. As a naturally introverted person, I tend to be quite quiet in class, but I’ve been trying to improve. Funnily enough, I think the class that reflects this the most is not a PLP class, it’s actually my environmental science class. Miss Kadi makes the class a very open environment, meaning I feel very invited to add my part to the class. Every day we’re asked a question where we all go around and give our answer, which really helps me get out of my shell. This makes me feel more included in class discussions and therefore helps me to fulfill my mission.

Values:

Engagement:

In terms of engagement I think I have been more locked in this year than ever. I’ve been able to take away the message of every class and understand everything the teachers are telling me. A project that showed this off was my most recent one, Reaconciliaction part 2 Haida Gwaii. Now I unfortunately didn’t go on this trip, however while at home I felt very capable of managing the tasks I was given to do. I was able to stay engaged and focus on my work even when there wasn’t a teacher to tell me what to do. I also knew when to reach out to my teachers if I needed help.

Self Regulation:

I have continued to use the strategies that I talked about in my mpol, and improved on them to suit me best. I think this also feeds into the reconciliaction project, because I was able to contain myself and focus on the work without getting distracted.

Communication and Collaboration:

I think this was very well reflected in my spring exhibition. We were on quite a time crunch, being given only about a week to make the whole thing happen, but my group really stepped up our game and took on our own roles that matched what we were good at. We all communicated what we were doing very well and organized how we would represent each section of our topic. 

Conclusion:

So we are now at the end of my last ever tpol and it is genuinely shocking how much I think I’ve improved. From focus in class, to participation in discussions, I am really proud of how great of a learner I’ve become. But we can’t leave out the driving question, “Why am I ready to move on to the next grade?” I think this year has taught me so much about how to be an independent and engaged learner. I’ve grown so much by developing strategies to help me improve my focus, participation and collaborative skills. But despite all this I don’t feel ready for grade 12, nobody ever really does, but I know that this is the best next step for me as a learner. 

So on that note I will be signing off, thank you for reading or watching my last ever tpol, and I hope you’ve gained new insight on how I have improved as not just a learner, but as a person.

Oh how I have grown: Mpol

Hello internet, Hello Miss McWilliam, Hello parents, welcome to my second last Mpol ever, you know the deal.

“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.”

So this year Mpol’s look a little different, so if you are wondering why this feels new, that’s because it is.

The first new thing is related to our prepol’s from this year. We have to show how we have aligned with our VMV’s, which is this thing. 

And we also have to answer this new question that I would like to consider the driving question of this post, “What is a habit or routine that has improved your learning so far this year?”. But I’ll get to that later.

My Vision

First of all, I would like to go over my vision “My vision is to be confident in social situations and be able to add valuable content to class discussions. I will be able to absorb information and use it in other ways, and even use it outside the classroom.” This is a great one to start off with because I have the perfect example. During our project about the Hiroshima bombing we were reading a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey, and every week we would take one class to sit down and hold a Socratic seminar to talk about the book. I really liked this environment because it felt less like a class where you had to put up your hand to talk, and much more like a group of people discussing a book that they all read. I felt like I could actually get my ideas out without having to be nervous of being wrong. These seminars really helped with my confidence in social situations and I can see it reflecting on me in places outside the classroom when I’m having discussions.

My Mission

Image credit: Big Think

Next I would like to go over my mission, “I plan to contribute to every one of my classes by providing at least one thing per class, whether it be a question, an idea or an answer. I want to do this because I believe I can bring new opinions to the table, as someone who has lived outside the country, I have two pretty different experiences and perspectives on how to live life. I think this is a valuable asset to have as I can give unique critiques and answers that some others might not think of.” I have a great example for this one too, however it is not a class nor a project, but a teacher. The introduction of Mr Gibson into PLP has helped me out quite a lot. The way he teaches classes makes it much easier for students to get their ideas out there because he provides a welcoming and open environment. He is always willing to answer our questions and never makes us feel stupid. This has helped me to add new things to each of my classes. Since I do have to give an example, I think this was well reflected in our project on The Cold War. The way he let us do this project helped us gain an insightful view into our topics. Since we were allowed to do WHATEVER WE WANT (as long as we could connect it to The Cold War) is widened the possibilities of our learning by so much because we could actually be interested in our topics, for example one of my classmates did a presentation on how The Cold War connected to Ryan Gosling. This project helped me bring ideas to the classroom that I think were truly my own.

My Values

Engagement

I think I have successfully been more engaged in class work this year because I’ve been finding topics that I actually care about more. For example, in our anthropology project we had to find an artifact and make a museum card that explained different things about it. Since we could choose whatever we wanted for the Museum of Anthropology, I chose to research a gun, because I find weapons very interesting. This allowed me to be more focused of my topic and actually care about researching it. If you would like to take a look at our final product you can find it here.

Self Regulation

I don’t have a specific project or class to associate with self regulation, but I have come up with strategies that have helped me improve on this. First of all I’ve been finding it easier to regulate myself just because I’ve have gotten older and matured more, but if even that isn’t working, I like to isolate myself so I know I won’t get distracted by my friends. This helps me to focus only on the work I have to be doing and lets me get classwork done in class. 

Communication and Collaboration

As I mentioned earlier, this year I have had experiences that allow me to collaborate effectively with my peers, however with communication I feel like I have also improved. Since this is my fourth year at the school, I have more and more realised that my teachers want the best for me too and also realised that they really aren’t that scary, so if I’m struggling I can just ask them for help and they won’t judge me because after all, they are there to help. An example of this is actually right now. As I am writing this post I have just asked my teacher for help because I was confused about some of the criteria, and wouldn’t you believe it, I actually got help from her.

