Artist statement:I decided to draw an osprey as part of my TPOL for a variety of reasons. I wanted to incorporate art into my TPOL to help represent the amount of opportunity I have, being at this school, to pursue what I enjoy. It represents being a hands on learner and the freedom we can have with our work. Part of being an osprey is learning to persevere and I feel me and all my fellow ospreys have had to adapt and persevere through so much this year. I am honestly so happy that I chose to go to this school and had the opportunity to become an osprey in such a strong, warm and welcoming community.
Question 1: What is the most difficult thing you have done this year? Why was it difficult, and how did you persevere? The most difficult thing for me this year would have to be the COVID-19 pandemic going on. Having to transition from being at school everyday and talking with people to finding out we weren’t going back after osprey week. It was really sad to hear about and at first I thought it was only going to be for a short extension. I had tried to keep positive thinking saying we would go back but as time went on we were told we were not going back to campus this year. Though highly disappointing, it was best for the health of our community.I will say I usually don’t really struggle with doing work online, though it can be a bit difficult at times. I can always email teachers or text friends if I need to. I think my two main classes I struggled with a bit were painting and humanities. I think the main reason was just time management. In painting I really enjoyed making a digital painting of my dog but it took a long time for details. We had to turn in a Digital portfolio update at the end of every week at 3:30. Sometimes I would need to email my art teacher, Britt, asking if I could work on it a little longer. I found with all of my other classes, it was hard to find time to get enough done on the picture each week. Britt was very understanding, super sweet and was fine with me taking a little more time to get it done. Working with the new online learning in humanities I had sometimes gotten confused and called with my friend, Za, to check with what she was doing. An example of this was the happiness reader we were working on and also what time we needed to get things done. The happiness reader was a list of different popular philosophers and their idea of happiness. We had to complete one to two readings each week and give a short response on some questions being asked. I had missed the first week of reading as I didn’t see it but Za mentioned it later and I went back and did them. An example of being worried about time was the last week of our project and having some confusion about when things needed to be turned in due to slightly messed up time stamps. I was also unsure about if we were supposed to wait till Friday to do the review but me and Za talked about it and figured out the situation. Part of the project we worked on was the happiness experiment. We did the happiness experiment as our last project this year. We learned a lot about the philosophy of happiness and thought about what our personal philosophy was. For one part of the project, we chose something we believe affected our happiness and did experiments to see if our beliefs actually affected our happiness positively or negatively during the week. We recorded the data of how we were feeling each day after the experiment. I decided to call Za every day and see how much of a difference it made on my mental health and happiness. It was really nice being able to talk to my friend and make sure we were both on the same page while working on these projects and just getting to chat. The main thing I struggled with while being in quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic was mental health. I noticed my anxiety has been more prominent, things like overwhelming thoughts you don’t want to hear and things like unconsciously chewing the inside of my mouth.I feel these habits are the main things I notice when I’m feeling anxious and or overwhelmed.These habits began being more noticeable while in quarantine as I realized I was doing it a lot more. I have been trying to persevere through all of this by staying in touch with Za by video call almost every day. I found that this made a HUGE difference, though our happiness experiment in humanities talked about above. I ended up being in an overall better mood that week and wasn’t so overwhelmed with a bad mental state. So I have been striving to call with Za a few times each week to help with my anxiousness ever since the happiness experiment. I feel also being outside for a small amount of time with my mom might have had some effect as well but overall I would say just being able to facetime my friend was the main reason for my mental health improving while in quarantine. I believe the reason my anxiety got so bad in quarantine was because I didn’t have any “social distractions.” I of course had to deal with this mental state before as well but it was usually just social anxiety or sometimes when I wasn’t around other people. Thankfully I have found out a way to help keep my anxiety from being too intense by staying connected with people. Question 2: What is the most important change that you have made as a learner this year? I would say the most important change I've made has been adapting to online learning. Learning to manage time, letting teachers know how things are going, and overall getting used to the way classes were changed for remote learning. After the first week of remote learning I started getting into a sort of “schedule” to some extent. In the morning at the beginning of the week I would check all of my teachers Digital Portfolios to see what I had been assigned. Based on that I would write a plan for the week to get my work done depending on what I felt most motivated to work on first. If I felt I needed an extension on my work near the end of the week I would communicate with my teachers and let them know about it and why I might need the extra time to work. I found working this way helped me be prepared for what the week had in store and helped me stay organized with my work. I feel if I didn’t adapt to doing work remotely in a way that worked for me I most likely would have had trouble getting all of my work done. Staying organized was a key part in making sure I was getting everything I needed done during the week or properly communicating.