Category Archives: Summative post

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March 10, 2024

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Why YOU Should Vote!

The latest PLP project, we explored voting, governmental systems, social contract theory, and the behavioural patterns of humanity to answer the driving question: How do we convince young people that they should vote? So follow me today on a journey through the ups and downs of those project.

We started off our learning by reading the book “Lord Of The Flies” by William Golding. It is a classic novel that explores themes of inner evil, innate human urges, and how successful and unsuccessful societies form.

Here is my reflection and chapter summaries: https://carrots-warn-h8i.craft.me/bFvKU9p9NfwzlZ

I honestly found the book very good: I liked how the author made no unintentional choices and every action is meant to reflect a counterpart in modern societal patterns. Every word is intentional and the book forms a powerful allegory for social contract theory and brings up an interesting debate about innate evil and good in every person.

I do, however, think that this step of the project was not helpful in moving towards answering the driving question: when we later explored the reason why young people don’t vote, the three main ones were

1: Not knowing how to vote

2: Thinking it doesn’t make a difference wether they vote or not

3: Not having the time to vote

So after knowing these three main reason, I ask you, how does a deep understanding of lord of the flies help us learn to influence young people. Common topics the book tackles are mentioned earlier, and none of them coincide with influencing young people to vote. Also, to some extent, the points above are all valid to an extent. Voting does take time, and some people need that time for other things. Also, when you cast your vote it is just one of millions that all have very little effect on their own. Fundamentally if you didn’t vote the election’s outcome would very likely be the exact same. So really the main thing we should focus on in influencing the young is teaching them how the system works this segways nicely into the next part of the project. This is why I think most of this project wasn’t actually helpful in the answering of the driving question.

This segment was started off with a comedy video that explains the Canadian government in a funny and engaging way:

Canada Explained

My main takeaway from this video was actually not about the Canadian government, but rather about how engaging the presentation was: I was laughing almost the whole time, which actually helped me retain the information much better. This concept will also be important later when me and my group create our own presentation.

After learning everything there is to know about Canadian government structure, we showed our evidence of learning with a Kahoot quiz.

Now that we knew the information needed to educate young people, it was time to learn how to teach them it. In my opinion, this section is the most critical to a good presentation: no matter how much useful information is in your final presentation, if nobody is listening it doesn’t matter. So we learned about how the most popular modern marketing trends and audience engagement strategies work, and we tried to incorporate these into our final presentation.

The style we used to incorporate our audience was a presentation with an interactive voting activity throughout. We split our group to research six individual issues that are very relevant right now and then found each political party’s stance on the topic and compiled all of this into one document.

Six Government Issues Research Doc

After this, we were finally ready to create our presentation. We worked hard to make graphics, videos, and an overall engaging and informative presentation, and then it was time to present. Unfortunately, our presentation fell slightly short. We had a sick group member who couldn’t come, our timing was off and we didn’t rehearse enough beforehand. If I did this again, I would strive to add more entertainment value to the presentation: ours, even after our efforts, was quite boring. I think comedy would be a useful tool and I think probably the biggest change I would make.

Thanks for reading my blog post! If you want to read this from my groupmember’s perspective check out their blogs here:

https://www.blog44.ca/maxl/2023/12/27/the-great-debaters-winter-exhibition-2023-double-post/

https://www.blog44.ca/tevab/2024/03/16/%f0%9f%8c%b2who-cares-and-why-bother-%f0%9f%8c%b2/

https://www.blog44.ca/sabrinag/2024/03/17/who-cares-why-bother/

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November 15, 2023

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Manhattan Project Squared

In the latest PLP project we learned all about the dawn of atomic energy: the manhattan project, Oppenheimer, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and so much more. Half of the class also ventured out to the birthplace of nuclear bombs: Albuquerque, New Mexico, to experience firsthand what happened there and capture media for the final product of this project, a book about the historical significance of the manhattan project.

This project started with a trip to where the first ever nuclear bombs were invented: Albuquerque New Mexico. This trip was not only an absolute blast, but we also learned s much valuable information firsthand. We visited the Trinity test site (where the first ever nuclear bomb was detonated), the los alamos lab were even today the military still innovates technology, the white sands missile range, and so much more. This trip not only gave us trivial information about the bomb’s development, but also gave insights on the cultural and economical impact present in the towns and people closest to where it happened.

