We all know the name of the amazing Rosa Parks, but recently I heard of Claudette Colvin. If you’re like me, you didn’t recognize that name. Claudette Colvin was the Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks. What do I mean you ask?

rosa parks

Rosa Parks is known for refusing to give her bus seat up to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested on December 1, 1955 as there were segregation laws in the south, and what she did was illegal. This kick-started the Montgomery Bus Boycott which was a key part of the Civil Rights movement and caused the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. So yes, Rosa Parks was a badass, but Claudette Colvin did the exact same thing as Parks nine months earlier, yet we never hear her name.

claudette Colvin

Colvin was 15 when she refused to move to the back of the bus and give her seat up to a white person. The bus driver demanded her to get up and she refused, telling the man she’d paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. A quote from Colvin herself is “All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily.” Moments later, she was handcuffed and arrested by two police officers. “I was afraid, but I was more angry.”

Colvin never really told her story when she moved to New York City, as no one in her community was taking about anything related to it. Colvin also shared the fact she believed Parks was chosen as the face for the bus boycott because she was a tidy, well off, adult. Colvin was a wild, and small teenager. While they both experienced racism, and had to deal with segregation in the south, Colvin was even less privileged than Parks. Colvin did the exact same thing, in the exact same place BEFORE Parks, yet she wasn’t the one everyone knew as the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Why I wanted to share Colvin’s story is because she’s so important to American history, yet she isn’t in textbooks, or talked about like Parks is.  If one little blog post can teach one person about her, then my goal is achieved. She was so young, yet so brave and strong. It’s inspirational to see someone only one year off my age (younger too) do something so dangerous and courageous.

When I heard her story, I instantly loved her. I read so many articles and watched so videos of her now at age 69 talking about her story. She’s an incredible woman and I look up to her and her smarts and bravery. Colvin knew what she was experiencing was wrong, and she stood up against it. Us all should look up to Colvin and learn a lesson or two from her. If a 15 year old can do what’s right, so can we.

“I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it, You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.” —Claudette Colvin

Macbeth! We all have read it, normally in high school English class, or maybe you read it on your free time….Whatever floats your boat. Anyways, my class and I had the endeavour of reading Macbeth. I wrote a few blog posts on the actual play, here, here and here, so check those out. After lot’s of prior work, we created something awesome… A movie! We wrote, planned, filmed, and edited a whole movie (almost). Almost, because of COVID. Lets get into it. 

Before making the movie, we did a lot of prep work. I was worried for this part because I knew it was going to be a lot of writing, but it ended up working out way better than I thought. We had to write something called a quest. The layout of it was to be given 3 quotes from the play, and we had to choose 2 to analyze in well written paragraph format. We had to include how the quote relates to the before, during and after the quote in events, how the quote highlights
the characteristics of the character, and the significance of the quote/relationship with themes. The first one I wrote was eh, the second one I wrote was good, and the last one I wrote was awesome. This isn’t luck, it was hard work. I made sure after each quest, I knew what I did wrong (not being specific enough, saying something is something when it’s not, proper punctuation, fully understanding the quote, etc) and how I needed to improve. This assignment was important to me, I wanted to do well.

We started by all pitching movie ideas. We needed to include the following: the a rough overall Macbeth plot line, in a 50s setting. My pitch was a secret society in a boarding school, with things like communists, love, betrayal, and all that wrapped into it. The class liked it, and we went with it. Everything’s a little blurry, as this was about 6 months ago, but I do have vivid memories of it all. Anyways, we were given roles. I wanted director or director of photography, but I ended up with production manager, which ended up being pretty similar to both of those. 

We started with things like script writing (by Jesse and Logan) costume’s (by Maggie), set decorations (by Isabelle), all the filming times (by Adlih), as well as also as a class fully storyboarding the whole movie. Also, a big part of the prep was reading the script. We spent many classes going over it by reading it as class and improving it. There was SO MUCH prep. But, it was fun. The class was very united, and we didn’t argue too much which was surprising. Something to mention is that, this Macbeth movie project is kind of cursed. My brothers grade, as well as the last years grade 11’s have attempted to make a Macbeth movie, and not to be harsh, but both of their groups ran into big problems, or just didn’t execute it properly. Why I’m mentioning this is because we went into this movie making process wanting to break that curse, and I would say we did, besides COVID rudely interrupting. 

