Category: Humanities

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

And just like that, the year is almost over. That means it’s time for Tpols, A time to reflect on our learning, how we improved and how we still need to improve. Specifically, in this post, I will be discussing my performance in humanities and my chosen core competencies. I will start with humanities.

 

Humanities

It’s wild to think that this is our only PLP class this year as over the past two years we have gone from four PLP classes to just one. However, that doesn’t mean I’m lacking in projects to reflect on. In this semester alone we have done 3 projects, this may not sound like a lot until you look into how big these projects were. Biggest of which is in my opinion the hide your fires Macbeth project. However, despite being the biggest I don’t think it is the best representation of my abilities as a learner. This is for two reasons, the way this project was structured meant that unless you volunteered to be an actor or part of the filming team you would have nothing to do for a quarter of the project, and two despite my role playing an important part in the creation of this film I felt I could have been better suited in another position. That being said I could have tried harder to be put in a better position including presenting a more in-depth pitch. The role I did end up playing in this project was the screenplay editor. In this position, I mainly took on the responsibility of formatting and checking the screenplay for continuity issues. I felt like in this project I could have done more, but before I get into that I think it’s fair to discuss what I did well. In this project, I tried my best to go out of my way to help. This includes offering to format the entire screenplay. This was a challenge as lots of the screenplays had errors that required entire sections to be rewritten. As well as going out of my way to try and do more I also felt as though I did my job at an accomplished level. 

 

Before I mention the second biggest project I feel as though I should mention the underdog in this story, our change my mind project. Despite being the shortest of our three projects I would have to say this was one of my favourites. This is mostly because we were given the freedom to pick any topic that we wanted, within reason. That meant I ended up talking about NFTs and how I think they are not a viable investment. The only issue I had with this project was the fact that we had to write it for someone. Now, I am aware this sounds pretty counterintuitive as the basis of this project was convincing someone on something, but just hear me out. The main issue from this came from the person I picked to convince, which was a friend from Discord. The issue arose when I had to choose the length of my writing because the person I picked had a short attention span I had to shorten my writing. This was a big issue as to properly convince someone about a financial decision, especially someone into crypto you need to have every fact and point covered, which is hard to do when you are limited to 1000 words. In the end, I think I did well in creating a case for my opinion. Looking back on my successes and shortcomings in this project there are a few obvious things I can point out. Starting with successes, in this project, I went above and beyond to research not just NFT as a whole but also researched deep into specific examples such as Cyberkongs. My shortcoming in this project mostly came from sticking to due dates although I’m not going to go too deep into that as I have already covered it like a million times. The other shortcoming I faced was decision-making. During this project, I struggled to pick my topic, format and person. This leads to limitations on research time and struggles to hand things in on time. Overall I felt as though this project serves as a good example of where I can exceed and where I fall short.

 

Finally our latest project. Despite being the second biggest our latest project was nothing special so I’m just going to get straight to the point. For what I did well I’m going to be focusing on two things, the Socratic seminars and the intro video.  

 

Socratic seminar

 

Despite not talking during one of them I would still call them a success. This is because during the Socratic seminars where I did talk I felt I tried to contribute as much as I could as well as trying to build upon and inspire discussion. However despite this success, I ran into one issue, that being the difficulty when it came to speaking. I think this is mostly because everybody had something to say but I feel if there was a better structure for talking I might have been able to contribute better. Overall I felt the Socratic seminars were a good example of my successes in this project.

 

Intro video

I specifically chose to talk about the intro video as I felt it was a great success. The intro video which Angelo, Anders, Asha and I (With support from Alex O) had to finish in two days may have been a challenge but with good communication and a lot of work, we were able to pull it off. The actual creation process of the video was split up between us. I was in charge of the voice-over (editing it and half of the actual talking), music, putting everything together and the end part with the references to the impact makers. I think in this case not only did I but I think the intro video team as a whole went above and beyond to provide the best possible intro video on time. 

