How I Love to Hate Politics

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I am sure that most people out their feel very similar to the way I do about politics. It has very interesting pieces of it from debates and peoples point of views all the way to the economic side of things. Over the past few years the United States politics has been constantly on the news because of our tiny handed orange friend. Anyways he is not the star of this post, this post is about political ideologies in general. This unit we focused on what are the different sides to politics, what we believe in and where we stand on the political spectrum.

Most people are probably confused by this political spectrum, as when I entered this unit I thought it only had an x-axis, but adding a y-axis makes a lot of sense. You have your views on rights and things like that as well as the economic side of things. Our teachers decided to actually give us written tests for the first time in a long time. We were given the same short quiz pretty much every time until we all had good enough marks. The quizzes were easy for me to understand as I had taken economics the year before which prepared me very well. We also ended up taking another test, not for marks one that told us where we stood on the political spectrum. I ended up landing a little bit below the x axis and slightly right on the economic side of things. I wasn’t surprised as I new that I was more libertarian and I definitely believe in a mostly free market economy. I personally am a capitalist and when I say that people jump to the conclusion that I am hard core right wing, which is far from the truth.

I ADVISE NOT TO WATCH IF EASILY UPSET BY TV SHOWS SIMILAR TO FAMILY GUY

I believe the reason why somebody would jump to that conclusion is because of the United States. Like I have said their politics have been showcased for quite some time now and their style of democracy has made people think differently about the spectrum. I do not like their two party system because it has caused the country to be split ideologically in half. This has made people believe their is either on or the other, if you are a democrat some people will think you are a full blow communist. If you are slightly a republican, people will call you a fascist. Funny thing is that those two political ideologies are closer together than you might think.

Their are two great examples of communism and fascism and both of them were existing during WWII. Joseph Stalin is the first person I think of when somebody mentions communism. He felt very strongly about spreading communism across the world. I am sure you know that the Fascist leader I am referring to is the one, the only Adolf Hitler. Everybody knows that this psycho also wanted to take over the world and luckily he was stopped. However if you look at the political pieces of both of their governments, they were very similar. The leader decided what was going to happen with no ifs, ands, or buts. As well as many authoritarian ideas, the main difference is just where they stood economically. Hitler was more right wing where as Stalin was more left wing.

There are several versions of how the the political spectrum can look, some people believe that is just an x-axis other people think it has an x and a y-axis, there is also weird one that is in the shape of a horseshoe that oddly makes a lot of sense, and supports my opinion on fascism and communism.

I decided that I should make my own now because I feel that this will be the most accurate for me.

I believe that it is more of an oval just because you can transition from communism to fascism easily or you can become more socialist, from either of those you can transition to capitalism, and so on and so forth.

A Figurative Table

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My High School life is sadly coming to an end. I am no longer going to have the same routine that I have had for the past 5 years. My life is now about to change immensely, now that I am going to be going to university next year. Before I start talking about that I should focus on how my opinions and views have changed. Several years ago I made a blog post about who my role models are and what rules or mottos do I live by. For this assignment I was told to do the same assignment as I did again just with my new worldview and state of mind.

This list is of who is at my table now, some of them were on my last table but others are newer role models for me.

Brent Grimes:

This Role Model of mine was on my last blog post because he has been really influential to me on how to keep push through adversity. Brent Grimes is a 5 feet 10 inches tall Corner Back in the NFL. The reason why I stated his height was because it was a big factor for why he inspired me and how he overcame that challenge. For the longest time he was told he was too short to play in the NFL, but he overcame that and went to the Pro Bowl 4 times after being undrafted in 2006. The next reason he inspires me is his work ethic. His work ethic showed the most when he had a massive injury when he played for the Atlanta Falcons, and then came back to the NFL and played for the Miami Dolphins because the Falcons released him. The third reason why he inspires me is because his ability is to prove people wrong. Which he showed when he was supposed to be “too short” to play and when he came back from his injury and played just as good if not better. Those are three reasons why Brent Grimes inspires me.

