So, I’m not sure if I’ve already mentioned this, but we’re currently in the middle of a project.

You might remember we were learning about revolutions a little while back? Specifically, the process of a revolution, with some focus on Crane Brinton’s theory.

More recently, we learned about steampunk .

Basically, we’ve been building “metaphor machines”, or machines which also serve as metaphors. In this case, we’re divided into small groups, and each group is building a machine to represent a revolution. Each part of the machine has to be a metaphor for an important event of the revolution. The machine also has to have a steampunk aesthetic.

My group is building a machine to represent the French Revolution. Because we’re still in the process of building it I don’t have a lot of photos, but right now it looks something like this:

The idea is for a ball to roll down the halfpipes, triggering reactions along the way such as pushing two gears together so they interlock (representing the Tennis Court Oath, an oath taken to say together), a string of lights going out (representing the September Massacres), and a pulley bringing the ball to the top of the machine (representing Napolean’s rise to power and a return to a similar government as at the start of the revolution).

The process of us making the machine, as well as some documentation of it working, and an explanation of the metaphors and the events of the French Revolution, will eventually be made into a video. We’ve been plotting the video by use of a storyboard, and taking some time lapses and pictures to potentially include in it. When it’s the done, the video will actually end up here, on this blog, so look forward to a part two of this post.

Until then, however, I think I’ll wrap this up.

Toodles!

So, it’s time for an Explain Everything. See, I just did a visual essay on the impacts of railroads in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, three of them: easier, faster travel, easier distribution of agriculture, and the breaking down of social barriers.

Now, my first draft of this was very much in need of improvement. Here it is so you can watch it:

The peer critique I got for this draft included making the audio louder, fixing the accidental repeat of the animation while I didn’t say anything at one point, fixing the static sound while I moved things, not using burgers for the food (as they weren’t around in the Industrial Revolution), adding more colour, using more images, and maybe adding music.

So, for my second draft, did I make a solid attempt to fix all of these things?

No. I just rerecorded some of the audio so it was louder, removed the silent animation, and attempting to move things more quietly.

Here’s the second draft:

The feedback I got for that draft included, once again, adding more colour and photos, not using burgers, and making the audio louder. This time it also included not having a white blob around the people, using a map of Britain instead of the world, and having more interesting backgrounds.

To start out, I found better (and more colourful) backgrounds, including a map of Britain instead of the world. Then I attempted to remove any white blobbery from the people. While I managed to cut down the white area pretty significantly, there was still some, and some of the people’s limbs ended up getting cut down quite a bit. However, I decided to move on, and found a picture of an apple as an alternative to the hamburger.

Here is the final draft of my Explain Everything:

While I still could have made some additions, like music, that would have improved it, I think it’s definitely a major improvement over my first draft.

Toodles.

So, we’ve been learning about revolutions.

More specifically, we talked about Crane Brinton’s theory of revolutionary process. Brinton defines a revolution as a “drastic, sudden substitution of one group in charge of running the territorial political entity by another group hitherto not running that government.”, and Brinton’s theory states that a revolution has four stages: the incubation stage, the moderate stage, the crisis stage, and the recovery stage.

In the incubation stage, people feel that the government has done something wrong. Often there is an economic crisis, and the current government may be thought to be weak by the general population. People who are considered intellectuals usually speak against the government at this stage.

In the moderate stage, the people leading the revolution try to get the government to change without extreme violence. This can consist of protests, and sometimes violence or threats on a small scale. Here, the revolutionaries are looking for the government to improve, not be overthrown.

In the crisis stage, radicals step up to take over, and sometimes assassinate members of, the government. There is a lot of violence during this stage. The radicals try and achieve justice, but in cruel or harsh ways.

In the recovery stage, things settle down and return to normal… with a few changes to the government due to the revolution.

Here’s a comic I drew showing the four stages of revolution according to Brinton.

After learning about Brinton’s theory, we were asked to come up with a question about it. My question was whether Brinton’s theory applied to all revolutions, and how it applied to fictional revolutions.

I’m going to stick to the first part of the question… Sort of. The revolution I want to look at, which I don’t think follows Brinton’s theory, is the one against Julius Caesar. However, as I was able to do a lot more in depth research about the events of Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar than the actual event (I.e. actually reading the play), I’ll be following that, and I’m not sure if it’s totally historically accurate.

