Category: Humanities

Hello internet, welcome to blog theory, if you get that reference your awesome. Anyways I’m back with another blog for you which means another project has come to a close, this blog will actually be on the project we did known as ology of apology aswell as the winter exhibition that came with it. This exhibition was like no other though and if you want to know why then you’ll have to read the whole post, or I guess you could look at the title.

So to start off this project we of course need ourselves a driving question and this time it was, drum roll please! 🥁🥁🥁🥁 “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” This is important because obviously apologizing can mean and do many things but those thing would be learned during this project.

First of all we launched the project by starting to learn about memorials because when it comes down to it memorials are often just big apologies and that’s what this project is about. We started looking into what a memorial is and what differentiates them from other works of art like sculptures or paintings, well the short answer is almost anything can have a memorial as long as it meets this criteria. Number 1 is it has to be about memory, a memorial displays a memory to keep it alive and bring awareness of it to many generations, Number 2 is it needs to be something physical that focuses upon and draws attention to one specific memory about something important and number 3 is the memory must be a public memory so it’s something that many can relate too. That’s what a memorial needs to be but there also a few things it can be, memorials are reminders of things bad but also often something good and not all memorials are built by big corporations but they can be constructed by a community.

Now I’ve told you about what a memorial is you might be wondering why I told you, if you guessed that we would be making a memorial somehow then you would be correct, and to prepare for making our final memorial we were tasked with designing our own mini models of memorials with Lego. I immediately thought of a major event that was very recent, you may have heard of it it’s called COVID-19, it was this whole big pandemic thing wasn’t the most fun to be honest, I thought to myself what’s something everyone relates too as a symbol of this pandemic and I came to the conclusion that I would display this major event with a memorial of a mask here’s what I designed. 

And here’s my descriptive paragraph about it.

My memorial was a giant face mask to symbolize the struggles and hardships that affected everyone in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we were told we would be making a memorial that would mean something to the public I immediately thought of the COVID pandemic as it was such a recent event that shook up the whole world and affected everyone in some way. If I was building a real memorial I would have inscribed the names of loved ones lost to the virus onto the front of the mask, I also added a spinning mechanism because it looks cool and would draw attention to the monument. I faced some challenges while building it mainly due to the limitations of the provided Lego bricks. I needed pieces that could hold other pieces in place since my design was held in the air by a stand. While building it I struggled to keep it all in one piece and it kept falling apart when I was trying out new designs and colours. I chose to make a COVID mask as it is something so widely recognizable by all as a symbol for the pandemic, whether you have seen videos of crazy anti-maskers or you yourself had to wear one for your safety. It’s a simple design that everyone is impacted by because we all lost someone in some way and even if you personally didn’t lose someone the names of those who were lost puts the numbers of the death toll into proportion. So in conclusion a COVID mask is an easily recognizable symbol of the global pandemic we all went through and although I had some struggles building it I still managed to come up with a design I was happy with and that everyone understood.

In addition to this we also looked into some other memorials the world had to offer just to further our understanding and if your interesting I recommend looking into the tomb of the unknown warrior in England the story behind it is quite interesting.

So now you might be wondering what we were going to make our memorials on, well we were going to be apologizing to one of 3 groups and I was selected for the Chinese Canadians. Before learning about that though we first started to look into discrimination and one of the major contributors to radical and discrimination in general is negative propaganda. Looking into different types of propaganda we talked a lot about anti-semitism as for some reason it’s becoming more mainstream again in recent years, things like social media have made expressing negative opinions to the masses easier than ever, and to talk about that I had to write a paragraph on exactly that topic, here’s what I came up with.