Muhammad Ali:

Muhammad Ali is an easy choice for me now that I have done research on him. He is most well known for being an incredible athlete as he was a heavyweight boxing champion with a 56 win record. That take drive and determination that is impressive on it’s own. The main thing that I admire him for is standing up for what he believed in. I believe that standing up for what you believe in is something everybody should do. He did what is right and that was the only thing that mattered to him. Muhammad Ali galvanized the Civil Rights Movement by appealing to people who otherwise agreed on little politically. The death of Muhammad Ali  provides us with an opportunity to reflect on his impact on the freedom struggle that has come to be known as the Civil Rights Movement. That is why he inspires me and that is why he is at my table.

 

Willie O’Ree:

If I had to bet I would say most people have not heard of this person. The only people who know how he is are people who know a lot about the NHL. Willie O’Ree was the first black hockey player. He is from eastern Canada, and he had a huge impact on the hockey world. After O’Ree’s stint in the NHL, there were no other black players in the NHL until another Canadian player, Mike Marson, was drafted by the Washington Capitals in 1974. There were 23 black players in the NHL as of the mid-2010s. Art Dorrington was the first black player to sign an NHL contract, in 1950 with the New York Rangers organization, but never played beyond the minor league level. NHL players are now required to enroll in a preseason diversity training seminar,and racially based verbal abuse is punished through suspensions and fines. From 1998 on, O’Ree has been the NHL’s Diversity Ambassador, traveling across North America to schools and hockey programs to promote messages of inclusion,dedication, and confidence.

Jackie Robinson:

This person was also on my previous list. Most People have heard of this Baseball player. Jackie Robinson was one of the first African American Baseball Players. He was well known across the USA with people who loved him and people who hated him, which is one of the reasons why he inspires me. That reason comes from him blocking out the noise from being so hated because of racism. Another reason is because he succeeded so much in the MLB. A lot of people on his team didn’t want to play with him but he still became one of the best players in the league, with being a 6 time all star. The final reason is that he did what he thought was right, and he was just an all around a good person. So much so that he got his number discontinued across the league and now there is a “Jackie Robinson Day”. That is what Jackie Robinson has inspired me.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson:

The Rock is probably a role model to many people now that he has gained so much influence as the highest paid actor in Hollywood. He is known for wrestling, acting, and advocating for mental and physical health. He originally started out as football player. From what I know he played in the CFL for a while after playing in the NCAA. He was eventually cut by Wally Buono, the General Manager at the time. Johnson is grateful for what Buono did as it was the turning point in his life. After that point he became a successful wrestler and everything else followed. The thing I admire the most about him is his work ethic. He has pushed through adversity all through his life to become a multi-talented celebrity. He is also constantly standing up for what he believes in, speaking his mind on political and societal issues as well as standing up to people like Donald Trump.

 

Not much about me has changed over the past few years, I think my morales are still pretty much the same and the main difference is that I am more experienced and more mature than I was. The main thing I am going to live by is that I am going to do what is right every possible chance that I get. A quote that I will also like to follow is one that comes out of the Rocky Franchise:

This motto has helped me push through adversity and I believe that if I follow my morales and live by this quote, I will be able to push through anything while doing the right thing.

The Godfather

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We have no come to the end of another unit. This unit was confusing for me as I wasn’t really sure how it correlated to the rest of the units that we have this year. Our previous unit was about horror, and the one after this one is about Ideologies. This one is about historical significance, as you can see there is a large disconnect. Anyways, this project was nice because it was an individual project and we were able to choose from a large variety of topics. The only rule when picking a topic was that we had to choose from the events and people that were mentioned in Billy Joels song, “We didn’t start the fire.” I wanted to shake up what I was doing in school and choose something that I knew almost nothing about. The topic I chose was Marlon Brando. I had no idea what he did besides star in one of the highest rated movies of all time. Turns out he was nominated for an Oscar after he starred in “The Godfather”. This was actually one of the most controversial Oscar nominations of all time because he decided that if he won he was going to boycott the Oscars. With that information in mind I decided to make my driving question “How did Marlon Brandos boycott change Hollywood and the Oscars?”