After all of the prep (which I could go on for HOURS about but I’m not going to due to not wanting this blog post to be 100000 words) we started casting and filming. I’d tell you the cast, but ill just let you watch the movie later in this post to see who plays who! Anyways, the filming process was chaotic, but fun. I loved being on set and helping execute stuff. And fun fact, a lot of the filming was in my house, so I had to control all that! As production manager, I didn’t have a super specific role like “actor” or “writer”, I kinda just filled in the gaps. On the first few days of filming, I directed a lot of the scenes. This was because at first, I was one of the only people who could handle the chaos and create what we wanted. But as a few days went on, our director (Giorgia) glowed in the spotlight. I’m used to bossing people around and running stuff in PLP projects, so I kind of showed Giorgia the way, and she took the advice and went with it. It wasn’t in a controlling way, I made sure to never step on her feet and just be there if she needed me. 

(A little funny video I made on a day of shooting…)

Also, on days our director of photographer couldn’t film (Lucas) I filmed. I got to use Lucas’s scary but lovely massive camera. I also was boom mic technician. Not to mention the whole flip my house from 2020s modern to 1950s school dorm room.

I’m only listing the things I did because I feel it’s important all of us PLP kids in this class share what we did and remind everyone, because it was such a hard and busy thing and we didn’t necessarily get to stop and appreciate each other on the way. Maggie did a great job at costumes, Jesse and Logan wrote a beautiful script, Adlih did a epic job at planning all the filming days and making sure everyone could show up, and Daniel did an incredible job at editing. I could go on forever with all the awesome things my classmates did, but I just recommend reading some of their blogs to hear about it. 

After all the filming days, it came to an abrupt stop when our main actor Macbeth (Marshall) got sick…. Then came spring break which turned into school never again thanks to COVID. Although we didn’t get all the footage, we have hope to one day finish it. So, heres the kind of sort of finished movie. I’m really proud of it, and all my classmates. I think we killed it. 

https://youtu.be/Ib4QMGU-PMc

This project was a highlight of my year, which I mention in my TPOL post. I broke a lot of comfort zones for my self and embraced new things. I let myself be okay with not having the roles I initially wanted, which was hard but was a good lesson for myself. I worked really well with the class, which was surprising as almost everyone in the class is as stubborn as me. I’m glad our class worked so well under that amount of freedom, we were were just given many empty classes that Alivia, Giorgia, Jesse and I ran. But…the thing I’m most proud of personally, is the immense amount of heart and soul I put into this movie. I genuinely cared, and worked my little iPad brain to it’s hardest, so I could do my part in this movie. I hadn’t felt this passionate about a project since the last movie project, the Simon Trailer. I loved feeling that passion again. All of these projects remind me of what I love, and thats filming and directing. It was incredible seeing my pitched movie idea come to life due to all the hard work and dedication everyone put in. 

Thanks blog, have a good one! 

Hi everyone. Recently, I’ve been researching the topic of slave patrols. It’s a topic I’m discussing in a seminar my group and I are participating in. Our driving question for the seminar is “Are we Doomed to Repeat History?” For this think and create post, I decided I’d discuss slave patrols because A) It will deepen my and your understanding of history and how it effects our world today and B) I can link this post to my seminar post so if readers want to know more about the topics I discuss, they can read this post. 

1600s

In 1619, hundreds of Africans were kidnapped and put on ships to what is now Virginia. They were sold off, and became enslaved to many white people living in the south. They worked on plantations, and the plantation owners would often rape and whip the enslaved. Some slaves were forced to whip other slaves, even their own family. The way the enslaved were treated was beyond horrible. On a typical plantation, slaves worked ten or more hours a day. At harvesting time, they were required to stay in the fields for even longer, up to 16 hours a day. 