 

Despite those successes, this project was not free from shortcomings. The biggest of those shortcomings being as always time management. This led to me handing in parts of this project late including but not limited to my portrait plan and my preliminary impact maker pitch. I also felt as though I could have put more time into at-home research. This would have allowed me to better participate in the Socratic seminars and more importantly build a better understanding of Jim Pattison and his impact on Vancouver/North Vancouver.

 

Core Competencies

Looking at the core competencies I think it’s fair to say that I am at an accomplished level for almost all of them. 

 

Communication

I think I was accomplished in this competency. This is for two reasons. First of all, is the exhibition intro video. For the intro video, my group and I had to effectively communicate our tasks and responsibilities for the video. The majority of which was done outside of school. Along with communication for the intro video I also for the change my mind project, contact interview and receive feedback from a friend.

 

Thinking

I think I accomplished this competency for a few reasons. The main reason is my critical and reflective thinking during Socratic seminars. In these Socratic seminars, we were asked to discuss questions about a text we had just watched using references to the text as well as notes we took. Along with the Socratic seminars I feel as though My blogs are a good example of my reflective thinking. Finally, creative thinking I feel that is shown through the brainstorming with the intro video team on how we were going to effectively introduce people to our project.

 

Personal and social

I feel as though I am almost accomplished in this core competency. This is because throughout all our projects I acted politely and responsibly with my peers. For example, in the Socratic seminars, I always tried to respond respectfully even when I disagreed with someone’s point of view. As well I am always the first one to call out my shortcomings and take responsibility for them. However, I lacked responsibility when it came to finishing assignments on time and keeping up with things such as the zettelkasten notes. I feel as though this did a disservice to my learning as it led to a lesser understanding of the topics and left me unable to participate in certain activities. Overall I hope to be able to improve on this in the future.

 

In conclusion, I feel over this year I have shown some improvement however overall my performance took a hit and I hope next year I can bring myself back to where I believe I am capable of being.

(blank) Change my mind, a saying popularized by an alt-right YouTuber, and also the idea behind our latest project. That project being a persuasive writing meant to convince someone of your choosing on a point of your choosing. This topic raised a few important questions, the most important of which was, “What am I going to convince someone on?” To assist us in answering this question we were assigned some brainstorming.

However, we first needed to create a “Writing Record” also known as a pages document shared with our teachers so they could have a live view of our brainstorming. I found this to be quite helpful as it meant that we Didn’t have to submit a new version to Showbie every time that we updated it. 

My brainstorming went in a lot of different directions, which ended up making it hard to choose. This difficulty was only exacerbated when we were introduced to the second part of our brainstorming. That part is our audience, also known as the person we are trying to persuade. However, eventually, I was able to conclude and settled on NFTs more specifically why NFTs are a poor long-term investment. The main idea behind my writing was that because of the unoriginality and over-saturation in the market, nfts are a bubble that is doomed to pop. This leads straight into my thesis statement “Oversaturated, unoriginal and overhyped, the NFT marketplace is a bubble that is doomed to pop”. I chose this as my thesis as I felt it encapsulated all of my ideas in a concise short sentence. 

 

The writing and research portion of this project for me at least kinda went hand and hand as I did most of my research as I was writing. Looking back on this workflow it did end up presenting some big issues. The biggest of which being that as I did more research the structure of my writing kept changing. This could have been easily avoided if I had just done more research before I started writing. Another issue that arose with my writing was how long it took me to write because I didn’t have a finished draft when we did peer review I wasn’t able to participate meaning I missed out on valuable feedback. In future, I feel I need to be more on top of due dates to not miss out on future opportunities for improvement. However, despite these issues my writing process still allowed me to deliver a product I’m satisfied with.

