Leave a comment Posted on Field Study, Loon Lake, Maker

An average post about Loon Lake

Hello and welcome to a blog post about our PLP class’ first field study since grade 8. This field study was about Loon Lake. Loon Lake is a retreat centre located in Maple Ridge, and operated by UBC, that focuses on corporate retreats or overnight school trips. Our class went there for a 4 day field study to try and get us out of the classroom and into a new gear of learning. Retreats are important because they can be like a large shift in your working habits, by putting you somewhere new, doing something new, you begin to develop new habits and can generally gain a new perspective on your personal and work life.

Throughout the trip we did numerous activities. These included: a birds of prey performance, a visit to the extreme air park, canoeing, rock climbing, high ropes, archery, some heated game nights, and some great food.

During the trip we were asked to think about a goal that could be feasibly completed by the end of the trip. My goal was “Build strategy(s)/a plan that can help me find what I want to work towards the future goal of gaining as much life experience and knowledge as possible while making myself more determined to learn in the process.” I thought of this goal because I wanted to use the field study as an opportunity, and start of new habits that will help me make sure that what I decide to do after I graduate high school is influenced by as much knowledge and experience as possible. I wanted to do this because at my current stage in life I only have a rough idea of what I have in mind for the future, and I want to be sure of my future by graduation.

Over the course of the trip, everyone in the class made progress on their goal, including me. Although there wasn’t as much there that was brand new to me, (I’ve done quite a bit of outdoor activity in my spare time) I still felt that I was building new habits towards my goal. As part of goal was to try and see the future an activity can bring, as opposed to the possibly monotonous present of the activity, I was trying to see what kind of future each thing could bring me to that I experienced, and throughout the learning about being “ready”, (for being a pretty simple term it really is quite complicated) I think that I demonstrated this by engaging myself and thinking of personal examples where the learning that was being conducted could be executed.

All in all, I think that I completed my goal for the time at loon lake and made great progress toward my larger goal throughout, and after the trip. Thanks for reading,

Keenan

Leave a comment Posted on Destination Imagination, Maker

An average post about D.I. 2022

Hello and welcome to this most recent blog post. This time, I will be talking about my experience with Destination Imagination. Firstly, a short explanation as to what the heck a “Destination Imagination” is. Destination Imagination is a challenge based competition that has teams compete against each other on different levels. The levels are: Regionals, Provincials, and Globals. Because there are so many teams competing for a spot at the global finals there are usually multiple tournaments before the global finals. But this year, the regionals were cancelled and teams were sent straight into the provincials. There are multiple challenges that a team can compete in which you can find on the Destination Imagination official website. My team was called “Yes”, and we competed in the scientific challenge.

This is our team photo, taken right before our challenge took place.

My team consisted of (from left to right): Nya, Julien, Ryan, Nathan, Me, and Liam.

Our challenge centred around a mysterious object and a microworld. You may be asking “what in the world is a microworld?” And we did too. A microworld isn’t really a scientific term. What the challenge meant by a microworld is basically just a world, but microscopic. The challenge was to create a story that centred around a character going into a microworld and finding a mysterious object, which the character(s) would find the use/purpose of later on in the story. Our performance was given points for many different aspects. These would be our story, our microworld scenery (the background depiction of the world from a microscopic creature’s point of view), the mysterious object, our lighting effect (which was used to reveal or enhance the mysterious object), and our team choice elements.

You can find our solution to the challenge here, with a recording of the performance.

Here’s a description of our solution. Our main story focuses on a group of scientists who and currently studying a bacteria called Vibrio Vulnificus, which is a flesh eating bacteria found in coastal waters during hot months. The scientists’ objective is to find a “cure” for this bacteria, but little did they know it would come to them in the weirdest way possible. The scientists are studying the bacteria when one of them sees a button in the lab they’ve never noticed before, so naturally, curiosity overwhelmed the scientist and she pushed the big red button. The characters realize that they have been somehow transported into the sample that they were studying, and become cautious that the bacteria must be somewhere in there with them. Lo and behold, the bacteria begins to attack them shortly after they found a mysterious Y shaped object while searching around. Panicking, the scientists try to think of something they can do to stop this bacteria, and weaponize the object they have found. It easily kills the bacteria, and the scientists make note that the object could be an antibody, specifically for Vibrio Vulnificus, and get back to trying to leave the sample before another bacteria arrives. They find the button, which appeared to have shrunk with them into the microworld, and decide to press it again, brining them back to the normal world, but this time, with a handheld antibody, the key to the completion of their mission.

