My Guided Learning Journey

In week one I had managed to complete my first consultation and refined the scope of my project.

In week 2, I had a competition to prepare for and i knew i would not have time for my Guided Learning Project, and pushed it back a week.

In week 3, I finished my learning contract and managed to submit it. I knew I was bad at multitasking so I specifically blocked out my exam week and planned my project around it. I had planned to analyse 2 books to investigate Japanese culture and history through Japanese literature.

In week 4, I was behind on the book reading as I had underestimated the time it would have taken to narrow down which books suited my project best and two weeks should have been allocated to this research.

By week 6, I should have been writing my first literary analysis, but i was still in the process of reading through the 5 novels I had selected.

In week 7, I managed to speed read through all the stories giving me a general gist of each of them.

In week 8 however, I had no time to do my project due to my exams and had to put the project on hiatus.

Week 9 was when disaster struck, I had not accounted for the fact that my parents wanted to bring me overseas during the holiday. As we only had 11 days my parents had jam-packed every single day with activities and while I tried to make some progress it was hard to sit down and write my Analysis of the Setting Sun. I still managed to re read the story and find the scope of my literary analysis.

Week 10 and 11 rolled around and I had to rush to complete projects for my other subjects, which again delayed any further progress.

Finally week 12 came, and I was finally able to start the literary analysis, 7 weeks late. At this point I was panicking but I managed to re read The Setting Sun for the third time and take down notes as I was reading. This allowed me to plan out my points for the analysis and locate quotes in the story as evidence in my analysis.

From weeks 12-15 I realised I needed to re-plan my timeline in order to finish my work on time as seen from my notebook. With a new plan in hand, worked furiously to finish my project and managed to finally complete my analysis and finish up my portfolio. However, during these 3 weeks I managed to find out just how much I could learn from The Setting Sun and how much detail was packed into it. I felt that doing 2 short analyses one for The Setting Sun and one for the Thousand Cranes to compensate for lost time, would not have done the book justice and made the last minute plan to only do one thorough literary analysis on The Setting Sun instead of 2.

Reflection

Throughout my GL journey my biggest struggle was making time to do this project amongst all my other responsibilities. I felt like I should have planned every day down to the hour in order to been able to allocate sufficient time for this project.

When reflecting on my Guided Learning Project, I am reminded of my half knitted scarf, which barely has enough rows to make a square. It was started early last year, and has since been sitting, barely started on my table since. I've realised how busy my life has become, where even the time to simply sit down and read a book was hard to make out of my busy schedule. If not for this guided learning project, my interest in Japanese Literature would have stayed like my scarf, barely started. My life is now focused on getting good grades, doing extracurriculars and taking on leadership roles. With little to no space for my other interests like baking and knitting. After this Guided Learning project, I've decided to take it slower this holiday, and to only focus on my club activities, away from anything course related.

My Guided Learning Project has given me the confidence to take on new skills. As the saying goes, " Perfection is the enemy of Progress". I was previously quite hesitant to take on new skills, as I was always focused on how good the end product would turn out, and if i thought that I would not meet my own expectations I would not even try. As GL is not graded based on the quality of our end product, but simply being able to produce something, it removed my hesitation to start. Because of this I was able to get over my initial fear of failure and create a product that showed me that I could be competent and tackle project a like this myself. From now on I'll start trying to remind myself that something is better than nothing and that I'm able to create good end products, which may not be perfect, but are definitely the steps to getting there. This project will become proof of this and give me the courage to continue learning and gaining skills in the future.

This Project definitely tested my resilience. Despite multiple setbacks amounting to a total delay of 8 weeks. I didn't give up was still able to fight to complete this project on time.

This GL project also pushed me to be self-directed. As my learning facilitator could only guide me. All the materials and information had to be sourced and collated by me. I also had to hold myself accountable for this project and the outcome of this project would be determined by me alone.

What I learnt

I learnt alot about Japan's History. Before taking on this GL project i had a vague idea about feudal Japan, and knew little of Japan after the Meiji Restoration.

The first thing I learnt through this project, was the American Occupation of Japan. I was surprised to not know about such a big event in Japan's History. The American Occupation played a large role in modern Japan's Political climate and was a big part of living in Post War Japan.

The Second thing I learnt, was Japan's deep historical ties with France and how it was the main foreign language in Japan for centuries. The influence of French Literature on Japanese Literature has manifested itself as the I-Novel genre which The Setting Sun is under.

The third thing I learnt was, Japanese Culture is also influenced by Confucianism, which originated in China. Confucianism carries the idea that men should be the sole breadwinner of the family while, women should stay at home to take care of the kids. This part of Japan's culture is still evident today with Japanese men doing the lowest percentage of household chores in the world.

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