So now we are coming to the end of the years Mpol, and I think I’m getting pretty good at these. But we mustn’t forget the driving question, “What is a habit or routine that has improved your learning so far this year?”. I feel like I’ve already talked about many of my improved habits, such as distancing myself when I need to focus, or talking to my teachers when I need help, but there is one more thing that has been extremely important. Actually writing down the things I have to do. This year, every time I am told I have to do something, like homework or something I didn’t finish in class, I write it down in things. By doing this I allow myself to be able to check what I still have to do, which has been really helpful for keeping me on track with my learning. I used to think “nah I’ll just remember it” but that way I always either forgot or did it late.

And so we have come to the end of this year’s Mpol post. I hope you can maybe take away something to help you improve yourself, and if not, I hope you can see how much I’ve grown as a learner over the years. That’s all for now. Good bye.

I Have Dug Deep

Welcome back to my second ever BC First Peoples blog post. 

This project was called Digging Deeper, and it was about archeology. When I first heard about this project I wasn’t too excited because archeology doesn’t really seem very interesting, but it turns out there’s actually a lot more to it than I first thought. With that said, the driving question for this project is “How might we use an anthropological perspective to better understand the history of British Columbia?”. Now with that out of the way, let’s get into the info.

First of all, we had to define what Anthropology is. I thought I knew what it was…. But I didn’t…. I really didn’t. Fun fact, there are 4 different types of anthropology, I thought it was just Indiana Jones. These four subsections are Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology and Archaeology. Now I’ll go into detail on each one.

Cultural Anthropology:

This is the study of human cultures, beliefs, practices, customs, rituals and social structures. These people are often employed based on observation, participation, and ethnographic field work. They aim to gain a cultural understanding and create positive social change. They publish their work through “ethnographies”.

Biological Anthropology:

This is the study of the evolutionary aspects of humans. They examine fossils, genetics and anatomy to gain their information. They use human biology and how different populations adapt to different environments to learn how humans and other animal groups have evolved and adapted over time.

Linguistic Anthropology:

This is the study of human language and communication. They study how language is shaped by different social interactions and cultural practices. This research helps them learn how languages change and evolve over time. They focus on the diversity of languages across societies.

Archaeology:

This is the Analysis of material remains such as artifacts, structures and environmental data. They have excavations to dig and document layers of soil to uncover artifacts. They use history, geology, chemistry, and biology to interpret evidence and further their research.

So those are all the different kinds of Anthropology but we’re not done with terms quite yet. There are still some important words that are crucial to Anthropology. These words being ethnocentrism, cultural imperialism and cultural relativism, there are also some less important terms that I will describe briefly. Culture shock is experiencing disorientation, frustration or confusion in different settings that they aren’t used to. Xenocentrism is the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own culture.

Ethnocentrism:

Ethnocentrism is a term that means to view a culture from the perspective of an outsider. This term is used when somebody evaluates a culture by comparing it to their own ideals and culture. This perspective can make one think of other cultures as “weird” just because it’s different.

Cultural Imperialism:

Cultural Imperialism is a term that means people who believe that other cultures need to be helped because it is inferior. This perspective can mean that people travel out to different cultures that they view as “worse off” and interfere with traditional practices because they need to be “fixed”

Cultural Relativism:

Cultural relativism is a term that means the opposite of Ethnocentrism. It means viewing a culture through the eyes of its own standards, rather than one’s own. This is the method that anthropologists must use in order to give a fair understanding and insight into their culture.

Now I promise that was all the important terms relating to anthropology, so now we can get into what we ended off doing. We were going to be making a website with all of our collective projects, what was this project? Well we learned that we were going to be making a digital museum exhibit about different artifacts that were in the Museum Of Anthropology. Immediately when I heard about this I knew I wanted to do some kind of weapon, so I rushed immediately to the website that we used to find our artifacts and sorted by weapons. Immediately something caught my eye, and that was a…. gun? I was quite surprised because I didn’t think Indigenous peoples had guns so I was immediately interested, so I locked that one in and started my research.

We were given a template with a few things to dive in to, those being the nation it belonged to, the date it was found or created, and a brief description of the artifact, then we had 4 extra cards embedded that were context and connections which was all of our research compiled, anthropological connections which explained how these artifacts connected to different types of anthropology, nation deep dive which went into the history and story of the nation the artifact belonged too, and finally an interactive element of our choice that would engage viewers.

Now I could explain what I researched and how I got my info, but I think it would be best just to give you the link. So go ahead and check out the website that we’ve made right here (embed the link). My artifact is the Jiiguu (Gun) and while you’re there, try checking out some of my other classmates’ work, you might learn a thing or two.

And now we come back to the driving question for this project. “How might we use an anthropological perspective to better understand the history of British Columbia?”. I think we can use these perspectives to gather more insight into what has built up BC’s history, and how different Nations have evolved over time. These perspectives can also help us view history through the eyes of those who experienced it, and help us see things from somebody else’s world view.

Thank you so much for reading my blog post on this project. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and there was a lot more to it than I knew. I hope you liked this blog post style, I tried to add a lot more images so it wouldn’t be a wall of text so hopefully this is a good change. See yaaaaa!

On The Road Again

What is up internet. Welcome to the third and final blog of this weekend. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about maybe read the two posts before this 😉). 

B.C. First Peoples is a course that students are required to take in high school in British Columbia, however because of my special little iPad kid school, it is now a plp course. Sooooo welcome to my first ever BCFP blog post. 🎉🎉🎉🎉. Let’s get started shall we.

This project was called Road to Rights, and believe it or not it’s all about the road to the rights of indigenous peoples, are you shocked, I know I’m shocked too. If I’m being honest I was not looking forward to starting this course because culture isn’t really my thing, but hey this project wasn’t that bad so who knows, maybe I’ll come around to it. One last thing before we get into the details is that this was a relatively short project so this may not be too long of a post.

