Category: PLP 11 Humanities

Eeeek! A Maus!

Welcome to my last humanities project of grade 11. Just a warning, this project was about the holocaust and talks about some very heavy themes. I have been interested in WWII and the Holocaust since elementary school, so I’ve been hoping for a project on this topic for a while.

The driving question for this project was;

How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues?

This project’s main deliverable was a literary criticism of The Complete Maus by Art Spiegleman, a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about Art’s relationship with his father, Vladek, and Vladek’s experiences surviving the Holocaust. One of the most powerful aspects of Maus is its ability to humanize the victims of the Holocaust. By focusing on one family’s story, Spiegelman makes the unimaginable suffering of millions of people palpable and relatable. Readers are able to empathize with Vladek’s struggles and losses, and through his story, gain a greater understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust.

When going through the writing and revision process, I’ve always found myself getting writers block and feeling discouraged doing writing assignments. So I had a bit of a barrier I needed to face during this project. Luckily with my personal interests activated, I was able to stay on top of my work, make revisions, and set goals for myself to complete. In the free-write we did at the beginning of this project, we wrote about why stories are an effective way to learn.

“Stories are an effective way to learn because they allow you to follow a plot line of important events and engage readers into the situation. ‘Facts in stories are 20X more likely to be remembered’ (Madsen) – it is easier for our brain to remember things with context, and that is what stories try to provide for us. With the use of characters, backstories, visuals, and sound, a story can be elevated to captivate and engage an audience. — Telling stories can connect not only the audience to the characters, but also to the storyteller, and that helps gain a deeper understanding of the story itself and the message that is trying to be conveyed by the author.” — (My Launch Free Write)

Maus Literary Critique

I chose to do a psychological analysis of Vladek’s lasting psychological effects and PTSD from the holocaust.

Theme

The Holocaust inflicted lasting psychological trauma on its survivors, affecting their mental health and daily lives long after the war had ended.

Thesis

The psychological trauma inflicted onto survivors of the Holocaust impacted them in their lives long after the war, like seen through the life Vladek Spiegelman in The Complete MAUS  by Art Spiegelman.

 

In my criticism I considered the root causes of psychological problems,  how other characters were affected, and what I could infer from behaviours and dialogue. Here is the essay in question;

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism of Maus by Art Spiegelman

Conclusion

I was so happy that we got the opportunity to go to the Holocaust symposium at UBC and listen to a survivor in person. It was a very impactful experience and really underscored for me the importance of testimonies in history and storytelling. I also really appreciated Ester Clark’s presentation on her family’s survival story and the time she took to share it with us. This project was definitely sometimes a challenge for me, but I was able to persevere through the writing and gain some valuable insights along the way.

As Always,

Brooke

The Fear Factor

Hello my dear readers,

I write to inform you of the developments from my most recent Humanities project, Fear Factor. This project has the driving question of How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?, and  the content was mainly surrounding the Cold War. I really enjoyed that the topics of this class were a continuation on from the knowledge we built in our Manhattan project project recently. Now I am able to have a very cohesive timeline in my head of the significant events from those eras and have a more extensive understanding of the context involved. Fear obviously also played the part in the Manhattan Project and the droppings of the bomb so it it was really interesting to be able to focus on fear going forward. 

Before I get into my reflections and learnings, here’s a brief overview of the project. Over the course of the project we were learning to build a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system using the principles of a “Zettlekasten”. And you may be thinking, “What the heck is a Zettlekasten?!”, and the short answer is simple, a collection of notes and information, ranging from fleeting notes to profound permanent ideas linked to other knowledge. I’ll talk more about my Zettlekasten later. We also read 2 books over the course of the project, Hiroshima by John Hersey and Fallout by Todd Strasser. These books, on top of many other forms of media, were just some of the resources we analyzed to gain knowledge for our final product. The specifics of the final product were up to us, but the main idea was to create and answer a personal inquiry question on some aspect of the Cold War and fear. So now that you get a bit of an idea of the project, lets talk more in depth about what I did and what I learned.

Zettlekasten-ing

So let’s talk about my Zettlekasten and PKM. At first the Zettlekasten style of note taking was a lot to get used to, but now I really love how I’ve been able to organize and link my notes. I found I have also been more engaged in the class material because I have been taking more time outside of school to synthesize my notes and use my own words to construct more rounded ideas about certain topics or events. I also found myself linking to more literature while researching. As new connections form, I now have an easy way to jot down an idea in a place where I know I will be able to go back and make something more out of it. Overall super excited to continue to use my Zettlekasten for upcoming projects!

