I just wanted to give everyone a quick update letting you know that I have a podcast! It is all about Wildlife Photography and Conservation. I have 2 episodes up right now and there will be at least 3 more coming in the next few weeks. The episodes include guest interviews with many experts in the field.
Episode 1: This episode is all about connecting with wildlife. There is a guest interview with Yellowstone based Wildlife Photographer Evan Watts. He has great insights on how wildlife photography can help change your perspective on wildlife and nature. Evan also runs a youtube channel all about wildlife photography and you can find it below.
Episode 2: This episode focuses on how wildlife photography can impact conservation. I interview award winning Wildlife and Bird Photographer Liron Gertsman. He gives his insights on how he likes to tell stories through his photos promoting conservation stories.
We just completed a project which we have had on the run since February. It was definetly a project which we did more in the background. But I took away a few key lessons.
We studied the 7 habits of highly effective people. One habit which really stood out to me was think win win. I found it interesting that the best way to get something for yourself, was to give something to others. Even though think win win stood out to me all the habits helped me be more effective as a learner.
Over the project we had to do assessment choice boards. These were little assignments which helped us summarize what we learned in the previous section of the book. Below are my assessment choice boards.
Private Victory:
Each of threes animals represents a different element of private victory. The eagle represents beginning with the end in mind. It has one thing in mind when it’s sitting there, food. It is already thinking about how it will catch that fish. The owl represents putting first things first. When it wakes up it immediately gets ready to look for food instead of waiting around until it’s to late. The ravens represent being proactive. This mating pair paired up in February Far before most pair up. They are being proactive to make sure they’re ready for spring.
After completing our first two assessment choice boards we created final assement choice boards to summarize our understanding of the project. I created two, check them out below.
7 Habits Review
With the recent release of the 7 habits of highly effective people products you may be wondering if you should buy it, and while buying all 7 habits would be great it is simply out of the price range of many people. So which habits should you buy? Keep reading to find out.
I ended up purchasing the whole 7 habits package deal and tried out every habit in order to tell you which one to buy. I had two favourites. Habit 1: Be Proactive and Habit 4: Think Win Win. Now why should you buy these two. Habit 1: will help you stay on track and take control of your own actions. I noticed a massive boost in productivity using this habit as well as less stress. It also helps you balance your life better. Habit 4: Think win win will help your relationships. You will notice everyone being more willing to work with you and help you out. It will force you to think out of the box to find solutions helpful to everyone.
Hopefully this short review help you figure out if the 7 habits, especially habits 1 and 4 are the right product for you.
All in all his project showed me some habits I need to implement in my own life to become a more effective person. I have been working on implementing a few of the habits into my own life. I will see how they affect my last month of school this year and if I should stick to them next year.
Two weeks ago we just returned from an iconic PLP experience which we lacked for the past 2 years. Can you guess what I’m talking about? Of course I’m talking about an overnight field study. These are a core part of the PLP experience. If you have been around my blog for awhile, and when I say awhile I mean since October 2019 when I was just 5 foot 4 and COVID didn’t repeatedly torture us all, you would know we went to Oregon on a 7 day field study. This was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had learning in “school”. Anyways we went to loon lake retreat. It is located near golden ears park and Mapleridge.
Location of Loon Lake
So before I get onto the learning which unless you’re my teachers won’t be the most interesting part of this blog post. I want to give you a recap of the highlights of the trip.
The view from 1 minute outside of our lodge
04/04/22 around 11am we loaded onto the bus and departed Seycove Secondary. However we weren’t heading straight to loon lake. We were going to Popeyes for lunch. The food was great but it still didn’t compare to what we did next. We stopped at Raptors Ridge Birds of Prey. This was the highlight of the day and possibly my favourite activity on the trip. I love raptors and spend a lot of time observing and photographing them, especially Bald Eagles and Barred Owls. At this stop we got to see many different Raptor Species including a white morph Gyrfalcon. An extremely rare bird from the icy north of Canada and Greenland. We also got to see a Harris Hawk, the wolf of the sky. We learned many interesting things about Raptor Conservation and why they keep these birds on there property. Overall extremely interesting 10/10 would recommend if you like birds and are in Vancouver. Then we arrived at the lake got settled in, ate and did some learning. I also watched the March Madness Finals, extremely exciting but how did UNC lose. I was so disappointed. Caleb Love was truly awful. Please leave a comment below about March Madness or NBA playoffs. I would love to discuss those.
