The Biggest Boom
Hello internet people, welcome back.
I know, it’s been a long time and I know you missed me but I’m back and this time I’m in grade 11… Who on Earth thought I was ready for this.
You may notice that it’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post and that is due to a combination of summer break and also this blog website being down, until now.
Just something I should say before we get into this post is that this is actually my second humanities project of the year but since the website was down we couldn’t make a post for that project but it will be coming soon.
With all this in mind, let’s get into the post.
Hiroshima. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the story behind the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki and how it made us win the war, but in reality, it is much more than just that. This bombing is the most significant event that has ever come out of a war (if you disagree feel free to yell at me in the comments). The lasting ripple effects that came from this bomb will solidify this date in history. So let’s go through what I’ve learned in this past month.
We started out by introducing the thing that would occupy the majority of this project, a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey.
This is a book that took information from interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, and turned them into an almost story-like experience. The first 2 chapters were all about the character’s lives the morning of the bombing, and then how they were immediately affected and what they did after they realised they had been bombed. Going into this project I rolled my eyes at the idea of having to read a book for school but after reading these first 2 chapters I found myself more interested in the story than I thought I would be. I think I explained this well in my first Journal that we were assigned about the book. This is what I wrote.
The first 2 chapters of Hiroshima by John Hersey are a brilliant way to explain the other half of the story to western readers. The book does a great job at explaining the character’s lives in detail and shows the thought process of each of the six survivors before and after the bomb was dropped. I thought it did a great job at humanizing the characters and showing that they are real people. For me realising the actual impact of numbers is hard to quantify, so explaining their lives and showing that they were people just like me was an interesting way to display that they were people and not just numbers in a statistic. The book made it clear what the emotions of all six survivors were in their respective stories, and helped me really understand what they were thinking in those moments. I think I was more able to understand and comprehend this book because it is very similar to a book I read with my class in grade 7 called Refugee. Both of these books follow multiple protagonists who find themselves in different but similar situations, this book was about 3 children with refugee stories and the challenges they faced, this book is about 6 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing and the challenges they faced. In conclusion I think this book does a great job at showing the emotions of the characters because the author was able to interview them and get the exact details of what they remembered and experienced, by doing this it allows for the characters to seem like real people instead of just numbers.
Most of the things we did while gathering information for this project were related to this book and for the sake of not just filling up this post with all my journals I am just going to skip over most of the other reading assignments. A quick summary for chapters 3-4 is that they talk about how they were surviving the after effects of the bomb and what their experiences recovering were. For chapter 5 the author came back 40 years later to interview these survivors again and see how this event impacted them for their whole lives afterwards. If this book sounds interesting to you I recommend checking it out.
One of the things I really enjoyed during this project is that every Monday we would take the whole class to do a Socratic seminar about the chapter(s) we had all read. During these group discussions, we would talk about what we read and what we thought about it. We also made connections to other things that we thought the book related to or reminded us of. These once again surprised me with how fun they were. It didn’t really feel like a class mandated discussion where the teacher was watching us and judging us based of our every move, it felt like a group discussion where you could chime in at essentially any moment if you felt like you had something to say. I actually really enjoyed these and I’m excited to hopefully do them in future projects, as my teacher said he would try and include them. Unfortunately, I didn’t talk as much as I hoped I would because of the fear I would say something wrong or be asked a question I couldn’t answer but I’m trying to work on improving my public speaking.
Another thing we did was on Fridays we would have the chosen 6 come in with current events stories that they thought related to Hiroshima in some way. Each of the chosen 6 would have 3 people assigned to them and they would lead a group discussion about their event. They would start by introducing what their event was and then end the discussion with some questions to ask the whole group that related to the event and/or Hiroshima. These questions would then hopefully break off into other mini side discussions that were still related to the topic but also could be about completely different things. The current event I chose was the Valencia floods. This is the document I used to lead my discussion.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/5xOMgzJVJMOrCW
I ask that you think about some of the questions I presented, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments. Overall I think my group’s discussion went well and we had some successful branching conversations.
And now it was time for the final event of the project to be revealed. Drumroll please.
🥁🥁🥁
It was an essay……
I know, I was a little bit upset too but it’s grade 11 so what can you do. Let’s be honest nobody enjoys writing essays, but I felt like I actually knew a lot about my topic so it wouldn’t be that hard. This essay had to be a minimum of 5 paragraphs and had to go over these 4 topics, The impact on the citizens of Hiroshima and Japan, The world in the short term, The world in the long term and myself. I wrote my first draft of the essay which I was pretty proud of, I was given feedback which I understandingly accepted, but then the big bad boss appeared.
MLA sourcing!
This looked terrifying to me, especially since this was a completely new concept to me. Thankfully my amazing teacher (shout out Mr Gibson) gave us a very in depth and understandable presentation on how to do it. But even after this I was still confused. Thankfully my mum was there to save the day and she helped me out with fixing up my mistakes.
Eventually after about 3 different drafts I had made it and handed in my final essay. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. If you want to read it here is the link but be careful there’s a lot of words.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/kWLF6SrdW5Tioj
And now we come to the end of this blog post. Overall this was actually a really fun and enjoyable project. I learned a lot about Hiroshima, Japan, and also really improved my skills of making connections between different things. This project was fun, educational and interesting and I really appreciate my teacher for making it this great.
Thank you for reading my blog, sorry it’s been a while and don’t worry (I actually have 2 more that will be done by this weekend). So with that have a good day internet people. Goodbye.