The most important part of creating a solution for a challenge like this, at least from my experience, is communication. What I mean by that is that if you want an exceptional solution, you NEED to get everyone’s opinion on each aspect of the solution you are creating, and you need to have everyone’s thoughts on the table. Our performance could have been better, that’s a given, because no matter what it is, it can always be better, but I believe that our skills and construction of the solution was good. The thing we lacked in was exactly what I just mentioned. Communication. During the time we had to create a solution for this challenge, it was often difficult to get a hold of team members. While we were in class, we did well at organizing meetups and such, but when we didn’t “have to” our group was not very active in trying to organize solutions. On my end, I believe that I could most definitely do better. If I tried to communicate like I sometimes did, I would just kind of wait for a response, but the action that I should take is encouraging communication or presenting a solution the next time I came face to face with my group.

Here is the participation award, given to us along with some cool pins.

Our team came 2nd in the main challenge, and took first place in the instant challenge (which I’m not allowed to talk about). These rankings were ones that our team was pretty proud of, with only a little bitterness for being 20 points short of first. Overall, I’m glad that we were forced to participate in this dreaded event, because despite the negative outlook most people took out of it, I think we all experienced at least a little valuable learning from each of our challenges.

Thank you for reading to the end of my D.I. reflection, and I hope you got something out of it,

Later!

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities

An average post about WWII

Hello and welcome back to my blog. In this post I am going to be talking to you about our recent project on WWII. In this project we got to select a subject from WWII that we could connect to the book that we read for class. I Read the book Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys, and my subject of choice was Unit 731, a Japanese biological and chemical warfare research station located in China.

Spotify

You can listen to all of the episodes of the podcasts here. An episode will be released each day for the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for episode 16! (Thats mine)

We started this project by looking at some of the causes of WWII. Some of these were directly linked back to WWI and the sanctions that were put on against Germany after the war had ended. I think that learning about the causes of an event of such scale is important because we can recognize patterns that are similar in real life events like the current situation in Ukraine. If you try to connect the start of WWII and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict I’m sure you could find many similarities. I think that if the nations involved fail to play their cards right, we man face the start of WWIII.

You can read more about the current status of the conflict at NBC news here.

We then began reading through our book with our group, and had regular book chats that sparked meaningful and thoughtful conversations about the topics of each book. As I mentioned earlier, my book was Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. The book follows a group of refugees from countries affected by the war and their individual stories. The main event of the book is a fictional representation of the Wilhelm Gustloff, an event of a ship sinking during WWII that was more deadly than the Titanic, but is still unknown to the majority of people. It tells the consequences of WWII by transporting the reader to the future at the end of the book and describing the fate of one of the main characters in a letter to a different character from the book. It describes how the war took many lives, innocent and military, indiscriminately.

We then chose a topic from WWII (I chose Unit 731) and made a podcast episode which will be airing daily starting March 13th. My podcast was on Unit 731, a very unethical biological and chemical warfare “research” station run by a man by the name of Shiro Ishii, located strategically in China for easy access to new test subjects. The acts that were committed at Unit 731 are absolutely disgusting. They experimented on, raped, and tortured innocent prisoners from China and Russia in order to “research” the effects of various pathogens and injuries. These include blood loss (limbs were severed), having severed limbs reattached to the opposite side of the body, freezing of body parts and thawing to study frostbite and gangrene, or surgery. All of these operations would be conducted without any anaesthesia of any kind to “prevent disruption of test results”. If you find this topic particularly interesting, you can find my podcast episode on it in the Hidden Chapters of WWII podcast Ep. 16: Unit 731.

How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?

