Category: Random stuf

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 [https://www.firstvoices.com/languages](https://www.firstvoices.com/languages). 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 👋👋👋👋

By December 2, 2024.  No Comments on On The Road Again  Random stuf   

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 👋👋👋👋👋.

Another Tpol, How much more can I take.

Hello everyone welcome back.

It’s that time of the year again where I am required by my school to make and present a Tpol. You may have noticed that there was no Mpol blog post this year and that is because, well I don’t really know why but we did something different this time.

This Tpol will be in a new kind of format, if you have read my others then you might realise that I usually go over the best and worst of each subject however this time I will be answering this driving question “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviors have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” And then I will also be using these 3 success behaviours to tell a story about my learning journey throughout this year, the behaviors I chose are Ownership and responsibility, Contributions and Preparation (this is technically 2 but I feel the need to talk about both).

But first, before I get into the depths of my grade 10 adventure I will go ahead and help future me with his presentation. “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.”

Now that’s out the way I’ll get into it but warning, this post is not for the faint of heart, I will be sharing my honest opinions on both how I feel I did this year but also my thoughts on this year’s projects. This is how the post will go. I will go over each success behavior and choose the projects that I think show my learning best for that behavior, then after I’m done with those 3 I will give my answer to the driving question.

Okay I promise I’m actually staring now.

Ownership and Responsibility 

At the start of this year, I went into school thinking every project would be laid out for me and what I had to do would be clear but this was not the case. This year I feel I got a taste of what PLP will be like in later years. The first project I think showed me this was our Peas in a Pod(cast) Maker project. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went into this really excited because I would learn how to be like everybody on the internet, and it was really fun but it introduced to me something really new to me. This project was simple, create a podcast about a topic of your choosing, but that’s where the new concept came in. It was a podcast based on something I got to choose. This was honestly difficult for me at the start because I’m not super great and coming to decisions but I finally came to a conclusion that I knew I wanted to do. As a British person in Canada, I sometimes say words and my friends look at me like I’m speaking a different language, and that’s because I am. In England, there is a newish language being developed which is essentially a lot of slang called roadman. If you want to know more about this listen to my podcast.

But now onto why this links into ownership and responsibility. This all showed me the start of having agency over my learning. Up to this point, we hadn’t had this much creative freedom but this project we got to choose what essentially the whole thing was and this was a big step forward for me because once I found out what I wanted to do this helped me actually be engaged with my learning. This is a big thing for me because I have ADHD which means I struggle to focus on things I don’t take an interest in but if I get to choose what I have to focus on it makes school just that much more bearable.

However having all this freedom hasn’t always been a positive for me, my example of this is our PGP project Back to the Future. In this project we were simulating the process of applying for a job, but with a PLP twist. We went through the whole process of making a resume and cover letter but when it came to the interview it would be a shark tank-style pitch of ourselves. 

If this sounds interesting here is the blog post.

As I stated earlier I sometimes struggle with making decisions about myself and one of those that has been most prominent in my life is deciding my career. I have always struggled with this so when I learned about this project it’s safe to say I was afraid. This project also felt very rushed especially since most of the class was on a band and choir trip the previous week so we didn’t learn about our end goal until the week it was happening. Because of all this combined stress I ended up needing an extension (thank you Ms Madsen) but this just shows that having too much control over something can lead to feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing. I think this also displayed my growth as well because once I had gotten an extension I locked myself into learning mode and figured out what I was doing and how I would do it all in one night. In previous years I would have just procrastinated and barely scraped by but my growth through this year has taught me what I’m capable of based on time limits. In my opinion, almost all of our projects this year have felt extremely rushed or unplanned but that’s not all bad. While I may have lost a few years of my life due to stress I also learned that I’m more capable than I once thought.

Contributions

 

This is an area that I feel I have struggled with this year and most other years of my schooling. As I’ve spoken about I struggle to really care about something if it doesn’t interest me so when having class discussions about what we’re doing I don’t often have any input to give. There isn’t really one project that displays this but if I had to choose there are a few I would say show this more than others but the one I’m going to talk about is the project This is Us in Humanities. Here is the blog.

This project was all about Canadian identity but as I’ve made it very clear… I’m not Canadian. So as you can guess I really didn’t have anything to say about this project. In this project, we had a lot of discussions about different history and aspects of Canada which I honestly felt quite left out of. This is something I dislike about the education we are given in Canada, we focus so primarily on Canada that we don’t learn about things going on in other places in the world. When I came here I knew nothing about Canada and I feel like going into high school I was just expected to know things I hadn’t even heard about. This often makes it a struggle for me to understand and participate in class discussions because it feels like a lot of my previous knowledge is invalidated because every project needs to involve Canada somehow. It feels like Canada is so focused on teaching about itself that a lot of kids here don’t know anything about the rest of the world unless they go out of their way and learn about it outside school. This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to participate in class.

Sorry for the big rant but I told you I would share my opinions.

I feel like I am improving on contributing in class as I grow up because I’m realising the fear I have of getting things wrong isn’t as big of a problem as I think but I will still admit this is one of my big struggles in school. 

Preparation

This is focused on both me preparing myself inside and outside school and there isn’t one major project for this as well but I will be referencing a few projects I did this well in. At the start of this year and the rest of my life I’ve always been just kind of living in the moment and winging it which has worked for me so far but now moving into the harder years I am realising I’ll need to prepare for things and revise or work outside school too. As much as I may hate doing this I will admit it has helped me greatly and here are some examples of how this has helped me.

A big one for this is something I previously mentioned which is our back to the future project. I already stated how I used the extra time I had been given to my best ability and that didn’t happen without a little planning and preparation beforehand. 