Propaganda can influence people in a good and bad way, but how can this affect people’s thoughts about standing up for those that need help? When people see propaganda it can affect them on all kinds of levels, some people just glance at it but don’t bother to look into it and move on with their day. Others may be deeply affected and have their opinions changed and morphed by it, an example is when the Nazi’s took over certain territories they placed propaganda in schools to try and influence the youth, some children were deeply impacted by this and it twisted their thoughts into believing that they were ugly and disgusting, while other children thought the same thing about them. Propaganda still affects us nowadays with social media being a major part of almost everyone’s daily lives around the world and with hate and hate crimes on the rise in recent years it’s reasonable to suspect that social media platforms have something to do with it. People can get away with saying almost anything today and with algorithms making it easier to see more of something once it’s been seen once peoples brain can be easily influenced into changing for the better and worse. Anti-semitism has shot up in recent years and there are so many links and ties that can be traced back to social media roots, a major example is Kanye West. Kanye West is a largely influential music artist with bipolar disorder, in recent years he has made many claims of being anti-Semitic which has influenced many people. Another major example is Andrew Tate, he is an influencer that has spread ideas and thoughts of misogyny to young minds of this generation. He is a multi-millionaire which gives him power and status and with this he has been distributing thoughts of sexism and has popularized being a so called “alpha male” which many take seriously and others mock this idea. Even though recently propaganda has spiked there has been many examples throughout history and all have a somewhat similar affect and outcome on those impacted by it. All of this ties into how propaganda changes peoples personal actions, for example those that see a lot of anti-semitism online are either more likely to stand by and do nothing if they ever see something like this happening in real life or they are more like to step in and stop things after seeing what people say online. Of course it’s possible that the opposite effect happens and they would be more motivated to join the oppressor in the confrontation. In shprt, many diffferent parts of a person can be changed by propaganda whether they are more likely to help those in need, more likely to attack those in need or if they are just to stand by and do nothing. No matter the time period people can be very impressionable so we have to be cautious of what we say.

I’m really proud of this work and I think I was able to convey my thoughts and beliefs on the topic through it. 

Now we spent a whole lot of time just learning about BC’s history in order to find out what each group wanted to base their memorial on and I don’t want this blog to be a lot  longer than it has to be so I’ll just tell you what my group focused on and presented about. We picked the Chinese head tax and immigration for Chinese people to Canada from 1858 to 1923. In short the gold rush brought many Chinese immigrants to BC an as a result of that the white people there and the government wanted them gone, so their idea was to make specifically Chinese immigrants have to pay a tax of $50 which was then raised to $100 and finally became $500 which was equivalent to over 2 years of labour and finally in 1923 they outright banned all Chinese immigration into Canada. After learning about this we knew it was right to make a memorial on it. We went through many design ideas but I believe we made one that represented our topic well. Our idea was to have an open suitcase with different things attached to a paper cutout of a man, there were lanterns depicting good things about immigrating to Canada and ankle weights displaying negative things about moving to Canada. The suitcase represented how all of the culture was never able to leave the immigrants luggage. We also made a information board and 3 other thing just to talk about the topic and describe our memorial, finally our group chose the name Symbold in Suspension for our memorial. When the day of the day of the exhibition came we were all somewhat mortified as we had started working on the final project last week but we were more prepared than we thought, but something we never prepared for was coming. After setting up our station this is what it looked like. 

I think everything turned out very well and for the short time I did I enjoyed talking to people about what I had learned, and I say short time because… well each of our exhibits had to have food and something to interact with, I had a stroke of genius that lead me to think an amazing idea would be to get people to use chopstick to move things over a line and some of that was our food, specifically fortune cookies. So you see I’ve never eaten a fortune cookie before and I’ve always wondered what they’re like so when my group brought them as one of our snack I kind of wanted to try one however I’m cursed with having soooo many allergies and there were no ingredients on the box so I opted not to have one but what I forgot to remember was not to touch them but one of our items to pick up with the chopsticks was, you guessed it, a fortune cookie. While resetting the game I had multiple time picked up the fortune cookie, which was fine at first but after getting an itch on my face everything went down hill. All of a sudden my eyes were getting watery and itchy, I stupidly thought nothing of it but then they wouldn’t stop itching which meant I touched my face more which made everything worse, on top of that my nose started running and I started sneezing uncontrollably, for those who don’t know me I’m not the most socially confident so sneezing mid conversation with a stranger makes me want to cry. Luckily my lord and saviour my mum showed up early into the exhibition and I expressed to her how I was feeling and she knew that Chinese food often has nuts in it, what an odd coincidence, IM ALLERGIC TO NUTS! I was having an allergic reaction to my own groups food mid exhibition she walked me out of the room and we found one of my teachers who thankfully brought me to the office and my lovely vice principal gave me some medication and a place to wash my face off, safe to say I went home early. My group still did amazing though and that was shown in the voting tally at the end, I’m very thankful for them and how they handled the unexpected situation. The turnout of the exhibition seemed great, here are some photos my friends took. 

