Who do I want to be?

This is a question that doesn’t have one answer. It is a question whose answer will change through time and circumstance.

At the moment I live life as a teenager and student. I want to do well in school and have fun with my friends. I want to enjoy this time and spend time with my family.

When I look forward I dream of living a life filled with travel, adventure and learning.  Where I meet new people and challenge myself to do new things and exert independence. I want to grow and challenge myself. I want to take a gap year and travel through Europe. I want to go to university and start learning the skills I need for my career.

To do these things I need to be a person who is brave and strong, confident and kind.  I need to reflect on who I am and what I want.  I need to learn my strengths and weaknesses and learn how to shore up those weaknesses with knowledge.  I need to find people who I admire and emulate the traits that I admire.

I want to be a person who can take risks and be successful and also be kind. 

Someone that inspires me is a man I read about in The Sun Does Shine called Anthony Ray Hinton, he was a man who was falsely accused of murder (because he was black) and sentenced to death row. Despite all that had happened to him he stayed true to his belief’s, he stayed kind and decided to help the people around them. He started a book club to help his fellow inmates find a little bit of joy, a flicker of light in the dark. After 30 years of fighting, he finally won and got out of death row, but at the same time had lost the most precious thing.

The reason that I was so inspired by him is because even in his  darkest moments, he refused to act like anything but himself. He refused to act like a killer because he wasn’t one, he refused to stop helping the people around him even when they were in hell on earth. He had lots of grit and perseverance and those are the characteristics that I want to strive for. 

Another person that I inspire to be like is my granny. I had an interview with her where she talked about her life, she’s very active and I inspire to be like her when I grow older. I wrote about the highlights of our interview and gave reasons to why she inspires me. 

In the first clip my granny is telling me about how she ran a 5k in her late 60’s. I found this inspiring because when people get older their health and fitness usually declines significantly. My granny has put in time and effort to staying fit and healthy into her older ages.

In the second clip my granny describes some of her experience growing up after World War II. I found this inspiring because even when her childhood was probably significantly harder for her than people in this generation she still talked about her experience in a positive way and not about how it negativity affected her.

In the third clip my granny’s talking about how the principal of the school wanted her to come back quickly after having a child. This makes me think that she was extremely high valued at her job and she was one of the best teachers. I find it inspiring that she found a job that suits her so well and she excels at while still enjoying it and being able to live her outside life without it interfering. I want to find a job that I enjoyed as much as my granny liked hers.

In the last clip my granny is telling me about her busy schedule and what she does with her life even after being retired. I strive to be have this kind of active lifestyle that my granny has. Instead of just staying in her house all the time she likes to keep herself busy with friends and community activities even though she is getting older (Almost 80 now). She talks about how she is helping out people at the community centre and likes to drive people around. She also told me about her hobbies like gardening, and walking in her local park. I inspire to have this positive mentality on life even as I grow in age.

While doing this project everyday, we would all wrote something we’re grateful for on a post it note and we would stick it on a window. I realized that many things in my life I take for granted, I live an extremely lucky life and I need to think about what I’m grateful for more often. The post-it window ended up looking so good in our class room, it was a pop of colour and kindness.

Thank you for reading and dear future me, I hope you completed all your goals and are living your fullest life.

Memorials are used as a public memory, to remember and honor a past event, or influential person. Our class started off this project by discussing some notable memorials and we learned how to analyze the different aspects (size, shape, colours, symbology, placement, location) and thought that went behind the design. Some memorials that we talked about were Mount Rushmore, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Holocaust memorial.

 Using our newfound knowledge on the aspects of memorials we designed our own memorials out of Lego. I created my lego memorial to honour the memory of the people who died on the SS. Mendi. I didn’t have all the lego pieces I needed to create my vision so I used mark-up to add the details that I couldn’t achieve with lego.

Before mark-up

After mark-up

Some of the main features that I added to my memorial were, buckets full of water that empty in the morning and refill throughout the day and night. It also will span the length of the SS. Mendi ship. I wrote a paragraph going into greater detail of my memorial. I composed details of the tragedy of the sinking of the SS. Mendi which would be included on a plaque. Paragraph link.

