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This year I had many ups and downs, two feild schools, and was juggling classes like never before. The experiences I got from this school year were like nothing I’ve had in any other year, and this presentation is a full reflection of my 2024-2025 grade 11 year. 

This year, two of the biggest things I struggled with was handing in assignments on time and coming to class late. Something that I find seriously contributed to this was the change in class schedules. Having 8 alternating classes to keep up with seriously overwhelmed me and gave me a workload I wasn’t ready to handle after coming out of the pandemic only having to juggle four classes worth of homework for each semester. This uptick in workload was meant to be offset by the alternating days, but in PLP we had Humanities every day anyway, which made the alternating days pointless as a way to help with homework and task management.

Something else I found that contributed to my decline about half way through the year was my slow degrading of all my work ethic. I talked about this in my MPOL, but after winter break it’s sort of like I forgot every single strategy I had, and I found it very difficult to built some of these strategies back up. I did manage to stay afloat for the rest of the year despite this, even though it did lead me to falling behind later in the year.

Some things I am proud of from this year include: my Cold War presentation, and my fishing game from the year end exhibition. The presentation I made for the Cold War project ended up even surprising me. The topic was fascinating. I loved diving into the history of abortion rights and simultaneously tying it back to a complex point about Donald Trump’s administration. This project is the one I think I learned the most from this year, and it is a direct result of how much effort I put into it. It really solidifies the saying of “you get out hat you put in” for me. My fishing game from the spring exhibition is another thing I’m very proud of, something that I had the idea for and helped to develop, as well as painting most of the fish. It was fun to make something fun and interactive while still being educational. It was also a great way to test myself and see how well I had retained some of the knowledge from our tour guides up in gwaii haanas, and I remembered everything surprisingly well!

Despite all the things that went wrong or right, I think I did some really great work this year and  I’m proud of the things I accomplished.

Something from my VMV that I think I reached the goal of (specifically towards the latter half of the year) is my engagement and active listening. In Haida Gwaii, I found myself paying attention easily and soaking up all the information I could. This helped me to contribute to an effective activation at our spring exhibition.

However, I didn’t reach all of my VMV goals. My agency is what I screwed up on the most, in my opinion. This is what led to so many assignments not being turned in or handed in late.

My mission was: I will try and bring my art into almost everything in creative and innovative ways while also using my focus tactics like music and pomodoro timers to get all my assignments finished. I want to put myself out there and communicate with my team members and classmates by asking questions andoffering help when I’m asked in order to prepare for my post secondary education. I will continuously be myself despite what anyone else thinks of me in order to build confidence, and I will encourage others to do so as well.

I think I managed to hit all these points decently, even if my values didn’t quite meet the mark. I was able to get to know some of the people I don’t usually talk to, and it was fun stepping outside my comfort zone in that way. This year I’ve definitely seen a shift in myself and the way I view my personal relationships, something that has really helped me for the better.

despite the semi-bipolar work ethic I’ve had this year, I really gave it my all to make things I’m proud of for projects like The Write Stuff and our Cold War project. Something both of the outcomes of these projects have in common is that I connected their final products back to my own personal passions, those being social justice and vampires. That brings us to what my strategy will be to improve for next year….

putting more effort into centering projects around things I can easily get invested in.

I want to make sure I will be able to lend my energy towards schoolwork with as little pain as possible. By reviewing what worked for me this year and comparing every success, I have noticed a pattern. They all draw in things I am already invested in to get work done more efficiently. In the coming year, I hope to take this knowledge I gained from my reflecting and put it towards future learning opportunities.

This year I started off with a few simple goals as a learner in three categories, things I wanted to improve upon. I’m going to try to keep this simplistic and focus less on filler, so this MPOL may be a bit different than the ones I’ve done before.

First, I’d like to talk about my vision, and how I think the progress toward it is going. 

Some examples of how I am working toward this vision include: applying to the artists for kids program (specifically meant for helping teens build their artistic portfolios), taking part in the ECU Teen Art Group for another year, and experimenting with more mediums like sculpture, watercolour, and charcoal.

Some examples of things I need to improve on to achieve this vision include: working harder on my job search, finding more oppurtunities for volunteering and work experience.

My mission this year focused on bringing my vision to life, and showcased a few specified ways that that could happen. I’m happy to say that many of these strategies and habits have been working well for me since the start of the year, e.g. pomodoro timers and communication with classmates.

