Weekly Reflection October 24th

After a refresher this week on what this post is supposed to be about, I am still lost, but I’ll try my best.

This week I learned that the line between shrew and “good” is very vague.

I can speak, have been able too since I was young, my first word was “dadda” when I was 1. Since then I have been spewing words as I learn then. Also known as speaking or talking. Only recently did I realize that because of my gender I would have been punished for spewing words, had I been born earlier. The lottery of birth protected me but it did not shield me from it entirely. I was really shocked that men would actually prefer it if women, or their wife, didn’t have any opinions, and didn’t partake speaking on any subjects other then the house. Thats like having a conversation with a wall. Wouldn’t it be more fun to argue a point? To see each others sides? To express both of your thoughts, not just make the woman stomach them, and the man speak for both of you?

We took a shrew test this week, to see how shrew’d we were, (I highly suggest you take the quiz, linked here). The woman who wrote the quiz was writing it to show women what they need to do to change, she wanted your score to be as low as possible. I took the quiz and was proud of my high score until I saw the objective. I was sort of confused. Obviously there are areas where I found myself placing low numbers, but I finished the quiz and got the score, “your man is probably immobilized, comatose and cached underground.” Hmmm. My man is dead? He couldn’t keep up? What did I “disrespect him to death?” Thats new. I found myself questioning where the male equivalent was. Where is the matching him and her shrew quiz? Huh? But that was the extent of the quiz. I also realized that it didn’t matter what the man had said, each of the categories (disrespecting, criticizing, nagging, lecturing, opposing, and punishing) were just never allowed for a woman to express. Basically a submissive woman is ideal. The woman who wrote this is obsessed with demoing homes, and finds herself happiest “when she has a power tool in her hand.” So how does she get to do a “male” job, but is not allowed to have her own opinions? Where is the line?

This question of where is the line is something that just continues to reoccur, with the suffragettes, there were “feminists” who were against the movement and found it was working against their efforts. When I did research for my Academic Conclusion this week I found countless STEM women who had had their discoveries usurped from them. Are they supposed to be happy that people realized? Next time they’ll get the nobel prize, right? Would it be inappropriate to fight? And when we read taming of the shrew this week, and had to draw the line between good and shrew, this line, the same line I have been talking about the entire time, is very very hard to find. 

This is when I wish I was in math, so I could just find the equation to the line. So I could find what the maximum amount of effort I could put in before I cross the line.

This line is exponentially hard to differentiate between, and I look forward to slowly placing it.

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Weekly Reflection October 18th

Welcome to my weekly recap! I will be creating one of these every week to just cover what I have learned each week, so sit back an relax and let me wrap up an old project and uncover a new one.

This week began with a lovely and much needed pro-d day. I was in Tofino, obviously respecting COVID guidelines, we barley ever went into town, and surfed the entire weekend, which made me feel much better after a stressful 5 weeks. Monday we headed home, realizing that missing one day of school was the equivalent of missing a day 2 week. So I was back and ready on Tuesday. On Tuesday I was in class and we just wrapped up our google map, and made sure that everyone had their information in. The google map was almost completely fined by the end of class, Jesse just had to finish putting the numbers on each stop, and we had to double check and make sure everyones info was in. Here is our final product, and here is the Wolves (class b’s) final product the pamphlet. On Thursday we officially hit 5 weeks and switched cohorts, english becoming an everyday class, and math becoming an every other day class, which also meant that we switched to Ms. Willemse as our teacher and switched projects. The new project we have begun Ms. Willemse has not released to us the driving questions but I have reason to believe that it has something to woman’s suffrage and The Taming Of The Shrew, a Shakespeare comedy, actually one of my favourite plays I have ever seen. So let me rehash this weeks learning.

“So they basically steal Dom’s wallet, and someone straps a bomb to themselves outside, but my bare legs are the big issue? Got it.” Joey a character on the Netflix show “Grand Army”,  a newly released and super interesting TV show based on “Slut: The Play,” says to her teacher, during a lockdown in the first 20 minutes of the show. Joey had just come from gym, and didn’t have time to change. Her friend attacking her with a rude comment on the way out of the gym, “you’ve had an abortion haven’t you?” Joey feels unfairly treated which is the basis of the work we’ve been doing in class this week. We’ve been covering an intro to the treatment of woman in the past and present, mostly relating to the word slut. To be called a slut is basically someone saying you sleep around, and regarding you as less then. Its a really detrimental term, and it sucks that ever since entering high school it has entered the lingo for many young woman, including Seycove students. In class we watched 4 clips where the word slut is thrown around, clips that were part of major on air tv shows. The first of them being the notorious, “Jane you ignorant slut.” Our class had a big discussion about this one, how all she had done was stand up for another woman, an all of a sudden her sexual life became what she was defined as, honestly this one sickens me. The way Jane immediately is quiet, and how she must shake his hand at the end, makes me green. I see reciprocal versions of this all the time, and I’m tired of girls feeling like they need to stomach the way they feel to make the man happy. Just the other day a girl (no exposing over here) was reading off of a card in a game. She was reading slowly and none of us had a problem with this, just reading, we were in no rush, until a boy at the table said “Just shut up and give me the card. Your stuttering and its taking to long. Nobody wants to hear you read this card.” My mouth fell open. I knew this boy, he was my friend, and I was so infuriated. I told him it was wrong, and that he had been incredibly rude, and so did another girl at the table, but the girl that he was rude too just looked like she had been stabbed. He answered with the line older then time itself, “it was a joke. I was only kidding, cant you take a joke.” If my mouth wasn’t already falling to the floor, then it had just hit the core of the earth. The other girl who had spoken up made him apologize, though he laughed through the whole thing, and said “I’m sorry”. I had expected the girl who was targeted to not say anything, or tell him how he had wronged her, and tell him how an apology doesn’t fix the fact she may be self conscious about reading out loud now.