A Peregrine Falcon at Raptors Ridge Birds of Prey Centre
04/05/22 This was our first of two full days at the retreat (but in PLP we don’t retreat we advance.) This day included 6 hours of outdoor activities. After Breakfast we met up and got split up into our activity groups. My first activity was canoeing. It was my favourite activity of the day and was very peaceful. We learned strokes such as the Forward, Pry, Draw, and J strokes. These are all used to effectively steer a canoe. Something I didn’t realize was difficult or complicated until then. I really loved sitting out in the lake in the cool spring morning as the sun peaked through the clouds. After that we did Archery, it was cool but I already do it quite often while camping. Then after lunch we did high ropes. This was interesting and a great opportunity to push my comfort zone. Finally we wrapped up the day with climbing which was a great workout. Then we set our goals for the rest of the advance. Something I will touch on later.
The Canoes on the dock
04/06/22 This was a day of learning and working towards our goals. My goal which by the way was not a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely), my goal lacked all but relevant. It’s hard to put into words but it was about reflecting on my growth as a learner in order to stay on track towards growing as well as holding myself accountable for other goals. I had some opportunities this day to work towards it. However it was hard to make serious progress to a goal this long term in a day. I think setting a more achievable and timely goal would definitely have made it easier to grow on this advance.
The reflective lake was very reflective
04/07/22 Our final day. We spent the morning learning and packing up. Then we had lunch and drove to the extreme airpark. It was super fun and a great workout. After that we returned home sleep deprived and hungry.
A photo from a little photo walk we did. It was supposed to be a challenge but I would have won to easily so we didn’t vote.
So as previously hinted this trip was about advancing (cause in PLP we never retreat only advance) and you know what I advanced. Not in the way I originally planned to but it was remarkable progress. The two biggest ways I advanced was in my mindfulness and note taking. These might seem remarkably different but they both came as by products of my not so great goal. How you might be wondering? While I asked myself the same thing. But I’ve come to the conclusion it came from me starting to develop my goal while canoeing. Out on the water we practiced mindfulness and it really set the tone for the rest of the day. Then that night I began using our note taking app, craft to reflect on our experiences in the day. While doing this I came to the conclusion that being more mindful led to me having better reflections and notes. Those last two achievements lend to me feeling like I made a ton of progress growing as a learner that day. Now you might be able to see how my goal was linked to these two but I probably should have focused on taking better notes during lessons instead of other goal.
Just enjoy my incredible photography
Loon Lake was definitely a great experience and acted a bit of a teaser for our bigger trip in grade 11 (New Mexico?) It also taught me so much more then I expected and truly helped me grow as a learner.
Since November I have been preparing for a big contest. It’s an event called Destination Imagination or DI. This actually wasn’t my first time competing in the challenge. In grade 8 I competed as well (read post here). However this year my category was completely different and really pushed my comfort zone. My challenge was called Festival Frenzy. Also I would highly recommend checking out my group members posts. Annie, Ethan, Jakub, Logan
Video of our performance
So if you don’t know much about DI you can visit the organization’s official website here. But the quick rundown is, its a challenge where teams compete in various categories. These challenges are centred around teaching youth the skills needed to grow as a learner. Our class competed in 4 categories, Technical, Scientific, Improv, and Fine Arts. I was apart of the improv challenge which is something far outside my comfort zone.
Taking risks is important for learning
I am not typically comfortable with acting and presenting creative work. The strange thing is I am quite comftorable public speaking but not very comfortable acting. It seems kind of strange to me. I am fully okay with talking about a project I made however, the second I have to act I freak out. Anyways getting back on topic. This challenge gave me a great opportunity to grow and become better at acting. It also taught me other skills such as teamwork, leadership, and Flexibility. These are all skills which I am always trying to improve. Overall I found that I grew a lot during this challenge.