Another Huuuuuge thing that required a whole ton of planning was destination imagination, here is the post for it.

This year we had significantly less time than we did in grade 8 which meant it required a lot of planning for meetups outside school hours especially since we had cross-grade teams. I was really proud of myself for getting through this as me and my grade 10 friend Kira took charge and instructed our team pretty well. I think I did especially well seeing as I missed the first performance due to being sick I had to push through the pain I was in due to getting shots and vaccines the day before the final performance but I made it and I think we did pretty well. I think this really showed how I’ve improved my planning skills greatly this year.

That’s all 3 behaviours so it’s time to drive that question. Just as a reminder, this is the question I’m answering “How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP Success Behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?” In my honest opinion, I don’t think I’m ready for grade 11, that’s a really big number and I don’t want to be in my second last year of high school. But with all that in mind that’s how I felt about grade 10, and look how much I’ve grown since then. I think even though I’m scared of next year I’ll be able to manage it and make it through just like I did this year. I think this has proved to me that I still have so much to improve on and now I know I’m fully capable of doing anything I want to (with the right motivation of course). There are a whole lot of ways I think I’ve improved this year that won’t fit into a 7 minute presentation or a blog post but the last thing I want you to know is.

I think grade 8 me’s jaw would hit the floor if he saw how far we had come.

Thanks for reading. See you next year?

Dragons, Sharks And The Worst Of All, Responsibility

Welcome back to my blog everybody, did you miss me?

Today I’m here to talk about our most recent PGP project and that is ‘Back to the future’. If your thinking..

“Wow they must have gotten to watch the movie” you would be wrong. I know very sad, this was much to the dismay of me and my classmates especially when we found out we would be watching a movie for the first few classes and it wasn’t the one our project was named after. However, the real reason our project was named this was because we would be thinking about what we want to be in the future and more importantly how we will get there.

So our driving question this time was “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” And this scared me quite a bit honestly, because I actually have no idea what I want to be or want to do when I’m older. Nevertheless, I realised that maybe this project could help me find that out for myself (have you ever heard of foreshadowing)? So now we know what the project is all about it’s time to find out what the end goal for this project was. We learned that we would be doing a Shark Tank/ Dragon’s Den type pitch about, get ready, drumroll

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Ourselves! Now this may sound confusing and I thought that too, but it’s honestly quite simple. We would be pitching ourselves as a product and marketing why we would be good in a work environment. It’s essentially a mix of a job interview and an infomercial. This sounded scary at first because I don’t know how to think positively about myself -I’m a teenager in a first world country that’s impossible! But, lucky for me I have friends and family who like me (I hope) so that’s where I started to look for positive things about me and how I can work effectively.

But first let’s go through everything we did in this project in a reflecting sort of a way. As I said we started out with a movie and it was called “The Dead Poets Society”. It was a pretty good movie (very sad) and I would recommend it, “Oh Captain My Captain 🫡” (that one was for my teacher reading this).

I think we watched this movie in order to learn and understand that we can do whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. I think it helped me learn that different perspectives on different matters can lead to different thoughts on how things should be done. Everyone’s thoughts are their own and valid. Overall this was quite helpful and I found myself reflecting on it throughout the project.

 Between this and the final projects we did a few different activities to learn about ourselves and how we work effectively – such as thinking about and writing out the skills we posses, making goals that would change aspects of our lives and how we could get to them. Setting goals I always find hard but I’m getting better at it. We were also learning about different types of skills and about the 7 habits of highly effective teens and completing a bunch of tests on Myblueprint, (a website that helps you with all kinds of education and career pathing techniques). If you’re interested in this for yourself you can look here.

All of these were different ways we learned to apply our skills to new environments and back up our abilities with examples.

The final thing we had to do before the actual Pitch itself was learn about writing resume’s and cover letters, and oh boy are there a lot of different marks to hit and a whole criteria I didn’t know about. Now I can’t share my resume and letter with you because they happen to contain some information about me that I would like to keep private but if you out there and ever have to make a resume or cover letter I suggest getting help from somebody who has done it before.

But before we go into the big bad boss of the project I’m going to talk about what I learned about myself throughout this whole process. I realised that me being funny is actually something useful in the work world. I understand that being funny alone won’t get me a job however, I now know that it’s an aspect that people look for, most companies these days don’t just want a perfect efficient work robot that can do everything they need to, they want to hire people who can learn what to do well and also be friendly and a joy to have around the office. Another thing I learned is there are a few career paths I didnt consider beforehand that actually might suit me pretty well, like being a stunt performer. I had thought about it before but was scared about getting hurt however, I now realise that I would get to travel the world and have fun with people I know and I would just have to know what I’m doing and how to be safe, which there are courses for and professionals to help with. I recommend you check out the personality quizzes and some of the other ones on Myblueprint because you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself and your possible career paths before.

