POL Declaration: 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.
Hello everyone, and welcome to my transitional presentation of learning. Today I will be reflecting on my learning over the 2024-2025 school year.Â
If you remember from my mPOL, I began by reflecting on my VMV statements, which I made in October. I’m going to begin this tPOL the same way, so we can look at how far I’ve come since then.
Let’s start with my vision. I said,
When I graduate, I want to be an open-minded, thoughtful, and helpful learner. I strive towards being a positive light in any team I work in and be able to work with a growth mindset on any project in my life.
While I have spent all year pushing for this, I have come to a bit of a realization that though this is a great goal to have, it is so insanely unhelpful when I try to force myself to be positive when I just need to push through and get things done. Sometimes, I will have to do things that I don’t enjoy, and forcing myself to pretend that I do enjoy it won’t do anything except waste my energy and leave me burnt out. That being said, I still think it’s important to try my best to not only start off every project with a positive mindset, but keep it up throughout. I think I have been pretty good at this over the course of the year – though I’m not perfect, I feel as though I stay pretty positive throughout my learning process.
This has been a year of much mental growth but very little habitual change. I have gotten very good at reflecting on what I do and who I am, but I have been very bad about handing in work – mostly because I struggle to actually get the work done. I often find myself starting things and getting stuck, unsure how to word my thoughts and write them down. I have never struggled with that in my life – I have always been able to just spew my thoughts out in a straight line, having them already formed into cohesive paragraphs.
Even as I write this, I am finding myself writing out many sentences on their own, leaving myself to put them together in a proper structure later. You will only see the finished product, but right now I have many thoughts that are not yet fully formed.
I have been trying to figure out a solution for this problem, as it has been an issue for me in many recent projects. For example, on our trip to Haida Gwaii, every night when we sat down to write our scrapbooks I found myself staring at the screen while my peers were feverishly working, knowing what I wanted to say without knowing how to say it.
I think that I need to find a way to organize my thoughts – and I have an idea for a solution. We all know that I’m good at talking. An idea that I have been toying with, and has been working so far, is to use voice memos to keep track of my thoughts. Often, when I’m doing things like writing, I get distracted mid sentence, hop onto a different train of thought, and then completely forget what I was originally thinking. I have recently been using voice memos to talk through it instead of keeping it all in my head. Overall, in the future, I’d like to actually utilize the tools I have to help myself stay on top of my work.
Let’s move on to something that I have concluded, in my recent reflections, to be one of the biggest things that has been holding me back.
I never considered myself to be someone who struggled to ask for help. I only ever thought that people felt like that because they were embarrassed to need help. I have recently been thinking a lot about how I see myself, and the expectations I carry for myself. I have been reflecting on the fact that I hold myself to a much higher standard than what is humanly possible: I want to have the highest grades, the most insightful projects, be the best gymnastics coach, do the best at gymnastics competitions, be the strongest leader, sing the best in choir. It’s important to want these things, but at some point or another, I have turned these into my own expectations for myself. That is totally unfair to me, and it’s become a habit. A major part of this is asking for help when I need it. Another unjust expectation I hold myself to is that I can do everything I need to do without asking for help. I have found that this leaves me unable to do so because I do not want to let myself down.Â
While for many people, the struggle comes from the fear of letting others (peers, teammates, teachers, parents) down, mine stems from the fear of letting myself down. I find that going into tests for other classes, gymnastics competitions, choir concerts, and even sometimes walking into class, leaves me paralyzed in my seat, and my mind running a mile a minute. For some, they may be thinking about how they don’t want to mess up, get a bad grade, or say the wrong thing. While those are also there for me, my main issue comes from getting distracted. Because I am constantly filling up my schedule until I am doing something every minute of the day, I spend my class time trying to sort through and process everything that is rushing by in my life. It feels like everything is speeding by and my brain is trying to catch up all the time.
As I write this, I can imagine you are thinking: well, maybe you shouldn’t do so much, Susan. If you can’t handle it, why add more? I find myself wondering that all the time. I have come to the realization that with these expectations for myself comes the need to excel in all of my fields. That includes school, gymnastics, choir, and coaching, which are all high commitment endeavours. If I tried to drop any one of them, I would be so incredibly disappointed in myself.
As I mentioned earlier, I struggle asking for help. My goal for next year, and to improve upon for the summer, is to begin turning to support when I need it. Whether it be my parents, coaches, teachers, or sometimes friends, I’d like to have the ability to ask for and get help without feeling like a failure when I need it.
In order to do this, I need to be ready to step outside my comfort zone. While sometimes I can do that, other times I am not very good at it. Next year, my goal is to keep pushing myself to do things I am less comfortable with, such as asking for help.
I was going to wrap this up with a few wins from this year, but I am realizing now I am running short on time to do so. Because of this, we will celebrate my one project this year with the most major win: The Write Stuff! The Write Stuff was a Humanities project we did back in March, and I am so proud of the work I did for that project. We got to write any piece we wanted to, so I reflected on a pivotal moment in my life with a journal-style writing piece. If you can recall from my mPOL, I talked a lot about how I work well when I have the freedom to do what I want with a project. This one spoke to me as soon as we began because I am someone who loves to write. Especially when I can write about what I want, it flows so easily and allows me to reflect and learn, processing what I’m writing at the same time as I put it out. This project was an absolute win because I completed all the work on-time, and feel as though I produced a great final product.
Other than that, I don’t have much more to say. Thank you for tuning in to my tPOL! Peace out Grade 11.