Why can’t you let a politician on a plane? Because he’ll keep trying to destroy the other wing.

The thing that makes PLP courses different from the rest, is the fact that we always learn about new topics and never seem to go back and revisit them. However, there are some similar themes/skills which carry on throughout every project, ex. Public Speaking, Digital Design, Writing, and effectively working in groups. This project put all these skills on display and even pushed our understanding and effectiveness with them to even greater heights. This project incorporated – Speaking to an audience, analyzing a “children’s” book for deeper meaning, putting together a short film, and researching issues in Canada. All things which wouldn’t normally be done together in any other English class, but that’s what makes PLP so special. 

In this project, we started by analyzing our understanding of voting, and if we even care about politics. We did a group activity where we’d go to a specific part of the room depending on whether you – care and know A LOT about politics, care somewhat and know some things about politics, or don’t care and know quite little about politics. I fell in the last category, having never really learned much about politics or the political system of Canada. But I was eager to learn more. With this exercise we did, I learned that many of my peers fall in the same category as me, but a handful of students placed themselves in the other areas of the classroom. This intrigued me, not knowing that some of my classmates were very invested in Canadian politics. But as this project went on, I saw myself asking those people for help when I didn’t understand something about the political system, which made this exercise ultimately valuable. 

After this, we were presented with the book “Lord of the Flies” by our teacher. At that moment, I recalled the time my dad had told me about the book, and how he had read it in grade 11. But what my teacher told me next, really confused me, and changed my understanding of the book in a big way. “It’s an allegory,” she said. Not knowing exactly what that meant at the moment, someone asked what that meant. She explained to us, it essentially means that the book has a deeper meaning than just a group of kids stranded on an island. The author is trying to portray human nature at its extreme, alongside the way humans organize themselves, and political systems. When I first started reading the book, I didn’t understand any of those themes. Not having read many books in my lifetime has finally caught up to me. I was not able to find a deep understanding of the book, and at the moment that scared me. But as the reading period for the book went on, I found myself understanding the book more and more. I talked with classmates and parents to gain some preliminary insight. However, I soon found myself coming to discussions with a very similar understanding of the book as my peers. This gave me hope for my future with the book, being that of a Socratic Seminar which would soon come to fruition. To prepare for the Socratic Seminar, I made notes after every chapter and created some notes about the book as a whole with different themes (i.e. as an allegory, human nature, etc.). While the Socratic seminar didn’t exactly go as planned on my end, I’m still proud of the progress that I made as a reader in just a few weeks. Reading this book knowing that there’s a deeper understanding to be made, definitely shifted the way I’m going to perceive all books I pick up in the future and books that I’ve read in the past. This part of the project not only challenged me to think critically about literature but also opened my eyes to the deeper meanings and themes that can be found in books like “Lord of the Flies”. that rhymes😁

Why can’t you let a politician on a plane? Because he’ll keep trying to destroy the other wing.

The thing that makes PLP courses different from the rest, is the fact that we always learn about new topics and never seem to go back and revisit them. However, there are some similar themes/skills which carry on throughout every project, ex. Public Speaking, Digital Design, Writing, and effectively working in groups. This project put all these skills on display and even pushed our understanding and effectiveness with them to even greater heights. This project incorporated – Speaking to an audience, analyzing a “children’s” book for deeper meaning, putting together a short film, and researching issues in Canada. All things which wouldn’t normally be done together in any other English class, but that’s what makes PLP so special. 

In this project, we started by analyzing our understanding of voting, and if we even care about politics. We did a group activity where we’d go to a specific part of the room depending on whether you – care and know A LOT about politics, care somewhat and know some things about politics, or don’t care and know quite little about politics. I fell in the last category, having never really learned much about politics or the political system of Canada. But I was eager to learn more. With this exercise we did, I learned that many of my peers fall in the same category as me, but a handful of students placed themselves in the other areas of the classroom. This intrigued me, not knowing that some of my classmates were very invested in Canadian politics. But as this project went on, I saw myself asking those people for help when I didn’t understand something about the political system, which made this exercise ultimately valuable. 

