Have you ever had your school force you to do hard labour without pay, fly a $500 flag, make a “Zine” (please read it as zeen before Ms. Mc takes my kneecaps), talk to a president of a legion, and teach you how to take notes?

No?

Just the notes part?

I’m weird for the rest of the stuff?

Wow. Okay then.

Let me explain then, when this all happened to me

This humanities project, Save Juno Beach, was our WWII project for the year. We were focused on how Canadians were shaped by WWII. Our driving question was “What role did the conflict of WWII play in shaping Canadian identity?” We delved into this topic through a myriad of different activities, the first of which was a rather lighthearted one. Our introduction to save juno beach was a class before it was supposed to be, and I’m glad it was. We stood in a circle and Ms. Madsen assigned us roles as we played out the inter-war period (thats the time between WWI and WWII). The reason I’m talking so much about this is because of how well it was done. It made relatively boring history entertaining and memorable, so props to you, Ms. Madsen. Another activity we did, this one a bit more central to the project was an hour (me saying it was a day may or may not have been an exaggeration) of volunteering to help us understand what service means. To me, service isn’t necessarily about what you do, it’s more about who you do it for and why. If someone’s helping starving kids in Africa just for people to call them a hero, that isn’t charity, you’re doing it with the intention of being reimbursed with a better reputation. After we completed our hour of service, we were to find a patron to donate $10 to the school to fly a flag in Juno beach Normandy, France. After flying the Canadian flag, we would have it shipped back, and presented to the leader of the lynn valley legion.

To talk about some less physically engaging assignments, let’s look at my multi-paragraph composition (MPC) (for those of you who are new here, that’s curiculumese for essay), and my zine (please remember what I said at the start of this post). These two are relatively interchangeable, which is because the zine is derived from my MPC, it just has photos, and is formatted in a way that doesn’t look weird (double spacing is a no). Speaking of, the biggest curveball of these assignments is the fact that we have to use MLA 9 formatting. Now, this is difficult for me, not because of the citations, but because of literally everything else. I didn’t have one thing wrong with the citations, but I didn’t double space my text, there isn’t supposed to be a comma between your last name and the page number, you can’t have acronyms in your title (such as WWII), etc. this is all a long way of saying, the writing of my MPC was a good test of resilience (I submitted about 10 or so revisions total). The zine, was approved second try, for those of you wondering. Speaking of, here’s a PDF of both my MPC and zine. Zine, WWII and Canadian Identity

The last part of my humble (and smart, cool, engaging, funny, entertaining) blog, is reflection. How have I improved, evolved, changed, advanced, .. you get the point. The biggest advancement for me during this project was me getting better at more formal writing, and making tools to help me with writing about sensitive topics. Most of my writing is like this, not very academic or formal, it’s more focused on being funny (hopefully). As you might be able to guess, cracking a few jokes about a battle to some WWII veterans is a bad idea, so I had to get better at making my writing proper and academic. The other big skill I worked on was note-taking, as I previously mentioned the 10s learnt about smart brevity, which is a new way Mr. Hughes want us to take our notes. (Here’s an example)

Thanks so much for reading, and please have a good rest of your day or night!