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Hi and welcome to my 2024 mPOL. As always I have to start with the POL 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.

Over the start of this school year we were doing a lot of stuff focused around personal productivity and happiness. The personal productivity part is something that I think is the most important for me and I learned a lot from it, what worked for me and more importantly what didn’t. This and more we did to answer the question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?” 

When doing the personal productivity we tried a lot of different strategies, many of which involved my calendar and lists. This is where I started to figure out what worked and didnt work for me. I found that when I had every single minute of my day planned out it seemed a lot more stressful and overwhelming, especially when we added the daily things check ins. I have a very busy schedule and when I just continually get notifications about the next thing it seems overwhelming and unmanageable. I find what works best for me is to have only some of the key things that aren’t part of my normal schedule on my calendar so I don’t forget them. I’m a creature of habit so I will rarely forget when I have something that I have every week. 

Last year I talked a lot about how the things I needed to work on the most were procrastinating and the amount of stuff that I was taking on. This year I found that my procrastination has gotten quite a bit better, still not perfect but better to a point that I dont think it’s holding me back. My problem this year is how much I’ve taken on. I’m the kind of person that wants to do as much as possible and I want to be as well rounded as possible but the problem is sometimes it backfires when my schedule changes and suddenly I’m triple booked three days a week. This is something that is really important to myself that I fix for next year, with the classes I’m taking being significantly harder. 

How much stuff I was taking on started really becoming obvious with Destionation Imaganition. DI is one of those things that, if you’re group isn’t all working at 100% from the start you are going to be in for a rude awakening later. My and my group, Matteo, Mika, Allie, Jack, and Jasper, started off really strong. We went through multiple different brainstorming sessions for the design of everything and how it would all play out. The problem started when I went to Seattle for the Cray Cray Yay Yay project. During the time I was away the rest of my group was supposed to have gotten a good chunk of the building of it all done. What I came back from the trip to was a big wooden outline that was for the frame. Me and my group really had to buckle down and get the work done. I ended up pulling 2 or 3 almost all nighters to work on DI as well as catching up on other school work plus work and basketball. I even ended up staying at the school until around 7-7:30 the day before the DI tournament to do as many of the finishing touches as I could. Sadly I wasn’t able to make it to the first DI tournament but luckily there was a second date that we were a lot more prepared for and even won a special award for. 

So the question is, how am I going to improve going forward? Anyone can say that they are going to improve but don’t always follow through on it, myself included, so how will I manage my schedule and school? My grade 11 year is lining up to be one of my more chaotic ones with a few grade 12 classes as well as classes I haven’t talken before. My plan for the rest of this year and going into next year is to prioritize school. That was a big part of the problem and a big part of where the procrastination has come from in the past. I was just not as motivated for school as I was the rest of the things going on in my life. Next year is going to be a big part in determining if I get into university and which one I can get in. Getting into a good university is very important to me and I’m seeing now more then ever that it’s going to take a lot of work and sacrifice to get there. I’m going to have to make some tough decisions in the upcoming months to decide what I can continue doing the same way, what I have to cut back on, and what I have to stop doing all together. 

Welcome back to my blog! It’s that time of the year again for an exhibition. This was our final one of the year. The driving question for the project was based around contrasting narratives, me and my group were specifically focused on the contrasting narrative of the traditional women compared to the WW1 and post WW1 women. For it I built a replica of a WW1 hospital, the place where women could work on the frontlines for the first time. This and more all went into the final and main thing, the exhibition.

The main part of this all was building of the replica hospital. This was a process that took multiple class times plus the better part of a night to complete and get to a point where it looks good and I was happy with it. The reason I built the hospital for the exhibition was, like I said earlier, it was the first chance women had to work on the frontlines. The traditional women, the pre WW1 women, was expected to be this stay at home mom that only worked as a teacher or a nurse until married. WW1 was the big tipping point where, since the men were away at war, the women got the chance to step up and prove themselves. They got the chance to vote for the first time, if their husbands and sons were at war, they started working in jobs like in factories that were previously male dominated, and they got their chance to work on the frontline for the first time in the hospitals. This snowballed and continued to grow even after the war ended. 

Finally, the day of the exhibition arrived, and I was excited to present my project to a group of people. The exhibition was held in the library, which all of grade 9 had to transform into our own WW1 museum, and each student had their own table to display their work. I set up my cardboard replica of the WW1 hospital, along with the card explaining it. As people began to arrive, I explained my project to them giving similar points to what I saying earlier. 

Overall, the PLP end of year exhibition was a success, and I was proud to showcase my project alongside the rest of PLP. The planner I had created for the cardboard replica of a WW1 hospital was an essential tool in the building process, helping me stay organized and efficient. Through the process of constructing the replica, I developed an appreciation for the WW1 women and what they went through. And finally, presenting my work to people and sharing what I learned was a very rewarding experience that’s always a highlight of the exhibitions.

It’s that time of year again where I do a mPOL. As always, I must start with making the POL 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.

At the end of last year, I did my tPOL. In it I talked a little about how one of my biggest problems is procrastination, which still is still the case but for a different reason. Last year my problem was more with how I managed my time poorly while this year is more with the shear amount of things that I have taken on. I am the kind of person that joins many many things and fully commits to them, in other words I bite off more then I can chew. I have always had a problem with this but I feel that it has become more apparent this year, at least in my eyes. Because of how much stuff I have going on, it’s less of a question of if I can manage my time, it’s more a question of if I have the time at all. This leads me to procrastinating things that I don’t find as important so I can try and give the more important things my time. 

