Category: End of Unit

We have no come to the end of another unit. This unit was confusing for me as I wasn’t really sure how it correlated to the rest of the units that we have this year. Our previous unit was about horror, and the one after this one is about Ideologies. This one is about historical significance, as you can see there is a large disconnect. Anyways, this project was nice because it was an individual project and we were able to choose from a large variety of topics. The only rule when picking a topic was that we had to choose from the events and people that were mentioned in Billy Joels song, “We didn’t start the fire.” I wanted to shake up what I was doing in school and choose something that I knew almost nothing about. The topic I chose was Marlon Brando. I had no idea what he did besides star in one of the highest rated movies of all time. Turns out he was nominated for an Oscar after he starred in “The Godfather”. This was actually one of the most controversial Oscar nominations of all time because he decided that if he won he was going to boycott the Oscars. With that information in mind I decided to make my driving question “How did Marlon Brandos boycott change Hollywood and the Oscars?”

We were being assessed on two curricular competencies. The first was communicate, which meant that we had to show how we share our own ideas. The other was historical significance, which was how do we make choices about what is worth remembering. This project was very open ended, all we had to do was explain how our topic was significant in a keynote presentation and in artifact(Painting, Sculpture, Photo Essay, Video, Podcast, etc.) of some kind. I decided I was going to show Marlon Brandos historical significance in a video. Before any of that I had to do a lot of research. I started with why he wanted to boycott the Oscars in the first place. It turns out there was a huge indigenous rights protest going on around that time as well. Approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and more followers of the AIM(American Indian Movement) took over the area on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee. The protest followed the failure of an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson. The United states government was criticized for there lack of ability to fulfill treaties with Native American people and demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations. The area was cordoned off by several law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the United States Marshals Service. Wounded knee was chosen because it had significance from a previous massacre that happened there. It got national attention as supporters traveled far distances and there was widespread public sympathy for the supporters.

That was what pushed Marlon Brando into boycotting the Oscars and changing them forever. My video was a direct representation of what my Keynote was. Sadly neither of them turned out that great. I put in a lot of work behind the scenes trying to get everything I needed for a great project but it did not work out. Both the video and the Keynote were “lacklustre”. I am not really sure what went wrong as the amount of work I put into the project was not shown in the result I created. But this is what I came up with.

I enjoyed this project as I was given a lot of freedom with what and how I wanted to do everything. I enjoyed what I was researching and I learned a lot about something that I thought was insignificant. Turns out its not as Marlon Brando has had an effect that has lasted almost 50 years.

At the beginning of the year we decided to start a unit on Horror. You may have noticed this based on the fact that I had a couple blog posts based around Horror Movies. That was all leading up to the big project that we were hoping to be amazing. It didn’t quite turn out that way. We had high hopes at the beginning but we slowly ran out of steam until we had a large heaping disaster. Guess what, we started again and then we ended pretty much in the same place.

We started off by going down to Seattle and learning about the project and what was going to go on during it. We studied how horror worked and what created a good horror movie. We also assigned roles while we were down there. I applied for producer and got the role of line producer. Two of my friends, Alex and Sam took the role of producer and I was pretty much their right hand man. I was in charge of making sure everything in the project went smoothly and everything finished on the deadline (that did not happen sadly). The script team got together and started putting together a story. They were first call to action, and they were told to do their best to create the best possible characters, and the best possible story.

When we got home, we decided to delve deeper into the world of horror.  By this time we had a general idea of what our story was going to look like. It would be two groups of teenagers who loathe each other. They are forced to work together because while they are locked in a school the janitor decides he wants to kill all of them. At first they blame the deaths on each other until they figure out there is someone else doing these acts. There were several types of characters and they died in a specific order depending on their stereotype. The first to die was the “Woman of Many Men”, or if you want to be rash, you can call her the slut. That’s generally the way most horror movies go. The deaths slowly worked there way through the groups until there were 3. They tried to make their final escape but it was too close so the last person you would expect to sacrifice himself, did. The person I’m talking about is the douche bag who is an arrogant leader of one of the groups and everybody else sees him as an asshole.

