tPOL 2023 – Advancing

Before we start, here is the POL declaration- “Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Hello and welcome to my tPOL (transitional presentation of learning). In this post I will try to answer the question “Why do I feel I am ready to advance to the next grade?”. In short, I am ready to go on to grade 11 because I have become proficient at the skills that I learned and developed in grade 10. And hopefully the rest of this presentation proves that. I have chosen one project from each class to represent me as a learner this year.

First, a quick look at my learning plan.  I did an excellent job this year at trying to reach my proficiency goals for each class, which were rainbows 🌈 across the board.

Some things that I feel I have done well at that are in my learning plan this year would be;

  1. I have been using things regularly for both school and non school related tasks and it has helped me greatly.
  2. I have been communicating with teachers more frequently when I need help or some flexibility. This was something I have never been good at but I feel like I finally made some headway on it this year.
  3. Creating authentic work that I feel represents who I am and my worldview.

Something that I want to improve more on in my grade 11 year will be handing my work in on time. To do this, I will structure my homework time more clearly and get help from my mum to keep my accountability on track.

Evidence From my Classes

Humanities

Save Juno Beach!

One thing you may or may not know about me is that I have loved learning about WWII ever since elementary school. Half of the books I own are WWII related and war movies are by far my favourite genre. So imagine how excited I was to find out that we were doing a humanities project on my favourite topic in history.

Let’s pop over to my blog post that I did regarding that project – > Juno Beach

I chose to talk about this project today because it shows my passion as a learner. I have always been able to learn %200 faster when im learning about something that I am genuinely interested in, a skill that PLP suits so well because we are generally allowed to focus on specific topics that pique our interest.

Maker

My Podcast – The Alt Manifesto

First of all how cool was it to practically be able to make our podcast about whatever we wanted? Remember when I just said how I am so much more engaged when I’m learning about something I’m genuinely interested in? Well this was literally a perfect time for that passion to shine for me.

Personal Growth Planning

I’ve decided not to choose one specific “project” from PGP because I feel like they all kind of blend together into one larger picture. At the beginning of the year I was still just a fairly organized 15 yo who didn’t feel like there was any need to worry about my upcoming adult life or post-secondary plans. First we organized our physical and mental spaces, then worked on building up good long term habits with Atomic Habits by James Clear, then thought about our future careers and how to market ourselves like adults, then started asking questions like what degree am I going to get after high school? What schools might I go to? How will I financially support myself? How can I be financially literate?

Now I stand here as a 16 yo who can drive a car, has a job, and is saving for the future. I have vague plans for post-secondary that I am looking forward to exploring with my mum next year. In PGP this year I did exactly what the class entails right in it’s title, and that is why I am ready for grade 11.

Thank you so much for coming!

Marketing Myself

Helloooo world of blog. I haven’t really done any blog posts yet this year specifically about my careers class so guess what we are talking about today? Yep my Personal Growth planning aka PGP aka Careers class and what we’ve been working on.

So how does one market themselves? In this case, I am talking about marketing yourself in terms of job opportunities through things like resumes and business cards. The choices that you make when choosing how to present yourself to potential employers can greatly influence your chances of getting that job. So this section of our PGP class set out to prepare us for the job hunting and professional self-presentation of our futures.

Driving Question;

How do I make career life choices?

Answer – planning. Let me explain;

We started by looking at our dream careers and our realistic careers, what those jobs would initial and what the prerequisites were. And then finding the prerequisites for those prerequisites and so on. What schools do you want to go to? How far from home are you willing to travel for university/college? What degree do you need? Where do you want to end up living? What’s your financial situation going to look like? Etc. Answering all these questions is essential to planning out any career life choice you make. Tracing out where you want to go and how to get there is how you make career life choices, or at least how you make good career life choices.

And to help us start making these career life choices, we started answering the question “How can I effectively market myself to employers?” To convey our answers to this question, we each made new resumes, business cards, and a cover letter draft that we could send out to potential employers.

The Resumes

Above you will see my updated resumes that I made during this course. I really like the one that has my picture on it because it separates my qualities/soft skills from my skills. An employer can make their decision just by a quick glance over a resume so it is important that they are neat and organized in layout. I think I did a wonderful job creating an appealing resume that accurately reflects me marketing myself.

The Business Cards

As you can see above, I have 2 different business cards. One I chose to do a simple black and white with minimal information and personality, the other is coloured and has some line graphics on it. I like the beige aesthetic one because it feels more personal and includes my title as student/sales associate.

