Driving question: How do ideas drive change?

When you think of December, whats the one holiday you think of? That’s right, The PLP winter exhibition!

The PLP winter exhibition took place recently, and a good time was had by all. The 9s- accompanied by yours truly- had a project all about revolutions!

The project was called “Metaphor Machines”, because the final evidence of learning was to create a Rube Goldberg machine, with metaphors from our chosen revolution. A Rube Goldberg machine is a big giant contraption with tons of connections between little events eventually leading to a final ending in which an anticlimactic task is preformed. These were made famous by cartoonist, Rube Goldberg.

 

I had the absolute honour and privilege to be apart of the greatest country in the world….. ‘MURICA *eagle caw*🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸💵🗽⚾🏈🍔🌭!!!!!!

We learnt about Crane Brinton’s anatomy of a revolution, and we were to create a infographic about it, following our revolution. Below, you can see an explanation of Crane’s anatomy, and my infographic. 

My group mates are as followed :

Nate – The brains 

Alex C – The metaphor mastermind

Lucas – Video master 

Julio – Editor in chief 

Claire – Cosmetics coordinator 

Nikan – Me, creative director.

I am so very grateful for my group. nobody slacked, everyone was committed, and it was just a fun environment to be in. After turning revolution metaphors into machine concepts, we began building. 

Building was fun, stressful, and everything in between. My group was full of hard working, smart individuals. They worked so hard on the documentary and machine, they were driven to creating an amazing product. 

Here’s where I come in. I’m really bad at working with my hands, and I communicated that to my team, and they were happy to accommodate me. I spent my days creating decorations, and overall, just trying to make the exhibition aspect be fun. 

But here’s what went wrong for me. I was drawing some decorations, and I started thinking. 

I became so worried that I was bringing my team down. I didn’t think I was doing any less work than anyone, but I felt the work I was doing was meaningless compared to everyone else. My mates were creating beautiful machine parts, filing a documentary, while I was sitting silently, folding a piece of paper into the statue of liberty. 

Soon enough, it was exhibition day. 

Our area of the library had a massive whiteboard along the wall, and my group assigned me to draw a massive mural across it, since they knew I loved to draw. So the entire setup, I was standing on a chair, drawing eagles and British flags. 

I focused way too much on this darn whiteboard. 

I wanted it to be gorgeous, and kept getting upset with myself over the fact that it didn’t look like the Sistine Chapel. 

I just kept erasing, and erasing, and erasing. At this point, we were about 90 minutes from doors open, and I had just about nothing. My group mates then – rightfully so- started pushing me to finish it. I began rushing, and it didn’t turn out how I wanted. 

In the end, it was just ok. The audience seemed to like it, but most people didn’t notice it because of the dim lighting. 

The exhibition itself went fine. I spent most of the time pouring drinks, or standing next to the machine. A big mistake I made was I was absolutely petrified of talking to people. A kind family pulled up to our exhibition, and Nate told me to go introduce them to our project. I was so terrified, I began slowly trotting towards them. I quickly rushed the introduction, and didn’t do great. I wish I had better prepared myself. Our machine didn’t work very often. When it would stop, one of us would just go push it along. We couldn’t have wasted peoples time. 

Ironically, the 2 times our machine worked were the 2 attempts while I was out greeting. I guess I was a bad omen. 

And time to answer the driving question. In case you forgot, the driving question is “How do ideas drive change?”

I think ideas drive change because an idea is never uniquely yours. Say I went on national television and said an obnoxious statement. Maybe I said “Ice cream is better with ketchup”. Sounds nasty, right? But I guarantee if I said that worldwide, I could fine lots of people who’d agree with me. That’s basically how revolutions start. Someone realizes that their government is incompetent, and other people join in through idea sharing. 

Welp, love, take care, Nikan- out!