As slave societies became more popular, slave patrols and slave catchers became a form of force in the south. Slave patrols were untrained white men in charge of keeping tabs on where the enslaved were. That meant if black men or woman were off the plantation, the slave patrol could demand to see their slave badge AND they could search anyone’s belongings, just because. Obviously this came with a lot of violence, and fear in the enslaved. The powers that be began passing laws that restricted the enslaved, but found the laws on their own were insufficient. Any adult white man was authorized to enforce those laws, becoming the body called slave patrol. Slave catchers are pretty self explanatory. They were people who returned escaped slaves to their owners. The slave catchers affected non runaway slaves too. They were constantly oppressing and scaring the enslaved to instill a fear in them so they wouldn’t run away. The slave patrollers were free to use any form of weapon to make sure the enslaved were returned to their owners. 

1700s-1850s

In the 1700s, the South became more industrialized, and there was a growth in slaves in the southern cities. This caused the slave patrols to expand from just remote farm lands of America to busy cities.  They then became professionalized once in the city, and very quickly, their duties expanded. They became a force that we immediately recognize, the modern police force. This first police force was overwhelmingly white, male and didn’t really focus on responding to crime. They wanted to make sure the enslaved felt oppressed, and that is what they did. 

2020

To this day, America uses law enforcement that stems from a system that was created with the goal of keeping entire populations of black men and women enslaved. There was never a chain broken of slave patrol to modern police, it just evolved and is what we see now a days. Although slavery is abolished, the spirit of tracking and policing black Americans, had continued. The system has been poked at and changed, but never been redone. In the media we see so many murders of black Americans like George Floyd, and the murderers aren’t just Americans, they’re police. They’re the people with the power. They don’t just have the system on their side, they ARE the system. They are the people we are supposed to trust, and call for help, but how do we expect all black people to trust a system that was built of their oppression.

The evolution of slave patrols to modern police is undeniable. The least we can do is educate ourselves, and thats why I wrote this. If you’re like me, you’d never heard of slave patrols until recently. I find that insane as it’s so connected to such a large and well discussed force (police) in America. I hope this blog post taught you something. Protest, talk, educate, donate, do anything you can to help stop police brutality.

Hi! This is going to be my last “This Week I Learned” post. While reading Macbeth and learning about the Cold War, I noticed a strong theme/idea that links the two together. This theme was noticeable through all of Macbeth, but during the Cold War lectures it was the first time I could really connect it to more modern times (1950’s is modern compared to the 1500’s!). The two things I’ll be comparing is the fall of the chain of power in Macbeth, and the Diefenbunker in the 1950’s. Both of these things help support the idea that a country needs to protect the hierarchy or the society will start to break down. 

For this weeks artifact I decided to do a podcast. I haven’t created a podcast since grade 10 and I think it’s a good way to switch up the layout of this TWIL post. Listen to the short podcast below where I discuss the importance of protecting the hierarchy using an example of power in Macbeth, and the Diefenbunker in the Cold War.

So, I’m not going to repeat everything I just said, but I am going to repeat one thing. The King being killed in the play is the equivalent to an atomic bomb being dropped on Canada in the Cold War. If you didn’t listen to that podcast, that is going to make no sense, sorry. Anyways, here’s the Encounters with Canada post I mentioned. I hope you learned something, and if you want to know more about the topics I talk about, I linked some articles to key words in the post.

This week I learnt, part 2. You know the drill! Hello! 

After a few days of lessons about the 1950’s, and a few days of reading Macbeth, I found myself gaining an interest in the TV aspect of the 1950’s. While coming up with what to write for this blog, I began to see a solid link between the 1950’s television and the activities Elizabethans would do besides watching theatre like Macbeth in the 1500’s. You wouldn’t initially think the 1950’s and a Shakespeare play would have similarities, but my class and I have discovered… There is plenty! So how are the 50s and Macbeth (1500’s specifically for this post) connected?

