This is my first official school post from my final year of grade 12; with us just passing the one month mark, its time to write about our first unit of the school year — this unit-based our studies around two main ideas. We looked at gender roles throughout history and what makes something (literature, movies, etc..) a classic. Incorporating both of these topics, we completed a final project in small groups to show our understanding of gender roles during a specific period using the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew. Watch the short animation below to see whether you understand our representation of The Taming of The Shrew set during the 1920s.
After watching the animation, I hope you understand the message of gender roles during the 1920s. If not, don’t worry throughout the remainder of this blog post, I’ll explain the learning I did alongside my group to obtain an understanding of both classics and gender roles.
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We actually started this unit in the summer by choosing and reading a classic novel. Instead of just reading one I decided to read two of the books were assign to complete a reading goal I set out for myself at my end of the year grade 11 PGP meeting. This was beneficial as it allowed for me to choose from the two books for which one I wanted to write a short review on. The two classics I read included The Wars and The English Patien,t, both of which were excellent, somewhat challenging reads. Sometimes with assigned school bo,o,k,s I don’t enjoy reading them, however I really enjoyed the books and during my family’s vacation in Winnipeg any free time I had I would read the books. Plus the more reading I do the more it will improve my reading and writing. Following reading both books, I decided to write my review on The English Patient as I really enjoyed the format in which it was written and the artistic, descriptive language used throughout the entirety on the story.
Here is my review:
Following writing this review we then wrote an opinion paragraph about whether the book we read was a classic or not. For my paragraph I said that The English Patient was a classic because of the longevity of Ondaatje style of writing. The idea behind the message of my paragraph was a very strong point however to improve the way it was presented in the paragraph I could have focused my writing a little bit more to make this powerful statement that exemplifies my point.
The next aspect of classics we looked at as a class was Shakespeare in specific his comedy, The Taming of The Shrew. As Shakespeare plays were meant to be performed instead of read, as a class, we went to the live performance of The Taming of The Shrew, performed at Bard on The Beach. With the play set during the Wild West, it was fascinating to see how the director decided to take the play as more of a love story instead of a “taming” story. Watching the story live helped me understand the story and helped bring a somewhat overwhelming and confusing play into perspective.
After grasping an understanding of the play, we were split off into groups and tasked will creating a short animation of one act of the taming of the shrew during a certain time period. My group, which included Alex, Ryan, Chiara and Myse,lf, were tasked with act two of The Taming of The Shrew during the 1920s.
Before staring the animation, we needed to gain a deeper understanding of gender roles during the 1920s. To do so, we created multimedia to show women roles during our time period. I decided to use Keynote to create a short animation and a recording to go alongside the animation. With my first draft, I didn’t include links to the photos I used so for this blog post, I went back and added the links as well as decided to add some music to the video to aid in emphasizing the points I was trying to get across.
Once each of us individually created multimedias to show our understanding of the time period. We then went on the begin planning our animation by cutting down the sc,ript, creating characters, and finally creating a storyboard. Alex and Ryan edited the script, Chiara designed all the characters and I created the storyboard. Throughout the entirety of this proje,ct, our groups worked very well together delegating and evenly splitting up tasks, as well as working alongside one another when we had time to work on the project together.
During the creation of this animation, we took a look back on classics. By writing an essay about whether The Taming of The Shrew was a classic or not. This was a hard question to answer, as I had good points on both sides of the argument. I ended up arguing that Taming of The Shrew is a classic mainly since it is still recognized and performed today. Below I’ve included a copy of my essay.
Following writing this essay, we then focused on creating our animation using our previous work from the storyboard and script editing. One we got started, we realized that creating a short animation was a lot more complicated than we thought, especially our original idea of using adobe animate (which is a pretty time-consuming program to use). Our first draft was very basic, with mostly just a recorded script and a little bit of animation.
What we learned from this draft was that our animation needed to be a whole heck of a lot shorter and have more animation to make it more interesting. After working together and many hours of revision and work, we created our final draft, which I would say is still a work in progress and something where we can learn from our mistakes. Originally our animation was supposed to have the characters’ mouths animated while our audio was going; however, after several tries using different mouth positions for each sound, it, unfortunately, didn’t end up working. This was definitely a learning experience and something where we can’t get frustrated with ourselves if it’s not always going to turn out the way we want it to. Although the final draft was due, I think our group will continue to revise our animation to reach fro a higher grade on the proficiency scale.
Throughout this unit, I’ve really tried to put in everything to go up and beyond; however, as a good number of the assignments were solely writing, I found it very difficult to meet the standards set in place. Writing has always been difficult for me, even when I put hours upon hours of research, planning, and writing in the final result is never where I want it to be. However, instead of letting this bring me down, I will continually practice my writing through writing more blog posts and reading regularly. To compare my progress and improvement during the year, I will compare myself on the proficiency scale and ask for feedback on all future assignments. My goal for the end of the year is to obtain, then maintain an exceeding on the proficiency scale to show a deeper understanding of the curricular competencies.