We used the knowledge that we gained designing individual memorials to work on creating a memorial within a group.  The class was spilt into 9 groups, and I worked with Sophia and Charlie (You can visit there blogs here and here). Each group had to research and create a memorial for either South Asia (specifically the Punjab region), Japan or China. My group got assigned South Asia. We each contributed our own individual creation, and we collaborated as a group on one memorial that represented the Komagata Maru.

My individual creation was a poster on the pushes and pulls of immigration of Sikhs to Canada. I brainstormed 12 main pushes and pulls and then provided further detail on a couple of them.

Some of the information that I included in my poster is below:

Pulls for Sikhs to come to Canada.

Labour

Agriculture

Political stability

Economic benefits

More freedom

Presence of established Sikh communities

Pushes for Sikhs to leave India.

Economic Hardships

Political instability

Religious persecution

Lack of opportunities

Overpopulation

Discrimination

For our group memorial we started by doing research on the Komagata Maru. The Komagata Maru was a ship that sailed with a few thousand South Asians (mostly Punjab men) immigrants into a port in Vancouver hoping to live and work in Canada. The Canadian government refused to let the people on the Komagata Maru into Canada and as a result they were stranded in the port for 2 months with decreasing food and water supplies and were forced to sail back to India. When they arrived back in India, British authorities suspected that passengers were arriving to make trouble. Shooting started and officially, 26 people died although there were possibly more unrecorded deaths. If you want to get a deeper understating of the Komagata Maru, I found this video extremely helpful during my research.

We planned our memorial and had many ideas but ultimately, we ended up deciding to create a 3D model of the Komagata Maru surrounded by 26 trees, one tree for each official death that occurred.

During this exhibition we had a small grade 10 competition. Within each memorial category there was one winner from the three groups that were presenting a different memorial about the same event. To decide this winner, the visitors were asked to look at all of the displays and select their favourite ones…

Our group ended up winning with a grand total of 44 votes. I think we were so successful because our group was extremely organized, and we all were able to complete out tasks on time and to the best of our ability. We also have an interesting name that I think stuck in people’s brains when they went to vote (our group name was Tantalus). I would say we had one of the most professional looking memorials thanks to Charlie’s 3D printer which allowed parents and viewers to see our vision slightly clearer than out competitor’s. I think we would’ve have done even better if we had gotten a better spot in the room. We were by the back and there wasn’t much light so that could have potential stopped viewers from being drawn to our station. I loved this project because I got to create something physical and show it off to an audience and this has definitely been one of my favourite projects of this year. Thanks for reading and happy 2024!

World War II (WWII) was an extremely impactful event for countries all over the world, including Canada. This project we learned about the main events that occurred during WW2 and how Canada contributed to the war efforts of the allies. The final goal of this project was to write an essay on the importance of learning about Canada’s war efforts in WWII.

How did WW2 start? One of the main contributors to WW2 was the Great Depression. When the stock market crashed, many countries went into a state of economic depression, it caused a lot of political instability. The political chaos allowed for dictators like Hitler gain control. Some people in Germany felt that they needed a leader that would take action and “Make Germany great again” after their defeating loss in WWI. Once Aldof Hitler gained control of Germany, he decided to send his army to invaded Poland in 1939 which drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

 As I said earlier the main goal of this project was to write an essay so I will show you my process. The first step of writing my essay was writing a thesis. I had to revise this thesis a couple of times till it was up to standard for my essay. The thesis I ended up writing was “Canada’s role in WW2 is commonly overlooked compared to other larger countries, so we need to learn about how WW2 truly affected our society today.“ This was going to be the main topic of my essay. The next thing I did was write a draft of my essay, there were a lot of editing mistakes and topics that needed to be revised but I am going to fix all those

I got some of my classmates and parents to revise my essay and give me edits to help elevate my writing. Firstly my classmate Kira edited my essay,(you can visit here blog here). She went over lots of small mistakes that I didn’t notice the first time. 

