My Last Tpol
Hello Internet, Hello again Miss McWilliam, Hello again parents. Welcome to my LAST EVER TPOL…. Oh god I’m so old. Before we get into anything, you know the drill.
“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.”
We also have a new driving question “Why am I ready to move on to the next grade?” But I’ll answer that later.
Now that that’s out of the way we can get into my VMV’s that I made at the start of the year, so first we have my.
Vision:
My vision from the start of the year was “My vision is to be confident in social situations and be able to add valuable content to class discussions. I will be able to absorb information and use it in other ways, and even use it outside the classroom.” I think this one is great and I actually feel like I have accomplished it, to prove it I have this project to show you. Macbeth. In this project we had to be very confident and sociable, because it was all about acting and analyzing Shakespeare as a class, meaning I would have to read the script out loud, add my input to the conversation, and act out as a character of my choice for a video. This was especially important because we had to get insight into the minds of the characters to portray them in between scenes. This perfectly fits my vision, and I think I’ve fulfilled it pretty well. I added to class discussions and made a large knowledge network that helped me keep track of my thoughts. If you would like you can watch my video here, but try not to judge my attempt at a Scottish accent.
Mission:
My mission was, “I plan to contribute to every one of my classes by providing at least one thing per class, whether it be a question, an idea or an answer. I want to do this because I believe I can bring new opinions to the table, as someone who has lived outside the country, I have two pretty different experiences and perspectives on how to live life. I think this is a valuable asset to have as I can give unique critiques and answers that some others might not think of”. Unfortunately, I don’t think I entirely completed this one, but I definitely did better than I did in any other year. As a naturally introverted person, I tend to be quite quiet in class, but I’ve been trying to improve. Funnily enough, I think the class that reflects this the most is not a PLP class, it’s actually my environmental science class. Miss Kadi makes the class a very open environment, meaning I feel very invited to add my part to the class. Every day we’re asked a question where we all go around and give our answer, which really helps me get out of my shell. This makes me feel more included in class discussions and therefore helps me to fulfill my mission.
Values:
Engagement:
In terms of engagement I think I have been more locked in this year than ever. I’ve been able to take away the message of every class and understand everything the teachers are telling me. A project that showed this off was my most recent one, Reaconciliaction part 2 Haida Gwaii. Now I unfortunately didn’t go on this trip, however while at home I felt very capable of managing the tasks I was given to do. I was able to stay engaged and focus on my work even when there wasn’t a teacher to tell me what to do. I also knew when to reach out to my teachers if I needed help.
Self Regulation:
I have continued to use the strategies that I talked about in my mpol, and improved on them to suit me best. I think this also feeds into the reconciliaction project, because I was able to contain myself and focus on the work without getting distracted.
Communication and Collaboration:
I think this was very well reflected in my spring exhibition. We were on quite a time crunch, being given only about a week to make the whole thing happen, but my group really stepped up our game and took on our own roles that matched what we were good at. We all communicated what we were doing very well and organized how we would represent each section of our topic.
Conclusion:
So we are now at the end of my last ever tpol and it is genuinely shocking how much I think I’ve improved. From focus in class, to participation in discussions, I am really proud of how great of a learner I’ve become. But we can’t leave out the driving question, “Why am I ready to move on to the next grade?” I think this year has taught me so much about how to be an independent and engaged learner. I’ve grown so much by developing strategies to help me improve my focus, participation and collaborative skills. But despite all this I don’t feel ready for grade 12, nobody ever really does, but I know that this is the best next step for me as a learner.
So on that note I will be signing off, thank you for reading or watching my last ever tpol, and I hope you’ve gained new insight on how I have improved as not just a learner, but as a person.
Apparently museums can be not boring?
Welcome back to my blog, everybody.
This project was quite a unique one, being heavily focused on museums. But! Be prepared for a whole lotta images because this project contained not only a field trip, but also a video. So, without further delay, let’s get started.
So we need a driving question, and for this project, it was “What role do museums and governments play in acknowledging and addressing historical injustices?”. To me, this question seemed to be really specific and not super open-ended, however, I came to realize that museums are more than just places where boring people and nerds hang out.
First of all, we started this project by being given a choice between 3 final products. We could write a letter to an MLA, make an audio recording, or we could make a video. And because I hate my free time, I decided to make a video…. From scratch….. using iMovie….. but we’ll get there.
This project was quite short, only lasting 3 weeks total, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the field trip. We started out by waking up at FIVE! AM! To get on a stupid boat. But after I was done zombie walking onto the sea bus, we continued towards Victoria and started to work on the ferry. We had to make a list of questions that we wanted to ask the museum staff, but that stuff is mostly boring, so here are a bunch of photos from the museum.
The museum was surprisingly quite interesting, and I really liked the exhibit with the fake animals.
The next day, we went to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, Unfortunately, we couldn’t take a lot of photos, but since we were a school group, we got special VIP treatment. They were quite excited to have us there, and our MLA, Susie Chant, was very enthusiastic about showing us everything she possibly could. We started our tour with our guide, Nicholas, who showed us some very interesting ways that Indigenous communities were honoured throughout the building. We also went into sections that were usually off limits, but because Susie was so happy to have us there, she pushed us through. Unfortunately, I can’t share much information because…. You know….. I’m not allowed…. But what I can do is share these photos.
Now we were headed home after 2 very, very veeerrryyyy long days. And there were still more long days to come. Because when I got home, I had 1 day of rest, then I was off to Edmonton for a choir trip with 2 SEPARATE 16 HOUR BUS RIDES. So safe to say I was struggling, sleep-wise and mental state-wise. But when I got home, I got straight to work. And by straight to work, I mean I waited until the weekend because I was in much need of sleep.
