One of my biggest fears is facing crowds and during the exhibition I had to come face to face with it, I had rehearsed the script multiple times but regardless of this the second I heard our teacher proclaim that the visitors were coming my heart dropped, I started hyperventilating and my mind went blank…
Recently we were assigned a project with the title of “Metaphor Machines”, where we were each given the individual task of getting to know a revolution. We were given many different options but I simply chose the American as I already had previous background knowledge on it and believed it to be the most simple of all the revolutions at our disposal.
The first major task we were assigned was creating a document with the stages of said revolution which was no easy task but after hours of tough research through articles, videos, textbooks and podcasts I finally built an arsenal of information that was both comprehensible and detailed. The information specifically being about every event that caused the revolution (the symptoms of the revolution) and the events that followed (the decent into anarchy, the fight itself and it’s eventual end), this whole document basically being largely inspired by the Crane Brinton stages of a revolution. The design of the document was also great for my standards (I’m not great at making Canva documents) and is some of my best work as I added multiple images which help illustrate my points while being on theme (patriotic).
After finishing the document up we were introduced to a rube Goldberg machine which happened to be our final product. For those who don’t know a rube Goldberg machine is a machine which includes multiple over complicated chain reactions to perform a simple task. But this wasn’t all we had to do as that was far too uncomplicated for PLP standards. We had to make a rube Goldberg machine whose chain reactions were metaphors for each important event of our revolution. This seemed like an impossible task and believe me it was tough but over the course of a couple of weeks which included hard work, teamwork, problem solving and far more skills we have developed over the time in PLP, we managed to create a huge Rube Goldberg machine, a documentary and add an American theme to our section of the room. My role was editing the documentary but as some members were unavailable through the duration of the building process the whole task of the documentary fell on my shoulders (or at least most of it). Over the span of said weeks I mostly worked on the documentary but was unable to work on the machine too much but either way I still managed to finish one or two metaphors with the help of my peers. I do believe I could’ve done a better job at juggling both though instead of purely focusing on the documentary, next time I will also try my best to work to meet each and everyone of my deadlines (as I even had work to do on the the day of the exhibition) and not purely following orders but following my own instincts regarding what to do next.
Eventually the day came and it was time to unveil our final product this being our machine, our documents and the documentary I had spent all this time working on. I won’t lie I was extremely nervous, I had rehearsed the script multiple times but regardless of this the second I heard our teacher proclaim that the visitors were coming my heart dropped, I started hyperventilating and my mind went blank. The first visitors came inside the room and I stayed completely quiet the entirety of the presentation until it was my turn to speak, luckily I remembered my lines last minute but it wasn’t quite worded right and I felt like I could’ve done a far better job. Lucky for me I had 1 hour and a half to go so for the next hour I slowly started talking more and more until soon I was the one introducing guests to our station and explaining what it was all about, a job which I couldn’t be more proud of because as I stated previously I am terrified of facing large crowds and that’s all I did. Personally I think I could’ve taken a shorter break as it ended up being longer than it really should’ve been but that’s something I can implement next time but overall I consider this experience a success as I conquered one of my biggest fears and maybe if I keep pushing myself I’ll be able to conquer even more in the future.