Let’s get Goghing!
So that time has come where Destination Imagination will strike fear into the hearts of those terrified of performing infront of others (like myself). So who’s nervous?
If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, a while being 2 whole years, wow 2 years that’s terrifying to think of anyway long time readers would know what destination imagination is, but I’ll go over a recap for those of you who need to learn. DI, or destination imagination, is a worldwide organization that hosts annual events for children of all age groups to come together with friends and learn skills that can be actually used and applied in the real world, such as creative or innovative thinking (shout out to the crazy ones). I could go on explaining what this event is but the lovely team at DI have made a video explaining what exactly goes down so here it is.
Now in DI there are different categories for each team to perform in, this year our options were Scientific, Engineering, Technical and finally my choice Fine Arts. I’m going to try to explain the Fine Arts challenge but if you interested in finding out about any of the other challenges, or really just anything DI related, I recommend you visit their website right here.
So my challenge is Fine Arts, the name of the challenge “In Motion” we were tasked to make a performance based around three things a piece of visual art, a kinetic art piece and a piece of reimagined art. These things are a piece of artwork that’s publicly known (visual art), a piece of art that has some form of movement via a mechanism (kinetic art) and the original visual art being transformed into one of these new art forms, Dance, Illusion, Puppetry, Music, Pantomime or a Spoken Word Poem. So in short we had to make a story based around these three things, but wait there’s more we had to include 2 extra things known as team choice elements. Essentially these are things that make our performance unique and different to others. Team choice elements can be anything decided by your team that everyone relates too. But in order to choose team choice elements, we needed a team. My group consisted of 3 wonderful grade 9’s called Charlie, Aiya and Melissa, but there was also my grade 10 buddy Kira (you can click on their names to see their blogs). Now I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to disclose what my team did for these exactly because we don’t want anyone stealing our ideas (that’s right DI is still not over) but I can assure you we came up with a solution we all agreed on. Now this may all seem like a lot, but I haven’t even gotten into any of the specifics yet, so if your interested you can find the document of rules on the DI website.
So now we knew what we had to do and just had to get down to it. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot I can say about the process of coming up with our solution, but what I can tell you is that it was stressful, I may have lost time from my lifespan, it was difficult and finally [suspenful pause] my team chose the art piece a Starry Night.
With this choice we came up with the name “The Gogh Getters”. Here is my groups version made by Aiya, along with some other photos of the creation process.
Now after I wrote the script and my group working hard to get everything done in the limited class time given and hours after school it was time, the week of DI had come. But here is the twist. The week before my lovely mother had gotten sick. I tried my best to keep my distance but on Tuesday I felt something going on with my throat, I immediately let my group know but I still hoped it was just a one day thing. But when I woke up the next day…. It had gotten worse. I decided it would be better for me to stay home and go get tested for something that had been going around. My results came back and well…. I had tested positive for strep throat. I felt so bad especially since I am one of the 2 main characters. I spent hours working on the script and I didn’t even get to perform it or see my friends act out scenes I had made. I am so thankful that my team reacted how they did and they are all so amazing. I’m so proud of them for doing as well as they did and learning new lines in such a short time. So now that this information is out there it’s time to see how my group did. Here is the video of their performance.
I’m really proud of my team for doing as well as they did without me and I’ll be sure to be there next time at provincials.
So now comes the part of the blog where I usually reflect on the driving question, however there isn’t one this time so I’m just going to look back on a few things. Firstly I think we could have improved by… well… you know…. Having the whole team there but we could have also communicated slightly more as a groups so we didn’t have to cram so much into the last week. But I think compared to most of the groups my team did really well with setting times for things to get done. I also think we worked really well together despite most of us being introduced to eachother for the first time in this process. But in terms of personal reflection, honestly I expected to hate every second of DI, but through this journey I learned a few things about myself like before I didn’t know this but I’m actually a pretty good script writer and it’s actually quite enjoyable. I also learned that I am more capable than I thought and I can get things done in a shorter time than I think if I try my best and put my mind to it.
With that I’m going to wrap up this blog post with one question for you.
Do you think we can win Provincials?
Actually I’ll wrap up with an answer for you
Yes we can.
From Pikachu to Seattle and all the crazy things in between
So you’ve come to me, on the day of my Pikachu presentation, to learn about how we got here today. Well then let me tell you a tale of memorization and stress. Welcome to my blog post about the “Craziest” project so far. This is proven by the title and driving question being “Cray Cray Yay Yay” and “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”. But I’ll come back and answer that later.
First of all we started out by defining what is crazy? You might think you know the answer but your probably wrong (unless you’ve read another blog post about this project). We are actually defining crazy like it’s used in the Apple “Think Different” campaign. To help explain that I am going to quote this campaign,
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” -Steve Jobs – 1997
Does it make sense now? I sure do hope so because the amount of times I’ve heard the definition by this point is driving me crazy. Here’s a fun game you at home can play, try and count every time the word “Crazy” is written, spoken or used in this blog.
Now that we know what crazy is let’s talk about what a Pecha-Kucha is, or as I like to say, Pikachu. So this term is Japanese for “Chit Chat” and is a type of presentation. It is a 20×20 presentation which means we have 20 slides and each of them will last 20 seconds leading to 6 minutes and 40 second of total stress and waffling (waffling is talking a lot about things).
But after this happened we went on a super fun trip to Seattle where we saw such wonders as the Museum of Pop Culture and Madame Web! We went on this trip with one thing in mind, the crazy ones of Seattle, and trust me there are a lot of them. Some of these people and experiences that we had the pleasure of visiting are The MoPop, The Space Needle, The Chihuly Glass Gardens, The Climate Pledge Arena Tour, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Museum of Flight and The Boeing Tour. As you can see, we went to a lot of places and subsequently learned a lot from this trip.
