Month: October 2020

Weekly Reflection October 24th

After a refresher this week on what this post is supposed to be about, I am still lost, but I’ll try my best.

This week I learned that the line between shrew and “good” is very vague.

I can speak, have been able too since I was young, my first word was “dadda” when I was 1. Since then I have been spewing words as I learn then. Also known as speaking or talking. Only recently did I realize that because of my gender I would have been punished for spewing words, had I been born earlier. The lottery of birth protected me but it did not shield me from it entirely. I was really shocked that men would actually prefer it if women, or their wife, didn’t have any opinions, and didn’t partake speaking on any subjects other then the house. Thats like having a conversation with a wall. Wouldn’t it be more fun to argue a point? To see each others sides? To express both of your thoughts, not just make the woman stomach them, and the man speak for both of you?

We took a shrew test this week, to see how shrew’d we were, (I highly suggest you take the quiz, linked here). The woman who wrote the quiz was writing it to show women what they need to do to change, she wanted your score to be as low as possible. I took the quiz and was proud of my high score until I saw the objective. I was sort of confused. Obviously there are areas where I found myself placing low numbers, but I finished the quiz and got the score, “your man is probably immobilized, comatose and cached underground.” Hmmm. My man is dead? He couldn’t keep up? What did I “disrespect him to death?” Thats new. I found myself questioning where the male equivalent was. Where is the matching him and her shrew quiz? Huh? But that was the extent of the quiz. I also realized that it didn’t matter what the man had said, each of the categories (disrespecting, criticizing, nagging, lecturing, opposing, and punishing) were just never allowed for a woman to express. Basically a submissive woman is ideal. The woman who wrote this is obsessed with demoing homes, and finds herself happiest “when she has a power tool in her hand.” So how does she get to do a “male” job, but is not allowed to have her own opinions? Where is the line?

This question of where is the line is something that just continues to reoccur, with the suffragettes, there were “feminists” who were against the movement and found it was working against their efforts. When I did research for my Academic Conclusion this week I found countless STEM women who had had their discoveries usurped from them. Are they supposed to be happy that people realized? Next time they’ll get the nobel prize, right? Would it be inappropriate to fight? And when we read taming of the shrew this week, and had to draw the line between good and shrew, this line, the same line I have been talking about the entire time, is very very hard to find. 

This is when I wish I was in math, so I could just find the equation to the line. So I could find what the maximum amount of effort I could put in before I cross the line.

This line is exponentially hard to differentiate between, and I look forward to slowly placing it.

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Weekly Reflection October 18th

Welcome to my weekly recap! I will be creating one of these every week to just cover what I have learned each week, so sit back an relax and let me wrap up an old project and uncover a new one.

This week began with a lovely and much needed pro-d day. I was in Tofino, obviously respecting COVID guidelines, we barley ever went into town, and surfed the entire weekend, which made me feel much better after a stressful 5 weeks. Monday we headed home, realizing that missing one day of school was the equivalent of missing a day 2 week. So I was back and ready on Tuesday. On Tuesday I was in class and we just wrapped up our google map, and made sure that everyone had their information in. The google map was almost completely fined by the end of class, Jesse just had to finish putting the numbers on each stop, and we had to double check and make sure everyones info was in. Here is our final product, and here is the Wolves (class b’s) final product the pamphlet. On Thursday we officially hit 5 weeks and switched cohorts, english becoming an everyday class, and math becoming an every other day class, which also meant that we switched to Ms. Willemse as our teacher and switched projects. The new project we have begun Ms. Willemse has not released to us the driving questions but I have reason to believe that it has something to woman’s suffrage and The Taming Of The Shrew, a Shakespeare comedy, actually one of my favourite plays I have ever seen. So let me rehash this weeks learning.

