Things Have Changed

It’s already been over a month since we’ve studied one of most significant time periods in history; bringing major developments to the world, the Renaissance is considered to be the foundations of all life today. Just like every other PLP project, we can’t just study one topic, we have to combine it with something completely random and that’s exactly what we did. Our driving question “who or what has challenged your worldview in the transition from elementary to high school?” had us all wondering how the two match and what is actually being asked to do. We later found out that these two topics related because they both brought lots of change but I still felt like these two things shouldn’t go together. It was still quite blurry on what the end product would look like but after a few days of clarification, we set to work. 

As I mentioned earlier there is kind of two parts to this unit, the Renaissance and the Change from Elementary to High School, what I didn’t mentioned was that we will be taking the lyrics from R.E.M’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It” and modifying them to fit our experiences from elementary and high school. A key part of this unit are the competencies, there are two, one being create and the other being cause and consequence. While learning about these competencies I was told that consequence isn’t always a bad thing, I always thought it referred to a bad situation but that’s only because I’ve used it in a situation like that. What do these competencies mean though, and how did I show them in my work? For the first competency create I think I demonstrate a great understanding because I show important parts of my worldview and write them to fit R.E.M’s song. I think the cause and consequence competency is where I excel at, in all the work I did in this project I tried to refer to this competency as much as I could. In my song I mention all sorts of change and what caused it; in my Renaissance work I explain that there has been positive consequences in all sorts of aspects in this time period and that it only brought positive change.

The whole first part of this project was about the song and our worldview so to kick it off we create a MindNode brainstorming all of the aspects of worldview that have influenced and change from the transition from elementary to high school. There are seven elements of worldview, time, beliefs, society, geography, values, economy and knowledge; all of these help break down my worldview and explain what has changed over the course of the past seven months in high school. Brainstorming these ideas will help us later on in recording and creating lyrics for our song. 

Now that we had some ideas on what has changed it was time to put them into lyrics. I actually found this quite hard because I kept pushing myself to find the perfect fit of words. Since we were making as parody of R.E.M’s song I wanted it to sound as similar as possible so I tried to make everything rhyme like theirs did. Later on in the lyrics this got very tricky rhyme so I had to just write them without a specific rhyming pattern. What I really liked about this part of the project was that everybody had different lyrics because we all have different lives, I found it fascinating to see how everyone else took on this task and how theirs differentiates from mine. 

Milestone three came and this was were we recorded our voices into the instrumental track. At first I was quite hesitant to start because I hate the way my voice sounds on recordings but I realized if I kept that mindset I would get nowhere. Once I got going it was smooth sailing from then on until I got to one verse were I struggled to find the timing, I listen to the original song a few times to see when he comes in and I eventually got it. 

This next milestone is really where we start learning about the Renaissance and its impact. Throughout the entirety of this unit we have had a few short lessons on the Renaissance but this is where we took all that information and put it together. This milestone also ties in with the competency cause and consequence because we were asked to write about a piece of evidence that shows the two. I thought art was the best example of this because we started to see a change in styles and purposes. The consequences that have occurred from the Renaissance are that we see developments in all aspects of life and the belief of god has gone down because of the introduction of humanism. The Renaissance also brought many geniuses that have changed the art scene forever because of their uniqueness and raw talent. 

After some Renaissance work we went back to the song and created one mega song with a group of three. In my group Nate, Cam and I worked well to create a song and video that clearly represents our change from elementary to high school.

At the start of this unit I didn’t really see the point but now that it’s come to an end I have really noticed that my worldview has changed drastically. Looking at the photos in our video I’ve come to realize that I’ve made many more friendships and my behaviour has changed. I thought Ms. Maxwell was silly when saying hat the transition from elementary to high school was one of the biggest changes in our lives, but I’ve now noticed that she was right. This change from elementary to high school has changed me a lot and I think it’s for the better.