Now after all this it was time for the thing I had been dreading, The Pitch! As we were building up to this I missed a week of school as I was on a trip to whistler with my choir and band, (we had an amazing time but we also missed quite a bit of work) which left me less time to prepare than I thought I needed. But nonetheless I worked hard to prepare myself for this pitch and even though I needed to get an extension I still learned some things about myself while preparing and performing my pitch. Like being aware of the impact of scheduling issues. Also another thing I realised is that I’ve always thought that I’m terrible at public speaking because it terrifies me to my core. However, while preparing I realised even though it scares me so much I can fake being confident relatively well. I think this is something that PLP has taught me to do as the teachers constantly push us outside our comfort zone and have us performing tasks I would usually be scared by. Don’t get me wrong they still terrify me but I do them anyway and then reflect on them to learn how I can do it better. I think this really showed in my pitch as when mentioning some of my weaknesses I brought up public speaking and one of my Dragons said that he wouldn’t have guessed that I was a nervous presenter if I hadn’t mentioned it. Another thing I learned is that I can learn lines and points pretty quickly which is a valuable skill to have. This links me into a reflection that I made during my pitch about myself that one of my Dragons noted that I did well. I have ADHD, and the crowd goes mild. The Dragon said many people included they had this condition yet I was one of the only ones who noted how this can be helpful as well as a hinderance. This is what I said about my condition:

“I have ADHD and with the help of my medication I can ditch the bad parts and harness the benefits, I can produce high quality work, can multitask and I am an extremely quick learner.  The hyper fixation element of my ADHD means I can focus on things with great intensity and learn a lot about something in a relatively short amount of time. This means that I can be a really diverse employee.”

At the start of this project I was worried because I came into it not knowing what I wanted to do as an adult and now I realise that I have left still not knowing what I want to do, but that’s the thing, I did learn what I want to do. It’s nothing specific like other people who know exactly what job they want and how they will get there. My goal for when I’m older is to find out what I want to do with my life! I want to explore and try many different career options, I want to find out what I like through trying them out. I’ll see what aspects from different careers I like and combine them to find the perfect job for me. I realise this will take a long time but I’m okay with that because it sounds fun trying lots of jobs and at the end of the day I will have to work for a long time when I find the right thing so it’s got to be good! So that’s the main thing I learned from this whole project that’s it’s ok not to know as long as you’re open to looking, exploring and finding. And here I look back to my Dead Poets and say I understand that we as young people can do and achieve whatever we want to if we put our minds to it. If you had told me at the start of the project I would find out this of all things I wouldn’t have believed you. However I think through learning about the different ways you can find a job it has just come to me that exploring my options is something I want to do. (Sorry if that last part was a little hard to understand it’s just hard to put my feelings into words, I’m sure you’ve had that happen before)

So now to come back to the driving question “How do you set yourself up to become the person you wanna be?” I feel like I’ve answered this in my last paragraph so I’ll keep it short. I’m going to use the newfound skills I now know I have to find the jobs that suit me and my personality the best and taking time to do this is ok!

Thank you for reading this blog, sorry there weren’t any pictures but I didn’t really have any that I could add that wouldn’t be just a photo of text, but just because you stayed you can have this photo of my dog

Thanks for reading, Good Morning, Good afternoon and Goodnight.

Who do you think you are? And… Who do you think you want to be?

Who are you going to be? The question isn’t what do you want to do, but who do you want to become. That’s the question I’m setting out to answer in this blog post, well I won’t be finding out who YOU want to be but I will find out who I want to be. This is a quote made by Michelle Obama which I strongly advise you readers and viewers think about and answer yourself. But with that out the way let’s get on to the post.

So what can we do to actually figure out who we want to be, some lucky people have it all figured out easily while other only think they do. A lot of people when hearing this question think it’s just asking what kind of job you want to do but this question is much more than that, I’m asking you what kind of person you want to be, who do you aspire to be like, how do you want to treat people and who do you want to associate with.

First I’m going to talk about who do you aspire to be like. This ultimately comes down to role models, who do you idolize and how can you be more like them, what exactly makes them a role model. For a lot of people, including me, a parent is a role model, it makes sense because most people love their parents because they raised them and helped them when they needed it. For me personally it’s my mum, she raised me, dealt with my annoyance and cared for me when I needed help, she works extremely hard for me and my sister even if we’re aren’t always grateful. I aspire to be like her when I grow up because she is a genuine good and kind hearted person and I look up to her because she tries hard to help others. Hopefully you have someone like that in your life and if you do think about why they are that person to you, and if you can why not tell them you love them.

Okay so now let’s do and activity that I did in class, I will give you five questions and I’ll give my answer for all of them. First up we just have who are you? For the sake of not doxing myself I’m not going to say this one. Next I’d what do you do? Personally I try to have fun with everything and I’m always trying to make people laugh, but I also play a lot of video games (maybe a bit too many to be honest). Now after that we have who do you do it for? I try to make others laugh because there is always the chance that someone I know is having a rough day and if my dumb jokes can bring even a little bit of light into someone’s day then I’ve done my job, but I also do it for myself, I personally think (most of) my jokes are funny so I can enjoy them too. Now we have what do they want or need? I think everyone needs laughter in their life so they can be happy and everyone needs to be happy and they want to have friends so I’m there to be that for them. And finally How do they change as a result? Like I said earlier if I can make anyone even the slightest bit happier then I know I’ve done a good job, so people change by being more happy when I make jokes and hang out with friends, but I also become more happy. Now you know the questions why don’t you ask yourself these things in your own time.

Another major factor in finding out who you want to be is thinking about the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. Because the people you choose to spend time with can reflect your character more than you probably think, for example if you chose to hang out with fun and funny people like I do that will in turn make you a more jokey and comedy centres person, however if you spend your time with more serious people you’ll be better off in more serious situations but you might not have as much of a sense of humor. When it comes down to it the people you spend time with often turn out to be the kind of person you want to be. 

Now I’m going to talk about the things we did in class to better answer the question. We first of all, every day made a sticky note that answered the question what are we grateful for, every day we came up with a different answer to this question, this ended up being one of my favrioute activities we did this project. 

We also did a speed dating activity to answer a few questions that might help but that would be difficult for you viewers to do without a big group of people so I’ll just give you a photo and move on.