My topic of Unit 731 can display the causes and consequences of WWII from the perspective of Japan by demonstrating the reasons Japan joined the war i.e. prejudice the Imperial Japanese felt at the time against most of the world at the time, and pressure to compete with military strength. And the consequences being the many lives that were unrightfully sacrificed and defiled by the “pursuit of science”. Understanding these things and why they happen is important because it allows us to spot them while they are growing in our lives and stoop conflicts and issues, whether you’re having a squabble with a neighbour, or you become the leader of a country.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Keenan, out.

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities

An average post about Shakespeare

Hello and welcome to my post about our humanities 10 Romeo and Juliet project. You may think of romeo and Juliet as some boring play and an even more boring english unit, but this project was actually a lot of fun.

This was the final video for the project, where we took the part of the play we chose and remade it with a modern audience in mind. My group recreated Act V Scene III. Our story was reworked with each family from the original being the leaders of worldwide drug empires.

You can read the script for the original act 5 scene 3 at this handy website that even has some translations for the wacky old Shakespearean English.

Throughout this project, we watched some modern versions of Romeo and Juliet that if you didn’t already know they were connected you would never guess (except Gnomeo and Juliet, you could probably guess that one) in order for us to grasp some of the more important concepts or ideas from the play. The main messages that we were on the lookout for were: the nature of free will, honour and obligation, the naivety of youth, the power of love and hate, violence and death, gender roles, revenge, and the multiplicity of identity. Our short video above had elements of the power of love and hate, violence and death, honour and obligation, and revenge.

Because of our current school system, and the new variants of COVID-19, this project was cut very short, like, an extra week on top of the already shortened project, so we really didn’t get the full scope of things (for the better or worse) but we read and watched adaptations of all the most important scenes. The parts of the movies we watched included: Romeo and Juliet; Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo + Juliet (1996), West Side Story (1961), Gnomeo and Juliet (no resources unfortunately), and Warm Bodies (2013). You can feel free to watch any of these and try to figure out the connections to the original Romeo and Juliet yourself!

Now the driving question for this was “Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?”. This question is quite complex, despite you maybe being able to give a light answer like “oh it’s taught in schools” but here’s mine. Not only are his plays considered to be beautiful works of poetry and literature, but also they provide some great concepts and realities related to each of them. I mentioned each of these concepts earlier in the post, and see that these concepts can help to teach and understand pieces of literature or texts more deeply and help further your comprehension of more intelectual or deep messages within different mediums such as films, books, or something like a game or even an advertisement.

 

Thanks for tuning into another one of my mindless rants about a recent project,

later!

Leave a comment Posted on Exhibition, Humanities, Maker

An Average Post About a Winter Exhibition

Hello, and welcome back to my blog, today we’re going to talk about our most recent event, the PLP Winter Exhibition. This event was pretty big because we were finally able to host it inside again. Unfortunately there was no food or drinks though.

The driving question this time was “How can we create a public memory of past wrongs so they are not repeated today?” This question mentions a “public memory” which refers to the circulation of recollections of members of a certain community as defined by Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips. In our case, the public memory is a memorial, which would refer to a place or structure created to commemorate or remember a significant event. During this project, we learned about 3 different events in Vancouver’s history where some form of discrimination occurred.

The first being the Komagata Maru, and event in history where the Canadian government issued a law called the Continuous journey act causing all sorts of trouble with a certain ship in Vancouver’s port.

The specifics on the event of the Komagata Maru can be found here, in my post about it.

The second event we learned about was the Chinese Oppression in BC. We focused most from the construction of the railways to the Second World War.

And last but certainly not least was the Japanese internment in BC during WWII. This was the topic of my groups project for the exhibition.

For each of these different events we went on a field trip to various areas to get first hand experience in memorials and culture of the affected groups. This way of learning really helped me personally because it gave me a personal connection to each of the events that not only helped me remember some information on each one, but also helped me understand what made a successful memorial because I could take on the role as spectator. For example I found the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen gardens where you went to new areas often to be an much more enjoyable experience than the first half of the Nikkei Cultural centre where it was almost exclusively writing on the wall.

