Welcome back to my blog. Now that we have English 12 behind us, it’s time to focus on history. This term I will be posting around 5 blogposts or so, reflecting on things that we have done throughout the last few months.
To start the term, we were introduced to how our work would be structured for the rest of the year. For every topic, we would be given baseline, challenge, and honours assignments to illustrate our learning. We would stitch together these assignments in a blogpost centred around the themes of the topic as a whole. This was part of a new system that we were the guinea pigs for. To be quite honest, this new system made me extremely stressed out. I have been attempting these past few terms to maintain a 95% average in order to receive an entrance scholarship for university. Since I am applying with history 12, I am trying to get above 95% in this class, which would require a lot of work considering the new system. In my opinion, giving a group of grade 12 students extra work makes it very tough to hand in our best quality work. Being the perfectionist that I am, I cannot really hand in work when I know that it can be improved, so I have spent a lot of time this term revising and re-revising assignments and projects. Luckily, we had a lot of time to do some of this work over spring break, however I was away the whole break, so I started out a few assignments behind and I feel like I’m still catching up. Again, this is just my opinion, I know that everyone learns in different ways and this new system may work for some of my classmates, it just didn’t work for me. I see the potential in this system and I think that it could work for a younger grade.
Our first topic under this new system was political ideologies. An ideology is “a more or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis for organized political action, whether this is intended to preserve, modify or overthrow the existing system of power”.
So to start the topic we had a brief summary of different political Ideologies such as socialism, communism, fascism, and all the other things that people argue about. This was done in a lecture style fashion and we were tasked with taking notes. However, we had to take notes in a different style for every lecture that we had throughout the term. I didn’t really see the point in this since the reason for taking notes is retaining knowledge and I feel like I have been in school long enough to know what style of notes works best for me. So it seems counterintuitive to me to have to take notes in a style that doesn’t help me retain knowledge. I know that different types of note styles work for different people, but since I already knew what style of notes works best for me, I would been more efficient if I could have done all the notes in this style.
But back to the Ideologies. So I took the notes for Ideologies in the first note style which was standard. This is my favourite type of notes so I was able to make simple, organized notes which gave me a solid understanding of the topic. These notes were the baseline component of the Ideologies theme. These are the notes that I took:
For the challenge component of this topic, we needed to create a movie trailer about a specific ideology, however, I talked to my teachers and they said I could write a short story instead. I decided to write a short story about a person living in a fictional totalitarian society. In my story, I wanted to illustrate the blending that occurs between different ideologies as well as the struggles that people can face under different political ideologies. Here is my story:
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The Time of Reckoning
My shoulders ache. My calloused hands sting incessantly. The clanging of the factory has deteriorated my ears to little more than useless tunnels into an empty soul. The foreman turns his back and I rest momentarily. This is what society has become. They call it communism but it is anything but that.
I remember when I first heard of communism. The leaflets were passed around from neighbour to neighbour, and when one finally arrived at my doorstep my eyes scanned the Manifesto eagerly. It seemed like such a perfect system, no social classes, no divide, only equality.
No one saw the problem until it was too late. A communist society must be regulated by the government. And therein lies the problem for my small town; the government is corrupt. We labour day in and day out and for what? The leaders go home rich while we suffer in pathetic slums.
It’s a joke really, that they still call it communism. It may have started that way but it quickly turned closer to fascism. We know what it is now. Most people call it totalitarianism.
The state controls everything, but who controls the state? A handful of officials who were “democratically elected”. It’s easy to win an election when you count your own votes.
We have all come to terms with it now, living in a totalitarian state. Every day is a nightmare, we are free citizens yet we live as slaves. But the leaders will pay eventually. They always do.
There are already murmurs of Revolution. They spread through the streets like wildfire. Oppression and corruption never lasts.
I snap out of my daydream but it is too late. The foreman’s whip cracks across my back and I fall to the ground. The whip lashes again and I scream in pain. The foreman gives me one last kick for good measure then walks off.
I may be down, but I stand up. I always do. The time of reckoning is near.
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For the honours component of this topic, we were tasked with creating a new visual to represent the political spectrum. I actually quite enjoyed this assignment as I am very interested in politics and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the political spectrum. The way the most common political spectrum is drawn has its problems. A line with communism and fascism at either end seems conclusive. What I wanted to do was make the spectrum into a circle instead of a line. Each ideology would be across the circle from its opposite. I also feel as though a circle illustrates the blending that occurs between people’s political views. I placed communism next to fascism which is very different than most people would do. Although they are usually portrayed as polar opposites, many fascist governments become communist and vice versa. Look at Mussolini’s Italy or Stalin’s Russia. Is either really truly communist or fascist? I don’t think so.
Here is my new and improved political spectrum:
In all, learning about ideologies was a good way to start the term and gave us the background knowledge that would be necessary for future topics. Understanding ideologies is key to understanding history and the motives of past leaders, so we were now ready to continue learning about the 20th century.