Above is a quote from a high level Canadian government official in response to a question about how many Jewish people should be let into Canada after the end of World War II.
We just finished another project in PLP 10. This one was about World War II, and it’s impact on the Canadian identity. Other elements in this project included an act of service, and a new note taking technique. This project was jam packed full of research, writing, formatting, and revising, so let’s hop straight in before I start to lose my marbles!
Let’s start with the note taking technique. As the name, Smart Brevity, suggests, this technique is meant to make your notes brief, simple and in order. There’s actually an entire book about Smart Brevity (That you can get here), and surprisingly enough for PLP, we actually didn’t read it. Smart Brevity has four core elements. The muscular tease, the lede, the the context, and the option to go deeper. The muscular tease is usually a headline that uses six or less words. The lede is a memorable first sentence that includes the one big takeaway of the note. The context explains the facts, ideas, or thoughts using axioms. An axiom is a guiding phrase that provides structure for your notes. The go deeper section has more information that provides a greater understanding of the topic. There’s also a lot of specific, and strict formatting regulations that I had to follow. I tried making Smart Brevity notes during the learning that we were doing in class about WWII. Here’s my most successful Smart Brevity attempt:
The next portion of this project was our act of service. This is also where the final product of this project comes into play. Our class will gift a Canadian flag that will be flown at the Juno Beach Centre in France, along with a collection of our essays in a magazine style, that our teachers are calling a zine (pronounced “zeen”), to the local Lynn Valley Legion. Our zine will also be sent across the Atlantic to the Juno Beach Centre in France. To earn the money to buy the flag, each student had to do at least one hour of community service, and find a patron who would give us $10 for our work.
When I was younger, over the summer, I would do classes at a local STEM camp called Zen Maker Labs, where I did activities like 3D printing, coding, and robotics. I thought it would be a great idea to volunteer in their kids classes. I did six hours of volunteering in the same classes I’d done when I was younger. It was a great experience, and it definitely helped me get more of an understanding of some types of jobs I can consider in the future.
I asked my grandma if she would be my patron, because I knew that she has a family connection to WWII. She agreed, and gave me some more information and details that I didn’t know about her family, including that her father and uncle fought in the war.
Onto the zine! There were two big steps to making our zine. Step 1 was to write an essay with perfect MLA sourcing and formatting, and step 2 was to reformat it so that it fits into a zine. I decided to theme my essay around how Canadian’s opinions on minority groups, specifically Jewish people, changed due to the events that occurred during WWII. I came up with the thesis “The fight against the Holocaust influenced the Canadian identity because it promoted the value of equality among religions and cultures in Canada.” The next step was researching information on my topic. The research definitely took a while, but it wasn’t too hard, and I was able to find all of the information I needed. However, sourcing my work was a whole other story. It was very challenging to figure out the exact rules for formatting the in-text citations, as well as the works cited page. It took me multiple revisions and editions before I finally got it right.
The process of writing my essay was also quite hard because I had struggles with summarizing and making my information fit within my paragraph topics. I also had some challenges because I wanted to include information about WWII in Europe, while also keeping my essay focussed on Canada. I initially had a paragraph with information about what Hitler wanted, why he wanted it, and what he did, but after a session of peer critique, I decided to replace it with a paragraph about Canada’s society in the 1930s leading up to the start of WWII. Below, are pictures of my essay to show the formatting that I spent hours perfecting through many revisions.
Reformatting my essay into a zine was pretty easy, although I did need to make a few revisions and changes. To create the zine format, I had to make sure my essay and sources were exactly 2 or 3 pages. Not 2 and a half pages. Not 3 and a little bit. Not a tiny bit less than 2 pages. Exactly 2 or 3 pages. To do this, I didn’t change any of the content of my essay, but instead, I adjusted the size, changed the alignment, put it into columns, and added a quote and some pictures. One of the pictures I found was actually of my great grandfather who was a captain in the Canadian army in WWII.
I learn a lot about Canadian history and how Canada became a very multicultural society while doing research for this project. It was interesting to see the role economic and politics played in promoting the values of equality.
Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope you enjoyed reading about my progress through this project!