As I move forwards in my high school career, a lot of thoughts cross my mind. Of course I’m excited to move forwards, but at the same time I’m nervous about the unknown, and nostalgic of my younger days. I probably sound funny saying that I’m nostalgic at 17 but some of my best memories are of PE class in grade 8 or moments from old PLP trips with the boys. As I become an older member of the school I feel I have a little bit more responsibility to make sure that younger grades can have similar experiences to the ones I did. Today I will be sharing why I am ready for that responsibility, ready to move forward in my learning and celebrating my work from this past year.

I guess a good place to start are highlights of my year. Pieces of work I have completed that I want people to see when they’re done. Things I’m proud of. Since my last Mpol, I’m really proud of a few things. First off, the class’s Macbeth. I could list a million reasons as to why it didn’t run its full course but I think most of them were out of our hands. Of course I take my share of responsibility for the failure, as I would’ve if it had succeeded. I think the Macbeth project was great for team building, it really showed how important a cohesive team is. We almost had a mini-government in the management roles and the people they governed in all the other roles which really emphasized the importance of clear and frequent communication. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not so much proud of the final product, but more so in the interesting and thought provoking learning that is hard to get anywhere else.

I’m also very proud of my TWIL blog posts under the same project. Since Mpols this year. All of our time has been spent on We Shall Overcome and Macbeth. All projects (including these two) involve usually one or two blog posts wrapping up and reflecting. During Macbeth I got to write blog posts on interesting topics as part of the TWIL posts. These posts were super open format which allowed for a lot of creativity and freedom of topic. For one of my posts I made a podcast that I’m super proud of, on infamous disasters and cover ups of the 20th century. For another post I discussed ease of communication (across the world) in modern day compared to Elizabethan times. All things that I found very interesting.

Over this year, probably throughout my whole learning career, I’ve had a realization. Success for me is directly correlated to passion.”You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick out.” – Steve Jobs. Of course there’s a lot in between passion and amazing work. It’s easier said than done to actually become passionate about something. At the beginning of PGP I was honestly struggling to become passionate about atomic habits. I thought it was kind of abrasive. I now realize I needed to find something to take that I like and look at the rest of the book through that. I like things to be easy and the atomic habits had a whole law called “Make it Easy”. So that’s where I chose to start from in my final project. I think this years PGP shows a nice crescendo of learning in my case.

At this point, I still think I could improve on every aspect of my learning, I still don’t feel I have mastered anything which is good motivation to continue. An area of improvement that I would like to work on in specific is receiving feedback. As a creator I can get attached to my work and sometimes when I get feedback I’ll either ignore it or change it to fit with current ideas. I think to change, I need to understand the value of someone else’s feedback as they have a much more objective view of the creation and aren’t biased. My plan going forward is to keep an old and new version of a project and ask a third party for their opinion.