Who cares, why bother?

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today’s post is on our first completed Humanities project of the new semester, Who Cares, Why Bother? This project was all about government structure in Canada, and the importance of young people voting. 

Our end goal was to make and present a 10 minute presentation to a panel of young people, on why it’s important for them to vote, and how to do so. This was a group project, and I was with Hannah, Sean, and Zach. 

This project began with an individual book study on Lord of the Flies. There were some guiding questions to help with our notes, and to help us prepare for a socratic seminar.

Throughout this process, I learned that I definitely prefer to read the chapter through once, and then go back to take notes. Fortunately, I’m a fairly quick reader, so I had ample time to read twice.

My text analysis process was to read through the book, while writing down important quotes, and writing chapter summaries. After doing this for the whole book, I thought about the text through an analytical lens, but specifically social contract theory. I thought it was interesting to learn about social contract theory and apply that to the context of this text. Building off of that, I really enjoyed doing my character analysis and comparing that to people we can see in our society.

This project was my first experience with Socratic seminar, and I have to say it was a bit of an awkward experience. I’m not super big on talking a whole ton in class, but I wanted to push myself to share my thinking on the book, because I did a whole lot of it. I made an effort to talk as much as I could in the Socratic Seminar and it turns out the world didn’t end and no one seemed to hate me for it!

This was a valuable experience for me, and definitely something I will carry forward for the rest of the year with my goal of speaking more.

Read my analysis below ⬇️

 

 

 

 

Overall, I enjoyed reading and analyzing this book. Our socratic seminar went fairly well, and I I found it interesting to hear about my peers interpretations of this story and characters. In my analysis, I mentioned that I believed the author was trying to say that some of humanity can be intrinsically good, but most are a mixture of goodness and evil. At our state of nature, the author was stating that the evil eventually will overtake the goodness, as originally seen in the killing of Simon. 

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Moving on from Lord of the Flies, we started our Canadian government part of the project. To learn about how it works, we did a Kahoot quiz a bunch of times.

Once I memorized the order of questions and where the correct answer buttons were, I got pretty good at it. I previously knew very little about how our government worked, so it was interesting to learn about the different branches, and what they do. 

 

 

 

 

After we all gained a solid foundational understanding of the Canadian government, it was time to spread the word. Working in our groups of four, we began the video portion of our presentation. I found working in this group pretty enjoyable, as we were all open-minded people and were fine to go down a more creative path. I was nervous about our video concept at first because I thought it wouldn’t address all the points we needed to hit, but we were able to compensate for that in our spoken portion of the presentation. 

Our video took a long time to film and put together, put the end result was an enjoyable short film. I believe the direction we took our video in set us apart, in the sense that it was less of a video explainer, and more of a short film. 

In terms of our full presentation, we were able to divide up the work pretty well. Zach took one for the team and edited our full video, so Hannah, Sean, and I worked on creating and scripting our slides. We thought that having audience participation would make our presentation more memorable and leaving a longer lasting impression on the audience. 

I enjoyed that this presentation, specifically the video portion, pushed my thinking down a more creative route. Doing a short film was definitely out of my academic comfort zone, and my first thought was to just do an animated explainer video. However, the unconventional style of our presentation just made it more memorable.

An important lesson this project taught me was that creativity is necessary sometimes and there is usually not a black and white version of what a project should look like. Getting totally caught up in comparison is truly helpful to no one.

Ok, you caught me. To be completely transparent with you, all I do is compare my work to other’s. This has been super helpful in some regards and certainly pushed me as a learner. However, it has a funny way of stifling my creativity and originality. So creating something that seemed so different from the other group’s (who I had been keeping tabs on) was pretty scary and stressful.

However, I’m glad I kept the trust in the group, because I’m truly proud of our end video.

 

 

In our audience feedback, we noticed that there was a lack of understanding on how the Canadian Government actually works, and the importance of voting. If I were to do this over again, I would have focused more on those political issues and relating them to the importance of voting. We had that more as an introduction, but I think it should’ve been a larger focus. 

So while, I had a whole passionate rant just before about creativity, and originality, there is always something to be said for the criteria 🤷

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Through learning about structure of government, and how voting works, I was able to find some connections to Lord of the Flies. For example, I compared Ralph to many world leaders in power. While they may not be the smartest or most qualified, they have charisma and a loud voice.

I also gained a further understanding about our need for government. The truth is that humans need some structure and governance. Without it, we enter our “state of nature,” which can be a dangerous place.

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Who Cares, Why Bother? 🤷

There are tons fo reasons to vote, but to sum it up, young people must be involved in the election process for a few reasons. Firstly, we are the ones who will stick around and see the world that our elected officials have made for us. We need to have a say in this process to make sure our government represents all age groups, beliefs, and values. Their stances on issues will directly influence our future. I also believe it is a privilege to vote, and one that we should be proud to exercise.

Although it might seem like your voice is screaming into the abyss of politics, one vote holds more power than you would think. If you have any level of concern for healthcare, the environment, education, or social issues, then VOTE!

Well, that’s all for this blog post. I know I’m definitely going to vote once I’m 18- will you? Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next one.

Sincerely,

Me