Now I’m done complaining, let’s talk about what needed to be in the video. We had to provide a clear thesis that set the theme for our whole video. We had to provide 2 pieces of evidence that strongly supported our thesis. And we had to give a call to action on how museums and governments could improve. So now you know the work we had to do, let’s watch my video.
Well, what did you think? I worked pretty hard on it, so I hope you liked it.
Usually, I end my posts with my answer to the driving question. Buuuuuut I kind of already did that in my video. So I’ll end slightly differently. I’m going to ask you the driving question. I ask that you take a few minutes to come up with an answer yourself, for the question “What role do museums and governments play in acknowledging and addressing historical injustices?”.
That’s it for this blog post. I hope you like the added media, and I’ll see you next time.
All The Write Things In All The Write Places
Writing, talking, walking and general existing. All these things share one similar trait. Who, you, are. There are many things that build up your character and one crucial part is your writer’s voice. That’s what this project was about.
Hello Internet, welcome back to my blog. This project was called the write stuff and it was all about finding your writer’s voice. I think I do a pretty good job at letting people know it’s me when I’m writing because abuse I write similarly to how I talk, but this project helped me learn about new ways I can bring forth my tongue into my literature (see look fancy words). The driving question for this project was “How do we develop our voice as writers?”. This question has many answers, so in order to answer it I will tell you about all the things we did to figure it out. Before we get started I would like to say this was a relatively short project and I was sick for a whole week so I’ll be missing some details. If you want a good overview on the whole project check out some of my friend’s blogs like Brooke and Logan.
First of all, we examined 3 essays (2 because I got sick) and answered questions about them so we could see what we found interesting and what was boring to a reader.
No Canada
The first essay was called No Canada, and it talked all about how the writer thought O Canada was a bad song. When going through this piece it felt like the writer was being really whiny, as he kept making claims that were entirely opinion-based, and not backing it up with any facts or evidence. However, it did have a good and clear structure with each paragraph having a clear point. By reading this essay I learned to avoid putting too much of my own feelings into my work.
All Quiet On The Northern Front
The second essay was called All Quiet On The Northern Front and was all about how Canadians are portrayed across the world. I found this essay much better quality because while it still had opinions, it was also backed up by logic, facts, and possible explanations. This piece also provided examples using previous interviews to help explain their point. From this essay, I learned that evidence is super important if you want to persuade a reader.
It was around here when I got sick and missed an entire third of the project, that’s right, this was only a 3-week project and I missed a whole week. So I missed the entire explanation of the 6+1 traits (check out my friends to see what those are). Since I missed this part we’ll just skip to where I came back.
So I’m back at school, stressing about all the things I’ve learned and then BOOM, I find out what the final project is like that. I suddenly realize that I have to write a whole essay by the end of the week, not too bad right? Then I’m told at the end of the week our teachers will come in and read the class’s essays and try to guess who wrote them. Luckily we were able to write about whatever we wanted so I chose a topic near and dear to me. Video games. More specifically, the health benefits and debunking myths about them. But we have 1 more super fun activity that we did in class.
So our teacher takes us outside and lines us up like roll call in a prison and explains the activity. She gives us a prompt and we have to count to ten using that voice, weird right? So we do that and then she tells us to walk back and forth in different ways with the prompts she gives us. I’m still a bit confused then she explains the premise of the exercise. Each one of us walked and talked in different ways at the start then when we saw things we liked from other people we used some of their ideas, this is the same thing with writing. Everyone starts in their own way, and then by consuming different media we build on what we do and change it to form our own style. I really liked this activity because we got to go outside and it helped us realize what our writing style is really all about.
So now, with all the things I learned, I took parts of everything I liked from this project, as well as my own quirks, and merged them all into my essay. I think I did a great job at showing my personality, BUT ONLY ONE OF THE THREE TEACHERS GOT IT RIGHT! To be fair it was pretty long so they didn’t read the whole thing, but I called myself a nerd, who else does that? Anyway, if you want to read my essay you can have a look here.
Finally, we come back to the driving question, “How do we develop our voice as writers?” This is different for everyone and you can obviously use the activities I talked about in this project, but I’ll give an answer that really works for me. When you are writing, speak it out loud or in your head with your voice. If it sounds right then perfect, but sometimes it sounds a little off and you wouldn’t realize if you hadn’t spoken it. This is a strategy I’ve used for years and it also helps me with punctuation and grammar.
Thank you for reading my blog post, I hope you learned something and I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
The Seven Deadly Questions
Hello Internet, welcome back to another blog post. This post will be quite different from any other in the way that it is formatted. I have been provided with 6 questions that relate to our project and I will answer these questions using resources, activities, and things we learned. But first I’ll tell you about the project.
This project was called Status and Indigeneity and was all about what identifying as an Indigenous person really means. This is reflected in our driving question for this project “How might understanding the sensitivities around Indigeneity, help us understand B.C. First Peoples?” Which is the secret 7th question for this post. But without further adieu let’s get into these questions.
What does “status” mean in Canada, and how does it shape identity and access to rights and resources?
So first of all we have to define status, and the way I see it, this can be interpreted in two ways. Number 1 is the legal definition, “Indian status is the legal standing of a person who is registered under the Indian Act. Registration under the Indian Act is not the same as applying for a status card. You need to be registered before you receive a status card, but you can apply for both at the same time.” This is a very clear and definitive way of describing it that makes sense in a Western society. The second way of defining it is left up to the indigenous peoples. I think they should get to say who is Indigenous and who is not because obtaining a status card can be a long and arduous process and using a little card to determine whether someone is Indigenous just seems wrong. Moving on to how it shapes identity, I think it can go multiple ways. Someone can either feel empowered by their status card, and use it as a symbol of their heritage, or someone could feel limited by status cards and see it as them having to prove they are Indigenous. For example, I am British and I know I’m British, so I would be pretty damn annoyed if someone told me I had to prove it to them by giving them a DNA test, especially if that meant I was being excluded from benefits. Either way, it definitely affects the way people identify and the way people are perceived.