But she said “its ok.”

“its ok.”

its ok. I almost can’t even type this because it aggravates me so much. She just stomached everything she was feeling, keep in mind she looked like she as going to cry, and made sure that the boy didn’t hurt. AGHHHHHH, its the same thing as, “Jane you ignorant slut.” Boys don’t think these things hurt, but they do hurt, and woman need to stop telling them don’t. I obviously realize that there is a lot of difference between what I saw and the notorious line, and how minimal this seems as well. I also realize that as a white woman I have it easy compared to many other people, but it hurt me to watch this, and I can’t stand the girl thinking that it was her bad for reacting. This sort of stuff has happened to me in the past before and I know how to react now. I know how to stand up for myself, which often makes men feel inferior, or attacked. I am sick of letting their opinion rule me. I am a loud, outspoken, and opinionated person for a reason. I am also sick of when girls come back and respond in an appropriate manner, boys almost always get threatened and attack physical looks, and personal attributes. But anyways I need to get back to my week, I could talk about this stuff for years.

The “Jane you ignorant slut,” quote also relates to a reading we had to do in english. The reading was about the role of a woman in marriage. Since I handed mine in I don’t have access to the actual reading, but I remember the just of it. Quotes from the reading read like “the woman has no-one other then her man,” even though earlier in the paragraph the reading had said that the man has friends and events and sports and an unlimited list of things to keep his company. It also mentioned how woman were the inferior species, and men were merely taking their god given right by being the more powerful person, and getting to make all decisions. (vomit). The sickening thing about that reading was that the author thought they were writing the truth. That that was sold or given to woman to religiously follow. Which boggles me. Anyway I need to get on with my day, and probably do some sort of exercise to get all this pent up anger out.

So I’ll see you guy next week.   

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A revamped historical tour of Deep Cove

PLP has begun and I can’t believe this is only my first post. Mr. Hughes told me during the normal year we would be somewhere in January now, so having to do one post is incredible, they will be much more frequent now. In english we have created a pamphlet and a google map as part of our historical walking tour of deep cove.

Pamphlet FINAL

The premise for the project was to answer the driving question “How can we as historians uncover and share stories about our community?” The final product was planned to be a historical walking tour, with plaques and a livestream of us taking the tour. COVID set up many barriers in this project which ended up altering our final project, causing us to add the map and remove the plaques. So let me explain this project.

Firstly, our teacher Ms. Maxwell took a shot in the dark and reached out to the Deep Cove Heritage Society (DCHS), and got a response from a man named Jim. Ms. Maxwell ended up being the first person to contact the DCHS from Seycove ever, and they were so excited to share their resources with us. We had previously done some research about the history of the cove and the Seymour area with help from the DCHS published books, “Echoes Across The Inlet,” and “Echoes Across Seymour,”

 

which helped us grasp an understanding of the historical past of each of our locations. We used this information to make a timeline highlighting certain events and dates the struck us as important from each chapter of both books (class A did one book and class B did another). When creating this timeline we also added national, and major world events to understand some of the influences that may have altered our history, and played a role in the way people made decisions. Take for instance my location which was the Corfield’s Dance Hall, located right on the water at the bottom of Gallant Ave. Corfeild’s went through many owners, but the reason the second owners sold was because of WW2. They fell into debt and ended up closing and selling the hall. Including the major world event, WW2, I was able to see why the hall closed abruptly and begin to realize that history is not just a set of loose dates, everything leads to something else, which was key to understanding in this project.

Once the entire class had delved into the readings and done some research, we all made a list of stops on the existing walking tour we would like to make “our” stop. What I mean by “our” stop is that we would be focusing on one stop for the project which would become “our”stop. My three proposed stops were, Corfield’s Dance Hall/DCK, Covecliff Elementary School, and the Moore Family Store. I ended up with Corfield’s Dance Hall, and Deep Cove Kayak which was perfect. To start research on the past of both locations (I thought they were in the same place, which was a hard truth to learn later on down the road) I dug a bit into “Echoes Across Seymour,” in which there was a whole blurb about the past of the kayak shop, including dates and names, which was incredibly helpful. The only hitch was there was nothing about Corfield’s. I mustered on, and ended up just talking about the land by the water in the cove, making sure not to step on the yacht club’s toes. Our first proper assignment which would carry into our final project was the draft of the blurb for the pamphlet. 100 words max, and it had to include two historical perspectives, as well as all your history, of the best of it. (Mine is on stop #7 on the pamphlet) I struggled a bit with this being fluent in writing larger amounts of text, I was bit daunted to write less. My first draft sucked, I made revisions following that (ex. completely cutting out Deep Cove Kayak Shop from the pamphlet) and my second draft looked much better. Once our pamphlet blurbs were in we could then return to beefing up the words since the new blurb would go on the google map that my group (the eagles) were creating. We also assigned roles for our group to fall into to help smooth out any confusion. I became a communicator between The Eagles, and The Wolves, just making sure that everyone had handed there info in to the right place and was on time. I also was supposed to help Jesse with the route, but it was cut so that job disappeared. While the map and pamphlet were being made we also had to finish up our individual stops, things like digital enhancement and our audio recording, were necessary to completing the stop. For my digital enhancement I scored a phone interview with Erian Baxter, the co-owner of the Deep Cove Kayak Shop (DCK), her mom started up the business in 1983, and Erian continues on her legacy today. In the interview I asked her questions about the past present and future of the DCK, here is the interview if you would like to listen. After the interview one of the last hurdles was the on scene video, the camera was a bit shaky, but I was happy with the video.

