Long time no see everyone! This is the first blog post I have written in quite a while, and it feels Goode to be back! Over the past few weeks in grade 10 PLP, we have been focusing on answering the driving question “Why does the world need more Canada?” The end product to answer this question was a podcast. We were allowed to choose any topic to answer this question and bring supporting evidence to back it up. The topic that I chose was: Canada’s journey towards reconciliation with the indigenous people and immigrants of colour. In this project, we were asked to write a multi-paragraph essay about our topics and turn it into a script for our podcast.

To start all this, first I needed a topic statement to build on. The final version of my topic statement that I ended up with was: ‘Though Canada is not perfect, its efforts to take responsibility for past and current wrong-doings by trying to reconcile with the indigenous people and immigrants of colour shows that the world could learn from Canada.’ The topic statement was quite easy once I had the right idea of it. The less easy part was the research. I had to make sure that my sources were reliable, and that the evidence I provided were relevant to my topic. But once I had my evidence and sources, the writing aspect of this assignment was much easier. Now that I had my topic statement, it was quite easy for me to grow it into my multi-paragraph essay. The link to my final essay can be found here. 

Now that I had my essay, all I had to do to turn it into a script was to change up a few words and make it a bit more interactive. The hardest for me personally in this step of the project was making sure my podcast wasn’t too long. When I first edited and rewrote my essay into my podcast script, the dialogue alone was over 5 mins. That was a problem because my teachers wanted the entire podcast to be around 5 mins at the longest. Having to cut down my script was the most difficult part of creating my podcast, but once I was satisfied with the length of my script, all I had to do was record. Recording and editing my podcast might have been the most frustrating part of this project, but I managed to get through it. The link to the final version of my podcast as well as my classmate’s is right here. I highly recommend listening to not just mine, but my peer’s podcasts because they all provide many different answers to our driving question and all talk about their topics in many diverse ways.

Overall, the reason why I think the world needs more Canada is because Canada is making the effort to recognize their faults (which some other countries haven’t done) and reconcile with the people that they hurt. I think that even though Canada has a long way to go, the fact that they are restarting on the right foot is a good reason why the world needs more Canada.