“So they basically steal Dom’s wallet, and someone straps a bomb to themselves outside, but my bare legs are the big issue? Got it.” Joey a character on the Netflix show “Grand Army”,  a newly released and super interesting TV show based on “Slut: The Play,” says to her teacher, during a lockdown in the first 20 minutes of the show. Joey had just come from gym, and didn’t have time to change. Her friend attacking her with a rude comment on the way out of the gym, “you’ve had an abortion haven’t you?” Joey feels unfairly treated which is the basis of the work we’ve been doing in class this week. We’ve been covering an intro to the treatment of woman in the past and present, mostly relating to the word slut. To be called a slut is basically someone saying you sleep around, and regarding you as less then. Its a really detrimental term, and it sucks that ever since entering high school it has entered the lingo for many young woman, including Seycove students. In class we watched 4 clips where the word slut is thrown around, clips that were part of major on air tv shows. The first of them being the notorious, “Jane you ignorant slut.” Our class had a big discussion about this one, how all she had done was stand up for another woman, an all of a sudden her sexual life became what she was defined as, honestly this one sickens me. The way Jane immediately is quiet, and how she must shake his hand at the end, makes me green. I see reciprocal versions of this all the time, and I’m tired of girls feeling like they need to stomach the way they feel to make the man happy. Just the other day a girl (no exposing over here) was reading off of a card in a game. She was reading slowly and none of us had a problem with this, just reading, we were in no rush, until a boy at the table said “Just shut up and give me the card. Your stuttering and its taking to long. Nobody wants to hear you read this card.” My mouth fell open. I knew this boy, he was my friend, and I was so infuriated. I told him it was wrong, and that he had been incredibly rude, and so did another girl at the table, but the girl that he was rude too just looked like she had been stabbed. He answered with the line older then time itself, “it was a joke. I was only kidding, cant you take a joke.” If my mouth wasn’t already falling to the floor, then it had just hit the core of the earth. The other girl who had spoken up made him apologize, though he laughed through the whole thing, and said “I’m sorry”. I had expected the girl who was targeted to not say anything, or tell him how he had wronged her, and tell him how an apology doesn’t fix the fact she may be self conscious about reading out loud now.

But she said “its ok.”

“its ok.”

its ok. I almost can’t even type this because it aggravates me so much. She just stomached everything she was feeling, keep in mind she looked like she as going to cry, and made sure that the boy didn’t hurt. AGHHHHHH, its the same thing as, “Jane you ignorant slut.” Boys don’t think these things hurt, but they do hurt, and woman need to stop telling them don’t. I obviously realize that there is a lot of difference between what I saw and the notorious line, and how minimal this seems as well. I also realize that as a white woman I have it easy compared to many other people, but it hurt me to watch this, and I can’t stand the girl thinking that it was her bad for reacting. This sort of stuff has happened to me in the past before and I know how to react now. I know how to stand up for myself, which often makes men feel inferior, or attacked. I am sick of letting their opinion rule me. I am a loud, outspoken, and opinionated person for a reason. I am also sick of when girls come back and respond in an appropriate manner, boys almost always get threatened and attack physical looks, and personal attributes. But anyways I need to get back to my week, I could talk about this stuff for years.

The “Jane you ignorant slut,” quote also relates to a reading we had to do in english. The reading was about the role of a woman in marriage. Since I handed mine in I don’t have access to the actual reading, but I remember the just of it. Quotes from the reading read like “the woman has no-one other then her man,” even though earlier in the paragraph the reading had said that the man has friends and events and sports and an unlimited list of things to keep his company. It also mentioned how woman were the inferior species, and men were merely taking their god given right by being the more powerful person, and getting to make all decisions. (vomit). The sickening thing about that reading was that the author thought they were writing the truth. That that was sold or given to woman to religiously follow. Which boggles me. Anyway I need to get on with my day, and probably do some sort of exercise to get all this pent up anger out.

So I’ll see you guy next week.   

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A revamped historical tour of Deep Cove

PLP has begun and I can’t believe this is only my first post. Mr. Hughes told me during the normal year we would be somewhere in January now, so having to do one post is incredible, they will be much more frequent now. In english we have created a pamphlet and a google map as part of our historical walking tour of deep cove.

Pamphlet FINAL

The premise for the project was to answer the driving question “How can we as historians uncover and share stories about our community?” The final product was planned to be a historical walking tour, with plaques and a livestream of us taking the tour. COVID set up many barriers in this project which ended up altering our final project, causing us to add the map and remove the plaques. So let me explain this project.