Here is the whole classes video!

Once everything was handed in it was just a matter of putting all the pieces together, making sure that everything worked. Here is the final product in length and I highly recommend you try visiting the stops if your local to North Van. The tour itself would be a very cool fair weather walk of scenic Deep Cove! Also if your in the cove check out Deep Cover Heritage Society, and pic up one of our pamphlets. I believe thats the end, this project was really fun and I enjoyed the class time we got to share ideas and brainstorm together.

  Competencies

The competencies being assessed in the duration of this project was “writing and designing text and using resources.” I felt I demonstrated this strongly by my many edits and recreations of my blurb, as well as making sure that I always held a good grasp of the Historical Thinking Concepts from historicalthinking.ca.  I also made sure to cite my resources, and keep track of the websites and books I referenced, sadly there wasn’t much about the history of the Deep Cove Kayak Shop and Corfield’s Dance Hall, but I did find enough resources. All in all I felt this was a strong project for me, and am excited to start the next project.

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TPOL 2020

Why do I feel I am ready to advance to the next grade? Why did I feel I was ready to advance to the next grade last year? Or the year before? Definitely not my spelling, or my grammar. My writing has become better, but that isn’t the only reason I should advance to the next grade, is it?

Hopefully this video makes it clear what it is.

If you chose not to watch the video, saving me some humiliation, I would like to talk about something I came upon when creating a time capsule video for this TPOL. Which I am keeping tucked away safe, because this TPOL has already been too humiliating. This concept that I strolled across, is the concept of school being fun. We all “hate” school. Who wants to do work? No one, thats who. But recently I have been receiving a lot of  recognition for my work, and it made me think, why have I all of a sudden found this sweet spot of work, where I work hard, but homework doesn’t control me, and where I get recognized. I pondered this, and I realized that the only answer that I could come up with was that school is enjoyable, so any work load isn’t something that makes me uncomfortable, and this also explains why I can put my best work forwards.

“Its just…. It’s fun. Learning is fun, and I think that thats the biggest thing I should always remember. Is that, if learnings not fun, I’m doing it wrong. And that I just need to stay realizing that growing the understanding and the education that I already have is a pleasure, and its a privilege. And I think thats what I’ve been able to see this year, and I think thats why I should advance to grade 12.” – Quote from me. from my time capsule for this 2020 TPOL.

 

via GIPHY

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The Scottish Play

I barley remember that we were even in school at one point anymore. Though things are clearing up, and things are beginning to go back to normal, I still cant believes that we’ve been learning from home for 3 months. Time travels fast when your not doing anything, I guess. Anyway Macbeth, thats what I’m here to talk about. So if anyone has ever told you about Macbeth, theres this curse that should also be mentioned. Now to preface this, I don’t know if I believe in curses personally, but there is definitely something I believe in about this play. The previous grade to attempt this jaw dropping stunt, that is recreating Macbeth but in a different era, incorporating history from the era into the play, was the now second year university students when they were in grade 11. Simpler to say 3 years a ago. As part of our class we watched their final product, and to be blatant, it grew our ego’s. It was a work in progress to put it nicely. Apparently they had lost the camera chip that everything had been filmed on, and I believed that more and more as the project went on. Here’s the backstage clip I could find of it.

Now after watching it we knew our grade, jam packed full of hard working individuals, could do better. And in the preliminary rounds, we did. But all of a sudden we weren’t doing so good. Our final product ended up looking like the previous attempt, just instead of the war, it was the dramatic and twisted 50’s. So this long and elaborate blog post will take you through the ups and downs to how we ended up with a video with blank title screens reading “In the classroom.” Too start I would like to let you guys watch the video, give it a good watch and realize our potential to make the movie great.

https://youtu.be/Ib4QMGU-PMc

Now alike the group that attempted this feat before us, we failed, but due to something that was out of our control. Covid 19 hit, and it hit us hard. All of a sudden its a week before the end of school (for spring break) and everyone is sooooo excited to get some sun, or to escape the classroom, when word starts traveling about how so-and-so’s trip was just cancelled, and how you realize that that sucks, but it won’t happen to you, you think.

