Hello everybody this is my spring SLC, a celebration of my work in grade 10. This year I did a lot of work that I’m very proud of, not the least of which being my blue sky project.
I really feel like the Blue Sky Project was the peak of my work this year, I felt I got the help I needed and followed what was expected and ended up with a great product, not without its strifes, but you can see the specific blog post for that.
Next I’ll talk about something I’m not as proud of, Destination Imagination, or DI for short. Now you can go see my review of those strifes here, but our main problem was is we didn’t really have leaders, by the end we did but at the start we didn’t and that really hurt our productivity. And our final product was hurt by that. And while we had our share of successes the experience was ultimately marred by having a not to guidelines instrument and being deducted a lot because of that.
In reflection I think this was quite a good year for me, between blue sky, 96% on my English 10 provincial and many other successes. I am very proud of my work and my year, and I may not have started reading a lot or completed my other goals I tried to get going, I think I improved on my all important growth mindset and had a fun and successful year
Thank you for reading, I’m Joel Hamersley.

Hello everybody, this is the continuation of my Spring SLC blog posts, and I’m talking about he light of my life, Little Big Stories. These are short videos we made as projects leaping off from the south trip. This one is about how anti trans laws connect to the Jim Crow laws.

This was an interesting project but underdeveloped and I don’t think they knew what they wanted sometimes, I think next time they do it it will improve and be better but they definitely could have been clearer. I felt from myself this was a good product, not bad, not my best work, given all the constraints in this project I felt it was the best effort I could give. Overall this project was interesting but not all that fun, and not as well taught as it could have been.

Thank you for reading, I’m Joel Hamersley.

Hello everybody, this is the continuation of my Spring SLC blog posts, and I’m talking about he light of my life, Little Big Stories. These are short videos we made as projects leaping off from the south trip. This one is about the difference between Memphis and deep cove ribs.

This was an interesting project but underdeveloped and I don’t think they knew what they wanted sometimes, I think next time they do it it will improve and be better but they definitely could have been clearer. I felt from myself this was a good product, not bad, not my best work, given all the constraints in this project I felt it was the best effort I could give. Overall this project was interesting but not all that fun, and not as well taught as it could have been.

Thank you for reading, I’m Joel Hamersley.

Hello everybody, this is the start of my Spring SLC blog posts, and I’m starting with the thing I am most proud of, my blue sky project. The blue sky project is a project with completely impossible guidelines, you have to solve a problem in your life with a completely new solution. On top of that you need a mentor to help you but it can’t be your family, and on top of that you have to go through a design process and rebuild it. I satisfied some of the guidelines, I solved a problem in my life, might not have been a completely new solution. I had a mentor, but it was my mom. I went through a design process, but I did it on paper and then built it right. My family fully believes in two things, one, you work out the bugs on paper, two, you measure twice and cut once. Both of those things don’t work for this project, because that’s not the project, but if you want to take it up with me, go see my mother, this was an impossible project to do in three weeks and why the hell would I rebuild it. The entire point of building things is to build them right, not to build them wrong. I am incredibly proud of my work, and I think I did a great job, I’m just saying how about we make the guidelines a little less close to the initials of the the project.
Here is a video on my design process

Thank you for reading, I’m Joel Hamersley.

For my third reflection I researched the question “How do you define laws that are unjust?” It was fascinating to research all of the times they had to do this and how they did it and I boiled it down to a three step process and chose two examples that I thought showed it well.

How do you define laws that are unjust? It is a fascinating question, because there is such a thin line, and you have to take your personal feelings out of it or else nobody will take you seriously. But the Civil Rights workers, from top to bottom, took their personal feelings and desires out of it and nonviolently campaigned for desegregation.
In Montegomery, the busses are segregated and unlawful, with laws against black people sitting where they want. Civil Rights leaders identify this as a good thing to attack for being unjust, and with many people fighting back it’s easy to find a test case to show all of them. They choose a woman named Rosa Parks, a mixed race part African American woman, married to a white man, with a job, and overall a very well respected person. They took this test case, just a woman wanting to sit on the bus, and brought it to court, and won. They used all the previous cases, but most of all they used the phrase “separate but equal,” because this was inherently unequal. They defined the unjust law, showed it was objectively, and got it changed.
Back to our question, how do you define laws that are unjust? You have to really make a case that almost no one can deny, so a half white, well respected woman that just wants to sit on a seat on a bus, that’s a case almost nobody but the worst racist can deny. Another example of this is Brown vs. Board of Education. A family in Virginia lives very near a white school, but has to send their children to the crowded unfunded black only school. They’re fed up, so they apply and get rejected, so they sue. It’s such an unbalanced and ridiculous case that the NAACP take it and use it as a flagship case for stuff like this, and win a unanimous decision.
It’s a land mark case for civil rights and against segregation, but only happens because they identified what was unjust. So to define laws that are unjust you first, find a law that could be unjust, second, find an example of it being grossly unjust or misused, and thirdly, present the case that it is unjust.

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

For my second reflection I researched Robert Johnson, specifically his rise to fame and the peak of his powers. It was fascinating to research with so little actually known about him it was interesting to see all of the speculation pieces. In the end I decided to adapt the poem “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou and I really tried to write it from his perspective, and tried to infuse some of his opinions and some of my own into it, so you can read it and see how I did.