Why do you think some people falsely claim Indigenous identity? What are the consequences of this?
For this question, I would like to look back on something we researched quite a lot in this project, and that is the topic of Buffy Sainte-Marie. You may have heard of her as she became one of the most influential Indigenous music artists ever, but recently evidence has surfaced that proves otherwise. There are a lot of loopholes in her story and the facts just don’t add up. If you would like to learn more about Buffy I recommend you watch this episode of The Fifth Estate. It goes in depth about her story and after watching it in class I can confirm that it does a great job of making sense of the whole situation. But after finding out what she did this sparked a whole bunch of new ideas to consider.
The cons:
There are some blatantly bad things that came from this. First of all, she abused the idea of being Indigenous to generate wealth and fame for herself. She not only profited from the struggles that real Indigenous peoples go through, but she also robbed other Indigenous artists of titles they can now never claim. Her first Indigenous-related awards included a Juno for Best Music of Aboriginal Canada, a Gemini Award, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Regina. These titles can now never be claimed by real Indigenous peoples.
The Pros:
You might think what she did was all bad but truthfully there was some good to come of this. First of all, despite coming from a corrupted origin, she still spread information that helped Indigenous culture and awareness become more mainstream. Without her, we may not even have the course that taught me all of this today. She also helped inspire this project by raising awareness of something called pretendians. Those who falsely claim to be Indigenous. If Buffy Sainte-Marie never had her rise to fame then not as many people would know about the danger of false claims of indigeneity.
How has your understanding of Indigeneity, identity, and authenticity evolved through this study?
I think through this project I’ve learned a lot more about what Indigenous people have to go through to even prove they are Indigenous in the first place. Through research and by talking to our Indigenous representative at the school, I can better understand the process of acquiring a status card and the effects that come with it. I’ve also learned how Indigenous people’s sense of identity is different than other races and cultures. Whether that be people not believing your background or the misperception of the benefits Indigenous peoples receive, I now know more about their struggles. Obviously I can’t know for sure, as I am unable to experience these things firsthand, but trying to learn is the best way to help fix it.
What is the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation? Where do we draw the line?
I think the difference is subjective. The line is drawn by those who it affects and nobody else. This makes it difficult to give a definitive answer because there is so much to take into consideration, however I can give a general answer. Cultural appropriation is using or doing something that belongs to a culture, without going through the effort of learning the history and use purposes of that thing. Cultural appreciation is using or doing something that belongs to a culture after learning the history and purposes of that thing and being given permission by someone from that culture, who also understands the history of it. Other than this, it is up to people from that culture whether you are allowed to or not because at the end of the day, if it doesn’t belong to you, you need to ask.
How do media and institutions (universities, arts organizations, government) contribute to the problem of false claims of Indigeneity?
I think these contributions are good in intent, but not entirely great in execution. These institutions provide “benefits” to Indigenous peoples but there are some obvious flaws. First of all, things that are considered benefits are not really benefits, it is just repaying the debts and trying to fix the damage that was caused. Despite this being the truth, people don’t see it this way with some misinformed people interpreting it as “they get free stuff just because of where they’re from?” This leads to stereotypes that Indigenous peoples are freeloaders, while this just isn’t true. Next, there is also the incentive for people to fake Indigenous heritage to also receive these “benefits”, which leads to more restrictions on them making it harder for the real Indigenous peoples to receive the help they need. Overall there are flaws that need to be fixed, but no obvious solution of how this can be done.
What responsibility do we have when discussing these issues outside of class?
This question is more of a personal thing, but I’ll give some things that you can do, followed by what I will be doing. Some things we can all do to help is by squashing stereotypes or micro aggressions when we see them. These things usually fly under the radar as okay because it’s seen as just a harmless joke, but just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean it’s okay. So we can all fix these things little by little. As for what I am going to do, I will take all of these things into account while also spreading information about Indigenous peoples when I fly back home to England. Before I moved here I knew nothing about Indigenous history and that is the same for all my friends still in England. Since we are not taught about the wrongdoings that occurred, I am taking the responsibility of informing my loved ones of what happened and how they can make it right.
So that wraps up all the questions from the project but one. Special question number 7, “How might understanding the sensitivities around Indigeneity, help us understand B.C. First Peoples?” I think the things I’ve learned throughout this project will help me be more cautious around what I say, and what I believe when researching in future projects throughout the course. The insight I’ve gained has gotten me slightly closer to understanding the modern struggles of the Indigenous peoples and while I still have much to learn I have definitely taken a big step.
Thank you for reading my blog post, sorry for so many words but I had a lot to say about this project. See you in the next one.
Oh how I have grown: Mpol
Hello internet, Hello Miss McWilliam, Hello parents, welcome to my second last Mpol ever, you know the deal.
“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.”
So this year Mpol’s look a little different, so if you are wondering why this feels new, that’s because it is.
The first new thing is related to our prepol’s from this year. We have to show how we have aligned with our VMV’s, which is this thing.
And we also have to answer this new question that I would like to consider the driving question of this post, “What is a habit or routine that has improved your learning so far this year?”. But I’ll get to that later.
My Vision
First of all, I would like to go over my vision “My vision is to be confident in social situations and be able to add valuable content to class discussions. I will be able to absorb information and use it in other ways, and even use it outside the classroom.” This is a great one to start off with because I have the perfect example. During our project about the Hiroshima bombing we were reading a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey, and every week we would take one class to sit down and hold a Socratic seminar to talk about the book. I really liked this environment because it felt less like a class where you had to put up your hand to talk, and much more like a group of people discussing a book that they all read. I felt like I could actually get my ideas out without having to be nervous of being wrong. These seminars really helped with my confidence in social situations and I can see it reflecting on me in places outside the classroom when I’m having discussions.