We were being assessed on two curricular competencies. The first was communicate, which meant that we had to show how we share our own ideas. The other was historical significance, which was how do we make choices about what is worth remembering. This project was very open ended, all we had to do was explain how our topic was significant in a keynote presentation and in artifact(Painting, Sculpture, Photo Essay, Video, Podcast, etc.) of some kind. I decided I was going to show Marlon Brandos historical significance in a video. Before any of that I had to do a lot of research. I started with why he wanted to boycott the Oscars in the first place. It turns out there was a huge indigenous rights protest going on around that time as well. Approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and more followers of the AIM(American Indian Movement) took over the area on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee. The protest followed the failure of an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson. The United states government was criticized for there lack of ability to fulfill treaties with Native American people and demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations. The area was cordoned off by several law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the United States Marshals Service. Wounded knee was chosen because it had significance from a previous massacre that happened there. It got national attention as supporters traveled far distances and there was widespread public sympathy for the supporters.

That was what pushed Marlon Brando into boycotting the Oscars and changing them forever. My video was a direct representation of what my Keynote was. Sadly neither of them turned out that great. I put in a lot of work behind the scenes trying to get everything I needed for a great project but it did not work out. Both the video and the Keynote were “lacklustre”. I am not really sure what went wrong as the amount of work I put into the project was not shown in the result I created. But this is what I came up with.

I enjoyed this project as I was given a lot of freedom with what and how I wanted to do everything. I enjoyed what I was researching and I learned a lot about something that I thought was insignificant. Turns out its not as Marlon Brando has had an effect that has lasted almost 50 years.

My Last MPOL

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Now that it is my final year in High School, I am doing a lot of things for the last time, and now that I am halfway through this year I am doing my last MPOL before I graduate. I am getting closer and closer to having to reflect all of my years at Seycove as opposed to just the past 9 months. I now know that these are my last few months for me to do my best work at this school.

This year has been more of a roller coaster ride than any other year. It has had a lot of failures and a lot of euphorias. We started off this school year super excited to get into the horror unit. It was lots of fun and it wasn’t like any other unit I have ever done. I decided that I wanted to take on more responsibility than on other projects. I decided that I was going to put my hat in the ring for an important position. I didn’t get it but it’s the thought that counts right? I was at least given a position that was close to the one I wanted as I was Line Producer. I was happy to take that position and I was excited about the new opportunity I was given to try and lead my peers. The project didn’t exactly go the way anybody really wanted it to. Nobody expected us to crash and burn as hard as we did. We all were hoping that it was going to be a great project. We were confident up until we realized how well we were working together as a team. Evidently, that didn’t go so well. I think a lot of people worked really well individually but when it came to putting it all together, it didn’t work. I think that I did a fairly good job of being the line producer. My organization skills were about as good as they could possibly be and I think that I did a good job of delegating tasks as well as making sure I was doing everything I needed to do to make sure I got my work done. I believe I could have done a better job if I was given another opportunity, and I did with our second chance as we were forced to restart. The second time around on that project went better than the first time, and I think a lot fo that has to do with how well we organized. Everybody knew what was going on at what time. We executed the best we could and we would have finished if he had one or two more days.

 

We then hit the ground running with our new unit in 2020. I wasn’t very sure what this unit had to do with anything that we were learning as it had a huge disconnect from the horror unit in my opinion. As soon as I figured out how we were getting our topics, I took it as an opportunity to learn about something new. That is why I chose Marlon Brando as my topic. I knew pretty much nothing about him. All I knew was that he was in one of the highest-rated movies of all time. I quickly learned he was involved in one of the biggest and most revolutionary boycotts in the history of Hollywood. I was happy with all of the work that I did on the project and I found that I put a lot of effort into my research. I then started to formulate it into a video. It was going well at first but by the end of it I wasn’t sure what was wrong but I knew my execution was off.  The quality of the video just wasn’t my best. I then had to present something that I knew I couldn’t execute at my best. The same thing happened with the presentation, I felt there was just something off with it. I’d say my presentation was worse than my video. I naturally am not very good at public speaking, so I talked to fast and I was worried about forgetting my information so I looked down for most of the presentation, which if you don’t know, that doesn’t create very good presentation.

