Zine. Lebensruam. Absquatulate. Foible. I don’t know what any of those words mean. 

“Zine: A noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.”

The latest PLP Humanities project that wrapped up was all about World War 2. Now stay with me here, but this project focused on a couple of aspects. They are:

• World War 2
• The act of service 
• Zine
• Juno Beach
• Essay writing
• MLA formatting 
• Smart Brevity notes 

The driving question was “What role did the conflict of World War II play in shaping Canadian identity?”, and we were to answer this question in various different ways. 

To start this project, we were handed the task of completing a service. Any service. But before we did this service, we needed to find a third-party to sponsor us 10$ to do said service. The only rule for the service was that the service can not be paid for by the “employer”. 

Now, this 10 bucks was not going to us. Oh no, no, no, this money was going to buying a flag that once flew at the Juno Beach Centre in Normandy, France, and give it to the Lynn Valley Legion. We had learnt about Juno Beach through the expert teaching of Ms. Madsen, and we all understood the importance of it. We were even showed the opening 30-minutes of Steven Spielberg‘s ‘Saving Private Ryan’, just to really get the message across that Juno Beach is ridiculously important, the those fellas who are trying to urbanize it are severely out of touch. For my service, I volunteered at a hockey game. This is what I wrote after my service, just ignore the 3rd person writing: 

Nikan decided to go on-brand for his act of service, volunteering at a North Van Wolf Pack hockey game. The North Van Wolf Pack are a junior ‘A’ hockey team apart of the Pacific Junior Hockey League. They play their home games out of Harry Jerome community centre. 

On November 16th, the Port Moody Panthers visited on NSWC Night, featuring NHL alumni Kyle Turris signing autographs for the North Shore Wolf Pack fans.

 Nikan was placed at the top of the arena, tasked with selling merchandise, and advertising a ‘puck toss’ contest. He learnt about customer service, the operation of running a hockey game, and improving confidence. Although service is not unique to Canada, I think the core values of being Canadian are reflected in service. Kindness, community, and helping others are some things that jump out to me as a Canadian, that work in the context of service. 

We also learnt about Smart Brevity notes, which is a professional, efficient way to write notes.

After all of our money had come in, we successfully donated the flag to the Lynn Valley Legion, which is a really wonderful veteran-house in North Van. It really seems like a youth-centre, just for people who severed in the army. 

Next up, essay. 

We were all to come up with a thesis, then write an MLA-formatted essay backing it up. Although not WW2 caused, my parents are immigrants, so I thought I would write about immigration to Canada as result of WW2. Writing the essay wasn’t too bad, but man, MLA-formatting isn’t fun. I really hope there aren’t any MLA-fanboys reading this. 

In MLA, every single aspect of your formatting is intentional. Indents, spacing, fonts, margins, sources, AHHHHHHH. 

After revising, and revising, my essay had finished. 

Then suddenly, I realized the essay wasn’t the boss-fight, it was just the warmup.

Ladies and gentlemen, the zine.

A zine (“Zeen”) is basically a mini magazine about one particular subject. We were all supposed to compile our essays into a zine. Sounds easy enough? No.

There were SO MANY rules we had to follow while formatting our zines. Ms. Mc really wanted to test us with this one. All of our zines had to be:

–  Baskerville font

• 11 font size for paragraphs 
• 13 font size for titles 
• Justified text 
• Indents before every paragraph 
• No spaces before paragraphs 
• Text in columns 
• Must be EXACTLY 2 or 3 pages.
• More

This was rough. The first time I submitted it, I was pretty confident that my zine followed criteria. I was sitting back in my chair, chilling. Then I hear a voice across the room. 

“Where’s Nikan?”.

It’s Ms. McWilliam. She then proceeded to tell me everything wrong with my essay. I had to go back to the drawing board, after I thought my story was Grammy-nominated (Ok I just wrote that metaphor and now I feel like a poet or like if Noah Kahan was a 10th grader). 

After VERY CAREFUL revisions, I submitted my new zine- a couple times. I waited, my palms shaking, lips trembling. I look at Ms. Mc, she looks at me. Her fist comes up, with her thumb skyward. 

I did it. 

Here’s my zine:

This was not a project I really loved doing, but those are the projects you learn the most from. This will definitely be a project that I’ll think about for a long time, and one in which the things learnt, particularly formatting, essay writing, etc. will stick with throughout my educational journey. The pros really outweigh the cons. 

Well, the winter exhibition is tomorrow, so I’m gonna go tend to that. See you soon, Nikan- Out!