Our team photo
One of the biggest points of contention throughout our team was practice. This included both how it should be execute and how often it should be done. Some group members thought we should only practice the actual challenge. Others thought we should try various improv games. This was tough to settle and often ended up in various group members not practicing for weeks on end. Practice was definitely the biggest part of our teams execution of this challenge I would change. Our group should have been more open to trying new things and should have tried more styles of practice. We also really should have practiced more often.
All in all DI was a great learning experience. I improved a lot of important skills and learned a lot of lessons. I think my team should have done some things differently but there’s nothing I can do now except reflect.
We made a Podcast! I think they turned out super well. You should definitely check them out as they get released in the coming weeks. I will update this post to include mine once it’s released. My episode was about German Propaganda during World War Two. I learned a lot about cause and consequence through my episode. I truly considered the effects of the war on both groups of people. It was very interesting to see how effective and quick they’re propaganda was. It taught me that we need to watch out for propaganda and fake news in our own lives.
Above is my podcast episode, it is apart of a collective class podcast. If you would like to learn more about all kinds of interesting aspects of the war. Go check it out. You can learn about the rise of german tanks, the failure of appeasement, music in the war, or whatever else catches your eye. There will be 23 episodes each focusing on something different in the war. New episodes are released daily so check back in.
So this project was obviously about World War Two but what did we study? The answer is, so many different topics. This was to give us a baseline understanding of the war and prepare us for our podcasts. We also read books and discussed them in literary circles. My book was called the Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender, I would highly recommend it. The book gives a super interesting, but very sad look into the lives of children, particularly Jewish Children throughout the Holocaust. Throughout this book I became interested in how the Nazis divided the communities so fast. They split up neighbours, friends, even family just because of there ethnicity. It just took them a few days after invading Poland which is mind boggling to me. I then decided to research how it works and why it was so effective. This led to my podcast topic.
“How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequences of WWII?” That was our driving question. Something I thought about through all of our assignments and even answered in our Podcast Episode. In my opinions stories are a key way to understand the causes and consequences of WWII. They help you connect with people and they’re a good way to spark a personal interest into researching this tragic event. However I think its extremely key to read stories of both sides in order to consider both sides and how people can be mislead so quickly. We can use this research to better determine the causes and consequences, and look out for these signs in our own lives.
And they’re back, Presentations of Learning. After being cancelled last year due to COVID we have to present to our teachers and parents our learning goals, progress, and accomplishments this year. This year has been tough for me. Between a lack on consistency across projects and various classes. Ive also have found that COVID has caused group work to be incredibly difficult. I’m hoping that a lot will change after this omicron wave and once the next semester comes around. I know everything is up in the air right now but I hope next semester everything looks more normal.
This doesn’t really relate to anything. Just a photo I took on a field trip to the Punjabi Market.
I would say my biggest in school accomplishment this year has been the leap I have made in terms of writing. If you look back on my older blog posts you’ll will notice the improvement. My writing is so much more polished now then it was a year ago. I think this happened because of the amount of different styles of media I have written over the last few years. But I really noticed the jump at the start of this school year. Why, I can’t say exactly, but I believe its because of the fact that I put more effort into the actual writing now compared to my previous research and fact heavy approach. It was mostly a mindset shift which happened at the start of the year. I realized that being able to communicate your point with specific powerful information, was more important then having tons of information and facts and trying to tell your story that way. I still have a long way to go as a writer and I will continue to improve that with every project I work on.
The work Im the most proud of this year is my exhibition project. I think I did a really good job at designing a good memorial idea, as well as did a good job pitching it to visitors. I was proud of how my group pulled together even though we had troubles coming up with an idea and working designing the memorial. I definitely think we could have been more organized and used our time better but in the end the video turned out great.
My groups memorial Proposal
I’m not very proud of my election project video. I don’t think we accomplished the task. The video was not very well made. We overall needed to work much harder to find a good objective and name. I wasn’t super into this project and neither was my group. That was probably why we didn’t really think much through. Such as filming a video about poverty and wealth inequality on the waterfront of deep cove.