Agriculture in the Cold War

After watching episode 2 of Turning Point: The Bomb and The Cold War, I was incredibly intrigued by the mention of Kulaks and Soviet farming. I previously have read Anna Karenina and it is one of my favourite books so I immediately connected the book as another piece of literature that I can drawn to understand the life of farmers in Soviet countries. Originally I had planned on doing my final product about “othering” and propaganda in America about the Japanese, but after learning more about agriculture during the Cold War, I decided that it was worth my time to redo everything and switch to a topic that I was genuinely interested in! 

My personal inquiry question became; “How did agriculture and food security change and cause fear in the Cold War?”. The people who will want to read this could be anyone interested in agriculture or the Cold War, my teachers, peers, and family. I want to engage my audience by creating emotional connections by humanizing complex issues, having an interesting and engaging plot, and including my research and answer to my question. I ended up wanting to write two fictional short stories about two families. One family in America during the Green Revolution during the Cold War, and one Soviet farmer family. At first I had a creative burst and was able to get one of the stories drafted quite quickly, but as the deadline drew closer, I realized that trying to write a short book in just two weeks is not a lot of time. But after a lot of creative thinking, peer critique, and writers block, I came up with the final story that I have now. I’ll link it below and feel free to give it a read. It’s not too long.

 

Conclusion

Throughout the course of this project I noticed major growth for me in my note-making and knowledge management skills. My Zettlekasten and new ways of organizing knowledge are definitely my biggest take-aways from this project and I am now looking to beef-up my notes for all my other classes so I can have something to look back on easily for information that I have gathered. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post and check out the book if you haven’t already!

As Always,

Brooke

I Care, I Bother.

Yo what’s up guys welcome to politics. This project was called “Who Cares and Why Bother?!”.  This project focused on our processing skills as we;

  • Investigated human nature and how humans organize themselves
  • Learned about the government system in Canada
  • Looked at issues important to young people and why or why not they vote
  • Developed a presentation to showcase the Canadian govt system and encourage young people to vote

  That’s the overview of this project so let’s jump in.

Lord of the flies

Investigation #1 was an analysis of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Lord of the Flies is an allegory and its deeper meaning ties back to our quest to learn about politics. I chose to listen to an audiobook playlist on YouTube which allowed me to take some pretty detailed notes while listening. After chapter 8 I stopped taking those notes because I realized that audiobooks take a lot longer to listen to than it would be if I just read the book. I think it was super important for me to read and analyze the historical context and learn a bit about William Golding because that allowed me to already engage in deeper thinking beyond the text. In the discussion we had post-reading, I displayed complete knowledge of the book and as we all know, I love to talk, so I had a perfect opportunity to stretch my communication skills 💪.

Learning about politics

At the start of this project, I was a person who didn’t know much about Canadian politics or government and to be honest, I didn’t care. But thanks to my photographic memory I now have an immense understanding of everything we talked about and learned in class, especially the structure of government that was drawn out on the white board. Learning about how politics worked made me much more interested in it, and I think that’s is one of the reasons why youth don’t feel like they want to be involved in government processes. So who cares about politics? Usually older people, but in this project I learned that a lot of young people do care about politics and they should! Getting involved with the government and voting is a great way to contribute to positive change, which young people these days always seem to be fighting for. So when it comes to convincing young people to vote, focusing on issues they care about and telling them what each party can do to help seems to be an effective strategy!

Group project

For my group’s presentation, I created the keynote and edited and storyboarded some of our TikTok’s. My main contribution was actually keeping everyone organized and mapping out what we should be doing individually and as group work. I think without my organization we definitely would have struggled to complete the presentation on time. I think myself and the group could’ve used more of our time to practice presenting and of course it was a bit of a hitch in the plan to have 2 group members missing for our final presentation.

I think the most impactful part of our presentation was the TikTok’s we made on issues in Canada that we care about. Showing the youth that the issues they care about are being acted on by some parties (and not acted on by others), is a motivation to vote to create the change they wish to see. 

Conclusion – Who actually cares? And Why Bother?

Who cares about politics and voting? I care, my classmates care, the adults in my life care, and many more people around the country and world. And why ultimately bother? To create the change you wish to see in the world. This project showed me that I can process ideas and further my understanding with deeper analysis and synthesis of information. I am proud of the work that I did and I know I am taking with me a lot of knowledge and regard for our political system and what my role can be.