So the teachers were in Vietnam and Cambodia. Yup. Thats right. In the height of the pandemic, my teachers were in Asia. So we had a sub, and we were puttering along in our work, we hit a few bumps with certain actors/actresses not being able to attend certain filming days, but we got through that. We even had a plan to film a whole bunch of scenes after spring break because Macbeth got sick,(which in the lead up to a pandemic its a good idea to stay home.) So we banked on the week after spring break to shoot all the shots we were missing. Little did we know that there wouldn’t be a “week after spring break” that we could film in. That maybe there wouldn’t be a week like that for a long time. After spring break, and we all realized that we wouldn’t be able to finish the movie, we gave what we had to the editors and they crafted the video linked above up for everyones viewing, which I have to admit is pretty incredible. (Also check out this video that Luca Jacoe made because its awesome.)

IMG_6692

They took some very random shots, and turned it into something better. I felt like the whole story about Covid interrupting our filming is a good image of the Macbeth curse. The Macbeth curse was something felt by many members of theatre as well as people of the audience. Things like fires in theatres, or strange lighting incidents, more major (though I dont quite know if true) include deaths from actors attempting to act in Macbeth, and so I think its funny that the past 2 times a PLP group has tried to recreate Macbeth, we have failed.

Now enough chat about failure, lets talk about what happened before we torpedoed. Right from the beginning.

Too start this unit we were tasked with answering in our own way, “Why Shakespeare?”

I honestly did a lot of research for this question, and I remember my theory being ripped to shreds in class, so obviously I didn’t quite know why shakespeare. What I left with is that Shakespeare alone created 1700 words in the english dictionary. And his plays help us to figure out what life was like back in the 1500-1600’s. After we had a understanding about what Ms. Willemse wanted us to take from the book, we began to read the book/play. We read the book through this app that made it so we were reading the acts, but we could also watch a video depicting what the scene would look like in play form, which really helped to digest the information. While we were reading the play we were also learning about the 1950’s, and to prove that we were actually absorbing information we were tasked with writing TWIL’s. TWIL stands for This Week I Learned, and when writing your TWIL you had to connect Macbeth, with the 1950’s. Here are my 3 posts I made about my connections to both topics.

Post 1 – https://www.blog44.ca/adlihb/2020/01/25/this-week-i-learned/

Post 2 – https://www.blog44.ca/adlihb/2020/02/03/this-week-i-learned-week-2/

Post 3 – https://www.blog44.ca/adlihb/2020/02/10/1740/

As well as posts we also wrote quests, (quiz and test combined). Our quests sort of forced us to look deeper in the book and realize what other meaning lay hidden within all the most important quotes. So in our quests we were given 3 quotes from the text we had read following that quest, and we had to tell Ms. Willemse, who said the quote, where in the plot the quote happened, and connect it to a theme. It sounded simpler then it was, because the second I got in there, I personally forgot everything to do with theme which sucked a lot.   

After we had accomplished all the preliminary tasks, we began the actual film. The first task was to apply for a position in the film, which did not include acting. Roles like Editor, Production Manager, and Costume Design, all fell into line. In the end Alivia was the Producer, Jesse was the Screenwriter, and Giorgia was the Director. These roles were at the top of the pyramid, so I mentioned them here, but I think it goes without saying that everyone else who worked on the film was equally important. Once roles had been assigned (Ahm Ahm Line Producer) we began the actual journey to the film. My role in the film production was very background. I made call sheets, and a lot of them. This is an example of a call sheet.

Basically all a Line Producer does is remind people of what scenes are being filmed where, and what needs to be there, and who needs to be there. So I personally think I was a very boss line producer, making sure that everyone could be where they needed to be at all times. I even sent out email’s to everyone reminding them of their filming days, like this one.

 

After all of this, spring break arrived, and I already tried to sell you on the curse, so I think my work here is done. All in all this project was fun. I enjoyed the freedom of having the leaders for the project be students and I think we benefitted immensely from that. I know that the teachers will always nag us about how we never finished Macbeth, but I think personally that we did all the heavy lifting. We learned so much from that project, with or without the final product. 

Thanks for reading guys!

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Atomic Habits

Recently PGP 11 has been working on a project to exemplify our understanding of the Atomic Habits book, written by James Clear. The guidelines of the project are as follows, (also in the photo below).

You had to pick something to think about such as a certain habit, a summary of all the habits or even some research into the graphic that interested you. After you chose a think item you had to pick a way to show your understanding, the two chooses offered were to make a video and the other was to create a tool to help you understand and use the think time that you choose. There was a third option that was “your choice” as well. Now once you’ve created an item you have publish it to your learning portfolio and explain it, and I choose the option to include how I am going to move forward with Atomic Habits.

This graphic will really help explain what the process was to choose a project that exemplified my work with Atomic Habits. For anyone who doesn’t know what I mean when I am talking about Atomic Habits, I wrote a separate blog post about it that I will link here! And if you would like a brief understanding of Atomic Habits then your in the right place as I was just about to depart on one. 

