Hi, and welcome to my tPOL. Before I begin, I must make the tPOL declaration. 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.
Halfway through the year, I did my mPOL. The mPOL was a reflection on my work throughout the first half of the year, while the tPOL is me explaining why I am ready to move onto grade 9. Throughout my tPOL, I’m going to be going through my different PLP classes this semester, scimatics and humanities, and pulling some examples from them to show why I should move onto grade 9.
Humanities
Humanities is a subject that isn’t really my strong suit. I tend to especially struggle with history, which wasn’t the best since we had all of our projects that were almost entirely based around history. The projects that we had for humanities this semester were The Renaissance, Argh Matey, and New Beginnings. All of these projects had different thing that went good or bad with them, or even just had things that I FAILed in.
Out of these projects, I think that my FAILs are the most important things that happened. If you didn’t already know, in PLP FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning. The reason that my FAILs are important is because mistakes can help you learn. If you do something wrong or poorly, you can take criticism and learn how to improve it. I feel that taking, and using, criticism is something that I do very well. The best example of me FAILing in these projects is the seycove advertisement that we did at the start of the New Beginnings. It was something that we were doing to see what we remembered from past projects about photography, editing, and layout. In my first attempt at it, I forgot about all of the things that I had learned in the past, making it look terrible. I took some feedback from some of my classmates and my teachers then started making changes. The feedback that I was given, allowed me to make my second version much better.
The other humanities project that I’m going to talk about is the argh matey project. This project had good examples of things that I did good in and things that I could have done better. The main thing that I think I really did good with in this project was getting things done efficiently. I feel that all my class time was used very well and, when we were filming at cates park, I was able to finish the project. The thing that I definitely could have improved on was my story for it. I had a bit of trouble with making the story enjoyable and have all the necessary information. I do think that I could have made my story a bit better if I had put a little more time into the actual writing of it and not all my time into the research.
Scimatics
For this semester, with scimatics being a lot more focused on the science aspect of it all, I had to push myself a bit more then normal. The reason that I say this is because I tend to understand math a bit more then I do science, but I do think that I was able to still do a pretty good job understanding the science this time around. The projects that I had for scimatics this semester were Chemistry Coding, Ultimate Design Challenge, and Comic Cells.
Out of these three projects, the Ultimate Design Challenge was the only one that was mainly math, it was also the one that I think I did the best in. A big part of the final result of this project, the presentation that we gave to the class about our design, was the calculations. For most of the shapes, we were given the formulas for surface area and volume, or we could just look them up, but I changed myself by doing shapes that didn’t really have a set formula, meaning that I had to figure them out. It was a fairly hard and tedious process, with a few FAIL moments, but I was able to do it in the end. I think that the whole process of that showed that I am a very persistent, and stubborn, person that will always do my best to follow through with things that I’ve committed to, in school and personally.
The Chemistry Coding project is the last scimatics project that I’m going to talk about because I feel that it really showed who I am as a learner. The first reason that I say this is because, like I was saying with the Ultimate Design Challenge project, I was really trying to challenge myself and see it through. We had to code a game in this project, and I was trying to do something a bit more complex, so I was using tutorials and videos and even other students to help me with making it work. It also definitely showed my ability to take and use feedback. I was continuously making changes and getting feedback/ideas from others.
In the end, I have really learned a lot about myself as a learner this past year. I think that, in this semester especially, I’ve really started shaping into the learner that I want to be. I do still think that there are things that I need to change if I really want to become that learner. The biggest change I’d need to make being my ability to use time more efficiently because, I know I’ve said this a lot in the past, but I always struggle with procrastinating and staying on topic, making my work not always as good as I want it to be. With that said, I do think that I did better with that every once in a while and that, with time, I can become a lot better with it.