This trip helped me visualize what crazy people have done such as Frank Ghery, Paul Allen and Bill Gates. I saw the things these people built their legacy upon and how their passion fuelled them to keep going. Here are some images from Seattle.
Sorry some of these are smaller than others.
Prior to this trip we had been given groups and a topic, you can check out my teammates at http://www.blog44.ca/brooker/ and http://www.blog44.ca/loganf/ so go show them some love too. Our topic was Aerospace Pioneers, so I was waiting for the Museum of Flight and Boeing tours. It was there where I gathered most of my notes and photos throughout the whole project.
This trip ended with one big thing, and no it wasn’t the bus ride home, It was an essay all about the crazy ones of Seattle. This essay was used to convey what crazy is and also try to answer the driving question. If you would like to read it here it is.
Are you crazy? You might think, “No, why would anyone want to be crazy?” but “crazy” has more than one definition. Crazy people are the ones who do something nobody else is willing to do because they are driven by passion for something they love, and even when struck with adversity they find workarounds continue doing what they love, because they believe it can affect others and change the world for the better. But what are some examples of crazy?
Firstly I want to talk about a crazy name that you may have heard of, Microsoft or more importantly Bill Gates. He and Paul Allen turn their hobby of computer science and coding into a huge company the whole world knows of today. For most of their career people thought of them as exclusively a video game console company, however Bill knew they could be more than that. With his expansive knowledge of technology, and immense funds earned by Microsoft, Bill Gates looked into investing in technology that could actually help people and is now using his status as a billionaire and founder of Microsoft to make new innovations and advancements such as AI that can predict what diseases mosquitoes could be carrying. This is an example of a crazy person as when nobody thought anymore of him than a gaming company owner, he pushed to give Microsoft a new name in the form of helping people who need it.
Now for a less known crazy idea, Climate Pledge Arena. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an enitre arena dedicated to having as low of a carbon footprint as possible print as possible. They represent a cause not a company and have become a part of a group called the climate pledge, their goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This is a crazy idea because of how many unique innovations and designs they use in order to achieve this goal, some examples of these are making all food from sources within 300 miles, having 0 single use plastics, using 150 gallons of rain water to make the hockey rink and saving 20,000 gallons of water every event that happens there from washrooms alone. This seems insane at this time but in the future if we want the planet to survive, this will become the new standard and climate pledge area is the foundation of this new norm.
A name you may have heard before is Boeing, but you might not know what he really did. Boeing was just a guy who went to an air show but from that stemmed his love and passion of aeronautical activities. While he started as a lumber worker he used the money he earned from his job to fund his hobby of flight. At this time nobody saw flight as anything more that’s just long distance mail delivery but Boeing could see a future nobody else could. He was considered crazy for wanting to put people on planes for transport, but he went against what everyone told him and made the first plane dedicated to the delivery of humans, not mail. This plane was far from perfect though, so he adapted and innovated to make these flight the most comfortable and safe options of travel, even when he would encounter large difficulties he kept trucking forward and essentially built the standard of flight today.
But to conclude I personally have been inspired by people and ideas like these who do things nobody else is willing to do. This has helped me realise that things I am passionate about could be developed in ways that nobody would ever think of and things we do everyday could be completely morphed even ten years into the future. Anything can be developed into something that changes the world for everybody and if you truly love and have passion for something, you can turn it into something others would be eager to learn about. These things have given me a whole new definition of the word crazy and I now know there’s more to everything than it would seem. These crazy people teach us that there are no restrictions on the things we love, the only boundaries are those we but on our imaginations.
Fast forward through all the slide making and script writing and we are finally at presentation night and everyone is terrified of messing up, however we worked hard on this so we knew we would somewhat survive the evening. My group started by having to redo almost our entire presentation. Your probably wondering “Why?”, well this project was lead by two of my teachers, one of which happened to be on another field trip for the week before the presentation. My other teacher had already approved all my groups slides so I assumed we were good to go, but when my other teacher got back she wanted us to make all our slides completely different. I don’t know what happened with my two teachers but it seems that there was a lack of communication between them. So I made all the changes to our slides (not all of which I agreed with, rest in peace little planes, if you know you know) and moved on with the night. We practiced our roles throughout the night and off we went.
Here are some photos of the night.
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Sorry this one is sideways -
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That about wraps up this blog post and this project, but now it’s reflection time. So let us return to the driving question, “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?” By this definition of crazy, it takes someone who is daring and willing to do what others will not to change the world, they fight for what they believe and push through and innovate when faced with challenges. These people change the world because they are the ones bold enough to do so.
This project has given me a whole new perspective on crazy and also taught me a lot about public speaking. Sorry this was such a long blog post it was actually supposed to be 2 but I thought it would be a better fit to have it all in one so I hope it was worth it. Thank you for reading my blog and I will write to you next time.
Who do you think you are? And… Who do you think you want to be?
Who are you going to be? The question isn’t what do you want to do, but who do you want to become. That’s the question I’m setting out to answer in this blog post, well I won’t be finding out who YOU want to be but I will find out who I want to be. This is a quote made by Michelle Obama which I strongly advise you readers and viewers think about and answer yourself. But with that out the way let’s get on to the post.
So what can we do to actually figure out who we want to be, some lucky people have it all figured out easily while other only think they do. A lot of people when hearing this question think it’s just asking what kind of job you want to do but this question is much more than that, I’m asking you what kind of person you want to be, who do you aspire to be like, how do you want to treat people and who do you want to associate with.