Atomic Habits was given to my class around November/December 2019, and we had to read it before school came back in January after Christmas break. As time went by I started to realize that my time was running out to read a book that would create so much time for me, the irony was too evident. I had poked and prodded at the book in December but I hadn’t made any real progress, during winter break though I really sat down and started to read. And I personally think that you have to consume all of this book in a small amount of time, unlike other books where you can leave it on the shelf, and read as you please. So I followed my own idea about how to read the book, and I read it all in like 6 days. After I finished I was like “ok, now I’m done. I can go read something else.” As in, I had no emotions towards the book, I just considered it another school book. Now it stayed that way for quite some time, really just until I picked it up for this project did I realize what information I had actually been using this whole time. To prove this point, the week before this project I had been telling my brother about the Valley Of Disappointment, he was talking about his cooking I think, and I had been telling about how I can make waffles (the only thing I can make) without a recipe, and he said that he wasn’t any good at cooking. So a little light came on in my head and I remembered this graph about where you wish you could be and where you are, so I told him about it, and since he’s a 14 kid, I don’t think it actually sank in, but it helped him to realize that just because he couldn’t make waffles like moi (the master) didn’t mean he couldn’t make them, and that one day he would be able to make them without a recipe as well. 

More then just the valley of disappointment stayed with me, (like how your environment impacts your habits, that’s really cool) but for the project I decided to focus on the first chapter of Atomic Habits. In this chapter James Clear goes over a few things like the 1% better every day graph (still don’t understand that), he also talks about a few points that are probably some of the most important in the book. The argument I have prepared for this point is that without these points the rest of the book doesn’t stick. “The fundamentals” is what the chapter is called. In this chapter James Clear discusses 4 problems that he has found with goals and habits in general. For my story I chose to exemplify all of these points. (These points are really hidden, but they’re there.) His problems are as follows: 

  • “Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.”
  • “Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only momentary change.”
  • “Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.”
  • “Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-time progress.”

Excerpt From Atomic Habits

Here’s my final project

I choose to show these problems through the lens of 2 young girls. The main character (who if you’ve noticed remains nameless) is a want to be pro swimmer. She joins a swim team without the proper swim tests and when she gets there she realizes that this swim team isn’t like the other ones that’s she’s been on, and she realizes that she isn’t going to become a pro swimmer because she isn’t as good as the other girls. So the main character leaves, and back at school her and her friend, Breonna (who is on the swim team) discuss what the main character is feeling, and that’s how atomic habits gets brought up. I found the connection that the girls made between atomic habits to the swim team to make the connection clearer to me. In the sense that the girls didn’t need the biggest goals ever to use the book to their advantage. They just needed to strive for something. 

One last point before I’m done here, is that the main character doesn’t have a name because I connect to her so much that I would read it as me. And I think that if you read it as you, then it’s you. I found that writing through the lens of others helped me to understand myself, what my goals actually are and what these problems that James Clear created actually mean. So without further a due, please read the short story, and tell me what you think. 

Thanks for reading 

Adlih

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Are we doomed to repeat history? (The climate crisis and the Civil Rights movement, week 3)

https://soundcloud.com/user-335030245/the-climate-justice-movement

Justice is a concept on ethics and law where people behave in a way that is fair, equal and balanced for everyone.”

To be unjust would be behaving in a way that is unfair, or morally wrong. 

(Now before I would like to continue any further I wanted to mention that I am coming at this from the perspective of a white teenage girl. That things I say could be perceived as wrong, because I am only able to build off of my own life experiences, and right now with all this information I am trying to be as open as possible, but if you read this and find something incorrect about it, please leave a comment!)

“Injustice causes movements.” – Megan Currin, District Councillor, and Shop owner, said. This blew all my work away. The point of there being yet another similarity between the Civil Rights Movement and the Climate Crisis. Last week I belittled my work with ways to prove it inaccurate, but I didn’t realize that by doing that it left very little for me to build upon for this week. I then realized that I could build upon the very thing that made me uncomfortable writing about, which is white supremacy. The Oxford dictionary defines white supremacy as, “the belief, theory, or doctrine that white people are inherently superior to people from all other racial and ethnic groups, especially Black people, and are therefore rightfully the dominant group in any society.” 

To find white supremacy in the Civil Rights movement you don’t have to look very far, every protest, every march, every sit-in and arrest happened because of this unjust believe that people with white skin were superior to people with darker skin colours. An example of white supremacy during the Civil Rights movement is the white knights of the KKK. The KKK’s goal was to maintain segregation, and to prove to any African Americans that the KKK was proof of supremacy, at the toll of violence. They did this through “cross lightings,” which was when the KKK community, at meetings/rallies, would burn a cross the symbol of christ and Christian faith, continuing to claim that they were non violent. Many of the KKK’s more violent lashes came from individual members, not the Klan itself. The members would make deals with police to attack or kill African Americans that had been released from prison, which brings up my next point. Many of the people who brutally attacked and killed African Americans were not themselves part of the Klan, which proves that you didn’t need to be a part of the Klan to be a white supremacist. The murder of Emmett Till is an example of murder at the cost of superiority. Emmett Till was a 14 years old, and on a trip to visit family, when he was murdered for making a comment to a female worker in a candy shop in Money Mississippi. The husband of the woman working in the candy shop, and his friend then 3-4 days later went to Emmett’s uncles house and dragged him into their truck, and drove off. He was found weighed down by a cotton Jin fan in a river near Emmett’s uncles house. He had suffered major injuries before the two shot him. It’s such a horrible event that didn’t need to happen. These men were not doing anything but showing their supremacy towards a 14 year old who was merely visiting his family. These 2 were not registered KKK members, this wasn’t part of a Klan act, it was a individual decision, which just goes to prove that you dont need to be part of a group that believes in white supremacy to be a whites supremacist. 

