On The Road Again
What is up internet. Welcome to the third and final blog of this weekend. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about maybe read the two posts before this 😉).
B.C. First Peoples is a course that students are required to take in high school in British Columbia, however because of my special little iPad kid school, it is now a plp course. Sooooo welcome to my first ever BCFP blog post. 🎉🎉🎉🎉. Let’s get started shall we.
This project was called Road to Rights, and believe it or not it’s all about the road to the rights of indigenous peoples, are you shocked, I know I’m shocked too. If I’m being honest I was not looking forward to starting this course because culture isn’t really my thing, but hey this project wasn’t that bad so who knows, maybe I’ll come around to it. One last thing before we get into the details is that this was a relatively short project so this may not be too long of a post.
Now it’s time for the driving question of the project. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. Going into this project I wasn’t at all prepared to answer this question, as I barely even knew what the Indian act was, but by the end of this project I think I’m a lot more familiar than I was but I know there is still much to learn.
We started off by just looking into what the Indian act is. We used this infographic as a baseline introduction.
Image Credit: 21 Things by Bob Joseph Sketch Note by Michael-tdsb
This infographic was the start of what we would eventually do at the end of put project, but I’ll get to that later. We were then assigned the task of making our own infographic about the Indian act that focused on one of these facts in the image. I was assigned Band Council Systems. I would explain to you what they are, but why tell you when I can just show you my Infographic.
After this we mostly just did research for the rest of the project. We looked into a lot of the different really important and significant events in Indigenous history. If I talked about every single thing that happened, we would both be here for hours, so for the sake of time I’ll just list some of the ones we talked about. 1831: The first residential school was created, 1876: The Indian Act is created, 1949: First Nations Right to Vote in BC, 1951: The First Indian act revisions, 1973: Calder v. BC, 1985: Bill C-31 Gender Equity, 1996: last residential school closes, 1997: Delgamuukw v. BC, 2007: UNDRIP.
And now it is time for the big reveal of the final product of this project. Drumroll please.
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It’s another infographic….
But hey I’m not complaining, they’re relatively fun to make. But first we had to pick our topic. After everything we had looked at, the only thing that really stuck with me was the Indian act. I was interested in looking deeper into it, and seeing what thing it banned and what rules it made, but I was also interested in why they thought making those rules was okay, and how people allowed that to happen. So there was my topic, “The Indian Act, How and Why?”
In terms of designing the Infographic, my teacher was in love with the design of the drawing I showed you earlier and wanted out class to do something similar so she could hang it up in the display case in our school’s hallway. She wanted it to follow this format.
So our infographics had to line up with each other like this with a road going through them to connect them. We were given numbers based off the year our event happened so that the infographics would line up chronologically, but the number I was given was number 5, and in my opinion that is the hardest one to avoid the road in. So I had my first draft look like this.
But then I realised as long as most of the road is visible it’s okay to overlap and my final project, which I think looks much better, looks like this.
And now it’s time to answer our driving question. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. The acknowledgment of Indigenous rights will change the ways that First Nations peoples live and breath. By doing this we recognize that we not only owe them the same rights as everyone else, but because of past wrongdoings we realize that they are owed more than we know.
Thank you for reading my blog post. I hope you learned something new about Indigenous peoples because I know I sure did during this project. Thank you again. Goodbyeee 👋👋👋👋
Projecting a Project about a Project’s Projections
Hello again internet and welcome to my second blog of this weekend. I’m making up for all the time we lost while this site was down by making 3 blog posts in 1 weekend so if you still crave more after this one be on the lookout. That being said let’s get started.
The Manhattan Project. I’m sure most of us have heard that name but many that have heard it still may not know what it was. And if I’m being honest, that was me at the start of this project. So if you don’t quite know what I’m talking about then don’t worry because all will be explained.
Before we get into the project though we need to find out what the driving question is this time. “How did the Manhattan Project’s scientific breakthroughs change the world?”. This is a big question that seems simple to answer but when you look closer, it’s quite difficult because there are so many different impacts it had that it’s hard to chose just one. Now that I’ve finished my starting spiel it’s time to get into the details, fair warning though a lot of what we did/handed in the project was just notes or a different form of notes so there may not be a lot of media.
We started out by learning the basics of the manhattan project. The Manhattan project was a secret U.S. government project near the end of WW2. The primary purpose of this project was to create the first functional nuclear bomb. The project involved 600,000 people and costed more than $2.2 billion, ($41 billion today) yet it remained top secret throughout WW2. We mostly just learned different facts about what it was and how it came to be through slideshows and videos that we watched.
It was around here that we kind of took a pause from learning about the manhattan project, and started working on different forms of note taking. In my opinion this was kind of weird and felt really unnecessary for the project, as the idea was pretty much entirely scrapped moving forward. But regardless it did happen so I’ll tell you what we learned. We first learned about smart brevity, a new way to present information that is supposed to get people to understand it more. This is the format. A heading, and interesting and summarizing opener, and then multiple axioms, which are sub-headings that define what the next few bullet points will be about, and finally a go deeper section that tells you where you can learn more about the topic. Here is an example of one of mine.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/7ROZONNqWLTxqi
Yes I did submit that for school. No I do not regret it. Moving on.
My honest review on smart brevity style is that I think it’s probably a good formatting method that does actually work, but I don’t think the way we were made use it works. They wanted us to use it as a way to take notes, which might work for some people, but a lot of us already had our own note taking methods that we’ve perfected that we know work for ourselves and trying to force a new way on us this late into our education doesn’t work. I think this method does work for news outlets that are sharing information with readers, but for taking notes I don’t think it works. But that is just my opinion on the situation we were in.
The next note related thing the zettelkasten. This is a way of storing your notes but the way to explain how we did it is quite confusing and relies of a specific program we use in plp so I’ll just explain the universal things. According to the zettelkasten there are 3 types of notes, literature notes (the most confusing ones) are a note that focuses on one specific thing, whether it be an article that you’ve read, or a conversation you heard, fleeting notes which are small notes you wrote on the fly almost just as reminders to yourself of something like a cool idea or something you have to do later, and permanent notes which are a note about something that you want to remember for a long time. The zettelkasten seems like a good idea, but I don’t think it was explained well enough in this project, and also similarly to smart brevity, many of us already had our own way of formatting our notes that works for us. So hopefully they stop trying to teach us how to completely revamp our learning so late into our education.
After all this we came back to our Manhattan project learning. And after a bit more research, slideshows and videos, we were finally told what the final product of this project would be. We were going to be doing, drumroll please!
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AN ANIMATED EXPLAINER VIDEO.
Now if you’re like me you probably haven’t heard of this before but it seems pretty self-explanatory, and it is, but to further help you out I’m going to show you the video we were shown to explain.
https://youtu.be/6h28_iry9u0?si=NBnZFF4elCrzICp5
Now we knew what we were doing, we needed to know what we were doing it about. Now I assume you’ve picked up the pieces and yes it is about the manhattan project, but more importantly why it is historically significant, and how it changed the world. Sound familiar? Maybe check out the start of this post and you’ll see why. That’s right it’s literally in the driving question. So that’s what we were doing.