At the beginning of the project there wasn’t really much for me to do until the script was done. So I started by making a timeline for the project (That was not followed. I then started taking everybody’s schedules and put them into a document so everybody could see when everybody was available. We then started watching horror movies. It was helpful with understanding horror, but it took up a lot of useful time.

We eventually got back to working on the project. We did casting and I ended up being the douche bag. We then failed and a bunch of people got removed of their positions such as both producers, and the director. Then I was happily removed from my character to be sadly put back in as the janitor, because the other janitor wasn’t intimidating enough.

The movie looked like it was back on track but we just barely ran out of time. I was furious with how this went because we were so close. I take a lot of blame for this because this process should have gone smoothly the first time. If I were to go back and do it again I would have taken more charge.

I felt that the wrong people were taking responsibility and it got in the way of knowing who was actually in charge. The organization skills of all ofus were only good in the end and by then it was too late. I’ve learned from this that in situations like this, you have to do it right the first time. I learned that when I have a lot of responsibility, I have to take charge and organize the people and the things that I need to just to make sure everything runs the way it needs to.

If you read a lot and are in to learning about literature you probably understand where this blog post is going. If you are more like me and don’t really read books written hundreds of years ago then I will explain it myself. To start off this year in PLP we started off by reading classic literature and tried to learn how to understand what makes a book or a play or any kind of literature a classic.

Over the summer I was given many options for books to read and I had to decide so I could give my own opinion. When I looked at my selection of books I was only drawn to two, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” and “The Great Gatsby”. I was told that “A Prayer for Owen Meany” was a good book and it has a story that I would enjoy quite a bit. On the other hand I was just naturally drawn to “The Great Gatsby” as it is one of the most well known books I can think of. For some odd reason I decided to go with “The Great Gatsby”. When I first started reading I noticed that it was a book that was quite short and I thought something might have gotten mixed up. I double checked and turns out that it is a very short book. I began to read the book, and I was interested but also confused. I was constantly re-reading pages to actually understand what was going on. I decided to do research and it turns out that I’m not the only one who felt this way. This book was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it turns out that he was a very depressed man who was also an alcoholic which brings a dark side to his writing. Even though I was confused for most of the book I still enjoyed the story and I was constantly paying attention to the way he set the scene in this book as his imagery was spectacular. Some how Fitzgerald was able to describe everything in every scene in a very short book. I would recommend this book to people as I thought it was really good but I feel that I would have to warn them that it is not an easy read has you have to pay close attention to each sentence to understand what is happening. This book is one of the best that I have read and I could see myself re-reading it again in the future.

After we finished our books and gave our opinions on them we were told that we were going to be focusing on the play, The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. One of the first things we did was go to see a re-done version of the play, done by Bard on the Beach. It was set in the Wild West instead of the original time period. They chose to change the play so that the main character was liberated instead of tamed, as it would be accepted instead of frowned upon by our current society. We were soon put into small groups, one group for each of the 5 acts. My group members were Isobel and Mimi, we all decided that we had to immediately start working on editing the script, I took this upon myself as my task as I wanted to help out my group as much as possible instead of sitting on the side being useless. This was not a fun task as I ended up staying up late reading Shakespeare over and over again. I cut out as much as I could until I requested another set of eyes from my group members to see what they think should be removed. We then started recording where I played every male voice and they split the female parts, of course with my luck I played around double the parts they had put together. We then decided to use Explain Everything as our animating software as we were familiar with it and knew that we could do it well. After our first draft we ended up taking out the whole first scene as we thought that it wasn’t needed. For our final draft we also revised our audio by making it clearer, and we also made the characters better by refining their image. Other than those changes we thought are first draft went really well.

With this project came other tasks of course. We also had to redo our act in another time. With that we had to change the story so it would fit that time. We ended up with the 1960’s. I did a solo project as well that involved me making a video about what women’s lifestyles were like during the 60’s. The taming of the shrew had a large focus on women and thats why we had to edit it so much as times have changed a lot with women’s rights and during the 60’s it was a revolutionary time.