After this, we were presented with the book “Lord of the Flies” by our teacher. At that moment, I recalled the time my dad had told me about the book, and how he had read it in grade 11. But what my teacher told me next, really confused me, and changed my understanding of the book in a big way. “It’s an allegory,” she said. Not knowing exactly what that meant at the moment, someone asked what that meant. She explained to us, it essentially means that the book has a deeper meaning than just a group of kids stranded on an island. The author is trying to portray human nature at its extreme, alongside the way humans organize themselves, and political systems. When I first started reading the book, I didn’t understand any of those themes. Not having read many books in my lifetime has finally caught up to me. I was not able to find a deep understanding of the book, and at the moment that scared me. But as the reading period for the book went on, I found myself understanding the book more and more. I talked with classmates and parents to gain some preliminary insight. However, I soon found myself coming to discussions with a very similar understanding of the book as my peers. This gave me hope for my future with the book, being that of a Socratic Seminar which would soon come to fruition. To prepare for the Socratic Seminar, I made notes after every chapter and created some notes about the book as a whole with different themes (i.e. as an allegory, human nature, etc.). While the Socratic seminar didn’t exactly go as planned on my end, I’m still proud of the progress that I made as a reader in just a few weeks. Reading this book knowing that there’s a deeper understanding to be made, definitely shifted the way I’m going to perceive all books I pick up in the future and books that I’ve read in the past. This part of the project not only challenged me to think critically about literature but also opened my eyes to the deeper meanings and themes that can be found in books like “Lord of the Flies”. that rhymes😁

Next, we started learning about the political system of Canada. Something I found quite amusing was the fact that the first thing she showed us on this topic, was a “Parody” of Canadian Politics. Rick Mercer’s “What you need to know about Canadian politics”

Weirdly enough, this video was great at explaining the Canadian political system, even if it was completely satire. But after this, our teacher explained some of the things in the video and then taught us some new things. One thing that surprised some of my classmates is that up until this project, I didn’t know what “right and left-wing” meant. I had a preliminary understanding of it, being that liberal is good and conservative is bad. Which now seems pretty stupid to look back on, but I had a lot to learn. As a first activity, we were tasked with writing a profile on a certain Canadian political party (had to be one of the main ones, i.e. no Rhinoceros Party of Canada). My group chose to research the Conservative Party, and after that process, my view of them as a party changed. I found myself agreeing with a lot of their opinions and policies. Some I was still against (ex. No Carbon Tax, support of Israel, etc.), but some things shifted my worldview. For one, they are against appointing senators, and believe they should be elected, something I agree with. They also support having pollution caps in place for big industries, which I found odd at first because my understanding of the party was that they didn’t care about climate change. Also, most of the policies that I researched ended up being centred around taxation.  It seems like a pretty big theme of theirs is to lower taxes in every area possible (ex. Income tax reductions, Business tax reductions, abolishing the carbon tax, etc.). At this time, we also learned how our political system is structured. Our teacher explained it to us with a “tree” diagram if you will. 

This was very interesting to me because I never really knew what Legislation meant, but after learning about this, and her teaching us about some other parts of our government, I finally have a good understanding of it. Up to this point, I felt like I had a strong understanding of how our government worked. But to test my knowledge, our teacher had a Kahoot quiz made for us to do. This is where I found that my understanding was pretty solid. I averaged about 15/16 out of the 3 times I did it, which I thought to be a big step up from when I first started the project. Overall, this stent of the project pushed my knowledge from 0-100 on how our government works. At the beginning of this project, I had no idea that the king was our head of state, I didn’t even know we had a Supreme Court. Those facts alone, seem like evidence enough, to prove that I learned a lot in this project.

What we did next, really seemed to open up my eyes for just how complicated environmental issues can be. In groups, we were tasked with researching different political issues for youth. Environmental issues, cost of living, children and social media, and post-secondary education were all on the board. However, I chose to focus my research on environmental issues. While conducting my research I found out just how much our carbon emissions fluctuate from year to year. I also learned just how hard our government is working when it comes to fighting climate change. We’ve emerged in recent years with organizations such as the Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Division of Natural Resources Canada, whose main goal is to conduct work on climate change impacts and adaptation. This organization, and other ones like it, have received upwards of 6.5 Billion dollars in funding since 2015. Alongside this, we’ve gained a vast network of external experts and partners to help us with climate adaptation. Something that surprised me though, is that the Conservative Party has acknowledged the importance of addressing climate change. This was weird to me because I had always thought that the Conservative Party was the Canadian version of the Republican Party. Safe to say, I was wrong. However, their approach to climate action focuses more on technology and innovation rather than regulation. They are also against the carbon tax. Something I will never stand by. 