So now that we know that believing in white supremacy is not limited to people in a clan/group, I feel that I can understand that white supremacy today follows that same mindset. You may be wondering what white supremacy looks like today and I think you would be shocked to know that it honestly isn’t that different. There are still KKK groups/communities all over the world, and if not in person, online. Many alt-right groups have taken to social media to hide, many finding homes on sites like twitter, facebook, and VK. After the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand in 2019, many media sites decided to purge their sites of platforms that portrayed a similar belief. These groups then found themselves home on a Russian site called VK. What makes VK so popular is that you can hide things in a “blanket setting.” Things like posts, pages, or sites can all be hidden from public view. 

Aside from the very evident white supremacy groups, there is also hidden white supremacy belief in many other areas, one being politics. To get right to the point the connection I had planned on using in this post was the misuse, and overuse of people and resources. How African American people were stolen, and then enslaved and forced to work inhumanly, and then when they wanted to be treated like humans, white people refused. I wished to connect that to how people in higher income counties have been extracting and burning up fossil fuels unable to look the people who they are affecting in their eyes, and refusing to stop. This misuse of resources struck me as a connection that I could tie into the Civil Rights Movement, so heres my explanation. 

When you go to a mainstream store, and you see a cotton tee-shirt on sale for $5.99, and you think its fate, all you wanted lately was a cotton tee-shirt, I highly recommend you think twice before purchasing it. If you are ok with the fact that the shirt was made by people (using Bangladesh for this example) who are earning 1.8 % of the hourly wage of the average American which means that these people (85% woman) can not provide for all living needs (shelter, food, education), that they receive this wage for working 14-16 hour shifts 7 days a week, that the people employed to work in the sweatshops face unsafe working conditions, and cramped quarters, and there are often factory fires due to these 2 points. Many of these workers are not granted maternity leave, and are not able to unionize. If you can make it through these points and still want that $6 shirt, I don’t know what will change your mind. It’s not that you shouldn’t consume, clothing is an important part of our life, its how we express ourselves, and obviously that is a very important part of our culture, but being able to express yourself, while also thinking about these people who are being targeted by this cutler of consumption is very important. 

This is where my connection comes in. When you don’t think about the people being affected by your actions your exercising your privilege, and supremacy. Many people will not think about the repercussions of their actions when it comes to the climate as well. When I say “the climate” its a pretty bold grab at anything climate related, emissions, pollution, global warming, major weather events, the death of species, and the blatant tendency for people to ignore those being affected. When people produce emissions it contributes to global warming which stirs up many major weather events, ( I am not a pro at this stuff so please comment if I mess this up). The people, in general, who contribute the most to the emissions are people living in higher income companies which generally reside in the global north. Now the major weather events affect people in generally lower income countries, that also generally reside in the global south. If you read that correctly you should have seen that the people who contribute the least to global warming, feel the effects the hardest. People don’t think about what there actions affects have on others, which is an example of privilege. 

Using that example here in North America, we can see that people like President Trump are examples of white supremacy in his actions to continue to extract and refusing the fact that his actions have repercussions across the world. There are many other ways that he can be considered a white supremacist, but to connect the civil rights unit to the climate crisis, I will remain talking about climate. 

“He is a dehumanizer. … He has been very clear about who he prefers to be in this country and who he literally wants to keep out with walls and cages and militarization and torture and cruelty. And again, we in El Paso have born the brunt of all of that.”

former Rep. Beto O’Rourke said

“I think if you own a business that attempts to keep black people from renting from you,” Coates said, “… if your response to the first black president is that they weren’t born in this country, despite all proof, if you say they weren’t smart enough to go to Harvard Law School and then demand to see their grades, if that’s the essence of your entire political identity, you might be a white supremacist.”

“Many of the statements [Trump has made] are exactly what a white supremacist would say — whether talking about immigrants invading or African countries being ‘s***holes’ or Mexicans are rapists,” Beirich noted. “He’s tweeted out material that came from white supremacists, and a lot of his views are indirectly views from white nationalists. I don’t know if that makes him a white nationalist, but he’s talking from their scripts.”

These are just quotes from a simple search about Trump and white supremacy. I hope this post makes the point about how people are still exercising their belief in white supremacy today, and that this misuse of the planet, that stems from that belief, is similar to the misuse of people during the civil rights movement.

Thanks for reading 

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Are we doomed to repeat history? (The climate crisis and the Civil Rights movement, week 2)

https://soundcloud.com/user-335030245/the-climate-movement-and-the-1

I cannot stop thinking about this question. That’s for sure. Are we doomed to repeat history, is a meaningful question that I feel like I will never, no matter how much work I put in, be able to answer which intrigues me even more. I feel like no one could ever have a fully formed answer to this question because there is so much unknown lurking within it. As Daniel (a fellow PLP 11 student) said “aren’t we still in history?” How are you supposed to answer a question when you haven’t even understood its foundation. Its all these little tripwires that make it so very interesting. 

Last week I argued that what Naomi Klein said in “On Fire: the burning case for a green new deal” was equal to what Rev Martin Luther King said after his house was bombed around the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and how that proved the 2 movements were alike. Now abruptly after (or even during) that post (link here if you want to read into the similarities that I focused on) I was stricken with the idea that maybe what they said was just explaining the basis of movement.