The largest solo piece of this project was definitely the essay that we had to write. We had to explain why TOS was a classic or not. We had to focus on one element that makes it a classic and follow through and be specific with it.I immediately came to the conclusion that it was a classic and instead of writing out pretty much what I wrote in my essay, I’ll just show you my essay.

This project has been eye opening to how different women’s rights were throughout history in all era’s. It truly has shown me how much has to be done before anything is changed. The centre piece to this project I believe was the fact that when Shakespeare first wrote this play standing up for what you believed in made you into a shrew, and the times have now changed that standing  up for what you believe in is common and a good thing.

The Year is coming to an end and so are our classes. That includes the most outside the box class I have in PGP. Performance Growth Plan is not a normal class, it involves extensive preparing and planning for your future. The whole point of it is to make you the best person you can be. We just brought the year to an end by creating what we call a time machine.

No we are not trying to recreate the flux capacitor, and now we are not literally trying to go back in time. We were tasked with creating something that explained something that we didn’t know at the beginning of the school year. We called it the time machine project because we would like to be able to send it back to ourselves so that we could use that information for the whole grade 11 school year.

I wanted to explain the whole entire year of PGP in the span of two pages. I used pictures with a side of success and another with failure. I explained what I thought were the most important things that I needed to remember form PGP to be successful.

This class was different than anything else that I have done. It was a rough start as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give it a chance at the beginning of the year, but giving this class a shot was one fo the best decisions I’ve made. I think that what I have learned has helped me more than almost every other class. It has prepared me for the future as it does a a really good job of turning you into your best self. If I apply what I have learned from PGP, I will have the best chance of being as successful as I can be.

You might be confused about my title, as how can the world fall of f the edge of anything. It’s in space so that doesn’t make any sense at all. I am actually referring to when there were massive political issues. This was during the Cold War, the world was on the brink of Nuclear war. There were multiple different occasions where multiple countries were worried that WWIII was going to break out. If you don’t know what the Cold War was it was essentially a political, ideological and cultural struggle between the democratic capitalist West and communist nations in eastern Europe and Asia. This issue was held mainly between the United States and the USSR.

Like I said there were multiple different issues that happened during the Cold War that could have pushed the world over the edge. I chose to write an essay that focused on a U-2 spy plane that crashed over top of the USSR. There was a huge conflict with lying and and disagreement. Here is what I wrote:

In the early 1960s, there was major distrust between two of the major nuclear powers of the world being the US and the USSR. Both countries were getting more worried and more desperate. Both countries were waiting for the other to make a move until finally the US couldn’t handle the suspense anymore. They had to know what the Soviets were up to. Tensions were at its highest when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The tensions were raised as the Soviets did not want anybody peaking behind the iron curtain, especially those who lie about what they were actually trying to accomplish.

At the time the two most focused on politicians in the world were Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev. Both politicians were bumping heads and fighting for power. Suddenly 13 days before the important Four Powers meeting between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and and France. A plane was shot down in Soviet Air space. The soviets knew that “This aircraft was specially equipped for reconnaissance and diversionary flight over the territory of the Soviet Union.”, this was clearly stated in historical material that specifically focused on this incident and the prove was it clearly had on board “It had on board apparatus for aerial photography for detecting the Soviet radar network and other special radio-technical equipment which form part of U.S.S.R. anti-aircraft defenses.”.

The United States quickly back pedaled, they claimed it was sent from NASA and it was an off course weather plane. The USSR new that they were lying and covering up for what was actually happening. The United States finally gave in when the Soviets revealed that the plane was clearly a spy plane and that they had apprehended the American Pilot Gary Powers, as he became “first a prisoner, then an international propaganda pawn.” Stated by military historian Lann A. Malesky. Khrushchev was demanding that the U.S. admit to what they they have lied about and tell the truth about the spy plane. Khrushchev requested this during the Summit meeting, but Eisenhower would not fold, and both leaders went home getting ready for the possibility of nuclear war.