Looking through my work I notice a few key things. First of all the difference in quality and care of work is astounding when I’m interested verse not interested. Just look at my blog post on why we need to change the election system verse my party video. You can tell which one I was interested in and which one I wasn’t very quickly. Also my strongest work is always done at the end of an assignment or project. I believe I need to fail once or twice to find a solution that works for me. This can be problematic on short deadlines though. A great example of this was our Romeo and Juliet Video linked below. A lot went wrong in that project. One of our group members got COVID. We also missed out on three classes for this project so our schedule had to be compressed. We also realized half way through filming that our vision was way to ambitious and we had to cut it down. The final product is a little bit rough but I think we demonstrated growth and learning. I’m also really proud of the police siren effect idea and execution.
I’ve thought a lot about whether or not my work is up to my standard this year. Now I’ve began to question how important having a standard is in the first place. Because what my standards are is an ever changing, complicated question. It depends on a number of factors, my group, the amount of time I have and how interested I am in the work. A good example is during the winter I see the lowest quality output of group work. One reason is I have less time, the Basketball team occupies most of my evenings which prevents me from staying late after school. Overall I need to find an acceptable standard to work towards in this next half of the year.
This video is a great example of the standard of work I would like to consistently be at. I think it was a unique idea, I had a lot of fun making it. As well as it was engaging to the viewer.
Now this year has been incredibly frustrating in so many ways. Obviously Omicron pretty much ruined the winter term of school. Also the weather has been terrible in every way. Finally, PLP and school in general has been really frustrating. I have found a lack of consistency in homework and expectations between not only all my classes, but between every project. I don’t know what to expect in terms of homework. I also have found there have been wildly different expectations for work output, and quality of work on every different project. However, I do understand that COVID has been tough on everyone, and I know delivering consistent results across projects from a teaching end is tough.
I have three main focuses for next semester, consistency, balance, and growth.
Next semester I will focus on having a consistent, quality and output of work. This will require me to push through projects I don’t want to do. A good example of when I did this was in my Romeo and Juliet project. Our group fell apart but I think working together we did a good job of doing a project none of us wanted to do. Another part of consistency is going to be comparing my work to other work I’m proud of to make sure it meets my standards.
Another key focus is balance. I’m often busy between sports, school, and social events. If I don’t keep a good balance I feel extremely overwhelmed. This is extremely unproductive and my quality of work suffers. Next semester I need to find a balance and flow of work which suits my style of learning. In general I put out my strongest work close to deadlines. I think when I get a sense of urgency it forces me to step up and do my best work. I generally need to large amounts of work at once. Breaking it up into small chunks does not work for me as I never achieve a good work flow. One strategy Ive found to be effective is to do a smaller bit of work related to my topic and then that leads me straight into the main work.
Balance includes making sure I have time to do my hobbies. One of them is photography. This is a shot of a black turnstone I captured over winter break.
Finally I need to continue to grow. I don’t think I grew as learner as much this year as I could. This one much like consistency will require reflection on past work. I want to feel that my work I did during this semester is not on the same level as the work I will do next semester. In order to achieve growth I will need both consistency and balance.
To wrap things up I would like to improve my consistency in my work, as well as to continue to work on my writing. I’m proud of my communication, presentation, and writing skills. I hope to continue my improvement as a learner in this next year.
Hope you had a fantastic time over the holidays and stayed safe. It has been strange getting an extra week off. But hopefully going back to school goes well and we all stay healthy. If you’re reading this post you probably heard about the PLP winter exhibition. Maybe you even went and checked out. Anyways it went quite well and I feel like I learned a lot.
So over the last two months we finally got to go back out on field studies. Even though they were not over night and we just remained in Vancouver it was nice to go back out of the classroom. We got to go to six super interesting places all around Vancouver. We learned quite a lot about three cultures. As well as the hardships and injustices they faced in Canadas past. As the people of China, India, and Japan arrived in Canada they were met with hostility. I was shocked to learn just how many terrible injustices these groups of people faced in the past. One injustice which truly stood out to me was the horrifying conditions Chinese Canadians were subjected to in the late 19th and early 20th century. It began with Chinese Canadians beingforced to pay a large tax in order to immigrate to Canada. Then they were forced to live in the worst areas of towns (typically swampy, industrial areas) and faced anti-asian racism. Many of them also were tricked into working on the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were promised good fortune and high wages but ended up being paid extremely low wages and were forced to do the most dangerous jobs.