The Mock Interview

Finally, we did mock job interviews. My partner Dana and I spent a lot of time carefully picking out interview questions that we thought displayed a good mix of our skills and personality, being sincere with our answers as well. We came into school dressed professionally and ready to shoot. We then dressed up and filmed the interview with both people answering and asking the questions. Practicing like it was a real interview helped me feel better prepared for any interviews I will have to do in the future because I already know what questions may be thrown at me and how I should respond to show off my best self. I think this interview shows off my skills in communication and my passion for my interests, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here is the video Dana and I made (I’m the brunette);

Conclusion

Overall this section of PGP has made me feel more confident in my abilities to get another job in the future when I leave the one I am currently at. I am excited to use my new resumes and maybe even hand out a business card or two. It was sometimes difficult to find colours or fonts that matched my personality, and trust me you can spend a very long time flipping through fonts that just dont feel quite right. But being able to critically think about one’s future is a skill I have always loved to use and exercising that in this project was very helpful for me. Thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke

So Many Lies And Incongruences

Content warning; there will be mentions of residential schools, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and other traumatic events for First Nations peoples.

This is not the first time we learned about Canada’s wrongdoings towards indigenous peoples in class, and it wont be the last.

Keystone 1

Keystone 1 for this project was reading the book The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline and filling out reflections and contributions each week relating to the chapters we read. This reminded me a lot of the “Lit circles” we used to do in elementary school, and I really enjoyed it. First of all, The Marrow Thieves is an amazing book that I had heard of prior to reading it in class, so I was super excited to be analyzing it. I would like to share with you my journal of reflections and contributions, so SPOILER WARNING if you havent read it yet.

Reading Journal pdf

As you may have seen, for some of my contributions I chose to make art pieces, and in one case an animation (that you would not have seen because that file is a PDF and cannot play the video but trust me it was cool). I usually don’t like making art because I find that my perfectionism gets in the way and I end up just giving up on  the art. But I really wanted to do something different that wasn’t just a piece of writing and I am super proud of how they turned out.

At the end of the journal there is a reflection answering the question “How does The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline reflect Canada presently and historically?” And I would like to charge a clip of that reflection with you now.

The characters in the book experienced loss of family, both chosen family and biological, just like indigenous people did during the time of residential schools and especially the sixties scoop. They were unable to know if their loved ones was alive or where they were taken, a heartbreaking type of pain to feel that was felt by a whole race of people. This type of pain is felt heavily even to this day because of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. The ramifications of the colonizers treatment of indigenous peoples in both the book and real life have long lasting consequences that will not be forgotten.

Keystone 2

DQ – How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time?

The driving question for this project can be answered by the work I did in keystone 2. Here is a brief look at what keystone 2 is about and the competencies that went along with it ⬇️

Keystone 2 was completed in 3 parts; history, contemporary issues, and civil disputes, and how each of those topics could be found in art. For each topic we had to find an art piece (could be any kind of art including music) and tie it to a specific topic or event that related to the main topic (I.e. Canada’s peace and friendship treaties for history or MMIWG).

For part 1 I chose to focus on historical peace and friendship treaties. I chose a piece of art that I found on a website with a research paper dedicated to Canada’s peace and friendship treaties. Lnuey.ca was an excellent source that I found for this topic and extremely helpful for writing.

Here is the art I chose that directly symbolizes the peace and friendship treaties. I encourage you to go to this link to see my write up on what the peace and friendship treaties ment and how this painting is represented. Keystone 2 pt 1. Treaties & Art 

Part 2 was about contemporary issues that indigenous people face culturally and how that can be seen in art.

For this I chose to focus on cultural appropriation. I was researching artists who were indigenous activists when I came across Kent Monkman, a Cree artist from Manitoba. With some help, I searched through his gallery on his website to find a painting that I felt could tie into the cultural appropriation topic. This lead to us finding a painting called “Welcome to the Studio”. This painting is actually too large to be imbedded here without me cropping it up so you will have to see it in my writing reflection -> Contemporary issues and art.

The final part of keystone 2 was a similar task to the first 2 parts, but this time it was related to a civil conflict. I chose to focus on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls because I think it is a powerful topic that is still very prevalent today. My reflection shows the connection to the red handprint and red dress movements that we see today as activism for this issue. The link to my full reflection can be found here -> MMIWG and art

The Collage

The final product of this project was a collage (physical or digital) showing what we had learned over the course of the project. Along with this came a short written reflection on our learnings and what we can do for truth and reconciliation.