First I’m going to talk about who do you aspire to be like. This ultimately comes down to role models, who do you idolize and how can you be more like them, what exactly makes them a role model. For a lot of people, including me, a parent is a role model, it makes sense because most people love their parents because they raised them and helped them when they needed it. For me personally it’s my mum, she raised me, dealt with my annoyance and cared for me when I needed help, she works extremely hard for me and my sister even if we’re aren’t always grateful. I aspire to be like her when I grow up because she is a genuine good and kind hearted person and I look up to her because she tries hard to help others. Hopefully you have someone like that in your life and if you do think about why they are that person to you, and if you can why not tell them you love them.
Okay so now let’s do and activity that I did in class, I will give you five questions and I’ll give my answer for all of them. First up we just have who are you? For the sake of not doxing myself I’m not going to say this one. Next I’d what do you do? Personally I try to have fun with everything and I’m always trying to make people laugh, but I also play a lot of video games (maybe a bit too many to be honest). Now after that we have who do you do it for? I try to make others laugh because there is always the chance that someone I know is having a rough day and if my dumb jokes can bring even a little bit of light into someone’s day then I’ve done my job, but I also do it for myself, I personally think (most of) my jokes are funny so I can enjoy them too. Now we have what do they want or need? I think everyone needs laughter in their life so they can be happy and everyone needs to be happy and they want to have friends so I’m there to be that for them. And finally How do they change as a result? Like I said earlier if I can make anyone even the slightest bit happier then I know I’ve done a good job, so people change by being more happy when I make jokes and hang out with friends, but I also become more happy. Now you know the questions why don’t you ask yourself these things in your own time.
Another major factor in finding out who you want to be is thinking about the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. Because the people you choose to spend time with can reflect your character more than you probably think, for example if you chose to hang out with fun and funny people like I do that will in turn make you a more jokey and comedy centres person, however if you spend your time with more serious people you’ll be better off in more serious situations but you might not have as much of a sense of humor. When it comes down to it the people you spend time with often turn out to be the kind of person you want to be.
Now I’m going to talk about the things we did in class to better answer the question. We first of all, every day made a sticky note that answered the question what are we grateful for, every day we came up with a different answer to this question, this ended up being one of my favrioute activities we did this project.
We also did a speed dating activity to answer a few questions that might help but that would be difficult for you viewers to do without a big group of people so I’ll just give you a photo and move on.
We also read one of these books to better understand different people and why they want to be who they are and we also made connections to the events and characters in the books. Here is a few of the books. Becoming – Michelle Obama, Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad, Born a Crime – Trevor Noah and I Am Malala – Malala Yousafzai. I chose I Am Malala and we took notes on these books writing down meaningful quotes, Life lessons, Connections from the books to our lives and general important ideas from the text. I’m not a fan of reading at all to be honest but I genuinely enjoyed this book so I recommend you to read it and maybe try to make the same notes we did.
So that’s it for what we did this project, it was really short as we needed to fit the entire thing into the few weeks we had before the semester changeover. As this blog comes to a close let’s revisit the question this whole thing is based on, “Who are you going to be?” Personally I’ve always struggled with this question but this project has helped me get closer to the answer I’ve been looking for. I now know that I want to be someone that can be looked up to like my mum or Malala, but I also want to be someone that people can have laughs with and enjoy the company of, I want to help those that need it and laugh with those who I need like my amazing friends. This project was one of the better ones and seems like it could have been so much better if we got more time so it sucks it was cut short. I’m going to end this blog with one question.
Who are you going to be?
Thanks for reading, Goodbye.
Allergy of Apology
Hello internet, welcome to blog theory, if you get that reference your awesome. Anyways I’m back with another blog for you which means another project has come to a close, this blog will actually be on the project we did known as ology of apology aswell as the winter exhibition that came with it. This exhibition was like no other though and if you want to know why then you’ll have to read the whole post, or I guess you could look at the title.
So to start off this project we of course need ourselves a driving question and this time it was, drum roll please! 🥁🥁🥁🥁 “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” This is important because obviously apologizing can mean and do many things but those thing would be learned during this project.
First of all we launched the project by starting to learn about memorials because when it comes down to it memorials are often just big apologies and that’s what this project is about. We started looking into what a memorial is and what differentiates them from other works of art like sculptures or paintings, well the short answer is almost anything can have a memorial as long as it meets this criteria. Number 1 is it has to be about memory, a memorial displays a memory to keep it alive and bring awareness of it to many generations, Number 2 is it needs to be something physical that focuses upon and draws attention to one specific memory about something important and number 3 is the memory must be a public memory so it’s something that many can relate too. That’s what a memorial needs to be but there also a few things it can be, memorials are reminders of things bad but also often something good and not all memorials are built by big corporations but they can be constructed by a community.
Now I’ve told you about what a memorial is you might be wondering why I told you, if you guessed that we would be making a memorial somehow then you would be correct, and to prepare for making our final memorial we were tasked with designing our own mini models of memorials with Lego. I immediately thought of a major event that was very recent, you may have heard of it it’s called COVID-19, it was this whole big pandemic thing wasn’t the most fun to be honest, I thought to myself what’s something everyone relates too as a symbol of this pandemic and I came to the conclusion that I would display this major event with a memorial of a mask here’s what I designed.
And here’s my descriptive paragraph about it.