My Mission
Image credit: Big Think
Next I would like to go over my mission, “I plan to contribute to every one of my classes by providing at least one thing per class, whether it be a question, an idea or an answer. I want to do this because I believe I can bring new opinions to the table, as someone who has lived outside the country, I have two pretty different experiences and perspectives on how to live life. I think this is a valuable asset to have as I can give unique critiques and answers that some others might not think of.” I have a great example for this one too, however it is not a class nor a project, but a teacher. The introduction of Mr Gibson into PLP has helped me out quite a lot. The way he teaches classes makes it much easier for students to get their ideas out there because he provides a welcoming and open environment. He is always willing to answer our questions and never makes us feel stupid. This has helped me to add new things to each of my classes. Since I do have to give an example, I think this was well reflected in our project on The Cold War. The way he let us do this project helped us gain an insightful view into our topics. Since we were allowed to do WHATEVER WE WANT (as long as we could connect it to The Cold War) is widened the possibilities of our learning by so much because we could actually be interested in our topics, for example one of my classmates did a presentation on how The Cold War connected to Ryan Gosling. This project helped me bring ideas to the classroom that I think were truly my own.
My Values
Engagement
I think I have successfully been more engaged in class work this year because I’ve been finding topics that I actually care about more. For example, in our anthropology project we had to find an artifact and make a museum card that explained different things about it. Since we could choose whatever we wanted for the Museum of Anthropology, I chose to research a gun, because I find weapons very interesting. This allowed me to be more focused of my topic and actually care about researching it. If you would like to take a look at our final product you can find it here.
Self Regulation
I don’t have a specific project or class to associate with self regulation, but I have come up with strategies that have helped me improve on this. First of all I’ve been finding it easier to regulate myself just because I’ve have gotten older and matured more, but if even that isn’t working, I like to isolate myself so I know I won’t get distracted by my friends. This helps me to focus only on the work I have to be doing and lets me get classwork done in class.
Communication and Collaboration
As I mentioned earlier, this year I have had experiences that allow me to collaborate effectively with my peers, however with communication I feel like I have also improved. Since this is my fourth year at the school, I have more and more realised that my teachers want the best for me too and also realised that they really aren’t that scary, so if I’m struggling I can just ask them for help and they won’t judge me because after all, they are there to help. An example of this is actually right now. As I am writing this post I have just asked my teacher for help because I was confused about some of the criteria, and wouldn’t you believe it, I actually got help from her.
So now we are coming to the end of the years Mpol, and I think I’m getting pretty good at these. But we mustn’t forget the driving question, “What is a habit or routine that has improved your learning so far this year?”. I feel like I’ve already talked about many of my improved habits, such as distancing myself when I need to focus, or talking to my teachers when I need help, but there is one more thing that has been extremely important. Actually writing down the things I have to do. This year, every time I am told I have to do something, like homework or something I didn’t finish in class, I write it down in things. By doing this I allow myself to be able to check what I still have to do, which has been really helpful for keeping me on track with my learning. I used to think “nah I’ll just remember it” but that way I always either forgot or did it late.
And so we have come to the end of this year’s Mpol post. I hope you can maybe take away something to help you improve yourself, and if not, I hope you can see how much I’ve grown as a learner over the years. That’s all for now. Good bye.
I Have Dug Deep
Welcome back to my second ever BC First Peoples blog post.
This project was called Digging Deeper, and it was about archeology. When I first heard about this project I wasn’t too excited because archeology doesn’t really seem very interesting, but it turns out there’s actually a lot more to it than I first thought. With that said, the driving question for this project is “How might we use an anthropological perspective to better understand the history of British Columbia?”. Now with that out of the way, let’s get into the info.
First of all, we had to define what Anthropology is. I thought I knew what it was…. But I didn’t…. I really didn’t. Fun fact, there are 4 different types of anthropology, I thought it was just Indiana Jones. These four subsections are Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology and Archaeology. Now I’ll go into detail on each one.
Cultural Anthropology:
This is the study of human cultures, beliefs, practices, customs, rituals and social structures. These people are often employed based on observation, participation, and ethnographic field work. They aim to gain a cultural understanding and create positive social change. They publish their work through “ethnographies”.
Biological Anthropology:
This is the study of the evolutionary aspects of humans. They examine fossils, genetics and anatomy to gain their information. They use human biology and how different populations adapt to different environments to learn how humans and other animal groups have evolved and adapted over time.
Linguistic Anthropology:
This is the study of human language and communication. They study how language is shaped by different social interactions and cultural practices. This research helps them learn how languages change and evolve over time. They focus on the diversity of languages across societies.
Archaeology:
This is the Analysis of material remains such as artifacts, structures and environmental data. They have excavations to dig and document layers of soil to uncover artifacts. They use history, geology, chemistry, and biology to interpret evidence and further their research.
So those are all the different kinds of Anthropology but we’re not done with terms quite yet. There are still some important words that are crucial to Anthropology. These words being ethnocentrism, cultural imperialism and cultural relativism, there are also some less important terms that I will describe briefly. Culture shock is experiencing disorientation, frustration or confusion in different settings that they aren’t used to. Xenocentrism is the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own culture.
Ethnocentrism:
Ethnocentrism is a term that means to view a culture from the perspective of an outsider. This term is used when somebody evaluates a culture by comparing it to their own ideals and culture. This perspective can make one think of other cultures as “weird” just because it’s different.
Cultural Imperialism:
Cultural Imperialism is a term that means people who believe that other cultures need to be helped because it is inferior. This perspective can mean that people travel out to different cultures that they view as “worse off” and interfere with traditional practices because they need to be “fixed”
Cultural Relativism:
Cultural relativism is a term that means the opposite of Ethnocentrism. It means viewing a culture through the eyes of its own standards, rather than one’s own. This is the method that anthropologists must use in order to give a fair understanding and insight into their culture.