Firstly, our teacher Ms. Maxwell took a shot in the dark and reached out to the Deep Cove Heritage Society (DCHS), and got a response from a man named Jim. Ms. Maxwell ended up being the first person to contact the DCHS from Seycove ever, and they were so excited to share their resources with us. We had previously done some research about the history of the cove and the Seymour area with help from the DCHS published books, “Echoes Across The Inlet,” and “Echoes Across Seymour,”

 

which helped us grasp an understanding of the historical past of each of our locations. We used this information to make a timeline highlighting certain events and dates the struck us as important from each chapter of both books (class A did one book and class B did another). When creating this timeline we also added national, and major world events to understand some of the influences that may have altered our history, and played a role in the way people made decisions. Take for instance my location which was the Corfield’s Dance Hall, located right on the water at the bottom of Gallant Ave. Corfeild’s went through many owners, but the reason the second owners sold was because of WW2. They fell into debt and ended up closing and selling the hall. Including the major world event, WW2, I was able to see why the hall closed abruptly and begin to realize that history is not just a set of loose dates, everything leads to something else, which was key to understanding in this project.

Once the entire class had delved into the readings and done some research, we all made a list of stops on the existing walking tour we would like to make “our” stop. What I mean by “our” stop is that we would be focusing on one stop for the project which would become “our”stop. My three proposed stops were, Corfield’s Dance Hall/DCK, Covecliff Elementary School, and the Moore Family Store. I ended up with Corfield’s Dance Hall, and Deep Cove Kayak which was perfect. To start research on the past of both locations (I thought they were in the same place, which was a hard truth to learn later on down the road) I dug a bit into “Echoes Across Seymour,” in which there was a whole blurb about the past of the kayak shop, including dates and names, which was incredibly helpful. The only hitch was there was nothing about Corfield’s. I mustered on, and ended up just talking about the land by the water in the cove, making sure not to step on the yacht club’s toes. Our first proper assignment which would carry into our final project was the draft of the blurb for the pamphlet. 100 words max, and it had to include two historical perspectives, as well as all your history, of the best of it. (Mine is on stop #7 on the pamphlet) I struggled a bit with this being fluent in writing larger amounts of text, I was bit daunted to write less. My first draft sucked, I made revisions following that (ex. completely cutting out Deep Cove Kayak Shop from the pamphlet) and my second draft looked much better. Once our pamphlet blurbs were in we could then return to beefing up the words since the new blurb would go on the google map that my group (the eagles) were creating. We also assigned roles for our group to fall into to help smooth out any confusion. I became a communicator between The Eagles, and The Wolves, just making sure that everyone had handed there info in to the right place and was on time. I also was supposed to help Jesse with the route, but it was cut so that job disappeared. While the map and pamphlet were being made we also had to finish up our individual stops, things like digital enhancement and our audio recording, were necessary to completing the stop. For my digital enhancement I scored a phone interview with Erian Baxter, the co-owner of the Deep Cove Kayak Shop (DCK), her mom started up the business in 1983, and Erian continues on her legacy today. In the interview I asked her questions about the past present and future of the DCK, here is the interview if you would like to listen. After the interview one of the last hurdles was the on scene video, the camera was a bit shaky, but I was happy with the video.

Here is the whole classes video!

Once everything was handed in it was just a matter of putting all the pieces together, making sure that everything worked. Here is the final product in length and I highly recommend you try visiting the stops if your local to North Van. The tour itself would be a very cool fair weather walk of scenic Deep Cove! Also if your in the cove check out Deep Cover Heritage Society, and pic up one of our pamphlets. I believe thats the end, this project was really fun and I enjoyed the class time we got to share ideas and brainstorm together.

  Competencies

The competencies being assessed in the duration of this project was “writing and designing text and using resources.” I felt I demonstrated this strongly by my many edits and recreations of my blurb, as well as making sure that I always held a good grasp of the Historical Thinking Concepts from historicalthinking.ca.  I also made sure to cite my resources, and keep track of the websites and books I referenced, sadly there wasn’t much about the history of the Deep Cove Kayak Shop and Corfield’s Dance Hall, but I did find enough resources. All in all I felt this was a strong project for me, and am excited to start the next project.

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