Overall the exhibition was a bit of a nightmare for me but in the end everything was fine, but now for what you’ve all (maybe) been waiting for, who’s group did the best, we had all guest vote in a ballet and even though I think there was some rigging here are the results.

As you can see we tied for first with another group, so now we have our answer to that we need to answer a different question, a driving question once again our question was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” In my opinion apologies can be kept alive in many ways such as memorials, schools or even by being passed down through family trees, all of these ways work for different reasons but are still able to keep things alive and serve as reminders and warnings about the past.

Thank you for reading my blog this exhibition was certainly my most… interesting one yet, I hope you enjoyed reading this far and now you know that apologies can be for many things like apologizing for a wrong theory, A GAME THEORY. Thanks for reading and putting up with my jokes and references.

Hello viewers welcome back to my blog, how are you doing today. I hope you are well, I myself am doing fine thanks for asking (I hope you asked or that was awkward). Today I’m going to be talking about my latest project all about WWII. This project is called Save Juno beach and was primarily about WWII’s historical significance to the world and Canada. But we also learned about many significant battles and events in WWII.

This project was primarily about learning and educating ourselves about WWII in order to write an essay about it for the final project. Since this blog isn’t a good place for me personally to teach I won’t be talking so much about WWII but rather about the different methods we used to learn about it. I will also talk a little bit about how we were taught about essay writing.

For the first few lessons we just went through slideshows about WWII but the first main thing we did was write a Point, Evidence, Explain paragraph or PEE for short. We were assigned to write about why WWII was started and learned about what makes a good PEE paragraph, this would be helpful later when we wrote our essays. Here is my work.

Point

One of the major causes of WW2 was the outcomes and consequences of WW1.

Evidence

Some of the reasons were because Germany was falling apart due to the outcomes of WW1 and the Great Depression, also there were new states in Eastern Europe that after WW1 were weakened and they were easy targets to Hitler.

Explain

After WW1 Germany didnt have any of the land they wanted or previously claimed however they lost the resources used to obtain those things. Because of this they had a failing economy and nothing to rebuild it or Germany. Another reason was that after WW1 there were many restrictions and sanctions put on Germany, due to the treaty of Versailles, which led to poverty, unrest and hatred towards the allies, Hitler saw this as an opportunity to sway the people of Germany into believing they could trust him and he built a nationalist party in this wake. Seeing as Germany had no resources of their own they decided the only solution was to take from other countries, and seeing as Eastern Europe had weakened countries and places such as Poland and France were easy pickings for Hitler.

Next up was a whole lot of learning about, you guessed it, WWII but instead of making it boring and just throwing information at us we got to participate in Kahoots to help us learn. The different kahoots we got consisted of, the interwar years, the start of WWII, Europe in the 1930s, D-day, the axis advances and pacific atlantic. It was through these kahoots that we built knowledge and educated ourselves on what actually went down in WWII.

Fast forward about 3 weeks we have now moved on from learning about WWII and we are onto learning about what historical significance is. Now, historical significance is (shockingly) a way to determine how significant historical events actually are and in order to help us we have an acronym, NAME, this stands for.

N otability, how notable something is has a huge impact on its historical significance.

A pplicability, how applicable is the situation today and how can we learn from it adds to its historical significance.

M emorability, how memorable something is changes how people remember it and it turn it become more historically significant.

E ffect, how big of an effect something has short term and long term can make it historically significant.

