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Grades 9-10： Personal Growth Portfolio Sharing Session

March 8, 2019

It has been said that most people want to change the world, while few want to change themselves. The first step that needs to be taken in the process of growth is to find one’s true self.

The personal growth Portfolio project, or PGP, provides a great opportunity for 9th and 10th grade students to discover their true self and, consequently, set a clear direction for their future.

Over the last semester, students shared and communicated their thoughts and dug deeper into themselves through a variety of activities. The PGP project continues this semester and is bringing more to the students and teachers.

From morning assembly to afternoon lecture, the 6th of March for the 9th and 10th graders was packed with in-depth reflection on the meaning of identity, discussions on what it means to be who you are, and a look back on the hard work of the previous semester—all in order to concretely answer questions on how we define ourselves and sum up our growth over time.

In the morning assembly, Mr. Pardy and Mr. Slonim asked students to reminisce about the events of the previous months. They had students participate in a simple game of memory to get them thinking about how identity is not just the classes they take or the things they like, but something that stretches beyond such simple terms.

This jogged students’ memories during the afternoon CAS class. It was divided into two parts. One part involved student representatives from each class presenting their story in-depth; the other part took the form of an interesting interactive game as students guessed each other’s personality and traits based on their artifact of choice.

First, student representatives gave presentations on their own unique objects. From a small bracelet to movie posters, from works on a canvas to a handmade artwork, from a school magazine to a thick notebook, the objects shared growth stories and unique hidden significance. For example, the bracelet not only shows the student’s love and enthusiasm for tennis, but more importantly, accompanies her through every single game, reminding her that persistence will finally translates into success. The seemingly ordinary school journal represented the experience of trying to fit into multiple cultures, as well as the confusion caused by multiple identities.

During the second part, students played a complex game requiring them to define the owner of a given object. Objects ranged from bottles to English projects, among other interesting and insightful items. Participants took turns trying their hands at guessing (and ad-libbing) how the object related to the anonymous person’s object(s).

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As the event drew to a close, the students were further aware of the importance of the abstract concept of identity. Many times, this idea gets muddled in the day-to-day, in the constant flow of life that we are subjected to. We can sometimes forget to reflect on ourselves, on how we as individual humans may be defined, and on how we’ve grown over a period of time.

At the end of the day, we are all our own person, determining for ourselves how we may be defined to others, not just through descriptions, but by the lives we lead and the environment we surround ourselves in. We believe that the effort will eventually be rewarded.

Written by 9(10) Brandon Wu, 10(6) Andrew Cheng Pictures by Grades 9 and 10 Teachers & Students Supervised by Xie Junyu and Zhou Dandan）