I’m sure if you’ve read all of my blog posts, you’ve seen many mentions of the traditional PLP Exhibition. I’m writing this because, as you may have inferred from the title, the Exhibition is what this post is all about, except for the fact that it wasn’t so traditional for the Grade 11 cohort. For our final exam in Socials and English, we were told we weren’t doing the regular pen on paper, or even finger on iPad, exam. To our surprise, we didn’t even have to do a Blue Sky Project. Instead, we were going to be DEBATING! I don’t know about many other people, but I kind of get freaked out when I hear that word, especially when my teachers tell me that we won’t know our topic until a minute before we debate the statement. But before I get into that, and before we even knew what our task was, we started by learning all about the Canadian government; in all its forms and levels.
As soon as we had completed a few in-class government activities with one of our teachers, Miss Maxwell, we were introduced to the intense novel, Lord of The Flies by William Golding (one of the strangest books I have come across). It honestly is hard to describe any feelings or thoughts I had during my time reading this book, but thanks to Ms. Willemse, she had already found a way for us to note down everything we needed to feel and think about the book, by creating “concepts”. These were pretty much broad topics that had everything to do with the novel, and gave us a way to link thoughts and events from the book, to real life events or other texts. She built up giant charts, and the class gradually filled them with ideas and links written on sticky notes, that we could potentially use for our “mysterious final project” (our teachers didn’t end up telling us the task of debating until a couple weeks beforehand).
In preparation for the exhibition, our teachers split the class up into groups of 3, which became our debate teams. In my group, I was with Jayden and Matt. S, who are both great at public speaking and creating ideas. We decided to name ourselves “Be It Resolved”! In the classes leading up to the Exhibition and “The Great Debate Battle Dome”, our groups were put through a series of exercises to practice and improve our debate and public speaking skills. We were also advised to be continuously writing down notes and ideas from the concepts (from earlier) onto our own mini digitized versions, also in preparation.
I was quite confident that our team would at least win one of our debates, and I wasn’t disappointed! We won our first round, and ended up falling short in our second, but I’m super proud that we made it to the semi-finals and showed everyone that we meant business! I think next time around, I would try to prepare even more than we did, because even with all the information we already had, I found it a bit difficult to find some interesting points while up on the stand. But I did end up learning how to think quickly on my feet, and improved my public speaking skills even more!
Overall, although I’m unsure if I would like to participate in another “Debate Battle Dome”, it was interesting, intense, and crazy, or in other words, just another regular PLP project!
