The Gwen blog

Hello and welcome to another blog post! 

This project was about history and nationalism mostly in Canada but we did get to expand in to other parts of the world and learn about their nationalism.

 One of the first things that we did and one of the most fun to me was a simulation of signing the confederation in Canada. Discussing with my group that represented east Canada was interesting and it was fun finding ways to give and get what we want from the agreement. My group decided that we would sign the confederation.

Moving on to the part of the project that would answer the driving question which is “How can an understanding of nationalism in the past, help us make sense of today?”. We made pictures and a caption for an instagram post that would show and explain how the event we chose answers the driving question. I chose the Canadian pacific railway to do my project on, and I chose it because it was a part of history I hadn’t learned about yet and it seemed interesting to learn about. We were put into groups of people that chose the same topic as us to make the pictures and the caption.

This in my picture

I chose to put a picture of the old Canadian Pacific railway and the new because it shows how much change and growth have happened since then. The  caption that we put with our pictures was mad eBay us all writing one and then took parts of ours that we liked and put it all together into one.

see you next time.

What makes a revolution effective or not? This was the question we answered in the only way proper, by taking it to court.

Now to specify we didn’t actually take this to court but we did the closest thing to it by organizing a mock trail for different revolutions.

Now, In preparation to understand revolutions, we learned about Crane Brintons Theory. If you didn’t know Crane Brintons Theory is a theory about the stages that a revolution can or does go through. It includes incubation – which is when people have a sense of government injustices and/or weak rulers, moderation –  protest against the government increase. Crisis –  the use of violence increase dramatically like the killing of a monarch, and recovery – violence diminishes and the old regime altered by the effects of the revolution returns. This helped me to better understand the how revolutions progress by pin pointing the stages of Crane Brintons Theory in the other revolution we learned about.

We connected Crane Brintons Theory to the story Animal Farm (if you haven’t read this book then  you should!). Animal Farm is a book based off of the Russian revolution by using the animal characters in the book to depicted key people who were in the revolution.                                                                            Here is my connection of Crane Brintons theory to Animal Farm:   

To start the process of making our mock trail, I was put in to my legal team, if you will, to start researching our revolution which was the Xinhai Revolution. In that group, before we were told if we would be prosecution or defence, we researched a lot about our revolution. This is my infographic on my revolution:

I learn a lot about this revolution, I went through almost every thing you could find about it online. There was a man named Liu Depang who wrote a daily journal during the time of the revolution. Though I could not find pictures of his journal to read myself I found a very comprehensive book on his journals that was had a lot of detail into his life and what he wrote. It was really cool to read about his daily life with his family and this helped a lot to find out what life was really like back then for people in a small town during the revolution. 

After a lot of researching, we were told that we were going to be defending the xinhai trial in court. Now I thought it was going to be easier to defend the Xinhai Revolution because, in the end the revolution was successful in toppling the Qing Dynasty but there of corse were many bad things before it got to that point. Never the less, we were able to put together a strong case to prove that the Xinhai Revolution was effective. We all had different roles in the trail and for my team I read the closing statements. Now I am terrified of public speaking, even if its scripted (which this was) its still pretty scary for me, but I feel that with all the practice I did, I didn’t do to terribly and doing this I feel it really helped me to not be so afraid next time I do something like this. In the end the the jury made up of our parents decided if the revolution was effective or not effective. Having my dad look right at me from the crowd and vote against my side was not a great confidence booster. Despite that the revolution was found not guilty!

For my first exhibition in PLP I think it was really fun and I’m really happy with how it turned out! 

Here Is a video of the trail:  

See you next time.

Hello and Welcome back to another blog post.

To start this we read and answered questions on common lit readings about the environment. One of the story’s we read was “he-y, come on ou-t” which has a pretty clear theme to it. It’s a story and some towns people found a hole in the ground after a storm. Someone yells “hey come on out” and throws a rock in to the hole but they don’t hear a echo or the rock hit a bottom. The hole doesn’t seem to have an end, so they start to dump the towns waste and garbage in to the hole to get rid of it. Other countries start to dump their toxic waste in it as well. After a long time of doing this (spoiler alert) a worker on break hears “hey come on out” that seems to come from the sky and a rock falls on him which indicates that every thing that they put in to the hole with now fall from the sky. The theme is basically what goes around comes around even if there are no immediate consequences.

My topic that I wanted to write my letter about was about the problem of Canada sending its waste over seas and how funding companies that recover and recycle waste that will help not to contribute to the growing environmental problems in the countries that we send our waste to. I wrote to the honourable John Horgan because as the premier of BC he could help fund these companies. Here is my letter:

While researching for this letter I Learned a lot about how Canada and British Columbia, along with other countries, impacted other places by sending their garbage away. China banned all imports of waste because they were becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of waste in land fills. Jiangcungou landfill, which is the biggest landfill in China, Is around the size of 100 foot ball fields and receives 10,000 tons of garbage a day. I think this really speaks to the impact of sending waste over seas and other countries might follow in banning imports as they be come increasingly worried how much waste there is.

After the letter, we planed an outline for a multi paragraph response to what common lit story theme connects with the theme to our letter. I connected my letter to a story called quite town. In quite town there is a family living in a town that everyone left because the water levels are raising and the town will eventually flood. Bev doesn’t believe the town will flood, not for a long time anyway. At the end of the story the town starts to flood and Bev realizes she should have done something and because she didn’t her family is in danger. I connected my letter to this because if more people don’t start changing what they do and being more environmentally friendly, it will cause major consequences that we wont be able to stop or reverse much like how because Bev didn’t do anything and now her family is in danger and she cant stop it but she could have before.

After we were done the letter everyone put the return address and where you want to send it to on your envelope, which took a couple tries for me, and then we walked to deep cove and mailed them. I am exited to see if and what john Horgan will write back to me.

see you next time.