I feel guilty now as a Canadian looking back on what my country did to the First Nations peoples. I had a pretty good understanding of most of this information before we started this project but I always felt that it didn’t affect me much. I learned much more about how the history of Canada’s wrongdoings against the First Nations people still affects them to this day through intergenerational trauma, lateral violence and cultural appropriation. I can contribute to Canada’s truth and reconciliation by continuing to learn and take seriously the lessons we are taught on this topic. Especially next year in my BC First Peoples class.

 

Conclusion

So this project contained a lot of heavy topics and was very impactful. During this project I heard someone say “If you feel comfortable about truth and reconciliation, you’re not doing it right.” And that really hit home for me because it is on the shoulders of us white colonizers to right the wrongs of our ancestors in any way we can. I did excellent work throughout this project and really showed off my authenticity and raw willingness to learn and participate, some skills that have grown immensely for me over the past year. Thank you for reading this post.

As Always, Brooke

Commemorating Canada

Hello all and welcome back. This post will be regarding my most recent humanities project, Save Juno beach! In this project we got to learn about World War II and Canada’s involvement and significance in said war. I have been fascinated by WWII for many years now so I was super excited to do a WWII project! So without further ado, lets hop into the project.

Driving Question

Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?

The Project; Keystones 1&2

We kicked off this project by learning all about WWII. Who was fighting? What was going on post WWI? Great Depression era? What was Canada doing? And how do all of these events and a grave economic collapse lead to WWII? Good thing I took extensive notes on all these topics in class because now I have a bank of knowledge that I can refer to anytime. Here are examples of some of my notes;

In keystone 1, we used our understanding of the criteria for determining historical significance to ascertain the 3 most important reasons why WWII was significant either for Canada as a nation or Canada’s impact elsewhere. Luckily my extensive note taking was coming in handy because I immediately knew what I believed to be some very significant events. I ended up choosing my 3 to be, in no particular order, the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Dieppe, and Elsie Macgill’s manufacturing of Hurricane planes for the Allied airforces. In case you were curious about these events or why they are significant, here is my writing for keystone 1 – Historical Significance of WWII

Keystone 2 reintroduced us to elements of rhetoric that would help us write our final composition for this project. We had previously learned about ethos, pathos, and logos in a project from grade 8 so it was definitely time for a refresher to step up our game. Part 1 of keystone 2 had us analyzing a text to look for its usage of rhetoric to get the message across. I started off my analysis by annotating the text as I read it to try to catch any usage of ethos, pathos, or logos. This ended up making it much easier for me to write about when writing my analysis to hand in. The question to be answered for keystone 2 was “What is the author saying and what are the choices they made to effectively communicate that message?” and I saw many areas appealing to different rhetoric schemes but found the main usage to be that of  pathos, appealing to emotion. 

Keystone 2 Analysis

Writing Process

To solidify our message for our final writing composition, we needed to develop a thesis. I wanted to recognize the importance of the Juno Beach Centre representing Canada globally and bringing people together. The final thesis that I came up with was;

“It is important to have Canada represented on the world stage when it comes to WWII memorials like the Juno Beach Centre because it is preserving the memory of Canadian soldiers, promoting international understanding and cooperation, and calling attention to the shared history and values that unite Canada and its allies.”

And before we jumped straight into drafting, we also did some brainstorming to make the writing easier because we would already have laid out what we wanted to talk about or make points of. 

After that, we finally started writing drafts of our composition. I ended up making 4 drafts in total before landing my final copy. I utilized a plethora of feedback from my peers and teacher to mold my writing and fix any mistakes I made. I found it super helpful to have multiple sources of feedback because sometimes certain people would catch mistakes that others didn’t or have a new idea for wording something that I wouldn’t have thought of. 

Overall I am really proud of my final work and my performance through this project. So, why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre? Here is my answer in my final composition, “Commemorating Canada”. LINKKKKKK

As Always, Brooke

Going to DISNEY WORLD??!?!?!!

Ever heard of Walt Disney? Or just Disney in general? Me too. Let me tell you about this project that we just did on Disney world. 

The Beginning 

We learned about Disney’s history, how Walt Disney came to create the whole franchise, and how his vision is being lived out today. To capture and sort out of of this new knowledge, we each started a PKM (personal knowledge management) system. My PKM consists of fleeting notes and summaries that I wrote about all of the different texts we viewed to help us understand Disney. You can find those at the top of the page on this link here.