Now it’s time for the driving question of the project. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. Going into this project I wasn’t at all prepared to answer this question, as I barely even knew what the Indian act was, but by the end of this project I think I’m a lot more familiar than I was but I know there is still much to learn. 

We started off by just looking into what the Indian act is. We used this infographic as a baseline introduction.

Image Credit: 21 Things by Bob Joseph Sketch Note by Michael-tdsb

This infographic was the start of what we would eventually do at the end of put project, but I’ll get to that later. We were then assigned the task of making our own infographic about the Indian act that focused on one of these facts in the image. I was assigned Band Council Systems. I would explain to you what they are, but why tell you when I can just show you my Infographic.

After this we mostly just did research for the rest of the project. We looked into a lot of the different really important and significant events in Indigenous history. If I talked about every single thing that happened, we would both be here for hours, so for the sake of time I’ll just list some of the ones we talked about. 1831: The first residential school was created, 1876: The Indian Act is created, 1949: First Nations Right to Vote in BC, 1951: The First Indian act revisions, 1973: Calder v. BC, 1985: Bill C-31 Gender Equity, 1996: last residential school closes, 1997: Delgamuukw v. BC, 2007: UNDRIP.

And now it is time for the big reveal of the final product of this project. Drumroll please. 

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

It’s another infographic….

But hey I’m not complaining, they’re relatively fun to make. But first we had to pick our topic. After everything we had looked at, the only thing that really stuck with me was the Indian act. I was interested in looking deeper into it, and seeing what thing it banned and what rules it made, but I was also interested in why they thought making those rules was okay, and how people allowed that to happen. So there was my topic, “The Indian Act, How and Why?”

In terms of designing the Infographic, my teacher was in love with the design of the drawing I showed you earlier and wanted out class to do something similar so she could hang it up in the display case in our school’s hallway. She wanted it to follow this format.

So our infographics had to line up with each other like this with a road going through them to connect them. We were given numbers based off the year our event happened so that the infographics would line up chronologically, but the number I was given was number 5, and in my opinion that is the hardest one to avoid the road in. So I had my first draft look like this. 

But then I realised as long as most of the road is visible it’s okay to overlap and my final project, which I think looks much better, looks like this. 

And now it’s time to answer our driving question. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. The acknowledgment of Indigenous rights will change the ways that First Nations peoples live and breath. By doing this we recognize that we not only owe them the same rights as everyone else, but because of past wrongdoings we realize that they are owed more than we know.

Thank you for reading my blog post. I hope you learned something new about Indigenous peoples because I know I sure did during this project. Thank you again. Goodbyeee 👋👋👋👋

Projecting a Project about a Project’s Projections

Hello again internet and welcome to my second blog of this weekend. I’m making up for all the time we lost while this site was down by making 3 blog posts in 1 weekend so if you still crave more after this one be on the lookout. That being said let’s get started.

The Manhattan Project. I’m sure most of us have heard that name but many that have heard it still may not know what it was. And if I’m being honest, that was me at the start of this project. So if you don’t quite know what I’m talking about then don’t worry because all will be explained.

Before we get into the project though we need to find out what the driving question is this time.  “How did the Manhattan Project’s scientific breakthroughs change the world?”. This is a big question that seems simple to answer but when you look closer, it’s quite difficult because there are so many different impacts it had that it’s hard to chose just one. Now that I’ve finished my starting spiel it’s time to get into the details, fair warning though a lot of what we did/handed in the project was just notes or a different form of notes so there may not be a lot of media.

We started out by learning the basics of the manhattan project. The Manhattan project was a secret U.S. government project near the end of WW2. The primary purpose of this project was to create the first functional nuclear bomb. The project involved 600,000 people and costed more than $2.2 billion, ($41 billion today) yet it remained top secret throughout WW2. We mostly just learned different facts about what it was and how it came to be through slideshows and videos that we watched. 

It was around here that we kind of took a pause from learning about the manhattan project, and started working on different forms of note taking. In my opinion this was kind of weird and felt really unnecessary for the project, as the idea was pretty much entirely scrapped moving forward. But regardless it did happen so I’ll tell you what we learned. We first learned about smart brevity, a new way to present information that is supposed to get people to understand it more. This is the format. A heading, and interesting and summarizing opener, and then multiple axioms, which are sub-headings that define what the next few bullet points will be about, and finally a go deeper section that tells you where you can learn more about the topic. Here is an example of one of mine.

https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/7ROZONNqWLTxqi

Yes I did submit that for school. No I do not regret it. Moving on.

My honest review on smart brevity style is that I think it’s probably a good formatting method that does actually work, but I don’t think the way we were made use it works. They wanted us to use it as a way to take notes, which might work for some people, but a lot of us already had our own note taking methods that we’ve perfected that we know work for ourselves and trying to force a new way on us this late into our education doesn’t work. I think this method does work for news outlets that are sharing information with readers, but for taking notes I don’t think it works. But that is just my opinion on the situation we were in.

The next note related thing the zettelkasten. This is a way of storing your notes but the way to explain how we did it is quite confusing and relies of a specific program we use in plp so I’ll just explain the universal things. According to the zettelkasten there are 3 types of notes, literature notes (the most confusing ones) are a note that focuses on one specific thing, whether it be an article that you’ve read, or a conversation you heard, fleeting notes which are small notes you wrote on the fly almost just as reminders to yourself of something like a cool idea or something you have to do later, and permanent notes which are a note about something that you want to remember for a long time. The zettelkasten seems like a good idea, but I don’t think it was explained well enough in this project, and also similarly to smart brevity, many of us already had our own way of formatting our notes that works for us. So hopefully they stop trying to teach us how to completely revamp our learning so late into our education. 

After all this we came back to our Manhattan project learning. And after a bit more research, slideshows and videos, we were finally told what the final product of this project would be. We were going to be doing, drumroll please!

