Monthly Archives: June 2017

The Greatest Moment in Canadian History

Posted on by under Humanities, School

Hello, Internet,

So, we’ve been learning about Canadian history in social studies. We’ve covered quite a lot of Canadian history in the past month and a half or so, and done a variety of assignments about it. Now that we’re wrapping up the school year, however, we’ve been given an assignment to each decide which moment in Canadian history, of the ones we’ve learned about, is the greatest, and justify why.

Before I get into which moment of Canadian history I think is the greatest, I should talk about (or, rather, write about) some of the past work we’ve done in this unit.

We’ve done a couple different assignments involving writing paragraphs; one on either Jean Talon, Count Frontenac, or Francois de Laval (I chose to write about Jean Talon), and one on Durham’s Report.

We also had to create a recruitment poster for railway workers.

My favourite assignment we’ve done for this unit is the Character Card; an assignment based around creating a card about what life would be like for a theoretical person during the Cariboo Gold Rush.

I chose to do mine about a shopkeeper, because I thought it would be interesting to focus on someone who wasn’t there as a gold miner. It did end up making it more difficult to research what life would have been like, but it did end up being interesting.

We also did an assignment relating to Confederation. This assignment involved writing a speech that was either pro-confederation, anti-confederation, or pro-annexation. I ended up being assigned to write an anti-confederation speech, which I found difficult, as I disagreed with the point of view I was writing from, and I don’t feel I really ended up doing a good job writing it.

The speech I ultimately came up with is as follows:

Joining confederation now will sap us of the opportunity to be independent; the opportunity to have a government that makes decisions in our own best interests. How do we know that they will not neglect our needs in favour of those of the easterners? Is it not better to know that we must take care of ourselves? If we join confederation, we are attaching ourselves to a country that we don’t need to be a part of. We will become indebted to them; in a way, we will be controlled by them. Instead, we should go on alone, apart from Canada and their government and ideas and plans.

If we stay as an independent nation independent from Canada, we can face the events of the future in our own way, on our own terms. Less people means less conflict to worry about; we shouldn’t have to take on all of Canada’s problems alongside the problems we have ourselves. Nor should we have to ask the Canadian government to attempt to solve our problems; anything that we got ourselves into, we should get ourselves out of. That being said, we must get ourselves out of the crippling debt that we are in; if we let Canada pay it off as they have promised to do if we join confederation, then we are not out of debt, it is only in a different place. We ourselves need to be the ones who are in control of our economy, or else our economy will falter and fail.

If we do join Canada, for whatever reason, then how do we really know that they will take the time to address our needs? Canada has their own needs to take care of, and they’re sure to favour the needs of those who have been with them a long time, rather than the needs of a new group of people joining them, especially when we join them at a time when we are so in debt, and don’t seem to be in a stable state. Sure, they’ve made promises to convince us to join: money, an extension of the railroad. These aren’t promises to take care of our needs long-term, but rather terms meant to lure us in so they can have power. Canada is already a stable country without us; if we do decide to join them, we may very well end up being dependent on a government we cannot and should not depend on.

The ideal decision for us to make here is not to join confederation and take a chance on putting our valuable future in the hands of others, but rather to go forth as best we can without assistance, and form our own government. We will lead a future where we live on our own land, with our own resources, under our own government. With less people, the British Columbian government can take more time to listen to everyone, everyone’s needs can be addressed and perhaps someday everyone can be happy.

Now, as I mentioned before, I completely disagree with this view. In fact, I think Confederation was probably the greatest moment that we learned about in this unit. There are a few different reasons that I think this is the greatest moment; for one thing, it resulted in BC becoming a part of Canada, which has had a pretty positive impact on my life, not to mention countless others. For another thing, while a lot of the moments in Canadian history that we learned about seemed to involve people being pretty horrible to one another, often due to racism, Confederarion was more focussed on everyone trying to get something positive to happen.

To further *illustrate* my point, I’ve drawn a comic about why BC joining Confederarion was the greatest moment in Canadian history.

Toodles!

TPoL Time

Posted on by under About Me, mPols & tPols, School


So, the time has come for another Student Led Conference. This time, however, it’s going under the name “Transitional Presentation of Learning” or, abbreviated, TPoL (pronounced tee-pole).

The point of the TPoL is essentially for each of us to make a case for why we should get into grade ten, based on the work we’ve done this year, how we’ve improved, what we’re proud of, what we’ve learned, and how we could improve further.

 

So, a project that I’ve done fairly recently that I feel I did well on is my Things I Carry With Me keynote and presentation. For this assignment I had to learn how to utilize Keynote, which I haven’t used in several years, and have never really used for anything school-related. While doing this style of presentation isn’t something I commonly do, I really enjoyed it, and I found it helpful that while I was learning how to use Keynote, I was doing an assignment about something I already knew a lot about: myself. I wish I had been able to wrap up the presentation a little better, but all in all I felt I did a good job.

