Blog post. Humanities final. This year was good. Doing good projects. Some of the things I did I was quite proud of, debating for example. I have never done something like that. It went terribly, but I did something new I guess. 

I learned quite a bit over this year, how to make a nuclear bomb, how to become a political leader, and learning about the place I’d live for the next two three years. All of those were nice to learn. It has given me the ability to do exactly what I want. In other words, its nice things to know. Would I want to elongate these projects? Yes. I felt I learned a lot, but I also feel like there is more to learn.

Thank you for reading. See you next year.

The Fear factor project is a continuation of the Manhattan Project project, but more based around the Cold War. In this continuation we went to see deactivated missile silos, we saw a replica of “Big Boy”. Big Boy was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In the underground mansion that we went to, we saw …(drum roll)… an underground mansion! I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy it. I did. History lesson: the mansion was built in the 70’s because the owner was rich and liked the idea, not because they were worried about an impending nuclear attack. The trip was fun. Well… any trip is fun. I got to know a lot more about my classmates. I talked a lot more. Guess I had more to say, which helped me start conversations for once. I learned a lot on the trip. I created a bit of a fact book amount aviation advancements during that time, unfortunately it was never finished. Overall, liked the project, learned a lot, but unfortunately I was too distracted to take advantage of the opportunity.

As you can see… politics. Interesting. I have never really been interested in politics before this project. It has always struck me as something I didn’t really need to invest much time into. After all this, i can say that my opinion hasn’t really changed. I did learn how British and Canadian politics can change, and affect others.

At the start of the project we read the book “Lord of the Flies”. The book was good. It showed how  a group of british schoolboys in the 50’s would react, and survive on a deserted island. The book started out with them establishing a society and giving roles to everyone. The kids deteriorate to a point where they are rebelling against each other, burning the land they live on, and threatening each others lives.

We worked in groups to create explainer videos on the Canadian government. During those videos we included an animation and an 80’s school video parody. The making of the video was okay. We worked fine. The video came along nicely and i feel like we did a good job. My part was to work on the script and appear in the video.

At the end, i feel like I learned something about democracy and how it is better than chaos. I don’t know how this will help me in the future though, unless I am stuck on a desert island.

In the Great Debate project we created some debates that we presented in front of parents, friends, and classmates. We got to choose classmates that we would compete against.

My partner and I chose to debate whether High School was properly preparing students for life in the real world. I argued that High School helps students in the real world, because you can’t go anywhere without learning the basics – you won’t be able to fulfil your dreams.

I feel like I learned good debating techniques – some of those include thinking on my feet (helped me because I find it hard to follow a script when I am stressed), conveying an opinion, displaying my ideas, and looking like I’m supposed to be there. I have always struggled with this for some reason. But, i guess it wasn’t too bad in the end.

I have always struggled with stage fright.  I think I got lucky by only having six or seven people watching, and it even lifted my sprits when neither my original partner or the backup partner showed up – it was a distraction from the stress.

I felt like the project helped immensely, because after all of the practice speeches, I could somewhat convey my point.

Here is the script I planned to read. The “script” that I actually used was just me “winging it”. A video of it should be floating around somewhere. If you find it, please don’t show me. I don’t want to see it.

Anyway, during the project prep, we watched The Great Debaters. Good movie. 7/10. It is about a debate team and their road to glory. Defying all odds. It has an expected amount of Hollywood moments (bending of the truth).

Emotion, logic, background preparation, all of the techniques I learned in the project, I also used in this blog post. If they made a movie about me, it might be called the “Not-Too-Bad Debater”.