My memorial was a giant face mask to symbolize the struggles and hardships that affected everyone in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we were told we would be making a memorial that would mean something to the public I immediately thought of the COVID pandemic as it was such a recent event that shook up the whole world and affected everyone in some way. If I was building a real memorial I would have inscribed the names of loved ones lost to the virus onto the front of the mask, I also added a spinning mechanism because it looks cool and would draw attention to the monument. I faced some challenges while building it mainly due to the limitations of the provided Lego bricks. I needed pieces that could hold other pieces in place since my design was held in the air by a stand. While building it I struggled to keep it all in one piece and it kept falling apart when I was trying out new designs and colours. I chose to make a COVID mask as it is something so widely recognizable by all as a symbol for the pandemic, whether you have seen videos of crazy anti-maskers or you yourself had to wear one for your safety. It’s a simple design that everyone is impacted by because we all lost someone in some way and even if you personally didn’t lose someone the names of those who were lost puts the numbers of the death toll into proportion. So in conclusion a COVID mask is an easily recognizable symbol of the global pandemic we all went through and although I had some struggles building it I still managed to come up with a design I was happy with and that everyone understood.
In addition to this we also looked into some other memorials the world had to offer just to further our understanding and if your interesting I recommend looking into the tomb of the unknown warrior in England the story behind it is quite interesting.
So now you might be wondering what we were going to make our memorials on, well we were going to be apologizing to one of 3 groups and I was selected for the Chinese Canadians. Before learning about that though we first started to look into discrimination and one of the major contributors to radical and discrimination in general is negative propaganda. Looking into different types of propaganda we talked a lot about anti-semitism as for some reason it’s becoming more mainstream again in recent years, things like social media have made expressing negative opinions to the masses easier than ever, and to talk about that I had to write a paragraph on exactly that topic, here’s what I came up with.
Propaganda can influence people in a good and bad way, but how can this affect people’s thoughts about standing up for those that need help? When people see propaganda it can affect them on all kinds of levels, some people just glance at it but don’t bother to look into it and move on with their day. Others may be deeply affected and have their opinions changed and morphed by it, an example is when the Nazi’s took over certain territories they placed propaganda in schools to try and influence the youth, some children were deeply impacted by this and it twisted their thoughts into believing that they were ugly and disgusting, while other children thought the same thing about them. Propaganda still affects us nowadays with social media being a major part of almost everyone’s daily lives around the world and with hate and hate crimes on the rise in recent years it’s reasonable to suspect that social media platforms have something to do with it. People can get away with saying almost anything today and with algorithms making it easier to see more of something once it’s been seen once peoples brain can be easily influenced into changing for the better and worse. Anti-semitism has shot up in recent years and there are so many links and ties that can be traced back to social media roots, a major example is Kanye West. Kanye West is a largely influential music artist with bipolar disorder, in recent years he has made many claims of being anti-Semitic which has influenced many people. Another major example is Andrew Tate, he is an influencer that has spread ideas and thoughts of misogyny to young minds of this generation. He is a multi-millionaire which gives him power and status and with this he has been distributing thoughts of sexism and has popularized being a so called “alpha male” which many take seriously and others mock this idea. Even though recently propaganda has spiked there has been many examples throughout history and all have a somewhat similar affect and outcome on those impacted by it. All of this ties into how propaganda changes peoples personal actions, for example those that see a lot of anti-semitism online are either more likely to stand by and do nothing if they ever see something like this happening in real life or they are more like to step in and stop things after seeing what people say online. Of course it’s possible that the opposite effect happens and they would be more motivated to join the oppressor in the confrontation. In shprt, many diffferent parts of a person can be changed by propaganda whether they are more likely to help those in need, more likely to attack those in need or if they are just to stand by and do nothing. No matter the time period people can be very impressionable so we have to be cautious of what we say.
I’m really proud of this work and I think I was able to convey my thoughts and beliefs on the topic through it.
Now we spent a whole lot of time just learning about BC’s history in order to find out what each group wanted to base their memorial on and I don’t want this blog to be a lot longer than it has to be so I’ll just tell you what my group focused on and presented about. We picked the Chinese head tax and immigration for Chinese people to Canada from 1858 to 1923. In short the gold rush brought many Chinese immigrants to BC an as a result of that the white people there and the government wanted them gone, so their idea was to make specifically Chinese immigrants have to pay a tax of $50 which was then raised to $100 and finally became $500 which was equivalent to over 2 years of labour and finally in 1923 they outright banned all Chinese immigration into Canada. After learning about this we knew it was right to make a memorial on it. We went through many design ideas but I believe we made one that represented our topic well. Our idea was to have an open suitcase with different things attached to a paper cutout of a man, there were lanterns depicting good things about immigrating to Canada and ankle weights displaying negative things about moving to Canada. The suitcase represented how all of the culture was never able to leave the immigrants luggage. We also made a information board and 3 other thing just to talk about the topic and describe our memorial, finally our group chose the name Symbold in Suspension for our memorial. When the day of the day of the exhibition came we were all somewhat mortified as we had started working on the final project last week but we were more prepared than we thought, but something we never prepared for was coming. After setting up our station this is what it looked like.
I think everything turned out very well and for the short time I did I enjoyed talking to people about what I had learned, and I say short time because… well each of our exhibits had to have food and something to interact with, I had a stroke of genius that lead me to think an amazing idea would be to get people to use chopstick to move things over a line and some of that was our food, specifically fortune cookies. So you see I’ve never eaten a fortune cookie before and I’ve always wondered what they’re like so when my group brought them as one of our snack I kind of wanted to try one however I’m cursed with having soooo many allergies and there were no ingredients on the box so I opted not to have one but what I forgot to remember was not to touch them but one of our items to pick up with the chopsticks was, you guessed it, a fortune cookie. While resetting the game I had multiple time picked up the fortune cookie, which was fine at first but after getting an itch on my face everything went down hill. All of a sudden my eyes were getting watery and itchy, I stupidly thought nothing of it but then they wouldn’t stop itching which meant I touched my face more which made everything worse, on top of that my nose started running and I started sneezing uncontrollably, for those who don’t know me I’m not the most socially confident so sneezing mid conversation with a stranger makes me want to cry. Luckily my lord and saviour my mum showed up early into the exhibition and I expressed to her how I was feeling and she knew that Chinese food often has nuts in it, what an odd coincidence, IM ALLERGIC TO NUTS! I was having an allergic reaction to my own groups food mid exhibition she walked me out of the room and we found one of my teachers who thankfully brought me to the office and my lovely vice principal gave me some medication and a place to wash my face off, safe to say I went home early. My group still did amazing though and that was shown in the voting tally at the end, I’m very thankful for them and how they handled the unexpected situation. The turnout of the exhibition seemed great, here are some photos my friends took.