The final product of this project was a book centered around one claim your group decides on (pertaining to nuclear energy of course). After lots of carful thought, our group’s claim was “The Manhattan Project is the reason the science of nuclear fission and fusion are creating positive change in our world today.” I actually disagreed with the assertion our claim makes, but we stuck with that claim regardless.

We wanted our book to feel like you’re reading and watching snippets from a bunch of movies, ads, and magazines. I was in charge of visual direction and I also created almost all the assets the book uses. I also helped edit and fact check every page of the book. Here are some of the pages I am most proud of. (I also wrote one of the top one’s magazine snippets)

Once we got through many rounds of tweaks, peer feedback, and revisions, we finally finished our book. I am very happy with the final result, but I think my group took it in a bad direction. Since our claim only talks about the good of the manhattan project (which is very little by the way) we have much more trouble filling up the ludicrous amount of pages we decided to add, and also make most sections of the book purposeless.

Overall, this has been one of, if not the best PLP project I’ve ever done. I loved learning about the rich history of the bombs and all the struggles that were involved making them, plus getting as close to the history ad possible with the field study gave it a quality I haven’t seen in any other projects (maybe loon lake). I just regret the direction our book went because I feel it didn’t accurately represent or show all the interesting parts of the manhattan project and nuclear bombs in general.

Thanks for reading my post! Stay tuned for the nest post where I learn how to debate like a boss. Bye bye now.

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June 12, 2023

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LIES! (And incongruencies)

In the latest PLP humanities project we learned all about Canada’s darker history of residential schools and cultural genocide to answer the driving question of “How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time”. So without further ado, here is the post.

The first step of this project was creating an I Am From Poem, which is a poem that describes me using a specific format. The way this connects to truth and reconciliation was very unclear at the start of this project to me, but later it connected back to the main idea of the project.

I Am From Poem

The order of this project was slightly disorienting, with Keystone 1 being the last keystone due and some other things like that, so I will go through this project in the order we handed them in.

🧱 Keystone 2

Part 1: History and Art

For this activity I explored a governmental act (I chose the Indian Act) and find art that reflects or makes a commentary on it. I found an amazing art exhibit called “The Indian Act Revisited” that looks at the Indian act and the current state of indigenous affair to see what has changed and what could be done. It consists of art form eight different First Nations artists. Here it is:

History And Art: The Indian Act

Part 2: Contemporary Issues

The goal of this segment was to find a text (art, music, essay, etc…) that reflects a modern indigenous issue. I found a song by indigenous artist “Dakota Bear” called Freedom that talks about inter generational trauma.

Contemporary Issues: Intergenerational Trauma

Part 3: Civil Dispute and Art

The last part of keystone 2 was a reflection on a civil dispute with sources and art. Here is mine:

Civil Conflicts and Art: The Oka Crisis

The next step in this project was a reflection on how I feel about living in Canada and my connections to truth and reconciliation. This is the part where the I Am From Poem ties back into the project, but to be honest, I felt like there could’ve been better ways to identify personal connections to Canada, like revising our I am from poems from a different perspective or creating rhetorical paragraphs from First Nations perspectives.

Truth And Reconciliation Paragraph

Throughout this project the whole class read a book called “The Marrow Thieves” by Cherie Dimaline. We also completed reading journal entries and reflections each week and finally at the end a paragraph that analyzes the book’s commentaries form the past and future.

My thoughts on the book

Personally, I really didn’t like this book; the dystopian future was somewhat believable, with the exception of one of the main plot points of the book: the ability to dream being lost by everyone EXCEPT First Nations people, with the secret being in their bone marrow. This is extremely unrealistic, as 1. Bone marrow cannot affect any of the brain’s processes 2. The government creates “schools” to place First Nations people in, killing them for their born marrow, but bone marrow can be harvested even right now in the real world without hurting the host, and 3. Bone marrow can infinitely be cloned with current technology as well.

“The Marrow Thieves” Journal

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Then finally it was time to work on the final product of this project: the collage. and after 6 drafts, this was the result:

Final Collage

Thanks for reading my post, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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March 29, 2023

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A Great Balancing Act

In this post, I will talk about the latest PGP 10 project. The driving question for this project was: “how does balance in my life create opportunities?”. So, without further ado, here is the post.