The assignment we had next, was the one I spent the most time on. I’ve always been pretty passionate about filmmaking, but have never really had the resources to make it look the same as how I originally envisioned it. But with this project, it was different. I was given access to a special camera from the yearbook room, and with this, I’d make one of the highest-quality films ever submitted for a PLP assignment. However, this short film couldn’t be about just anything, its main goal is to engage teens and teach them about our government/the voting process. Something I forgot to mention earlier, was the fact that our final product for this project would be a presentation in front of a panel of teens at our school. It would have to be a 10-minute presentation, including the short film, and has to be engaging for people our age. Engaging is the keyword here. So when I found this out, my group and I started coming up with some ideas for a video. We had plenty, ranging from “Heritage Minute” to “Canadian Parties Rap Battle”. But ultimately, we decided on making a partially satirical film about a voter going to, well vote, then following the ballet to the PM. The movie would also include plenty of other facts/details about how our government works (ex. dissolution of parliament, campaigning, etc.) We then started storyboarding, and scripting, and soon we started filming. We had a lot of fun with this part of the process, but that came with some negatives. We ended up having to do plenty of reshoots because either, I would laugh behind the camera making it shaky, or someone would speak too robotic, or someone would just be too unserious while on camera. I also soon realized that the focus on the camera I was using was buggy when filming, something that would nip me in the bud later on. But regardless of all the errors in the beginning, we kept on going, getting better and better with every day, and soon filming was done and to our liking. Once I finished editing, we showed the movie to some of our classmates. They all found it pretty funny and well-produced, but some of the content required wasn’t there. But our rationale for that was that we’d have that information in the actual presentation, not in the movie. Also, our film was 2x longer than any other in the class. Overall, I was happy with how it came out, but I learned just how long it takes to finish a movie, especially with my unrealistic expectations. But our next challenge would soon come, in the form of the presentation.

This part of the project didn’t exactly go as planned. Since it took us so long to finish the re-shoots for the movie, we didn’t have as much time as we’d hoped to put together and practice our presentation. Nonetheless, we tried to make it the best we could. Our idea for it was to start by going over some political issues and asking the panel if they were concerned about them. We also asked some questions that would lead into the short film about voting (ex. “Is anyone here 18 years or older?”, “Who here is a permanent resident of Canada?”, “Who here has a piece of photo ID?”, etc.). Our main idea to make the presentation engaging, was to have a lot of audience participation, and a funny video. Then after playing the video, we’d talk about how our government is structured. We made our version of the “tree” that I showed earlier in this post and added some photos alongside it. Then after that, we had some more audience participation, in the form of some Trivia!! However, our presentation can only be 10 minutes, so we only had 3 questions – 2 true or false – one multiple choice. Once we finished the presentation, and made it look more aesthetically pleasing, we started doing some run-throughs. A problem we had, was that our run-throughs would always get interrupted by one thing or another. This would come back to hurt us in the end. Then the dreaded day of presentations came, and we felt somewhat confident, but we really should have practiced more. Our presentation went somewhat smoothly, we did however run into some technical difficulties with our video, and the projector was making everything look yellow and pink. This didn’t do any justice to the video that I painstakingly worked on for over 2 weeks. So I wasn’t super pleased with our presentation, but the feedback we received from the panel was overwhelmingly positive in most areas. Overall, we should have prepared much more for the final product, instead of focusing so much on the short film. We also should’ve added more direct educational bits into the video.

In conclusion, this project has been quite a journey for me filled with lessons. There are a lot of things I could’ve done differently myself, and some things we could’ve done differently as a group. But overall, looking back on it, our teamwork was solid, so if we do get the chance to do another group project, I’d like to do it again with this group.