As 2017 is about to end, units and lessons are being crammed in before the holidays. The most recent unit our Humanities Ten Class completed was the Sins of the City unit: a history of Vancouver beginning in the early interwar years. This unit involved many assignments, lessons, and of course, podcasts. How was this two month unit experience like? Let me tell you.

At the start of the unit, I had a brief knowledge about Vancouver. Named after an explorer, home to over two million people, Vancouver is known as one of the most beautiful cities to live in, not to mention one of the most expensive. I am very fortunate to live in such an amazing city, and in this unit our class got to learn more about where we live and how it became such a great place. To kick things off, we were introduced to some of the things that started Vancouver’s economic growth. The Canadian Pacific Railway opened up many job opportunities for immigrants and people who were looking for jobs. Once the railway was complete, the people who were left without jobs had to look elsewhere, meaning they had to work in the industries. These industries included logging, mining and business to support a start up a city. From here the city began to grow exponentially, creating new communities and generating new businesses.

Once we learned about the city, we began reading a book called the “International Bank of Bob”. Written by Bob Harris, the book was about Kiva loans and how they help individuals all across the world. That being said, I didn’t connect with the book, finding it extremely boring at some parts and a little hard to read. The book was more of a bunch of diary entries than an actual novel. It felt like I was reading his journal, rather than reading about an actual story with a plot and characters. Every chapter felt like the same thing, over and over again. It was him travelling to a new country, meeting with someone who started a business, and how people used Kiva to help start it up. Some of the companies were interesting, like the one about creating a learning centre for people in Rwanda after the mass genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I think it would have been better if Bob were to have introduced two or three companies and come back to the same ones after two or three chapters, instead of flipping through twelve different short stories. He talked about Kiva in every single chapter, and although learning about it was quite interesting, it was repetitive. The conclusion of the book should have ended with an overview about what had happened to all the companies and what their plans might be in the future, but instead, it just talks about him going back to the United States and how he lived out his life. If this book had some minor tweaks to it, maybe it would have been a better story to read. It did however expose me to life in other cities around the world.

 

The next part of this unit was going to the Museum of Vancouver. This field school taught our class about the history of Vancouver and how it became what it is today. The main goal of this field school was to learn more about a certain topic about Vancouver and to eventually choose a topic we would compile more research for our podcast. This podcast would involve us to work in a group and create an audio file which talks about the history of Vancouver. Some of the topics included environmental issues, labour and human rights, immigration policies, and other city based topics. The topic I was most interested in was “city development”. I’ve always been interested in cities and how they function and thrive, so I wanted to learn more about how Vancouver’s development cycle has changed over the past hundred years and what the city did to develop such an amazing place. Unfortunately, despite all the thought I had put into this topic, I was instead assigned to “city growth”, which was more about how Vancouver became such a booming city and how the economy has grown over its lifetime.

I was in a group with Kate and Adam, and together we did research on how Vancouver grew so well over time. Industries like the logging, pulp and paper, and mining  all contributed towards Vancouver’s huge success over the past hundred years. Once we had done our research, we started to begin our first draft of our podcast. I thought it ended up pretty well for a first draft, you can check it out below.

However, we learned some minor things had to be changed. Some of the bits of audio were too loud or inconsistent, the city noises at the start could have been longer, things that were easy to change and were not fixed at the beginning. Another thing we had to add in this podcast was an interview. This interview was an important part of the podcast, as adding an interview to a podcast can enhance it’s interest and appeal. Interviews give a different view-point and provide expert opinion on a topic to give more knowledge to the listeners of the podcast. I interviewed a man named Tobin Postma, who works at Vancouver City Hall as “Director of Strategic Initiatives”. His focus is to look into systemic social problems like over population, homelessness and the rising housing market and recommend and develop ways to help or solve these issues. He provided a lot of extremely useful information and perspectives about the challenges the city faces around growth, but hope for the future. I thought his input both supported and enhanced our podcast.

The next part of the unit was to create a literary essay discussing an issue in the city. As a group, Adam, Kate and I decided to make our issue the tourism crisis in Deep Cove. In the warmer months of the year, Deep Cove is bombarded with active tourists and locals trying to get a taste of the west coast. Popular tourist destinations such as the Quarry Rock Hike and Panorama Park attract tourists throughout the summer, and bring traffic congestion and parking problems. Our group went into extensive research, seeing if we could come up with any ideas to help out this issue. Fortunately, we found some methods to help Deep Cove. We had to create to essays, one individually and one as a group. The one individually would be about the problem and one way to solve it, and the group essay was all of our ideas combined into one to send to a Member of Parliament.

My individual essay was really good, I explained the topic well, and my ideas were ideal and could help Deep Cove, but the conclusion needed some work as well as some of the paragraphs were a little hard to understand.

 

Once I completed these revisions, it was time to do our group essay. This essay would be sent to the MP, Terry Beech, in letter format, meaning introduction, straight to the point facts and much more. Not your “ideal literary essay” that people would expect. Anyways, our group got into development very quick, and we amalgamated our essays quite easily. In the end, it turned out pretty nicely.

 

At the very end of our unit, we were asked to create a unit end video, showcasing all of the things our class did in this unit. The video was supposed to be fun and exciting, with lots of edits and unique shots. Since we were all familiar with video creation from last year, expectations were high. We did not meet them. Everyones videos didn’t have enough footage of group work, and there was too much museum footage.

This unit was very fun to learn about and covered many angles. Our class got to learn more about our city and how it turned out to be such a gem and world class city. We are all extremely fortunate to be able to live in such a wonderful place, but I also learned that Vancouver isn’t perfect. It still has problems that the city is trying to deal with, but these issues can be solved. That is what I take away most in this unit: our city can change and will change, and has shown in the past that as a community, we can develop an even better community for future generations.