What do you know about the city you live in? It’s probably not a question that people are often asked but think about it, why do certain things happen in your city, why are some people treated differently than others? It’s something that isn’t talked about enough.

So why am I bringing this up? Well recently, us grade 10’s from PLP have been looking at the questions I mentioned earlier and how they apply to our city, Vancouver. There’s a lot of things that make up this city. There’s people, buildings, and nature to list a few but those are just things that we see everyday. What we don’t see are the obstacles that the people we see have dealt with or the way that certain buildings and projects have impacted the city. That’s why we thought it would be a good time to start learning about these things. Also, there’s a project…

We were essentially tasked to make an 8-9 minute group podcast about a social injustice in Vancouver based on a given topic which we were interested in. At the time we were introduced to the project, none of us really knew too much about Vancouver’s history or problems and quite frankly, none of us really knew what we were interested in. That’s where the MOV came into play.

Around the beginning of the year, we took a trip to the MOV—or Museum of Vancouver— to give us a better idea about what topics we were interested in making our podcasts about. We were given seven different topics to think about;

-Human Rights
-Environment
-First Nations
-City Growth
-City Development
-Immigration
-Labour Rights

With that in mind, we were given some time at the MOV to explore and learn about Vancouver’s history. I personally really enjoyed our visit to the MOV as I got to see a lot about Vancouver which I didn’t know a lot about. I was especially interested in immigration and city development so I made sure to give those two sections of the museum some extra attention. As luck would have it, I ended getting city development alongside Alex and Michael.

Our group’s first order of business was to come up with a pitch which we would present to our teacher. We had to make sure that our pitch was bringing together components of city development from the Interwar Period and current day while also dealing with the pros and cons of city development for people in Vancouver.

Once we got that out of the way, we started working on our script.
Being in a group definitely has its merits as we were all able to work together very well with the script. We were able to split up the tasks of research, writing, and editing which allowed for the script to come together smoothly. Like I always mention, the script is never really the hard part for me. Our group definitely struggled collectively when it came to actually record the podcast. When we recorded the first thirty seconds of our podcast for the first draft, our tone was completely flat, the quality of the audio sucked, the background music was too repetitive, and overall, we just didn’t sound too interested in what we were talking about.

For our first actual draft, we made sure that we found a good place to record. We also made sure that we had an actual microphone this time. There’s not doubt that this draft is a big improvement compared to the first thirty seconds. I think our problem when we recorded the first thirty seconds was that we were really uncomfortable with having people watch us talk into an iPad. Even when I messed up, I felt a little embarrassed. That was definitely not the case when we came into our first draft of the podcast. Each of us had the same goal in mind to make a great podcast, no matter how long it was going to take. We ended up spending a couple of hours recording only nine minutes of audio. We were pretty tough on ourselves and each other to use as much expression as we could when we were recording and to just do a good job. At this point, I think we did a pretty good job with the recording even though there were some mistakes. The editing though is where we found some other problems as the interview wasn’t implemented very well and the music didn’t fit too well with the podcast.
You can check out our first draft here.

Since the difference between the second and final draft are barely different, I’ll just talk about the final draft. We definitely made changes according to the feedback we were given. We made sure that the music didn’t become repetitive by switching it every time we switched the topic, we re-recorded again so we could be more expressive, and we integrated the interview in the podcast much better as we broke it up and included it in different parts of the podcast. We also changed the script so it sounded more like a “Roundtable Podcast.” Although it’s not perfect, I think it’s a pretty good final draft for our podcast and does its job of being entertaining and informative.
Check it out!

At around the same time we were working on our podcasts, we also were given books to read which we thought we were going to be writing an essay about. I’ll get more into that later… Anyways, my group, along with the city growth group, got a book called The International Bank of Bob. It was essentially about a man named Bob Harris who travels the world and stays at fancy hotels to write reviews about them. He eventually gives up his fancy, yet temporary lifestyle in the pursuit for helping people in need. His solution to helping those in need and making an impact on the world against poverty is through micro finance. He ends up travelling the world again for a large micro finance organization known as Kiva but instead of going to fancy places, he visits the poorest countries on Earth to find out how micro finance has affected the lives of those partaking in it and gets into the grit of it, talking to people who have lived through gruesome wars and tyrannies.

Contrary to my reading group, I actually didn’t think the book was half bad. I was mainly bothered by the repetitiveness of the book as two-thirds of the book was a constant cycle of Bob travelling to a new country, learning about the people and what micro finance has done for them, and then swiftly travelling to the next place. Although these parts of the book included some of the most interesting and intense moments in the book, it can’t be the main component of the book. Aside from that, I really like Bob’s narrative as he writes very personally and he displays his personality through the way that he writes and displays his thoughts. Not a bad book, just a little too repetitive.

Of course we can’t just keep our thoughts of the book in our heads, we also had to write them down! That’s exactly what we did for our books as we split up the books into four sections and wrote reading responses for each of those sections. They had to be brief and they couldn’t just be summaries of each section, they had to be personal connections and opinions about each section which demonstrated our understandings of the book. Here’s what one of these would look like

While this was happening, we were also preparing for an essay that we would all be writing about our books. The problem was that most o the class publicly displayed their discontent with their books so to save the pain of essentially reading twenty-five angry book reviews, our teacher decided it would be best to turn that book essay into an essay about our podcast topics. The catch was that we would be writing our essays separately but we would be amalgamating them with our podcast group’s essays to create a short letter for member of parliament, Terry Beech where we would be addressing an issue/concern and how he could help solve that.

I was really excited about that as for the first time, I would actually be reaching out to an important member of Vancouver and contacting them. I had to make sure mine was good…

So we started off by writing our essay thesis outlines. My podcast group and I all shared ideas on what we could be writing about and we all landed on the same idea. Passive houses. It was something that we did the most research on for our podcasts and we knew we could write some interesting things with passive housing. As each of our essays had to include a concern and solution, I thought up of big ways that passive housing could change the world and how Terry Beech could help make my thesis a reality. I had a little but of trouble with my thesis outline but when I started writing the essay itself, I knew I had come up with something interesting. You should definitely check out my essay as it goes into complete detail of what I’m talking about and honestly, I’m pretty proud of it. You can look at that right here.

After writing our essays, my group put each of our essays together to make one really strong letter to Terry Beech, taking the strongest aspects of each of our essays to help get our point across. It combines each of our theses and deals with how if Vancouver changes its building codes to become passive, it can start a movement of passive housing around Canada which could help start the movement worldwide as it would drastically improve the world’s environment and livability. As of yet, we haven’t heard back from Terry, but we’re eager to see what he has to say.

Anyways, that has been our Sins of the City unit! In it, we went over the history of Vancouver and how many events have shaped it to be the city we know so well today, we looked at the different kinds of people and how they were treated, we made podcasts addressing injustices based on a certain topic, we read books relevant to our topics, and we even reached out to a member of parliament to address a problem that we are passionate about. I’ve definitely learned a lot about working in groups and how to effectively get work done as a team. I also learned about the many different aspects of Vancouver and what happens through our city, even though there’s still a lot I can learn. I really enjoyed working in this unit as it utilized many skills that we’ve been learning and took us out of our comfort zone. Maybe one day the sins of our city will be something that everyone can learn by and improve upon but until then, we’ll only have to wait and see…