This was a message from Brooke. do doo do do *← the theme from messages from the govt of canada*

THE Great Debate

Happy 2024 everyone!!! 

I come to you today with a project we finished just before winter break, and if you know PLP you know that means it was also our Winter Exhibition project! This project was called The Great Debaters, and if you can guess by the title, it was a project centered around debate. We not only learned about public speaking, and how to debate, but we also learned about researching, finding credible sources, and structuring persuasive text that combines the right mix of pathos and logos. 

The Project

At the beginning of this project, we got the chance to watch Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters. If you have not seen this movie, it is based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson, who was a professor at Wiley Collage in Marshall, Texas. The movie follows Mr. Tolson’s debate team as they work their way to challenge Harvard for a national championship. It was a very inspiring movie and helped get us into the mindset of debate.

The first piece of writing that we did was a short paragraph on the best “blank” ever. It could be a book or a season or musical artist. It was up for us to choose a best “____” so I chose to do mine on something I care very deeply about, Christmas stuffing. 

Over the next few classes, we learned about different ways to improve our writing and practiced using these techniques with our “best blank ever” writing. I found parallel structure really interesting and highlighting different sections for different tones.

Around this time, it became time to choose a debate partner, and topic. My partner Ines and I decided to choose the topic “zoos should be banned“ with Ines arguing the affirmative and myself arguing the negative. I am already passionate about this because I love reading books on conservation and had recently read about this issue in particular.

Now that we had our topic chosen, Ines and I wouldn’t be collaborating again for the rest of the project. promptly, I came up with some Need-To-Knows and got down to researching.

A big part of writing is revision, so of course the next few weeks were chock full with writing our opening argument, rebuttal, and closing statement, rewriting and practicing aloud, and so much peer critique. 

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, this project was our PLP 11 project for the PLP Winter Exhibition. This means we would be performing these debates live in front of an audience, and they will get to choose the winner. The pressure is on! I debated fiercely, but in the end I came up victorious. Thank you Ines for being a fierce rival.

Conclusion

Overall, I really like public speaking so this project is pretty fun for me. I think I definitely improved my redrafting skills because I find sometimes I don’t do enough drafts and end up with something that I’m not completely happy with. But in this project I really pulled through, and in the end had a speech that I was very proud of. Thank you to Madsen and all the PLP teachers and students for a wonderful exhibition and see y’all next time!!

As always, Brooke

The Fallout

“I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight — if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified — as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment.”

The quote above is the beginning to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists on November 2, 1945. I chose to start the post with this speech because; 1. We did an analysis of this speech as part of this project, and 2. I think the last sentence of the quote is a really funny way to start my little blog post. 

This project was based around one of the most important projects in history, The Manhattan Project. Now I wont go into depth about what the Manhattan project is for those who don’t know, because the final product for this is an interactive book about the manhattan project!!

Field study!!

Even though it is called the “Manhattan “project, it did not take place in Manhattan. The project was based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a town that was constructed specifically for the Manhattan Project. Through PLP we got the wonderful chance to do a field study and go to New Mexico to do hands-on learning about the project.

It was amazing to be able to visit historical sites around New Mexico and get to have tours of various museums from some very interesting tour guides. Usually our guides had some personal connection to the museums like working for the Air Force in the past or having spouses and relatives working in nuclear science labs. This made our tours more captivating because our knowledgeable guides always had some facts that you cant find on the plaques.

Capturing in The Field 

Before leaving for New Mexico, we set out plans and to-do’s with our group of where the field team, Declan and I, should film, get interviews, and collect information.

With our little microphone in hand, we filmed up a storm.

Après Field Study – Piecing the book together

When we returned home from New Mexico, our group got back together to check in on what each side had completed. Our home team had already started writing up the chapters and getting a layout of the book. I was the art director for our book and had design ideas right from the get-go of what aesthetic to have, and some page layouts. I worked with Arianne, our lead graphic designer, to crank out some sample pages that we could duplicate and use for each chapter. Our chapters were laid out, chronologically over the time of the Manhattan Project, and we decided to have the first few chapters in a lighter colour palette and then switch to darker tones after the chapter about the Trinity Test to reflect the sombre feelings of what happened after the bombs were dropped. We worked as a team to divide up all the chapters to do revisions and citations and input some amazing videos done by our audio/video people. We spent a lot of time coming up with a thesis around the historical significance of the Manhattan project. We have worked with historical significance before and past projects, so it was not a concept we were unfamiliar with. It was incredibly difficult to have to come up with our thesis towards the end of the book because then we had to go back and change/edit what we had already written to ensure it met the thesis. It would’ve been much easier to do it at the beginning before starting to write any of the chapters or collecting media in the field, but it was a good way to challenge ourselves in the end when we were already crunching to finish the book.

