The school year is finally nearing its end, and it’s time for the last ever humanities blog post that I will write as a ninth grader.  This unit has truly been one to remember, and has taught me a lot about both the subject at hand, and about myself and my work habits.

The first thing that I would like to touch bases on is the driving question. The driving question of this whole entire unit was how does power alter relationships. This question has been at the centre of all of the work done for this unit and had been something that has really made me rethink the effects of power, and the extent of how it effects our everyday lives.

The first piece of work that we completed was our Louis Riel book report. My whole class was tasked to read this comic by Chester Brown that summarized the life of and events that occurred involving Louis Riel. Since I have already done a complete summary of this assignment in another post of mine, I won’t go into to much detail, but basically Louis riel was a Metis who stood up for his people when they were being taken advantage of by the English, and it ended up costing him his life. The story of Louis riel gave me a greater insight into the effects that power can hold, and shows how easily power can influence both good and bad behaviour.

Louis Riel wasn’t all that we researched in this unit, we also looked at and talked about the gold rush, the CPR railway, and the Numbered Treaties. I’ll start by giving you a little bit of insight concerning the Gold rush. The gold rush really blew up in the 19th century, where many people of all different ages, classes, and races, traveled to Canada in hopes of striking it big and hitting the mother load. During the gold rush, social status and class didn’t matter as much as money and survival.

The CPR was also a big part of this unit. The CPR railway requires a lot of work to build, and the majority of the workers were Chinese. These Chinese workers risked there lives everyday and had to withstand the dangerous conditions that came with working on the railway. The railway was a big part of trade if, and was also used as defence against America. This railway has served many purposes, but the one that I found most important was the fact that it expanded trade across Canada and made Vancouver into the bustling city that it is today.

Lastly I would like to talk about the Numbered treaties. If you didn’t already know, treaties are terms of agreement between the indigenous peoples and the Canadian Government. The treaties were put in place to negotiate land and cohabitation. In many ways, the indigenous people were misled and taken advantage of with these treaties, and were bought out of their land, and in many cases had their rights and culture taken away from them. These treaties do still exist today, but many people have forgotten about them, and therefore do not abide by them today.

These were all things that I had to learn before I could move on to the animation portion of this unit. He final project for the unit was to create a two to three minute animation about a person or event that fell under one of these five categories, Manitoba/the Red River, Canadian Pacific Railway, First Nations Perspectives, the development of BC /the Gold Rush, and Immigration. After looking into it and doing some research, I chose to create my animation based on Simon Fraser and the story of his exploration of the Rockies, as well as his discovery of what is now called the Fraser River. 

The next thing to do was to start researching and putting I this research into a story. I after these steps, I created a storyboard to make the filming process easier. When creating the actual animation, I first experimented animating using keynote magic moves, but ended up actually using an app called FlipaClip instead. After drawing, editing, and adding sound to my final animation draft, my whole class had a peer critique where we watched everybody’s videos, and gave each other feedback.

This whole unit has really been one to remember, and as much as I am sad to watch it come to an end, I know that the knowledge that I learned here will be beneficial for me next year and in the years to come

With the year coming to a close, it’s time for yet another transitional presentation of learning (TPOL). Like many of my other TPOL’s, I will talk about a project from each subject that I feel represents the best of my work and why. 

I’ll start by talking about my science project on reproduction. We had the amazing opportunity to clone dandelions using asexual reproduction. I took good care of these five dandelion plants, and was so proud when not only one, but two of the dandelions sprouted. This project was the most enjoyable of any of the science projects that we’ve done all year. The project was something that really resonated with me mainly because it required a hands on experiment to do with nature, which is one of my favourite topics. I feel that the work I produce when I’m passionate about a subject is of better quality than that of a subject that I don’t really care much about. I’m very proud of the work that I put into growing these plants and creating an informational videos about them, and that is why I chose this project over any other one that I did this year in science. Even thought I was proud of the outcome of the project, I recognize that there is always room for growth, and I do think that I could’ve communicated a bit better with my group when finishing up the final video. 

The next subject is math. The proudest that I have been about a project of this subject was during our road trip project. In this, we were tasked to plan a road trip from New-York to a destination of our choosing. We had to use the math skills that we had learned to plan out the cost of everything from accommodation, gas prices, the route and time that it would take to get to and from the destination, and even food cost. I really liked the idea of being able to plan out your own dream trip, so this project was very appealing to me. The one place that I feel could’ve used some improvement was when I was planning out the route for my trip. The destination I chose was quite far from the starting point and there were too many stops for me write in, so the data got very messy and a bit confusing at times. This was something that I could’ve payed more attention towards fixing, but I put my focus on other things and let it slip. 

Meanwhile in humanities class, we were working on a comic for our World War One unit. This meant that we would have to pick a topic from the ones that we had learned about to do with WW1, and crate an informative comic on that certain event or group of people. I did mine on the changing role of woman in the First World War, and was quite proud of my final product. Other than a few times when I didn’t divide up my work properly and made the process a bit more pressured and stressful, I was happy with how everything turned out and will benefit from the knowledge that I gained when doing this project.

The last class to touch bases in is maker. I really connected with our most recent blue sky project where me and Jessie created a website for perspective dog owners. This project not only had me go out and interview a stranger, which for me was quite a challenge, but it let me work on a subject that I am very interested in. I loved doing the research on all of the different types of dogs and creating the survey to show you which dog would be perfect for you. This project really showed me that taking care of a dog, especially a puppy, is not as easy as it sounds, and there are many factors to take into consideration before hand. Although I was very happy with the work I produced for this project, there’s always room for improvement, and I definitely could’ve added more when it came to the display aspect of our project.

All of these projects from all of my classes stand as pieces of evidence that show that I am ready for next year and all the challenges that will come with it. Throughout the year, I have acquired the skills to be able to see my mistakes and use them to make and execute a plan and overcome them, and with this knowledge, I will be able to make improvements for next year.

DI 2018 has finally come to a close, and I’m here to share my experiences with this year’s Destination Imagination Provincial tournament.

After DI regionals had ended, my group and I had to reflect on our performance and find out what went well and what didn’t. Taking advice from the feedback we received from the appraisers, we had decided to switch around some of our team choose elements, edit our script, and build a giant rock out of paper mache to conceal the speaker that we were using for our soundtrack. We had planned out a schedule of what we would get done and when. The first thing on the list was to build the rock. The rock was built out of chicken wire and paper mache, and was finished over spring break. Next we began to build our new team choice element. This team choice element was our drums. We had decided to create drums out of PVC pipe, balloons, wooden sticks, quark, and construction paper. These drums would show our creativity and love for music. We had planned to get the materials and finish building this team choice element in the first three or four days, then spend the rest of the week editing the script and rehearsing our presentation. Almost everything went according to plan, accept rehearsing. We had devoted the whole time to building new things to add to our presentation, and didn’t actually leave enough time to practice as much as we needed to.

When it finally came time to present at DI provincials, I felt a bit underprepared. This wasn’t because we had slacked off, but rather we had put our effort into creating more, when we should’ve been focusing on improving what we already had. We should’ve taken more time to memorize the edited script and review the changes we had made in the performance. With that said, I was quite happy with the changes that we had made. I thought that the drums looked really good and were a great addition. Also, the script was a lot better after we edited it for provincials.

With all the ups and downs that DI has induced, as beneficial as it was, I’m glad that it has finally come to an end. This tournament has been a real reality check for me, showing me all the ways that I thrived, and all the aspects that I need to improve for next year.