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

AN ANIMATED EXPLAINER VIDEO.

Now if you’re like me you probably haven’t heard of this before but it seems pretty self-explanatory, and it is, but to further help you out I’m going to show you the video we were shown to explain. 

https://youtu.be/6h28_iry9u0?si=NBnZFF4elCrzICp5

Now we knew what we were doing, we needed to know what we were doing it about. Now I assume you’ve picked up the pieces and yes it is about the manhattan project, but more importantly why it is historically significant, and how it changed the world. Sound familiar? Maybe check out the start of this post and you’ll see why. That’s right it’s literally in the driving question. So that’s what we were doing.

Okay I’m going to rant a bit here. So after we were told this the criteria our teacher gave us was written on the board for 1 class, from what I recall we were told it had to be an explainer video, it had to be animated, it had to be about the affect the manhattan project has on the world, and it had to be 2-3 minutes long. I read these but due to my ADHD brain I happened to mostly forget them by the time next week came around. I thought it was fine because one of the benefits of PLP is everything the teachers do is left up online for us to see. Right? Wrong. For some reason the whole second half of the information page about this project is incomplete, it’s just a template that I assume is to remind the teachers what to write. I thought maybe this was okay because I could just go in and talk to my teacher, but I remembered that on the day he wrote it on the board he said that he was leaving on another grades field trip for the whole week, and when he was back (the Monday of next week) the video would be due. And so in the time that we were given to work on it during the week I had no idea what to do and just was scrambling trying to find out what any of the video criteria was. By day 2 I had given up and just started writing the script for the video, but writing the script took up the whole week. So my situation is I have 2 days before the final due date of a 3 minute animated video that I don’t have a success criteria for and haven’t started making. Does that sound stressful to you? I worked on making that video, for 8 hours straight. I was proud of myself in the end after I had completed it, but still unhappy that it had to come to this. So Monday comes and I begrudgingly drag myself into class as always to see my teacher is finally back. He asks who has finished their video and from my memory, I was the only person to put their hand up! I spent my entire day working hard and nobody else had even finished it. So I assume I’ll get extra credit for this, but no. Instead he just gives everyone an extra week to work on this. I am fuming in my chair right now but I don’t say anything due to my respectful nature. Then the next day he tells us that we were supposed to make 5 smart brevity style notes for all the research we were going to use in our video. I am very confused at this point because I already handed in my video research and it isn’t in that format at all. I assumed I wouldn’t have to worry about it, but I checked in with him regardless. He told me to reformat and gather new information for the video I had already made. So for the rest of the week I’m reverse engineering research for my video and then I hand it in. All of this was a really stressful and frustrating process but it’s finally over so I’m happy to relax and wait for my grade… And I wait… and I wait… and I wait… I am still waiting for my video grade as I’m writing this. What the heck Mr Hughes!? 

Sorry for the long paragraph but I try to express my feelings towards projects in my blog posts. Anyway now that my rant is out of the way I can show you my video. 

https://youtu.be/RHvDmO-CGZc?si=D6zkPeLh0aB4ZogK

I hope you like it because as you know it took away 1 day of my life and likely many more days due to stress.

Anyway now it’s time for the answer to the big old question. Or is it? You see I think my answer to the driving question is displayed perfectly in my video. So I’ve already answered the driving question.

Thank you for read my blog post, sorry I was a bit negative but I think this project could have been so cool and so much better if done right, but instead it just kinda felt like we weren’t always the priority and sometimes the focus wasn’t even on the manhattan project. All things considered this was a semi-decent project, which is unfortunate because it had so much potential. Anyway I’m signing off. Goodbyeeeeee 👋👋👋👋👋.

Another Tpol, How much more can I take.

Hello everyone welcome back.

It’s that time of the year again where I am required by my school to make and present a Tpol. You may have noticed that there was no Mpol blog post this year and that is because, well I don’t really know why but we did something different this time.

This Tpol will be in a new kind of format, if you have read my others then you might realise that I usually go over the best and worst of each subject however this time I will be answering this driving question “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviors have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” And then I will also be using these 3 success behaviours to tell a story about my learning journey throughout this year, the behaviors I chose are Ownership and responsibility, Contributions and Preparation (this is technically 2 but I feel the need to talk about both).

But first, before I get into the depths of my grade 10 adventure I will go ahead and help future me with his presentation. “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.”

Now that’s out the way I’ll get into it but warning, this post is not for the faint of heart, I will be sharing my honest opinions on both how I feel I did this year but also my thoughts on this year’s projects. This is how the post will go. I will go over each success behavior and choose the projects that I think show my learning best for that behavior, then after I’m done with those 3 I will give my answer to the driving question.

Okay I promise I’m actually staring now.

Ownership and Responsibility 

At the start of this year, I went into school thinking every project would be laid out for me and what I had to do would be clear but this was not the case. This year I feel I got a taste of what PLP will be like in later years. The first project I think showed me this was our Peas in a Pod(cast) Maker project. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went into this really excited because I would learn how to be like everybody on the internet, and it was really fun but it introduced to me something really new to me. This project was simple, create a podcast about a topic of your choosing, but that’s where the new concept came in. It was a podcast based on something I got to choose. This was honestly difficult for me at the start because I’m not super great and coming to decisions but I finally came to a conclusion that I knew I wanted to do. As a British person in Canada, I sometimes say words and my friends look at me like I’m speaking a different language, and that’s because I am. In England, there is a newish language being developed which is essentially a lot of slang called roadman. If you want to know more about this listen to my podcast.

But now onto why this links into ownership and responsibility. This all showed me the start of having agency over my learning. Up to this point, we hadn’t had this much creative freedom but this project we got to choose what essentially the whole thing was and this was a big step forward for me because once I found out what I wanted to do this helped me actually be engaged with my learning. This is a big thing for me because I have ADHD which means I struggle to focus on things I don’t take an interest in but if I get to choose what I have to focus on it makes school just that much more bearable.