This project can be cleanly split into 3 facets of learning: atomic habits by James Clear, the 7 habits of highly effective people by Sean Covey, and positive brain training.

Positive Brain Training

Positive brain training is the act of consistently using your brain in ways that increase positivity and efficiency. This can be accomplished through meditation, exercise, being kind or grateful, and many others. We set a positive brain training schedule that looked like this:

Positive Brain Training

I felt that this process helped short term, but I didn’t train my brain consistently for long enough for long term results. But, I have started to keep journaling and noting routines because of this activity

The 7 Habits

You may recognize this book from another blog post I did long ago, but if you don’t or need a refresher, the seven habits are habits that anyone can implement into their life to make their productivity and overall happiness better. They go as follows:

1. Be Proactive

2. Begin With The End In Mind

3. Put First Things First

4. Think Win-Win

5. Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

6. Synergize

7. Sharpen The Saw

These habits I think help simplify and objectify the process of improvement into clear individual steps, which I found very helpful when I first read the book. When it was brought up again, I used this as an opportunity to reflect on the habits and goals I set previously.

Atomic Habits

Now for the center piece of this project: Atomic Habits by Sean Covey. This book’s messages about how small things can compound for massive impact later was quite eye opening for me personally, and I really enjoyed reading the first 5-6 chapters. However as the book went on, I found it quite repetitive, and the way the author wrote was sometimes convoluted. Even with these minor gripes though, I have implemented many of these habits into my life such as workouts and making negative habits unattractive, and had noticeable improvements since.

And this concludes my post! Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something. I would recommend anyone to try these self improvement strategies on their own as well. Bye

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March 28, 2023

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Trendisney

Recently, most of the PLP 10 class went to Disney world in Florida for a ten day trip. And we didn’t go there just for the rides (though they were a very nice extra), we had two projects centred around this trip: The Power of Imagination & Creating Trend Videos. This post will cover the latter, the trend videos project. In this project, I created five trend videos to answer the essential question: “How do I make effective personal design choices?”. So, without further ado, here is the post.

We started this project by creating personal productivity systems. The first step in making my system was to learn about the tools I already had: like things, calendar, etc… next, I cleaned and organized my physical and mental spaces and started creating time blocks in my calendar and checklists in my things. Then, I started on the next facet of this project, which was creating trend videos

Trend: a general direction in which something is developing or changing.

A the next step in this project was creating Disney themed trend videos: creating ideas for what our five videos could be, and writing it down for the next step. I came up with five ideas: a dance compilation, a street interview about people’s favourite rides, a fake interview and hotel room tour, a prank video, and a day in the life at Disney video. Once these ideas where written down in my craft document, I started planning out how I would create them.

Click here for the full planning document for my videos

I created a storyboard and planning table for each idea, as well as example material and extra details. Then, we went on the trip to Florida,

Or we would have gone to Florida, if our flight hadn’t been cancelled the night before. Thankfully, our teachers somehow managed to reschedule the trip for soon after, and the trip was back underway.

I filmed all my videos, but once I got home and started editing, I realized I didn’t film enough for one, and it wasn’t turning out how I wanted, so I pivoted and created something else instead. You can watch the final five videos on my YouTube channel:

https://youtube.com/@theryns.3895 <~~click this link

Thanks for reading my blog post. Make sure to check out my other posts, and see you in the next one.

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March 27, 2023

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The Power Of Imagination!

Recently, most of the PLP 10 class went to Disney world in Florida for a ten day trip. And we didn’t go there just for the rides (though they were a very nice extra), we had two projects centred around this trip: The Power of Imagination & Creating Trend Videos. This post will cover the former: the Power Of Imagination. The driving question is “how do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, physiological, and social experiences of visitors”

At the start of this project we learned how to summarize and understand text better, and we worked on an assignment about a TED talk called the happiness advantage.

421 Organizers (left is the revised one)

Final Summary Document

This didn’t have a lot to do with the project, but practiced skills that would come in handy for many future projects, including this one.