I have found myself opening up more and more this year as my confidence grows, and I have started asking and answering more and more questions. My classroom participation has improved, and it’s something I’m pretty proud of. Pomodoro timers are an adhd managing strategy that I learned from my therapist, and I’ve found a brilliant app that works well for me. Building these habits, I have improved on my agency and self regulation, two success behaviours mentioned  in my VMV plan.

Now that we’ve talked about the more general parts of my VMV and how my school year has gone thus far, let’s get into the details.

Agency

I’ve struggled slightly with the “listening to critique” portion of this success behaviour, simply because recently I have been struggling with getting all my assignments in on time which leaves little room for revisions later on. I feel like before winter break happened, I had a really good rhythm going and my habits were doing very well, but the two week break sort of threw me off and now my habits are all out of whack. This is a big issue for me, where if I have a good habit going and it gets interrupted by for example a vacation or my schedule changes, I am almost entirely unable to return to that previous schedule without a ridiculous amount of effort. This makes it pretty challenging to keep up with homework, since having a productive streak can get interrupted by hundreds of little things that I can’t predict and throw me off my balance.

I have been asking more questions in class as previously mentioned, which is something I feel came naturally to me as I found myself in late 2024 and throughout 2025. I’ve really been building my confidence as a learner and as a person. An example of this newfound confidence can be seen in the coffeehouse choir performance I’ve signed up for in April, something the shows how I have evolved and come out of my shell recently. I’ve always had bad stage fright, but I’ve been less scared to do daring things and come out of my shell as of late.

Engagement

As I talked about before, my contributions to class discussion have become far more frequent. I’ve found myself chiming in with new ideas more and more, which is something I want to continue to push and build on throughout the rest of this year. My confidence and self worth have become a pretty huge chunk of the things I want to continue improving as I’ve navigated through 2025, and I’ve decided that my own confidence has become a pretty big theme of the year for me. I want to be proud of myself and what I create, and always push for better.

Self Reg.

The struggle with my self regulation for things like time management, distraction mitigation, ADHD paralysis, and other things that impact my ability to self regulate and keep myself on task has been one of my biggest setbacks for years, having stayed with me since elementary school. At times I find it very difficult and sometimes physically uncomfortable to force myself to do schoolwork, most of the time it takes hours for me to be able to work comfortably, and I forget what I was asked to do the second I switch to a different tab in my browser. Simply exiting out of craft can ruin a good session of work for me, because I might end up forgetting what I needed to do and compulsively clicking on instagram instead, which often sucks up more hours of my time. This is something I know I will need to work with my parents to get through, and their support is vital in this area. Even as I’m writing this paragraph I’m actively resisting the urge to pick up my Apple Pencil and get back to working on my latest drawing, and I’ve been sucked into it multiple times already. It’s very difficult to deal with and very hard to understand when you aren’t someone who deals with it.

The next steps in my learning journey definitely revolve closely around finding a reliable way to help maintain habits in a way that my brain can work with. We’re playing on it’s terms, not the other way around. My biggest issue is the way that one moment, I can have perfect schedule and all the stars will be aligned thanks to my hard work in building up these habits, and then it will all come crashing down because one day my usual schedule had a slight change. Before winter break, all my math homework was getting finished along with most of my PLP stuff, science stuff, and yearbook stuff. After winter break, I don’t think I’ve actually handed in a math assignment since, and it’s just because my rhythm was broken while my brain was still getting used to the whole concept of teams for math assignments after having used Showbie for years and years.

Saying simply “just go do the homework” isn’t good enough, because that’s not how it works. I need to find proper ways to allow myself to be able to work comfortably and complete assignments before deadlines. I think one of my big focuses for the rest of my grade 11 school year should be on finding this solution, because this problem has haunted me for years and will continue to stick around if nothing really changes.

This year, we did so many new things, one of highlight being the Alberta trip on which we learned so much about Canadian history. Before then I’d never been on a school trip that long, and the longest one I’d gone on had only been for 2 days (outdoor school). This is a summary and reflection on everything I have done and learned about this year, and also how I could have done better.

One of the projects I struggled with this year was the building a nation project. I felt it just wasn’t a topic I was that interested in, and for that reason it was a lot harder for me to focus on the things we were doing in class. I think a lot of the work I produced during this project was mediocre and I want to be able to put out high quality work in all the things I do, whether the idea of it is captivating to me or not. I think next year I should try to find interesting things in everything I do, that way it will be easier to focus on the topic we are learning about in class.

