It’s that time again — it’s time for my 2025 MPOL (mid year presentation of learning). What is an MPOL? An MPOL is where I showcase my progress halfway though each year, revisit my goals, and set new goals to help me improve my learning throughout the year. Enjoy!
This year I have been working hard on myself. Trying to take my work beyond what is expected of me and create work that I can be proud for years to come. Work that doesn’t just show what I learned, but who I am and who I aspire to be. Work that pushes me to dive deeper into the things I am passionate about, and explore new things to find new passions that I can carry with me.
As I get older, I gain a deeper sense of who I am. What you’ll see throughout this post is that I know a lot about myself. I have experimented with all sorts of different ways of learning to see what works best for me. I am getting very good at understanding what works for me, and what doesn’t. However, one question still lingers over my head:
Who do I want to be?
This is an all encompassing question.
What kind of work do I want to create?
How do I want to present myself to the world?
What do I want to do with my life?
The closer I get to the end of my high school journey, the more terrified I get. All my life I have considered myself a very well rounded student and I am academically very gifted. How I want to use this talent is another story entirely. Again — who do I want to be?
At the start of the year I created something called my Vision, Mission and Values (VMV). The Purpose of this was to create a vision of who I was going to be during my grade 11 year, create my mission for how I will achieve this vision, and define the values that I will need to hold to achieve these goals.
What my VMV did a great job of was setting goals that I know will help me. In fact I know these goals will help me because they are the same goals I have been setting and refining since my grade 9 MPOL. Check this out:
Does this mean that I perfected myself in grade 9, and that I don’t need to grow as a person because my goals are perfect? No. I am not the same person I was in that photo and I certainly don’t want to be. I am happy I was able to identify what works for me so long ago, but two years have passed since I gleefully sat on a bench on my iPad and had that photo taken of me. It’s time for the future.
Now that we’ve identified who I need to leave in the past, let’s talk about some of the examples from this year, and what I think they can tell me about who I want to be.
My Goals Work (Kind of)
First, let’s talk about an example of how these goals I set at the start of the year work. To be clear, I’m not getting rid of these goals. I am simply upgrading them to allow for upgraded learning.
The first humanities project of the year was called The Manhattan Project Project. The second humanities project of the year was called the Legacy of Hiroshima. Both had extremely similar topics, one being the manhattan project, and one being the direct aftermath. The only difference was the final product.
The final product for the Manhattan Project Project was an explainer video explaining the impact of the Manhattan Project. I did mine on warfare. I ended up going super in detail about this and extending my research far beyond what was expected of me. I dedicated a lot of time into creating this final product because I enjoyed learning about the global politics side of the manhattan project, I enjoyed the animation process, and I was passionate about my final product. These all led to me enjoying the creation of the final product and therefore putting in more effort into making something I was proud of. I was a huge fan of the video I created. Check it out here:
The final product for the Legacy of Hiroshima was very different. We had to write a formal essay about the short term and long term implications of the bombing of Hiroshima. I did not care for the formal essay style, and I especially hated using in text citations. While I still found this a very good project, I didn’t create a final product that I would celebrate as my best work as it did not bring me as much joy in creating. What I should’ve done, was focus more on bringing the things that interested me about Hiroshima and explored those, which was part of the criteria of the essay. If I had focused more on that, I think I would’ve created a better essay that I can show off as my best work. To read the essay, click here.
This serves as a clear example of how I know these goals work, but am still perfecting the system. Often times with this, I am at a loss when I get stuck with a project that I don’t enjoy working on. There are ways to get around this, but these are not as easily specified in my VMV. This is something that I would like to update moving forward.
Biggest Success
My biggest success this year was definitely my last humanities project, The Cold War in Retrograde. In this project we were tasked with creating a 15 minute presentation in which we traced a modern day event back to the Cold War. I did mine on the banning of TikTok, which interested me heavily. This project really inspired me and I had an amazing time constructing a presentation with an interactive element.
I spent a really long time researching and had a great time presenting to my peers. I had a super enjoyable time engaging with them and answering their questions. I was laughing lots and genuinely having fun with it. I really enjoyed the presentation because developing my knowledge and sharing it with my peers, while scary and slightly out of my comfort zone, pushed me to do something that seemed daunting and have fun while doing it.
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/056tODAHUhGuV7iMH_e5tii6w#Dystopian_Genre.pptx_2
What does this teach me? This teaches me that I strive when I know I have to do something that scares me. And what did I mention at the start of this post?
Figuring out who I am scares me.
This is the main thing I’m going to add to my goals:
I will push myself outside of my comfort zone to explore new passions and expand my learning to new and scary places
This goal will help me to achieve success beyond each individual project. As I explore new things, and develop new skills, I will start to understand more about who I want to be, and what I want to do with my life. The more I practice going outside of my comfort zone, the more I will learn about myself. The more I learn about myself, the more I can learn about who I want to be. My goal for this post wasn’t to decide who I want to be, it was to determine how I will find out. To see what I discover about myself, keep an eye on my blog.
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