The Winter Exhibition. Oh boy. This was an experience. Now the way I’m talking about it might make it sound terrible, but it really wasn’t all that bad. We had the room arranged so each group got a 6th of the room’s space. We had a corner halfway through the visitors journey. During the exhibition I noticed that our text based way of explaining our project only worked for a handful of people.

Our project was on the Japanese internment during WWII, we decided to make a statue that reflected a shadow onto a large wall at night, signifying the large part of life the Japanese Canadian parents had to keep in the shadows, hidden from their children so they could live a happy life.

This was the statue we made. It doesn’t specifically depict anything, except for a hard working Japanese Canadian. To my group it looked like a farmer or a soldier but it could look like something completely different to you. But the thing they most all have in common is that they work hard and push through tough times.

Earlier I mentioned that out text based descriptions didn’t really work for most people. This is probably because they weren’t interested or they figured it wasn’t important. We tried to circumvent this problem during the exhibition with some improv changes to our pitch where we would tell the visitor that the may not have to read the first 2 paragraphs because we were placed after the other Japanese Internment group. We explained it by saying the other group likely other already explained the content. This is the kind of place we needed to use our teamwork skills. This is because not only did we have to make changes midway through our exhibition we also needed to make sure everyone knew what they were going to say. Another part of the teamwork part we didn’t do too well was communicating outside of school. We were using an iMessage group chat to message each other about the project but most of the time it went unused and we failed to communicate some extra ideas that may have made the final cut.

 

Now this exhibition may have seemed pretty laid back so far, but the was a vote going on between each team from each event. Now in my group I don’t think we were too concerned with the votes, and I think it was better that way. But the results of the voting were clearly biased, but when the votes were counted we found that probably about 60% of the ballots all voted for the first option from each category. This is probably something like what this article is talking about. Now I can still hold my pride high and say that we would have won it if not for the poorly designed ballots I think that we could have presented our project a lot better. I think the biggest culprit of our democratic failure was our large amounts of text. If we had spent some more time refining the paragraphs and making them look slightly less intimidating then filled in the blanks ourselves when the visitor asked a question we could have had many more votes.

 

If I were to pitch this to a city hall or propose it as a real monument I would most likely not change much about our pitch. I’m proud of the way we explained the metaphoric value of the shadow and the interpretations of the mysterious figure at the same time and think it might even have a chance of being a real thing. But I don’t think thats going to happen. I have better things to do with my life like binging series upon series on Netflix.

To give credit where credit is due, this was my group, unfortunately I didn’t come up with this whole thing myself, and I owe it to my team members: Sophia, Josh, and last (and maybe least? Just kidding) Nate.

Finally, we come full circle and I get to answer the driving question. “How can we create a public memory of past wrongs so they are not repeated today?” And I think that the best answer I can give to that is to choose the right event for the job. You will always want to take something local, or something the people you need or want to affect will all associate with. It gives them the kind of sense that they have experienced it or if they have a distant relative that experienced the event they will care more or be more interested in general.

 

Thanks for coming along with me on my extra long rant today, peace

Keenan

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities, Maker

An Average Post About the Komagata Maru

Hello, and welcome to my first post on our newest project, “Ology of Apology”. This project focuses on the Canadian Government’s injustices towards minorities. This post will focus on a more specific event though. The Komagata Maru.

The Story

Passengers of the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-: CVA 7-127

The Komagata Maru is a story of injustice, and a story of bravery, testing the limits of the law. The story starts in Hong Kong, where a wealthy Sikh man name Gurdit Singh came into possession of a boat named the Komagata Maru. 150 Punjabi passengers boarded the ship in Hong Kong, all Punjabis. But this wasn’t enough yet. The ship travelled through Japan and picked up 226 more passengers.

Passengers aboard the Komagata Maru
Image: James Luke Quiney fonds/City of Vancouver Archives/AM 15984-:CVA 7-122.

The ship then began its 2 month journey into Canadian waters. Although Gurdit Singh and the passengers were aware that Canada had been turning away south Asian immigrants for almost 5 years, they thought that being British subjects would be enough to be allowed admittance. This was not the case. Only 20 passengers (and a few special cases) were allowed onto solid ground due to the fact that they were returning residents and could prove it. The other 350 some passengers were kept on the boat for 2 months with food or water supply all while the local police were harassing them hoping to get them to leave by their own volition.