Driving Question + Project

How do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?

Once we had gathered some basic knowledge on the origins of Disney itself, we started looking at answering the driving question. To help us solve the question and create the final product, we were sorted into groups focusing on different topics. My group was focusing on “the magic of Disney entertainment” and how the magic relates to the answer to the driving question. We then proceeded to do some research on our specific topics and put them into our PKMs, mine are at the bottom of the page here. 

The product of this project is a video answering the driving question that we made with our groups while in Disney World. So as with any project that involves a video, there was a lot of story boarding, scripting, and call sheets to fill out. We split all these tasks up within the group so that we could divide and conquer but still all be involved with what is going on. We also decided that we all would have to record a voiceover for the final video so that we could all be represented in the final product.

And then the real test finally came, the trip to Disney World.

The trip got off to a rough start with out flights being delayed by a few days but eventually we lifted off from YVR and set sail for Florida. There was a lot of filming to do throughout the week because we also had to do filming for our maker project that I just did a blog post on here. Overall I think we were not as organized as we should have been when we were filming in Florida and it shows in our final video, especially as we start out the video with Sepaus filming the intro in the hotel bathroom. 

The Video 

I now present to you, the magic of Disney and how we answered the driving question;

Our video could have been way more succinct and we definitely didn’t need that much information on the history of Disney, but eventually we did get to the point and answer the driving question. Disney brings nostalgia for America’s past, utopian fantasies of the future, and their world-building stories to life in their immersive performances, character interactions, and parades using highly trained cast members, themed costumes and sets, and engaging light and music.

Conclusion

Obviously it was really awesome to be able to go to Disney world for this project and this is definitely one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. I think my group did a pretty good job with our video and everything that led up to it. I’ll leave you here with some photos that I took during the trip, see you next time!

As Always, Brooke.

One of the Most Toxic Relationships I’ve Ever Seen

Heyo wanna hear about the PLP 10 humanities project that I did last semester? Well you’re in luck because this is a blog post just about that. What is the topic you may ask? Its a doozie for sure. For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The Project

So obviously if we’re doing a project on Romeo and juliet, we need to actually know what story we are talking about. To help us understand the concepts and themes discussed in the sometimes hard-to-understand world of Shakespeare, we created a theme book to identify a topic within an act, include evidence as quotes from the text to support the topic, and connect that theme to one of the film adaptations we watched in class (I’ll talk about that last part later). We did this knowledge tracking twice for every act, so 10 different quotes and entries in total. As we read aloud certain scenes from every act, readers theatre style, we would make note of any quotes that we felt represented common topics in Romeo and Juliet such as; The Nature of Free Will, Honour and Obligation, The Naivety of Youth, The Power of Love and Hate, Violence and Death, Gender Roles, Revenge, and The Multiplicity of Identity. We would then write about how we thought Shakespeare was trying to convey that theme in the scene. 

My themebook  

The Product + Driving Question

How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?

So remember when I previously mentioned connecting identified themes to film adaptations that we watched, and then I said I would talk about that later. Well this is later because the best answer to the driving question is the film adaptations we reviewed and lead us to create our own. Yes we actually watched movies as schoolwork and were encouraged to watch more movies as homework. The films all were somewhat based or modelled off of Romeo and juliet (hence why we refer to them as film adaptations). My group re-enacted the balcony scene for our video, with myself playing Romeo and Ines playing Juliet. We chose to film it in a pseudo-Maury Povich/The Office/reality tv style with a hint of Taylor Swift. It was really fun to create and I think the final product is pretty good. So here it is!

Conclusion

Overall, this project was really fun and I actually really loved learning about Shakespeare and his magnificent play, Romeo and Juliet. I also enjoyed being able to read aloud in class and gain confidence on video. I think I did good. Thanks for reading!!!!

As Always, Brooke.

✨Becoming Even Better✨ (Ikr How is That Possible)

So flashback to last year in grade 9 when we did the project on the 7 habits of highly effective people, this project was basically adding on to what we learned then with some positive brain training and a study of the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

This project was based around the question; How does balance within my life create opportunities?