Now I promise that was all the important terms relating to anthropology, so now we can get into what we ended off doing. We were going to be making a website with all of our collective projects, what was this project? Well we learned that we were going to be making a digital museum exhibit about different artifacts that were in the Museum Of Anthropology. Immediately when I heard about this I knew I wanted to do some kind of weapon, so I rushed immediately to the website that we used to find our artifacts and sorted by weapons. Immediately something caught my eye, and that was a…. gun? I was quite surprised because I didn’t think Indigenous peoples had guns so I was immediately interested, so I locked that one in and started my research.
We were given a template with a few things to dive in to, those being the nation it belonged to, the date it was found or created, and a brief description of the artifact, then we had 4 extra cards embedded that were context and connections which was all of our research compiled, anthropological connections which explained how these artifacts connected to different types of anthropology, nation deep dive which went into the history and story of the nation the artifact belonged too, and finally an interactive element of our choice that would engage viewers.
Now I could explain what I researched and how I got my info, but I think it would be best just to give you the link. So go ahead and check out the website that we’ve made right here (embed the link). My artifact is the Jiiguu (Gun) and while you’re there, try checking out some of my other classmates’ work, you might learn a thing or two.
And now we come back to the driving question for this project. “How might we use an anthropological perspective to better understand the history of British Columbia?”. I think we can use these perspectives to gather more insight into what has built up BC’s history, and how different Nations have evolved over time. These perspectives can also help us view history through the eyes of those who experienced it, and help us see things from somebody else’s world view.
Thank you so much for reading my blog post on this project. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and there was a lot more to it than I knew. I hope you liked this blog post style, I tried to add a lot more images so it wouldn’t be a wall of text so hopefully this is a good change. See yaaaaa!
My Honest Re(concili)action
What’s up internet people and welcome back to my blog. This is a very special blog post because not only is it an exhibition post, not only is this my first exhibition of grade 11, IT’S MY TENTH EXHIBITION 🎉🎉🎉🎊🎊🎊 So happy exhibtioversary everybody, I have made it to the double digits. With that being said they still aren’t easy and the fact that this time our whole theme was BC First Peoples made it new and scary I think this might have been my best looking exhibition yet. Now with that in mind let’s get started.
The name of this project was ReconciliACTION and the whole topic was about, you guessed it, reconciliation. The driving question for this project was “How might we engage in meaningful Reconciliation?” This question isn’t something that has a definitive answer, so instead of coming back to it at the end of this post, the answer will be showcased through my learning in this project.
In order to start this project we need to first actually define reconciliation. I’m sure we’ve all heard this word before, and we know what it means, but when we try to define it we struggle and find that most people give a similar answer but there is variation. Through this project, we found out that reconciliation is a word that means something different to everyone. Being from England I hadn’t really heard this word before moving here, and so I felt like everyone had a head start in this course, but slowly I’m realizing that I’m figuring out my own definition at my own pace which is important and central to what reconciliation means to me.
Because in the past our teachers have waited too long to tell us our exhibition projects and we have been super panicked on the day of, we were told what our project was, what our topics were and who was in our group almost immediately, I and everyone else in the class really appreciated this because we knew what we had to eventually do and we could plan ahead accordingly with 2 months of advance. The final product of this project would be our whole class diving into 8 different groups, each dedicated to reconciliation efforts being made in Canada, and we essentially had free reign and complete control over what we did to explain our topic to the public. My topic ended up being Indigenous language revitalization which I was interested in because I had heard some things about the indigenous peoples having tons of languages and I wanted to know the history behind them and how they were being brought back from death after getting lost in residential schools.
Although we knew our end product in advance, we decided to hold off on starting on it immediately because we first had to expand our knowledge of reconciliation as a whole so we could understand how our topic showed reconciliation. We first decided to talk about why reconciliation actually matters. We learned this by doing many activities such as talking about what we already knew before this project, learning about why residential schools were made, learning about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and seeing why reconciliation matters to indigenous peoples today.
To further our research we went in-depth on what is and what isn’t reconciliation. This was important because we needed to understand what parts of our topic to include and be able to tell the difference between reconciliation and general apologies. At this point, we had moved into working with our final groups and we were given an assignment to all separately gather 5 different sources that backed up research we had done about reconciliation attempts being made In Canada. Using this research we all came to a decision of what is and isn’t considered reconciliation in our topic (language revitalization).
After completing our research we began to actually start working on our actual product. We first were told that we would have to have some kind of interactive element, typical PLP, and we had some class discussions about how to actually engage our audience so they didn’t just come in and see their kid and leave. We had to get them to actually care about our topic first and then we could teach them about how they can reconcile. Some of the suggestions were making a game they could play, having something they could add to at the exhibition and over time it would grow, or making something they could take away with them, my group decided we would make a game.
Now we could actually start working on our project but before we had complete control we had to pitch our design to our teacher with a drawing and a keynote presentation. We worked together as a group and came up with some really solid ideas.
This was our initial design for our station, however it would receive changes in the future. Our interactive element would be a memory game, where we had 5 language names and 5 common greetings in each of those languages, then would give the contestants a cheat sheet that contained a ton of languages and their common greetings, but they would only get to keep it for 15 seconds, they would then have to match the cards with the right languages and words. We also had a listening station where there was a website set up called BC First Voices that teaches you how to speak indigenous languages by giving you a catalog of languages to pick from that you could learn the alphabet of and search for translations of words or phrases. It’s a great website that you can use, find it here. We also decided to serve mint tea to the guests, now I know you might be thinking “How on earth does that relate to your topic”, that is a great question…. I don’t really know, but my group mate Susan had a whole story behind it that involved her and her mum at a camp finding mint tea leaves and making tea for everyone so we rolled with it. We also had a sign that said hello in English and then below had hello in many indigenous languages. Another thing we added was a map of BC that showed where all the languages in BC came from. At first, we were going to have a timeline that showed the evolution of languages in BC, however, we scrapped this idea because we all realized it didn’t really fit and none of us knew how to do it well. That’s pretty much everything we had planned, so now we just had to actually make it.
