Welcome, to the final event. That sounds incredibly eerie, but basically welcome to another end to a project. This is a special end, however, because this is the last Summative project post that I’ll be writing for the year of Grade 10. Well, there will probably be one more, that is going to be about the Final Spring Exhibition, but this will be the last about a certain project. Entitled, “Voices of the Cove”, this project had two different parts. The first part being archival interviews for a society in Deep Cove: The Deep Cove Heritage Society. We interviewed residents of Deep Cove, that have roots in this area, and who have contributed to the change. The PLP 10 class interviewed 12 different people, and these interviews were recorded. Then comes the second part, which was much longer, much more gruelling, and made us work so much harder: the podcasts. If you don’t know already, each student in the PLP Grade 10 class, has their OWN podcast, thats right, their OWN podcast! Isn’t that amazing? And naturally, I am part of this PLP 10 class, so I, too, have my own podcast. It’s called “Turn it Up”, and you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you stream your podcasts. Recently, throughout, this project, I released Episode 8, of Season 1 of “Turn it Up”. I named this episode: “A Trip to the 50s”, which hopefully tells you that we were studying the 1950s in class. I researched all about how genres like Jazz evolved from the post-World War II era, all the way to todays world, on this episode. If you want to know more, (which I hope you do), check out Episode 8 of Turn it Up, right here, right now!
So you want to know more about the episode eh? Well, you’re lucky you’re talking to the creator of it! This episode, I talked about the timeline of music, mentioning the progression of racism and equality, and how its changed to what it is in todays world. Very obviously, times have changed, and a lot of people believe that change sometimes isn’t a good thing. But I think that through the progression of music from the 1950s to today, music has changed for the better especially through the culture and people that was brought along into today’s world. First of all we had to talk about how Canadian life really developed after the Second World War. 
The Second World War was a revolutionary time for Canada. Canada was involved in many aspects of the war and even took part in helping it end, but as we started to talk about this in class it got my mind thinking, if we’re going to be talking about this specific topic, why not relate it back to my podcast? Throughout the entire year I’ve been keeping a podcast up with now eight full episodes released, and my common theme throughout this entire journey has been the theme of music. 
Music has always been a huge part of my life and I genuinely connect, naturally. So creating a podcast about it was literally my natural first instinct when we were asked to choose a topic. So as our driving question was introduced to us as “How does Canadian life develop after World War II.”, in my mind I started to think of it as “How did Canadian music and artists change Canadian lives after World War II?” I even wrote a full reflection on this which you can read here :
I found this activity of writing the reflection really interesting actually because we don’t normally write papers or do tests in PLP, so having to write this full on (basically) paper, really gave me a chance to express my true thoughts on the situation and answer the questions that was being asked to me, in detail. Now obviously music has changed a lot since the 1950s and we’ve definitely come along way in the aspect of excepting others into the industry and coming together as one to just share the love of the language of music, which is something I’m actually really proud of. There are still places and people in this world who still choose to discriminate and choose to exclude certain heritages because of their personal preference. When I was born into this world and I quickly realized that I never wanted to be anything like those people. I’ve always wanted to create an excepting society for people around me because sometimes it can unconsciously be the opposite. I talk about this, in the reflection piece, and on my podcast episode, so if you want to hear more about this in full detail, check it the podcast episode.
As always we have had something called ‘core competencies’ that we need to demonstrate throughout projects, but the competencies for this project, were a bit of a eye-opener for me. I did the careers 10 course this year, and in the course they talked about something called “soft skills” which are basically skills that you pick up that don’t require any technical aspects and are more focused on behavioural actions and reactions, gathered from experiences. I feel like the core competencies are like the soft skills of the English & Literature world. The core competencies that we were working on throughout this project were labelled as “Continuity and Change”, and “Discuss, Listen, and Speak.”
If you know me in person you know that I am a very talkative and extroverted person, so when I heard that the “Discuss, Listen and Speak” competency would be part of our assessments, I didn’t really think much of it. I wasn’t too worried about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to communicate my ideas because for the past three years that I’ve been in PLP for, that’s one competency that I excelled at continuously. 
Something we had to complete was basically a presentation to our class, consisting of just a Keynote and yourself, and it was a spoken presentation. 