Finally, after a lot of hard work and time spent outside of class, we completed the book. I suggest you take the time to read it through fully and watch all the videos to get the full sense of the story we are trying to tell. I hope you enjoy.

*technical difficulties we cannot currently upload the book due to file size issues. Will get this fixed ASAP!!*

Conclusion 

This project was a lot of fun to work on, and also very serious. I am so thankful for the opportunity to be able to go to New Mexico and touch history in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to without the PLP program. We have worked with historical significance in the past, but this project put it in a new light that was really interesting to work with and I enjoyed working on it. Thank you for reading.

As Always, Brooke.

Dear Grade 8’s

Wow the first blog post of grade 11, we’ve come a long way since my first big post back in grade 8. I remember crying over writing that… anyway. So what kicked off our grade 11 year? A project about something that is “mightier than the sword”, a writing project answering the driving question “How can we use the power of written text to inspire the new PLP 8 learners?”. This project helped us get through the messy writing process and learn how to evaluate our work to real-world standards. We also had to analyze our rhetorical situation and cater our writing to our audience, and with our main audience being the grade 8’s, this was a bit different than writing for our teachers like we are used to. 

Academic Writing

Before we jumped in and did our piece for the grade 8’s, we did some writing workshops and learned about the pre-writing process. We then tested this out in preparing a little academic writing piece answering the question “Why is PLP a good choice for students?”. Any good sarcastic PLP student would first think “Nooooo it’s hell not a good choice!!!” But I cracked down to research the benefits of PLP nonetheless.

I then did a rhetorical analysis pretty quickly because honestly it hasn’t been the most helpful tool for me to use so I didn’t put too much time into it.

Then was the generation of a topic sentence. I came up with 2 ideas that I wanted my topic to include; the fact that we live in a project based world, and how PBL and PLP help learners use 21st century tools and expectations to stay authentic with their work. I came up with a few but eventually settled on;

“Seycove’s Performance Learning Program adopts an authentic, real-world approach to empower learners and enable them to reach their full potential in our dynamic, project-based world.”

2 drafts later and I ended up with my final piece of academic writing. I’ll link it here for you to see – PLP Paragraph

Text for Grade 8

This is where we come back to our main driving question of “How can we use the power of written text to inspire the new PLP 8 learners?” I met briefly with some grade 8’s one morning before school with some of my peers to see what the grade 8’s are like. Really trying to take in their worldview and how they are feeling about high school. I took these notes to advise me in what to write, as there weren’t really any restrictions. I chose to go for a chill and honest tone to my message and just write a short paragraph, because I didn’t have the time or attention span in grade 8 to read essays full of cheesy advice. 

I really liked my first draft which surprised me because I was thinking I wouldn’t write something that I liked right away. A few little tweaks left me with something I was really proud of and excited to share. So to all the grade 8’s out there, this is my advice to you.

How to Get Through High School… Realistically.

So, you’re now in high school. New friends, new routine, new school, everything’s unfamiliar and exciting. Until it’s not. Too many new names to remember, classes are hard, you get rained on at the bus stop in the morning. Eventually the excitement wears off and you’re left being like, “Well I guess this is my life now.” But here’s the truth: high school can be a rollercoaster, and it’s okay to feel overwhelmed sometimes. The key to getting through high school realistically is finding balance. Yes, study hard and aim for good grades, but don’t forget to make time for yourself. Join clubs or sports you’re genuinely interested in, and surround yourself with friends who are thoughtful and supportive. High school is one hell of a journey, and you’ll have ups and downs, but remember, it’s all part of the process and it’s going to be ok. Stay true to yourself, stay organized, and don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Your high school years will shape you in ways you can’t even imagine right now, so embrace the experience and grow from it. You’ve got this. 

Conclusion 

In this project, I feel my writing grew more in the process than in the final pieces themselves. I can think more consciously about my word choice now thanks to the writing workshop and I understand how analyzing a rhetorical situation helps me inform my decisions as a writer. 

So to the grade 8’s that were forced to read this post, thank you for listening and I hope PLP treats you well. And to everyone else, thank you for reading as usual and stay tuned because I will be going on a field study for the next project that will be mighty interesting. I will write to y’all again soon,

As Always, Brooke