However having all this freedom hasn’t always been a positive for me, my example of this is our PGP project Back to the Future. In this project we were simulating the process of applying for a job, but with a PLP twist. We went through the whole process of making a resume and cover letter but when it came to the interview it would be a shark tank-style pitch of ourselves. 

If this sounds interesting here is the blog post.

As I stated earlier I sometimes struggle with making decisions about myself and one of those that has been most prominent in my life is deciding my career. I have always struggled with this so when I learned about this project it’s safe to say I was afraid. This project also felt very rushed especially since most of the class was on a band and choir trip the previous week so we didn’t learn about our end goal until the week it was happening. Because of all this combined stress I ended up needing an extension (thank you Ms Madsen) but this just shows that having too much control over something can lead to feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing. I think this also displayed my growth as well because once I had gotten an extension I locked myself into learning mode and figured out what I was doing and how I would do it all in one night. In previous years I would have just procrastinated and barely scraped by but my growth through this year has taught me what I’m capable of based on time limits. In my opinion, almost all of our projects this year have felt extremely rushed or unplanned but that’s not all bad. While I may have lost a few years of my life due to stress I also learned that I’m more capable than I once thought.

Contributions

 

This is an area that I feel I have struggled with this year and most other years of my schooling. As I’ve spoken about I struggle to really care about something if it doesn’t interest me so when having class discussions about what we’re doing I don’t often have any input to give. There isn’t really one project that displays this but if I had to choose there are a few I would say show this more than others but the one I’m going to talk about is the project This is Us in Humanities. Here is the blog.

This project was all about Canadian identity but as I’ve made it very clear… I’m not Canadian. So as you can guess I really didn’t have anything to say about this project. In this project, we had a lot of discussions about different history and aspects of Canada which I honestly felt quite left out of. This is something I dislike about the education we are given in Canada, we focus so primarily on Canada that we don’t learn about things going on in other places in the world. When I came here I knew nothing about Canada and I feel like going into high school I was just expected to know things I hadn’t even heard about. This often makes it a struggle for me to understand and participate in class discussions because it feels like a lot of my previous knowledge is invalidated because every project needs to involve Canada somehow. It feels like Canada is so focused on teaching about itself that a lot of kids here don’t know anything about the rest of the world unless they go out of their way and learn about it outside school. This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to participate in class.

Sorry for the big rant but I told you I would share my opinions.

I feel like I am improving on contributing in class as I grow up because I’m realising the fear I have of getting things wrong isn’t as big of a problem as I think but I will still admit this is one of my big struggles in school. 

Preparation

This is focused on both me preparing myself inside and outside school and there isn’t one major project for this as well but I will be referencing a few projects I did this well in. At the start of this year and the rest of my life I’ve always been just kind of living in the moment and winging it which has worked for me so far but now moving into the harder years I am realising I’ll need to prepare for things and revise or work outside school too. As much as I may hate doing this I will admit it has helped me greatly and here are some examples of how this has helped me.

A big one for this is something I previously mentioned which is our back to the future project. I already stated how I used the extra time I had been given to my best ability and that didn’t happen without a little planning and preparation beforehand. 

Another Huuuuuge thing that required a whole ton of planning was destination imagination, here is the post for it.

This year we had significantly less time than we did in grade 8 which meant it required a lot of planning for meetups outside school hours especially since we had cross-grade teams. I was really proud of myself for getting through this as me and my grade 10 friend Kira took charge and instructed our team pretty well. I think I did especially well seeing as I missed the first performance due to being sick I had to push through the pain I was in due to getting shots and vaccines the day before the final performance but I made it and I think we did pretty well. I think this really showed how I’ve improved my planning skills greatly this year.

That’s all 3 behaviours so it’s time to drive that question. Just as a reminder, this is the question I’m answering “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” In my honest opinion, I don’t think I’m ready for grade 11, that’s a really big number and I don’t want to be in my second last year of high school. But with all that in mind that’s how I felt about grade 10, and look how much I’ve grown since then. I think even though I’m scared of next year I’ll be able to manage it and make it through just like I did this year. I think this has proved to me that I still have so much to improve on and now I know I’m fully capable of doing anything I want to (with the right motivation of course). There are a whole lot of ways I think I’ve improved this year that won’t fit into a 7 minute presentation or a blog post but the last thing I want you to know is.

I think grade 8 me’s jaw would hit the floor if he saw how far we had come.

Thanks for reading. See you next year?

Dragons, Sharks And The Worst Of All, Responsibility

Welcome back to my blog everybody, did you miss me?

Today I’m here to talk about our most recent PGP project and that is ‘Back to the future’. If your thinking..

“Wow they must have gotten to watch the movie” you would be wrong. I know very sad, this was much to the dismay of me and my classmates especially when we found out we would be watching a movie for the first few classes and it wasn’t the one our project was named after. However, the real reason our project was named this was because we would be thinking about what we want to be in the future and more importantly how we will get there.

So our driving question this time was “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” And this scared me quite a bit honestly, because I actually have no idea what I want to be or want to do when I’m older. Nevertheless, I realised that maybe this project could help me find that out for myself (have you ever heard of foreshadowing)? So now we know what the project is all about it’s time to find out what the end goal for this project was. We learned that we would be doing a Shark Tank/ Dragon’s Den type pitch about, get ready, drumroll

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

Ourselves! Now this may sound confusing and I thought that too, but it’s honestly quite simple. We would be pitching ourselves as a product and marketing why we would be good in a work environment. It’s essentially a mix of a job interview and an infomercial. This sounded scary at first because I don’t know how to think positively about myself -I’m a teenager in a first world country that’s impossible! But, lucky for me I have friends and family who like me (I hope) so that’s where I started to look for positive things about me and how I can work effectively.

