Hey guys, the final project of the year has finally come to a close which means it’s time for the final blog post of my grade 11 year. As always the last project was presented in the spring exhibition, which this year had both some great ideas and execution and some downfalls. But this is not just about the exhibition, the project itself was also very important in both my learning and the success of this exhibition. “But what is that project?” You may ask. Well the driving question for this project, lovingly called Cray Cray Yay Yay , is:
“What makes someone a community impact maker?”
We started the project looking through a more global lens and learning about “Crazy Ones” or people that changed the world. Some of the most famous crazy ones can be seen in this famous Apple ad called “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”. To expand our learning on this topic we watched three movies: Hidden Figures, Amadeus, and Gandhi. Each focused on the lives and paths these ‘Crazy Ones’ took to change the world and it was our job to take notes and spend a bit of time thinking through what we had watched and turn that into a deeper understanding of the text to be debated in a Socratic Seminar. Out of all the movies we watched I think my best for analyzing was Gandhi, by that point I had an understanding of what I should be looking for and my ability to connect both to the text and to outside texts had grown as well allowing me to get the most out of the seminar and share my own thoughts.
However, that global lens wasn’t where we were going to be doing the main part of this project. Instead we were looking at impact makers in our communities, whether that be a geographical community or a larger general community. Whichever community you chose, it was our job to pick someone from the community that has made an impact and research and hopefully interview them to eventually present them at the Spring Exhibition. I ended up choosing Lisa Muri, a NVD councillor, as my impact maker for her work back in the 90’s to get out local forests rezoned so they can’t be developed on. I was lucky enough to interview her and surprisingly the practice taking notes from the movies came in handy when I was taking notes when she was talking for the important pieces. I also ended up learning a lot about the beginning of her fight and what happened afterwards which helped me gather a very clear picture of who she was and why she does what she does. This knowledge would eventually translate into creating a portrait of her to display at the exhibition.
This was the part of the project where I think I learned the most from both reflecting on what Lisa had said in our interview and taking that to create a presentation on her. It forced me to put my interview skills to use and to decipher from what she was saying what I needed to know and what the important parts were that showed her no her beliefs as a person not just what she had said.
Making chocolate chip cookies with Alex
That was, of course, not the end of this project since we still had to present our learning at the Exhibition. The grade 10-12’s, who were doing the same project, were put in the gym and split into five categories: Environment, Business, the Arts, Athletics, and Service. I was put into Service with Matthew, Ethan, Zoe, Amy, Thomas, Gabe, Alex, Emily, Jordyn, and Sophia. Our theme was supposed to be a street where all the different stations was a different service centre. I think our group was surprisingly put together with our planning and set up, and our food was delicious even if there were a couple of problems with drizzled chocolate. I was very happy with my station as well since I had a flier from the wilderness committee that completely outlined what Lisa and her group GUARD did. I only wish we could have reduced the lights and that the flier could have been in colour.
In the end, I think this was an extremely successful project. Throughout this entire project I learned both practical skills when it came to note taking and sharing ideas but I also learned a lot about taking information and connecting it with other sources and keeping those connections. I’m lucky that I often am able to keep multitudes of information in my mind at a moment’s notice to be used but the connections and pieces of information I don’t keep is something I have improved on this project and something I can still improve on. I have been able to rely on my mind for so long that taking the time to have somewhere else to keep these ideas is still something I can push myself to do better at.