Monthly Archives: January 2024

Who am I gonna be? This is the question we were asked throughout this project, and what we were supposed to have answered by the end.

In this project, everyone read a book, and the one I read I found very inspiring. The book is an autobiography called An Ordinary Man.

The reason I found this book inspiring, is because I want to be like the man in the book. I don’t want to be a hotel manager or anything, but I do want to be able to control and use my emotions and words like he did in the book. This will help me so much later in life, especially when I get angry.

To answer the question Who am I gonna be, I would like to tell you a bit of a story. I’ll tell you this first, don’t watch either video until the end.

A little while ago, a video popped up on my radar, which was called “The Most Unexpected Answer to a Counting Puzzle”. Pretty much, two blocks, both with a mass of 1kg and are sitting on a frictionless plane, with a wall to their left. One 1kg block comes with some velocity from the right, with the other 1kg block stationary. All of the collisions are perfectly elastic, which means there is no energy lost. In that interaction, there are three collisions.

Now, let’s say the block on the right has a mass of 100kg. There are 31 collisions. 10,000? 314 collisions. Does anyone see the pattern here? Let’s do one more. If the right block has a mass of 1,000,000 there will be 3,141 collisions. So now, does anyone have any idea what the pattern is? For a mass of 100,000,000kg, how many collisions will there be? Let me know in the comments if you get it correct!

Possibly……

???

No, no not that kind of pie… π there we go. So for a mass of 10,000,000,000kg, how many collisions? 314,159!!! CRAZY!! So why is this? The answer is very, very complex and difficult to explain, so I’ll let you watch this video instead.

Why does that story answer the question?

It shows who you are gonna be by what you enjoy doing. I like physics, so I may be a scientist. But then again, I might not.

That’s all for today, thanks!

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my blog. We just had one of our two major exhibitions! This Winter Exhibition was especially fun because our project was extremely successful. The project that we did was called the Ology of Apology, and we made memorials!
My answer to the driving question:

How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?

I think to not repeat it, we need to learn about just like we learned it the WW2 project. As Canadians, the stereotype is for us to over apologize. Sure, it could get a bit annoying, but over apologizing is way better than never apologizing. It’s kind of like the saying: better late than never! Another answer to the driving question is what we were making – memorials. Memorials are a great way to apologize and remember different events in our history. There’s only one thing I wonder about memorials – Why aren’t there any memorials about good events in history? There memorials about people, but not events. It is amazing to look and learn and remember the bad stuff so that history doesn’t repeat itself, but we should also be proud of what we’ve accomplished as Canadians. We do have a memorial for allowing gay marriage, but nothing recent.

In the project, there were three different groups, and three groups within those groups. They were chosen randomly, and I was grouped up with Jupiter, Keaton, and Kadin. As I stated previously, the goal was to make a memorial that commemorated one of three groups. The Canadian Sikhs, Chinese Canadians, and Japanese Canadians were chosen because they all played an important role in our history but they were also majorly discriminated against. My group got the Chinese Canadians, and we learned all about them through research and some of Mr. Hughes’ talks (lectures, anyone?). I took a whole bunch of notes, and you can see them all here, which is also where I kept all my work for the project. 

The very, very first thing we did when we came into class on the first day that the project was due to begin was read this paragraph on the body rituals of the Snaidanac people. I thought it was very interesting, but then I realized, what is Snaidanac backwards?!? CANADIANS! I thought that it was crazy, and it was also very interesting because most of it is true. A little bit exaggerated, yes, but true. 

After that we had to make our own memorial out of LEGO about something that we think doesn’t have a memorial built after it. As you can see in this photo, I built mine to commemorate people who have died in waterfalls. After that, we learned about Othering and Upstanding, and had to write a paragraph about it. Again, you can see all this work in the link above.

Eventually, when we started work on our memorial, we decided to do something really different. We thought everyone would do something simple and like other memorials, such as a boat, train, or other objects. We decided to do both a train and a pickaxe, but have glow in the dark words written on them. The idea was that in the daytime, it would show how the Chinese Canadians were sadly treated as more tools than people. In the night though, when everyone looked the same and you couldn’t see them, it showed all of the different words that described how they were feeling, such as pain, discrimination, hunger, etc. I personally loved this idea, and it turned out fairly well!

Anyways, I thought I did quite well in this project, I felt like I led the group, organized, and put in a lot of work. I felt like I led my group, because I told everyone what to do by when which was helpful. Here’s a few photos of our part of the exhibition, enjoy!

Thanks for reading, see you in the next post!