But first let’s go through everything we did in this project in a reflecting sort of a way. As I said we started out with a movie and it was called “The Dead Poets Society”. It was a pretty good movie (very sad) and I would recommend it, “Oh Captain My Captain 🫡” (that one was for my teacher reading this).

I think we watched this movie in order to learn and understand that we can do whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. I think it helped me learn that different perspectives on different matters can lead to different thoughts on how things should be done. Everyone’s thoughts are their own and valid. Overall this was quite helpful and I found myself reflecting on it throughout the project.

 Between this and the final projects we did a few different activities to learn about ourselves and how we work effectively – such as thinking about and writing out the skills we posses, making goals that would change aspects of our lives and how we could get to them. Setting goals I always find hard but I’m getting better at it. We were also learning about different types of skills and about the 7 habits of highly effective teens and completing a bunch of tests on Myblueprint, (a website that helps you with all kinds of education and career pathing techniques). If you’re interested in this for yourself you can look here.

All of these were different ways we learned to apply our skills to new environments and back up our abilities with examples.

The final thing we had to do before the actual Pitch itself was learn about writing resume’s and cover letters, and oh boy are there a lot of different marks to hit and a whole criteria I didn’t know about. Now I can’t share my resume and letter with you because they happen to contain some information about me that I would like to keep private but if you out there and ever have to make a resume or cover letter I suggest getting help from somebody who has done it before.

But before we go into the big bad boss of the project I’m going to talk about what I learned about myself throughout this whole process. I realised that me being funny is actually something useful in the work world. I understand that being funny alone won’t get me a job however, I now know that it’s an aspect that people look for, most companies these days don’t just want a perfect efficient work robot that can do everything they need to, they want to hire people who can learn what to do well and also be friendly and a joy to have around the office. Another thing I learned is there are a few career paths I didnt consider beforehand that actually might suit me pretty well, like being a stunt performer. I had thought about it before but was scared about getting hurt however, I now realise that I would get to travel the world and have fun with people I know and I would just have to know what I’m doing and how to be safe, which there are courses for and professionals to help with. I recommend you check out the personality quizzes and some of the other ones on Myblueprint because you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself and your possible career paths before.

Now after all this it was time for the thing I had been dreading, The Pitch! As we were building up to this I missed a week of school as I was on a trip to whistler with my choir and band, (we had an amazing time but we also missed quite a bit of work) which left me less time to prepare than I thought I needed. But nonetheless I worked hard to prepare myself for this pitch and even though I needed to get an extension I still learned some things about myself while preparing and performing my pitch. Like being aware of the impact of scheduling issues. Also another thing I realised is that I’ve always thought that I’m terrible at public speaking because it terrifies me to my core. However, while preparing I realised even though it scares me so much I can fake being confident relatively well. I think this is something that PLP has taught me to do as the teachers constantly push us outside our comfort zone and have us performing tasks I would usually be scared by. Don’t get me wrong they still terrify me but I do them anyway and then reflect on them to learn how I can do it better. I think this really showed in my pitch as when mentioning some of my weaknesses I brought up public speaking and one of my Dragons said that he wouldn’t have guessed that I was a nervous presenter if I hadn’t mentioned it. Another thing I learned is that I can learn lines and points pretty quickly which is a valuable skill to have. This links me into a reflection that I made during my pitch about myself that one of my Dragons noted that I did well. I have ADHD, and the crowd goes mild. The Dragon said many people included they had this condition yet I was one of the only ones who noted how this can be helpful as well as a hinderance. This is what I said about my condition:

“I have ADHD and with the help of my medication I can ditch the bad parts and harness the benefits, I can produce high quality work, can multitask and I am an extremely quick learner.  The hyper fixation element of my ADHD means I can focus on things with great intensity and learn a lot about something in a relatively short amount of time. This means that I can be a really diverse employee.”

At the start of this project I was worried because I came into it not knowing what I wanted to do as an adult and now I realise that I have left still not knowing what I want to do, but that’s the thing, I did learn what I want to do. It’s nothing specific like other people who know exactly what job they want and how they will get there. My goal for when I’m older is to find out what I want to do with my life! I want to explore and try many different career options, I want to find out what I like through trying them out. I’ll see what aspects from different careers I like and combine them to find the perfect job for me. I realise this will take a long time but I’m okay with that because it sounds fun trying lots of jobs and at the end of the day I will have to work for a long time when I find the right thing so it’s got to be good! So that’s the main thing I learned from this whole project that’s it’s ok not to know as long as you’re open to looking, exploring and finding. And here I look back to my Dead Poets and say I understand that we as young people can do and achieve whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. If you had told me at the start of the project I would find out this of all things I wouldn’t have believed you. However I think through learning about the different ways you can find a job it has just come to me that exploring my options is something I want to do. (Sorry if that last part was a little hard to understand it’s just hard to put my feelings into words, I’m sure you’ve had that happen before)

So now to come back to the driving question “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” I feel like I’ve answered this in my last paragraph so I’ll keep it short. I’m going to use the newfound skills I now know I have to find the jobs that suit me and my personality the best and taking time to do this is ok!

Thank you for reading this blog, sorry there weren’t any pictures but I didn’t really have any that I could add that wouldn’t be just a photo of text, but just because you stayed you can have this photo of my dog

Thanks for reading, Good Morning, Good afternoon and Goodnight.

Who do you think you are? And… Who do you think you want to be?

Who are you going to be? The question isn’t what do you want to do, but who do you want to become. That’s the question I’m setting out to answer in this blog post, well I won’t be finding out who YOU want to be but I will find out who I want to be. This is a quote made by Michelle Obama which I strongly advise you readers and viewers think about and answer yourself. But with that out the way let’s get on to the post.