Overall the exhibition was a bit of a nightmare for me but in the end everything was fine, but now for what you’ve all (maybe) been waiting for, who’s group did the best, we had all guest vote in a ballet and even though I think there was some rigging here are the results.
As you can see we tied for first with another group, so now we have our answer to that we need to answer a different question, a driving question once again our question was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” In my opinion apologies can be kept alive in many ways such as memorials, schools or even by being passed down through family trees, all of these ways work for different reasons but are still able to keep things alive and serve as reminders and warnings about the past.
Thank you for reading my blog this exhibition was certainly my most… interesting one yet, I hope you enjoyed reading this far and now you know that apologies can be for many things like apologizing for a wrong theory, A GAME THEORY. Thanks for reading and putting up with my jokes and references.
PREPOL
Hello everyone and welcome to my first ever pre-pol. Just like any other blog post this one has a driving question. That driving question is “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. This is a very important question to think about because without balance and support in your own life doing everyday tasks just becomes so much more difficult. In this blog I will review a project I’ve had this year and what I’ve taken away from it that helps me in daily life. So let’s get started.
So in order to figure out what would work for me in my PGP class we went over many strategies to help keep track of our lives and work. First of all everyday we would do happiness activities and then reflect on them these consisted of, Monday meditation, Tuesday Helper day, Wednesday exercise, Thursday journaling and Friday 3 gratitudes. Some of these I enjoyed like on Wednesdays going for walks with my friends was enjoyable but on Thursdays we had to journal about a topic and I’ve never liked writing so this wasn’t enjoyable for me however I’m glad I tried these because without doing them I wouldn’t know how I felt about them, to my surprise I enjoyed the meditation more than I thought I would, it isn’t the sort of thing I would do on my own but if offered to do it in a group I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If I’m being honest these daily activities didn’t seem to change my life much but I’m sure they work for some people just not me. Something else we had to do was reflecting on our days, weeks and planning what next week would look like. Once again this probably works well for some people but for me this just felt like another stressful thing I had to get done and brought an unneeded aspect of worrying into my life. The other thing we had to do was timeblock events on our calendar and use an app called things to schedule work and plans. This worked a little more than some of these other things but to be honest I don’t like having to refer to thing to remember them and I just keep information in my head but I still gave it a shot and here is the before and after photos.
From this project I took away that using different strategies works for different people and no one person can force their strategies on another, this is why I don’t think this project worked very well. In my opinion we were given set strategies to help manage our lives when instead we should have been given free reign to test out what worked for us, different options were given but those options had very little flexibility for us to manage them our way. While this didn’t work out for me I know others found a way that they like so from this I learned that everyone need to experiment with different options to help manage themselves.
After this project I’ve thought about what I think would actually work for me without having to worry about deadlines and borders to limit my options and I’ve discovered that I work best under some pressure so leaving work and procrastination is sometimes helpful. I like to wait until I have to get stuff done and then take a day to do all my work at once. I am able to do this because without my ADHD medication I can’t work at all but with it I can get anything accomplished however there are side-effects that make me not eat as much so I find taking them one day and cramming all my work into that time worlds well for me.
If you read that thank you and I hope you can find something to help manage yourself like I did and I appreciate you (some what) caring about my life and tactics. Now I’m going to review each of the core competencies and see if I used them in this project.
COMMUNICATING
I think I communicated well with peers and teachers by asking questions when necessary and helping out others in any way that I could. I would say I demonstrated this well.
COLLABORATING
This project didn’t need much collaboration as it was mainly a personal thing to get your life on track but whenever we did have to collaborate I did it well as I am comfortable around my peers by now since this I our 3rd year together.
CREATIVE THINKING
Throughout the duration of this project I don’t think I was very creative as I struggled to have interesting ideas with borderlines stoping me however once the project had ended I used my creative liberties to think about what works for me and why.
CRITICAL AND REFLECTIVE
Since we had to reflect an almost every action we made in this project it makes sence that I did this well since without it I would fail miserably however it did did quite repetitive at times.
PERSONAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY
This project was all about taking responsibility for yourself so I took agency over my own learning and went past the restraints to figure out what works for me personally.
POSITIVE PERSONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
This project contained a lot of knowing who you are and how you work so It helped that I know myself well and I can tell if something works or doesn’t work for me.
SOCIAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY
I don’t think I showed this during this project because it didn’t require it at all, we only focused on ourselves this project and didn’t have opportunities to work with others.
That’s it, the blogs over, but wait we still need to answer that big question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. I found out that each individual has their own thoughts on this matter and everyone works differently, but for me letting work build up and doing it in one blow is a good strategy to get everything done and finishing it all is very satisfying and being a little bit stressed help me work better.
Thanks so much for reading my blog post I hope you take something away from this that can help you with your work. I won’t see you next time but you will read me, Byeee!
TWO WORLDS WARS AND AN ESSAY!
Hello viewers welcome back to my blog, how are you doing today. I hope you are well, I myself am doing fine thanks for asking (I hope you asked or that was awkward). Today I’m going to be talking about my latest project all about WWII. This project is called Save Juno beach and was primarily about WWII’s historical significance to the world and Canada. But we also learned about many significant battles and events in WWII.