Ah, the one thing that keeps us all sane…. Entertainment. Now a days this can be anything, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, Tik Tok, the list goes on. But, even less than 100 years ago, it was dramatically different. And then even farther, the 1500’s… What would you watch or do if you had absolutely no form of electronic, or couldn’t even read a book? (A lot of people in the 1500’s didn’t know how to read.) We are so used to entertainment and the media we are fed by the world, that we don’t even think about it. For the Elizabethans, they really had to do the most to find entertainment. They would do normal things like sports (wrestling, archery, juggling) and then really odd things like visiting prisons, and watching bears battle dogs. But one of the most respected and popular things they did was watch theatre. 

Theatre was a big thing in this time period. It was something to do, and the closest thing they had to television. They would watch hour long plays, either standing in the pit or in the side stands, seen in this picture beside this text. An example of a play they would watch would be Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and all those classic Shakespeare plays we study to this day. I think the things people develop in times where entertainment is what gets you through the days, is very interesting. How do they come up with these things? How long does it take to become normal? We never think about these things as now in 2020, everything is normal, but back then new ideas were constant. 

In the 1950’s, television became really popular. The price of a TV went down and 3/4 of Americans ended up having one in their house!

They didn’t watch the type of shows we are used to know, they were very stereotypical scenarios of the time period. This was to reenforce the “normal” on the country to maintain a picture perfect country. Anyways, thats not the point I’m making today. The point I’m making is that once war was over, people had money, houses, and families, they could settle. They had the luxury of the chance to watch TV, and enjoy their free time. This was crazy as in the war it was the opposite. Television/entertainment became a large part of Americas culture as they had actually had the time and resources to enjoy life.

These graphics I created represent entertainment and the way it can evolve and form through the years, and a compare/contrast of the outcome of evolving.

This one here shows a 1950’s television family cast on stage in the 1500’s.

And this one shows a 1950’s family watching a scene of Shakespeare play on stage, on their television.

Entertainment is valuable, and humans are very attracted to it. You can see that throughout every year humans have been around. We will create things to distract us from life even if it is going to a prison and watching the prisoners be in prison… (*cough cough* elizabethans)

Hi! It’s that time of year. MPOLS! A time where I get to talk about myself for seven minutes. This is honestly a really valuable part of the year as Its a time where you’re forced to think really deeply and reflect on your work. This year has been going by so fast MPOLS is like a freeze frame to think about you and your work ethics. This post is going to be mainly on the opportunities I have for improvement, but there will also be some highlights of the year so far, and ending it off with a laser focused question that I need answers to!! I like MPOL’s. They remind me, no matter how many times I do this, I will never run out of thing I can improve on and learn... First though, here is the POL deceleration. 

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and weaknesses. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

GOAL #1 STOP TRUSTING MYSELF 

You may be thinking, uhhhhhh, what? When you read that caption, but let me explain. I trust myself when it comes to school. I know I can get done what I put my mind to. This trust has grown over the past 4 years of high school, and you would think its a good thing but its not 100% good. Its good in the way where I have high self efficacy in my school category, which helps me succeed, but it’s bad where It kind of ruins my days. I think Ive mentioned this before but I can do a lot of work in the mornings before school. I sometimes find my mind is most awake then, and the pressure of the 8:30 school time makes me go 10x faster than I would normally. Thats good I guess, I can produce quality work in the mornings. Some of my best blog posts have been written in the morning.

Why its bad is because the homework I have to do is constantly hanging over me like a sad rain cloud, and I sometimes just loose overall motivation to actually do it in the morning. Or, I don’t have enough time. A goal I made in PGP was to get my work done right away at 3 while I’m still feeling motivated, and I am going to try really hard to stick to that. I want to be nicer to myself by not leaving homework to the morning. 