Okay I’m going to rant a bit here. So after we were told this the criteria our teacher gave us was written on the board for 1 class, from what I recall we were told it had to be an explainer video, it had to be animated, it had to be about the affect the manhattan project has on the world, and it had to be 2-3 minutes long. I read these but due to my ADHD brain I happened to mostly forget them by the time next week came around. I thought it was fine because one of the benefits of PLP is everything the teachers do is left up online for us to see. Right? Wrong. For some reason the whole second half of the information page about this project is incomplete, it’s just a template that I assume is to remind the teachers what to write. I thought maybe this was okay because I could just go in and talk to my teacher, but I remembered that on the day he wrote it on the board he said that he was leaving on another grades field trip for the whole week, and when he was back (the Monday of next week) the video would be due. And so in the time that we were given to work on it during the week I had no idea what to do and just was scrambling trying to find out what any of the video criteria was. By day 2 I had given up and just started writing the script for the video, but writing the script took up the whole week. So my situation is I have 2 days before the final due date of a 3 minute animated video that I don’t have a success criteria for and haven’t started making. Does that sound stressful to you? I worked on making that video, for 8 hours straight. I was proud of myself in the end after I had completed it, but still unhappy that it had to come to this. So Monday comes and I begrudgingly drag myself into class as always to see my teacher is finally back. He asks who has finished their video and from my memory, I was the only person to put their hand up! I spent my entire day working hard and nobody else had even finished it. So I assume I’ll get extra credit for this, but no. Instead he just gives everyone an extra week to work on this. I am fuming in my chair right now but I don’t say anything due to my respectful nature. Then the next day he tells us that we were supposed to make 5 smart brevity style notes for all the research we were going to use in our video. I am very confused at this point because I already handed in my video research and it isn’t in that format at all. I assumed I wouldn’t have to worry about it, but I checked in with him regardless. He told me to reformat and gather new information for the video I had already made. So for the rest of the week I’m reverse engineering research for my video and then I hand it in. All of this was a really stressful and frustrating process but it’s finally over so I’m happy to relax and wait for my grade… And I wait… and I wait… and I wait… I am still waiting for my video grade as I’m writing this. What the heck Mr Hughes!?
Sorry for the long paragraph but I try to express my feelings towards projects in my blog posts. Anyway now that my rant is out of the way I can show you my video.
https://youtu.be/RHvDmO-CGZc?si=D6zkPeLh0aB4ZogK
I hope you like it because as you know it took away 1 day of my life and likely many more days due to stress.
Anyway now it’s time for the answer to the big old question. Or is it? You see I think my answer to the driving question is displayed perfectly in my video. So I’ve already answered the driving question.
Thank you for read my blog post, sorry I was a bit negative but I think this project could have been so cool and so much better if done right, but instead it just kinda felt like we weren’t always the priority and sometimes the focus wasn’t even on the manhattan project. All things considered this was a semi-decent project, which is unfortunate because it had so much potential. Anyway I’m signing off. Goodbyeeeeee 👋👋👋👋👋.
The Biggest Boom
Hello internet people, welcome back.
I know, it’s been a long time and I know you missed me but I’m back and this time I’m in grade 11… Who on Earth thought I was ready for this.
You may notice that it’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post and that is due to a combination of summer break and also this blog website being down, until now.
Just something I should say before we get into this post is that this is actually my second humanities project of the year but since the website was down we couldn’t make a post for that project but it will be coming soon.
With all this in mind, let’s get into the post.
Hiroshima. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the story behind the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki and how it made us win the war, but in reality, it is much more than just that. This bombing is the most significant event that has ever come out of a war (if you disagree feel free to yell at me in the comments). The lasting ripple effects that came from this bomb will solidify this date in history. So let’s go through what I’ve learned in this past month.
We started out by introducing the thing that would occupy the majority of this project, a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey.
This is a book that took information from interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, and turned them into an almost story-like experience. The first 2 chapters were all about the character’s lives the morning of the bombing, and then how they were immediately affected and what they did after they realised they had been bombed. Going into this project I rolled my eyes at the idea of having to read a book for school but after reading these first 2 chapters I found myself more interested in the story than I thought I would be. I think I explained this well in my first Journal that we were assigned about the book. This is what I wrote.
The first 2 chapters of Hiroshima by John Hersey are a brilliant way to explain the other half of the story to western readers. The book does a great job at explaining the character’s lives in detail and shows the thought process of each of the six survivors before and after the bomb was dropped. I thought it did a great job at humanizing the characters and showing that they are real people. For me realising the actual impact of numbers is hard to quantify, so explaining their lives and showing that they were people just like me was an interesting way to display that they were people and not just numbers in a statistic. The book made it clear what the emotions of all six survivors were in their respective stories, and helped me really understand what they were thinking in those moments. I think I was more able to understand and comprehend this book because it is very similar to a book I read with my class in grade 7 called Refugee. Both of these books follow multiple protagonists who find themselves in different but similar situations, this book was about 3 children with refugee stories and the challenges they faced, this book is about 6 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing and the challenges they faced. In conclusion I think this book does a great job at showing the emotions of the characters because the author was able to interview them and get the exact details of what they remembered and experienced, by doing this it allows for the characters to seem like real people instead of just numbers.
Most of the things we did while gathering information for this project were related to this book and for the sake of not just filling up this post with all my journals I am just going to skip over most of the other reading assignments. A quick summary for chapters 3-4 is that they talk about how they were surviving the after effects of the bomb and what their experiences recovering were. For chapter 5 the author came back 40 years later to interview these survivors again and see how this event impacted them for their whole lives afterwards. If this book sounds interesting to you I recommend checking it out.
One of the things I really enjoyed during this project is that every Monday we would take the whole class to do a Socratic seminar about the chapter(s) we had all read. During these group discussions, we would talk about what we read and what we thought about it. We also made connections to other things that we thought the book related to or reminded us of. These once again surprised me with how fun they were. It didn’t really feel like a class mandated discussion where the teacher was watching us and judging us based of our every move, it felt like a group discussion where you could chime in at essentially any moment if you felt like you had something to say. I actually really enjoyed these and I’m excited to hopefully do them in future projects, as my teacher said he would try and include them. Unfortunately, I didn’t talk as much as I hoped I would because of the fear I would say something wrong or be asked a question I couldn’t answer but I’m trying to work on improving my public speaking.
Another thing we did was on Fridays we would have the chosen 6 come in with current events stories that they thought related to Hiroshima in some way. Each of the chosen 6 would have 3 people assigned to them and they would lead a group discussion about their event. They would start by introducing what their event was and then end the discussion with some questions to ask the whole group that related to the event and/or Hiroshima. These questions would then hopefully break off into other mini side discussions that were still related to the topic but also could be about completely different things. The current event I chose was the Valencia floods. This is the document I used to lead my discussion.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/5xOMgzJVJMOrCW
I ask that you think about some of the questions I presented, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments. Overall I think my group’s discussion went well and we had some successful branching conversations.
And now it was time for the final event of the project to be revealed. Drumroll please.
