Have you ever heard of Billy Joel? Yes? Then chances are that you may have heard of his song “We didn’t start the fire”. This song was the main artifact for our project for this unit. As some may know we have three main PLP Humanities teachers. As part of the PLP 12 cohort we are usually taught by Mr.Hughes and Ms.Willemse but for this unit, Ms.Maxwell was in charge. We started this project by listening to this song. After listening to it two or three times we broke down the lyrics. There are over 100 different references to influential people and events in the lyrics from the year 1930 until the year 1980, when the song came out.
Our task for the unit was to pick a topic or person that we heard in the song and research about it. Once I heard the song and looked into the lyrics I immediately knew which topic I wanted. After researching some of the topics we went to class the next day and drew names to get first pick at each topic. With my luck there were three students left. I had wanted the Watergate scandal as my first choice because I have always been interested in the history of American politics. With three people left my name was called right after Watergate was chosen. Lucky I had a backup that I interested in. I ended up choosing the assassination of the 35th president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The reason I wanted Watergate was I didn’t have that great of an understanding of what happened unlike the JFK assassination. To my surprise there was a lot more to uncover about the assassination than I had first thought and it turned out to be very interesting.
Now that we had our topics picked, it was time to create a driving question. The driving question for this unit was made by each individual person. My driving question was ‘Why was JFK assassinated and how did his death impact America?’ Now it was time to move on to the main research. This was a 5-10 page document that compassed everything there is to know about the event, the repercussions and the long term impact it had. At first I thought that 10 pages of research would take a long time, but to my surprise I ripped through those pages in no time. While doing my research I was intrigued to learn the details of this monumental event. As I mentioned previously I thought I had a good understanding of what happened but as I kept digging, new details emerged. I got to a website that sparked my interest about an angle for this project. I would look at the what if? What if lee Harvey Ostwald missed that day in Dallas? Looking at what history would have been like if JFK had not been assassinated, changes the entire landscape of American events. Would MLK have ever been assassinated, would the Vietnam war have ended sooner or gotten worse? Would JFK ever have been able to change segregation like LBJ did? All these questions sparked my interested and showed me a great point when explaining the significance of the topic.
Here is my JFK Research assignment with MLA citations:
After I was done with the research I moved on to the next part of the project. This was to create our artifact that would help us tell the story of the event or person we chose. I chose to create a video that would explain my findings on the topic and answer my driving question. I wanted this video to be made up of different footage from the time period. While creating the outline for my video I focused on three main points which were relevance, importance and durability. These points would be the overarching themes for my video and presentation.
The last part of this project was to create a 5 min presentation that would answer the driving question. This 5 minute presentation would be used to present to our PLP cohort. My project would take the same shape as my video. I would use the same three points, relevance, importance, durability. I decided to create a simple keynote deck that would accompany my speech. I believe that if the slides are one to two words with a photo of what your talking about behind the words, then it doesn’t take away from the presenter.
The time came to present to my class. I like to set a goal before going into a big presentation. This goal is supposed to address a point of personal important? I seem to talk very fast while presenting to any audience. My goal was to slow down my presentation to make it easier to understand and to lengthen the amount of time. When the time came to present I definitely slowed my speaking down, but it still isn’t where I want to be in terms of that jurisdiction. My video and presentation were the two aspects of the project this project that touched on the communication requirement.
This project was a great way for us to look back at all we have learned so far in PLP as we evolved through the 1900’s. The aspect of showing the significance about each project is a great way to learn a lot more about all the topics. When looking at answering the driving question that I created, I feel I accomplished the task at hand. The driving question was : Why was JFK assassinated and how did It impact America’s view of itself? The first part of the question is hard to answer because there is no true answer to the question, but there are many conspiracy theories. I’m going with the Russians having something to do with it because of the fact that Oswald defected there for three years right before the assassination. The second part of the question is never ending. The list of impacts that this event had on America is huge. I cover the major impacts that this event had on America in my historical artifact video. Please take a look.