This brings us to the exhibition. My group which included, Dries, Julien, and Erin was tasked with creating a memorial for the Chinese Canadians. We decided on creating a giant railroad spike. You can see a photo of the model below.
This spike would be placed in across from the Canadian Pacific Railway station in downtown Vancouver. It would be in a park surrounded my vegetation in order to increase public traffic around the spike. At the spike there would be plaques with information about the racism Chinese Canadians faced in the past. There would also be information about how that racism continues to this day. See location below.
If I was to pitch this idea to city council I would probably make some minor safety edits to the spike. As well as change the location because apparently that park will be the site of a hospital in the future. I would likely need to hire an engineer and a city planner to help find a suitable safe location for the spike. The location would also need to hold significance just as the train station did.
We chose a spike for our memorial as we wanted to create a powerful and simple visual piece which memorializes the hardships Chinese Canadians faced in the past. We wanted to show the ugly history of one of our nations greatest triumphs and most important pieces of infrastructures. Even though the railway connected our nations coasts, it drove apart our people.
We just started a new project called the Ology of Apology. With this project we are lucky enough to go on six day trips around Vancouver. You can follow these trips along in real if you go follow the @plpseycove instagram account. For our first trip we went to a Sikh temple and the Punjabi Market. At the Sikh temple we visited an exhibit dedicated to the Komagata Maru.
If you don’t know what the Komagata Maru is I would suggest watching the video below. So at the exhibit we learned about the the history of South Asians and particularly Sikhs in Canada. After this we got to experience a sliver of South Asian culture at the Punjabi market. It was really incredible to see all these stores selling traditional Indian food and goods. One thing which really stuck out to me after learning about the Komagata Maru was that the Canadian and BC governments did not offer good apologies for these events even after 100 plus years.
Apologies are really important. Especially to a community like the South Asians and particularly Indians. They weren’t allowed entry into Canada even though they were apart of the British Empire. A good apology could help spark a change and prevent anything like this from happening again. Then discovered the terrible apology the Canadian Government offered the Sikhs. Even though eventually the Canadian Government offered a better apology its still is terrible that it took them so long to do so.
Originally I had troubles relating the Komagata Maru incident to my life. I mean it was 107 years ago and didn’t affect any one of my relatives or family members. But then after the trip to the Punjabi Market I realized how it was relevant today. We need to interact with many different communities to build a complete worldview. We should never exclude a group of people due to where they came from or the colour of there skin. The Komagata Maru incident really serves as a reminder of the danger of only interacting with people who look and think the same as you. I also began to think of how my ancestors would have been some of the people in Vancouver. Hearing the White Canadian perspective about this ship and while I have no clue about what their opinions on the ship would have been. I know that if they interacted with the Indian community they would see the problem with this incident.
Memorializing people and events of the past is a great way to help those affected as well as remind the public of the importance of not repeating our past wrongs. We need memorialize the courage and bravery of these men onboard the Komagata Maru as well as the Sikh community in Vancouver. We need to document the struggle of both the individuals and the community as a whole as a reminder of our past wrongs.
We just finished our first project this year. If you’ve kept up with my blog you will already know what this project is, in short. We had to create political parties with classmates to fix an issue we had with our current system of government. I created the traditionalist party of Canada with a few classmates, go read about it here. It was interesting to go into detail about how our government works. I gained a perspective on why it was so much more complicated to fix current issues through doing so.
Above is our party video, you can watch it for a brief summary on our party. But I would strongly recommend reading my in depth post about the Traditionalist party of Canada as it will make this post much easier to understand.
Working with a group who has all kinds of opinions is challenging to say the least. But it really gave me a perspective on why it so difficult to make major changes in society. I was only working with 4 other students and we often had troubles agreeing on what issues were important and how we should solve them. I really had to do my research to avoid digging myself into holes when pitching my ideas to my group and teachers. I found some really good sources about housing affordability and wealth inequality. You can check them out below.