We also read one of these books to better understand different people and why they want to be who they are and we also made connections to the events and characters in the books. Here is a few of the books. Becoming – Michelle Obama, Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad, Born a Crime – Trevor Noah and I Am Malala – Malala Yousafzai. I chose I Am Malala and we took notes on these books writing down meaningful quotes, Life lessons, Connections from the books to our lives and general important ideas from the text. I’m not a fan of reading at all to be honest but I genuinely enjoyed this book so I recommend you to read it and maybe try to make the same notes we did.

So that’s it for what we did this project, it was really short as we needed to fit the entire thing into the few weeks we had before the semester changeover. As this blog comes to a close let’s revisit the question this whole thing is based on, “Who are you going to be?” Personally I’ve always struggled with this question but this project has helped me get closer to the answer I’ve been looking for. I now know that I want to be someone that can be looked up to like my mum or Malala, but I also want to be someone that people can have laughs with and enjoy the company of, I want to help those that need it and laugh with those who I need like my amazing friends. This project was one of the better ones and seems like it could have been so much better if we got more time so it sucks it was cut short. I’m going to end this blog with one question. 

Who are you going to be?

Thanks for reading, Goodbye.

PREPOL

Hello everyone and welcome to my first ever pre-pol. Just like any other blog post this one has a driving question. That driving question is “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. This is a very important question to think about because without balance and support in your own life doing everyday tasks just becomes so much more difficult. In this blog I will review a project I’ve had this year and what I’ve taken away from it that helps me in daily life. So let’s get started.

So in order to figure out what would work for me in my PGP class we went over many strategies to help keep track of our lives and work. First of all everyday we would do happiness activities and then reflect on them these consisted of, Monday meditation, Tuesday Helper day, Wednesday exercise, Thursday journaling and Friday 3 gratitudes. Some of these I enjoyed like on Wednesdays going for walks with my friends was enjoyable but on Thursdays we had to journal about a topic and I’ve never liked writing so this wasn’t enjoyable for me however I’m glad I tried these because without doing them I wouldn’t know how I felt about them, to my surprise I enjoyed the meditation more than I thought I would, it isn’t the sort of thing I would do on my own but if offered to do it in a group I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If I’m being honest these daily activities didn’t seem to change my life much but I’m sure they work for some people just not me. Something else we had to do was reflecting on our days, weeks and planning what next week would look like. Once again this probably works well for some people but for me this just felt like another stressful thing I had to get done and brought an unneeded aspect of worrying into my life. The other thing we had to do was timeblock events on our calendar and use an app called things to schedule work and plans. This worked a little more than some of these other things but to be honest I don’t like having to refer to thing to remember them and I just keep information in my head but I still gave it a shot and here is the before and after photos.

From this project I took away that using different strategies works for different people and no one person can force their strategies on another, this is why I don’t think this project worked very well. In my opinion we were given set strategies to help manage our lives when instead we should have been given free reign to test out what worked for us, different options were given but those options had very little flexibility for us to manage them our way. While this didn’t work out for me I know others found a way that they like so from this I learned that everyone need to experiment with different options to help manage themselves.

After this project I’ve thought about what I think would actually work for me without having to worry about deadlines and borders to limit my options and I’ve discovered that I work best under some pressure so leaving work and procrastination is sometimes helpful. I like to wait until I have to get stuff done and then take a day to do all my work at once. I am able to do this because without my ADHD medication I can’t work at all but with it I can get anything accomplished however there are side-effects that make me not eat as much so I find taking them one day and cramming all my work into that time worlds well for me. 

If you read that thank you and I hope you can find something to help manage yourself like I did and I appreciate you (some what) caring about my life and tactics. Now I’m going to review each of the core competencies and see if I used them in this project. 

COMMUNICATING

I think I communicated well with peers and teachers by asking questions when necessary and helping out others in any way that I could. I would say I demonstrated this well.

COLLABORATING

This project didn’t need much collaboration as it was mainly a personal thing to get your life on track but whenever we did have to collaborate I did it well as I am comfortable around my peers by now since this I our 3rd year together.

CREATIVE THINKING

Throughout the duration of this project I don’t think I was very creative as I struggled to have interesting ideas with borderlines stoping me however once the project had ended I used my creative liberties to think about what works for me and why.

CRITICAL AND REFLECTIVE 

Since we had to reflect an almost every action we made in this project it makes sence that I did this well since without it I would fail miserably however it did did quite repetitive at times.

PERSONAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY 

This project was all about taking responsibility for yourself so I took agency over my own learning and went past the restraints to figure out what works for me personally.

POSITIVE PERSONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

This project contained a lot of knowing who you are and how you work so It helped that I know myself well and I can tell if something works or doesn’t work for me.

SOCIAL AWARENESS AND RESPONSIBILITY 

I don’t think I showed this during this project because it didn’t require it at all, we only focused on ourselves this project and didn’t have opportunities to work with others.

That’s it, the blogs over, but wait we still need to answer that big question “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own wellbeing”. I found out that each individual has their own thoughts on this matter and everyone works differently, but for me letting work build up and doing it in one blow is a good strategy to get everything done and finishing it all is very satisfying and being a little bit stressed help me work better.

Thanks so much for reading my blog post I hope you take something away from this that can help you with your work. I won’t see you next time but you will read me, Byeee!

By December 3, 2023.  No Comments on PREPOL  Random stuf   

Humanities Exhibition

Hello zeros and ones on the internet and welcome back to my blog. This blog is about both my Humanities project and the Exhibition we did. So first I will talk about the project and then the process of the exhibition. 

So first of all the project name was “Dulce et Decorum est” which means it is sweet and fitting in Latin. The name comes from a poem about the First World War, so as you can guess our project was about the war. We soon took a trip to a museum so that we could better understand them, why you ask, that’s because we will be making a WW1 museum for this project. This may sound impossible now but don’t worry it’s not a big real museum we are just making our own exhibits. 

