Hello World,

This is my second blog post of grade 10 which will be continuation of our PLP “Think You Can Do Better” project all about government. This is the third milestone so we are pretty far in and I’ll be talking all about what we did, my groups political party and why should care.

Big Ideas:

For starters, let’s talk about the big ideas of this milestone and what we are meant to cover.

Here are the big ideas:

• The development of political institutions is influenced by economic, social, ideological, and geographic factors.
• Language shapes ideas and influences others.

As you can see, much of this project involves how politics works and what factors influenced this. To cover these topics, we covered multiple forms of government, looked at how the political spectrums affect these government institutions and even found out how different types of media can influence our political thoughts. Thats just what we have learnt, but how have we applied this knowledge?

What Have We Been Doing:

After finishing our research and learning Zettelkasten, a form of creating a better work system, we began creating the main aspect of this project, our political parties. What do you mean creating political parties you may ask? It’s simple, what better way of learning about the government is there than actually stepping into shoes of real politicians? Hence, was the beginning of The Hippopotamus Party of Canada.

The Hippopotamus Party of Canada’s Founding:

In this project, we had taken political compass tests before to see where place on the spectrum. Part of this was to decide what group we would have to make our political parties and I got the honour of working with my friends Keenan, Liam and Jonathan (click their names to see their blogs). After getting put in our groups, we began thinking and planning how our party was going to be. We were all on the right of the spectrum so obviously our party was going to be a right-wing party but out task wasn’t as simple as finding our place on the compass but we also had to figure out what we wanted to do, what we were going value ourselves on as well as the most important thing, OUR PARTIES NAME. Obviously we wanted to make our selves different, and what better way was there than naming ourselves off of an animal the world always associates with us Canadians, the proud hippopotamus! Actually though, the planning of party took us more than a week and we had to create presentations and full write up on our promises, values, roles, priorities and more; but what makes us different from other parties?

What Makes the HPC different?

Well apart from our outstanding, perfect-of-a-creation logo, there are multiple things that separate us from other parties.

For example, the Hippopotamus Party of Canada (HPC) is the only party fully centred and prioritizes national debt. We believe that focusing on paying it off now makes the most sense as not only well the interest of that debt increase by many folds but it will also make our nation handle off crises much better. Contrary to popular belief, a nation’s national debt does affect a it’s operations and is actually very important especially in the time of a crisis. We believe that Covid 19 was a wake up call for us and the sooner we can rid of our debt, the better. Now getting rid of it sounds great, but how exactly are we going to achieve it? Well, we believe that our very government can help solve this problem. We plan to reduce the costs of government operations by using more efficient methods. By cutting down on what we spend on the government, we can actually spend that money on the people. A clear example of how we think we waste money was the very election! We spent 600 million dollars election for a voter turnout less than 60%. This debt crisis is just one example of something we will do differently and there is many more but for sake of this blog’s length, I won’t write a paragraph for everything we plan on changing. If you want to read more about our plan click here! Also here is logo:

Why You Should Vote for Us:

To put simply, we have an outstanding name and logo, a perfect team of capable individuals who will live up to their promises, an actual goal for clearing national debt and fixing the housing crisis, a plan that doesn’t overcommit and finally, an understanding of what our priorities should be.

HPC and My Previous Blogposts:

Now how does this relate to my past blogposts or milestones? Obviously, this task still lets learn about the government which is the main topic of this project but is that really all? We have done two milestones so far, first being about the Canadian government and creating our parties statement of intent but of you think about it, this milestone is not learning more about the Canadian government but how different types of influence change the government. This milestone builds on the past two as we begin to explore how the government came to be rather than how it works.

HPC and The Curricular Competencies:

The curricular competencies are the values we use to help learn so let’s talk about what they were for this project and how they relate. For starters, here are this milestone’s competencies:

• Using evidence to show what you know
• Expressing an opinion and supporting it with credible evidence
• Using writing and design processes to plan, develop, and create original, engaging, and meaningful texts for a variety of purposes and audiences
• Reflecting, assessing, and refining texts to improve clarity, effectiveness, and impact for purpose, audience, and message

Here is also how I believe I covered each competency in the respective order above:

• One key aspect of our parties creation was having a sound plan of promises which meant we needed to do research. Enough research in fact to please Mrs. Willemse so need I say more about showing evidence? (Sorry Mrs. Willemse)
• This is a continuation of the one above but if you want read HPC’s many opinions on government, click the link on the “what makes us different” paragraph of this blog.
• As a political party of a democratic government, we needed the support of the people on our side so writing our statement of intent was very important. We needed consider types of political audiences who would read about it and engage to the point where they would consider us a potential party for their vote.   
• Refining our party’s views after the statement of intent I believe really ties in well with this competency. After trying to engage we needed a clear message which effectively get its point across, and so we spent a lot time re-wording and changing the presentation and social methods to make it more effective. I think our slogan, “snap back to reality”, is a clear example of conveying our message across effectively.

How Political Parties Affect Us & Why You Should Care:

Now the final thing I want to talk about is why my project relates to you. As I talked about before in my previous blog, the government is a huge aspect of our lives but now I’ve learnt influences, what can I add on? After actually simulating a political party I realized about not only how much we rely on the government but how much the government relies on us as well. As a party, we can’t doing without first getting people support us and how we do it, whether though media, speeches or something else, ultimately all depends on the people. The government changes policies and promises in this voting phase to get more people to support them and this leads to power balance between the people and the government. What I am trying to say is that although we may rely on the government, ultimately the government also relies on us so if we don’t do our duties to research and vote, we won’t have a government we want and need.

Conclusion:

Well thats all for this post and sorry this post is mostly text heavy. I will probably write at least one more blog post on this project but until then,

BYE!