People coming to watch the conflict between the law and the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-:CVA 7-129.

The Punjabi people on land did their best to get food and water to the ship while raising money to bring the issue to court. They raised an incredible sum of money and hired lawyers to take the case to court. The court later ruled that the ship had broken the continuous journey act and the ship began its journey back to India. The ship stopped in Japan where approximately 20 passengers got off of the ship. The ship then arrived in the port of Budge Budge in India, where some distrusting police members got into a scuffle with the passengers resulting in the death of 20 passengers.

This is a brick that was used to fight against the police officials trying to force the Komagata Maru to leave

Source: Museum of Vancouver

The Apology

in 2008, Stephen Harper made a public apology to around 8,000 people in a local event in Surrey, BC. The Sikh community thought that this apology was half hearted and demanded it be said on the floor of the House of Commons, which didn’t happen until 2016, when Justin Trudeau made the decision to apologize in the House of Commons as the Punjabi community asked.

This is the stage where Justin Trudeau gave his formal apology

Recent events such as residential schools are getting the same sort of apology in an attempt to make things write and move forward as a society. These sorts of apologies are important because they allow the general public to be educated or just acknowledge the events and it shows the remorse and responsibility the government is taking on because of it. It also allows the community affected to observe this and forgive.

The Conclusion

This event isn’t just some random thing from history class. This event is even significant to our lives today! This is because of the effect that it had on the way it has functioned as an example for discrimination and how we have pushed against systemic racism evident by the great variety of people now living in Canada. But overall, I think the most important part of this whole story to remember are the people that took the journey knowing it may not work out, eventually leading to the society we live in today.

 

Thanks for reading this post on the Komagata Maru, and I hope you look out for my next posts on the other racial injustices in Canada!

Signing off.

Leave a comment Posted on HPC, Humanities

An average post about Canadian politics

Hello, and welcome to this post on our latest project, “Think You Can do Better?”. This project was about taking on the role of a political party in the Canadian federal election and creating the basis for a campaign. My party was comprised of Jordan, Jonathan, Liam, and myself.

Here you can see our campaign video, detailing our intentions and plans.

The video above was the final product of the project.

The HPC (Hippopotamus Party of Canada)

You can read more about our party and our ideas here, on my post detailing the party if you want to read more. Our party believed the current inflated housing market in populated areas, as well as our ever-growing national debt to be problems that need fixing before they get even more out of hand. Our reasoning for the housing crisis is self explanatory. This is seen in our campaign video with a decent sized Vancouver home costing as much as $2,000,000. Thats a lot of money! The debt crisis is more of a controversial topic. The main reason people will denote national debt is because they believe government to function almost indifferently under debt or not. And they are partially right. The big issue with that though is the large hit the country will take if another event like the pandemic occurs, because the debt a country holds directly affects the amount of monetary support or budget the country can afford to spend attempting to recover, as well as the large interest rates. These interest rates can be observed here.

How should we govern ourselves?

This project had a very difficult driving question; “How should we govern ourselves?”. This question is particularly hard to answer because the answer will change depending on who your asking and what values and experiences they have. For me, I think that the best political system is one in which every different problem and angle on those problems is presented and heard. One such system, known as proportional reprentation (here is a great in-depth explanation from Fair Vote Canada). Proportional representation is a system where seats in government are spread throughout parties based on percentage of votes, for example, if a party were to get 15% of Canadian votes, they would get 15% of seats in the House of Commons. This means that the large percentage of Canadian’s who don’t vote on the grounds that their vote doesn’t matter, would lose their excuse.

Reflection

Overall, I think that this project put me into a new perspective on politics and showed me that the ideal system I have been talking about is very difficult to implement due to how the current system works. And I also think that despite advocating for such a this as an individual, as a party it is disadvantageous to have proportional representation due to the fact that there will almost never be a majority government. On the work side of things here, I think that our campaign video was very successful, even though we were missing some shots due to poor weather and tight time constraints. During this project I’m sure I could have made use of my new Zettelkasten to make my work easier on me, and I hope that I can do that in the future.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and I hope you’ll join me later for more!