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It was an essay……
I know, I was a little bit upset too but it’s grade 11 so what can you do. Let’s be honest nobody enjoys writing essays, but I felt like I actually knew a lot about my topic so it wouldn’t be that hard. This essay had to be a minimum of 5 paragraphs and had to go over these 4 topics, The impact on the citizens of Hiroshima and Japan, The world in the short term, The world in the long term and myself. I wrote my first draft of the essay which I was pretty proud of, I was given feedback which I understandingly accepted, but then the big bad boss appeared.
MLA sourcing!
This looked terrifying to me, especially since this was a completely new concept to me. Thankfully my amazing teacher (shout out Mr Gibson) gave us a very in depth and understandable presentation on how to do it. But even after this I was still confused. Thankfully my mum was there to save the day and she helped me out with fixing up my mistakes.
Eventually after about 3 different drafts I had made it and handed in my final essay. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. If you want to read it here is the link but be careful there’s a lot of words.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/kWLF6SrdW5Tioj
And now we come to the end of this blog post. Overall this was actually a really fun and enjoyable project. I learned a lot about Hiroshima, Japan, and also really improved my skills of making connections between different things. This project was fun, educational and interesting and I really appreciate my teacher for making it this great.
Thank you for reading my blog, sorry it’s been a while and don’t worry (I actually have 2 more that will be done by this weekend). So with that have a good day internet people. Goodbye.
Another Tpol, How much more can I take.
Hello everyone welcome back.
It’s that time of the year again where I am required by my school to make and present a Tpol. You may have noticed that there was no Mpol blog post this year and that is because, well I don’t really know why but we did something different this time.
This Tpol will be in a new kind of format, if you have read my others then you might realise that I usually go over the best and worst of each subject however this time I will be answering this driving question “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviors have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” And then I will also be using these 3 success behaviours to tell a story about my learning journey throughout this year, the behaviors I chose are Ownership and responsibility, Contributions and Preparation (this is technically 2 but I feel the need to talk about both).
But first, before I get into the depths of my grade 10 adventure I will go ahead and help future me with his presentation. “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.”
Now that’s out the way I’ll get into it but warning, this post is not for the faint of heart, I will be sharing my honest opinions on both how I feel I did this year but also my thoughts on this year’s projects. This is how the post will go. I will go over each success behavior and choose the projects that I think show my learning best for that behavior, then after I’m done with those 3 I will give my answer to the driving question.
Okay I promise I’m actually staring now.
Ownership and Responsibility
At the start of this year, I went into school thinking every project would be laid out for me and what I had to do would be clear but this was not the case. This year I feel I got a taste of what PLP will be like in later years. The first project I think showed me this was our Peas in a Pod(cast) Maker project.
I went into this really excited because I would learn how to be like everybody on the internet, and it was really fun but it introduced to me something really new to me. This project was simple, create a podcast about a topic of your choosing, but that’s where the new concept came in. It was a podcast based on something I got to choose. This was honestly difficult for me at the start because I’m not super great and coming to decisions but I finally came to a conclusion that I knew I wanted to do. As a British person in Canada, I sometimes say words and my friends look at me like I’m speaking a different language, and that’s because I am. In England, there is a newish language being developed which is essentially a lot of slang called roadman. If you want to know more about this listen to my podcast.
But now onto why this links into ownership and responsibility. This all showed me the start of having agency over my learning. Up to this point, we hadn’t had this much creative freedom but this project we got to choose what essentially the whole thing was and this was a big step forward for me because once I found out what I wanted to do this helped me actually be engaged with my learning. This is a big thing for me because I have ADHD which means I struggle to focus on things I don’t take an interest in but if I get to choose what I have to focus on it makes school just that much more bearable.
However having all this freedom hasn’t always been a positive for me, my example of this is our PGP project Back to the Future. In this project we were simulating the process of applying for a job, but with a PLP twist. We went through the whole process of making a resume and cover letter but when it came to the interview it would be a shark tank-style pitch of ourselves.
If this sounds interesting here is the blog post.
As I stated earlier I sometimes struggle with making decisions about myself and one of those that has been most prominent in my life is deciding my career. I have always struggled with this so when I learned about this project it’s safe to say I was afraid. This project also felt very rushed especially since most of the class was on a band and choir trip the previous week so we didn’t learn about our end goal until the week it was happening. Because of all this combined stress I ended up needing an extension (thank you Ms Madsen) but this just shows that having too much control over something can lead to feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing. I think this also displayed my growth as well because once I had gotten an extension I locked myself into learning mode and figured out what I was doing and how I would do it all in one night. In previous years I would have just procrastinated and barely scraped by but my growth through this year has taught me what I’m capable of based on time limits. In my opinion, almost all of our projects this year have felt extremely rushed or unplanned but that’s not all bad. While I may have lost a few years of my life due to stress I also learned that I’m more capable than I once thought.
Contributions
This is an area that I feel I have struggled with this year and most other years of my schooling. As I’ve spoken about I struggle to really care about something if it doesn’t interest me so when having class discussions about what we’re doing I don’t often have any input to give. There isn’t really one project that displays this but if I had to choose there are a few I would say show this more than others but the one I’m going to talk about is the project This is Us in Humanities. Here is the blog.
This project was all about Canadian identity but as I’ve made it very clear… I’m not Canadian. So as you can guess I really didn’t have anything to say about this project. In this project, we had a lot of discussions about different history and aspects of Canada which I honestly felt quite left out of. This is something I dislike about the education we are given in Canada, we focus so primarily on Canada that we don’t learn about things going on in other places in the world. When I came here I knew nothing about Canada and I feel like going into high school I was just expected to know things I hadn’t even heard about. This often makes it a struggle for me to understand and participate in class discussions because it feels like a lot of my previous knowledge is invalidated because every project needs to involve Canada somehow. It feels like Canada is so focused on teaching about itself that a lot of kids here don’t know anything about the rest of the world unless they go out of their way and learn about it outside school. This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to participate in class.
Sorry for the big rant but I told you I would share my opinions.
I feel like I am improving on contributing in class as I grow up because I’m realising the fear I have of getting things wrong isn’t as big of a problem as I think but I will still admit this is one of my big struggles in school.
Preparation
This is focused on both me preparing myself inside and outside school and there isn’t one major project for this as well but I will be referencing a few projects I did this well in. At the start of this year and the rest of my life I’ve always been just kind of living in the moment and winging it which has worked for me so far but now moving into the harder years I am realising I’ll need to prepare for things and revise or work outside school too. As much as I may hate doing this I will admit it has helped me greatly and here are some examples of how this has helped me.
A big one for this is something I previously mentioned which is our back to the future project. I already stated how I used the extra time I had been given to my best ability and that didn’t happen without a little planning and preparation beforehand.
Another Huuuuuge thing that required a whole ton of planning was destination imagination, here is the post for it.
This year we had significantly less time than we did in grade 8 which meant it required a lot of planning for meetups outside school hours especially since we had cross-grade teams. I was really proud of myself for getting through this as me and my grade 10 friend Kira took charge and instructed our team pretty well. I think I did especially well seeing as I missed the first performance due to being sick I had to push through the pain I was in due to getting shots and vaccines the day before the final performance but I made it and I think we did pretty well. I think this really showed how I’ve improved my planning skills greatly this year.
