Hello, Internet. Merry December. The classroom is full of fairy lights and poinsettias, students are wandering the halls in Santa hats and festive jumpers, and everyone’s getting ready for the Winter Exhibition.

However, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about
Social Studies. More specifically, it’s about a socials project we’ve been working on concerning social justice throughout the history of Vancouver.

For this project, we were split into groups based on the specific topics we were interested in, and asked to create a podcast about our topic, and how it affected Vancouver, in the interwar years and now. My group’s topic was Aboriginal Rights.  Specifically, we focussed on two things: Residential Schools, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In order to get some firsthand information on residential schools and First Nations rights, we interviewed Joy Fontaine-Cramer over the phone. She gave us an insight into the lives of her parents growing up, and her job now. We had to cut down her interview in order to integrate it into our podcast properly, but listening to all of what she had to say was very interesting, and I wish we could have kept more of it in.

Our final project ended up going on SoundCloud, and we’ve sent it to Joy Fontaine-Cramer in the hopes that she can listen to it,

Now that we’ve finished the podcast part of our project, we’re working on writing essays that we’ll eventually amalgamate into a letter to send to Terry Beech. Each letter must address a problem related to our subject, and suggest a way to help solve that problem. For my group, we’re addressing the problem of stereotypes surrounding aboriginal peoples, with the suggestion to add discussion about these stereotypes into the BC curriculum in order to dispel them in the future.

Toodles!

Hello, Internet.

So, last week was National History Week, and in order to celebrate it we did a mini history project. We worked in small groups to research the history, and particularly the namesakes, of different places around Vancouver. Each group chose one place to research that they thought was interesting or iconic. The place my group chose was Blood Alley.

We then made a video about that place, in the style of this video.

Now, while Blood Alley is a somewhat gruesome name, the history of the alley, originally known as Trounce Alley after Thomas Trounce, is much less sketchy than it sounds. It was a pretty normal alley that was renamed in the 70s during Gastown’s rénovation into a commercial heritage district, as it was believed the name Blood Alley would interest more people than “Trounce Alley”.

Rumours were then spread about the alley having a grisly past for pretty much the same reason: to attract tourists. An alley that was said to have been soaked with blood each night after the butchers threw buckets of blood down it, or that was the site of public executions, or was rife with fights and other violence, is much more interesting than just an alleyway that nothing super notable happened on.

Here is our full video detailing the history and namesake of Blood Alley:

Toodles!

Hello, Internet.

So, in Health and Career, we’ve been learning about work safety.

We started out by watching a video of a few different situations in which young adults were permanently injured due to improperly following work safety rules, and filling out some worksheets about job safety in our own respective work experiences, and the Occupational Health and Safety Regulation.

We also talked about the required training for different jobs, and how being trained thoroughly can help you stay safe at work.

We were supposed to have a guest speaker come in to talk to us about work safety, but they didn’t show, so we instead did an activity where we looked at different scenarios and figured out what was unsafe about them, and how they could have been made safe.

As part of our learning for this unit, we were each asked t create a visual to represent work safety. I drew some common safety related symbols (no fire, toxic chemicals, tripping or falling), and a girl giving a thumbs up.

We were also asked to talk about how we would each handle our own workplace safety. My current job has very little in the way of safety hazards, and is generally safe as long as you use common sense. However, for jobs in the future that might be more risky, I’ll make sure to stay out of potentially dangerous situations that I haven’t recieved proper training for, and to wear the appropriate safety gear and use safety precautions when needed. I’ll also keep aware of the fact that I don’t have to put myself in a situation in which I feel unsafe.

Toodles!

Hello, internet.

Recently, we’ve been making podcasts to show our learning about World War One. We were each asked to choose one soldier who fought in WWI, tell a story about their life, and answer the driving question: How did WWI shape Canada’s identity as a nation?

The soldier I chose to focus on was a man called Herbert Peterson. He disappeared in a battle in 1917, and his bones were found, identified and buried almost a century later. This story can be seen as a literal example of the way World War One has left us with “skeletons”; consequences and effects of the war that have not fully gone away even today.

In the process of making this podcast, I did research, wrote a script, and recorded a version with that script before realizing that I wasn’t telling the story the way I wanted to be telling it.

My original script started off as follows:

Hi. So, today we’ll be talking about World War One, and more specifically about the story of a soldier called Herbert Peterson.

Private Herbert Peterson was born in Scranton, Kansas, on December 18, 1895, to Julia and Charles G. Peterson. A little less than 21 years later, in Calgary, Alberta on February 22, 1916, he enlisted to go to war. On the day of his enlistment, notes were made of everything from his hair colour to the three small scars on his upper arm, and after a medical examination, he was declared fit to serve as a soldier. He served in the Alberta regiment of the Canadian Infantry.

While the information I started out with was interesting, and introduced Herbert Peterson, I thought it made the story feel a little boring as it played out. Eventually, I decided to start off the podcast with the interesting part of the story, then go back and explain the backstory later. I also decided to drop the introduction altogether, and I think the podcast is better for it.

Toodles.