Atomic Habits

So as I previously mentioned, throughout the course of this project we would be reading and analyzing a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I personally did not find this book very interesting and I think there was a little too many anecdotes and much too much repetition of topics. So to help me get through this book, I made a collection of all of the chapter summaries so I could more clearly see the big ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can find all of those chapter summaries on a Craft document here

Positive Brain Training

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So as you can see from the image above, our positive brain training was something that we did everyday as a class. These activities were supposed to re-wire our brains to be more optimistic and function better. Now I don’t know if I see a big improvement or anything but we also fell out of consistency after a few weeks so that may have affected the efficacy. Every time we did do the activities though, we recorded them in a Craft daily note, and I would like to share my favourite one with you.

This is my journaling response to the prompt “Imagine your perfect day and write about what it would look like.” It’s a little too long to copy on to this page so I will give you the link to my daily note of that day here.

Conclusion 

Overall answering the driving question, balance in my life creates opportunities by helping me feel more organized and calm. I think I learned a little bit about how I respond to what I feel is an oversimplification of toxic positivity through the duration of this project. I think I preformed well and came out the other side a more organized and self-aware person. 😁

As Always , Brooke

 

I’ve gone viral

Hellloooooo and welcome back to another blog post by Brooke. For this project I had to get into the mind of a professional tiktok star and create some trendy videos that I’m sure will revolutionize your view of trends in the media and Disney world. Well just kidding I don’t think my videos will revolutionize anything but I hope they are still enjoyable. I know this all may sound a little different, so lets jump into why I had to make tiktok videos for a school project.

Driving Question

How do I make effective personal design choices??????

I make effective design choices by staying organized and planning things out. And I hope the rest of this post reflects that 😁.

The Project + Trip

So before we even stepped in to beginning to make our trend videos, we did some much needed personal productivity management. This included organizing our calendars, email inboxes, and most of all, our Things app. I have always been pretty good at keeping my unread emails at 0 and keeping my things to-do’s organized and functional, so this part of the project was pretty easy for me. But it was important that we got a refresher on how to be responsible for our own tasks because we would need to be able to stay on top of our filming when we had our limited time at the Disney parks. We then started researching popular video trends and looking at how we could make our own videos for the trends. Once we decided what types of videos we wanted to do, we then storyboarded and drafted 5 videos that we planned to make during our trip to Disney World. You can find all of my research and drafting in this link to my video research craft document. Once all of this was done we set sail for Florida.

The Videos

Now unfortunately one of my videos was mainly depending on Minnie’s Beach Bash, a breakfast with some of the characters. I was planning to do a character fit check video because I would have had a bit more time to do so at the bash then at the regular character meet & greets. But unfortunately by the time the teachers made the pivot to not have us go to the beach bash breakfast, I became very sick and was not able to go to the last park day where I could have filmed a replacement fit check.

But regardless, I finished 4 videos and I am quite proud of them. Here you can follow the link to see the completed version of all 4 of my videos.

Although some of my videos did not turn out exactly like I had planned, I still think most of them are enjoyable. I think I forgot about the “Filming Borzoi Shaped Things” until it was too late to grab any more interesting footage. It was a it harder to find those shapes than I originally thought 😅.  But still I got 4 out of 5 pre-planned videos complete and I think that is pretty good.

Conclusion

Overall I preformed quite well in this project. I definitely could have done a better job especially at executing the final videos, but my planning was thorough and did my best to stay organized. Disney was also a blast so I think this was a pretty fun project. Anyhoo thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke.

mPOL 2023 :)

Wazzup home slices and welcome to my mPOL 2023

Declaration of learning;

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner

How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?

Loon Lake

Loon lake was an absolute triumph for me. I laughed, I cried, I loved and lost. Lets head into the post I made about the Loon Lake learning advance so I can talk about how my goals changed the more I worked and my learnings with self-doubt and mental fortitude.

Frozen 3: Olaf Goes to Loon Lake

Summary from the post; 

As this was a Leadership-themed retreat, we did a lot of talk about leadership and how we could be the best versions of ourselves. One of my favourite activities that we did was creating a personal credo, which I think is more easily described as personal affirmations. I found it hard to get past the barrier of self-doubt when trying to list my strengths or talents. I found that reflecting on my personal values helped me see what I was actually good at and what my ideal qualities were.