So what can we do to actually figure out who we want to be, some lucky people have it all figured out easily while other only think they do. A lot of people when hearing this question think it’s just asking what kind of job you want to do but this question is much more than that, I’m asking you what kind of person you want to be, who do you aspire to be like, how do you want to treat people and who do you want to associate with.

First I’m going to talk about who do you aspire to be like. This ultimately comes down to role models, who do you idolize and how can you be more like them, what exactly makes them a role model. For a lot of people, including me, a parent is a role model, it makes sense because most people love their parents because they raised them and helped them when they needed it. For me personally it’s my mum, she raised me, dealt with my annoyance and cared for me when I needed help, she works extremely hard for me and my sister even if we’re aren’t always grateful. I aspire to be like her when I grow up because she is a genuine good and kind hearted person and I look up to her because she tries hard to help others. Hopefully you have someone like that in your life and if you do think about why they are that person to you, and if you can why not tell them you love them.

Okay so now let’s do and activity that I did in class, I will give you five questions and I’ll give my answer for all of them. First up we just have who are you? For the sake of not doxing myself I’m not going to say this one. Next I’d what do you do? Personally I try to have fun with everything and I’m always trying to make people laugh, but I also play a lot of video games (maybe a bit too many to be honest). Now after that we have who do you do it for? I try to make others laugh because there is always the chance that someone I know is having a rough day and if my dumb jokes can bring even a little bit of light into someone’s day then I’ve done my job, but I also do it for myself, I personally think (most of) my jokes are funny so I can enjoy them too. Now we have what do they want or need? I think everyone needs laughter in their life so they can be happy and everyone needs to be happy and they want to have friends so I’m there to be that for them. And finally How do they change as a result? Like I said earlier if I can make anyone even the slightest bit happier then I know I’ve done a good job, so people change by being more happy when I make jokes and hang out with friends, but I also become more happy. Now you know the questions why don’t you ask yourself these things in your own time.

Another major factor in finding out who you want to be is thinking about the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. Because the people you choose to spend time with can reflect your character more than you probably think, for example if you chose to hang out with fun and funny people like I do that will in turn make you a more jokey and comedy centres person, however if you spend your time with more serious people you’ll be better off in more serious situations but you might not have as much of a sense of humor. When it comes down to it the people you spend time with often turn out to be the kind of person you want to be. 

Now I’m going to talk about the things we did in class to better answer the question. We first of all, every day made a sticky note that answered the question what are we grateful for, every day we came up with a different answer to this question, this ended up being one of my favrioute activities we did this project. 

We also did a speed dating activity to answer a few questions that might help but that would be difficult for you viewers to do without a big group of people so I’ll just give you a photo and move on.

We also read one of these books to better understand different people and why they want to be who they are and we also made connections to the events and characters in the books. Here is a few of the books. Becoming – Michelle Obama, Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad, Born a Crime – Trevor Noah and I Am Malala – Malala Yousafzai. I chose I Am Malala and we took notes on these books writing down meaningful quotes, Life lessons, Connections from the books to our lives and general important ideas from the text. I’m not a fan of reading at all to be honest but I genuinely enjoyed this book so I recommend you to read it and maybe try to make the same notes we did.

So that’s it for what we did this project, it was really short as we needed to fit the entire thing into the few weeks we had before the semester changeover. As this blog comes to a close let’s revisit the question this whole thing is based on, “Who are you going to be?” Personally I’ve always struggled with this question but this project has helped me get closer to the answer I’ve been looking for. I now know that I want to be someone that can be looked up to like my mum or Malala, but I also want to be someone that people can have laughs with and enjoy the company of, I want to help those that need it and laugh with those who I need like my amazing friends. This project was one of the better ones and seems like it could have been so much better if we got more time so it sucks it was cut short. I’m going to end this blog with one question. 

Who are you going to be?

Thanks for reading, Goodbye.

PREPOL

Hello everyone and welcome to my first ever pre-pol. Just like any other blog post this one has a driving question. That driving question is “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. This is a very important question to think about because without balance and support in your own life doing everyday tasks just becomes so much more difficult. In this blog I will review a project I’ve had this year and what I’ve taken away from it that helps me in daily life. So let’s get started.

So in order to figure out what would work for me in my PGP class we went over many strategies to help keep track of our lives and work. First of all everyday we would do happiness activities and then reflect on them these consisted of, Monday meditation, Tuesday Helper day, Wednesday exercise, Thursday journaling and Friday 3 gratitudes. Some of these I enjoyed like on Wednesdays going for walks with my friends was enjoyable but on Thursdays we had to journal about a topic and I’ve never liked writing so this wasn’t enjoyable for me however I’m glad I tried these because without doing them I wouldn’t know how I felt about them, to my surprise I enjoyed the meditation more than I thought I would, it isn’t the sort of thing I would do on my own but if offered to do it in a group I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If I’m being honest these daily activities didn’t seem to change my life much but I’m sure they work for some people just not me. Something else we had to do was reflecting on our days, weeks and planning what next week would look like. Once again this probably works well for some people but for me this just felt like another stressful thing I had to get done and brought an unneeded aspect of worrying into my life. The other thing we had to do was timeblock events on our calendar and use an app called things to schedule work and plans. This worked a little more than some of these other things but to be honest I don’t like having to refer to thing to remember them and I just keep information in my head but I still gave it a shot and here is the before and after photos.

From this project I took away that using different strategies works for different people and no one person can force their strategies on another, this is why I don’t think this project worked very well. In my opinion we were given set strategies to help manage our lives when instead we should have been given free reign to test out what worked for us, different options were given but those options had very little flexibility for us to manage them our way. While this didn’t work out for me I know others found a way that they like so from this I learned that everyone need to experiment with different options to help manage themselves.

