As soon as we got back from our Albuquerque adventure, PLP 11 was onto another one with our Lord of The Flies project. Basically, we read and did critical analysis on William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and then later on did a project on group or tribe of our choice. This whole project was based around the theme of tribalism and our driving question throughout was “what is the role of tribalism in society?”
At first, I thought that tribalism wasn’t necessary at all. After all, society is society we just need people to create that. Lord of the Flies changed my view significantly. For several weeks we would discuss Lord of the flies as we read it, covering major points like character significance, overarching themes, and plot lines. As we discussed we always came back to our driving question and gave our thoughts.
At the end of the book I was left with mixed feelings. It had quite a surprising ending and was both happy and sad, almost bittersweet. I really liked the book and I think it is an absolute masterpiece. The class also had a test on the book at the end which I think I did really well on.
After the Lord of the Flies, we moved on to the main part of our project, our presentation. We were put in groups and with Isy and Kai, I would continue to develop my literature skills. Oversimplified, each group chose a “tribe”. The tribe could be any group of people that is unified by something for some groups it was a political party or even a cult but for me it was the Hitler youth. The Hitler youth was essentially Boy Scouts infused with Nazi ideals. The purpose of these boys was to be slowly vetted and trained for the German army. Anyways, we would research and present how this group is a tribe, how it’s similar to Lord of the Flies, and based on the information we gathered from the Hitler youth, an answer to our driving question.
In our group, I did a lot of research and I also did a lot of management. I felt like I was often connecting Isy and Kai. We all did every part of the project as a collective but one person is always going to take the reigns for each part of the project.
In our group, Isy really took a leader ship role. She would always be really on the ball and she did a great job. I know I did a really good job too but I think Isy really stepped up. We ended up making a keynote with several slides and a loose script instead of a full script to keep our presentation very relaxed and informative. When it was our turn to present I was a little nervous but I presented well. Every one else also presented well and everyone clapped when we were done.
After this project, I can see tribalism isn’t only necessary in society, but an integral aspect of social interaction entirely. Human nature is both very simple and very complicated at the same time. On one hand people will always go back to their instinct but on the other hand you can never completely predict a human brain.
Every time I work on a project, I make sure to keep track of my curricular competencies. Curricular competencies are overlying themes in our learning and we have them in every project. For this project we had several competencies to work on and I feel in this project in particular have grown a lot. One competency I would like to touch on is the “What is the author saying and how?” competency. I wanted to write about this because I feel like I am able to realize and comprehend specifically placed writing more frequently and accurately in books. Class wide Lord of the Flies discussions definitely helped with this and encouraged me to often take an extra step in my literary analysis. One more competency I would like to mention is “What do I think about this text and why”. This competency has a lot to do with literary analysis as well. The reason think I improved here is because I learned to really care and enjoy reading the book. after I did poorly on our second reading test I decided I should make it right and get my reading on track. Once I realigned my reading and really got invested in it, I found I was better able to respond to it at a higher and more thought out level.
Content wise, this was one of my favourite PLP projects ever. Human nature and psychology have always been a big interest of mine and this really uncovered a lot. I feel a lot more educated on things that you wouldn’t normally expect school to teach you. I now know a lot more about how society fundamentally works. Human relation, human nature and German history were also big learning topics. Overall I feel like a I did great in this project and a big part of doing great for me is actually enjoying the project. I was excited to learn the content and then actually go home and keep thinking about it. I critically looked at what we learned and absorbed it at much more than a standard level. Actual learning like this is what matters to me.