That maybe they weren’t as similar as I previously thought. Which confused and intrigued me. Was I wrong to jump so quickly to a connection? To figure this out I delved into a 3 hour “power hour” just inhaling information about movements (The 3 hours, I think, is in part due to the fact I finished the tv show I was watching yesterday!) and boy did I ever find enough information to answer my question. 

Ok so no. That’s the answer. I was wrong to make such an abrupt connection to the climate movement. I still agree that what I found was identical, but thats is like saying the Merriam-Webster definition of movement is the same as the Oxford dictionary definition.

If you see what I mean. Obviously they are going to be the same, because they are describing the exact same thing. Now I was not completely wrong in my conviction from last week, I say this because the power of a movement relies in the numbers, that is true, and the statements I used exemplify that, its just not a usable example of a connection. For example I could draw a connection between the Climate movement with the Civil Rights movement because they are both movements, but nobody wants to hear that crap. It’s not a strong connection. This is where my 3 hours of movement investigation comes in. Be prepared, I am hoped up on candy and I am going to butcher my connections I made last week. (Read last weeks connections here). 

Firstly the Civil Rights movement was a force to be reckoned with. It had a firm belief to abolish the Jim Crowe laws and to supply African Americans with equal rights, and on paper it succeeded. (It was successful per-say, the movement did not account for bigoted people of power who could refuse to listen to the federal authority due to personal bias, but the movement mostly surpassed those people.) Now the focus for the Civil Rights success should be on the movement’s concrete and pinpointed objective, which I mentioned above. Every person who partook in the Civil Rights movement knew what they were fighting for. This fact makes it seem cruel to compare the Civil Rights movement, and the Climate movement, for what is the concrete and pin-pointed objective of the climate movement? Every organization has a different answer, sure they may all be variations of keeping the planets warming below 2 degrees, and making up for the poor treatment of low and middle income countries, but thats not direct. Its what has to happen yes, but in little steps. The only goal should never be the end goal. It needs to be thought out in bite sized pieces. In terms of movement: bite off more then you can chew, and its forgotten forever.

Example: Occupy Wall Street, (I feel like I don’t need to say any more, though I will) failed because they didn’t have a consensus about what they were fighting for. They had a catchy slogan, I’ll give you that, but they lacked the direction needed to turn their protest into a movement that would catch the attention of others. Now this is an excellent segway into my second point which is described perfectly by Greg Satell in this quote. “Until your movement is able to attract the support of those who don’t immediately agree with you, its noting more then a protest.” Let that settle for a second. 

The Civil Rights movement is riddled with examples of attracting support from white people who, as Satell stated, “didn’t immediately agree with (them).” Take the Freedom Rides for example, the support was bi-racial.

The Riders did not only consist of African American students, it also consisted of white students who saw the inequality because the Civil Rights movement was able to catch their attention. I know we haven’t fully diverged, in class, into the peaceful protests of Selma, but this is another excellent example. By supporting the belief of non-violence, Selma attracted many people who were seen as villains. This switch from minority to majority takes the movement from only those affected by it, to a wider scale. Every movement must undergo this phase, but yet again I feel like I was cruel to place the Climate movement beside the Civil Rights movement. I feel this way because the climate movement has yet to exit the chasm. (Image below to reference). Take Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign for example, (please feel free to @ me in the comments, I know this is a risky statement to make)

Sanders actions made him look like he felt that if you didn’t share his exact same opinion, then he would target you as corrupt, or against the Climate movement, even though in many cases the person he was targeting was, in theory, on his side. (The side would be socialist, and well as climate activist in this case democratic). This caused people to resent what he stood for, because he was forcing people who fought for him, to fight against him if they stood for something even miniscully different. Though Bernie Sanders may have gained a strong, loyal following, he lost the ticket to change when he lost the majority. He took the Climate movement and made it a hierarchal thing, instead of what it is, a “current” – who said this. The power comes from everybody believing in the same thing, not one person edging his way to fame and fortune in the name of climate, by pushing others down. 

And so I hope these 2 points help you to see the incorrectness of my connections from last week. 

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The Ivy Lee Method

When we (PLP 11) were assigned this project, Ms. Maxwell made an example fo showing us the Ivy Lee method. She had a tab specifically for it and shared that if she were to pick a habit off of James Clears website it would be the Ivy Lee method. At that point I didnt really know what the Ivy Lee method was, sounded cool, but I thought I would personally look through all the posts and find something fitting for me. So that’s exactly what I did. I spent a good chunk of time getting lost in links from page to page, and then realizing I was lost and hoping the back button would bring me around to an all too familiar home page. In all this searching though I only found one post that caught my attention, and I felt it was a shame that it was the exact same one that Ms. Maxwell had used as an example earlier that day. I just couldn’t find any other habit that would benefit me as much, as well as be an easy integration into my life. In this long and rambling paragraph it is my way of saying that I chose the Ivy Lee method. And I think I was quite right to choose it. 

My understanding of the Ivy Lee Method is that you start with 6 tasks. They can be any 6 tasks, or chores or errands, just anything you need to do. At the end of the day you check back on your 6 tasks and if you completed all of them, good going, you get to make 6 more tasks for the next day, if you didn’t complete all of them (alike me) you carry any uncompleted task over to the next day and incorporate it into your 6 tasks. Seems simple (and it is) but it’s also revolutionary. I have found in the roughly 2 weeks that I have been doing this that I have become much more productive, because I don’t want tasks to drag over onto new days. I like to keep the list fresh which pushes me to complete the assigned work! It’s really great and I don’t have anything negative to say about the Method.