This project was primarily about learning and educating ourselves about WWII in order to write an essay about it for the final project. Since this blog isn’t a good place for me personally to teach I won’t be talking so much about WWII but rather about the different methods we used to learn about it. I will also talk a little bit about how we were taught about essay writing.
For the first few lessons we just went through slideshows about WWII but the first main thing we did was write a Point, Evidence, Explain paragraph or PEE for short. We were assigned to write about why WWII was started and learned about what makes a good PEE paragraph, this would be helpful later when we wrote our essays. Here is my work.
Point
One of the major causes of WW2 was the outcomes and consequences of WW1.
Evidence
Some of the reasons were because Germany was falling apart due to the outcomes of WW1 and the Great Depression, also there were new states in Eastern Europe that after WW1 were weakened and they were easy targets to Hitler.
Explain
After WW1 Germany didnt have any of the land they wanted or previously claimed however they lost the resources used to obtain those things. Because of this they had a failing economy and nothing to rebuild it or Germany. Another reason was that after WW1 there were many restrictions and sanctions put on Germany, due to the treaty of Versailles, which led to poverty, unrest and hatred towards the allies, Hitler saw this as an opportunity to sway the people of Germany into believing they could trust him and he built a nationalist party in this wake. Seeing as Germany had no resources of their own they decided the only solution was to take from other countries, and seeing as Eastern Europe had weakened countries and places such as Poland and France were easy pickings for Hitler.
Next up was a whole lot of learning about, you guessed it, WWII but instead of making it boring and just throwing information at us we got to participate in Kahoots to help us learn. The different kahoots we got consisted of, the interwar years, the start of WWII, Europe in the 1930s, D-day, the axis advances and pacific atlantic. It was through these kahoots that we built knowledge and educated ourselves on what actually went down in WWII.
Fast forward about 3 weeks we have now moved on from learning about WWII and we are onto learning about what historical significance is. Now, historical significance is (shockingly) a way to determine how significant historical events actually are and in order to help us we have an acronym, NAME, this stands for.
N otability, how notable something is has a huge impact on its historical significance.
A pplicability, how applicable is the situation today and how can we learn from it adds to its historical significance.
M emorability, how memorable something is changes how people remember it and it turn it become more historically significant.
E ffect, how big of an effect something has short term and long term can make it historically significant.
So that’s how you determine something’s historical significance, why don’t you try to think of an example and see how it does in all those categories…. Go on I’ll wait…. I’ll still be here when your done….
So now we move on to preparing for an essay. First thing we have to do is plan out different ideas in a brainstorm. I chose to make a mind map of 6 different potential topics and 2 reasons to back them up. Here it is.
And using those I crafted a thesis statement for my essay to be based of and stand by. My sentence was ‘WWII was historically significant because it changed the way the world worked and showed off how powerful Canada actually was and could be.’ This would be the basis of my whole essay.
After this we went onto the final step, making an essay outline, for each paragraph we wrote the main topic sentence and then 3 points to back it up. Here is a photo of my outline.
At this point all that left is to write my whole essay, even though I felt very overwhelmed with the thought of writing a whole essay in a day it wasn’t as scary as I thought thanks to my outline giving me the points to write about. You can imagine how upset I was though after hearing that we had to get it critiqued by a friend and the revise it but that too wasn’t so bad. At this point you must be dying to read my essay, if you are I don’t understand why but here you go.
That’s about it for this project but first we have to look back and answer the driving question ‘Why is is so important to learn about. Canadas involvement in WWII?’ This is a very valid question, I’m sure every grade 10 student in Canada has asked. Well honestly I think it’s so we can know about what we have done in the past, it’s important to know that everything we have wasn’t just handed to us on a silver platter and we need to know that it was earned and achieved by the many soldiers that gave us our reputation through WWII to modern day. But that’s just what I think so if you have any different thoughts or disagree with me you can talk to my lawyer, you can find him nowhere because he doesn’t exist.
Thank you so much for reading my blog, I know this one was really wordy and I’m very sorry but this project didn’t have many things to take photos of and was mainly just a lot of learning and talking that couldn’t be described in words on a page. I hope you at least enjoyed my blog a little bit and why not come read the next one. But for now I’ll see you later. Goodbye!
Those are some human looking books?
Hellooooo gorgeous internet people I have returned after a long time, did you miss me. Anyway welcome back to my blog, there’s a reason I’m writing this ,and it’s not because it’s my passion, but it is because I have completed another project in my humanities class. Without further a due let’s get into it.
This project was all about Canadian identity which gave it the name “This Is Us 🇨🇦” our end goal was to make a human library. You are probably thinking “what the actual hell is a human library” and I don’t blame you because I had the same thought. Well the human library started in Denmark in the year 2000 as a safe space for people to understand the experiences of others or express themselves and their story to those interested. The name human library may sound confusing but when it comes down to it they are calling the people with unique experiences books and those interested readers. If you are interested in human libraries I recommend checking out their website. Here is the link. https://humanlibrary.org
Now that we know what we will create we… Didn’t really do anything about it. However we did sort of prepare for how it would be if we ourselves were the books. One of the stepping stones leading up to the final product was to research a topic and become experts on it, then we would present a one minute elevator pitch about our topic and answer some questions. My topic was all about living as an immigrant in Canada.
I decided on this topic because as and immigrant in Canada I thought I would have a fun time learning more about why and how we are treaded different. So I made my own driving question “How are immigrants treated different to Canadian born citizens” once I had this question I made some need to knows to build up my knowledge toward key categories but you don’t need to see those. We did the elevator pitch and I can’t perform it for you but here’s my notes.