I was stuck at a point on the wall that I could just not get over. But the amazing guy at the end of the rope would not let me go down. I spent around 15 minutes stuck at that one point on the wall and I felt so bad about holding up the line of people waiting to try the side I was on. He told me that he knew I could do it and that I knew what I needed to do I just had to put my mind to it. I tried SO HARD to climb up and use all my mental strength to conquer the wall, but I failed. I was exhausted both physically and mentally. But I also think I was overwhelmed because of the amount of support I was receiving from my peers. And how a man who I had only known for less than an hour had so much faith in me. So in conclusion, I was able to do a lot of learning and self-reflection during my time at Loon Lake. I hope to carry this experience with me throughout the rest of my life and take full advantage of the opportunities that this trip has opened for me.

Humanities

Out of the 3 humanities projects we have done so far, I think I showcased my best work in the “Ology of Apology” project. Even though it took me quite a few revisions to get to where I wanted it to be. I really enjoyed getting to create the monument with my partners and showing it off at the exhibition was a blast. So lets hop over to that post so I can talk about how I got through the revision process and got to utilize my public speaking skills.

How to Apologize

Summary from the post;

I really enjoyed showing off my Keynote presentation and talking about our monument to all of the passers by at the exhibition. Despite being occasionally quite socially anxious, I actually really enjoy public speaking and commanding a room. So that was really nice for me to get in touch with that part of myself again. 

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of the year?

First lets review my statement of learning intent,

 

I think that my statement of learning intent has been well upheld for the past semester. And I think that I will be good to stick with it in the upcoming months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the last semester of humanities, I played well to my strengths and I have also turned one of the things I initially wanted to have growth in into a strength, the goal of having my work sound authentically like myself. So now since my growth area looks a little empty, I have decided to add one more area where I wish for growth, timeliness. I am going to pay more attention to getting work handed in on time with no sacrifice in quality. I will do this by using my Things to keep better track of tasks and when they are due. I also want to bump up my goal for maker from an accomplished to an extending. I was basing the accomplished goal off of my grades in maker in the past instead of striving for the best for the future. I believe that I am capable of getting an extending in maker this term so lets see how that pans out.

 

 

 

And to achieve that plan I will use my pre-determined ideal disposition, habits, and systems to my advantage.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to my mPOL for 2023. I hope next semester is going to be just as good.

As Always, Brooke.

 

How to Apologize

Well happy new year! 🥳 

It is a brand new year but still the same semester. So lets quickly talk about the project and exhibition that we just finished last year.

Driving Questions

How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered and not repeated today?

We used the exhibition as a way to educate about the past wrongs we studied. Education is very important in making sure that those past wrongs are properly remembered and accounted for in our society today.

Us grade 10’s were working on a project called “The Ology of Apology” where we studied historical wrongs towards different races of people in Canada’s past. The three main topics we studied were the Chinese head tax, Japanese internment during WW2, and the Komagata Maru incident in 1914. I ended up studying the latter and for an easy explanation of the incident I present to you my Keynote presentation, also known as “Keystone 1: Keynote of Transgression”.

The komagata maru

What does James Cameron’s “Avatar” reveal about our society?

Avatar brought up many themes present in our society today. Themes like militarism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, corporate greed, and such. Avatar magnified these issues as their world is almost an augmented reflection of ours. The Winter Exhibition was themed around this question and each room/area was to tackle one of the themes and how it was represented in the movie and in our topics that we studied. For the Exhibition, I was in the library room that was originally themed to represent racism but had to have a bit of remodelling done.

Our Memorial And The Exhibition 

The monument I created was in collaboration with Ines and Gwen. We had all studied different topics for our first 2 keystones so we wanted our memorial to relate to all 3 subjects. Gwen came up with an excellent idea of a figure breaking down walls to represent combatting racism and discrimination. I suggested that we put cutouts of racist newspapers and notices from the 3 events on the walls to give more meaning to the monument. We accidentally learned that spray paint actually eats styrofoam while trying to paint the walls black. We also were scrounging for paint and other supplies to bring our work to life. It was a work-in-progress up until the verify last minute. I LOVE our finished monument and was very proud to be able to display it at the winter exhibition.

I really enjoyed showing off my Keynote presentation and talking about our monument to all of the passers by at the exhibition. Despite being occasionally quite socially anxious, I actually really enjoy public speaking and commanding a room. So that was really nice for me to get in touch with that part of myself again. 

Conclusion 

After not attending any exhibitions last year, I can say that I think this exhibition was my best one yet. I am very proud of the amount of work I was able to put into this project and the fact that I actually had enough energy to go to the exhibition. Overall a successful semester in Humanities 10.

As Always, Brooke