Girl Power

After the longest ten weeks of my life, that’s a wrap! The first quarter of this crazy school year is complete, and that means that so is the first half of PLP 12. Somehow, I made it out and am alive to tell the tale, so here goes.

As you would know if you frequent this brain dump of a blog of mine, these last five weeks have been spent reading Shakespeare and learning about women’s rights. Even just saying ‘5 weeks’ is wild to me because it feels much more like 20. How we were able to fit everything in, only god knows. But that’s not the point, the point is, we have wrapped up the ‘Shrew You’ project, and it’s time to reflect. 

Starting off by getting a baseline understanding of women’s rights and the scope of the topic we were facing, our first milestone: the Academic Conclusion, tasked us with formulating our findings in to answer to the question;

How can the suffragette movement demonstrate both how much and how little has changed for women?

Instantly, I was quite excited by this assignment, because it is always the case in these types of projects where we mash Shakespeare and history, that I favour the history portion, as was the case in this unit. Right from the first class with Ms. Willemse, the topic of women inspired some passionate conversations, something I enjoy here and there. The Milestone itself however, provided a canvas for me to illustrate my thoughts and ideas on the question, backed by evidence. This would be the first of many assignments we would put a spotlight on sources and citing information, an aspect of writing I, and many of my classmates, had yet to learn much about. I won’t go too in-depth with what my essay was about, as I’m sure the carefully revised words of the essay explain my thoughts much better than the ramble-y nature of blog-writing Daniel could on here. So with that being said, check it out!

Th next portion of this unit I want to talk about is a portion that was ongoing, and provided practice, of sorts, for the more important Milestone work we would complete periodically. This ongoing practice came in the form of essay responses, both on CommonLit, as well as specific essays given to us by Ms. Willemse. I would be a liar if I told you it wasn’t frustrating at first seeing the long list of essays we would have to read, comprehend, and respond to, but in the end, I can see how it expanded my writing perspective and aided in making my work better and more complete. I found the CommonLit readings to be much more difficult than the latter, as many of the response questions were confusing and seemingly had multiple possible answers. It certainly made me think long and hard about my answers, although I’m sure my mark would beg to differ!

As for the other essays, the ‘exemplar readings’ as put by Ms. Willemse, I found them more digestible. They were specifically chosen to align with our unit, and overall I clicked with them more, allowing for genuine response. My favourite thing about them was the multiple perspectives that were provided, because I, as I have mentioned before, often enjoy taking the opposition in many arguments, so its sometimes surprising to read a perspective the same as mine. 

The other half of this unit to women’s rights/history was the Shakespeare side of things. For this year, the play of choice was Taming Of The Shrew, as you may have guessed by the title of our unit, ‘Shrew You’. No doubt being chosen to coincide with the theme of our unit, this play would act as the backbone of our Milestones, and be a vital source of references. We first began by reading the play and analyzing it on a literary level, taking notes and copying quotes to help us later down the road. As we made our way through the first couple acts, we paused, and switched to the movie version, watching those first couple Acts and absorbing even more, now seeing a physical depiction of the intricate screenplay. As you can imagine, watching the movie was really helpful, and made it easier to understand what was going on, at least for me. I have no shame in saying that I find written Shakespeare a little hard to follow, but hey, he didn’t mean for us to read it anyways!

The next Milestone I want to mention is Milestone 3, where in groups of 3 or 4, we created a Women’s Rights poster, accompanied by a *ten minute* presentation explaining it. Each of the groups had a different time period to tackle. Alongside Luca J, Izzy L, and Jamie, I had the 90s, all the way up til now, present day. Our group was psyched to get this era, and we got brainstorming right away. Izzy, Jamie and I spent our time figuring our thesis and deciding on the layout of our presentation, while Luca and her art skills took on the role of creating the poster. Right from the get-go, our group worked great together, and I had a really good time collaborating with them. My idea for what I was going to talk about was created from a free-flowing conversation we all had just sitting at the table, and it turned out to be really effective during the presentation. We were first up and I feel confident unsaying we knocked it out of the park. It all came together, with the poster, our thesis, our presenting skills, to create a great presentations and the rainbow was a nice confirmation.

From here on out, it was time to get going on our final Milestone, our essay. Milestone 4 consisted of coming up with a thesis statement and an outline, the foundation for the essay. This meant searching through all our research of Milestone 2 to decide on what the essay would actually be about. Whichever way we wanted to take our essay in, it had to ultimately answer our driving question:

How can we use our study of “The Taming of the Shrew” to understand how much, yet how little, has changed for women?

After some thought and consideration, I settled on the topic of my essay. I made sure that it was something I thought was both unique as well as intriguing, and something I knew I would be able to sit down, and actually write about. After multiple revisions and finally an approval from Ms. Willemse, my thesis was finalized…

The male role of securing and upholding a woman has spanned centuries and generations, and today, men possess these relationship ideals subtly, and without malevolence, perpetuating a cycle of disempowered, dependent women.

I was really excited about this, and it propelled me in to writing my essay with much more fire and desire to write something amazing. Having written the entire outline of my essay made it so much easier to get going, and took away some of the stress associated with making sure the essay flows correctly. So with the outline at my side, I got writing.

Milestone 5 was my first draft, and it was a draft I was happy with, but I definitely knew there was work to be done, I just needed some guidance to figure out what that work was. This is where the annotation really helped me. Our in-class annotation session highlighted areas that needed improvement, making revisions much clearer. Following class that day, I knew what needed to be done to achieve the mark I wanted, so I got to work.  

In the end, this essay saw more edits than any piece of writing I have written In quite a while, and that’s great. For whatever reason, I have developed a bad habit of not getting anyone to read over my work. Perhaps its because I get too locked in to my own perspective that I assume its the only one that matters! In all seriousness though, this project really helped me break away from that habit. Allowing myself help from my teachers, peers, girlfriend, etc. made the final version of this essay read so much better, and I’m really glad I had all these people who wanted to help. All in all, this unit was an amazing finale to these ten weeks, and a great way to start the biggest break I’ve ever had from PLP! See you in May 🙂