Next, I came across an issue when it comes to what it would take to convince my audience and what my audience would be willing to read. Given the stereotypical NFT crowd, a basic list of trite arguments won’t work. To be more convincing I would require a lot more detail. This however is hindered by the amount my audience has the attention span to read. This left me with the dilemma of what to sacrifice to keep the length shorter. In the end, I decided to instead of having many short sections settle for a smaller number of well-researched sections. I feel like this worked better as it allowed for more new evidence to be presented instead of a ton of buzz words and trite anecdotes.

The final step for me was to format it. Initially, I was planning on formatting it as an anti-stock pitch until I realized that stock pitches generally assume you do not know the stock in question which would not work in my case. Instead, I decided on just basic formatting as I felt it was the best way to present my information without distracting too much. This decision is to blame as well on the fact that I was running out of time so take that as you will. 

 

Finally, I had to send it to my audience, which I did over discord. In the end, the verdict was sadly a no, kinda. They said I had some good points but it wasn’t enough to sway them. I think maybe given more time I could have made something more convincing. 

In conclusion despite all the issues and my failure in swaying a friend I am still proud of what I made and think with a bit of polishing it and more time it may have been able to sway him. As always fail is just a first attempt in learning. 

 

Our hide your fires Macbeth project was an otherwise successful project that could have benefitted from more time.

In this project, we were tasked with the goal of Creating a class film of “Macbeth” set in the 1950s which shows that appearances often hide a very different reality.

To complete this task we had to first learn the ins and outs of “Macbeth” as you cant modify and create a film adaptation of something you don’t understand. This is where the first issue in this journey emerged, my trouble understanding the Shakespearean dialect, as you may assume this leads to some issues when it comes to dissecting a piece of literature. Luckily I feel as though I was able to overcome that issue through a mixture of youtube videos and lessons from my teacher. In Future, I feel as though it may be beneficial to do more research into Shakespeare’s writing style so I don’t need to rely on youtube videos in order to fully comprehend his writing.

A big part of our journey in understanding “Macbeth” was my act quest. The act quest was an assignment where we had to dissect a quote based on the information we had from the first three acts. This assignment was different as we were tasked with creating the best essay we could through many revisions. In the end, this ended up working out quite well although in future I need to stay more on top of feedback and revisions.

For the film portion of this project, we had to be put into roles. In order for that to take place, we had to apply for roles. Now, me being a naive ambitious teenager I decided that I would either apply for screenwriter or director. My reasoning behind that decision was that those roles sounded fun and I had a little experience in both of those fields. However, I could only choose one. In the end, I chose to apply to screenwriter, this was because I felt like that was something I had more experience with. For our application, we had to write about why we wanted to have this role, what we would bring to this position and finally Any ideas we had for the production. That last step was where I made a catastrophic blunder, This was because I didn’t really have any ideas for the production aside from a few specific non-cohesive scenes, so when it came to my application I chose to leave them out. In the end, I got the role of script editor, as much as this was a disappointment I feel as though it is what I deserved based on what I put into my application. If I were to do this again I would have definitely spent more time on each part of the application, especially the production ideas.

Before I was able to do my job of editing the screenplay we first needed a screenplay. Normally the screenwriter would be in charge of that task however, this specific screenplay would be written by the entire class split into groups Each working on a different scene. Despite my initial dislike for this idea for reasons I won’t get into, it ended up going pretty well and was an all-around fun experience. One thing I do have to say about this process of having the class write but then a dedicated screenwriter is that the screenwriter basically became an editor, so by the time it came to me I was like the script editor editor.

As the script editor, my main task was formatting but I also would occasionally fix some continuity issues. In the end, I think this role worked out quite well as it allowed me to learn new formatting rules that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned. One issue that did arise in my editing process was my stubbornness when it comes to what program I use for screenwriting which at times leads to issues, which I was luckily able to fix. In future editing endeavours, it would be beneficial to compromise and use different screenwriting software.