However, I haven’t necessarily done well on everything I’ve done this year. I’ve learned and grown since the start of the year. During my last SLC I mentioned two goals that I’ve been working on throughout the year: being able to talk to people as sources of information for projects, and believing in myself more and trying to actually do the things that I’d usually avoid. Over the year, I’ve made progress on both of these goals. My Blue Sky project required me to ask some tween neighbours of mine for feedback with a game, which is something I would have found very difficult in the past, but have gotten better at this year. In terms of my other goal, I can take an example from the same project: while Blue Sky last year was a very stressful experience, this year I was able to get the project done almost a week before it was due, because I’ve been working on procrastinating less, an issue I’ve been meaning to work on for a while,  but am finally taking the initiative to do.

 

There are still things I have to work on in the future, however. For instance, I think my time management could use some work. With better time management comes the ability to better maximise the amount of effort put into each assignment or project, which is something I’d really like to get better at. I’d also like to get better at working from a textbook, which is something I find really difficult, as I don’t find it an effective way to take in information. My goal for the coming school year is to find a way to make textbook work effective.

Toodles!

The Factors of a Successful Exhibition

Posted on by under Exhibitions, Humanities, Math & Science, School

Hello,  Internet,

So, we’ve just had our spring exhibition . It was a little different this year than the one last spring, and personally, I feel that my project went a lot better this time around.

So, the basic guidelines this year were:

• you must solve a problem
• your problem must apply to either tweens, toddlers, elders or pets
• you must have at least three drafts to present at the exhibition

I chose to solve the problem of math being anxiety-inducing or hard to engage with for tweens. I decided to solve this problem by creating a math-based video game, although when I decided this I had no idea what I wanted the game mechanics to be. Basically, I knew that I needed to make a game that was non-violent, non-stressful, not confusing, and still taught math.

I’ve had some experience with programming before, mostly in the language Python, but in order to present the game with a mobile device, I needed to learn a new way to program.

I eventually came up with a basic concept for a game, and programmed a few drafts of it in an app called SketchNation before deciding that I needed more freedom in order to program the game I wanted.

The idea I was working with at this point was to have a player move from one side of a screen to the other, with obstacles that represented different numbers, and a scoring system based on factors of a given number equalling positive points, multiples of the same number being neutral, and other numbers equalling negative points. This idea remained pretty close to the game I ultimately created, although I had initially hoped to have different levels, each with a different number for the points system to be based around, and for the game to be called The X Factor. I ended up not having enough time to program separate levels, and sticking with a points system based around the number 8.

With some help from my dad, I learned how to use the website GameSalad, and programmed a new draft of my game.

In keeping with my plan to have the player move across the screen, I set up a purple box to act as the goal point, which would reset the game when a player navigated to it. I would later realize that it made more sense for the goal of the game to be collecting all the factors of eight, and to just keep the box around as a reset button. However, this didn’t occur to me until after my next draft.

During said next draft of my game, I covered almost the entire screen in numbers in the hopes of making the goal of getting to the purple box with a positive score more interesting. I also made each number disappear after it was hit, so that you couldn’t rack up points by just hitting the same number over and over again.

At this point, I asked a few of my tween neighbours to try out the game and give me feedback. I took into account both their direct feedback, and their reactions to things during the gameplay.

Besides changing the goal of the game to “collect all the twos and fours”, the main changes I made in my final draft were to decrease the amount of numbers on the screen, bring the number six into play, and add instructions to the description of the game.

My actual project aside, the exhibition took some preparation. I was in a group of 23 people who were creating solutions for problems that applied to tweens, so we had to decorate an area of the school library to look tween-themed. This was achieved mainly through the use of posters, a whiteboard, funko pops and balloons. We also had chips, pop, candy, and pizza-themed cookies available for people to eat and drink.

I quite enjoyed this year’s exhibition, although not that many people seemed to take an interest in my project (most seemed deterred by the mention of math).

Toodles!

The Things I Carry With Me

Posted on by under About Me, Humanities, School

So, as I’ve mentioned, we’re currently doing a unit in Health and Career. One of our assignments for this, my favourite so far, involved creating a keynote presentation entitled “The Things I Carry”.

The idea of this presentation is that each person comes up with ten physical or mental things that they carry with them that affect their daily life or who they are.

My ten things were as follows:

1. Headphones
2. Phone
3. Creativity
4. Privilege/opportunity
5. Fan culture/pop culture
6. Anxieties/insecurities
7. Introversion
8. Work ethic
9. Words/language
10. Sense of humour

I don’t really have a lot of physical things that I carry with me at all times, so I focussed more on the mental side of things.

Here’s my keynote:

I started off with talking about the physical things I carry with me, beginning with my headphones.

I go through a lot of headphones, mostly because I lose or break them from using them all the time. While I had considered just putting music down as one of the things I carry, music is only a part of what my headphones represent. I carry headphones with me a lot of the time because they act as a source of privacy even when I’m out in public. As someone who finds it draining to spend too much time around a lot of people, having a small source of privacy makes me feel a lot better when I get stressed or tired out.

What I use my headphones for subdivides into the categories of music and videos. While I can often be found listening to my favourite song, whatever’s stuck in my head at the moment, or a song I’ve recently started listening to, I also spend a lot of time watching YouTube, and doing so has provided me with a lot of useless information, entertainment, and even a few role models.

