When you think of an average high school project, you probably of think of a worksheet or an essay right? Normal things that you would expect to see. What about a livestream? Probably not what you expected, but It’s what we did. How you may ask? Well you’ll just have to read the rest of this blog, won’t you.

Welcome to a blog post about our latest humanities project, “Hey Boomer”, where we investigated what life was like in Canada following WWII and what happened during that time to form modern Canada. Fromm what we learned we were then to create as a class, a satirical radio play to be preformed and live streamed by us. It was a daunting task but I think as class we rose to the challenge.

We started by actually learning what our play was going to be about, which included Canada’s history from the around the 1950’s-1970’s, watching and analyzing the movie “Pleasantville”, and learning about satire and it’s uses. 

For our Canadian history notes, we were challenged to focus on aspects of our note taking such as organization, being concise, and having brevity. It took a little practice but I was happy with how my notes turned out, although it took so long to format everything after that I think I still need to work on being selective with what I write down. If you want to take a look at my notes I’ll put a link to them right here: My Notes

We then moved onto the film “Pleasantville” which was set in the 1950’s and explored the the aspects and stereotypes of the time period in an entertaining and satirical way. It acted as a great rough visual representation of what we were trying to do with our product and was also a good opportunity to practice our ability to critically analyze and summarize media. Here is what I wrote about how Pleasantville satirizes the 1950’s:

“Pleasantville satirizes the 1950’s through the story of two teens who find themselves inside of a black and white television show from the time. The movie highlights many aspects of life at the time and reveals the multitude of societal elements that were flawed during that era. The two main characters soon realize that although the world they have been thrust into appears perfect and everyone acts happy, many things are wrong behind the scenes, accurately representing 1950’s western life with its unrealistic “perfect” standards for everything. Many historical elements and themes are also shown through satire, such as a fear of change and progress represented by town members fighting back against change as people begin to find happiness and independence, which leads to them becoming coloured. Humans’ discrimination against “different” people is also critiqued when the city begins to shun and separate those who were coloured  from the uncoloured people despite them being happier and having found something they enjoy. The film also challenges stereotypical gender roles, exposing them as limiting and absurd. There are also some very literal and historical examples of totalitarianism near the end of the movie with new books and artwork being destroyed and burnt by the city in order to censor an outside reality. In conclusion, Pleasantville provides a critique on the constrictive, idealized ways of western 1950’s living.”

It took a lot of revision to get right, and the realization I used the same phrase six times, but after all that I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. We then moved on to doing a bit of research into satire and all of the different forms it can takes and when it is often used. After that we were able to move onto creating our script for the radio play. 

our class was broken up into different groups so we could all focus on our individual sections like the overarching story, the sound design & production, the script itself. I worked on the very last scene in the play (which ended up being a parody/copy of Pleasantville for some reason), and after a few revisions and script run-throughs I was actually very happy with, and I was also chosen to be the voice of the dad in our story which I enjoyed but unfortunately I only had two lines. If you want to hear our radio play in its entirety I’ve linked it here: Our Radio Play

From this whole experience I learned a lot about post WWII Canadian history I had no clue about which I found really interesting, and started truly thinking about how emerging ideas whether from a group or an individual can profoundly influence societies. I was pretty happy with my own performance in this project and I felt that I put in an adequate amount of effort for the result that I got. I was a useful; member of my script writing team and I tried to extend by asking for a role in the production side of things, but was understandably turned down as I would be missing for a week due to school band trip.

Going forward I still need to work on time management and timeliness, but I definitely felt like this project was a step in the right direction and I made progress both in my learning and myself.

On that note thank you for reading and I hope you tune in again soon to hear my justification of how going to Disney World was part of a school project.