Next I got my mom to edit over my essay. She fixed a lot more of the grammar and editing issues than Kira did, but she also gave me some tips on what more details I should add to better my essay.  

You can check out the fully edited version here.

To write this essay I had to come up with 3 main points that would be the evidence to my thesis. These would be the topics of my 3 body paragraphs. 

The first paragraph was about How and what Canada contributed to the Allies war efforts. I talked about the supplies and pilots that Canada gave to the Allies during the war.

The second body paragraph I talked about Canadas role in the D-day invasion and other extremely significant battles. 

The last body paragraph I wrote was about the consequences during and after the war for Canada.

After I finished all these edits I had my finished product, which I ended up being extremely proud of. Writing is not my favourite topic but I truly enjoyed researching and learning about WWII. My favourite part of this project was learning about all the events of WW2 and doing Kahoots on them. I got to learn a lot about WWII that I had didn’t understand before. If I had to improve my final project I would have added more details about the United Nations and N.A.T.O. I also would have gone over and edit it more. 

Thanks for reading my post, Have a great day!!!

The goal of this project was to understand how Canadians are viewed by the countries around us and how to beat the general stereotypes of Canadian life.

Important Starting Information 

We started or by learning about Canada and how the laws here are created following the Charter of Rights.

The Charter rights protects different rights and freedoms. Some of the rights and freedoms are..

Fundamental Freedoms 

Main Points 

– Everyone in Canada is free to practise and religion or none 

– We are allowed to express are religion in private and public 

– We are allowed to speak our minds, and listen to opposing view (this doesn’t include hate crime and threats of violence) 

– We’re allowed to protest against a government action or institution

As you can see the charter rights are basically the laws of Canada in the simplest forms. The basic human rights that the Supreme Court of Canada believes should be enforced. 

The official English version of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is shown.

Canadian Identitiy through Economy 

Each person in my class had to chose a topic that related to our Canadian Identity, we then had to become an expert on our topic. The topic that I chose was economy. I wrote about how the economy of Canada is effected by our geography and how our Canadian identity is effected by our economy. After we were done becoming experts on our topic we had group discussions. The first discussion we had was with people who has similar topics to ours. The topics in our group were Economy (mine), Hockey, Air Canada and Tourism. In this group we easily found similarities and had an easy conversation. Then we had a conversation in groups with topics completely different to ours. In my different goroup the topics were, Economy (mine), Chinese immigrants, Canadian Actors and Animals. This conversation was harder to talk about similarities, but it seemed to flow smoother because everybody had a lot of different points to bring up. In the elevator pitch that I presented I briefly described my topic. Here is my elevator pitch… 

How does the Canadian economy support Canadian identity?

Considering how small our population is Canada has one of the strongest economies in the world, in 9th place as of 2023, just behind France and the UK. The reason Canada has a strong economy is that it has many natural resources including minerals from the Canadian Shield, timber from British Columbia, fish from the Atlantic region, wheat and grains from the prairies and oil and gas from Alberta. The three largest/most profitable industries in Canada are commercial banking, primary care/doctors and apartment rental . Commerical Banking is controlled mainly by interest rates, Health care is effected by population growth from immigrants and the increase of rental demand is supporting growth in the rental market. Some benefits of having a large economy are that many Canadians have good job opportunities, generating higher tax revenues allowing the government to spend more money on publicly funded services like free health care and widespread education. An additional benefit of a strong economy is a higher average income allowing more Canadians to keep up with inflation. Our economy supports the idea that Canada is a prosperous country, that is safe and enjoyable to live in. 

Human Library

For the final part of this project we hosted a Human Library at our school. You might be wondering “What is a Human Library?”. A human library is a safe space where people who have lived different experices to ours have the chance to share their story. Instead of borrowing a book, you would borrow a conversation from someone. A human library is a place where you can ask people questions that you would not get to normally ask them in public. 