So that’s how you determine something’s historical significance, why don’t you try to think of an example and see how it does in all those categories…. Go on I’ll wait…. I’ll still be here when your done….

So now we move on to preparing for an essay. First thing we have to do is plan out different ideas in a brainstorm. I chose to make a mind map of 6 different potential topics and 2 reasons to back them up. Here it is.

And using those I crafted a thesis statement for my essay to be based of and stand by. My sentence was ‘WWII was historically significant because it changed the way the world worked and showed off how powerful Canada actually was and could be.’ This would be the basis of my whole essay.

After this we went onto the final step, making an essay outline, for each paragraph we wrote the main topic sentence and then 3 points to back it up. Here is a photo of my outline.

At this point all that left is to write my whole essay, even though I felt very overwhelmed with the thought of writing a whole essay in a day it wasn’t as scary as I thought thanks to my outline giving me the points to write about. You can imagine how upset I was though after hearing that we had to get it critiqued by a friend and the revise it but that too wasn’t so bad. At this point you must be dying to read my essay, if you are I don’t understand why but here you go. 

That’s about it for this project but first we have to look back and answer the driving question ‘Why is is so important to learn about. Canadas involvement in WWII?’ This is a very valid question, I’m sure every grade 10 student in Canada has asked. Well honestly I think it’s so we can know about what we have done in the past, it’s important to know that everything we have wasn’t just handed to us on a silver platter and we need to know that it was earned and achieved by the many soldiers that gave us our reputation through WWII to modern day. But that’s just what I think so if you have any different thoughts or disagree with me you can talk to my lawyer, you can find him nowhere because he doesn’t exist.

Thank you so much for reading my blog, I know this one was really wordy and I’m very sorry but this project didn’t have many things to take photos of and was mainly just a lot of learning and talking that couldn’t be described in words on a page. I hope you at least enjoyed my blog a little bit and why not come read the next one. But for now I’ll see you later. Goodbye!

Hellooooo gorgeous internet people I have returned after a long time, did you miss me. Anyway welcome back to my blog, there’s a reason I’m writing this ,and it’s not because it’s my passion, but it is because I have completed another project in my humanities class. Without further a due let’s get into it.

This project was all about Canadian identity which gave it the name “This Is Us 🇨🇦” our end goal was to make a human library. You are probably thinking “what the actual hell is a human library” and I don’t blame you because I had the same thought. Well the human library started in Denmark in the year 2000 as a safe space for people to understand the experiences of others or express themselves and their story to those interested. The name human library may sound confusing but when it comes down to it they are calling the people with unique experiences books and those interested readers. If you are interested in human libraries I recommend checking out their website. Here is the link. https://humanlibrary.org

Now that we know what we will create we… Didn’t really do anything about it. However we did sort of prepare for how it would be if we ourselves were the books. One of the stepping stones leading up to the final product was to research a topic and become experts on it, then we would present a one minute elevator pitch about our topic and answer some questions. My topic was all about living as an immigrant in Canada.

I decided on this topic because as and immigrant in Canada I thought I would have a fun time learning more about why and how we are treaded different. So I made my own driving question “How are immigrants treated different to Canadian born citizens” once I had this question I made some need to knows to build up my knowledge toward key categories but you don’t need to see those. We did the elevator pitch and I can’t perform it for you but here’s my notes.

So I decided to research into the experience of immigrants in Canada and in doing so I learned many things that I didn’t know before. Found a few websites and asked my mum about her experiences. I made a driving question which was “how are immigrants treated different to Canadian born citizens” and then I made some need to knows so I could narrow down my topic to some specific points. I first thought about how minority immigrants would be treated different or discriminated against and after looking into it I was surprised. First of all they aren’t treated the same by the government, first of all if they aren’t citizens they can’t vote, they have additional tax on property, many educational qualifications and accomplishments aren’t recognized or valued and access to healthcare isn’t free for those that aren’t permanent residents. Then we start to get into general discrimination like different backgrounds and histories may affect the way people are seen and sometimes they are blamed for something they didn’t do. I was shocked to discover refugees are treated different and heritages and other religious beliefs are neglected or ignored. Getting jobs is also more difficult, as past experiences and qualifications are forgotten or invalidated as I stated before, however I didn’t say that many immigrants have to redo and complete college courses to acquire titles that they already earned. And all of these things don’t apply to immigrants of a Canadian background. I believe this is unfair and should be changed but as a child I have no authority to change anything.