After this project I’ve thought about what I think would actually work for me without having to worry about deadlines and borders to limit my options and I’ve discovered that I work best under some pressure so leaving work and procrastination is sometimes helpful. I like to wait until I have to get stuff done and then take a day to do all my work at once. I am able to do this because without my ADHD medication I can’t work at all but with it I can get anything accomplished however there are side-effects that make me not eat as much so I find taking them one day and cramming all my work into that time worlds well for me. 

If you read that thank you and I hope you can find something to help manage yourself like I did and I appreciate you (some what) caring about my life and tactics. Now I’m going to review each of the core competencies and see if I used them in this project. 

COMMUNICATING

I think I communicated well with peers and teachers by asking questions when necessary and helping out others in any way that I could. I would say I demonstrated this well.

COLLABORATING

This project didn’t need much collaboration as it was mainly a personal thing to get your life on track but whenever we did have to collaborate I did it well as I am comfortable around my peers by now since this I our 3rd year together.

CREATIVE THINKING

Throughout the duration of this project I don’t think I was very creative as I struggled to have interesting ideas with borderlines stoping me however once the project had ended I used my creative liberties to think about what works for me and why.

CRITICAL AND REFLECTIVE 

Since we had to reflect an almost every action we made in this project it makes sence that I did this well since without it I would fail miserably however it did did quite repetitive at times.

PERSONAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY 

This project was all about taking responsibility for yourself so I took agency over my own learning and went past the restraints to figure out what works for me personally.

POSITIVE PERSONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

This project contained a lot of knowing who you are and how you work so It helped that I know myself well and I can tell if something works or doesn’t work for me.

SOCIAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY 

I don’t think I showed this during this project because it didn’t require it at all, we only focused on ourselves this project and didn’t have opportunities to work with others.

That’s it, the blogs over, but wait we still need to answer that big question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. I found out that each individual has their own thoughts on this matter and everyone works differently, but for me letting work build up and doing it in one blow is a good strategy to get everything done and finishing it all is very satisfying and being a little bit stressed help me work better.

Thanks so much for reading my blog post I hope you take something away from this that can help you with your work. I won’t see you next time but you will read me, Byeee!

Humanities Exhibition

Hello zeros and ones on the internet and welcome back to my blog. This blog is about both my Humanities project and the Exhibition we did. So first I will talk about the project and then the process of the exhibition. 

So first of all the project name was “Dulce et Decorum est” which means it is sweet and fitting in Latin. The name comes from a poem about the First World War, so as you can guess our project was about the war. We soon took a trip to a museum so that we could better understand them, why you ask, that’s because we will be making a WW1 museum for this project. This may sound impossible now but don’t worry it’s not a big real museum we are just making our own exhibits. 

So first of all we had to visit a museum and learn from it. We went to the Museum of North Vancouver to talk to the curators and find out how to make a museum flow. We looked at all the exhibits and the different types so we could take inspiration. Here are some photos I have.

 

So after we developed an understanding of how museums work we had to design our own museum and exhibits. But first we needed to know what out topic for our exhibit was. Obviously it was WW1 but that’s too broad so to narrow it down we decided to write paragraphs to show the contrasting narratives of war. I chose the difference between war and propaganda for war. This is the paragraph I wrote.

 The contrasting narratives of war spread from the thought and ideas of the battle to the starvation and rationing done by the average person. During the First World War people perceived war as a fun adventure that they would be home by Christmas but if you know anything of the war it’s the complete opposite. People had this idea because the government wanted to imprint in their brains that the war was fun, and to do so they had methods such as propaganda full of lies that would manipulate the average folk into believing what they wanted them to. Many Canadians joined the war at the start due to being roped in as Great Britain’s ’pet’ because they were still a colony and didn’t have a say, but later on, many of those who joined wouldn’t come back. After some time all the soldiers were dying so the government needed a way to get more troops, they started making posters to manipulate men into joining and serving their country. They also made posters to force women and children to ration as another problem would soon arise. Seeing as people were rationing so much they would think soldiers would be eating feasts but it was quite the opposite starvation was a major problem of the war. Soldiers were running out of food and had nothing to eat, many died and others were traumatized. Another cause of trauma was disease. The trenches were thought of as nice places to live but they were nasty pits of death and decay. Trench foot, trench flu, rats everything was busting with bacteria. Overall the lies and the manipulation of the government were unacceptable and they didn’t value the lives of their men. To conclude the main contrasting narrative of war was it being a glamorous thing that was fun and new, versus the pain and suffering soldiers had to endure.

So now it’s time to craft our exhibits I decided I wanted to make an audio based exhibit so I thought about what our group was, I decided to be in the group about how women and societies view of women changed over the war. So I now had to write a script for it and after writing for an hour I had it. But I still had planning to do. You see I have something I haven’t told you about yet. I know what your thinking “I don’t really care but what is it” well my enthusiastic friend they are none other than real World War 1 artifacts. I know I’m so cool but honestly you don’t need to flatter me. But now I need to think about how I’ll turn these into and exhibit (that won’t be touched by small annoying children). You’ll find out.

So after all the prep we finally came to exhibition day everyone was nervous and I had my exhibit and artifacts. It was very stressful but honestly it went pretty well. The theme of the exhibition was pathways but I don’t think anybody really understood that, we gave people pamphlets that they could get a stamp on for every grade they visited. But I don’t think that convinced people. Well the Tim has com for me to show you my awesome artifacts. Your so excited aren’t you. Here they are. Sorry they are sideways I don’t know how to fix them.

Now the exhibition was over and we had so much cleanup to do but after a long hard 14 hours at school I finally went home and I immediately passed out. Thank you for reading my blog post sorry this one was long I hope you enjoyed it and have a great rest of your day.