Welcome back to my blog. As of the time that I am writing this blog there are a lot of crazy things happening in the world right now. Countries are on lockdown and people are being forced to self isolate, it is a global pandemic. Just before the Covid-19 virus really took off my class took a trip to Vietnam. While in Vietnam we got a chance to see how the other side of the world was dealing with the pandemic. Little did we know that when we got back to Canada life had changed. Upon arrival we had a mandatory 14 day quarantine. This was a shock because not 2 weeks earlier we were in school going about our business as usual.

Here’s a picture of my friends and I in Vietnam

After our mandatory quarantine was over it was time to get back to school. This was in a different form than before. Due to the social distancing policy put in place by our government we have now moved to studying online. With this change in our learning our smart teachers Mr.Hughes and Ms.Willemse started a unit called “The New Normal”. This was a unit focused on utopia and dystopia.

We started off the project by completing milestone 1. This task was to create our ideal utopia, we would then pitch the idea of our ideal way of life to our classmates and try and get them to join. Sam, Adam and I created what we called “Bearnstien”. This utopia had a list of rules and regulations that people had to follow in order to join.

Here’s the list

After we had presented and the rest of the project we had a vote. Our utopia came in a close second only losing to the winning group because they had more group members to vote for them. 

Next we moved on to the literature aspect of the unit. We had a choice of 4 books to read about different fictional dystopias. The books were 1984, Station Eleven, Handmaids Tail and World War Z. After doing research on all the books I ended up choosing World War Z. I had always wanted to read this book and after learning about how the format of the book was set up, I was sold. The book is a compilation of interviews that are taken from people all around the world as a global zombie Apocalypse is happening. As we read the book we made notes to help us remember key points. After we read a section of the book we had literary discussions with people in our class that read the same book. We talked about things we found interesting, connections we could make to present day events and many other things. An example of a connect I made was how the world leaders in both World War Z and current Covid-19 events are dealing with the pandemic. Both world leaders that came out of the pandemic successfully took immediate action, vs the ones that were in denial came out with more tragedy.

After all the discussions we moved into the 3rd milestone for the unit. This was to create a piece of writing no more than 500 words and it would have to connect the section of reading to the current events you are studying. I chose to connect my book World War Z to the similarities of the coronavirus. 

Now for the last milestone, we moved into our big project for this unit. This project left a lot of room for creativity. In our book groups we were asked to create a driving question to push our project. Our driving question was “How can we use literary dystopias to provide insight into the way human beings react to a worldwide pandemic?” In our book World War Z, the book is set up in an interview format. We wanted to create a presentation slash video of the current Covid-19 in the same interview format. We interviewed people from different cultures around the world and got their take on the current pandemic. We interviewed:

-An oil rig worker from Alberta and how the pandemic is affecting his job.
-A doctor stationed in Italy and how he is making a difference in Italy’s tough times.
-An older farm couple on how they were dealing with the pandemic and
– A protest sympathizer and how he was taking in the current events.

We compiled these interviews into one and it made a nice presentation. We showed the video to our class and talked about the comparison between our books pandemic and the Corona pandemic and how there are many similarities between how the human population is acting.

Here is our presentation

Overall it was really interesting to get to study a unit that is relating to such prominent current events in our world today. Learning more about how Covid-19 is impacting people around the world is very important. It will be very interesting to look back in 20 years and see the impact Covid-19 had on our world.