At this point, this is where my job ended if you don’t include bringing in some props as a job. Now however this was not the end of the project, there was still a lot more to be done by my peers. This included the rest of the pre-production, production, and post-production. I can’t comment on the inside dealings of those parts of the project as I had nothing to do with them, but what I can say is from what I did see they were doing a great job although it seemed like the production could have used more time for filming. In the end, I feel as though the other teams created a great product that honours and lives up to the screenplay.

At the end as mentioned before I feel as though we were able to create a compelling entertaining film. This is thanks to all of the great teams that helped put it all together. Overall this was a great learning experience, if one thing, in particular, stands out to me it would be the change in roles which felt like a great learning experience.

I’ve always liked music. I listen to anything from Cannibal Corpse to Bach. That’s why I was intrigued by this project since I had never really analyzed music before. The part of this project I was not so excited about on the other hand was having to read poems since I have never really liked them. That being said, I did read some poems I did like, but I’ll get to that later.

As I briefly mentioned before, a big part of this project was analyzing music. More specifically we would be creating a playlist of five songs that we thought represented us then analyzing those songs. But before we could get to the analyzing part of this project we had to learn how to analyze music. 

This is where poems came into play. This is because poems and songs use a lot of the same writing techniques. As well as that poems are easier to analyze since the only thing you need to worry about is the actual writing since there is no instrumental. Our first analysis activity was to analyze and answer questions about 8 poems in groups of three. This activity ended up having a mixed difficulty since on one hand there were poems that were long and had quite obvious meaning. Whereas on the other hand there were poems that were two lines and were about wheel barrels. However in the end we were able to analyze almost all of the poems we were asked to analyze. This activity ended up being eye-opening since I was able to read poems of all types which led my stance on poems to slightly change positively. Along with my change in opinion on poems this activity ended up being a great way to cement the poetic terms in my mind. 

After thoroughly preparing our brains to analyze poems it was to try using those skills on songs. To do this we were tasked with picking a song that had meaning to us and then analyzing it to the best of our ability. The biggest challenge of this task for me was to pick the song. This was because I generally don’t think of the songs I listen to as having meaning, just that they make my brain happy. But finally after countless hours (more like 30 mins) of searching I had a candidate, All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. I started my analysis by listening to the song a few times to try and discern the mood and tone. After that, I pulled up genius to get an in-depth look at the lyrics and the list of poetic terms. Instead of walking you through my step-by-step analysis, here is my finished analysis.

All Along The Watchtower

Jimi Hendrix’s most famous song (according to Spotify) has been a song that has stuck with me ever since the first time I heard it. All along the watchtower specifically struck a chord with me due to the vocal and instrumental performance by Hendrix. As always Hendrix is putting on a truly beautiful electric guitar performance that left me wanting to listen on repeat. Along with the amazing performance, the lyrics by Bob Dylan leave lots to question and interpret. A good example of this is who the joker and thief are. 

Onto the technical side of the lyrics, this song is a good example of many of our poetic terms. The most prevalent of which is free verse. I think free verse is such an important part of this song since it allows the story to be told in a more entrancing way. At least that’s how it felt for me. I feel like if this song were to have been written in a more traditional way it would have lost some of what makes it so great. Along with free verse, this song also demonstrates Caesura. This becomes pretty apparent because of this song’s free-verse style. Just looking at the lyrics while listening to the song you can see this. For example, the is a very apparent pause in verse 1 in between the first line and the rest of the verse.

Doing this analysis I was able to figure out what I was good at when it came to analyzing music and what I still needed to work on. I discovered that I needed to work on the emotional connection of the songs. I noticed this while writing since As I wrote the paragraph on the emotional connection I slowly realized that I didn’t have much of a connection to this song other than the fact that I liked it. There was no memory of listening to it when I was young or something in my life that is related to it. This is something that I tried to improve in the main analysis.