The women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the guitar I play
The pick I play with
The guy I met at the crossroads
The stuff the devil gave me
I’m Robert Johnson
No soul
Devil in the man
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And as I perform,
The women stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s in the guitar I play
The pick I play with
The guy I met at the crossroads
The stuff the devil gave me
I’m Robert Johnson
No soul
Devil in the man
That’s me.

The women themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the guitar I play
The pick I play with
The guy I met at the crossroads
The stuff the devil gave me
I’m Robert Johnson
No soul
Devil in the man
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or dance about
Or have to sing real loud.
When you see me performing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the guitar I play
The pick I play with
The guy I met at the crossroads
The stuff the devil gave me
I’m Robert Johnson
No soul
Devil in the man
That’s me.

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

In 1954 Brown vs Board of Education ruled that segregated life was unconstitutional, and so ruled that schools had to be desegregated, but in the Deep South this didn’t happen quickly, and things really started to heat up when in 1957 the NAACP sent nine students to enrol in Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas, later known as the Little Rock Nine, where the schools were very segregated. For the first time black people were going to get to go to an all white school, how exciting! Until the Arkansas state governor Orval Faubus ordered the state national guard to block the students by any means necessary, after a little while of the children not going to school President Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne division of the military, to accompany the students and make sure they were allowed to enter. They were subject to a year of physical and mental abuse but they stuck with it and in the end it was a landmark event for civil rights. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a trailblazing president on the grounds of civil rights, and during the Little Rock Nine events his acts became legend, but as a politician he must have wondered about his decisions, there must have been a lot going on in his mind, and I’m going to give my interpretation of what he must have been thinking. This is inside the mind of President Eisenhower.

Inside the Mind of Eisenhower Comic Life

Making this was a fun process, it took a lot of time, but once I got the ball rolling I got excited and I’m quite proud, this project was especially interesting because this is part 1/3, so I’m thinking I might do a bunch of these “inside the mind of president ____” but I guess I’ll wait for feedback on this one to see if that’s a good idea. I hope you enjoyed reading my comic book, and I’ll see you next time.

Spring SLC’s, how did we get here. Lots of work, lots of fun, and lots of learning, let’s talk about it. Firstly I’ll tell you about the thing I’m most proud of, it’s a representation of how golds value has changed, but no words. I’m so proud of this because I did it in a short amount of time, and it really gets the point across. Here’s the link if you want to see it.
Gold Rush Paper
Secondly I’m going to tell you about the thing I think shows the most growth, and it’s writing we did at the beginning of the year. We wrote a paragraph in 10 minutes, and my first to my lasti s a huge difference. You can see those here.
Writing Prompts
Thirdly, I’ll tell you about work I had a growth mindset for, and it’s a podcast we are currently doing. I hated the idea but am really enjoying doing it, read about that here.
Podcast
And lastly, I pose a question to my teacher to see if they read these, why do we do one at the ends of term 2 and 3, why not at the end of all 3 terms? Why not split them evenly? Just something I wondered, thanks for reading! See you later!

I like doing many things, and two of my favourite things are acting and music and I got to do both of those at something I’m very excited to do again, Destination Imagination. Destination imagination is a contest that is important for building critical thinking and many other skills. You get a challenge and have to complete with creativity and innovation.
Our challenge was to create a machine that could play a thirty second musical solo and hold as much weight as possible. As I am a musical person I was put in charge of the performance aspect, and as I read closer I realized that this was an entire show, not just a solo. We had to have an 8 minute performance that included setup and integrated the solo and the weighing testing of the instrument. It was tough at first, trying to come up with a story that everybody could get behind and wanted to do but after a while we found it.
The earth had been destroyed and one human had been sent out to an alien planet that was completely liveable except it had a little too much energy so they didn’t know how he would build. Fortunately when he got there aliens showed up to help him. They showed him how to build on the planet, after they left he got so bored, and so he built an instrument. He plays a solo and then dies because he used all of the trees on the instrument and then the aliens come back and decide that it looks strong and they test it.
The biggest challenge on the day of was actually getting it down to weight, it had to be 175 grams, which is so light, especially when it has to be 7.5 inches tall. So our team whittled and drilled it down to weight, only to be deducted all of the points you get for the weighing. We had illegal beads on it. Dumb technicalities.
It was an odd experience being there, because our teachers were the most intense there by a mile. The only people there that matched the intensity of my teachers were the check in people when we were 10 minutes late for check in and they were mad, and the elementary school teachers getting mad that we made a mess.
In the end I am very proud of how we did and excited for provincials. Here’s some pictures from regionals, see you later!

Podcasting, I thought I would hate it, I told my friends I would hate it, I told my parents I would hate it… I don’t hate it! It’s incredible to me because I freakin hated this idea. A project just done by editing, but no, I love it! You hit about ten minutes in doing this and it’s full steam ahead? I’m just enthralled for about an hour just editing and improving and listening. It’s a very fun fascinating process that I surprisingly love. Currently I only have a draft, you can listen here. When it is done I will put the link here and give you the ability to listen to my final draft. Thanks for reading!