This year so far as been high intensity but I think that I have been doing fairly well. I know that I can do better and I am going to use my past experiences this year to do that. I am going to try and figure out what I did wrong in this past unit to make sure I can execute in the next. I think that over the past term and a half that I have stepped up to the plate and I have been working harder than I ever have but I just need to work on my execution a little more. I also have to ask a question for the Presentation of Learning that will help me for the rest of the year as my parents and teachers are supposed to answer it and that is supposed to point me in the right direction for improvement.

My Question Was:

How do I bridge the gap between what I’m actually achieving versus what I am expecting to achieve based on my knowledge, effort and understanding for the course?I feel I should be doing better.

 

A Scary Project… For Two Reasons

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At the beginning of the year we decided to start a unit on Horror. You may have noticed this based on the fact that I had a couple blog posts based around Horror Movies. That was all leading up to the big project that we were hoping to be amazing. It didn’t quite turn out that way. We had high hopes at the beginning but we slowly ran out of steam until we had a large heaping disaster. Guess what, we started again and then we ended pretty much in the same place.

We started off by going down to Seattle and learning about the project and what was going to go on during it. We studied how horror worked and what created a good horror movie. We also assigned roles while we were down there. I applied for producer and got the role of line producer. Two of my friends, Alex and Sam took the role of producer and I was pretty much their right hand man. I was in charge of making sure everything in the project went smoothly and everything finished on the deadline (that did not happen sadly). The script team got together and started putting together a story. They were first call to action, and they were told to do their best to create the best possible characters, and the best possible story.

When we got home, we decided to delve deeper into the world of horror.  By this time we had a general idea of what our story was going to look like. It would be two groups of teenagers who loathe each other. They are forced to work together because while they are locked in a school the janitor decides he wants to kill all of them. At first they blame the deaths on each other until they figure out there is someone else doing these acts. There were several types of characters and they died in a specific order depending on their stereotype. The first to die was the “Woman of Many Men”, or if you want to be rash, you can call her the slut. That’s generally the way most horror movies go. The deaths slowly worked there way through the groups until there were 3. They tried to make their final escape but it was too close so the last person you would expect to sacrifice himself, did. The person I’m talking about is the douche bag who is an arrogant leader of one of the groups and everybody else sees him as an asshole.

At the beginning of the project there wasn’t really much for me to do until the script was done. So I started by making a timeline for the project (That was not followed. I then started taking everybody’s schedules and put them into a document so everybody could see when everybody was available. We then started watching horror movies. It was helpful with understanding horror, but it took up a lot of useful time.

We eventually got back to working on the project. We did casting and I ended up being the douche bag. We then failed and a bunch of people got removed of their positions such as both producers, and the director. Then I was happily removed from my character to be sadly put back in as the janitor, because the other janitor wasn’t intimidating enough.

The movie looked like it was back on track but we just barely ran out of time. I was furious with how this went because we were so close. I take a lot of blame for this because this process should have gone smoothly the first time. If I were to go back and do it again I would have taken more charge.

I felt that the wrong people were taking responsibility and it got in the way of knowing who was actually in charge. The organization skills of all ofus were only good in the end and by then it was too late. I’ve learned from this that in situations like this, you have to do it right the first time. I learned that when I have a lot of responsibility, I have to take charge and organize the people and the things that I need to just to make sure everything runs the way it needs to.

Get Out or Read this Post

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After watching Halloween we decided to watch another horror film, a more recent one at that. This had a very different vibe, and it struck me in a different way. This movie was Get Out.

It was very well known when it first came out a few years ago. It is a lot deeper than most horror movies especially slasher films. It touches on modern society in the United States. It can get confusing at times if you don’t pay attention as this movie has many different layers and you can lose track very easily. It has twists and turns you won’t expect, and forces you to the edge of your seat.

