- Another unit, another post. Yes, I’m back with yet another learning experience to write about. The project’s main focus this time? Vancouver. Sins Of The City, kind of a misleading title for a unit, we didn’t learn much about what this city has done wrong, we did our own research on assigned topics. Environment, city development, labour rights, First Nations rights, and mine, Adam, and Aiden’s topic, city growth. Not to be confused with city development because we were focusing specifically on the economic aspect. Even our own group got confused with that.
You might be able to guess what format our final product was going to be in. Obviously an interpretive dance, kidding, I WISH it was that. It just might have been easier than another podcast.
Technically we started the unit off with a trip to the Museum Of Vancouver but of course I was away for another field hockey event. But hey, this one was for the junior national squad so I think that’s a valid reason. So I, started the unit the following week, with a pitch about what elements of city growth we wanted to cover. We decided to go with the story of Vancouver’s economy. Starting from just after the First World War and ending with today.
From there we began our research, tons of notes, upon notes, upon notes. I didn’t mind though, with my parents in the real estate business I’ve always been interested in the economic side of things. Having part of the research based around one of the times I’m most interested in (World War One) was just a bonus.
Our first actual task to complete and hand in was our script. The first draft did not turn out well, we’d based it heavily off of the notes and it barely had any storyline. It was more of a list of facts that we’d found, not something we actually understood and wrote about. A majority of it was in a huge block of text, the information was inseparable. The things we decided we would need to change were, to simply to spread things out, develop a storyline, and find a way for us to incorporate our interview that we had set up with someone who worked for the district.
Moving forward, we needed to record our first 30 seconds and find an interesting way to engage the audience into the topic. As our background we used city noises, to get a sense of the overcrowded, constantly moving streets that make up Vancouver. Then we ask a few questions, what brought people here? Why did they stay? What is there to do? One question after another to get the listener thinking, wanting an answer.
Fiiiiiiiiinally we got to move onto the recording of the full podcast. Due to the quality of a few of our group member’s podcast is in the past we chose to record in the same place. The sound booth in our school’s band room. We were also able to use an even better version of GarageBand that’s called Logic Pro X. It runs through the Mac desktop in the band office and is hooked up to a mic that’s set up in the booth. The first draft turned out really well, besides one thing… me popping my p’s when I spoke. I don’t do it when I speak normally but for some reason whenever I record it happens. Thanks to this we tried to research how to fix it in GarageBand or iMovie and we were able to figure it out. Did you know that the term for when someone pops their p’s it’s called a plosive? Cause I had no clue.
Yes, the final piece of the project is complete, or so we all thought, until we were all reminded of a literary analysis essay we had only talked about briefly here and there. Literary analysis of what you ask? Only the most boring book on this planet. That might be an overstatement, but just barely. The International Bank of Bob (link), a book I do not recommend unless you need a book that will make you go to sleep. As you can already tell I’m very strongly opinionated about this book and that is very evident, if you want to read more of me reviewing this book, be my guest.
Realizing that she was just setting us up for failure with this essay, Ms. Maxwell withdrew the task of writing about our novel studies. Not the essay, just the novel piece. We would continue as planned with the writing portion of this unit, about a solvable problem that related to our Vancouver podcasts. My group chose to focus on the overcrowded tourist destination that is Deep Cove and how simply adding more parking or a shuttle from transit hotspots would improve the organization of the area, give more privacy to residents, and offer a better experience for businesses.
We all had to write an individual essay, however we would alter combine them into a single letter. This would be sent to our MP, Mr. Terry Beech, in hopes that we would eventually see a change implemented that would help fix our problem, even better if it involved our ideas.
I know I said this in my last humanities post about the WW1 assignments, but this was honestly one of my favourite units. I was able to keep on working on my teamwork skills, my group had to mostly communicate by text due to our hectic schedules (sorry you had to be stuck with the two busiest kids in Vancouver, Aiden). Checking in with the group regularly was essential, when we were able to work together it had to be productive and straight to the point. An example would be how we had just under an hour to record our entire podcast and we still managed to get it done. Not only did this unit allow me to develop my personal skills but also my technical skills. I learned even more tricks for recording, editing, downloading, uploading etc. Pretty much everything that we’ve been learning about in PLP since grade 8 was involved in this unit. No video was included you say? Well, you are incorrect. At the end of the unit was a fun, behind the scenes styled video. A video log of us working, shots in correlation with our project, and a view at what goes into a PLP project.
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