So I decided to research into the experience of immigrants in Canada and in doing so I learned many things that I didn’t know before. Found a few websites and asked my mum about her experiences. I made a driving question which was “how are immigrants treated different to Canadian born citizens” and then I made some need to knows so I could narrow down my topic to some specific points. I first thought about how minority immigrants would be treated different or discriminated against and after looking into it I was surprised. First of all they aren’t treated the same by the government, first of all if they aren’t citizens they can’t vote, they have additional tax on property, many educational qualifications and accomplishments aren’t recognized or valued and access to healthcare isn’t free for those that aren’t permanent residents. Then we start to get into general discrimination like different backgrounds and histories may affect the way people are seen and sometimes they are blamed for something they didn’t do. I was shocked to discover refugees are treated different and heritages and other religious beliefs are neglected or ignored. Getting jobs is also more difficult, as past experiences and qualifications are forgotten or invalidated as I stated before, however I didn’t say that many immigrants have to redo and complete college courses to acquire titles that they already earned. And all of these things don’t apply to immigrants of a Canadian background. I believe this is unfair and should be changed but as a child I have no authority to change anything.
After this we invited in our friends or family to come be the books in our library. I think it went well but look and see for yourself.
Well that’s it everyone. This was a shorter blog than usual but this was a short project so I guess it works out. I learned a lot about Canada and it’s history, but also I learned about myself during this project and I’m glad I did that. Thank you for coming to my blog and (hopefully) reading through it, I know I was very wordy but I hope it was worth it. Bye 👋
Humanities Exhibition
Hello zeros and ones on the internet and welcome back to my blog. This blog is about both my Humanities project and the Exhibition we did. So first I will talk about the project and then the process of the exhibition.
So first of all the project name was “Dulce et Decorum est” which means it is sweet and fitting in Latin. The name comes from a poem about the First World War, so as you can guess our project was about the war. We soon took a trip to a museum so that we could better understand them, why you ask, that’s because we will be making a WW1 museum for this project. This may sound impossible now but don’t worry it’s not a big real museum we are just making our own exhibits.
So first of all we had to visit a museum and learn from it. We went to the Museum of North Vancouver to talk to the curators and find out how to make a museum flow. We looked at all the exhibits and the different types so we could take inspiration. Here are some photos I have.
So after we developed an understanding of how museums work we had to design our own museum and exhibits. But first we needed to know what out topic for our exhibit was. Obviously it was WW1 but that’s too broad so to narrow it down we decided to write paragraphs to show the contrasting narratives of war. I chose the difference between war and propaganda for war. This is the paragraph I wrote.
The contrasting narratives of war spread from the thought and ideas of the battle to the starvation and rationing done by the average person. During the First World War people perceived war as a fun adventure that they would be home by Christmas but if you know anything of the war it’s the complete opposite. People had this idea because the government wanted to imprint in their brains that the war was fun, and to do so they had methods such as propaganda full of lies that would manipulate the average folk into believing what they wanted them to. Many Canadians joined the war at the start due to being roped in as Great Britain’s ’pet’ because they were still a colony and didn’t have a say, but later on, many of those who joined wouldn’t come back. After some time all the soldiers were dying so the government needed a way to get more troops, they started making posters to manipulate men into joining and serving their country. They also made posters to force women and children to ration as another problem would soon arise. Seeing as people were rationing so much they would think soldiers would be eating feasts but it was quite the opposite starvation was a major problem of the war. Soldiers were running out of food and had nothing to eat, many died and others were traumatized. Another cause of trauma was disease. The trenches were thought of as nice places to live but they were nasty pits of death and decay. Trench foot, trench flu, rats everything was busting with bacteria. Overall the lies and the manipulation of the government were unacceptable and they didn’t value the lives of their men. To conclude the main contrasting narrative of war was it being a glamorous thing that was fun and new, versus the pain and suffering soldiers had to endure.
So now it’s time to craft our exhibits I decided I wanted to make an audio based exhibit so I thought about what our group was, I decided to be in the group about how women and societies view of women changed over the war. So I now had to write a script for it and after writing for an hour I had it. But I still had planning to do. You see I have something I haven’t told you about yet. I know what your thinking “I don’t really care but what is it” well my enthusiastic friend they are none other than real World War 1 artifacts. I know I’m so cool but honestly you don’t need to flatter me. But now I need to think about how I’ll turn these into and exhibit (that won’t be touched by small annoying children). You’ll find out.
So after all the prep we finally came to exhibition day everyone was nervous and I had my exhibit and artifacts. It was very stressful but honestly it went pretty well. The theme of the exhibition was pathways but I don’t think anybody really understood that, we gave people pamphlets that they could get a stamp on for every grade they visited. But I don’t think that convinced people. Well the Tim has com for me to show you my awesome artifacts. Your so excited aren’t you. Here they are. Sorry they are sideways I don’t know how to fix them.
Now the exhibition was over and we had so much cleanup to do but after a long hard 14 hours at school I finally went home and I immediately passed out. Thank you for reading my blog post sorry this one was long I hope you enjoyed it and have a great rest of your day.
TPOL the T is for Transitional not Tea and Crumpets
“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”
Hello and welcome to my TPOL blog post. This is a blog post all about my school work this year, I will be going over some high and some lows that I thought I could improve on. If you are a random internet viewer and your wondering what that starting sentence is, it’s some thing I have to say when presenting, without further ado let’s get started.