I think the most interesting thing I learned about this year was all the things I researched during the WW1 project that we did in humanities this year. I got to present some very (in my opinion) captivating work for the exhibition, and I did some research on human psychology and trauma during war. My least favourite/least interesting project from this year was the Frankenstuffies project. I thought the book was boring and I had a hard time staying on top of reading deadline because of this. I thought I would like it more because of the creation aspect, but overall I found this project unfulfilling.

An instance where my goals for my work changed as I worked on it was during the prep for the spring exhibition. When I was working on my art for the exhibition, I originally had a much different idea then what it ended up as, but the more I worked on the original sketch the more I disliked it, so I did a 180 with it and decided to use a completely different style for the art. These are the drawings I ended up with, I’m very proud of how they turned out.

here are the art pieces:

Something I struggled with this year in PLP was the blog posts. I had a hard time committing to them, more specifically when nearing the end of the year. Next year I want to put in an effort to stay on time with blog posts, and with that staying on top of assignments.

This year, not all of the work I did met my standards. A lot of it was rushed or incomplete, and I wish I had thought about putting more time into my work so that I could create and learn with much higher output quality.

During my mpol, I set some goals for myself for the rest of the year. The main one that I think I completed to it’s most potential is the one in which I talked about how I wanted to explore my own interests more. This goal was mostly about wanting to learn how to express emotion through art and also make my art look more pleasing, and I think I was able to accomplish this goal with evidence for it from the spring exhibition. The drawings I made were able to effectively and clearly tell a story about the progression of trauma throughout war, which is definitely something I wanted to accomplish with this goal.

Now let’s look back at my learning plan. My statement of learning intent was “I will improve my time management and work on task management. In order to do these things, I will aim to police myself when it comes to staying focused in class. I will strive to listen and learn, and be open to new concepts and ideas. When I don’t know or don’t understand something, I won’t be afraid to ask for help from my peers or a teacher.”

I think I really fell off on my statement of learning intent nearing the end of the year, and I’m not sure whether this was something that came out of burnout or just lack of motivation in the final stretch of the school year. It was most likely a mix of both, but I do know that once the middle of may hit I was feeling unfulfilled and bored when it came to school. I feel like I could’ve learned a lot more if I had just spent a bit more time thinking about my statement of learning intent whenever I was feeling less motivated.

Despite this, I think that overall I was able to commit to a lot of the goals behaviours I had listed in my learning plan, for example:

-I feel like I achieved my maker goal of being the most creative version of myself possible through some of the art I made this year in and outside of school

-I was able to set reminders for assignments and regularly checked basecamp like I said I would in the habits section of my learning plan

-I was able to implicate the system I talked about in my learning plan for after school and weekends

This year was filled with plenty of different successes and F.A.I.Ls, all of which I hope to be able to learn from in the future. To answer the driving question, I think I am ready to move on to the next grade level because I am looking forward to extending my learning capabilities and using the things I have learned this year to make higher quality, more captivating work that I can use to express topics, feelings and emotions.

Honestly, when I found out we were gonna be going on our first learning advance, I was quite nervous. But, in the end I decided to go, and it was a blast. Here, in this blog post, are all of the things we learned on our Loon Lake learning advance.

When we first got there, I was very relieved. Who wouldn’t be, after an hour long bus ride? The first thing we did at Loon Lake was take our stuff to our cabins. I was a little disappointed to not have been put in a cabin with my friends, but I got over that quickly. The second thing we did that day was go to eat lunch, of course. The food up at Loon Lake was much better quality then I had expected. After that we did advisory (going over rules and how you’re doing), had evening fun (self explanatory), had dinner (which was delicious) and then went to sleep back at our cabins. And just like that, day one was over.

Breakfast had to have been the highlight of my trip. It was so good, for day 2 breakfast we had pancakes and breakfast sausages. After that, we headed down to our morning advisory, which I had some trouble getting to. After that we took the “ferry”, which was a dock type thing that you could pull across the water, across the lake so we could go on a nature walk. I loved the nature walk, I really enjoy being outdoors. One of our teachers saw a fox, and I found a piece of what looked to be quartz. I don’t really remember what happened after that, so we had advisory and dinner and went to bed.

The last full day there was spent doing tons of fun activities like laser tag, battle archery etc. when we finally got home, I have to admit I was a little relieved. The trip was fun, but my bed at home is much more comfortable than the one at loon lake. That basically sums up my school trip to loon lake. I had lots of fun, and in the end I managed to also form new bonds with some people.

This is the Ebook I made while on the learning advance.