That’s all 3 behaviours so it’s time to drive that question. Just as a reminder, this is the question I’m answering “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” In my honest opinion, I don’t think I’m ready for grade 11, that’s a really big number and I don’t want to be in my second last year of high school. But with all that in mind that’s how I felt about grade 10, and look how much I’ve grown since then. I think even though I’m scared of next year I’ll be able to manage it and make it through just like I did this year. I think this has proved to me that I still have so much to improve on and now I know I’m fully capable of doing anything I want to (with the right motivation of course). There are a whole lot of ways I think I’ve improved this year that won’t fit into a 7 minute presentation or a blog post but the last thing I want you to know is.
I think grade 8 me’s jaw would hit the floor if he saw how far we had come.
Thanks for reading. See you next year?
Dragons, Sharks And The Worst Of All, Responsibility
Welcome back to my blog everybody, did you miss me?
Today I’m here to talk about our most recent PGP project and that is ‘Back to the future’. If your thinking..
“Wow they must have gotten to watch the movie” you would be wrong. I know very sad, this was much to the dismay of me and my classmates especially when we found out we would be watching a movie for the first few classes and it wasn’t the one our project was named after. However, the real reason our project was named this was because we would be thinking about what we want to be in the future and more importantly how we will get there.
So our driving question this time was “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” And this scared me quite a bit honestly, because I actually have no idea what I want to be or want to do when I’m older. Nevertheless, I realised that maybe this project could help me find that out for myself (have you ever heard of foreshadowing)? So now we know what the project is all about it’s time to find out what the end goal for this project was. We learned that we would be doing a Shark Tank/ Dragon’s Den type pitch about, get ready, drumroll
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Ourselves! Now this may sound confusing and I thought that too, but it’s honestly quite simple. We would be pitching ourselves as a product and marketing why we would be good in a work environment. It’s essentially a mix of a job interview and an infomercial. This sounded scary at first because I don’t know how to think positively about myself -I’m a teenager in a first world country that’s impossible! But, lucky for me I have friends and family who like me (I hope) so that’s where I started to look for positive things about me and how I can work effectively.
But first let’s go through everything we did in this project in a reflecting sort of a way. As I said we started out with a movie and it was called “The Dead Poets Society”. It was a pretty good movie (very sad) and I would recommend it, “Oh Captain My Captain 🫡” (that one was for my teacher reading this).
I think we watched this movie in order to learn and understand that we can do whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. I think it helped me learn that different perspectives on different matters can lead to different thoughts on how things should be done. Everyone’s thoughts are their own and valid. Overall this was quite helpful and I found myself reflecting on it throughout the project.
Between this and the final projects we did a few different activities to learn about ourselves and how we work effectively – such as thinking about and writing out the skills we posses, making goals that would change aspects of our lives and how we could get to them. Setting goals I always find hard but I’m getting better at it. We were also learning about different types of skills and about the 7 habits of highly effective teens and completing a bunch of tests on Myblueprint, (a website that helps you with all kinds of education and career pathing techniques). If you’re interested in this for yourself you can look here.
All of these were different ways we learned to apply our skills to new environments and back up our abilities with examples.
The final thing we had to do before the actual Pitch itself was learn about writing resume’s and cover letters, and oh boy are there a lot of different marks to hit and a whole criteria I didn’t know about. Now I can’t share my resume and letter with you because they happen to contain some information about me that I would like to keep private but if you out there and ever have to make a resume or cover letter I suggest getting help from somebody who has done it before.
But before we go into the big bad boss of the project I’m going to talk about what I learned about myself throughout this whole process. I realised that me being funny is actually something useful in the work world. I understand that being funny alone won’t get me a job however, I now know that it’s an aspect that people look for, most companies these days don’t just want a perfect efficient work robot that can do everything they need to, they want to hire people who can learn what to do well and also be friendly and a joy to have around the office. Another thing I learned is there are a few career paths I didnt consider beforehand that actually might suit me pretty well, like being a stunt performer. I had thought about it before but was scared about getting hurt however, I now realise that I would get to travel the world and have fun with people I know and I would just have to know what I’m doing and how to be safe, which there are courses for and professionals to help with. I recommend you check out the personality quizzes and some of the other ones on Myblueprint because you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself and your possible career paths before.
Now after all this it was time for the thing I had been dreading, The Pitch! As we were building up to this I missed a week of school as I was on a trip to whistler with my choir and band, (we had an amazing time but we also missed quite a bit of work) which left me less time to prepare than I thought I needed. But nonetheless I worked hard to prepare myself for this pitch and even though I needed to get an extension I still learned some things about myself while preparing and performing my pitch. Like being aware of the impact of scheduling issues. Also another thing I realised is that I’ve always thought that I’m terrible at public speaking because it terrifies me to my core. However, while preparing I realised even though it scares me so much I can fake being confident relatively well. I think this is something that PLP has taught me to do as the teachers constantly push us outside our comfort zone and have us performing tasks I would usually be scared by. Don’t get me wrong they still terrify me but I do them anyway and then reflect on them to learn how I can do it better. I think this really showed in my pitch as when mentioning some of my weaknesses I brought up public speaking and one of my Dragons said that he wouldn’t have guessed that I was a nervous presenter if I hadn’t mentioned it. Another thing I learned is that I can learn lines and points pretty quickly which is a valuable skill to have. This links me into a reflection that I made during my pitch about myself that one of my Dragons noted that I did well. I have ADHD, and the crowd goes mild. The Dragon said many people included they had this condition yet I was one of the only ones who noted how this can be helpful as well as a hinderance. This is what I said about my condition:
“I have ADHD and with the help of my medication I can ditch the bad parts and harness the benefits, I can produce high quality work, can multitask and I am an extremely quick learner. The hyper fixation element of my ADHD means I can focus on things with great intensity and learn a lot about something in a relatively short amount of time. This means that I can be a really diverse employee.”
At the start of this project I was worried because I came into it not knowing what I wanted to do as an adult and now I realise that I have left still not knowing what I want to do, but that’s the thing, I did learn what I want to do. It’s nothing specific like other people who know exactly what job they want and how they will get there. My goal for when I’m older is to find out what I want to do with my life! I want to explore and try many different career options, I want to find out what I like through trying them out. I’ll see what aspects from different careers I like and combine them to find the perfect job for me. I realise this will take a long time but I’m okay with that because it sounds fun trying lots of jobs and at the end of the day I will have to work for a long time when I find the right thing so it’s got to be good! So that’s the main thing I learned from this whole project that’s it’s ok not to know as long as you’re open to looking, exploring and finding. And here I look back to my Dead Poets and say I understand that we as young people can do and achieve whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. If you had told me at the start of the project I would find out this of all things I wouldn’t have believed you. However I think through learning about the different ways you can find a job it has just come to me that exploring my options is something I want to do. (Sorry if that last part was a little hard to understand it’s just hard to put my feelings into words, I’m sure you’ve had that happen before)
So now to come back to the driving question “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” I feel like I’ve answered this in my last paragraph so I’ll keep it short. I’m going to use the newfound skills I now know I have to find the jobs that suit me and my personality the best and taking time to do this is ok!