For the main analysis, I spent much more time deciding my five songs. I started by looking through all of my playlists and picking any songs that I had a memory of listening to when I was young and any song that had a meaning that I agreed with. I ended up with around ten songs. Now it was the hard part eliminating songs. This was hard for me since in my mind all ten of those songs could and should be on the list of songs that represent me. However in the end I was able to bring myself to cull down the list to five. Here is that list

Analyzing those songs wasn’t the hardest but it did take lots of time. From that process, I ended up with A 1300 word google doc containing my five-song analysis. Out of those five, I had a couple of favourites. One of which was Nightcall by Kavinsky. This ended up being one of my favourites since I was captivated by the lore I discovered while researching. If you’re interested in reading them you can find my two favourite analyses below.

Kavinsky Nightcall

I’ve been a fan of synth/synth-wave music ever since the first time I heard it. I’m not exactly sure what I like so much about it. Part of it could be the smooth electronic melodies or maybe it’s the fact it feels like if you asked a robot to make lofi. This particular song I discovered while watching the movie Drive(which you should watch if you haven’t it’s pretty darn good). It’s actually kind of funny when I first heard it I liked this so much I spend 20 minutes searching for it. Another thing I enjoyed about this song is the limited repeating lyrics. They tell a story but leave lots of room for the important part of the song. The synth. 

Looking into the limited lyrics of this song you can see hints of a love song. Although there is a lot more than just that going on it just takes a bit more research to find out. There are lots of theories about the meaning behind this song but the one I like most is the one I found on a random message board. That theory was that this story continues the story from one of kavinsky’s past albums about a racer who died in a car crash and became a ghost racer. In this song, it would be that ghost racer confessing his love and that person contemplating what is going on knowing the ghost driver and the person on the other end of the phone’s death. In terms of poetic techniques, this song employs the most prevalent would be repetition. This is heavily relied on due to this song only having one chorus and verse that are just repeated. However, this is not to the song’s detriment I would say it’s quite the opposite. Due to this song’s electronic nature, I feel like having more lyrics would have taken away from the overall entrancing aspect of the song. Whereas the carefully chosen and limited lyrics add to it.

Guns N’ Roses civil war

This song has a lot of meaning to me and it has nothing to do with the lyrics. To me, this song represents my introduction to 90s rock. The memory is clear as day, I remember stealing my dad’s iPod and bringing it to my grade 5 classroom. I remember the fear of it being taken away because we weren’t meant to have any devices. And most of all I remember the intro to the song. “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate some men, you just can’t reach so, you get what we had here, last week which is the way he wants it well, he gets it”. All of these things came into play when I was choosing the songs that represent me and are the reason I chose to put this song first.

Now that I have introduced to you the lyrics of this song I might as well start that part of the analysis. The most dulled-down way to describe this song is by stating the overarching idea behind it. War is bad/anti-war. To forward the meaning behind the songs lots of creative techniques are used. One of which is imagery. You can see examples of imagery throughout. One example that specifically sticks out to me is the intro where you are forced to think and picture the effects of war. Along with imagery this song also employs repetition. By repeatedly asking you to look at the effects of war it helps cement them in your mind leading to a more memorable experience.

When reading over my analysis now I can see a lot of things I wish I had done differently. The biggest of which is the depth in which I analyzed each song. This is because even though I feel as though I did an acceptable amount of analysis there is still so much detail and technique hidden that I am yet to discover. 

In conclusion, I feel even though I did accomplish what we were asked to do in this project I could have done more and perhaps even exceed the requirements if I had just spent more time on each song. So finally I will leave you with my answer to the driving question “How can we use music to represent ourselves and text”. To answer that I would say using the meaning and emotion behind songs we can choose one that we feel represent our emotions and opinions on this world. And for text, it is the same thing although you swap out yourself with some form of text.

For me, this was an interesting project. Be it the fact that I had minimal knowledge about the manhattan project before it or that I used to think contemporary art was a joke. So it was good that we not only covered but combined those two subjects in this project. More specifically we were asked to after some research create a conceptual art piece that represents some part of the manhattan project.

