Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. Today, I will be taking you through the ups and downs of our most recent project – Who cares? Why bother? Overall, it was not my favourite project but I had some good learning experiences which I will carry forward with me into future classes.

Starting off not so strong, we read LOTF. Overall, it was a better book than I initially thought it was. On the surface, it seemed like a bit of a childish book HOWEVER after further analysis it was clear that there were much deeper connections to societal issues, social structures, and the social contract theory.

If I’m being completely honest, this might have been the weakest part for me in this project, but I think that it also gave me the most learning opportunities. My first and rudimentary problem started when I chose to read a physical copy of the book. In past projects, I had always chosen to read the digital version – which made it easier to take notes. This time, I thought I would challenge myself and read it and try and annotate it (*with sticky notes not actually writing in a library book*). This did not go well. I would always forget to make notes, and sometimes I forgot my sticky notes, as well I found was much easier to get distracted. To put it bluntly, I did not have the systems in place to read and take notes for a physical book. I learned about systems during my Atomic Habits project in gr 10 I probably should have tried to implement some for this. Anyway, even though I was trying to annotate the best I could, I still had to go back and try and decipher what I noted and put it into my digital notes. Long story short – for me personally, reading and taking notes digitally is much easier and gives me better results. Actually, right now we just started a project in BCFP where we have to annotate a piece of writing and I will be taking this learning forward with me and reading and taking notes on the book DIGITALLY.

Because of this disorganization with my book reading and note taking, led to a lack of thinking – or more because I took bad notes, there wasn’t really much to think on. My connections were weak, my character analysis was basic, and my overall notes were lacking. So I tried the best that I could with what I had and it was bad. It wasn’t up to the standard that I usually try and perform to. This was really frustrating for me because, at the time, I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, but now reflecting it was clear that the issue began when I read a paper book and didn’t have the systems in place to take notes. Anyway, I was allowed to revise and try and express my thinking and learning in a better way. So, I went back and revised my notes. This meant that I went back and re-read/skimmed the book. This time, I took as thorough notes as I could and tried to make deeper connections from outside the book. I wanted to focus more on what everything symbolized outside of the book, how social contract theory affected the book, and how the author’s experiences from WWII impacted the righting. Personally, I think that I had a huge improvement from the first time. This was the biggest learning opportunity for me in this whole project. Even though we’ve been told time and time again how important revision is, this is a clear example, for me at least, of how important it actually is. Even if I don’t get extending for this part of the project, the effort that I put in is enough for me and I am very happy with how far my notes and thinking came.

You can read my final notes after much revision here

Next up, we learned about the structure of the Canadian government. Coming from the US, I had a non-existent understanding of how the Canadian government works. I also still don’t really know how the US one works. That’s beside the point. Ms. Madsen gave us a few lectures and whiteboard diagrams which were really helpful because she gave us the base knowledge as well as a visual representation which I would continue to reference. I took the Kahoot quiz so many times I could probably get 100% on it right now. At one point, I had the entire podium with just “Dana”, “Dana 2.0”, etc. I found that pretty funny. In this part of the project, rather than learning a transferable skill, I just learned information which would be crucial in our final project.

Speaking of final products, next up it was time to work on our end project. Yikes. In the end, it all worked out but the process to get to our presentation was rough, to say the least. For the first week of planning, we never had all of our group members which created some major confusion of what we wanted to create within the first few days. After seeing this, I decided to step up and help with group communication so that there would be less confusion. Overall, in my group I helped with communication – whether that was coordinating and enforcing due dates that we set for ourselves or making sure that we were on track to finish the project on time. Besides doing just my individual part of the presentation (researching and writing about Canada’s environmental issues, researching and writing about all the different party’s views on environmental issues, creating animations for my part of the video, researching and writing about the Governor General and Head of state, etc), I also helped edit our entire slide show to make sure that the theming was consistent (colour, font sizing, amount of text). As well, I edited the entirety of the video and put together everyone’s draft videos together. Unfortunately, we had to re-film everything so we had to re-edit everything again. Overall, I think that I made a good contribution to the team.

From doing this, I learned the importance of educating young people about how their government works and the importance of voting. I also learned about how to create an engaging and informative presentation using different styles. Finally, I gained experience in collaborating with others and presenting information in a creative way that tried to engage our audience.

Throughout the project, I definitely had some conflicts with my group members. Group projects are hard for me especially when people’s visions of success look different. Especially when people don’t fully complete their work or finish it on time. If anything, this project taught me patience and understanding of different people’s abilities at work. This is a very real-life skill that I will encounter repeatedly in the future so it’s good to practice now.

Below, you can check out our group’s government video ⬇️

Overall, while this project was not my favourite, I shared some of my big learning opportunities. If I were to go back and change one thing, it would be to read LOTF digitally. Going forward I want to continue to help my groups with communication and meeting deadlines. Something I could have done better was trying to push my group’s thinking more to go above and beyond the criteria.

Thanks for reading!

Best wishes

Dana