Originally, I had some second thoughts on not going on the Albuquerque field-study with the rest of the Prefomance Learning Program cohort. Even though, staying back at Seycove is always an option, this was my first time I made this decision. By the time the departure date arrived I had accumulated a wide range of knowledge on the topics we were studying.
During the summer break I was assigned an amazing book by the name of The Age Of Radiance, by Craig Nelson. This book outlined nuclear history starting from the discovery of radium, to Fukushima, and Chernobyl. Included in this book was the main subject of our project, the Manhattan Project. The name of our project was The Manhattan Project^2 (Squared), intellectually inspired by Mr. Hughes. The squared was added, to supplement proper name, “The Manhattan Project Project.”
The project for this unit was the creation of a book that answered or included these three sentences.
- The history of the atomic bomb
- The science of the bomb
- The cultural impact of the bomb
- How the bomb impacted New Mexico
- How the bomb impacted Canada
- Why was the development of the bomb historically significant
When this project was being announced, I immediately jumped to a time line format, and after further research I created a first draft of a time line in the App Pages. This timeline had about thirty events that tied directly to our six questions. Later in the proses I brought it down to the twenty strongest.
When my classmates left for the field study, I had a very strong plan on how I was going to get a good chunk of the now twenty five pages finished. I knew that I had about three hours, one hour every day to work on this book in class, and I had one hour every other day to work on it in my spare. This lead me to having five hours off in class time to work. I also formulated that I had to complete about three pages every day for six days to finish up to the Importance/ Significance parts of the book. The last rule that I put in place was that, if I finished before the end of my one hour time slot, I still left fifteen minutes to clear my head before the next class, I would keep working. The three page rule just dictated if I had to work “overtime” on that day.
The way that I planed out my book lead me to individually researching the many events that happened during this atomic era, in stead of researching it as a whole. This lead my knowledge on the subject to become less cumulative, and more subjective. To put it in simpler words I knew the ins ands outs of this historically significant time period. This even lead me to explaining to a sub for thirty minutes the very microscopic impact Einstein really had, and how its was the Hungarian physicists, like Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller that should be credited for warning the president.
Overall I found that this time a way from my fellow students lead me into really diving deeper in my research and picking a format that answered these six questions effortlessly. If you want to checkout my blog post on the Atomic era that included my book Press Here.