So first of all we had to visit a museum and learn from it. We went to the Museum of North Vancouver to talk to the curators and find out how to make a museum flow. We looked at all the exhibits and the different types so we could take inspiration. Here are some photos I have.

 

So after we developed an understanding of how museums work we had to design our own museum and exhibits. But first we needed to know what out topic for our exhibit was. Obviously it was WW1 but that’s too broad so to narrow it down we decided to write paragraphs to show the contrasting narratives of war. I chose the difference between war and propaganda for war. This is the paragraph I wrote.

 The contrasting narratives of war spread from the thought and ideas of the battle to the starvation and rationing done by the average person. During the First World War people perceived war as a fun adventure that they would be home by Christmas but if you know anything of the war it’s the complete opposite. People had this idea because the government wanted to imprint in their brains that the war was fun, and to do so they had methods such as propaganda full of lies that would manipulate the average folk into believing what they wanted them to. Many Canadians joined the war at the start due to being roped in as Great Britain’s ’pet’ because they were still a colony and didn’t have a say, but later on, many of those who joined wouldn’t come back. After some time all the soldiers were dying so the government needed a way to get more troops, they started making posters to manipulate men into joining and serving their country. They also made posters to force women and children to ration as another problem would soon arise. Seeing as people were rationing so much they would think soldiers would be eating feasts but it was quite the opposite starvation was a major problem of the war. Soldiers were running out of food and had nothing to eat, many died and others were traumatized. Another cause of trauma was disease. The trenches were thought of as nice places to live but they were nasty pits of death and decay. Trench foot, trench flu, rats everything was busting with bacteria. Overall the lies and the manipulation of the government were unacceptable and they didn’t value the lives of their men. To conclude the main contrasting narrative of war was it being a glamorous thing that was fun and new, versus the pain and suffering soldiers had to endure.

So now it’s time to craft our exhibits I decided I wanted to make an audio based exhibit so I thought about what our group was, I decided to be in the group about how women and societies view of women changed over the war. So I now had to write a script for it and after writing for an hour I had it. But I still had planning to do. You see I have something I haven’t told you about yet. I know what your thinking “I don’t really care but what is it” well my enthusiastic friend they are none other than real World War 1 artifacts. I know I’m so cool but honestly you don’t need to flatter me. But now I need to think about how I’ll turn these into and exhibit (that won’t be touched by small annoying children). You’ll find out.

So after all the prep we finally came to exhibition day everyone was nervous and I had my exhibit and artifacts. It was very stressful but honestly it went pretty well. The theme of the exhibition was pathways but I don’t think anybody really understood that, we gave people pamphlets that they could get a stamp on for every grade they visited. But I don’t think that convinced people. Well the Tim has com for me to show you my awesome artifacts. Your so excited aren’t you. Here they are. Sorry they are sideways I don’t know how to fix them.

Now the exhibition was over and we had so much cleanup to do but after a long hard 14 hours at school I finally went home and I immediately passed out. Thank you for reading my blog post sorry this one was long I hope you enjoyed it and have a great rest of your day.

TPOL the T is for Transitional not Tea and Crumpets

“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.”

Hello and welcome to my TPOL blog post. This is a blog post all about my school work this year, I will be going over some high and some lows that I thought I could improve on. If you are a random internet viewer and your wondering what that starting sentence is, it’s some thing I have to say when presenting, without further ado let’s get started.

I haven’t had Maker or science since the first semester so I will start with those. In maker last semester I had many different projects that required their own skills such as building a rollercoaster or making films and videos (there were a lot of videos) but something I’m super proud of was my stop motion film, the project was, as you can guess, to make a stop motion video but there was a twist. We had to recreate a viral video in stop motion. I’m very proud of this not only because of the final product, but also because of the strategy and planning that went into it. I’m happy that I learned to use a green screen to make it just a bit better, and I’m also proud of myself because I used creative strategies to hold the characters in place, however the main reason I’m proud of myself is because I tried to have fun with it and I did which was why the outcome ended up so great. Here is the video.

But since I talked about what I think I did well, I subsequently must discuss some things I could have improved on. If you read my MPOL post you would remember that I said I wasn’t proud of my goal setting skills and I still believe this but I will go more in depth about why. I don’t really like making goals because I will set them and forget about them immediately or just not do it due to not feeling it. I’m also not very good at reflecting on my own work to improve and critique it. I don’t believe I will ever enjoy setting goals but people change and maybe I will too.

Now we will move to science, I’m extremely proud of most of my science work as it was such a great subject for me because I enjoyed the classes and the work which made me do better in my work. I’m very proud of my infographic of energy sources, of which I chose wind energy. I’m so proud of myself for making this as I worked so hard and I came up with an original design for it. I also found out that what I had done might have been plagiarism without my knowledge so I am proud of my creative thinking and responsibility that I used to fix my mistake.

But once again I need to think back on how I could have improved my work, this is difficult for me as really there is only one thing I’m not proud of but I talked about that in my MPOL however I have something that I think I could have improved on even though I tried super hard. This was my operation board game, this started off well but then just started going downhill. I had the character finished but when it came to cutting the holes for the objects it went bad and then it went worse when the electronics got involved. There were a number of reasons this happened like lack of time or resources but I should have planned ahead. My awareness of time should have been better and I should have collaborated with my teachers or peers when I was struggling with the electronics. This is the game.

