In my DP classes I feel like we focus so much on producing quantity work that we forget about the quality of the work we produce. The opposite is true in the IA; we believe that learning for the sake of creating multiple products is not what learning should be about. Learning should focus on creating "beautiful" work, work that we're proud of, work that we're eager to share with others, and work that we've crafted.
time to create "beautiful" work?
These past two weeks have been crazy busy for me. I had a math test, an econ test, a bio test, TECHO, my birthday; the list was pretty much endless. On top of all of this, I had a documentary and a POL due. I was frustrated because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to finish it all. But I was even more frustrated because I knew that given my time constraints, I was going to rush through the editing of my documentary. It bothered me that for the past two months I had been working so hard to produce a film that I was truly proud of, and that I was going have to throw it all away in the final step, the editing. So Andrea and I did what most of us are afraid to do.
Don't get me wrong, it's extremely important to meet deadlines, because that's something we're going to have to do for the rest of our lives. But it's also important to realize that once these deadlines become unrealistic and unhealthy we need to 1). speak up and 2) plan out our time.
Teachers are humans, remember? They too have busy schedules, and they know what it's like to be a busy teenager. Therefore, when they know you've been working really hard on something, many times they won't mind to give you more time for it. This was the case with Mr. Topf. He knew that we had gone through iteration after iteration and that we had planned out our time, thus, he was understanding of the extension we needed.
but I promise that I'm about to connect the dots for you.
I know that many times we have this urge, this driving force telling us that we can do it all, but there's a difference between doing it all and doing it all well. This year, I've gone from wanting to do everything, to wanting to do a few things and really dedicating myself to doing them well.