Normally for each project we’ll be connecting ideas. Usually from a historical event or series of events, and seeing how they can connect to today in order to gain a deeper understanding of what society can learn today from events of the past. By this point, term 3 of grade 12, that’s pretty much routine. So this project, The New Normal, was a big change.
I’ll explain why, then show the product. So for this project we were put into novel study groups. I was with Alex, Willa, and Isobel. We were studying the book Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. Our task was to create a presentation answering the driving question: How do literary dystopias help us understand what is happening now? Here is our Keynote…
See Keynote Here

Station Eleven

So the first topic of that novel was the novel Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. We read this book over a period of 3 weeks. Every week we would meet in a zoom meeting with the class, as well as smaller groups that consisted of the 4 people who were all reading the same novel. Personally when I began reading this novel I was fascinated by the idea of it.  It’s a post-apocalyptic dystopia caused by a disease driven pandemic. That’s very like what we’re experiencing today. As the book continued though I lost that connection and interest. The constant jumping from character to character and all over the timeline made it a chore to read and hard to finish. Also, the ending was not satijsfactory at all. I made notes for each discussion, but I found the most interesting thing I did though, something that helped drive our answer to the driving question was find this article. Here. It is an article from Time about is,olating and how that effects people.

Dystopian Journals

The other thing we were doing weekly was our dystopian journals. These were weekly reflections on what we had read and how it connects to today. I very much enjoyed writing these as they were a way to take what was being said by the author and make some sense of it. It was also a chance for me to try out writing again.

If you’re unaware of the current situation, we’re living in a pandemic. So, school is different, it’s 100% virtual and the content is skimmed down and delivered to us differently. I would say that what I learned from this unit was drastically altered due to our current situation. From my book I learned that the situation we are in is barely bad compare to what it can be and that helps me understand that we are going to be fine. The academic thing I learned is that is the strategy of the author. As far as school goes, I’ve realized that personally at this point in the year, my mark can’t go down, there is minimal work, and I’ve committed and been accepted for post-secondary next year. In my head I’ve already checked out of high school so I’m finding it hard to enjoy my work.