So now it’s time for humanities which is the only PLP class I have had this semester so the examples are more recent. This semester had some really cool and fun projects that were super enjoyable but my most proud was movie trailer. We designed characters that we made with stuffies. I enjoyed using creative thinking skills to morph the characters into reality and then thinking about what his backstory was and why the story went the way it did, then being able to make a trailer for a movie starring him was super fun. I’m proud of my filming skills I learned in maker the semester before to piece together the video. Here it is

But now I have to think about what I could have improved on. For this I have to go with my museum exhibit (which is a sneak peak to a blog post coming out soon). This project as a whole was super fun and one of my favourite in humanities this year. However since I was so focused on bringing in my own artifacts from WW1 I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have to my own project. I made a piece of writing and then recorded me doing a voice over for it. I feel like I could have been more creative with my idea or could have gotten critique from peers to it improve more. But no picture because we can’t have spoilers for the next post 🤫

In conclusion I feel like I have made major progress this year and I’m so happy about how things are going now compared to last year. I owe huge thanks to my ADHD medication because I couldn’t have done this without them. I’m able to focus much easier on work and make better products as a student. I’m in a much better place than I was at the start of the year and I want to say thank you to my teachers and my mum for supporting me and helping me learn and developed my skill sets.

Thank you for reading my post and I will see you when I see you. Goodbye!

Rise my creatures

I’m back and the same as ever.

I would say I’m better than ever but that’s probably a lie.

Hello internet people I have returned from my blog-free era and now, I have to make a humanities blog. This specific blog was about our project called.

RISE OF THE FRANKENSTUFFIES.

The driving question of this project was “How can sci-fi/fantasy fiction help us imagine a different future?” 

This is a big question to answer without any knowledge of sci-fi, so let’s take a look at the steps we took to answer it.

First of all we needed to know the end product of this project, so we found out that our goal was to create a movie trailer for a sci-fi film based around a character that we made. So  obviously the first thing we had to do was make this character. To do this we bought our own stuffies and sewed them together in order to create the amalgamation we would base our story of off. I decided to get a standard doll and remove the torso to create a spider-like creature. I named my protagonist DERRICK.

 

 

So now we have the character we have to make up who he is. Derrick is a weird looking creature so I wanted him to be from outer space. I wanted it to be somewhere that hasnt been greatly explored so I thought maybe mars, but I decided against that because martians are too cliche. The other planets are all to far away and are too different from earth so I went with the moon, but that has been explored so I went with the dark side of the moon. Now I knew where we was from I had to pick between hero and villain, so I went with villain because, well, look at his face. If you want to understand more about hike here is a resume for him as a… person… thing… I don’t really know what he is. 

Now we started to read a book called leviathan, and if you are wondering why it’s because we needed to figure out what makes a good sci-fi story. While reading leviathan we had to pay attention to the details and what made it a good sci fi book. To help us do this we had reading roles that we had to complete, and also in class activities to help us understand it further. Unfortunately there isn’t much else I can say about this but the book was very good.

Now we know who Derrick is, we needed to start thinking about what our story would be. I wanted this to be a dark and sadistic and what more dark that eating babies. Since I made Derrick out of a stuffie I wanted him to act like one to be able to hide in plain sight. Now we had the base of the story I needed a plot to focus it around. Now I usually don’t like when villains turn into good guys but I couldn’t come up with anything, so I asked for my teachers help and she suggested it. I had given Derrick a rough past and had the idea to include that in the story. My idea is incredibly cliche but it works out, I decided to have Derrick meet a child who doesn’t have loving parents and feel bad for him. So we learn more about him no Derrick decides not to kill him, but instead to befriend him. So that would be the base of my story.

Now I knew what my story would be about I had to write it but before that I made a sort of cheat sheet to help me write it. I had a table with opening, action and details on it, so I could write what I wanted to have in my story, and have the points I wanted to get across in that section written down. If you ant to read it you can but it’s quite long.

Transition        Action            Details

Out in space A shuttle is headed toward earth containing an alien life-form that recently discovered a planet called earth. The creature inside is named derick and is looking for a new home because he feels excluded on the dark side of the moon even though it is his home. Derick is flying to earth in a shuttle

Derick was rejected and left the dark side of the moon

Once he had landed His shuttle hit the ground and the door opened into a world of such beauty gorgeous green grass and vibrant coloured trees,  derick sets out to explore. Derick lands and sees the beauty of nature

Derick starts exploring

After his exploration Derrick realises how humans live and decides to observe one specific family to expand his knowledge of the new creatures. He doesn’t understand why and how humans do things

Derrick decides to watch one family

After a few years Derick realised one of the humans got very big and then suddenly she shrunk and there was a new small creature that was very annoying and irritating yet the big humans cared for it and loved it. This makes Derrick mad, such a stupid ugly creature was getting the attention he never did from his parents, this rage drives Derrick to destroy this creature, and all creatures like it. Derrick observes a family have a baby

Derrick hates the baby and doesn’t think it deserves the love that it’s getting that he never received

After some planning Derrick plots and chooses the best way to eliminate the baby, he will act like one of the toys it has and then eat it. But first it has to integrate itself into the family. Derrick plans out how to kill the baby

He will pretend to be a toy

When the time was right Derrick weaved it’s way into their life and mind controlled the baby into making its parent buy him. He waited until they baby was alone and then struck, he had eaten the baby. Derrick got into their life and swiftly killed the baby.
After some time Derrick yearned for more so he went on a rampage, tricking and killing and deceiving and destroying, he had never felt a rush like this. Derrick finds all the loved babies he can and murders every one he finds.
But one day He found a child bigger than than his previous victims, he watched and learned about this child and noticed this family is different. This child has only one parent lives in a small empty home and has no friends, his parent doesn’t even love him. Derrick finds an older child with a very difficult life and it reminds him of himself. 
Suddenly Derrick felt a new emotion he was unfamiliar with, it made him feel bad and almost want to stop what he was doing. This feeling was sorrow, remorse, anger, fear and horror all at once. He realised what he was doing was wrong. He decided to change. Derrick feels bad for the child