The next assignment, however, has everything to d with the project. We read an article from Smithsonian Magazine and crafted a summary the same way as shown above. Here is mine:

“How Disney Came To Define What Constitutes The American Experience” Summary

The next step in this project had us divide into groups to tackle each section of the driving question: cultural, economic, physiological, and social. I was put into the social interactions group. Each group had their own subsections for individual group members to research. My job was to create five PKMs (Personal Knowledge Managers) about the positive social interactions Disney cultivates for its visitors. Here are my five entries:

Entry #1

Entry #2

Entry #3

Entry #4

Entry #5

answer to my individual research question

Then, it was times to start fleshing out our final product: our group’s video to answer the question “How does visiting Disney World enhance well-being, reduce stress, and provide a sense of escape and enjoyment for some visitors?” We created a flow chart to help clarify our ideas, and then started working on our screenplay, call sheets, and storyboard.

Final Screenplay

After finishing the planning documents for our video, we went to Disney World, filmed and edited our video.

Final Video Link

Thanks for reading my post! This is one of two blog posts I’ve written about my class’s Disney world trip. If you want to read the other one, click here. Anyways, that concludes this post, bye.

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February 6, 2023

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Romeo Romeo, What Did We Say About Poison?

Hello readers, and welcome to my blog. This reflection is on the latest PLP project, “Romeo Romeo, are we still talking about Romeo and Juliet?” (I know, a bit clunky, but it works). The Driving Question for this project was: “How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?” And to explore this question, we read and reflected on the play, and then created an adaptation of our own.

The first step to this project was reading the play. We read the most important parts in class, and completed sections of a theme book to analyze the themes of what we read and connect them to adaptations of the play. Here is my completed theme book:

Romeo and Juliet Theme BookDownload

The next step in the project was to get into groups, and brainstorm ideas for out film adaptations. Our job was to take one or two scenes from the play, and think and create original adaptations of them. I was paired up with Sylas, Dana, Declan, and Nolan.

We chose the scene where Juliet fakes her death, and started thinking. The first idea that popped into my mind was instead of faking her death, she could go into a cryochamber. I thought that this was the closest to death someone can come nowadays without actually dying, and proposed it to my group. They thought it sounded good, so we started filling it our film pitch form.

Film Pitch

Then, we created a script, and started filming. And then, when all is said and done, here is the final film:

And that concludes this post. Thanks for reading.

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January 30, 2023

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MPol 2023

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

In this MPol post, I will go over all the PLP project I have done this year: Gold digger, Oology of Apology, and Romeo, Romeo, which I haven’t finished yet at the time of writing this.

First, I will look at my learning plan to show my expectation going into this year.

GOLD DIGGER

In this project, I learned all about the gold rushes in Canada’s history.

This project’s blog post is HERE.

Gold Rush Essentials PageDownload

Oology of Apology

This project’s driving question was: “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated – today?”

The blog post I wrote for this project is HERE.

I learned about ethical judgement, and how to make an accurate ethical judgements, and about some of the bad parts of Canada’s history, and what others and I can do about it.

Romeo Romeo, Are we still talking about Romeo and Juliet?

Despite the long title, this project was one of the shorter ones, and felt like it only lasted a week. It explores how we can interpret themes from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and connect them to film adaptations, finally concluding with a film adaptation of our own.

Romeo and Juliet ThemebookDownload

Loon Lake Field Study

Loon Lake Post

This concludes the post! Thanks for reading my MPol Post. Bye.

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January 9, 2023

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My Marketing Of My Merry Self

In the latest PLP project, we worked resumes, business cards, emails, and more in order to effectively market ourselves to employers.

The first step in this project was to find out what jobs we might even apply for in the future. One of the crucial steps to marketing yourself, or anything for that matter, is knowing your audience. I completed job surveys to see what I might be suited for, and these suggestions helped shape the way I describe myself on resumes, business cards, etc…

Job Survey Reflection

The next step was the resume: a document that usually shows these main things: references, work and volunteer experience, objective, skills and qualities, education, achievements, and contact info. I had started building a resume before this project, but for this assignment I just started over in Canva, which had great looking resume templates that helped make my resume look better. After many roundds of peer critique, here is my finished resume.