The goal of it was to try to get us to voice our thoughts and really show that we understand how to think for ourselves and have our own opinions. Again, when I heard it was a spoken presentation I wasn’t really that worried, but I think this milestone in the project was one of the ones that I think I could’ve improved on actually. I had a lot of ideas but although they say that creativity should not have any reigns, I think it’s important to prioritize and choose between the ideas you really want to use versus the ideas that are not really necessary in the moment. That was my challenging factor throughout that assignment, and hopefully I’ll be able to learn from that and prioritize my ideas so I’m able to present them at this coming spring exhibition. But instead of waiting for the spring exhibition I decided to try and improve on this competency as quickly as I could. I saw an opportunity to voice my thoughts better with a podcast episode, which was the final product of this project and I think I did just that. My final episode is something that I am so proud to share with you guys. I honestly don’t think I could’ve asked for a better outcome on the episode itself. I talked with a freelance orchestral clarinet artist, Julie Begg, and I talked about the progression of music from the 1950s and again how the racism and equality aspect has really changed. 
I also did mention all of these concepts in my presentation, but I think in the episode, my thoughts were more organized this time and it was more of a composed way of sharing my understanding. I really really enjoy making podcast episodes so this podcast episode is basically a fuse between something I’m really passionate about talking about, and my love for making content for my audience. I was really happy with the way it turned out and I hope you guys will go give this episode to listen if you haven’t already!
The other competency, entitled “Continuity and Change”, was a competency that I found was really interesting. We’ve worked with it a little bit before, but this competency sticks out from the rest. I think that’s because continuity and change is a really important part of not only this project, but the world itself. I don’t really think the world would be moving forward if we didn’t have continuity or change. Even though there are two very different things, I think they basically go hand-in-hand with each other. I already talked about that presentation that we had to do in class, but I didn’t really talk about the content I talked about in the actual presentation. This is where the continuity and change competency comes in. 
My presentation was about the continuity and change of the music in history especially artists in the music industry, since the 1950s. I talked about Jazz musicians like Ray Charles, how disabled or racially different people started to pave their way into the music industry, as well as the continuities of society that we still see today. Now, I’m not gonna lie to you, it was a really fun presentation to put together, but I think I was coming from two separate sides of the map here. I didn’t really talk about the continuity in music that we see today, instead I talked about the values that we still see today that were also practiced by society/people in the 1950s. Honestly though, what is a project without hitting some road bumps? Probably a really easy way to waste time, I would say! I definitely learned from this particular milestone in the project, that it was really important to organize my thoughts and try to stay on the same topic throughout my final product, which was the podcast episode.
Another interesting research assignment we did was an assignment called the immigration trends chart. 
We were talking about the immigration trends from other countries coming to Canada from the 1950s all the way up to 2010. On my podcast they talk a lot about racial exception, and this immigration Chen trend chart really showed just how continuous that concept is. As we move on throughout the years from 1950s all the way up to 2010, I saw a lot more Third World countries immigrating to Canada versus countries that are pretty much developed, like the British Isles. Throughout these years things like the Chinese head tax were finally removed and it was more excepting to immigrate to places like America and Canada. Obviously immigration has come along way and you can basically immigrant to anywhere in the world now, but what’s changed is the people that are immigrating. Concepts like the Chinese head tax deliberately stopped people from moving and immigrating to other places and now this world is for the most part in open book when it comes to immigration.
I want to bring you back to the driving question that I talked about in the beginning of this post. “How did Canadian lives develop after World War II?” Well, Canadian lives changed a lot having a lot more people come over from other Third World countries or countries in Asia, have a new music and new artist introduced to the industry Canadian life developed continuously and very fast. 
After the 1950s it’s sort of seems like a blur there were so many different types of people and so many different types of trends in music, in fashion, in actions and reactions, in behaviour, politically and economically, and of course racially. Everyone has their own look on history but I think Canadian lives developed for the better after World War II. There was the time of the baby boom, which brought a lot of money into the economy at the time and people were settling down and having families and buying houses. It was a time of happiness for Canadians not only through one aspect, it was a time of happiness for Canadians through multiple concepts. I’m not saying the war was a good thing because that is the complete opposite of what I’m trying to say.
I’m saying if Canada never did what they did in the war, which is help keep peace and solve problems significantly in the Middle East, the time between the 1950s and the 2000s probably would’ve been very different and I think the way it did happen and the way it did play out was the best way it could’ve.
Throughout, I have this project I’ve definitely learned a lot, not only through content but mainly through how to organize my thoughts and present in a meaningful way that will get my point across to everyone. Although this project is over, the work still isn’t. We, the PLP Seycove classes, have an exhibition coming up on June 23, 2021, and it’s going to be a special one. Check out my post on drive-thrus, because our exhibition directly relates to that concept. Interested yet? Well, I hope you come check us out on June 23 and if you don’t you’ll probably get a post from me about it. However, something you can check out from the comfort of your own home is my podcast, “Turn it Up”! You can listen to episode eight right here and while you’re on it, listen to some other episodes as well, and let me know in the comments what you think.
I’ll leave it with one final question: How do YOU think Canadian lives developed after World War II? For the better or for worse?
Until next time folks…
Competencies for this Project:
Leave a Reply