Me biting off more then I can chew does have some benefits, for example the work that I hand in. I think a good example of this was the asexual reproduction comic that we made in science. In this we were tasked to make 5 different comics on the different ways of asexual reproduction. At the start of this, I planned out to make each comic with detailed drawings, an interesting story line, and more. The problem was that this was a lot for me to do, especially with other things that were going on, inside and outside of school. So I ended up putting it aside and doing other things that I thought were more important. When I finally came back to it, it was late to hand in and I didn’t have a lot done, so I had to do easier versions of what I originally planned. This is something that I found helps my work because when I try and go big on a project and end up having to dumb it down, it still ends up better then if I had started small and built up on it. 

Another thing that I want to work on this year is my learning habits/systems. In my learning plan (which I’ll talk more about later). In my learning plan I said that I wanted to get into the habit/system of doing my homework in shifts (20-30 minutes of work with no distractions then a 5-10 minute break with rewards for myself when I get things done). I find that this strategy really works for me and helps me get into the right mindset to get work done, the only problem being finding enough time at once to sit down and get stuff done. I find that I only normally have less then 1 hour at a time, unless it’s a bit later at night, to get the work done. This makes it harder to stick with this habit/system so I have to work extra hard this year to be able to stick with it. This may prove to be a challenge but I think it will pay off in the end. 

One thing that I think I have been doing well with this year is FAILing then learning from those FAILs. As you may know, fail stands for first attempt in learning, and I think one of my strengths has always been my ability to learn from my mistakes and improve on them. A good example of this was the Power of Geography ebook. This was something that I FAILed in a lot, and was still able to take criticism and learn from my mistakes to make it something that I am proud of. In my first draft or two, my ebook looked very messy, had too much writing compared to the photos I had, and even the photos themselves were poorly edited, if even. Through the feedback I got, and even my own personal opinions, I was able to pinpoint specific things that needed work and fix them. I was able to cut the text down to a manageable amount, I was able to lay everything out in a more visually appealing way, and the thing I spent the most time on, I was able to edit all the photos to something that I was at least somewhat proud of.

Looking back, there is always stuff that I’d want to change within my projects and work that I hand in, and an amazing example of that was with my first film documentary. This was a project that I more or less had to do most of the work last minute on it, due to the interview portion. I ended up sending out emails to around 3 or 4 different people and/or groups. The ones that responded mainly said that they couldn’t. This lead me to only really being able to plan out my video and get bits and pieces of the B-roll. Thankfully on pretty much the last day possible I asked Mr. Hughes for an interview and he was able able to do so. Once I was done with the interview, I still had to get more clips of B-roll, now that I knew what specifically I needed. I was able to get some revisions the next day for my documentary, but there is still a few things that I would want to change. My biggest thing looking back that really needed to be changed was the part where I actually talked about avatar. I think that it was too sudden and too short to make a lot of sense. I think I could have given it more of an introduction at the start of my documentary to give it more context and not make it seem so out of place. I do think that if i was to go back to it now and edit more and revise more, I could make it a lot better. 

The final thing that I’m going to talk about is my learning plan and what I could maybe even change. I thing that this year, for the most part, I have done a good job at keeping to the goals that I set for myself on my learning plan and getting the proficiencies that I wanted. There are always a few exceptions were I found that I haven’t done my best work or met the goals I set for myself, but I thing that for each subject overall I have been keeping on track. Something that I think would be a good thing for me to change would be to change my goal to an extending in humanities. Since humanities will be my only PLP class next semester, I think that I should set my goals a bit higher in it. Humanities it also not my best subject so I think that setting a higher goal might really help me try and understand it better. 

In the end, I think that this has been a fairly successful semester, but still with room to improve. 

Hi, and welcome to my final scimatics blog post of the year. This was a pretty fun project where the final result was a comic. The driving question for this project was “How do cells and diseases interact?” There were a few steps that we had to do to get to the point where we could write the comic. We had to do our normal mind map, we had a wanted poster on our disease of choice, we had a storyboard, and of course, we had the final comic. 

As we normally do in scimatics, we had a mindmap to start of the project. In it we more or less just start writing about the subject, in this case it was how do cells and diseases interact. We write questions we have, thoughts/things we already know, and some examples. 

The disease wanted poster was a chance to pick our disease. In the poster we had to research and draw our own interpretation of the disease that we would later go on to put into our comics. We then put that all onto a poster and did our best to make it feel like an authentic wanted poster, while still displaying the information. I decided to go with ebola because I knew that it’s a well known disease that I could get a lot of information on. 

The storyboard was where we really had to start thinking about the comic. We started to plan it out but not in too much detail, while keeping in mind that we were going to add more on. We had to keep this in mind because we were supposed to keep the comic around 20ish panels long. We also had to include about 10 scientific words. I think that mine was not terrible but I did end up redoing a chunk of it. 

storyboard template (2) (2)

To finish off this project, we had the comic. This had to be about 20 panels long, with the scientific words from before and it had to be in full colour. I do wish that I had spent a bit more time on the drawings because they ended up being not the best. My story was also a little bit boring but I couldn’t think of ways to make it less. Overall I do think that my comic did a good job showing how cells interact with disease. 

battle of ebola

So, How do cells and diseases interact? Well, there are a few different ways that they interact, but for the most part it is a bit of a battle. The disease needs to find host cells to reproduce, while the cells have to defend themselves and the body. I think that I did a pretty good job on this project. I could have used my class time better but I do think that I was able to use the vocabulary that we learned to make the comic pretty realistic as to what would happen.