Final Resume

The next major step in this project was the business card. Most business cards should have enough information to pique a possible employers interest, then enough contact information for them to get back to you. I created two possible designs I would use for my ideal job, each with a front and back print:

After the business card was done, we worked the job interview. I learned about common job interview question and what kind of answer are better than others, and finally demonstrated this learning with a job interview skit I filmed with my partner Carter Chong (his blog here) so, here is the final video:

https://youtu.be/cFIRFSXpBuw

And after that we did some learning about the gig economy: the economy of small unique jobs, like Uber, Fiverr, or Skip The Dishes.

UBER game reflection

GE Questions

Thanks for reading my post. This was an extremely valuable project that I was happy to do, and honestly helped me get some things done that I’d been putting off for a while.

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January 5, 2023

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Oology of Apology

Hello, and welcome to my latest blog post on the project Oology of Apology. The driving question for this project was: “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated – today?” So, without further ado, here is the post.

The first assignment was a written reflection on a documentary we watched about Canada’s history. This activity served mostly as a taster of what is to come, and only really scratched the surface of Canada’s rich history.

“The most interesting takeaway I have from this video is how much rich history about minorities Canada is built on. The transgression that stood out to me the most was about Chinese people building the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were forced to build it on a very difficult and dangerous area to build on, despite having a much safer option that is more costly. This really showed me how brutal life could be in those times and what people were forced to do to build the Canada we know today.”

As we learned more about Canada’s history, we talked about the Ukrainian internment, and whether it was a just course of action or not.

https://www.craft.do/s/9g1sgtlpJOg9d0

And then we did the first keystone. This was a keynote presentation about one of three events: the komagata maru, Chinese head tax, or Japanese internement. I chose Komagata maru and ended up with this:

 https://www.icloud.com/keynote/04cyCwXUZhwvpBxmOnQA7a6Kw#Komagata_Maru_Keynote

The next keystone was a written script for and audio file about your given incident. It was also accompanied by a recorded reading of the script.

Script

Introduction:

Almost every country or civilization has had injustices towards their own people or outsiders in their history. Today l’II talk about one from Canada’s past: the Komagata Maru incident. This story takes place just before World War One, and shows the journey of a large steamship that helped change the Indian public opinion against the British.

Body:

Our story starts in 1908, when the continuous journey regulation laws were put into place, which prevented immigrants from many foreign countries coming to Canada unless they didn’t stop in any other countries along the way. this rule mainly restricted minorities from entering canada, but in a way that didn’t specify exclusion based on race. 6 years later, and the year is 1914, and the steamship Komagata Maru arrives in Vancouver, BC. However, upon entry, it is held offshore because of a violation of the continuous passage regulation. While this violation was disputed in court, the ship was held offshore for two months while the passengers barely scraped by on the little food and water they had. Then, the courts decided they were in violation of the law, and threatened to sink the ship if it didn’t head back to India. The ship was escorted out of port by the HMCS Rainbow, a British military cruiser. Once they arrived back in budge budge, an Indian city, disgruntled and starving, their was an altercation between British authorities and passengers, and shooting broke out, leaving 22 dead, including 16 passengers. These 16 deaths, and the opportunities lost for the passengers, are under partial responsibility of the Canadian government, and these passengers only received an official apology from the Canadian government nearly a century later, and never received compensation for their hardship.

Conclusion:

This incident paints a picture of Canada being an anti immigrant country, which is a far cry from the Canada we know today. From the racist policies to the casualties of the passengers, the komagata maru had an extremely rough journey, made this way becuase of our government. My final opinion is that the actions of the government were, and are, unjust, because of the racist actions our government made, like sending the Komagata back because it violated an already racist policy and keeping them in very inhumane conditions for months. But, everyone has their own opinion, so I encourage you to read more about the Komagata Maru and other injustices in our past.

And then, the final culmination of our learning from the project, the monument about the incident. My group decided to make ours a diorama of a ship (the komagata) being held between two countries by large guns.

We presented our monument at the PLP Winter Exhibition in the militarism section. Me and my group explained what it meant and it’s connection to militarism. The theme was the movie Avatar, and everything eventually connected to it.

Overall, I feel that this project has helped teach me a lot about how we can memorialize past  wrongdoings using monuments and apologies.