Our human Library 

In our human library each person from our class invited 1-3 people. In total 18 people/books were able to show up. We had many guests about 5 people talked to each book. I ended up talking to 3 books. All the books had exccedingly different stories. One person I talked to was a surgeon who immigrated from England to B.C., the second person I talked to was an engineer who constructed contraptions for disabled people in his free time (if you want to learn more about what he does you can visit this website https://tetrasociety.org/) and finally I talked to a lawyer who immigrated from Equador to Canada. I personally think our human library was very successful, I got to talk to so many people with interesting stories about their lives. 

Overall I actually enjoyed this project a lot. My favorite part of this project was the Human Library. It went a lot better than how I thought it would and I greatly enjoyed hearing all the cool stories. My least favorite part of this project was when we had the group conversations because I struggled to come up with good questions to ask. But  I learned a lot and had fun during this project. Thanks for reading my post and have a great day!

Canada is a huge country full of many different nations and communities. On July 1st, 1867 the colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, West Canada and East Canada came together to form the Dominion of Canada. 

What does nationalism mean for people around Canada?

Confederation Simulation 

Our class broke up into groups of 6 colonies New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, West Canada, East Canada, Prince Edward Island and New Found Land. My group was Nova Scotia. Each group had to make a list of demands that they wanted out of the confederation. Our demands were 

• Shared currency (to allow for easier trade between colonies)
• Bilingualism (The French language becomes an official language, taught in all elementary schools)
• Military power (The US is a threat to Nova Scotia so we would need military protection)
• Equal power in the government (Nova scotia wants equal seats in the government to every other colony so we don’t get overlooked)
• A railway (Nova Scotia wants a railway connecting to Halifax to allow for resources to be sent to us) 

We also want a fishing arrangement with Prince Edward Island to allow us to both use the waters in between us for fishing and ship building, 

The final agreement 

We were able to get a railway connecting all the colonies, shared currency, military power and we got seats in the government based on population capping at 20%.

The process of creating a board game 

Step 1:  Brainstorming 

We came up with a lot of ideas but ultimately we decided to go with a game we’re you had to recreate the confederation. To win you must get everyone to join the confederation by trading resources with each other. 

Step 2: Creating the game 

Firstly we had to design many different types of cards.

Resource cards:

Save cards:

Raid cards:

Natural disaster cards:

Then we had to make the game board. The game board had a map so you know where your colony was located and it had places for all the cards to sit. Lastly we had to make coins, to trade you had to pay for either a train ticket (to travel across land) or a boat (to travel across the ocean). 

Step 3. Game Rules

Thanks for reading, have a great week!

In this project we were assigned a revolution and a group in this group we made court cam style videos to try and prove if our revolutions where effective or ineffective. Our group tried to prove that the French Revolution was effective. 

Graphic Organizer

I made an organizer that showed the different stages and properties of the French Revolution. It explained the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of the revolution and 

French Revolution 

Underlying Conditions

France was in sever debt due to the people with power spending all their money on useless luxury items. The peasants and general public were severely taxed and weren’t able to afford general necessities. This made the people of France mad and they decided to revolt against the dictatorship 

Main Characters

Louie XVI- Louie XVI was the leader of France before and at the start of the revolution. In 789 the Bastille was stormed by protesters who forced the king to accept the newly formed National Assembly. 

Marie Antoinette- Marie Antoinette was the queen of France during the French Revolution. Lots of people didn’t like her because she would spend large amount of money on luxuries well the people of France were poor and heavily taxed. She was executed on October 26th 1793.

Napoleon Bonaparte- He was a French Military leader who became powerful during the French Revolution. In 1804 he became the Emperor of France.

Effectiveness and Ineffectiveness

After all the deaths the laws and rights that the people fought for did not get instituted effectively, almost 40,000 people died for changes that weren’t going to be made. But the French Revolution helped the French people become a more equal state and showed Europe that the French were not afraid of standing up for what they believe.