I have included scans of my lists in this post and you can see that they are simple lists made on sticky grid paper. You might also be able to see that I have exceeded 6 tasks on certain days which I have a good reason for. This reason is that during COVID I have a hard time feeling excited to focus and get to work, so I decided to add really simple tasks to my lists, like send text to so-and-so, water plants, etc. Crossing off these tasks gave me a bit more energy to complete the trickier tasks. Though once COVID is over, I will return to the 6 tasks per day!

All in all a really good habit, and I highly suggest everyone incorporate it into their life!

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Are we doomed to repeat history? (The climate crisis and the Civil Rights movement)

https://soundcloud.com/user-335030245/the-climate-movement-and-the

Last week to answer this question I went into a specific example of a human rights issue that is being disregarded tying into the human rights issue we have been studying. This week I wanted to delve into connections that I have been seeing between the civil rights movement, and the climate crisis. It may strike you as quite a stretch, and personally it looks like quite a stretch written out. Though this entire week I have been taking note of similarities that I have been seeing when reading “On Fire, The Burning Case For A Green New Deal” and any information prescribed by Mr. Hughes, and Ms. Willemse. I will begin to unpack these connections below. I have also mentioned any connections I made in the podcast linked above!

Racism confines people based on the disproportionate use of skin colour. A racist has a preconceived notion of the value of the person they are being racist towards. They put that person, along with others who they identify as “similar” in a box. This cramped space is not appropriate to be placing people in, though the people that place these people in these spaces cant really find the decency to stop. African Americans fought for their human right, freedom. They slowly gained this through a series of marches, sit-ins, peaceful protests, and rallies. Though today that freedom is not quite detectable because it was never fully given. African Americans are still suffering against segregation, and racism, though today the approach is different. Did you know that 70% of toxic waste treatment facility’s in  the United States are placed in and around communities of colour? That these facility’s are affecting around an estimated 1.5 million African Americans? The government is still treating people that are not white as lesser, and its getting a little frustrating. Take immigration for example. Now this is a big topic so I will try to handle it as best I can. In 2018 alone the United States became home to 44.7 million immigrants.

(Watch this for more information)

Seems like a lot but it turns out to be 0.59% of the global population. Still a substantial amount of people. These people immigrate for a variety, and abundance in some cases, of reasons, environmental reasons being one of them. People in the global south are feeling the effects of climate change must faster then it will hit the North. So that means that generally the counties the least responsible for climate change, are the ones who feel the effects first. Which doesn’t seem fair. So these people who live in these counties that are being hit with drought, monsoons, hurricanes or floods are trying to escape. The homes they built have become companions of the sea, and are lost to her forever, so they try to move to America.

People walk on a street next to destroyed houses after Hurricane Matthew hit Jeremie, Haiti, October 6, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Mr. Trump isn’t really the nicest though is he? He turns his back on these people who have lost so much, and are willing to make a new home for themselves in this country, and work to build thier economy, but Mr. Trump isn’t sold. He is racist and doesn’t want to take in “others.” By 2030 Live Science predicts that over 100 million people will be immigrating due to climate related reasons. Where will they turn if the only place that looks safe is really the only place that isn’t? That America turns out to be more dangerous and scary then their home?

Another connection I have been seeing throughout this period is in the planning. Little comments that are identical to each to her. Naomi Klein, the author of On Fire, said “the weight of the world is not on any one persons shoulders… It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already a part of.” She was confessing that this movement would not progress with people carrying this on their shoulders privately, sure the problem is more one persons then the other and people should be feeling guilt for that, but in the end it does become everyone’s problem. I was watching Eyes On The Prize, a civil rights TV show created in 1987. The show makes bite size pieces of the civil rights movement. The first episode is called Awakenings (1954-1956), and it focused on the exact same events we have been covering in class. The bit that caught my eye was when they interviewed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr after his house was bombed. This is what he said:

Interviewer : “are you scared?”

Rev. King : “No I am not. My attitude is that this is a great cause. It is a great issue that we are confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of the cause that I am concerned about. And I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted and willing to face the consequences whatever they are. And if he is filled with fear, he can not do it.”

His message is almost exactly what Naomi Klein said. That you must give up the idea that you carry do thing by yourself. Whatever your fighting for must be on the backs of many before you make progress. 

This may seem like a very small connection, but I believe that the climate justice movement could pull a lot from the civil rights movement. That in a sense the fight for a green new deal is similar to the fight for equal rights. The peacefully protesting and marching people are doing today evolved from the civil rights movement. There are still many differences between the climate crisis and the civil rights movement, many to big to even think there are connections, things like lynching, segregation, slavery, and profiling. But those horribly terrible things were the reason to act. The climate crisis has very similar things that cause people to act, things like the 2 degrees of warming that was promised not to cross, leaders that don’t seem to care, and actions that contradict what is said. I’m still a bit iffy about all this, but I have been struck on more then one account of the connection between the civil rights movement and the climate crisis. If you have any further ideas please mention them in the comments because I would love to hear what others think.

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