Thank you for reading this blog, sorry there weren’t any pictures but I didn’t really have any that I could add that wouldn’t be just a photo of text, but just because you stayed you can have this photo of my dog
Thanks for reading, Good Morning, Good afternoon and Goodnight.
Let’s get Goghing!
So that time has come where Destination Imagination will strike fear into the hearts of those terrified of performing infront of others (like myself). So who’s nervous?
If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, a while being 2 whole years, wow 2 years that’s terrifying to think of anyway long time readers would know what destination imagination is, but I’ll go over a recap for those of you who need to learn. DI, or destination imagination, is a worldwide organization that hosts annual events for children of all age groups to come together with friends and learn skills that can be actually used and applied in the real world, such as creative or innovative thinking (shout out to the crazy ones). I could go on explaining what this event is but the lovely team at DI have made a video explaining what exactly goes down so here it is.
Now in DI there are different categories for each team to perform in, this year our options were Scientific, Engineering, Technical and finally my choice Fine Arts. I’m going to try to explain the Fine Arts challenge but if you interested in finding out about any of the other challenges, or really just anything DI related, I recommend you visit their website right here.
So my challenge is Fine Arts, the name of the challenge “In Motion” we were tasked to make a performance based around three things a piece of visual art, a kinetic art piece and a piece of reimagined art. These things are a piece of artwork that’s publicly known (visual art), a piece of art that has some form of movement via a mechanism (kinetic art) and the original visual art being transformed into one of these new art forms, Dance, Illusion, Puppetry, Music, Pantomime or a Spoken Word Poem. So in short we had to make a story based around these three things, but wait there’s more we had to include 2 extra things known as team choice elements. Essentially these are things that make our performance unique and different to others. Team choice elements can be anything decided by your team that everyone relates too. But in order to choose team choice elements, we needed a team. My group consisted of 3 wonderful grade 9’s called Charlie, Aiya and Melissa, but there was also my grade 10 buddy Kira (you can click on their names to see their blogs). Now I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to disclose what my team did for these exactly because we don’t want anyone stealing our ideas (that’s right DI is still not over) but I can assure you we came up with a solution we all agreed on. Now this may all seem like a lot, but I haven’t even gotten into any of the specifics yet, so if your interested you can find the document of rules on the DI website.
So now we knew what we had to do and just had to get down to it. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot I can say about the process of coming up with our solution, but what I can tell you is that it was stressful, I may have lost time from my lifespan, it was difficult and finally [suspenful pause] my team chose the art piece a Starry Night.
With this choice we came up with the name “The Gogh Getters”. Here is my groups version made by Aiya, along with some other photos of the creation process.
Now after I wrote the script and my group working hard to get everything done in the limited class time given and hours after school it was time, the week of DI had come. But here is the twist. The week before my lovely mother had gotten sick. I tried my best to keep my distance but on Tuesday I felt something going on with my throat, I immediately let my group know but I still hoped it was just a one day thing. But when I woke up the next day…. It had gotten worse. I decided it would be better for me to stay home and go get tested for something that had been going around. My results came back and well…. I had tested positive for strep throat. I felt so bad especially since I am one of the 2 main characters. I spent hours working on the script and I didn’t even get to perform it or see my friends act out scenes I had made. I am so thankful that my team reacted how they did and they are all so amazing. I’m so proud of them for doing as well as they did and learning new lines in such a short time. So now that this information is out there it’s time to see how my group did. Here is the video of their performance.
I’m really proud of my team for doing as well as they did without me and I’ll be sure to be there next time at provincials.
So now comes the part of the blog where I usually reflect on the driving question, however there isn’t one this time so I’m just going to look back on a few things. Firstly I think we could have improved by… well… you know…. Having the whole team there but we could have also communicated slightly more as a groups so we didn’t have to cram so much into the last week. But I think compared to most of the groups my team did really well with setting times for things to get done. I also think we worked really well together despite most of us being introduced to eachother for the first time in this process. But in terms of personal reflection, honestly I expected to hate every second of DI, but through this journey I learned a few things about myself like before I didn’t know this but I’m actually a pretty good script writer and it’s actually quite enjoyable. I also learned that I am more capable than I thought and I can get things done in a shorter time than I think if I try my best and put my mind to it.
With that I’m going to wrap up this blog post with one question for you.
Do you think we can win Provincials?
Actually I’ll wrap up with an answer for you
Yes we can.
From Pikachu to Seattle and all the crazy things in between
So you’ve come to me, on the day of my Pikachu presentation, to learn about how we got here today. Well then let me tell you a tale of memorization and stress. Welcome to my blog post about the “Craziest” project so far. This is proven by the title and driving question being “Cray Cray Yay Yay” and “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”. But I’ll come back and answer that later.
First of all we started out by defining what is crazy? You might think you know the answer but your probably wrong (unless you’ve read another blog post about this project). We are actually defining crazy like it’s used in the Apple “Think Different” campaign. To help explain that I am going to quote this campaign,
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” -Steve Jobs – 1997
Does it make sense now? I sure do hope so because the amount of times I’ve heard the definition by this point is driving me crazy. Here’s a fun game you at home can play, try and count every time the word “Crazy” is written, spoken or used in this blog.
Now that we know what crazy is let’s talk about what a Pecha-Kucha is, or as I like to say, Pikachu. So this term is Japanese for “Chit Chat” and is a type of presentation. It is a 20×20 presentation which means we have 20 slides and each of them will last 20 seconds leading to 6 minutes and 40 second of total stress and waffling (waffling is talking a lot about things).
But after this happened we went on a super fun trip to Seattle where we saw such wonders as the Museum of Pop Culture and Madame Web! We went on this trip with one thing in mind, the crazy ones of Seattle, and trust me there are a lot of them. Some of these people and experiences that we had the pleasure of visiting are The MoPop, The Space Needle, The Chihuly Glass Gardens, The Climate Pledge Arena Tour, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Museum of Flight and The Boeing Tour. As you can see, we went to a lot of places and subsequently learned a lot from this trip.
This trip helped me visualize what crazy people have done such as Frank Ghery, Paul Allen and Bill Gates. I saw the things these people built their legacy upon and how their passion fuelled them to keep going. Here are some images from Seattle.
Sorry some of these are smaller than others.
Prior to this trip we had been given groups and a topic, you can check out my teammates at http://www.blog44.ca/brooker/ and http://www.blog44.ca/loganf/ so go show them some love too. Our topic was Aerospace Pioneers, so I was waiting for the Museum of Flight and Boeing tours. It was there where I gathered most of my notes and photos throughout the whole project.
This trip ended with one big thing, and no it wasn’t the bus ride home, It was an essay all about the crazy ones of Seattle. This essay was used to convey what crazy is and also try to answer the driving question. If you would like to read it here it is.
Are you crazy? You might think, “No, why would anyone want to be crazy?” but “crazy” has more than one definition. Crazy people are the ones who do something nobody else is willing to do because they are driven by passion for something they love, and even when struck with adversity they find workarounds continue doing what they love, because they believe it can affect others and change the world for the better. But what are some examples of crazy?