Get Out gains its fear factor from how much is unknown. Most of the movie the main character is in the dark and you are not sure what is really going on. You end up being confused and on the edge of your seat trying to expect what is next. It also uses classic ways of scaring the audience. They use music and audio I effects to scare you before you even see what’s going on on screen. If you watch the movie and think about what was said earlier in the movie, that also scares you as it hits you in a much different way after you know whats going on. Some other things that happen are just mess with your mind, involving hypnosis. You see the main character floating in nothingness while staring back through what his eyes are currently seeing and having no control whatsoever over there own physical actions. The movie is very well written with every piece of the movie being involved with the plot.

It was the exact opposite of a slasher film like Halloween, instead of having a unstoppable killer killing people throughout the movie, you have a messed up family that forces the protagonist to try and survive in confusing and awful circumstances. Nobody is killed until the end of the movie, after the protagonist becomes clever, he is able to outsmart the nuts family.

As I said before it comments on societal problems in the US. It touches on racism, Black Lives Matter and police brutality. The location of most of the movie is in a rural area where there is a mainly Caucasian demographic. The protagonist constantly feels out of place throughout the movie because of this especially when he runs into a cop. The family on the other hand try to seem welcoming but at the same time it is obvious they are trying, also to like they are trying to hard. It creates these awkward scenes in the movie.

You can very easily compare this to Frankenstein as it is not a slasher like Halloween and it is more of psychological horror. They both don’t have many deaths, and the whole entire movie doesn’t focus on death. Both movies also look into what is going on the world at the time. Frankenstein looks at humanity and what makes us human. It has a huge focus on wrong right and how that connects to what makes us who we are. Get Out focuses on the norms and impacts of society. It especially focuses on racism, and how it has gotten better but it still isn’t really gone from the world and probably never will be.

The movie is complex and uses many different disguises for different topics outside of the movie. It is one of my favourite horror movies and it is one of the most engaging movies I have ever watched. This movie is a great example of how horror movies can actually be something besides mindless killing and death.

Two Versions of Frankenstein and the Movie about the Person who Created the Movie

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This is probably the most confusing title that I have ever written but it is exactly about what I learned about. A piece of our horror unit was about Frankenstein, we read the book and watched the movie, then we moved onto a movie about the producer of the movie.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the first created and the one that we started with. I personally was not a huge fan of the book as it left me reading pages more than once out of confusion some times. The plot was interesting but I found it hard to follow along with what was going most of the time, I don’t enjoy having to seek clarifications for a book that I am reading. The book was a lot more philosophical than I thought it would be. I originally just thought the story was about a monster named Frankenstein. In reality it’s about a man named Frankenstein who accidentally creates a monster. It then moves into what being a human truly means. When you really think about who is truly the monster between Frankenstein and his creature, you are forced to way the differences between the two. There is no easy answer to that question, the creature has the physical and stereotypical features of a monster but the original actions of Frankenstein that put the creature in that position were almost worse than anything creature did. Frankenstein created something with no knowledge of what was going on, all that the creature started to learn was how it did not fit in because of its physical appearance, this angered the creature as it could do nothing to find happiness and Frankenstein was the only one to blame.

To me the most interesting story fo the three artifacts we studied was the Gods and Monsters movie. This movie was about the man who directed the Frankenstein movie and The Bride of Frankenstein. This movie takes place in the 50’s and there are no creatures just relatively normal people. James Whale is an openly gay man and he starts to bond with his Gardner who does not think much of this at the time. The true underlying theme of this movie is harder to understand but it almost seems as if James Whale is the monster in this situation as he experiences PTSD and you see in his flash backs himself represented as the creature. Later in the story, the Gardner is seen as the monster in the flash backs. It shows progression of James Whales’s thinking through the movie. It seems as if he does not blame himself anymore and has pushed it off on to the Gardner now. This movie was very hard to understand, but it was extremely interesting, I think that if I were to intently watch it again I would gain a much greater understanding for the underlying theme.

The entire underlying message of Frankenstein in general has to do with what being human means. It breaks down into several parts, but none can be properly explained so it makes explaining what it means to be human very difficult. Everybody would have different definition.

 

 

Shrews and Shakespeare

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If you read a lot and are in to learning about literature you probably understand where this blog post is going. If you are more like me and don’t really read books written hundreds of years ago then I will explain it myself. To start off this year in PLP we started off by reading classic literature and tried to learn how to understand what makes a book or a play or any kind of literature a classic.