GOAL: #2 MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE

While reading atomic habits, It gave me a new perspective on the way I personally approach schoolwork. I’ve noticed that I’m way more likely to do something when I’ve made myself excited for a certain aspect of it. The 2nd law in atomic habits is all about that. Its called “MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE.” Ive kind of had this overall idea in my head for a while, but never laser focused my thoughts and actually developed something connected to the idea. My goal is to use some of the rules from this law to help me gain more motivation to do my work.

Something I really liked that the author said was to pair something you WANT to to with something you HAVE to do. Ive found that if I switch up the way I do my assignment, like writing it on paper instead of my iPad, or just making a bunch of coffee/tea and settling down while doing my work. I need to attach an attractive and positive activity with the work I need to do, or I honestly lose all motivation. An example of me doing this since I read atomic habits is during this new Macbeth unit. I find Shakespeare quite hard to enjoy and understand, but I’ve been taking notes at home on the scenes writing it out and drawing things connected to it makes me actually enjoy reading Shakespeare in class. 

What project did you struggle with?

This year has been full of projects that aren’t necessarily my favourite “genre” of projects. I like really open ended projects with not a lot of creative constraints. I find thats the best way I learn, as its an attractive and fun thing but also forces you to get to know the unit content really well. This year they have been very writing based, from the New Mexico book (partially creative as it includes photo and video) to the Lord of the Flies Essays, to The poetry book, its been a lot of writing. I have expressed before that I have a hard time with writing as I just don’t like it that much. But obviously, I am still going to need to do it. The Lord of The Flies unit was quite challenging for me in the motivation category.

Writing is something I get better at every year, but it takes a lot. To see progress, I need constant critique, motivation, and dedication to revise. This unit I was missing the critique and motivation. It was a lot of writing assignments, and I’d write them and think they were great, then a week or so later get a bunch of critique on them and feel disappointed and have little to no motivation to revise and I couldn’t even remember my thought process. This was a very mentally challenging project for me, and I think it was because I just simply didn’t enjoy it and that caused no motivation. I lacked the motivation and inspiration to create and write. I handed in a lot of stuff late, and felt like I was always behind. Writing isn’t something that comes to me naturally, and I need to remember thats okay, I’ll just have to work a little harder.

So, what am I going to do to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen again? I need to start relying on myself and ways I can make myself inspired to do something I don’t enjoy. Here’s a book you have to read, you don’t really like the book, and you have to write about it. A lot. I want to be able to take that un enjoyment as an opportunity to find something I enjoy about it. I don’t know how Ill do that yet, but I’m going to test out some ways as the year continues. For this project I could have taken a large interest in the film aspect of LOTF as that’s something I love, or even just taking notes each chapter to keep me motivated. 

What project surprised you? 

In the beginning of the poetry unit, I expressed my weird dislike of poetry. I didn’t hate it, just never felt an interest or connection to it. So, that’s why this project surprised me so much, because it was my favourite project out of all of them this year. I think it was a perfect combination of history, poetry and creativity.

I liked the amount of openness we had and freedom to do anything we wanted. Like I said earlier, writing doesn’t come easy for me, but once
I wrote a few poems and got over my weird fear of writing about poetry being cringe, it came pretty easy. I think the most nervous I’ve been all year was before a dress rehearsal in our class. I had to read 2 poems I wrote just in front of my classmates and Ms Maxwell. I was so so so so scared for some reason and remember feeling my heart beating out of my chest. I think I was so nervous because poetry is so personal and reading it out loud can be hard. 

After the dress rehearsal, my eyes opened up and I really decided I was going to take this poetry unit as an opportunity to take risks and do things I normally don’t like. This project was a learning lesson for me as well as a successful project. I learnt I need to always go into a project with an open mind, and take risks!

Laser focused question!

So we have to come up with a question to ask our parents and teachers, and mines more about you than me. I want to know how you handle a situation I personally struggle with, so I can learn from it and help myself. I find hearing about how others deal with something can help inspire me 

When motivation is lost, what route do you take to re-inspire yourself and get it done?

I know as adults you guys must be plenty of things you don’t want to do, but you have to do. I experience that more and more as I get older and I want to know what you guys do, because it would really help me out.