Firstly I want to talk about a crazy name that you may have heard of, Microsoft or more importantly Bill Gates. He and Paul Allen turn their hobby of computer science and coding into a huge company the whole world knows of today. For most of their career people thought of them as exclusively a video game console company, however Bill knew they could be more than that. With his expansive knowledge of technology, and immense funds earned by Microsoft, Bill Gates looked into investing in technology that could actually help people and is now using his status as a billionaire and founder of Microsoft to make new innovations and advancements such as AI that can predict what diseases mosquitoes could be carrying. This is an example of a crazy person as when nobody thought anymore of him than a gaming company owner, he pushed to give Microsoft a new name in the form of helping people who need it.
Now for a less known crazy idea, Climate Pledge Arena. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an enitre arena dedicated to having as low of a carbon footprint as possible print as possible. They represent a cause not a company and have become a part of a group called the climate pledge, their goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This is a crazy idea because of how many unique innovations and designs they use in order to achieve this goal, some examples of these are making all food from sources within 300 miles, having 0 single use plastics, using 150 gallons of rain water to make the hockey rink and saving 20,000 gallons of water every event that happens there from washrooms alone. This seems insane at this time but in the future if we want the planet to survive, this will become the new standard and climate pledge area is the foundation of this new norm.
A name you may have heard before is Boeing, but you might not know what he really did. Boeing was just a guy who went to an air show but from that stemmed his love and passion of aeronautical activities. While he started as a lumber worker he used the money he earned from his job to fund his hobby of flight. At this time nobody saw flight as anything more that’s just long distance mail delivery but Boeing could see a future nobody else could. He was considered crazy for wanting to put people on planes for transport, but he went against what everyone told him and made the first plane dedicated to the delivery of humans, not mail. This plane was far from perfect though, so he adapted and innovated to make these flight the most comfortable and safe options of travel, even when he would encounter large difficulties he kept trucking forward and essentially built the standard of flight today.
But to conclude I personally have been inspired by people and ideas like these who do things nobody else is willing to do. This has helped me realise that things I am passionate about could be developed in ways that nobody would ever think of and things we do everyday could be completely morphed even ten years into the future. Anything can be developed into something that changes the world for everybody and if you truly love and have passion for something, you can turn it into something others would be eager to learn about. These things have given me a whole new definition of the word crazy and I now know there’s more to everything than it would seem. These crazy people teach us that there are no restrictions on the things we love, the only boundaries are those we but on our imaginations.
Fast forward through all the slide making and script writing and we are finally at presentation night and everyone is terrified of messing up, however we worked hard on this so we knew we would somewhat survive the evening. My group started by having to redo almost our entire presentation. Your probably wondering “Why?”, well this project was lead by two of my teachers, one of which happened to be on another field trip for the week before the presentation. My other teacher had already approved all my groups slides so I assumed we were good to go, but when my other teacher got back she wanted us to make all our slides completely different. I don’t know what happened with my two teachers but it seems that there was a lack of communication between them. So I made all the changes to our slides (not all of which I agreed with, rest in peace little planes, if you know you know) and moved on with the night. We practiced our roles throughout the night and off we went.
Here are some photos of the night.
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Sorry this one is sideways -
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That about wraps up this blog post and this project, but now it’s reflection time. So let us return to the driving question, “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?” By this definition of crazy, it takes someone who is daring and willing to do what others will not to change the world, they fight for what they believe and push through and innovate when faced with challenges. These people change the world because they are the ones bold enough to do so.
This project has given me a whole new perspective on crazy and also taught me a lot about public speaking. Sorry this was such a long blog post it was actually supposed to be 2 but I thought it would be a better fit to have it all in one so I hope it was worth it. Thank you for reading my blog and I will write to you next time.
Who do you think you are? And… Who do you think you want to be?
Who are you going to be? The question isn’t what do you want to do, but who do you want to become. That’s the question I’m setting out to answer in this blog post, well I won’t be finding out who YOU want to be but I will find out who I want to be. This is a quote made by Michelle Obama which I strongly advise you readers and viewers think about and answer yourself. But with that out the way let’s get on to the post.
So what can we do to actually figure out who we want to be, some lucky people have it all figured out easily while other only think they do. A lot of people when hearing this question think it’s just asking what kind of job you want to do but this question is much more than that, I’m asking you what kind of person you want to be, who do you aspire to be like, how do you want to treat people and who do you want to associate with.
First I’m going to talk about who do you aspire to be like. This ultimately comes down to role models, who do you idolize and how can you be more like them, what exactly makes them a role model. For a lot of people, including me, a parent is a role model, it makes sense because most people love their parents because they raised them and helped them when they needed it. For me personally it’s my mum, she raised me, dealt with my annoyance and cared for me when I needed help, she works extremely hard for me and my sister even if we’re aren’t always grateful. I aspire to be like her when I grow up because she is a genuine good and kind hearted person and I look up to her because she tries hard to help others. Hopefully you have someone like that in your life and if you do think about why they are that person to you, and if you can why not tell them you love them.
Okay so now let’s do and activity that I did in class, I will give you five questions and I’ll give my answer for all of them. First up we just have who are you? For the sake of not doxing myself I’m not going to say this one. Next I’d what do you do? Personally I try to have fun with everything and I’m always trying to make people laugh, but I also play a lot of video games (maybe a bit too many to be honest). Now after that we have who do you do it for? I try to make others laugh because there is always the chance that someone I know is having a rough day and if my dumb jokes can bring even a little bit of light into someone’s day then I’ve done my job, but I also do it for myself, I personally think (most of) my jokes are funny so I can enjoy them too. Now we have what do they want or need? I think everyone needs laughter in their life so they can be happy and everyone needs to be happy and they want to have friends so I’m there to be that for them. And finally How do they change as a result? Like I said earlier if I can make anyone even the slightest bit happier then I know I’ve done a good job, so people change by being more happy when I make jokes and hang out with friends, but I also become more happy. Now you know the questions why don’t you ask yourself these things in your own time.
Another major factor in finding out who you want to be is thinking about the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. Because the people you choose to spend time with can reflect your character more than you probably think, for example if you chose to hang out with fun and funny people like I do that will in turn make you a more jokey and comedy centres person, however if you spend your time with more serious people you’ll be better off in more serious situations but you might not have as much of a sense of humor. When it comes down to it the people you spend time with often turn out to be the kind of person you want to be.
Now I’m going to talk about the things we did in class to better answer the question. We first of all, every day made a sticky note that answered the question what are we grateful for, every day we came up with a different answer to this question, this ended up being one of my favrioute activities we did this project.
We also did a speed dating activity to answer a few questions that might help but that would be difficult for you viewers to do without a big group of people so I’ll just give you a photo and move on.
We also read one of these books to better understand different people and why they want to be who they are and we also made connections to the events and characters in the books. Here is a few of the books. Becoming – Michelle Obama, Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad, Born a Crime – Trevor Noah and I Am Malala – Malala Yousafzai. I chose I Am Malala and we took notes on these books writing down meaningful quotes, Life lessons, Connections from the books to our lives and general important ideas from the text. I’m not a fan of reading at all to be honest but I genuinely enjoyed this book so I recommend you to read it and maybe try to make the same notes we did.