As this is a PLP project we had a driving question it was “How Should We Govern Ourselves.” Actually through reading some articles about photography I managed to connect it with the driving question and I came up with this answer “We should govern ourselves in away which connects us together and aids everyone. Instead of trying to change the past we should embrace it and learn from our mistakes. We should find out what is important to us and use that to connect us all and make a better Canada for everyone.” You can check out my notes on the importance of photography which lead me to this answer here.
I found it very interesting researching housing affordability and the wealth gap. It was also fascinating to learn about other democratic systems of voting such as proportional representation. In my first post for this project I reflected on the election and related it to a research topic of choice. I chose to research how are election could of been changed and bettered by the use of proportional representative voting. This post really taught me how many different ways one can run there government. It also made me aware how our current system of government often favours the rich and majorities. I never quite realized how minorities have such a hard time getting a say in government.
I think we can do better and that it will be my generation who will have to start a change in government to benefit Canada as a whole. Thanks for reading and have a good day!
After my last post where I reflected on the results of the election our class was split into different groups and we each have to make a political party. The Political Parties should be focused on solving problem we don’t think any of the current political parties solve. I’m in a group with Nate, Logan, Sophia, and Indy. We’ve named our party the Traditionalist Party of Canada. We aim primarily aim to solve income and wealth inequality while improving the Canadian economy.
This graph is a good visualization of Canadian wealth inequality.
Sounds like a big task right? While it is, there is a lot that goes into solving wealth and income inequality. First you need to understand how big the wealth gap is in Canada right now. As well as how its grown over the years. A good example of this is that Finances of the Nation suggests that the top 1% of Canadian hold 25.6% of National wealth. This is much higher then the 10% the one percent held post WWII. The wealth of the one percent seams ridiculous compared to the 4.5% of the wealth held by the bottom 50%. Covid-19 has only made wealth inequality grow. During the pandemic the wealth of the one percent of Canadian has grown by over 20 billion dollars. While the wealth of the bottom half of Canadians has slightly declined. These estimates were provided by the National Observer.
Now understanding income inequality and affordability and how it has gotten worse over time. Burying a home which was a normal and relatively easy accomplishment in the past is now incredibly difficult if your not rich. Just how much easier was it in the past? Check out this article on Seattle housing over time (even though it’s not a Canadian website it’s a near identical story across all major Canadian cities) or you keep reading this blog post. For example the median household income in BC in 1980 was $21,000 per year. That adjusted for inflation is around $67,000 per year. The average home in BC was $68,000 in 1980 that adjusted for inflation is $216,000. Now the median income a household is $90,000 per year but the median house in BC is $736,000. That means in 1980 the average house was 3.2 times the median household income but in 2021 it is 8.2 times the median household income. That is a massive difference and clearly something needs to be done to change that.
concept by money house from coins
This is where the Traditionalist Party of Canada comes in. If elected we would make housing more affordable. This would be done through lowering BC and Ontario housing prices by 35%. That might sound like a lot but that would set these housing markets back just 5 years. This would be done a number of ways, first of all we will ban all future foreign buyers from the Canadian Market. Only Canadian residents may purchase property in these places. There however would be exemptions in tourist locations such as Tofino. We will also ad a house flipping tax. It would be a large sales tax on houses which were sold within two years of being purchased. Finally we would make laws to repeal strict zoning ordnances which keep housing prices high.
In addition to making housing more affordable we will increase wages in Canada. This will be done through decreasing education costs as well as increasing high paying industries in Canada such as mining, oil and gas and tech. This will create more high paying trades jobs as these industries typically have high median wages. The median wage in all these industries is over $60,000 per year and there is many high paying six figures jobs in all these industries. Allowing these industries to flourish in Canada will help all aspects of our economy.
I hope you learned a lot about income and wealth inequality in Canada and how the Traditionalist party of Canada can fix it. To sum up the Traditionalist party of Canada. We aim to fix income and wealth inequality in Canada by modelling our economy after the successful economy throughout the 50s-80s.