Over the summer I was given many options for books to read and I had to decide so I could give my own opinion. When I looked at my selection of books I was only drawn to two, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” and “The Great Gatsby”. I was told that “A Prayer for Owen Meany” was a good book and it has a story that I would enjoy quite a bit. On the other hand I was just naturally drawn to “The Great Gatsby” as it is one of the most well known books I can think of. For some odd reason I decided to go with “The Great Gatsby”. When I first started reading I noticed that it was a book that was quite short and I thought something might have gotten mixed up. I double checked and turns out that it is a very short book. I began to read the book, and I was interested but also confused. I was constantly re-reading pages to actually understand what was going on. I decided to do research and it turns out that I’m not the only one who felt this way. This book was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it turns out that he was a very depressed man who was also an alcoholic which brings a dark side to his writing. Even though I was confused for most of the book I still enjoyed the story and I was constantly paying attention to the way he set the scene in this book as his imagery was spectacular. Some how Fitzgerald was able to describe everything in every scene in a very short book. I would recommend this book to people as I thought it was really good but I feel that I would have to warn them that it is not an easy read has you have to pay close attention to each sentence to understand what is happening. This book is one of the best that I have read and I could see myself re-reading it again in the future.

After we finished our books and gave our opinions on them we were told that we were going to be focusing on the play, The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. One of the first things we did was go to see a re-done version of the play, done by Bard on the Beach. It was set in the Wild West instead of the original time period. They chose to change the play so that the main character was liberated instead of tamed, as it would be accepted instead of frowned upon by our current society. We were soon put into small groups, one group for each of the 5 acts. My group members were Isobel and Mimi, we all decided that we had to immediately start working on editing the script, I took this upon myself as my task as I wanted to help out my group as much as possible instead of sitting on the side being useless. This was not a fun task as I ended up staying up late reading Shakespeare over and over again. I cut out as much as I could until I requested another set of eyes from my group members to see what they think should be removed. We then started recording where I played every male voice and they split the female parts, of course with my luck I played around double the parts they had put together. We then decided to use Explain Everything as our animating software as we were familiar with it and knew that we could do it well. After our first draft we ended up taking out the whole first scene as we thought that it wasn’t needed. For our final draft we also revised our audio by making it clearer, and we also made the characters better by refining their image. Other than those changes we thought are first draft went really well.

With this project came other tasks of course. We also had to redo our act in another time. With that we had to change the story so it would fit that time. We ended up with the 1960’s. I did a solo project as well that involved me making a video about what women’s lifestyles were like during the 60’s. The taming of the shrew had a large focus on women and thats why we had to edit it so much as times have changed a lot with women’s rights and during the 60’s it was a revolutionary time.

 

The largest solo piece of this project was definitely the essay that we had to write. We had to explain why TOS was a classic or not. We had to focus on one element that makes it a classic and follow through and be specific with it.I immediately came to the conclusion that it was a classic and instead of writing out pretty much what I wrote in my essay, I’ll just show you my essay.