So that’s it for what we did this project, it was really short as we needed to fit the entire thing into the few weeks we had before the semester changeover. As this blog comes to a close let’s revisit the question this whole thing is based on, “Who are you going to be?” Personally I’ve always struggled with this question but this project has helped me get closer to the answer I’ve been looking for. I now know that I want to be someone that can be looked up to like my mum or Malala, but I also want to be someone that people can have laughs with and enjoy the company of, I want to help those that need it and laugh with those who I need like my amazing friends. This project was one of the better ones and seems like it could have been so much better if we got more time so it sucks it was cut short. I’m going to end this blog with one question.
Who are you going to be?
Thanks for reading, Goodbye.
Allergy of Apology
Hello internet, welcome to blog theory, if you get that reference your awesome. Anyways I’m back with another blog for you which means another project has come to a close, this blog will actually be on the project we did known as ology of apology aswell as the winter exhibition that came with it. This exhibition was like no other though and if you want to know why then you’ll have to read the whole post, or I guess you could look at the title.
So to start off this project we of course need ourselves a driving question and this time it was, drum roll please! 🥁🥁🥁🥁 “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” This is important because obviously apologizing can mean and do many things but those thing would be learned during this project.
First of all we launched the project by starting to learn about memorials because when it comes down to it memorials are often just big apologies and that’s what this project is about. We started looking into what a memorial is and what differentiates them from other works of art like sculptures or paintings, well the short answer is almost anything can have a memorial as long as it meets this criteria. Number 1 is it has to be about memory, a memorial displays a memory to keep it alive and bring awareness of it to many generations, Number 2 is it needs to be something physical that focuses upon and draws attention to one specific memory about something important and number 3 is the memory must be a public memory so it’s something that many can relate too. That’s what a memorial needs to be but there also a few things it can be, memorials are reminders of things bad but also often something good and not all memorials are built by big corporations but they can be constructed by a community.
Now I’ve told you about what a memorial is you might be wondering why I told you, if you guessed that we would be making a memorial somehow then you would be correct, and to prepare for making our final memorial we were tasked with designing our own mini models of memorials with Lego. I immediately thought of a major event that was very recent, you may have heard of it it’s called COVID-19, it was this whole big pandemic thing wasn’t the most fun to be honest, I thought to myself what’s something everyone relates too as a symbol of this pandemic and I came to the conclusion that I would display this major event with a memorial of a mask here’s what I designed.
And here’s my descriptive paragraph about it.
My memorial was a giant face mask to symbolize the struggles and hardships that affected everyone in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we were told we would be making a memorial that would mean something to the public I immediately thought of the COVID pandemic as it was such a recent event that shook up the whole world and affected everyone in some way. If I was building a real memorial I would have inscribed the names of loved ones lost to the virus onto the front of the mask, I also added a spinning mechanism because it looks cool and would draw attention to the monument. I faced some challenges while building it mainly due to the limitations of the provided Lego bricks. I needed pieces that could hold other pieces in place since my design was held in the air by a stand. While building it I struggled to keep it all in one piece and it kept falling apart when I was trying out new designs and colours. I chose to make a COVID mask as it is something so widely recognizable by all as a symbol for the pandemic, whether you have seen videos of crazy anti-maskers or you yourself had to wear one for your safety. It’s a simple design that everyone is impacted by because we all lost someone in some way and even if you personally didn’t lose someone the names of those who were lost puts the numbers of the death toll into proportion. So in conclusion a COVID mask is an easily recognizable symbol of the global pandemic we all went through and although I had some struggles building it I still managed to come up with a design I was happy with and that everyone understood.
In addition to this we also looked into some other memorials the world had to offer just to further our understanding and if your interesting I recommend looking into the tomb of the unknown warrior in England the story behind it is quite interesting.
So now you might be wondering what we were going to make our memorials on, well we were going to be apologizing to one of 3 groups and I was selected for the Chinese Canadians. Before learning about that though we first started to look into discrimination and one of the major contributors to radical and discrimination in general is negative propaganda. Looking into different types of propaganda we talked a lot about anti-semitism as for some reason it’s becoming more mainstream again in recent years, things like social media have made expressing negative opinions to the masses easier than ever, and to talk about that I had to write a paragraph on exactly that topic, here’s what I came up with.
Propaganda can influence people in a good and bad way, but how can this affect people’s thoughts about standing up for those that need help? When people see propaganda it can affect them on all kinds of levels, some people just glance at it but don’t bother to look into it and move on with their day. Others may be deeply affected and have their opinions changed and morphed by it, an example is when the Nazi’s took over certain territories they placed propaganda in schools to try and influence the youth, some children were deeply impacted by this and it twisted their thoughts into believing that they were ugly and disgusting, while other children thought the same thing about them. Propaganda still affects us nowadays with social media being a major part of almost everyone’s daily lives around the world and with hate and hate crimes on the rise in recent years it’s reasonable to suspect that social media platforms have something to do with it. People can get away with saying almost anything today and with algorithms making it easier to see more of something once it’s been seen once peoples brain can be easily influenced into changing for the better and worse. Anti-semitism has shot up in recent years and there are so many links and ties that can be traced back to social media roots, a major example is Kanye West. Kanye West is a largely influential music artist with bipolar disorder, in recent years he has made many claims of being anti-Semitic which has influenced many people. Another major example is Andrew Tate, he is an influencer that has spread ideas and thoughts of misogyny to young minds of this generation. He is a multi-millionaire which gives him power and status and with this he has been distributing thoughts of sexism and has popularized being a so called “alpha male” which many take seriously and others mock this idea. Even though recently propaganda has spiked there has been many examples throughout history and all have a somewhat similar affect and outcome on those impacted by it. All of this ties into how propaganda changes peoples personal actions, for example those that see a lot of anti-semitism online are either more likely to stand by and do nothing if they ever see something like this happening in real life or they are more like to step in and stop things after seeing what people say online. Of course it’s possible that the opposite effect happens and they would be more motivated to join the oppressor in the confrontation. In shprt, many diffferent parts of a person can be changed by propaganda whether they are more likely to help those in need, more likely to attack those in need or if they are just to stand by and do nothing. No matter the time period people can be very impressionable so we have to be cautious of what we say.
I’m really proud of this work and I think I was able to convey my thoughts and beliefs on the topic through it.