After this we invited in our friends or family to come be the books in our library. I think it went well but look and see for yourself.

Well that’s it everyone. This was a shorter blog than usual but this was a short project so I guess it works out. I learned a lot about Canada and it’s history, but also I learned about myself during this project and I’m glad I did that. Thank you for coming to my blog and (hopefully) reading through it, I know I was very wordy but I hope it was worth it. Bye 👋

Helloooooo Internet!

I’m back and I’m writing a post about a little project called building a nation. This project was all about learning what nationalism and what a nation is. So we had to have a driving question to go along with this project and that was, “ What did/does nationalism mean to the people around canada?” Now we know the big question let’s get on to the post.

The first thing we did was a simulation of confederation and the build up to it. We got assigned groups and picked a colony that we wanted to be, my group went with New Brunswick. We were given folders with information that told us about our opinions and information and what resources we had and needed. Based off this information we had to decide whether joining the confederation would be beneficial to us or if we would lose more that we would gain. New Brunswick was really weak and was mostly only good for lumber and some fish. We were also very open to attacks from America and had little to no military power. We also needed grain so we could have more food options and a balanced diet. So this was a no-brainer as we had much to gain and little to lose. 

We ended up joining the confederation and settling on laws that were agreed upon by all.

So we had finished the simulation and it was now revealed that we were going to make a board game for the end product of this project, this was a very cool idea and it sounded really fun but of course this is school work so there was a small downside, we had to incorporate nationalism and make the game based around confederation. This wouldn’t be much of a challenge for most people, buuuuuut I’m from England and I know absolutely nothing when it comes to Canadian history. Luckily my partner knew a lot and I had this little thing called google that was going to help me out, but of course you know about google because you are probably using right now to view this post. 

We now had to come up with an idea for what we would do, there were a lot of options but we decided on a trivia style game, similar to trivial pursuit. We modified the questions to be five new categories with two different styles, there were indigenous questions about the Wendat and Algonquian nations. The categories were economics politics and history, and there was also French and English questions, with the categories of political and transportation. This was fine and dandy but if our game was real there would be a lawsuit for copyright reasons, so we needed to make a change and that was adding raiding. In order to make the game more original and to enhance the nationalism aspect we decided that on every card one question was selected to have a raid symbol, if you answer it right you get to destroy a piece obtained by your opponent.

We had the idea but before we make it we needed rules for the game, this was done by my partner so go check out his blog at blog44.ca/callumr 

We now needed to construct the game which was a huuuuge pain because originally we were going to make 60 cards each. This didn’t seem possible in 9 days so we cut it to 30 each and then cut it to 30 for him and 20 for me this still made 10 cards which was reasonable, after we made the cards I made the boards and then we brought in game prices and the dice and boom the game was finished.

Now we go back to the driving question” What does/did nationalism mean to the people of Canada?” 

The answer is it’s what it means to be a Canadian but not just that, it means striving for the country that you love, it’s embracing who you are and where you come from. 

Thanks for reading my post I know this was super wordy an I apologize for that but I hope you have a good day and bubye 👋👋👋👋

Hello internet

Today I am going to talk about Revolutionary discoveries such as sliced bread, electricity and pizza. Just kidding although I was on to something with Revolutionary, that’s right this project was about revolutions (in my case the French one) and what starts them and ends them. 

The driving question for this project was,

“How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world?”

This is a big question for a small class but luckily we had time and perseverance on our side, but did I have confidence, well no but I’m was required to do it anyway.

