During the beginning of school I wrote my Mission that I wanted to complete by the end of the 2024-2025 school year. This Tpol I will cover how I have grown over the course of the year, the progress I have made on my mission and reasons to which I am ready to move onto my final year of high school.
My mission đŤĄ
My mission for this school year was to build my confidence by taking on leadership opportunities, in both school and in my community. I will seek out leadership in group projects and focus on participating in class discussions. I want to push myself to take risks that align with my long-term visions and challenge my motivation to improve. I hope to see progress in my communication and I want to take self initiative to ensure that I am working up to the standards I desire to be at.
This mission has been a struggle for me to complete, but I can say with confidence that I have worked my very hardest to achieve it. Over the course of the year I have taken risks with my public speaking even when it was out of my comfort zone, I may not have always pushed myself as much as I could have but I did push myself even though I was out of my comfort zone. This year consisted of many class discussions, not all of which I spoke in, but I was able to gain the confidence to speak my ideas well in smaller groups such as during our current event discussions with Mr. Gibson at the start of the year.
I was also able to work well in the Macbeth acting confessional videos which was also out of my comfort zone, despite this it ended up being one of my favorite projects due to the fact that it pushed me to try something I knew I wasnât good at.Â
During my Mpol I split my main goals for the year into 3 big sections, writing skills, communication/confidence skills and organization skills. I want to focus on how I have improved these over the entire course of this year.Â
Communication & Confidence Skills đŁď¸
The last exhibition project was a good showcase of my learning throughout the year. We worked in groups and I was able to contribute my ideas and add important insights to my group. I had much more confidence in this project and felt that I contributed tons to my group. I was always able to find a job to help my group with, always keeping myself busy helping my group come to the final product. This final project showed how my confidence has grown over the course of the year in group projects as well as presenting my work to audience. This is the first exhibition where I wasnât nervous about presenting. I enjoyed talking to people about my experience and learning in Hadia Gwaii, at the end of the exhibition I was very proud with what I presented.Â
Photos from the exhibitionÂ
Writing Skills âď¸
My writing skills have improved drastically over the course of this year. We did many writing heavy projects this year that gave me lots of practice writing long fluent pieces such as âThe Write Stuffâ and âLegacy of Hiroshimaâ. Both these projects forced me to do lots of writing across various topics which is what I struggle with most, but they also taught me so much about ways to write that work well for me, such as starting my writing piece by brainstorming the topics I want to focus on. I also started just writing my ideas down, not worrying about grammar, fluency or anything else, then going back to refine and make my piece sound complete.
Here are some writing pieces that Iâm proud of from this year.
Human connection to the environment through nature experiencesđ˛
Another thing that helped me improve my writing was getting back into reading. Reading helps me expand my vocabulary, understand how to set sentences and paragraphs up in ways that are easy and fluent to read as well as generally helping me come up with what to write. Reading helped writing seem much less daunting to myself, made it less of a challenge and more achievable.Â
Organization Skills đ
My organization skills have improved greatly over the course of this year. As I talked about in my Mpol I have organized my craft into a ZettleKasten system which has helped me over the last 6 months. I have also incorporated using tags at the end of my documents, this helps me find connections between projects and notes that I may have not seen before. I also have began to use my calendar to help plan out time when I can complete my homework, by planning out my week I can see how much free time I need to give myself to complete the work thatâs given to me. To improve on my current calendar instead of only adding my out of school events I want to add important deadlines that I have in school to plan out working and studying times. Â
Risk-Taking & Growth Mindset đą
This year, I learned that taking risks is an essential part to my learning. Many projects this year I felt I pushed myself such as the Cold War in Retrograde project where we had to do a 20 minute presentation of current events connecting to the Cold War. Public speaking is not my strong suit but this project pushed me past those fears and I was able to be proud of how I presented even though it wasnât perfect.Â
Cold War in Retrograde Presentation Â
Not all of those risks paid off, but Iâve come to see failure as a valuable part of the learning process. Iâve learned how to take feedback and actually use it to make my work better. This shift in my mindset from has stopped me from fearing mistakes but instead embracing them, seeing them as part of the learning process.
Why am I ready to move onto the next grade?
Over the course of this year I have grown my confidence so much and that has allowed me to improve in all aspects of my learning. Confidence is so important in being able to develop, being more proud in the work I have done has also pushed me to improve my work. Has given me the motivation to work harder even when Iâm struggling because I know, no matter what I even if I fail can still be proud of what I learned through the experience. I think Iâm ready to move onto the next grade because PLP is a course that has always pushed me and contributed to make me fail over and over again, learning and truly accepting this fact is why Iâm ready to continue failing and learning into the next year.