Now we spent a whole lot of time just learning about BC’s history in order to find out what each group wanted to base their memorial on and I don’t want this blog to be a lot longer than it has to be so I’ll just tell you what my group focused on and presented about. We picked the Chinese head tax and immigration for Chinese people to Canada from 1858 to 1923. In short the gold rush brought many Chinese immigrants to BC an as a result of that the white people there and the government wanted them gone, so their idea was to make specifically Chinese immigrants have to pay a tax of $50 which was then raised to $100 and finally became $500 which was equivalent to over 2 years of labour and finally in 1923 they outright banned all Chinese immigration into Canada. After learning about this we knew it was right to make a memorial on it. We went through many design ideas but I believe we made one that represented our topic well. Our idea was to have an open suitcase with different things attached to a paper cutout of a man, there were lanterns depicting good things about immigrating to Canada and ankle weights displaying negative things about moving to Canada. The suitcase represented how all of the culture was never able to leave the immigrants luggage. We also made a information board and 3 other thing just to talk about the topic and describe our memorial, finally our group chose the name Symbold in Suspension for our memorial. When the day of the day of the exhibition came we were all somewhat mortified as we had started working on the final project last week but we were more prepared than we thought, but something we never prepared for was coming. After setting up our station this is what it looked like.
I think everything turned out very well and for the short time I did I enjoyed talking to people about what I had learned, and I say short time because… well each of our exhibits had to have food and something to interact with, I had a stroke of genius that lead me to think an amazing idea would be to get people to use chopstick to move things over a line and some of that was our food, specifically fortune cookies. So you see I’ve never eaten a fortune cookie before and I’ve always wondered what they’re like so when my group brought them as one of our snack I kind of wanted to try one however I’m cursed with having soooo many allergies and there were no ingredients on the box so I opted not to have one but what I forgot to remember was not to touch them but one of our items to pick up with the chopsticks was, you guessed it, a fortune cookie. While resetting the game I had multiple time picked up the fortune cookie, which was fine at first but after getting an itch on my face everything went down hill. All of a sudden my eyes were getting watery and itchy, I stupidly thought nothing of it but then they wouldn’t stop itching which meant I touched my face more which made everything worse, on top of that my nose started running and I started sneezing uncontrollably, for those who don’t know me I’m not the most socially confident so sneezing mid conversation with a stranger makes me want to cry. Luckily my lord and saviour my mum showed up early into the exhibition and I expressed to her how I was feeling and she knew that Chinese food often has nuts in it, what an odd coincidence, IM ALLERGIC TO NUTS! I was having an allergic reaction to my own groups food mid exhibition she walked me out of the room and we found one of my teachers who thankfully brought me to the office and my lovely vice principal gave me some medication and a place to wash my face off, safe to say I went home early. My group still did amazing though and that was shown in the voting tally at the end, I’m very thankful for them and how they handled the unexpected situation. The turnout of the exhibition seemed great, here are some photos my friends took.
Overall the exhibition was a bit of a nightmare for me but in the end everything was fine, but now for what you’ve all (maybe) been waiting for, who’s group did the best, we had all guest vote in a ballet and even though I think there was some rigging here are the results.
As you can see we tied for first with another group, so now we have our answer to that we need to answer a different question, a driving question once again our question was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” In my opinion apologies can be kept alive in many ways such as memorials, schools or even by being passed down through family trees, all of these ways work for different reasons but are still able to keep things alive and serve as reminders and warnings about the past.
Thank you for reading my blog this exhibition was certainly my most… interesting one yet, I hope you enjoyed reading this far and now you know that apologies can be for many things like apologizing for a wrong theory, A GAME THEORY. Thanks for reading and putting up with my jokes and references.
PREPOL
Hello everyone and welcome to my first ever pre-pol. Just like any other blog post this one has a driving question. That driving question is “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. This is a very important question to think about because without balance and support in your own life doing everyday tasks just becomes so much more difficult. In this blog I will review a project I’ve had this year and what I’ve taken away from it that helps me in daily life. So let’s get started.
So in order to figure out what would work for me in my PGP class we went over many strategies to help keep track of our lives and work. First of all everyday we would do happiness activities and then reflect on them these consisted of, Monday meditation, Tuesday Helper day, Wednesday exercise, Thursday journaling and Friday 3 gratitudes. Some of these I enjoyed like on Wednesdays going for walks with my friends was enjoyable but on Thursdays we had to journal about a topic and I’ve never liked writing so this wasn’t enjoyable for me however I’m glad I tried these because without doing them I wouldn’t know how I felt about them, to my surprise I enjoyed the meditation more than I thought I would, it isn’t the sort of thing I would do on my own but if offered to do it in a group I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If I’m being honest these daily activities didn’t seem to change my life much but I’m sure they work for some people just not me. Something else we had to do was reflecting on our days, weeks and planning what next week would look like. Once again this probably works well for some people but for me this just felt like another stressful thing I had to get done and brought an unneeded aspect of worrying into my life. The other thing we had to do was timeblock events on our calendar and use an app called things to schedule work and plans. This worked a little more than some of these other things but to be honest I don’t like having to refer to thing to remember them and I just keep information in my head but I still gave it a shot and here is the before and after photos.
From this project I took away that using different strategies works for different people and no one person can force their strategies on another, this is why I don’t think this project worked very well. In my opinion we were given set strategies to help manage our lives when instead we should have been given free reign to test out what worked for us, different options were given but those options had very little flexibility for us to manage them our way. While this didn’t work out for me I know others found a way that they like so from this I learned that everyone need to experiment with different options to help manage themselves.
After this project I’ve thought about what I think would actually work for me without having to worry about deadlines and borders to limit my options and I’ve discovered that I work best under some pressure so leaving work and procrastination is sometimes helpful. I like to wait until I have to get stuff done and then take a day to do all my work at once. I am able to do this because without my ADHD medication I can’t work at all but with it I can get anything accomplished however there are side-effects that make me not eat as much so I find taking them one day and cramming all my work into that time worlds well for me.
If you read that thank you and I hope you can find something to help manage yourself like I did and I appreciate you (some what) caring about my life and tactics. Now I’m going to review each of the core competencies and see if I used them in this project.
COMMUNICATING
I think I communicated well with peers and teachers by asking questions when necessary and helping out others in any way that I could. I would say I demonstrated this well.
COLLABORATING
This project didn’t need much collaboration as it was mainly a personal thing to get your life on track but whenever we did have to collaborate I did it well as I am comfortable around my peers by now since this I our 3rd year together.
CREATIVE THINKING
Throughout the duration of this project I don’t think I was very creative as I struggled to have interesting ideas with borderlines stoping me however once the project had ended I used my creative liberties to think about what works for me and why.
CRITICAL AND REFLECTIVE
Since we had to reflect an almost every action we made in this project it makes sence that I did this well since without it I would fail miserably however it did did quite repetitive at times.
PERSONAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY
This project was all about taking responsibility for yourself so I took agency over my own learning and went past the restraints to figure out what works for me personally.
POSITIVE PERSONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
This project contained a lot of knowing who you are and how you work so It helped that I know myself well and I can tell if something works or doesn’t work for me.
SOCIAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY
I don’t think I showed this during this project because it didn’t require it at all, we only focused on ourselves this project and didn’t have opportunities to work with others.
That’s it, the blogs over, but wait we still need to answer that big question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. I found out that each individual has their own thoughts on this matter and everyone works differently, but for me letting work build up and doing it in one blow is a good strategy to get everything done and finishing it all is very satisfying and being a little bit stressed help me work better.
Thanks so much for reading my blog post I hope you take something away from this that can help you with your work. I won’t see you next time but you will read me, Byeee!