On the manhattan project side of this project, we started by learning the basics. After that, we started the interesting part which was how these bombings affected Japanese citizens. Enter Hiroshima by John Hersey. Hiroshima is a non-fiction book that follows six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing from moments before to weeks after the bombing. As part of this book reading, we were asked to write questions and answer them with our opinions every twenty pages. This was all in preparation for something called a Socratic seminar which we would do around every forty pages. A Socratic seminar is a form of group discussion created by Socrates to create a dialogue between students rather than a traditional lecture where a teacher is presenting information directly to the students. The story told by Hersey was a very human one. The part that struck a chord with me was the descriptions of the chaos that ensued after the detonation. Reading this book I felt like I was able to get a better understanding of the consequences of the bombing and what survivors had to go through. If you would like to have a more in-depth view of my views on “Hiroshima” you can find all my questions plus answers along with all of my reflections.

The second part of this project was the art aspect. This ended up being one of my favourite parts since I discovered that I quite like conceptual art (with some exceptions). We started our education with some of the basic histories. That is when I learned of Yoko ono and Marcel Duchamp. I specifically mentioned these two because they were both very important when it came to forming my opinions on conceptual art. One forming positive views one forming negative views. My negative views stemmed from the “readymade art” that Duchamp was credited as pioneering in the early 1900s. It’s not that I have no respect for readymade art I have respect for the effort of the idea behind it. It is just my opinion that I feel without changing anything about the item it lacks any way of giving off your idea. I think that interpretation is good but if I were to just put an uncooked hot pocket on a table in a museum most likely nobody would be able to infer the intended meaning. Speaking of museums back to Yoko Ono. During this project, I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Vancouver art museum where they were showing the Yoko ono exhibit. This was interesting since it was the first time I was able to experience some famous conceptual art pieces. One such piece was a short film that I wrote an essay on which you can find here. If you would like to visit the Yoko ono exhibit yourself you can find a link to the exhibits page here.

In some ways creating my piece of art was the hardest and easiest part. That is in thanks to how the creation portion was split up. The creation portion was split up between idea creation and creating the art piece. For the idea creation process, we were put into groups that had a specific theme. This was because The exhibition our art pieces were for was split up into themed rooms. I was not the biggest fan of this idea since it restricted creativity. However, I’m biased since I missed the day when we were put into groups which meant I was put into a group that didn’t match up with the ideas I had been brainstorming. Along with that, the exhibition needed to be split into themed rooms or else it just really wouldn’t have worked. Even though it was a slight inconvenience to me it was necessary and it wouldn’t even be an inconvenience if I was in class. In the end, however, after doing my brainstorming and talking to the teachers I had an accepted pitch. That pitch was about the switch in people’s perception of what is and isn’t possible after the discovery that nuclear technology is possible.

I decided to represent this idea with a locked safe that said unlocked this was to represent the subversion of what people believed was possible. You may be wondering why the safe wouldn’t say locked and be unlocked, well, too bad because telling you why would be very embarrassing.

Finally, the night was here, it was time for the exhibition. This was by far one of the hardest exhibitions I have had to set up. That is thanks to my little side project which was a video that was meant to go along with my room’s historical context statement. You may be wondering why the video was the reason it was hard to set up since you would generally make a video before you had to set it up. Well, the reason may surprise you. It was not because I procrastinated on making the video (although I did also do that) it was my over-complicated idea of how I was going to display the video. That idea was to project the video on the back of a curtain so you could see it on the other side like a screen. This idea wouldn’t have been so hard if it weren’t for the fact that we had certain lights we couldn’t turn off and that the area where we were planning on setting up the projectors was the abysmal entrance to the washroom. My original plan was to Since my video was split into two I would have each half projected onto two different curtains. Although in the end, I ended up combining the two videos and just projecting it onto one curtain. Although this wasn’t what I had originally planned it did end up working well and I think if I had stuck with the two projectors it wouldn’t have turned out as well due to how many problems would arise.