Revolution Trial 

We had to make a video showing a trial that determines if the French Revolution was ineffective or effective. Our group was trying to prove that the French Revolution was effective, because it allowed for growth of the French government and it created a constitution which limited the power of the monarchy.

How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world? 

Revolutions allowed for growth and development in countries. It allowed for the people of lower classes to express what they wanted to change and allowed for growth in different empires and countries.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day.

We just did a revolution simulation in class. I got to experience first hand what it was like to live in Hierarchy and run such an unbalanced nation.  

Rules of the simulation:

In our Nation X simulation there were 4 social classes, peasants, merchants, law enforcement and royalty. I was in the royalty class with Charlie R and Charlie M (the king).

The peasant class was in charge of doing all the work, they had to write 100 word essays everyday as well as picking up our trash. Despite all the work they did they only made $1 a day.

The merchant class was in charge of the shop. They would get to set all the prices, but with the money they got they would be heavily taxed. The merchants only made $2 a day.

The law enforcement was able to put who ever they wanted in jail (given they had a reason) and they were in charge of making sure the royalty was safe. The law enforcement made a good income of $5 a day.

The royalty class was in charge of making laws and keeping our economy stable. We also had to get our civilization strong enough to fight Nation Y.

Day 1: Today I was not voted king, but the store was filled with vast amounts of food. I was able to buy a lemonade for a cheap deal of 7$. During the day the peasants cleaned the trash and wrote their pages, the store owners were bringing in lots of profit, and the law was putting peasants in jail well me Charlie R and Charlie M (the king) were keeping our civilization organized. When dusk falls we hear a rumour that the peasants and merchants are plotting to kill the king. We must keep an eye out for any suspicious actions.

Day 2:  The store is plentiful again, but the store owners have raised the prices due to higher taxes. We passed many laws, you can now buy chairs for 2$, there will be higher pay (2$ for the peasants, 3$ for the merchants), and there will be a limit to the store prices (no more then $10). Also the peasants have stopped working due to low pay and bad working conditions something must be done about this.

Day 3: As our civilizations economy is crumbling, there was only one lemonade left in the store (which I bought) and the peasants are refusing to do there work (due to them wanting higher pay and better rights). The peasants, merchants and law holders are plotting something against the king. We have to get weapons to protect ourselves.

Day 4: There has been a disease outbreak of Kienbock’s Disease, from the peasants because they are poor and dirty. Kienbock’s is a condition in which one of the small bones in the wrist loses its blood supply and dies. We had to hand out precious cures to keep the disease from spreading. We also kept our weapons to protect us from the rising risk of a regicide. But Charlie R in an act of greed tried to kill me and the king. We were able to flee to a deserted island were we met with Nation Y and decided to betray our sinking civilization. We were able to kill Charlie R and take over Nation x.

Why did our civilization fail?

Our civilization failed because the peasants felt they were being wronged by the government, as they gained more power (with alliances) they began to uprise which ended in a revolution. Because of this revolution Nation X was weak which is why me and the king (Nation Y) were able to take over so easily. A real life example of this is the fall of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary had a huge crop failure which led to an economic crisis. This meant that the government was more vulnerable to revolution. The soldiers refused to fight for a crumbling nation which ended in the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.

The Stages Of Revolution (In Austria-Hungary)

 Incubation Stage- There was an economic crisis and lack of food due to a huge crop failure, this caused the people of Austria-Hungary to get with the government.

Moderate stage- The people of Austria-Hungary formed factions, the leftists and pacifists. They organized strikes in factories and uprisings in the army were had become common. 

Crisis Stage- The soldier’s of Austria-Hungary refused to keep fighting for a crumbling nation  and the Emperor lost power as his empire disintegrated.

Recovery Stage- Austria-Hungary split into separate entities based on nationality: Czechoslovakia, (which later split into current day Czechia and Slovakia), Yugoslavia, Poland,  Romania, Ukraine and most of the land went to creating the current day countries Hungary and Austria.

This was a very fun simulation to do. I got to understand what it would be like to be a ruler and how difficult it is to run a nation in war. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and have a great day!!!