Who knew you could see and do so much stuff in ten days! This was the project that incorporated my field study trip in grade 11. As you can probably guess from the title the project was about fear, more specifically answering the question “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?” 

One of the first things we did to launch 🚀 this project was read Hiroshima by John Hersey. This book follows the lives of 6 different survivors of Hiroshima, before, during, and after the atomic bomb was dropped. We did in class discussions, wrote theme analyses, and just considered the different views on the decision to drop the bomb. I found reading this book very interesting because I’ve never known much about Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though they were such an important part of our history and I’m glad I got to understand more of what happened. I also learned more about how an author can use different ways of story telling to show us a theme or message. Most information after the war about Hiroshima was about the statistics, where as this book showed people the influence the bomb had on individuals.

Then we BUILT A SECOND BRAIN! (Technically we just started building a second brain but still.) Have you every heard of a Zettelkasten??? Well before this project I hadn’t heard about it either; its based on the idea that our brain can’t hold all the information and thoughts you have in a day so you write them down in different formats and use your brain more to make connections between everything you write down. Out of the three types of notes (fleeting, literature, and permanent) I found that I normally do fleeting, I find the second one hard and I found the permanent most useful. I am not going to lie but for a while there when we were learning this in class I was thinking “this is never going to be useful to me,” “whyyyyyyyyyyy” and “what the heck is going on,” but guess what? I used the links for permanent notes in my writing on the project I’m working on now. Ms. Madsen told us to write a paragraph on why stories are a good way to learn and I was like “hey I wrote a permanent note about this” so then I linked it and used the previous things I had link to as examples for this piece of writing!!! It actually works!!!!!!! I’m trying to still keep the system in place but I am finding myself falling behind on it so I might need to change how I do parts of it to find something that works better for me. Overall I liked how I could show the connections between topics instead of just having them in my head for a day then forgetting them. 

Using our Zettelkasten system to record information and our thoughts, we watched different films about atomic warfare, and just the Cold War in general. During this time we also read a book called Fallout by Todd Strasser which I found really engaging. It focused more on the impacts the Cold War had on individuals and it was my inspiration to my own question for the project. Unlike most PLP projects we got to choose not only what our final product would be but we also got to create our own inquiry question to answer. Being interested on individual people’s decisions during the Cold War I decided on the question “How did fear influence people’s and society’s decisions about personal safety?”

Then our TRIP. I loved this trip, it was even better then last years (which was also amazing) and last year’s was to Disney World so you know the bar was high. We flew into Tucson Arizona, then went to a missile silo (where I gotta be one of the people to turn the key), copper mine, a long hike, museum/zoo, air and space museum (I absolutely loved this part, especially talking to the people there), an all you can eat buffet, all you can eat buffet and a wild West show. Then on our way to Sedona we went to the biosphere 2, visited the Casa grande ruins, and heard an organ player at a pizza restaurant. Then still making our way up Arizona we went on a really cool hike with beautiful views (this was my favourite hike), another really cool hike, a church in the mountains, and saw an IMAX video that had a cougar attack in it! The next day we woke up at 4 o’clock and saw the sunrise on the south end of the Grand Canyon (if you ever go see the sunrise there WEAR PANTS it is cold), then we hiked, partly down into the canyon, which was beautiful, we got to explore, we drove up and stopped at this town on Route 66 which had lots of cool shops, and ended the day at a delicious steakhouse. The next few days included museums, the Hoover dam, the Neon museum,  Fremont Street, National Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas crazy casinos, talking to AI robots, seeing the sphere show, another all you can eat buffet and undercover mansion, more malls, three hours in a place called Omega mart and so so much more. It was amazing to visit these places first hand and especially to talk to the volunteers at the Air and Space museum because they had actually been kids during the Cold War. 

When we got back from our (amazing) trip we were in a bit of a rush to finish our final product. I am really proud of what I created for my question but it took a long time and I should’ve done a less time consuming style of animation. For this project we got to pitch whatever final product we thought could show our answer to our inquiry question and I wanted to do something I wouldn’t normally get to do for a project. Since my question was about peoples’ decisions being influenced by fear I wanted to show some of those possible decisions by making an interactive story!!! The hardest part for me (other than the drawings which took a really really long time. P.S. do not look at any of the peoples hands in the illustrations… I gave up on trying to draw hands years ago), was showing that it was fear that made people make these decisions. From my research, I could see that it wasn’t just “oh I feel like making kids hide under desks today,” but that people were scared and had to make hard decisions with different impacts. For my animation I designed it to seem like you were a mother in 1960 in Tucson, Arizona where you had to make all these decisions based off different information that I gathered on my trip and in my search. Throughout the animation, with almost every decision there was an option to “give up and move on with my life,” which I included because fear can also drive you to push away the fear, or you may also realize that you just did not believe in it and I thought that was an important perspective that I needed to add. Overall, I’m especially proud of how I included evidence in so many different forms: I had voice interviews, videos, photos, pamphlets and drawings. Creating this final product was very fun (even the drawings…sorta) but mostly I enjoyed it because I actually am very proud of what I made and felt I showed a lot of my learning in a very creative way. If you click here you can see and go through my final product (unfortunately you have to have an app called keynote in order to see the animations and videos) 

Fear has influenced the world in so many ways, and if you want to see other ways from during the Cold War I suggest you check out Teva’s about secrets, or Fraser’s about Canada today or Nolan about technology, or Ava’s about the red scare and McCarthyism or Sabrina’s about politics or any of the other PLP 11s who all showed different sides and ideas.  I never knew much about the Cold War but I definitely never realized just how big an impact it had on our society. It was a war not fought by soldiers or guns, but with fear. This isn’t the only example of fear shaping our society but it does help show how our world is so connected and defined by fear.