That meeting was the tipping point. It was this simple blatant lie, this moment when Eisenhower refused to tell the truth that pushed the world to the edge. The Soviets had solid evidence that made it obvious that the United States was lying. The USSR had similar technology to the Americans, similar enough to understand that this was a reconnaissance plane. The arrogance of the Americans pushed everything too far, as they were essentially saying that the soviets did not know what they were talking about and that they couldn’t be trusted even though it was almost exactly the other way around. The rest of the world looked down upon the United States after they committed espionage but they did not care as they were going to hold their ground. Neither country was going to give an inch, but neither country wanted to be the reason for Nuclear Fallout, so nobody knew who was going to be the one to strike first. 

So how did the U-2 spy plane almost put the world into nuclear fallout? It instantly rose tension with the spying behind enemy lines, and the fact that the US decided to lie about it made matters worse. At this point in time, this event was just the cherry on top to what was already going on and nearly pushed the world to self-destruction. Neither country knew what was going to happen next as they were both at each other’s throats, one of them looking behind the iron curtain and the other holding a man captive. The main factor is that the Soviets were not happy with the Americans peaking behind the iron curtain and continuing to hold their ground and lie about what their true intentions were. This was one decision that blossomed into a big mistake that nearly ended everything. 

Another thing that I wanted to focus on for this unit was Gay Rights. We have come a long way from the original problems with this subject. Homosexuals were essentially treated like they were not human just because of one simple preference that they had. They were essentially being called diagnosed as sick. They weren’t allowed certain jobs like working in the government and they were constantly being fired for unexplainable reasons except for the fact that they were gay. They were also basically tortured if they got aroused by another person of the same sex, a common way was electrocution.

Right before the 70’s started something changed everything and it happened at the Stonewall Inn. It was a gay bar in New York. In 1969 an all out war started out front of the Stonewall Inn. Four police were stationed outside and they raided the bar along with two policemen who were undercover. The tables were turned on the policemen as the citizens inside the bar decided to fight back, which started a riot along the street. Everything went crazy as there was now a mob stretching the length of the street. This was essentially a new beginning and was the birth of Gay Pride Parades.

This unit was one of the best units I have ever done, as it was very open ended and I got to choose what I wanted to learn about. I had very hard decisions to make as I was interested in a lot of Cold War topics. I also struggled to find my thesis as I wanted something different to challenge me and I did, and that is why I think this was successful unit for me.

So recently in my science class we started learning about astronomy. Astronomy is such a broad topic and so hard to learn in a short matter of time. Our teachers solution to that was to have everybody split up into groups of two, and then we do a lottery to see which topic each person gets. My partner Robbie and I got “Nuclear Reaction and How Stars Work”.

We thought that this was going to be an interesting topic as the sun itself is one giant ball of fire slowly getting bigger, and we wanted to know how that exactly works. Most of or project was just doing basic research. We wanted to add an experiment in where we take some object and just cover it in something highly flammable and light it on fire but, its not a greate idea becuase, that is how one fo us burns ourselves, and also it wouldnt really accomplish much.

My partner and I then decided to put this information that we had acquired and put it into a video. We thought that a video was the best way to portray our information, as it is done all the time by proffestionals, and we also thought you could do a lot more with a video than with a Keynote, as that was our other option. So here is our video on how stars are created and sustained:

Lastly becuase there are so many different parts of astronomy we had to learn interconnect everything we learned about astronomy, and here that is:

This project was a lot fo fun, and I plan on learning more about astronomy in the future as there is so much even scientists dont know about it, and this topic intrigues me a lot.

Yet again we have finished a unit, and thankfully this is the last one before summer starts. This last humanities units was probably one of the most challenging for me, for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is that I had to read probably one of the most famous and confusing books that I have ever read and public speaking was required in this unit which is not one of my strong suits. This unit was probably the most diverse unit I have ever done, as we showed our learning in many different ways.

