The day has come upon us! The day that we learn about memes in school. This however is not just memes. Like all schools, there needs to actually be some learning involved. So while we looked at memes, we also were learning about some topics like nationalism, colonialism, and historical significance. These topic were eventually mixed in with memes that we had been learning about. That’s, where things got a little more interesting. We were given a project, that project was to take what we learned about historical significance, nationalism, colonialism, etc, and make three memes about it. One of our meme formats had to also be a Tik Tok because it is one of the biggest memes itself right now. So, I got to work!

MEME #1: Still image

The first image I created is my second favourite purely because of the meme. The meme that I used is called “stonks”.

From the god himself Elon Musk ( he didn’t create this meme, but he does use it )

The “stonks” meme is a very simple but hilarious meme in my opinion. To make a “stonks” meme, you take the oddly shaped head that every “stonks” meme has, and then you give a describing word in broken English, like “stonks” which was created from the word stocks.

Now, for the meme that I made. I made a “not stonks” meme which is basically the reversed version. Then from there I decided that I was going to make the meme about something that we had been taught about, slavery after colonization. Slavery was a massive problem before the 1865. Any nations who colonized over a different nation would most likely use the other nation’s people as slaves. That is why I chose this topic. It affected many and it was a worldwide problem. This is also why I found it fitting that there is a world map in the background.

To create the meme, I started to add some simple text like, ” when the westerners take over your country and then take your people as slaves”, followed by “not stonks”. Remember, making a meme isn’t challenging, it’s the message behind it that counts.

This is what I ended up with.

MEME #2: Still Image

For my second meme, I chose a different format to go with. For this meme I chose the moana “what can I say except you’re welcome” meme. This meme has Dwayne Johnson’s character Maui, saying a line in his song. People have taken that line and applied it to many different memes:

Thank you Meme.xyz

From the main meme, I decided on another idea to collaborate with. I tried to think about one of our other topics because I didn’t want to make another meme off of slavery. I ended up choosing the topic of colonization in general because it is another problem that was felt worldwide. I really was trying to focus on things that were big topics and not small ones.

Before I started making the meme, I wanted this meme to be a little more directly for used on one place. So I recalled one re-occurring name that came up, Britain. After doing some research, I was astounded at how many places the British had colonized in history. Once I had seen how many, I knew exactly what I was going to make my meme about:

All that I did to create this was make the original meme with text box on mematic, and then I went into a editing software and overlapped a British flag with some opacity on top.

MEME #3: Tik Tok

It is time to create my third and final meme. This meme is in a Tik Tok format and I have a couple of friends in the video. ( Matthew and Tom ) This meme is not based off of a certain format however, this is based off a song. “Steppin” is a popular song to have in Tik Toks.

Even though it has very few words in this section, it’s going to work really well for what I have planned.

My plan for this Tik Tok was to make a commentary on woman’s lack of rights in history. So, I used the “I don’t know” lyrics to signify all the times rights were rejected or sometimes even taken from women. I also decide to add a part where a male person suggests something that women should be able to do. I added that section because I feel that maybe, even if a woman suggested something it wouldn’t be listened to. So, the flip side would be a guy giving the same idea and that idea then being listened to.

I have to say, this has been my favourite project that we’ve had this year and last year. Incorporating learning into something that kids really like ( memes ) is a way better way of getting people interested and enveloped into learning.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!