Everything was going super smoothly, we had a lot of time, and everyone had their individual roles, there was a slight scare when I ran out of my ADHD medication and couldn’t refill it but we got over it and everything was perfectly fine. Until it wasn’t. One of my group mates was supposed to draw the map, but then around 10 days before the exhibition, he got pneumonia. This was a huge panic for our group because none of us were artistically skilled. We had a 2-day freakout but then our teacher said we could use her map of exactly what we wanted to do, this was perfect so we were relieved, but then 2 days went by and there was no map. I went to ask my teacher about it and she said she had lost the map! Now we were in panic mode but luckily we had the design digitally so Susan locked in and drew the whole thing by herself and it looked great.
Exhibition day came around and we were so….. actually prepared? We all knew what we had to do and we just had to set things up because we had finished all the work in the days before. After a few minor hiccups hanging up the sign, we were done with our station around 20 minutes early. So with nothing to do, we just hung out and prepared for visitors. Here is what our final product ended up looking like.
I think it is the best-looking exhibition I’ve had to date. Huge shout out to to my group members Susan, Sofia and Jasper for being so awesome throughout this project.
Like I said I won’t be ending this post with a driving question answer but I will give you what I found out reconciliation means to me. To me, reconciliation is working together to make up for past wrongdoings and moving towards a better more equal future.
Thank you for reading my blog post, sorry there weren’t too many pictures but I hope you enjoyed, and maybe you learned something while you were here. See yaaaa!
On The Road Again
What is up internet. Welcome to the third and final blog of this weekend. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about maybe read the two posts before this 😉).
B.C. First Peoples is a course that students are required to take in high school in British Columbia, however because of my special little iPad kid school, it is now a plp course. Sooooo welcome to my first ever BCFP blog post. 🎉🎉🎉🎉. Let’s get started shall we.
This project was called Road to Rights, and believe it or not it’s all about the road to the rights of indigenous peoples, are you shocked, I know I’m shocked too. If I’m being honest I was not looking forward to starting this course because culture isn’t really my thing, but hey this project wasn’t that bad so who knows, maybe I’ll come around to it. One last thing before we get into the details is that this was a relatively short project so this may not be too long of a post.
Now it’s time for the driving question of the project. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. Going into this project I wasn’t at all prepared to answer this question, as I barely even knew what the Indian act was, but by the end of this project I think I’m a lot more familiar than I was but I know there is still much to learn.
We started off by just looking into what the Indian act is. We used this infographic as a baseline introduction.
Image Credit: 21 Things by Bob Joseph Sketch Note by Michael-tdsb
This infographic was the start of what we would eventually do at the end of put project, but I’ll get to that later. We were then assigned the task of making our own infographic about the Indian act that focused on one of these facts in the image. I was assigned Band Council Systems. I would explain to you what they are, but why tell you when I can just show you my Infographic.
After this we mostly just did research for the rest of the project. We looked into a lot of the different really important and significant events in Indigenous history. If I talked about every single thing that happened, we would both be here for hours, so for the sake of time I’ll just list some of the ones we talked about. 1831: The first residential school was created, 1876: The Indian Act is created, 1949: First Nations Right to Vote in BC, 1951: The First Indian act revisions, 1973: Calder v. BC, 1985: Bill C-31 Gender Equity, 1996: last residential school closes, 1997: Delgamuukw v. BC, 2007: UNDRIP.
And now it is time for the big reveal of the final product of this project. Drumroll please.
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It’s another infographic….
But hey I’m not complaining, they’re relatively fun to make. But first we had to pick our topic. After everything we had looked at, the only thing that really stuck with me was the Indian act. I was interested in looking deeper into it, and seeing what thing it banned and what rules it made, but I was also interested in why they thought making those rules was okay, and how people allowed that to happen. So there was my topic, “The Indian Act, How and Why?”
In terms of designing the Infographic, my teacher was in love with the design of the drawing I showed you earlier and wanted out class to do something similar so she could hang it up in the display case in our school’s hallway. She wanted it to follow this format.
So our infographics had to line up with each other like this with a road going through them to connect them. We were given numbers based off the year our event happened so that the infographics would line up chronologically, but the number I was given was number 5, and in my opinion that is the hardest one to avoid the road in. So I had my first draft look like this.
But then I realised as long as most of the road is visible it’s okay to overlap and my final project, which I think looks much better, looks like this.
And now it’s time to answer our driving question. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. The acknowledgment of Indigenous rights will change the ways that First Nations peoples live and breath. By doing this we recognize that we not only owe them the same rights as everyone else, but because of past wrongdoings we realize that they are owed more than we know.
Thank you for reading my blog post. I hope you learned something new about Indigenous peoples because I know I sure did during this project. Thank you again. Goodbyeee 👋👋👋👋
Projecting a Project about a Project’s Projections
Hello again internet and welcome to my second blog of this weekend. I’m making up for all the time we lost while this site was down by making 3 blog posts in 1 weekend so if you still crave more after this one be on the lookout. That being said let’s get started.
The Manhattan Project. I’m sure most of us have heard that name but many that have heard it still may not know what it was. And if I’m being honest, that was me at the start of this project. So if you don’t quite know what I’m talking about then don’t worry because all will be explained.
Before we get into the project though we need to find out what the driving question is this time. “How did the Manhattan Project’s scientific breakthroughs change the world?”. This is a big question that seems simple to answer but when you look closer, it’s quite difficult because there are so many different impacts it had that it’s hard to chose just one. Now that I’ve finished my starting spiel it’s time to get into the details, fair warning though a lot of what we did/handed in the project was just notes or a different form of notes so there may not be a lot of media.