He wanted to change his ways

After some thought Derrick decided to befriend this child and help him to be happy.  He decided to act like a toy that the boy could play with and as expected the boy loved him. They played they talked, they did everything together. But Derrick was left with the question, should he let the boy know he isn’t a toy. The boy loves Derrick

Derrick wonders if he should let the boy know he’s alive

A year passes  After a while Derrick starts making plans to have fun with the boy but unfortunately during this time the human walked in on Derrick, learning that he is in fact alive! The boy finds out Derrick is alive
Now his secret was revealed The boy was stunned, Derrick thinks the boy won’t love him anymore but this was the opposite of reality. The boy was jumping with joy after finding out his best friend wasn’t a toy. But they had no was to communicate. The boy is happy his friend is alive.

They can’t talk to each other.

After some thinking Derrick made a translator device to allow them to talk. Derrick explained his story as he believed the boy had a right to know. Unbeknownst to Derrick the boys mother was listening behind the door. She informed the city of derricks existence. This causes an uprising among the parents of the dead children. Derrick explains his past to the boy

The boys mother overhears and informs the city which causes an upset among the people

Now Derrick is faced with a challenge, a moral dilemma, does he flee or does he face the consequences of his actions from the past. This isn’t avoidable so he must chose what to do. Derrick has to chose from running away or facing angry parents.
Once he made up his mind He explained to the boy what he had to do, he needed to confront his past. He could try to explain, or he could fight back what would he do. Had he really changed as a derickian or was he still the murderer he once was. This was indeed a struggle. Derrick is faced with an inner conflict having to think about if ha has really changed for the better.
Now the time had come Derrick was on his was to confront the mob, he surely knew this was his impending doom, as he roamed the streets of inevitable demise he thought about what he would do. Finally the end was in sight.  Derrick decided to talk to the people
Finnaly Derrick was face to faces with the terror of his past. He tried to use the translator

“WAAAAIIIT!” 

Came a scream from the device.

“STOOOOOP! I CAN EXPLAIN!”

But alas they were blinded by rage, nothing can stop the passion of an angry grieving parent. Until a scream followed by a running child came from a distance.

Derrick tries to reason with the mob.

A child is running towards them

It was the boy The boy that derick was best friends with came charging in screaming at the top of his lungs, but no one was listening, nobody could hear him over the sound of revenge. 25 meters, 20 meters, 15, 10, 5, he was too late the angry mob had derick by the limbs? Tentacle? Nobody knows what those are but anyway, the boy was jumping and screaming and losing his voice but this was a futile attempt to stop them. Derrick was torn apart, ripped in two and lay cold on the floor. The boy was running towards the people but no one could hear him

The boy could get to Derrick in time and they tore him apart

Dead on the floor Derrick sat there, no longer alive. The boy came running over to him, eyes flooded with tears, he dropped to his knees and started sobbing. But somehow derricks to parts started drifting towards each other.  The boy is crying about Derrick being dead.

His parts are moving closer

Shocked The group of parents noticed what they had done. They had murdered the only friends that boy ever had, realising this this must have meant he changed, they regretted their actions. However Derrick wasn’t finished quite yet. The two pieces of his body melded back together and Derrick was reborn. The people realise derrick changed and feel bad.

Derrick came back

Using the translator Derrick explained what his powers were, and helped them understand that he couldn’t move in sunlight. Derrick apologised for what he had done and tried to make amends with all he had hurt. Derrick apologies to the people
Ever since that day Derrick lived among society living with his new best friend and working any jobs he can find to make money for the boys food. He is known by all in the city and lives peacefully as if he isn’t an alien. Because he isn’t, earth is his new home, and that’s perfectly fine. At least he thinks so.

Now I was ready to write the real thing. I had a lot of prep before hand so surely I was ready. So I started writing and figuring derricks tale. I don’t have much to say about the writing of the story so here you can read it.

Out in space, a shuttle is headed toward earth containing an alien life-form that recently discovered a planet called earth. This creature is called Derrick, he is looking for a new home as he was excluded from his own planet. Derrick is a Derrickian life-form native to the dark side of the moon. This specific one has chosen to leave because it was exiled for being stupid by the standards of the species. He landed on earth and opened his door to the beauty of nature, he decides to explore. 

During his exploration Derrick finds out how humans live and decides to observe one specific family. This family consisted of two tall creatures, but suddenly one of the humans starting expanding, then over the course of 9 months they got bigger and bigger until one day they shrunk. A new small ugly creature had arrived. Derrick wonders why they pay attention to it. It is annoying, loud, stupid and tries to eat everything. WHY WERE THEY GIVING IT SO MUCH LOVE! Derrick thought to himself why do they love that thing, I deserve their love. Why don’t I get that love, I hate that thing, I want to kill that thing, I want to destroy all of those creatures. I WILL DESTROY THEM ALL! This set Derrick out on a quest. A journey with only one outcome, to kill all babies. 

First to deal with this one, the first baby he ever saw and the first he would ever kill. He planned for days and weeks crafting the most detailed and thought out plan ever known. He would put up an act as a stuffy and integrate itself into the family, and then make the move. Derrick weaved himself into their lives, first by mind controlling the baby and making it grab him so the parents just had to buy it. Then waiting until they left the baby all alone, carefully he snuck up behind the baby and… CHOMP! He devoured the child with one big bite. All these thoughts and emotions rushing through Derrick’s head the taste, the thrill, the joy, the fear. All these things, Derrick was thirsty for more. He needed more, he had developed a taste for it. A need, an addiction. And so began Derrick’s murder spree, he went around town hunting new families, one after the other, baby after baby, victim after victim, no child was safe, missing children, disappearances everywhere. 

