Jay's World

I can’t believe grade ten is almost over. It’s gone by so fast. I mean, I can remember every detail of the first big project we had in socials. Next year things matter and I’m confident in saying I’m ready for next year.

This year I felt as though my work habits finally found balance. In the past, I spent hours wasting time when I could have been doing school work, and that always came back to bite me. But I can remember when we got that first project something just changed. That’s the only way I can describe it. Something told me, get to work and get it done and since then my work has really gone up in quality.

With the addition of PGP, those work habits have developed even more. I can’t express how much I love Things. Having it on my iPad and my phone is the greatest. I always know what I need to do and with time blocking I know when I need to do it. I think if I’ve learned one thing about myself it’s that I take a lot of time to do tasks, so time blocking an hour for a blog post is not ideal.

Now I may be a hard worker but I think one of my weaknesses is that I take on too much work. Hi, my name is Jessie and I’m a “Yes Man”. I’ve been a yes man for 3 years now. I take on tasks people ask me to do so that I don’t disappoint! Multiple times in the past this has brought me down, and I mean really brought me down. Sometimes it gets to a point where the work is too much and my brain overloads and shuts down. I mean, human things 1010010011101… sorry I don’t know, what that was… Anyways, these past couples months I’ve started to take a step back and look at my situation before agreeing to more tasks. It’s not been completely successful so I can say it’s a goal for next year.

“Now Jessie, you say you are a hard worker! But how do we know?” Well, the answer to that is hopefully you’ve been reading my blog! But in case you missed something, I’ll tell you again.

In science, we just finished a small project about space. Morgan and I chose the topic of the possibility of colonizing the moon. We put together a 5-7 minute presentation with a keynote in about 4 days. We got an exceptional mark on it and I think its A because our research was good and B because we made the level of work as good as the time we had, if not slightly better. One of the things the teachers have told us many times is to use the time we have. If they give us half an hour to do something, make it half an hour level work. For me, this really showed in this project.

You’ve got no idea how much I want to talk about my Perks Of Being A Wallflower trailer again. I already talked about it in the last presentation of learning. But there are still some things I want to say. As you can tell I’m eager to talk about it more. For me, this shows how proud I am of it. Another thing that shows how proud I am of it is that I still show people the video. You could ask me to show that video in front of anyone, visitors, friends, people I’ve never met and I’d say go for it. Because I am so proud of how it turned out, and I’m proud of the hard work my group put into making. Ok, that’s all I have to say about that now, thanks for letting me talk about it again.

As you know we very recently went on a trip around BC. We always come back from these trips, our minds bursting with knowledge and ideas and we also come back a better team. Now together we are working very hard to put together an exhibition to showcase our great ideas. Creating something as a team is always so rewarding and I’m super excited to see how this turns out. For my individual project, I’m so happy with how it’s coming along. I’m really passionate about my idea and I think that’s really what’s driving this project. I learned how to book bind for this project and have learned that I really enjoy it. That’s what I really love about PLP, I like being able to create things I’m passionate about. Sure there are some ups and downs. But I managed to pick myself up and get back to work. So here I am now telling you about my school year.

I feel as though the work I’ve done this year has stood out, and I like to stand out. In grade 11 and 12 standing out is so important. That’s why I think the work I’ve done this year is important. Because it is proof that I’m ready for the next step. So here’s to next year!

Having a safe work environment is so important. However, some people don’t understand the rights they have to a safe workplace. This can lead to people attempting dangerous tasks they aren’t trained for. To avoid this, schools are now required to teach workplace safety and highlight all the important rights and regulations put in place to keep people safe at work. In my CLE 10 class (career and life education) we’ve completed multiple assignments to help better educate us on work safety. One of those is an artifact which you will see below.

The workplace safety course was divided into two parts which I’m going to title, Make You Sick and Research and Present. 

Make You Sick

The reason I call this part Make You Sick is that that’s what it did. As a part of this course, we had to watch that awful work safe video where they show people getting into horrible accidents. Although I must say the video featured some amazing below D list actors. Truly the next RDJs. Anyways, the video was very visual and it made me feel very sick. I barely watched the video because I had to rest my head on the table.

I think although the video was tough to watch the take away was that this is the reality. Some people get into these awful accidents due to the lack of training and we now have a way to prevent that. That leads very well into part two…

Research and Present

For part two we did a lot of research into the regulations Work Safe has in place. One of the activities was called Search The Regulations, where it asked you a question and you needed to find the section where it was answered.

The learning outcome of this activity wasn’t so much to learn some regulations but more to learn how the website works. It is very useful to know how to navigate the site because there are so many regulations you couldn’t possibly remember them all but if you know how the site works you can find any of the ones you might need.