We started out by learning the basics of the manhattan project. The Manhattan project was a secret U.S. government project near the end of WW2. The primary purpose of this project was to create the first functional nuclear bomb. The project involved 600,000 people and costed more than $2.2 billion, ($41 billion today) yet it remained top secret throughout WW2. We mostly just learned different facts about what it was and how it came to be through slideshows and videos that we watched.
It was around here that we kind of took a pause from learning about the manhattan project, and started working on different forms of note taking. In my opinion this was kind of weird and felt really unnecessary for the project, as the idea was pretty much entirely scrapped moving forward. But regardless it did happen so I’ll tell you what we learned. We first learned about smart brevity, a new way to present information that is supposed to get people to understand it more. This is the format. A heading, and interesting and summarizing opener, and then multiple axioms, which are sub-headings that define what the next few bullet points will be about, and finally a go deeper section that tells you where you can learn more about the topic. Here is an example of one of mine.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/7ROZONNqWLTxqi
Yes I did submit that for school. No I do not regret it. Moving on.
My honest review on smart brevity style is that I think it’s probably a good formatting method that does actually work, but I don’t think the way we were made use it works. They wanted us to use it as a way to take notes, which might work for some people, but a lot of us already had our own note taking methods that we’ve perfected that we know work for ourselves and trying to force a new way on us this late into our education doesn’t work. I think this method does work for news outlets that are sharing information with readers, but for taking notes I don’t think it works. But that is just my opinion on the situation we were in.
The next note related thing the zettelkasten. This is a way of storing your notes but the way to explain how we did it is quite confusing and relies of a specific program we use in plp so I’ll just explain the universal things. According to the zettelkasten there are 3 types of notes, literature notes (the most confusing ones) are a note that focuses on one specific thing, whether it be an article that you’ve read, or a conversation you heard, fleeting notes which are small notes you wrote on the fly almost just as reminders to yourself of something like a cool idea or something you have to do later, and permanent notes which are a note about something that you want to remember for a long time. The zettelkasten seems like a good idea, but I don’t think it was explained well enough in this project, and also similarly to smart brevity, many of us already had our own way of formatting our notes that works for us. So hopefully they stop trying to teach us how to completely revamp our learning so late into our education.
After all this we came back to our Manhattan project learning. And after a bit more research, slideshows and videos, we were finally told what the final product of this project would be. We were going to be doing, drumroll please!
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AN ANIMATED EXPLAINER VIDEO.
Now if you’re like me you probably haven’t heard of this before but it seems pretty self-explanatory, and it is, but to further help you out I’m going to show you the video we were shown to explain.
https://youtu.be/6h28_iry9u0?si=NBnZFF4elCrzICp5
Now we knew what we were doing, we needed to know what we were doing it about. Now I assume you’ve picked up the pieces and yes it is about the manhattan project, but more importantly why it is historically significant, and how it changed the world. Sound familiar? Maybe check out the start of this post and you’ll see why. That’s right it’s literally in the driving question. So that’s what we were doing.
Okay I’m going to rant a bit here. So after we were told this the criteria our teacher gave us was written on the board for 1 class, from what I recall we were told it had to be an explainer video, it had to be animated, it had to be about the affect the manhattan project has on the world, and it had to be 2-3 minutes long. I read these but due to my ADHD brain I happened to mostly forget them by the time next week came around. I thought it was fine because one of the benefits of PLP is everything the teachers do is left up online for us to see. Right? Wrong. For some reason the whole second half of the information page about this project is incomplete, it’s just a template that I assume is to remind the teachers what to write. I thought maybe this was okay because I could just go in and talk to my teacher, but I remembered that on the day he wrote it on the board he said that he was leaving on another grades field trip for the whole week, and when he was back (the Monday of next week) the video would be due. And so in the time that we were given to work on it during the week I had no idea what to do and just was scrambling trying to find out what any of the video criteria was. By day 2 I had given up and just started writing the script for the video, but writing the script took up the whole week. So my situation is I have 2 days before the final due date of a 3 minute animated video that I don’t have a success criteria for and haven’t started making. Does that sound stressful to you? I worked on making that video, for 8 hours straight. I was proud of myself in the end after I had completed it, but still unhappy that it had to come to this. So Monday comes and I begrudgingly drag myself into class as always to see my teacher is finally back. He asks who has finished their video and from my memory, I was the only person to put their hand up! I spent my entire day working hard and nobody else had even finished it. So I assume I’ll get extra credit for this, but no. Instead he just gives everyone an extra week to work on this. I am fuming in my chair right now but I don’t say anything due to my respectful nature. Then the next day he tells us that we were supposed to make 5 smart brevity style notes for all the research we were going to use in our video. I am very confused at this point because I already handed in my video research and it isn’t in that format at all. I assumed I wouldn’t have to worry about it, but I checked in with him regardless. He told me to reformat and gather new information for the video I had already made. So for the rest of the week I’m reverse engineering research for my video and then I hand it in. All of this was a really stressful and frustrating process but it’s finally over so I’m happy to relax and wait for my grade… And I wait… and I wait… and I wait… I am still waiting for my video grade as I’m writing this. What the heck Mr Hughes!?
Sorry for the long paragraph but I try to express my feelings towards projects in my blog posts. Anyway now that my rant is out of the way I can show you my video.
https://youtu.be/RHvDmO-CGZc?si=D6zkPeLh0aB4ZogK
I hope you like it because as you know it took away 1 day of my life and likely many more days due to stress.
Anyway now it’s time for the answer to the big old question. Or is it? You see I think my answer to the driving question is displayed perfectly in my video. So I’ve already answered the driving question.