So, the first, third and fourth stages of Brinton’s theory actually do fit The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. In the first stage, Brutus, Cassius, and the other conspirators believe that Caesar is a weak leader, and has done wrong by killing Pompey. In the third stage, the conspirators assassinate Caesar, and subsequently go to war with Caesar’s supporters. In the fourth stage, they are defeated, and Caesar’s supporters, specifically Octavius, take over as government.

However, they kind of skip over the second stage, where they would try and get the government to change somewhat peaceably. Here is a video with the stages of my comic from earlier versus the events of Julius Caesar.

*cue generic iMovie music*

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Yeah, so there’s a bit of a difference there…

I think this answers my question. Basically: no, not all revolutions necessarily follow Crane Brinton’s theory of revolutionary process, but that doesn’t mean that most don’t.

Toodles.

Once upon a time, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans explored the world. This had quite an impact.

Now, there is not a clear consensus on whether the bulk of this impact was positive or negative, so we looked into it and then attempted to make a museum. And we eventually sort of did, with eight or nine people working on each exhibit (desire to explore, means to explore, and the one I was working on, results to explore.).

We decided to name our project The Men Who Sold the World after the similarly titled David Bowie song, because I made a joke, and because we felt it reflected the greed, male power, and rise of buying and selling at the time.

To recap the European Exploration for you: Europeans, looking for land, people, and goods, went out to sail the world, and they found North America, the “New World”. Short on time and communication, they reacted violently to meeting the natives, and killed many, or took them as slaves. They also spread disease.

But both sides got some payoffs as well. The natives got some new technology, and the explorers got to have tomatoes to make pizza for the first time, as well as new land and they even spread their religion.

I won’t go on about it too much. Personally, I think the results overall were negative, but I can see both sides, and hey, you could always go post your opinion on the Instagram account conveniently made for that exact purpose.

I’ve got to go explore the world now.

Toodles.

Here, have some music while you listen to this post.

And if for whatever reason it fills up your whole screen… Well, I can’t really help you there just read this post first so you can understand what you’re listening to.

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So this is a piano cover of Resistance by Muse (here’s how it’s supposed to sound). Actually, it’s half of one as I couldn’t upload the full thing; it was too long. I apologize for the background noises, and also for any mistakes as I’m still learning how to play the piece.

In fact, my learning to play this piece is actually relevant. (Insert awesome clapping noise here). We have this project right now known as the Blue Sky Design project. Similar to the Star Wars project, this was a fairly open-ended project (although I still managed to get a couple of ideas rejected). We had to be solving a problem, doing a project on something that interested us, and designing something.

So, the problem I was working to solve was lack of motivation, and I decided to design a system to determine what form of motivation best to use in different situations. I also wanted to find out what forms of motivation worked best in different situations, as well as how you could use a few of them together. To test some different forms, I’ve been motivating myself to learn a song on the piano, which I’ve had trouble doing ever since I stopped taking lessons.

Some of the different forms of motivation I’ve tried so far have included:

• knowing that this is a project for school and I have to do it, which worked pretty well for a couple days, but eventually I became really busy and kept forgetting to practice. This was an excellent way to propel myself, and is a form of motivation to fall back on when one of my other methods isn’t going so well.
• rewarding myself immediately after I practiced I tried different kinds of rewards, from going on a walk to eating dinner, and while I found this definitely did motivate me, it didn’t motivate me to do anything really well. I found myself rushing and being careless as I mostly was just playing to get through the piece so I could get whatever my reward was. To get something done fast that doesn’t require a lot of work or thought, such as taking out the trash, I think this could work, but not so much for something that needs you to put a lot of time and effort into it.
• going back and listening to the recording of the first time I played this song and the most recent time (the time before the recording I have posted here) , which actually was surprisingly more motivating than I thought. I could really hear the difference and it made me feel like I was improving and could continue improving. As well, reviewing the recording made it easier for me to hear my mistakes so I could focus on learning certain areas. Overall, it was pretty helpful, but obviously only works when you’re partway through a project. It is important to review and edit things like essays, and seeing that you’ve done something well can be inspiring and motivating when you feel like a project is never ending.

So the recording above is my first try motivating myself with this last type of motivation, and although I did know ahead of time that I was going to be including it in my post, which gave me a second form of motivation, I think it worked pretty well.