People started to speculate that someone was behind this. A murderer with a sick mind, who could this mystery man be. Word had spread throughout the city. Children were being hidden away, this was a problem for Derrick he kept finding it more and move difficult to wiggle his way into their lives, but this just made him want more. Years passed and Derrick was still at it, nobody knew the cause they only knew the consequence. Everybody was learning and working from home. The whole city was in hiding. But one day Derrick found a new child. 

He did the usual routine of finding the family, learning all about them and getting into their life. But this family was different. There was only one big person, and they barely ever spoke. The small person was always locked in their room, and never did anything. He didn’t eat he didn’t play he didn’t have anything, not even the big pillow they sleep on. Derrick started to think this wasn’t a child. He was bigger and didn’t have much love, but he knew that it was a child when he got into his life. He adored Derrick treated him like the only friend he had. This was baffling to Derrick, he was receiving love. 

This caused Derrick to think back, Derrick remembered what his childhood was like. It was so similar, he never spoke to his family, he had no friends, if only he had someone to love. This caused Derrick to re-think his actions. What had he been doing. Why was he killing these innocent things just because of his lacking parents. Why had he caused all of this carnage. What had he done! He was so scared, he was regretting his actions. He didn’t want it to be real. He didn’t want to live this way anymore. He wanted to change. Derrick decided to be friends with this boy. He learned his name, Todrick, he hadn’t had a second parent his whole life. He never had friends, and never had toys. This made Derrick feel awful, he wanted to explain to todrick what he had done. He thought he deserved to know. 

He built a translation device to be able to explain to todrick what he was, where he was from, and what he had done. He explained to him that he was entirely immortal, but died in sunlight. Derrick was worried todrick would hate him and run away or kill him, but the complete opposite happened. Todrick was astonished he thought Derrick was so cool they played together and talked and cooked. They did everything together. After a few weeks of knowing each other, Derrick explained how to him the murder he had caused but explained that he had changed, todrick had made him realise what he had done. Todrick understood and really believed he changed but little did they know, Todrick’s parent was listening through the door. 

They informed the whole city about what he did who he was and where he was. Now Derrick was faced with a challenge that caused much panic. How would he address the matter, would he run away or face the actions of his past. Derrick chose impending doom, he would confront the angry parents and try to explain himself. To confront the mob he would have to prepare himself, he needs to get their attention, but how. He decided to go head to head with them and just try to talk it out. The time had come for Derrick to face his past, he needed to scream (well technically he couldn’t scream but the translator could) the loudest he could. Doom was approaching in the form of a riot. There they were, the families of all his victims morphed into a ball of rage. He was screaming STOOOP! WAAAIIT! I CAN EXPLAIN! Nothing. They were like a bull to a red flag. Charging, getting closer and closer. But suddenly, in the distance you could hear a voice. Noooooo! Stooooop! 

It was a race, the murderous mob of parents, or a small todrick. He tried his very best but he wasn’t fast enough. They grabbed Derrick by the legs and thrusted him up into the air. Everyone got a stab or a whack at the small creature, until finally the last two parents, the first of Derrick’s victims. They stared into Derrick’s eyes, face to face with the root of his murder but then. They ripped him in two. 

Derrick lay cold on the the floor lifeless. Todrick ran over to his lost friend and toppled over straight onto his knees and started bawling. The angry mob heard his sobbing, they all turned around to see the boy crying his eyes out. This meant he had to have changed, he couldn’t be the same ruthless killer that he once was. Full of remorse those two parents that started it all walked over to comfort Todrick. Their shadows looming over the spit body cast a big enough shadow for Derrick to regain his powers. His two halve started moving together like magnets, slowing drifting along the floor. They started melding back together, merging to create a reborn form of Derrick. 

Todrick had no idea his eyes still flooded with tears. Todrick felt a pat on his leg, he opened his eyes and still couldn’t see well. He wiped the tears from his face and burst with joy, still careful no to move as to take him out the shadow. Derrick picked up the translator and explained his whole story to the public. He told them everything about himself and helped them understand who he was. To this day Derrick still lives among those people, as if he is a citizen. He has a job to pay for Todrick’s food, he has friends that he spends time with and he even goes to book club on Wednesdays. He lives a normal human life on earth, living in a city in Ohio. At least for now……

So now the story was complete I had to make it into a movie because who reads books nowadays. So before I made the movie I had to hype it up with trailer. (By the way there isn’t actually going to be a movie but there will be a trailer). But first we had to find out what makes a good movie trailer, so I examined trailers carefully, and by that I mean I watched a couple videos, and noticed that it had to be exciting, but not too revealing. It had to be suspenseful but not confusing. And it needed to make people want to watch it and find out what happens. With all this information stored in my noggin I popped out this trailer for Derrick vs the world.

Finally I will return to the driving question. How can sci-fi/fantasy fiction help us imagine a different future? 

I think that we can learn from the mistakes that these fictional characters make and improve our lives to make sure that they never happen to us. We can use these made up stories as vessels to convey our thoughts and problems with the world. We can use our imaginations to create a world where we want to be. If we write about a future that we want to be in we can escape a sad or lonely life.

Thank you for reading my blog (but I don’t blame you if you skipped some parts) I appreciate it. I hope you’ll read some more and have a nice day : )

Bye bye