In the end, the night ended up being pretty well I got to talk to lots of people about my art piece. I also got to experience some silent judgment. If I were to do it again I would probably have practiced explaining my art piece a little more. I also enjoyed looking at all my peer’s art.

Overall this project opened my eyes to the world of conceptual art leaving me with some good and bad impressions. If I were to do this project again I would have put more effort into reading and reflecting on Hiroshima by john heresy since I would often procrastinate on reading what I had to. This lead to my reflections not being of a quality that they should have been. This is something I hope to work on in my next project.

“Plaster, dust, blood, and vomit everywhere. Patients dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses.” That was how John Hersey described just a minor fraction of the horrors in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima in his book Hiroshima. The story of Hiroshima is that of six survivors and their journey through the horrors following the detonation of the little boy bomb. In this essay, I will be analyzing Hiroshima and its look into the impacts of the Hiroshima bombing on the civilians who experienced it.

Hiroshima came when propaganda and anti-Japanese hate were still very widespread. It served to give us a human look into the people affected by the bomb instead of some Americanized disconnected view. From the first paragraph, this is demonstrated. This paragraph serves to show us what the survivors were doing just before the bomb went off. “Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital” They weren’t doing sadistic things, they were doing everyday things. This is in stark contrast to the dehumanized view of Japanese people held by most Americans during this time. This feeling is best described by James J Weingartner when talking about Japanese POWs and the American’s “conviction that the Japanese were ‘animals’ or ‘subhuman’”.

Despite trying to just tell an unfiltered account of the events John Hersey was still creating a story of events meaning he had to decide when and how long to focus on certain elements. One such element was the suffering and brutal nature of the aftermath. He did this by not only describing in detail the horrors that occurred but by also including a looming sense of defeat and hopelessness. “he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death” This is a quote that functions as an example of that hopelessness. It is a quote describing Dr.Sasaki’s thoughts as the Red Cross hospital is engulfed in the wounded. In this moment faced with endless amounts of the wounded he had to decide to focus on not healing and recovery but just keeping them from dying and then moving on to the next.

All of this fits into what I interpret as the theme of this novel which is how one action can affect so many people. John Hersey does well showing this by including lines such as “In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.” Now take into account that the population of Hiroshima was approximately 255,000 at the time of the bombing you can see how the majority of its civilians were affected directly by the bomb. But that’s only first hand you also need to look into people affected by the bomb in a second-hand way. What I mean by this is that you didn’t have to be physically affected by the bomb to be affected. I should state however those civilians affected secondarily are not very focused upon in this book. Despite that, the book still emphasized the true amount of people affected. This is shown best when the Red Cross hospital is discussed being described as overflowing with people. “patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochère, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside.” This is a long but important quote that Hersey chose to write in his book. It makes the point to go through every possible place for the injured to be and how those places are all full. All of these details were deliberately put into his book and all show how many people were affected by one thing, the bomb.

In conclusion, Hiroshima effectively shows not only how people were affected by the bomb by describing the injuries and long-term consequences of the radiation but it also shows how all of this was caused by one thing. It wasn’t an air raid it was one flash. A flash that left hundreds of thousands scarred and left a permanent mark in history.

What makes the creation of Google a historically significant moment in the history of technology? To answer that question, we have to look at three main aspects How notable was it at the time, How widespread and lasting the consequences were and How symbolic it is. Before I delve specifically into each of these categories I would like to give a cliff notes version of why I picked to write about google. I picked google because not only did it revolutionize how browsers function but it succeeded so well that it is known by pretty close to everybody on earth.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with this. The first and in my opinion most important category how widespread and long-lasting the consequences were. This category is the most important since it is where google shines the most. I say that because Google is practically unavoidable be it the fact it’s installed on almost every device in some kinda way. Secondly, Google is so widespread it was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary back in 2003.