Leave a comment Posted on HPC, Humanities

An average post about a press release

Hello and welcome to my second post about our “Think You Can Do Better?” Project. This post is going to focus on our parties press release and answer some important questions about our classes parties. Our party is called the Hippopotamus Party of Canada my parties members were Jordan, Liam, and Jonathan. We chose this name because of our party’s representative, Haben the hippopotamus from the Greater Vancouver Zoo. One of our parties focuses is to pay off our national debt to free our future generations and increase our countries wiggle room during a large scale event such as a pandemic. Here is an article about our neighbours, America’s national debt.

We insist to employ our people’s social, poltical and environmental ideologies in order to develop society and its future. We are a group of people who best understand Canada’s economic issues. We understand that Canada's economy has been falling off ever since the 2015 election. Our Values: Justice – We push for a free future in which those who should be punished, be punished and those who should be rewarded, be rewarded. Prosperity – We want to have a successful economy as we believe any working nation is fundamentally driven by a good economy. Integrity – We will follow through with our promises and do our best to be up front with all of our plans. We support a market with low restrictions on the international trade environment. We will cut ties with British Monarchy and become a democratic republic. We stand for the reinforcement of our economy and plan to push back against the COVID crisis through lowering taxes and creation of safe job oppurtunties through our new systems. We plan to implement flat tax (same percentage for everyone) for persons making a gross income of more than $25,000 a year. We plan to support lower cost homes with new 3d printed homes/different technologies. We promise to flatten taxes for our citizens to support the growth of our citizens wealth. We want to fix our laws in order prevent slow court cases. ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Priorities: Housing affordability Working with businesses and introducing new technologies Minimizing and paying off national debt

Why should you choose us?

Unlike others, We promise to focus on eradicting national debt in order to create a free future for nations. The Hippopotamus Party of Canada truly strives for the betterment of our economy as we believe, currently, Candian standard of living will improve. Besides national debt, our next main priorty will be fixing the housing crisis which has not been achieved by any other party and difference between us and them, is that we will use our resources to devolp new technolgies to decrease the pricing of housing. Here is a list containing some technologies that can help build the housing market.

How does this relate to the federal election?

This is relevant to the recent federal election because we believe that there are current issues that the country is facing, but the current parties have overlooked entirely, more specifically our current national deficit of almost 1.2 trillion dollars. You can find the current number here. We are also concerned about our current housing market. The prices are rising all over Canada, and this issue is ever present in Vancouver. You can read more about this issue here. These issues have been largely ignored by most parties and not heavily addressed by any. This is why we believe, as citizens of this country, that these are the more important issues at the moment, requiring much more attention.

Thank you for coming and reading about our political party, and I hope this has raised some more awareness to these important issues.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities

An average post about the Government of Canada

Hello, and welcome to another post. This is the first post of my grade 10 year! What a milestone. This post will contain some opinions that you might not agree with, so watch out, and don’t get too mad.

This post will focus around the Canadian federal election that happened just a few days ago. And how the Canadian government is structured.

 

This election was not like a normal October election. You see, normally elections are held every 4 years in October, but there’s more to it. The current Prime Minister of the country can call an election at any time during their term. We can only guess at what our current Prime Minister, Justin Treaudau’s motive was, but it was most likely an attempt to attain a majority government (if so, it didn’t work). A majority government is when a single party hold more than half of the seats in the House of Commons where there is a seat for each and every riding in Canada.

These are the current seats as of writing this post. image from CBC News

Our election system is called “first past the post”. This means that, as seen above, our leader is determined by the amount of seats their party got. To acquire a seat, a party must get the highest amount of votes in a riding. A riding is an area where certain candidates from each party run a campaign to attract the attention of voters (voters must be over the age of 18). The candidate with the most votes in the riding is elected and get one seat in the House of Commons. Personally, I believe that while our country may be functional as a government, it has failed as a representation of all of our people’s views. This is because of a flaw in which a party could amass hundreds of thousands of votes over different ridings and not en up with a single seat. This is explained well in a video by CBC News titled “What would parliament look like with proportional representation?”