I’ve been studying up a bit on the different forms of motivation. As far as I can tell, it can be broken down into intrinsic/internal motivation,and extrinsic/external motivation, and then into eight subgroups:

1. Emotional motivation, when you do something because you enjoy it, or out of anger or sadness or really anytime you do something driven by emotion. The connection here to my piano playing is that I enjoy playing, and I enjoy being able to play well. This can be a really powerful form of motivation, as it generally means that you actually want to be doing something, which is the best reason to do it, at least in my opinion. This is often a reason people do things like playing a game or going out with friends (happiness), writing poetry or doing other expressive arts (any emotion), or even learning a sport as an outlet for anger.
2. Incentive motivation, when you do something for a reward or positive result. The connection to my piano playing is both that I did use a reward system, and I want to do well on this project. As I mentioned before, it can result in rushed or careless work, but it really depends on the situation. This is what motivates a lot of people to do their jobs, especially jobs they don’t enjoy, and is often considered the “carrot” of the carrot/stick metaphor.
3. Achievement motivation is when you want to achieve something, as you may have figured out. The connection to my piano playing is that I would like to do well on the song, and on the project. This is also a pretty powerful form of motivation, but if you aren’t seeing a lot of results, it can get frustrating, and is a form of motivation that often makes people start things they later give up on. However, if you are dedicated enough, it can be an excellent form of motivation. This is what motivates award winning athletes to train, doctors to take many years of intense schooling, and little kids to do art.
4. Fear motivation is when you are scared of a negative consequence. The connection to my piano playing is that I don’t want to fail this project. This is the other half of the carrot/stick metaphor. It is a very powerful motivator, and can have varying degrees of results depending on the negative consequence. It can be especially powerful when it’s combined with an incentive, for instance if people do jobs they don’t like because they want money, they do them well because they don’t want to be fired.
5. Growth motivation, when you want to get better at something, be it a sport, a social interaction, or any other skill. The connection to my piano playing is that I want to improve at this song and see how I’ve grown. As I said before, seeing how much I’ve improved motivated me more than I thought, and it was really helpful, and I think it is something to do when you feel like giving up on a project. This is what motivates people to get help, or start something they want to get better at. Although it can be applied similarly to Achievement Motivation, it’s not quite the same thing.
6. Power motivation is a very interesting sort of motivation but I won’t get too far into it. Essentially, it’s when people do things to gain power, or to feel powerful. The connection to my piano playing is that I want to have the power to play a song well. I think you could do a lot with this type of motivation, in certain situations, but it has also led to negative consequences in the past. For an example of power motivation, I’d say any dictator, but actually a lot of politicians. If you don’t like politics, this is also part of what motivated Batman– he wanted the power to stop villains. That’s not really the prime example however as Bruce Wayne already had a lot of power.
7. Social motivation, when you do something to impress or please other people. This is often considered not to be as effective as the more intrinsic motivations,
as you aren’t doing something for yourself, but it can lead to people doing things like dares, and often is more effective when it’s something like trying to do what your parents want you to do.
8. Affiliation motivation is when you do something to fit in, such as conforming to a beauty standard because you think it will make you more popular, or pretending to like something because someone else likes it. I can’t say I really have a connection with this in terms of piano playing, but I have done it in the past, although I was about six years old and stopped watching Dora because “it wasn’t what the cool kids did”. After that I kind of stopped doing things to fit in because it wasn’t making me any happier.

So yeah, there will be a second part to this post at some point, but for now…

Toodles.

So I don’t know if I’ve mentioned already, but we’re doing a unit on religion right now. And for part of this unit, we’ve been visiting some different religious sites.

First of all, we went to a Hindu place of worship. As I’m doing a group project on Hinduism right now, I took a lot of pictures.

After that, we visited a few Buddhist temples, in one of which I didn’t take many pictures because I was too busy meditating. We also got to learn a chant but that may has been wasted on me as I’ve already forgotten what it was and what it meant.

We also visited a Sikh temple, where we were served lunch, and even given Rice Krispie squares and– what do you mean this isn’t a blog post about food? Fine then. Back to the religion part. We also got to try meditating in the Sikh temple, and we were told some information about the founding of Sikhism.

Now, the next week, we were set to go to a church and a mosque. So to prepare for this, we did a quick info check to make sure we remembered what religions these corresponded with. It went something like this:

“Okay, so a mosuque is what religion? Yes, Willa?”

“Seriously?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that the Jewish place of worship is a Synagogue. But for some reason at that exact moment I thought it was the right answer. Just in case I had any credibility left, I also wore pants with skulls on them into the church and mosque, which may not have been the best decision but they kindly didn’t comment.

So, yeah. I’ll just sneak quietly out of the room now.

Toodles!