The final two categories I will condense into one paragraph since I have less today about them. Firstly Google took a while to become a phenomenon not earning that status till 1999 but after that point, it has not fallen in popularity. Finally when it comes to how symbolic Google is you can’t get more symbolic Google is most likely the first thing people think of when they are asked to name an internet browser.

In conclusion, I think I have given a good introduction to why the creation of google was historically significant. Not only because it has taken over the entire internet browser market but it has become an alternative word to you should search it now it’s you should google it. So for all the things I have stated I believe that the founding of Google is historically significant.

How should we govern ourselves? Good question right, I mean it’s a question every voter should be answering so I guess it’s good that it’s the driving question for our latest project.

To answer the driving question we had to do some things first. The biggest of those things was to understand how our government is currently governed. We achieved this goal through a form of note-taking called zettlekastens and lectures.

With this knowledge, we were able to better dissect the current workings of the government and examine how we might be able to change them for the better. With our newfound beliefs about the Canadian government, we were put into groups and given the task of making a statement of intent.

To make our statement of intent we first discussed each of our ideas for the structure looking to see if there were any overlapping ideas or ideas that the majority of us disagreed on. After completing that we were left with a pretty good list of changes to the Canadian government. We were able to make this beautiful statement of intent With that list.

Now that we had all of our ideas and statement of intent we started our final task of creating a party ad. To finish the video on time we had to split up each part of the production. My role was to write the script and assist in editing.

For the script, I decided to stay away from an info dump and instead try to draw attention to the party along with showing on a surface level what we stand for. I did this by talking about all the things that our party thought were wrong about Canada then showing our solutions.

With the script completed Gabe then completed the storyboard and it was time to film. We decided to be as professional as possible when it came to our setup for filming and I’m happy we did that because our footage ended up looking very good.

Finally, all that was left was editing which was almost entirely up to Anders with me only helping slightly with on-screen text.

overall I think our video turned out pretty great although if I were to do it again I would make the effort to try and take some of my footage for drone shots. Still, I think that can be very hit or miss since stock videos will always have better quality. I also think that we could have included more details about our plan.

In conclusion in this project, we never wrote down a concrete sentence that answered the driving question instead we showed our answer through our fictional party. Although if I had to write a sentence that answered the driving question of how should we govern ourselves it would have to be “We should govern ourselves in a way that is similar to Canada’s current government but with a bigger focus on phasing out oil and reinvesting in our environmental future”

 

Have you ever wondered how the government is structured? Good because that’s what this post is all about. More specifically in this post, I will be looking at the similarities between the structure of the Canadian government and the structure of a corporate business.

First, let’s take a brief look at the structure of the Canadian government more specifically the legislative part of the federal government. The legislative sector is the parliament which contains the senate and the House of Commons.

Now for our comparison, we’ll be mostly focusing on the Committee style of business structure. In a committee-style business structure, authority and responsibility are held by a group rather than an individual although generally, the committee doesn’t have the power to make decisions. So basically decisions will be discussed with a group of people and they will report to the board of directors.

Now let’s talk about some of the connections between the two structures. the first and biggest connection is the similarities between the company committee and the house of commons. If you look at the most basic job of the house of commons their job is to debate and vote on bills then send them up to the senate. Now if you compare that to the committee business structure where a committee will discuss ideas then send them to the higher-ups or the board of directors to be the final deciding factor.

This leads me to my second connection which is the board of directors and the senate. Just like before when you start to compare them you will start to see some similarities for example the board of directors and the Senate are both the highest power and in charge of final decision making. one difference between the senate and board of directors is that the board of directors is elected by shareholders whereas the senate is selected.

In conclusion, I think when you start looking at the structure of the Canadian government you can see how in some ways it functions like a company.