Recourses: BC Gold Loon Lake ology of apology/winter exhibition

Introduce parents*

Statement of learning*

Story of my year (so far)

Unlike last year, this year we didn’t start off the year with a project. But we actually did something which in my opinion was better. We did something called a “skill sprint”. This “skill sprint” was really just a refresher on some of our PLP learner skills. We did some team building activities to get better acquainted with each other. We did some writing samples. We made some new norms, and went over the core competencies. 

Another thing that really changed this year compared to last was that we no longer had Scimatics included in PLP, and with that we wouldn’t have as many projects. But I am ultimately glad about that because I wasn’t learning much in that class anyways. 

The project we started off the year with was called Gold Digger and was taught to us by Ms Madson. This project was actually introduced to us last year but we scraped it so we could focus on the spring exhibition that was right around the corner. BC GOLD (or Gold Digger) was a project about the BC gold rush from 1851-1898. We went over all the different groups that were involved in the gold rush, like Europeans, Americans, African Americans, Chinese, etc. We went over the bad conditions that they had to face, all the racism at the time, among other things. But in the end I found the project to be very informative and it definitely expanded my learning. 

The second project we did this year was named “Ology of Apology” and was taught to us by Ms Pitches (or Alexis). This project was about analyzing past “wrong doings” by the Canadian government against people from other countries. So in other words it was about racism against foreigners. Before starting the project we watched some apology videos from our government about racist acts that happened mainly in the early 1900’s. And analyzed them to see if the apology was, well, good enough. We then were instructed to chose one of three tragedies that happened in BC against people of other races. Those options were; the Chinese head tax, Japanese internment during WW2 and the Komogata maru. I chose to research Japanese internment. I ended up learning a lot during this project about Japanese internment, and just how racist and greedy the government was back then. The driving question for this project was “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated – today?”, and I think that the main thing that you can do to prevent them from repeating is public awareness. Doing projects like this one is very big because we don’t just research the projects ourselves, we also present our learnings to a bunch of people during our exhibition.

Then we went back to Loon Lake for another field study, but unlike last year, I actually enjoyed it. This time around it was much better tho. It was introduced to us as a leadership training boot camp. But on the bus ride up there nobody had high expectations, besides the teachers. Another thing that was different compared to last year is that we started doing “work” right away when we got there. Now the basic run down of each day when we were there is the following. 7 am wake-up, basketball for 20 mins, breakfast, workshop, lunch, activity, workshop, dinner, workshop, basketball, sleep. Some days we got more free time than others but I would still just play some basketball in the gym. The highlights of the trip were the meals, building better bonds with some of my friends, watching the movie “Killer Bean” and the last night time workshop with Jono.

The last project we did for this semester is a project that I was highly anticipating, Romeo and Juliet. (Romeo Romeo why are we still talking about Romeo and Juliet). This was a very fun project in my opinion, but I had very high expectations for it that it didn’t meet. I was hoping to do a full “play” type performance like I saw my sister do when she was in grade 10. However our final product this time around was a modernized scene from the play. Only one scene. This project was still very fun from beginning to end though. We started it off by reading certain scenes from the different acts of the original play. Then after that we connected some of the main ideas of the play to adaptations of it. (Ex. Gnomeo and Juliet, Warm bodies, Romeo + Juliet, etc.) We also wrote down those things into a theme book that we then handed in. Then we started on our modernization of an act from the play. My group chose to reenact the Party scene (Act I scene V) but with a twist. Instead of it being Montague VS Capulet we made it Future VS Past. its hard to explain but you can read my blog post about it when it comes out.

Looking back on my learning plan, I can say that I’ve already achieved some of my goals in different areas. I have achieved a profile 5 in Collaborating during my time up at Loon Lake, I also think that I achieved a profile 4 in Personal Awareness and Responsibility. However the other ones I still very much need to improve on by the time Tpols come around. The ones that I will focus on are Communicating, Creative Thinking and Social Awareness an Responsibility. (The others are important too though of course.) 

To reach the learning plan goals of mine that I have not yet reached, I have a few things that I can do. To reach a profile 5 in communication I will practice talking to more people around my school, another thing is to practice my Mpol presentation so that it captures my audiences attention. To get to a profile 4 in the thinking categories, I will try and get a bigger role in DI and show that I can think outside the box. Then there’s some other things that I can do to become an overall better student. For example, I can start going to tutorial time more often, I can participate more in class discutons, etc.