Thank you for read my blog post, sorry I was a bit negative but I think this project could have been so cool and so much better if done right, but instead it just kinda felt like we weren’t always the priority and sometimes the focus wasn’t even on the manhattan project. All things considered this was a semi-decent project, which is unfortunate because it had so much potential. Anyway I’m signing off. Goodbyeeeeee 👋👋👋👋👋.
The Biggest Boom
Hello internet people, welcome back.
I know, it’s been a long time and I know you missed me but I’m back and this time I’m in grade 11… Who on Earth thought I was ready for this.
You may notice that it’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post and that is due to a combination of summer break and also this blog website being down, until now.
Just something I should say before we get into this post is that this is actually my second humanities project of the year but since the website was down we couldn’t make a post for that project but it will be coming soon.
With all this in mind, let’s get into the post.
Hiroshima. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the story behind the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki and how it made us win the war, but in reality, it is much more than just that. This bombing is the most significant event that has ever come out of a war (if you disagree feel free to yell at me in the comments). The lasting ripple effects that came from this bomb will solidify this date in history. So let’s go through what I’ve learned in this past month.
We started out by introducing the thing that would occupy the majority of this project, a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey.
This is a book that took information from interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, and turned them into an almost story-like experience. The first 2 chapters were all about the character’s lives the morning of the bombing, and then how they were immediately affected and what they did after they realised they had been bombed. Going into this project I rolled my eyes at the idea of having to read a book for school but after reading these first 2 chapters I found myself more interested in the story than I thought I would be. I think I explained this well in my first Journal that we were assigned about the book. This is what I wrote.
The first 2 chapters of Hiroshima by John Hersey are a brilliant way to explain the other half of the story to western readers. The book does a great job at explaining the character’s lives in detail and shows the thought process of each of the six survivors before and after the bomb was dropped. I thought it did a great job at humanizing the characters and showing that they are real people. For me realising the actual impact of numbers is hard to quantify, so explaining their lives and showing that they were people just like me was an interesting way to display that they were people and not just numbers in a statistic. The book made it clear what the emotions of all six survivors were in their respective stories, and helped me really understand what they were thinking in those moments. I think I was more able to understand and comprehend this book because it is very similar to a book I read with my class in grade 7 called Refugee. Both of these books follow multiple protagonists who find themselves in different but similar situations, this book was about 3 children with refugee stories and the challenges they faced, this book is about 6 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing and the challenges they faced. In conclusion I think this book does a great job at showing the emotions of the characters because the author was able to interview them and get the exact details of what they remembered and experienced, by doing this it allows for the characters to seem like real people instead of just numbers.
Most of the things we did while gathering information for this project were related to this book and for the sake of not just filling up this post with all my journals I am just going to skip over most of the other reading assignments. A quick summary for chapters 3-4 is that they talk about how they were surviving the after effects of the bomb and what their experiences recovering were. For chapter 5 the author came back 40 years later to interview these survivors again and see how this event impacted them for their whole lives afterwards. If this book sounds interesting to you I recommend checking it out.
One of the things I really enjoyed during this project is that every Monday we would take the whole class to do a Socratic seminar about the chapter(s) we had all read. During these group discussions, we would talk about what we read and what we thought about it. We also made connections to other things that we thought the book related to or reminded us of. These once again surprised me with how fun they were. It didn’t really feel like a class mandated discussion where the teacher was watching us and judging us based of our every move, it felt like a group discussion where you could chime in at essentially any moment if you felt like you had something to say. I actually really enjoyed these and I’m excited to hopefully do them in future projects, as my teacher said he would try and include them. Unfortunately, I didn’t talk as much as I hoped I would because of the fear I would say something wrong or be asked a question I couldn’t answer but I’m trying to work on improving my public speaking.
Another thing we did was on Fridays we would have the chosen 6 come in with current events stories that they thought related to Hiroshima in some way. Each of the chosen 6 would have 3 people assigned to them and they would lead a group discussion about their event. They would start by introducing what their event was and then end the discussion with some questions to ask the whole group that related to the event and/or Hiroshima. These questions would then hopefully break off into other mini side discussions that were still related to the topic but also could be about completely different things. The current event I chose was the Valencia floods. This is the document I used to lead my discussion.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/5xOMgzJVJMOrCW
I ask that you think about some of the questions I presented, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments. Overall I think my group’s discussion went well and we had some successful branching conversations.
And now it was time for the final event of the project to be revealed. Drumroll please.
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It was an essay……
I know, I was a little bit upset too but it’s grade 11 so what can you do. Let’s be honest nobody enjoys writing essays, but I felt like I actually knew a lot about my topic so it wouldn’t be that hard. This essay had to be a minimum of 5 paragraphs and had to go over these 4 topics, The impact on the citizens of Hiroshima and Japan, The world in the short term, The world in the long term and myself. I wrote my first draft of the essay which I was pretty proud of, I was given feedback which I understandingly accepted, but then the big bad boss appeared.
MLA sourcing!
This looked terrifying to me, especially since this was a completely new concept to me. Thankfully my amazing teacher (shout out Mr Gibson) gave us a very in depth and understandable presentation on how to do it. But even after this I was still confused. Thankfully my mum was there to save the day and she helped me out with fixing up my mistakes.
Eventually after about 3 different drafts I had made it and handed in my final essay. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. If you want to read it here is the link but be careful there’s a lot of words.
https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/kWLF6SrdW5Tioj
And now we come to the end of this blog post. Overall this was actually a really fun and enjoyable project. I learned a lot about Hiroshima, Japan, and also really improved my skills of making connections between different things. This project was fun, educational and interesting and I really appreciate my teacher for making it this great.
Thank you for reading my blog, sorry it’s been a while and don’t worry (I actually have 2 more that will be done by this weekend). So with that have a good day internet people. Goodbye.