 

As seen in CBC’s video above proportional representation is a system in which seats are given to parties relative to the percentage of votes they got across the whole country. Using this system, a majority government is likely never going to happen, but the views of all parties will be shared more equally. This system is likely not going to be implemented soon or ever, even thought it is a much better representation of what the people want from their government, because the leaders of the country benefit more form the current system. This means that while this may be a flaw to us people who want our views to be shared, it is an integral part of, at the moment, the LBC’s (Liberal Party of Canada) position of power. This will most likely not change in the future, and the Liberal and Conservative parties will likely stay predominant in the next few elections.

Here’s a chart I made with the data collected at CBC News’ Federal Election Results site.

As you can see with the chart, with proportional representation, the seats are much more spread out between the different parties. While this might make decision making slightly harder in the House of Commons, it guarantees that all parties views will at least be pitched as ideas. The only problem with this is that for this system to be fully implemented, it requires the current leading party’s support, which is unlikely to happen due to the fact that the current system favours those who can get just slightly more votes in certain ridings as opposed to the new system that favours those who get more votes altogether.

 

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk and I hope you enjoyed seeing a little through my eyes on this topic. Until next time.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities, Maker

An Average Post About WWI

Hello, and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be telling you about my learning in our most recent project, The Great War Exhibit. This project was focused around an artifact that we chose at the start of the project. I chose trench art, for the simple reason of not knowing what’s it was at the time. Little did i know, it was pretty amazing.

Trench art was and still is important. Trench art is made, and has been made in wars all over the world. This includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and both World Wars (and hopefully not a third one). Trench art is important because of what it represents, and what it does for the people that make it. First of all, trench warfare was brutal (you can play a game to learn more here). There was no clean water (you would have had to boil it to make it drinkable), no way to clean your lice infested clothing, and a lot of terrifying experiences. The soldiers would spend most of their day waiting for the next attack from the enemy or awaiting new orders. This lead to the soldiers spending large amounts of time in their terrible living conditions, doing basically nothing. Soldiers began to get creative. There were many pastimes in the trenches, and one of the more pronounced ones was trench art. Trench art symbolizes the drive and spirit of the soldiers and what they were so determined to get through.

This is the example the Canadian War Museum gave us as an artifact.

Trench art came in many forms, and they ranged from boxes with punched in writing on it, to beautiful designs such as the one on the artillery casing seen above.

At the start of the project we also researched a soldier from the Canadian archives. My soldier’s name was Edward McFeely whose information can be found here. We looked through our soldier’s information and crafted a story with as much truth to it as possible. For this we had to figure out where they fought, how and if they died, and many other personal facts. This was a very challenging assignment especially because we had to read so much old cursive. This story was supposed to help Canadians understand the historical significance of our soldier and artifact.

Here is the final product of my story. The video!

 

This video demonstrates the competencies “establish historical significance” and “using resources” because of the extensive research done into the purpose, meaning, symbolism, and achievements of the soldier and artifact used to create the video. I think that the importance of that ties into the driving question for the project, “How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI”. I think that the answer to the driving question is the same as the examples of the competencies mentioned earlier. This is because the video itself is the answer to he question. We can use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI by creating an informative video that shows the experiences soldiers had in the trenches and explaining why they mattered.

The next example I would like to share with you is the mini-museum that we hosted as a class in our school library.

This is a picture of me at my station with the trench art!

A short version of this event was streamed and recorded on instagram, which can be viewed here on the Seycove Secondary instagram page. This was a big event, where classes from the school would come through our exhibit and learn about each of our artifacts. This gave us a great opportunity to share what we had learned up until that point in the project. The competency “global collaborator” was a big part of this event because of how we had to take the perspective of someone who knew nothing and explain the artifact fro the ground up. During my presentation, I gave a very similar explanation to the one I put at the top of the post.

Overall, I think that his project was a huge success, and helped us better understand WWI and the parts of it that aren’t easily accessible.

I hope that you enjoyed reading through this post about my learning.

Thanks for stopping by!

Keenan