The other physical thing I carry with me is my phone. I don’t spend a lot of time on my phone, at least in comparison to the stereotypical teenager, largely due to the fact that I use my iPad for a lot of things. However, I usually bring my phone with me if I’m going somewhere, because I need the ability to communicate with my parents or friends, and because it’s useful as a camera and as a way to get or store information.

One of the mental things I carry with me is my creativity, which manifests itself in a variety of ways: playing piano, drawing, singing, writing, and making the occasional hat, candle or doll dress. Being creative has always been a big part of who I am, and I enjoy being able to look back on the things that I have created over the years.

The next thing that I carry with me is one that I had trouble putting a word to, but I eventually decided on “privilege”. A lot of the things in my life, such as where I live, the opportunity to go to school, my family, my community, or the amount of travelling I’ve been able to do, are things I didn’t choose or earn in any way, but which have ended up being big, usually postitive, influences on my life.

One of the things I carry with me is fan culture, or pop culture, and this is something that ties in to a lot of the other things I carry with me. There are a lot of areas of pop culture that appeal to and influence me, the prevalent ones being YouTube, music, books, movies and TV. The things that I’m a fan of are often an inspiration for my creative outlets; for instance, this drawing that I did.

Something that I carry with me that isn’t quite so positive is my anxieties and fears. These are mostly basic things: Am I doing well at school? Do I look okay? Am I saying something offensive without realizing it? Am I making good choices? Even the most basic of fears, however, can still be a big part of one’s life, and these daily fears and anxieties are definitely a big part of mine. However, like everyone else, I do my best to accept or overcome them.

The next thing I carry with my is my introversion, which I’ve seen viewed as a negative thing before, but I personally think can be positive, and has had a lot of positive effects on my life. I like to spend time alone, which gives me a chance to do the things that I enjoy, such as writing, or focus on the things I need to do, such as doing homework. Being introverted has also made me independent, which can often be useful or important.

My work ethic is something that I’ve carried with me for as long as I can remember. I feel a strong need to do well at everything I do, or at least to do the best I can, and if I don’t put my best effort in, I don’t feel satisified with the end result. This is something that helps me attain goals, as well as learn new skills or learn about new topics.

One thing that I carry with me is my love of words and language. I enjoy learning about the structure or etymology of words, as well as wordplay and puns. I also like reading and writing a lot, and I find it easier to express myself through the written word than I do just through speaking.

The last thing I carry with me is my sense of humour, which is composed mostly of puns, pop cultural references, sarcasm, self-deprecation, irony and memes. My sense of humour is something that seems to annoy or confuse a lot of people, but it’s something that helps me communicate or connect with the people around me.

The things that I carry with me might change over the years, and they have changed throughout my life, but they will always be a part of who I am.

Toodles!

Cookies, Careers and Class

Posted on by under Fun Stuff, Humanities, School

So, we’ve been working on health and career. As suggested by the name “health and career”, one of the aspects of this unit is career goals and planning.

Now, learning about this involved a couple of different things. Before you can start thinking about the future, you have to understand how you got to where you are now, so we began by each making a timeline of our lives thus far.

I had some trouble figuring out what events in my life were important enough to go on this timeline, but I eventually decided to go with the points at which I began to do things that I would continue to do for years afterwards.

The next part of our career study was doing a piece of writing detailing the steps to becoming “gifted” at something. There are a lot of things that I’m not gifted at, but I chose to write about baking.

My steps to becoming gifted at baking were as follows:

Step One: Practice. Find recipes, find ingredients, find utensils. Keep trying.
Step Two: Identify what you’re doing wrong. Burnt cookies? Non-buttered pan? Accidentally put whipping cream in the wrong bowl? Understand your mistakes so you know not to make them again.
Step Three: If needed, get help from someone who’s already gifted. Ask questions. Pay attention. Figure out why they are gifted.
Step Four: Research. If you’re still having trouble, try and find out what you need to do to become better. Get as much information as you possibly can, even if you might not need it.
Step Five: Practice more. Apply what you’ve learned. Try out new or more difficult recipes.
Step Six: Get feedback. Find out what other people think of your abilities. If needed, adapt to their needs or specifications.
Step Seven: Don’t give up. Nobody can be perfect at doing something. You will occasionally mess up something beyond repair. Remember that that’s fine.
Step Eight: Take breaks. Learn other skills that might be helpful to you.

That being done, we went on to take some aptitude tests. I found the results to mine a bit confusing and not all that appealing, but taking the tests was interesting.

Now, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I have some ideas about what I’d like to study in university, but I don’t know where that’s leading in terms of a job, other than I want to be as financially stable as I can and hopefully do something I enjoy. This lack of a plan or dream made the next part of this assignment kind of difficult.

So, the main part of this assignment consisted of creating a video in which you had to introduce yourself and then tell a fairytale about your ideal future career. I don’t have an ideal future career yet, so I decided to continue down the vein of my writing assignment from before, and explore a potential career in baking.

While I’m not sure baking is actually a career I would be interested in persueing, this was a fun video to make, and it would be interesting to have a career doing something I enjoy.

Toodles!

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