Grade 11 went by sooooooooo fast like really sooooooo fast. Another year in the PLP program…..good times? The debate exibition wasn’t something I was too exited for. Most people would think ” Nolan your a smart and handsome guy who’s a great speaker you should love debating right?”-an average joe. No wrong Ikinda hate it. But I’ll try to stay positive I like the people I did it with… that’s something right? Anyways in this blog post I’ll break down my experince and what I learned.

Hard work, effort, and thick skinis what you need to produce some amazing projects in PLP. If you want to go through all the steps of what it takes to make a project in PLP you clan actually be proud of what comes out of it, this is no different it. Thursday June 14th Seycove hosted PLPs second exhibition..THE BATTLE DOME and this time our presentation was not at all like the last exhibition we produced. Unlike anything we have before we had to perform a live debate that we could only kinda prepare for. This is PLP 11 is there a point of doing it if it’s average apparently.

Everything we did leading up to the exhibition, Lord of the Flies, government, current events… got us ready for the exhibition. Also, Ms Maxwell prepared us,p. She taught us valuable public speaking skills through practice debating in class and other activities.

All three of the PLP teachers made this debate even more of a big deal  by not telling us our debate topics only until two minutes before we got up to debate, so you had to be ready for anything. The preparation process was crucial,  nobody wanted to look clueless up in front of everyone.

The debate was structured into three rounds, and everyone would at least debate twice. There was a losers bracket and of course a winners bracket. If you won first you would then move on to the semi finals, and then to the finals if you won again. My group made it all the way to the final round.

Overall, I learned that I HATE debates and it is not at all what I thought it would be like, but on the flip side, I’m glad that I got to do it with my friends because they made it more fun. And even though I don’t like debating, it was fun to do as a class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TohNrz5dk94

What do strippers, money, and nuclear war all have in common… Sin City aka Las Vegas. Our class had a chance to go there. No, I’m not going to talk about strippers, and money isn’t the reason why I’m here. I’m here to talk about nuclear war.

This year in PLP are end of the year project was about fear and the assignment was a video essay. So to start, we found out what we wanted to talk about. In my case, it was something to do with the cold war. After, I figured out that I needed to make an essay before my video essay. So in most cases the first step of an essay is your thesis. My thesis was ” what is the point of having nuclear weapons although they have only ever been used once in WWII”. Coming up with this thesis was the hardest part, most of the class struggles with it. It was because of this that not just myself but the entire class fell behind on due dates and sticking to Hughes and Willemse tight schedule. So after I got my thesis, it became a lot easier, and so did the first few drafts of my essay.

After my essay was complete, I had to turn that into a video essay which I found easier than writing the essay itself. I went through my essay, and wrote as well highlighted things and key points that would work well as visuals.

Then I went into the movie making stage. I made the visual essay on iMovie. I went back into the document with the highlighted points and inputed all the visuals into iMovie. After that I used my essay as a script to talk over the visuals. But as you could imagine it sounded very boring. So what I ended up doing was use the information from my essay drafts and made it sound more interesting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=3LoszHan_oY

You can take lessons and skills away from everything in life, this project was no different. I learnt that making a video essay is a lot different, because my previous thinking process befor this project was that I could just make an essay and turn it into a video. But in reality, just talking over visuals while quoting your essay is quite boring, so you have to frazzle dazzle it up.