Before we started the unit, our teacher came up with an interesting plan to create groups. That plan was to lock us in a room together and have us create a groups based on what we thought would be reasonable or fair. We generally split people up by making diverse groups with their skills and abilities.The book that we read was Lord of the Flies. I assume you figured that out by the title of this post. If you have not read LOTF I highly recommend it, as it is one of the best books I have ever read. It has one of the most interesting storylines to it, and shows off the true colours of human nature. It is very dramatic with times where everybody is civilized and others where people become complete savages. This book is so diverse that even with all of that going on it has fear, sorrow and even anarchy. If that interests you I highly recommmend that you go and read this book, as it is probably one of, if not THE best book that I have ever read. To make sure we were actually reading the book our teacher made us to do chapter tests. It wasn’t too hard as long as you read the book, plus you took the test as a group. Another thing that went on throughout this unit was a point system. Since we were put into groups, that essentially made teams. So each group was competing against each other to get the most points. You could gain or lose points based off of basic things like tucking in chairs or forgetting to hand in an assignment. It made it so that the team members had to rely on each other to succeed, and it made us more well behaved in class which was a plus for our teacher.

One of the other things that we  focused on was Politics. Generally not the most interesting topic in the world but, I acutally enjoyed learning about it. We mostly focused on how different electoral systems worked. Some of them made sense, and then there were confusing and seemed like a dumb idea. We also talked about how a pipeline is trying to be built across BC coming from Alberta. In my opinion there are a lot of people who care about it but, theres probably even more who don’t care. The people that dont want it are worried about oil spills. That is completely understandable, but if it isn’t built then many people could lose their jobs, and the pipeline that has been there for about 70 years has never had a leak except for when somebody drilled through it.

Lastly the biggest part of this unit, the debate. As I said we were put into teams, and those were our debate teams, and at the end of the unit we had to debate against another team. We based the topics off of ideas from LOTF. To prepare we did these things called concept journals. To do them you essentially pick a topic like Humanity vs. Inhumanity. Then you essentially make an argument for one of the sides. Here is what I did for human nature:

Be it resolved that “It is human nature to be good at heart unless tempted by evil”. William Golding made this statement, as it is true and there are many examples of it all around us. Humans are constantly trying to make a difference in this world, they are trying to improve Earth itself, and the people on it. Progressively through history, the general population has shown more acceptance, kindness and love. A good example of that is the acceptance of LGBTQ, with San Francisco leading the charge. That example shows how most people are showing their inner kindness through acceptance. That is again showed the same way through the reduction of racism over some of the most recent decades. A different example is how we are currently trying to mend with First Nations, after we destroyed most of what they owned and part of their culture. Everybody who is not indigenous is currently trying to give back and support them, because humans are naturally good at heart and humans feel sympathy towards others. My last example of humans being good at heart is the fact that a lot fo people donate to charity. That shows that humans aren’t naturally evil or greed, although that doesn’t mean that humans cant be evil or greedy. One of the most common things that will make a person evil or greedy is money. Money can change a person into a monster. Money will make people sabotage peoples plans or even something like a sports game. Referees are constantly bribed in sports because getting money is more important to them than staying true to their profession. Even though humans can be greedy or unfaithful, doesn’t mean that they cant be good at heart. Ralph shows that at the end of Lord of the Flies, as he breaks down in tears in front of a Naval Officer because he had finally come back to reality and realized all of the horrible thing that had happened on that island.

For preparing for our debate we also listened to a debate podcast called Intelligance Squared US. It was actaully very interesting I highly recommend you to listen to one. Then we basically just studied our topic like there was not tomorrow. My group had to argue that it is human nature to put yourself above others. Here is the debate:

I thought that this unit went very well. I am very happy with the results, as I believe that my group had very strong arguments. It wasn’t perfect as I wish that I had said a couple different things. I felt that I have learned a lot and that I have grown a lot in this unit as I feel my public speaking has gotten a little bit stronger as well as my writing. At the beginning I was not to happy about having to debate but I am very happy that I have done it as it was a great expierence