William Shakespeare is one of the most well known and greatest writers of all time. He wrote many plays that countless people have come across including Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Taming of the Shrew and many others. There has been countless remakes of his work. Just because it was written by Shakespeare does not mean that it is a classic, but The Taming of the Shrew is. It is a timeless play that has been redone over many generations purely because it is a classic. Not all plays are able to withstand the test of time. To withstand the test of time means that over generations and generations it has to be relevant, and to be relevant it has to be enjoyed by a large group of people over every generation. If one generation forgets about it, it will ceased to exist and will no longer be a classic and it will be forgotten forever. A recent example of this play being enjoyed is Bard on the Beach. Anybody is able to go and witness the recreation of this classic play. It is meant for all ages, but not everybody will understand the full meaning of the play as even still being adapted, it is a play written by William Shakespeare. Someone who has read or watched a form of the play, can understand it better and see the transformation that has been done to the story line and have an even better understanding than before. The newer adaptations have changed the ending as the original would be frowned upon now a days. This makes it more enjoyable for audiences today, and makes the play last longer so that it can be a timeless classic. The adaptations are integral for plays to become classics because the original play will be enjoyed as much as one that is changed and edited to be more socially accepted by that time period. The original play has an ending where the shrew sub misses to the men in her life and gives up what she was fighting for. Slowly over the hundreds of years that this play has existed, it has changed. The bard on the beach version ends with the shrew being liberated. This was a now brainer for the producer with all of the women’s rights progress that we have made over the past few decades. That single change in the play is one of the biggest pieces to making sure that this play stays a classic and is accepted until it needs to be changed again. Currently we don’t see much else in the story that is politically incorrect, but when it was first made, all of it was acceptable. I am sure that eventually there will be something else in the play that needs to be changed because, our opinions are constantly changing. Their is one part about Shakespeares writing that cannot be changed. It is the actual written words, sentences and paragraphs. It is too important to the quality and identity of the play. When I had the chance to talk with the cast of the Bard on the Beach adaptation, they said the only made required changes to their play, as their is a certain flow and rhythm to his writing that can’t be replicated. That is one piece that makes his writing to a classic. His writing alone has stood the test of time even though it’s hard to understand because nobody speaks in old english anymore. Our language might even change some more but his writing will still be important to how the play is written. The Taming of the Shrew was originally written over 400 years ago when times were different. Women were oppressed and men had all of the power. The play was seen as something that was entertaining and enjoyable. Now the original is seen as not acceptable and not something that should be seen as right. With that being said it has still stood the test of time and has been relevant all of these years. Sure it has been edited and changed so that it can be enjoyed by each generation, the heart and soul of the play is still there and the legacy of William Shakespeare lives on in this timeless classic that can never be replicated.

This project has been eye opening to how different women’s rights were throughout history in all era’s. It truly has shown me how much has to be done before anything is changed. The centre piece to this project I believe was the fact that when Shakespeare first wrote this play standing up for what you believed in made you into a shrew, and the times have now changed that standing  up for what you believe in is common and a good thing.

 

 

My Final TPOL

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It is that time of year again for us to do TPOL’s once again. I dread these meetings I have to stand up in front of my parents and teachers and talk about what I have done this past year, that includes the things that I have done well in and the things that I need to improve. At least I can say this is my last TPOL at the end of grade 12 there is an FPOL which I think is a very fitting name. This TPOL will not be focusing on my outstanding work, it will generally be focusing on the lack of outstanding work as this year has been a bit rough.

I feel as if I have a let down my teachers my parents and myself. This year was most definitely not my year. Everybody who wants me to do better keeps hearing me promise that I will get better, and it never really has. I was told at my last POL that the third term was my last real shot at proving anything, and I more or less blew it. I still think that I can do better and I think I have found how, I just need to prove it.

This past year has been rough. I have faced a lot of adversity and I think that I have powered through it. I believe that I got better throughout the year as I believe my first term took a deep dive into lower quality. The second term I put more work in but it still wasn’t enough. I think that My second term was better than my first, as I do believe that my work was improved. I knew that I didn’t have a second chance and I knew that this last term really mattered but I still couldn’t really pull it all together. Looking back on it it was a train wreck. Over these past couple weeks while I have been fighting to catch up I have realized what I have to do to be more efficient. I now know that I have to hand things in and revise after. That way at least I have something done opposed to redoing the same assignment and making it look like I have nothing. 

One thing that I believe I need to focus on is: Am I ready for PLP next year?Personally I think I am very ready even though it is hard to trust me after this last year of broken promises of me improving. I think that I can improve on everything that I have done. I know what I have to do, and I know what I have to stop doing. This is a turning point in my life and I know that grade 12 is going to be a great year for me, and that is including my grades and who I am as a person.

Even though this year was rough doesn’t mean I didn’t succeed at all. The first example of that is the Manhattan project that I did at the beginning of the year. I think that was one of the best projects that I have ever done as my groups video turned out very well. One of the best projects that I did all year was my final project that I did for the year end exhibition. I think that is one of the best projects that I have shown at an Exhibition in all of the years that I have been in PLP. With all of my ups and downs this past year, I am happy as it is over as I think I need to reset before next year.