I haven’t had Maker or science since the first semester so I will start with those. In maker last semester I had many different projects that required their own skills such as building a rollercoaster or making films and videos (there were a lot of videos) but something I’m super proud of was my stop motion film, the project was, as you can guess, to make a stop motion video but there was a twist. We had to recreate a viral video in stop motion. I’m very proud of this not only because of the final product, but also because of the strategy and planning that went into it. I’m happy that I learned to use a green screen to make it just a bit better, and I’m also proud of myself because I used creative strategies to hold the characters in place, however the main reason I’m proud of myself is because I tried to have fun with it and I did which was why the outcome ended up so great. Here is the video.
But since I talked about what I think I did well, I subsequently must discuss some things I could have improved on. If you read my MPOL post you would remember that I said I wasn’t proud of my goal setting skills and I still believe this but I will go more in depth about why. I don’t really like making goals because I will set them and forget about them immediately or just not do it due to not feeling it. I’m also not very good at reflecting on my own work to improve and critique it. I don’t believe I will ever enjoy setting goals but people change and maybe I will too.
Now we will move to science, I’m extremely proud of most of my science work as it was such a great subject for me because I enjoyed the classes and the work which made me do better in my work. I’m very proud of my infographic of energy sources, of which I chose wind energy. I’m so proud of myself for making this as I worked so hard and I came up with an original design for it. I also found out that what I had done might have been plagiarism without my knowledge so I am proud of my creative thinking and responsibility that I used to fix my mistake.
But once again I need to think back on how I could have improved my work, this is difficult for me as really there is only one thing I’m not proud of but I talked about that in my MPOL however I have something that I think I could have improved on even though I tried super hard. This was my operation board game, this started off well but then just started going downhill. I had the character finished but when it came to cutting the holes for the objects it went bad and then it went worse when the electronics got involved. There were a number of reasons this happened like lack of time or resources but I should have planned ahead. My awareness of time should have been better and I should have collaborated with my teachers or peers when I was struggling with the electronics. This is the game.
So now it’s time for humanities which is the only PLP class I have had this semester so the examples are more recent. This semester had some really cool and fun projects that were super enjoyable but my most proud was movie trailer. We designed characters that we made with stuffies. I enjoyed using creative thinking skills to morph the characters into reality and then thinking about what his backstory was and why the story went the way it did, then being able to make a trailer for a movie starring him was super fun. I’m proud of my filming skills I learned in maker the semester before to piece together the video. Here it is
But now I have to think about what I could have improved on. For this I have to go with my museum exhibit (which is a sneak peak to a blog post coming out soon). This project as a whole was super fun and one of my favourite in humanities this year. However since I was so focused on bringing in my own artifacts from WW1 I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have to my own project. I made a piece of writing and then recorded me doing a voice over for it. I feel like I could have been more creative with my idea or could have gotten critique from peers to it improve more. But no picture because we can’t have spoilers for the next post 🤫
In conclusion I feel like I have made major progress this year and I’m so happy about how things are going now compared to last year. I owe huge thanks to my ADHD medication because I couldn’t have done this without them. I’m able to focus much easier on work and make better products as a student. I’m in a much better place than I was at the start of the year and I want to say thank you to my teachers and my mum for supporting me and helping me learn and developed my skill sets.
Thank you for reading my post and I will see you when I see you. Goodbye!
Nation Sensation
Helloooooo Internet!
I’m back and I’m writing a post about a little project called building a nation. This project was all about learning what nationalism and what a nation is. So we had to have a driving question to go along with this project and that was, “ What did/does nationalism mean to the people around canada?” Now we know the big question let’s get on to the post.
The first thing we did was a simulation of confederation and the build up to it. We got assigned groups and picked a colony that we wanted to be, my group went with New Brunswick. We were given folders with information that told us about our opinions and information and what resources we had and needed. Based off this information we had to decide whether joining the confederation would be beneficial to us or if we would lose more that we would gain. New Brunswick was really weak and was mostly only good for lumber and some fish. We were also very open to attacks from America and had little to no military power. We also needed grain so we could have more food options and a balanced diet. So this was a no-brainer as we had much to gain and little to lose.
We ended up joining the confederation and settling on laws that were agreed upon by all.
So we had finished the simulation and it was now revealed that we were going to make a board game for the end product of this project, this was a very cool idea and it sounded really fun but of course this is school work so there was a small downside, we had to incorporate nationalism and make the game based around confederation. This wouldn’t be much of a challenge for most people, buuuuuut I’m from England and I know absolutely nothing when it comes to Canadian history. Luckily my partner knew a lot and I had this little thing called google that was going to help me out, but of course you know about google because you are probably using right now to view this post.
We now had to come up with an idea for what we would do, there were a lot of options but we decided on a trivia style game, similar to trivial pursuit. We modified the questions to be five new categories with two different styles, there were indigenous questions about the Wendat and Algonquian nations. The categories were economics politics and history, and there was also French and English questions, with the categories of political and transportation. This was fine and dandy but if our game was real there would be a lawsuit for copyright reasons, so we needed to make a change and that was adding raiding. In order to make the game more original and to enhance the nationalism aspect we decided that on every card one question was selected to have a raid symbol, if you answer it right you get to destroy a piece obtained by your opponent.
We had the idea but before we make it we needed rules for the game, this was done by my partner so go check out his blog at blog44.ca/callumr
We now needed to construct the game which was a huuuuge pain because originally we were going to make 60 cards each. This didn’t seem possible in 9 days so we cut it to 30 each and then cut it to 30 for him and 20 for me this still made 10 cards which was reasonable, after we made the cards I made the boards and then we brought in game prices and the dice and boom the game was finished.
Now we go back to the driving question” What does/did nationalism mean to the people of Canada?”
The answer is it’s what it means to be a Canadian but not just that, it means striving for the country that you love, it’s embracing who you are and where you come from.
Thanks for reading my post I know this was super wordy an I apologize for that but I hope you have a good day and bubye 👋👋👋👋