First of all we need to learn about what makes a Revolution a Revolution. Luckily crane brinton a French historian from America decided to research into how a revolution starts and what the different stages of it are. (If you would like to learn more here is an image of the process of a revolution)

Now we know what a revolution is we found out the main focus of this project, we were going to perform a live court case deciding whether our assigned revolution was effective or ineffective. I was terrified for this because I do not like improv and our group was outnumbered four to six, but I was semi-prepared to do it.

To have a chance in this court case we had to make 3 main points to guide our argument in the form of an affidavit. This is a written statement backed up with evidence to assist you in court, we made a meh affidavit and we very ill prepared then on top of that our teacher had a baby with his wife and went on paternity leave which left us with a substitute who didn’t really know what we were doing, then the next week we had a new sub and we were no longer doing an improvised performance. This was great for our group because at this point we were lost and didn’t know what to do. We found out that we were doing a scripted video instead. This was going to be a lot easier because we could collaborate with the other class…. Right,  well they didn’t seem to think that’s what we were doing this together which became a whole new struggle. This has been a lot of writing so here is a photo of a cute puppy, take a 10 second break.

Ok we are back. Change of plans we are no longer going by a script and instead filming a one sided video of our court case which would later be spliced together with the other group by a teacher (this is still yet to happen to my knowledge) this was the best possible news because we now could take our time write a script an act everything out in our own time, I could also edit things how I wanted them too be. We wrote the script film the videos and made the film this is the product of our hard work.

Go check out Ronan, Luca and Owen’s blogs they did great.

Now back to the driving question.

“How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world?”

Revolutions cause political change like dissolution of a monarchy or the introduction of dictatorships, they also can cause disruption of an economy and havoc among citizens.

This can shake up societies even outside the revolution’s original country as places may fear it will spread to them. They can also start wars that have unneeded deaths, however they can have good side effects like giving a voice to the people and overthrowing corrupt leaders.

Ok bye

So I wrote and an ebook that is and my poem from this project that express element of my worldview

Have you ever wanted to cry…..

Well I have the perfect movie for you! The Outsiders is a sad yet entertaining movie that can teach you a lot about worldview at least It taught me a lot about having a different perspective on life than from other people.

At the start of the project we had to express our own world view, this was my mine:

World view
I believe that gaming is a sport but its an e-sport I believe this because I am very in to gaming
I like to make friends who also play video games
Beliefs Geography
I think beliefs are very important in your worldview because if you believe something different to another person then you will have a different worldview than theirs but different beliefs can drastically change a person e.g religion.
Geography is very important because if you come from a different place than someone then you might have different thoughts about something or you might have a different culture to them.

Following on from our beliefs we worked to understand the different characters and thier motivations, this helped me to feel more attached to the characters and think about how they would see things.

See my slide show below to discover more.

Next up we had to recreate a trailer for the movie in new groups. This was fun. We filmed different scenes from the movie that show key elements of the story: I edited them into a trailer.  If you want to watch it click below, I hope you enjoy the comedy subtitles I made.

Next we individually made movie posters for the well movie I guess, I took quite a bit of time making mine as I couldn’t find the colour change filter. I put a lot of effort into it though.

The left side is representing before they ran away as things are normal, well as far as normal goes for greasers. And the right side is after everything is going wrong.

However, we then made a group movie poster and I think it turned out much much better than my original one

In doing this I found out that making a movie poster is harder than it looks and it takes many different stages of design and critique and making every little detail perfect. It also made me think about important elements of the story and showing key characters.

Our final project element was to complete a tableau showing one section of the story that we would present on exhibition evening. My group looked at expressing the fountain where Jonny killed Bob. We had to demonstrate it as it would have been during the time it was set and also in modern day. We had to demonstrate Elena’s of world view.

We chose time because drive in movie theatres were only popular for such a short period of time.

 We chose beliefs because Cherry changes Pony’s beliefs of what socs are like. She says “things are rough all over”, referencing how greasers have it tough and socs have it tough as well.

Overall the outsiders taught me that different people can view the world in different ways and have different ideas about the same thing or event, they can have different experiences based on their upbringing and ideas of the world.