Hello and welcome to my final blog post of grade 11. PLP’s spring exhibition this year was titled “Impact” since grades 10, 11, and 12 were all working on defining what a “community impact maker” is. At the exhibition we had all chosen our own example of a community impact maker by picking someone from our community, and we had made a contemporary portrait of said person to present. 

The driving question for this project was “what makes someone a community impact maker?” and we started this project out by learning all about what a “crazy one” is. For those who haven’t seen the massive “crazy ones” ad by Apple, which was released over 2 decades ago, you can watch it down below. My class defined a crazy one as “someone who goes against the mainstream narrative to push the human race forward”. We came to this conclusion by watching multiple films about so-called “crazy ones.” The films we watched were Amadeus, Gandhi, and Hidden Figures. The first two titles are quite obvious about who the crazy one is, but Hidden Figures is a film about 3 African-American women in the 1960’s working for NASA at the height of the space race. It is a great film and I recommend watching it. Anyways, after we watched these films the class all participated in a socratic seminar. We’d done them before in the past this year and my participation in them was quite embarrassing, so for this project I was very determined to contribute to the seminar. 

I am very happy to say that I contributed in all three seminars. I’d say my strongest one was the Amadeus seminar. I had planned very well for that one, especially because I got to watch the movie on my own (I had missed school) which let me be more focused while watching. I think my weakest seminar was the Gandhi seminar. I didn’t participate as much as the first two, but I still managed to make some references to the text and ask a few questions. All in all, I am very proud of the growth that I managed to have in these seminars this semester. 

After we had watched the movies, we moved on to what a community impact maker was. Using what we learned about crazy ones, we decided that a community impact maker was “someone who made a positive change to their community”. After we had done that we began to choose our own impact makers. After some research, I decided that my impact maker would be Robert Dollar. 

Since he spent his entire life in the lumber industry, I felt it was only right that my contemporary portrait included trees in some way. He also managed to live to 88 years old, so what better metaphor for resilient and withstanding than a tree? My idea for my portrait was that he was holding up the town above him to show that he was the “father” of Dollarton (family tree) and that without him, Dollarton would not be the same. I am happy with the idea that I managed to come up with for my portrait, but the perfectionist in me wishes I did a better job on the execution level. Nevertheless, it was another successful exhibition. 

This was a cool project. It was interesting to learn about the history of the community I live in. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I did as much thinking in this project, but I feel like that has something to do with me and not the project itself. After a long conversation at my TPOL, my teachers and I came to the conclusion that in order to take this project to the next level, I should’ve taken initiative and done my own research to extend my learning. If I had taken that extra step to consider other perspectives on Robert Dollar or thought about other similar events or people around the world, I feel that my project could’ve been taken to that next level I’ve been looking for. Still, I always love to learn about history, so like always, I loved to learn about my community.