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.
Here we are again, our Presentations of Learning. Last time I did this presentation I was super nervous and thought I had to do perfect. This time around, I will do my best to be relaxed and more confident about what I say. So, without further ado, my Mpols, a reflection on my learning so far.
This year so far had been very, very eventful. Some points that I will talk about in this post are: engagement in school, specific projects, Field studies, my concussion, and DI. Now, if you look at this list its kind of all over the place so I will do my best to connect and explain these points.
I think a good place to always start during these presentations is my learning goals I made at the beginning in of the year. These goals are something I will often be coming back to thorough this post but for now I will do a basic rundown.
It might be hard to read the text boxes on the page. but all of them basically sum up to say I will be a perfect student who excels at almost everything in and out of the classroom. As you might guess, this is crazy unrealistic. I don’t know why I didn’t learn from last year, but that just isn’t really something I should be aiming for. I should be aiming to get better and maybe even go above and beyond in some parts of my learning that I need to improve on, making me a more well rounded learner. I have since adjusted my learning plan to make them realistic, and will be revising these throughout the rest of the year.
The first big thing this year that we did as a class was a Field School. We went to Alberta on this study in early September, which I really liked exploring with my friends. I always love Field Schools, so you could probably guess how excited I was to see how early we were going.
This trip really started the year out with a bang and got us as a class excited for the rest of the year. We went to places I would never have otherwise been, such the exclusive part of Lake Louise, the view point on the Lake Louise hike, the Big Beehive and discovering the endangered snails. To give you a bit of perspective, it was like giving a bunch of already excited kids Redbull just before a soccer game. This would make us crazy with excitement, which is kind of what this trip did. But it was definitely an amazing trip.
School engagement:
I would love to say that I am 100% invested and dedicated to school and school work, but that would be a lie. To be honest, I don’t know how dedicated I am with school. I like to be in class with my classmates and I like all of my teachers, but everything else about school just doesn’t interest me all that much. There are so many other things around me that get me distracted from school and academics in general. This is something I have been struggling with most of the year and am dong my best to help myself and problem solve. I find that as a result my work is certainly not at my potential. I learn best when my body is moving but even then I find myself getting distracted. I know being engaged in school is important especially as I move up in grades and I really want to try to find a way to put more effort into school, and hopefully get more out school as a result. And I don’t think it is a PLP thing, I am struggling to be engaged in mainstream classes as well.
This is an image of my original thoughts and goals in relation to my engagement. This has since been revised.
Favourite project:
One project I really liked was metaphor machines. These machines were products of our imagination and thought process which we developed over a span of a month and a half. I really like learning about the history of the Qing Dynasty and how it is reflected in modern day China. The machines we built took over a month, and they were extremely tedious to build because every detail had to mean something. For example, one of the parts of our machine was 14 marbles falling down a ramp and this represented the 14 provinces of the China and how they all collapsed into a rebellion against the dynasty. I think I am most proud of the teamwork that happened and the actual machine itself. During this project I got know some people that I’ve never really talked to before and that was a lot of fun. I personally am most proud of making sure the machine ran as I was the Building Director. I was proud to share our work with everyone during the Winter Exhibition.
Concussion:
In November, I got a concussion from a field hockey ball hitting my temple. This really set me back academically and physically as this took away one of the things in my life that helps me regulate myself, which is sports. It set me back quite a bit in school as I couldn’t focus at all in class, and was having trouble understanding almost all of the work, and it was taking almost all of my energy just to be there and socialize. As this was my first ever concussion, I didn’t realize how long it would take to recover. I kind of thought it would just go away within a month. I worked very closely with my physiotherapist, and they helped me through my concussion by giving me exercises and treatments that would help. As I needed to wait a while for physio clearance to play sports again, I didn’t really have balance between school and sports as it was only school and no sports. This really affected me because being active and playing sports is such a big part of my life.
DI:
In PLP we participate in a tournament called Destination Imagination where schools from all over the lower mainland compete to win in different categories. This is my first time doing it since we didn’t do it last year, but my brothers did it in previous years and I’ve always watched them. My group this year had one of my good friends, two other grade nines and two grade tens. We don’t normally work with different grades so I thought this was going to be fun and the grade 10s had done DI before so we were hoping that they would help us through the basic steps and help us strategize so that we could have the best possible tournament. Our group was tasked with making a machine that could launch a beanbag a certain amount of distance, as well as a play, that creatively described how the launcher fit into the everyday world. Well, we all had big parts in DI. Ultimately only four of us ended up performing. Our first performance went quite well. We stuck to the script and came first over all the groups in our category. For our next tournament, the provincial tournament, we improved big parts of our script and a little bit of our machine. We had learned how to work together well during the first tournament so we knew that we could do way better this time round. We ended up coming first overall of the entire province in our category! Although, for both the performances, the grade tens did not perform, I still feel very proud of our hard work and dedication. I’m actually looking forward to doing it again next year!
Conclusion
Overall this year I think that I grew as a person and a learner. All of my mistakes I made this year, which were a lot, I definitely learned from. One of the things I did different this year compared to last year was asking for help. There were a couple times this year that I think I should be very proud of, those moments were when I asked for help when I needed it. Whether it was from friends, parents, or teachers it almost always cleared something up or helped in some other way. This to me was the biggest change I think I made this year.
Overall looking back on my first semester in grade nine PLP, I think that I have met my goals, while also improving in all the places where I had hoped to. I have created pieces of work that I can be proud of, while also learning how to be a part of my class. Looking forward to the rest of the year, I hope to be able to continue developing my skills as a PLP learner, as well as provide work in every project that shows a complete and sophisticated understanding of the topic.