The other activity we had was to present a short keynote describing one of the hazard categories. My group was in charge of Exposure to Mineral and Chemical Hazards. I learned that pesticides can absorb into your skin even when it’s intact which is super interesting and scary.

It was our job to teach the class about our topic. For the other presentation, we had to listen carefully and take notes because that was the only time we would hear it.

Having this information makes me more educated when I’m at work. This has opened my mind up to so many questions about my very own job. One of the things I was questioning was our qualifications to clean up blood and vomit. Oh, I should probably mention, I work at a circus school — sometimes kids throw up and stuff. It’s sort of common sense to know you should wear gloves but it was still a question I had. Even thinking about it now, I can think of many things I wouldn’t do at my job without training, like climbing a tall ladder and rigging. Now I have the knowledge to make the right decisions and I will be safer in all my future jobs.

As always, thanks for checking in, I’m still in school.

Jessie

I have to do this assignment where I plan out my post-secondary plan on a website called my blueprint. This assignment is part of my Career life education course which is designed to get you thinking about the future. As of late, they have asked us who we are and who we want to be. We had to create a presentation about who we are as a learner. It was an in-class presentation so I only have my keynote but here it is.

The presentation was pretty straight forward. I’m mostly a kinesthetic learner and a very social being that likes to be in supportive environments. I personally didn’t learn all that much from the who am I assignments, it showed me a lot that I had already recognized about myself.

For the post-secondary part of the My Blueprint assignment, we had to first plan out our high school courses. Since it is nearing the end of the school year I have already done course selection for grade 11. All I needed to do was put down the ones I chose into the website.

For the grade 12 courses, I’m going, to be honest, I have no idea what I want to take. I have no clue what my school offers and I have no idea if my career aspirations will change in the next year. I did try my best to fill it in with courses I thought would be interesting.

So what do I want to do in the future? Well, I’m hoping to do something within the film industry whether it be directing, acting or writing. For me, acting is more of a side passion but writing and directing is something I love to do. I would like to direct because I like to have control and really be there for the creation of the story. However, I feel like being in a writers room with more people who love writing would be fun too. I’ve favourited some of my favourite careers, apprenticeships and colleges/universities that My Blueprint has offered me.

My top favourite results for the occupation category were Director, a Creative Writer and Actor. I didn’t realize you could reorganize the ranking so in the image it’s different. These are all dream occupations of mine, especially directing and acting. I’ve always had these occupations in the front of my mind when I’m thinking about the future.

Going to post-secondary has always been an aspiration of mine and I’m intending to go through with it. The programs listed above are all ones I would love to study and ones that would hopefully lead me to a dream career.

I really didn’t like any of the apprenticeships options. I don’t think that would be the direction I would usually take for my future. I did favourite two of them but that’s sort of just for fun. For the next part of this assignment, I created a numbers sheet comparing all the different professions and what they offer.

So why exactly are we doing these assignments? Well, it’s not for nothing. It’s so we can better understand who we are and how we learn. Being self-aware and knowing what your skills and talents and will greatly contribute to your career and life choices. If I didn’t know I wasn’t compatible as a doctor I might choose that path for something like how much money it makes. Then I would have to endure another schooling I wouldn’t enjoy and have a job I wouldn’t enjoy either. Knowing these things keeps you on the right path so you are doing the things you love.

As always, thanks for checking in, I’m still in school.

Jessie

For the past— well actually a long time now, about 2-3 months we’ve been working on a very big project. In previous blog posts, you’ve seen the video projects, photo projects and physical projects I’ve made. This project, however, is something new and exciting. It’s a podcast!! I’ve never made a legit podcast before and I’m excited to tell you about the learning journey I had.

What is this podcast, you might be asking? Well as we called it, the Peoples Podcast and that’s what it is. It’s a podcast for the people, to educate the people, about the people. That’s how I’d describe it anyway.

Our task was to create a 15-20 minute podcast that educated people about a certain minority group in Canada. The podcast needed to answer our driving question which was; how has the “Canadian Experience” been different for minorities. We were all in groups of around 3-4 people, my group included Tamara, Alivia, and Kai.

The minority group we researched for our podcast was the LGBTQ+ community. We decided that since it was such a big and ever-growing community that we would focus on some of the smaller less acknowledged groups within the community. Bisexuals, Asexuals and Pansexuals are often discriminated against within the community and we wanted to bring light to that and talk about some of those issues. We reached out to one of our community members and youth workers, Yvette Narlock, to see if she wanted to chat with us on the subject and she happily participated in an interview for our podcast. Here is the final draft of our podcast Forget The Boxes.

Now that you’ve had a chance to listen to the podcast I wanted to go back a bit and talk about the process and learning experiences we had while making this project.

China Town Field Trip

As a part of our course, we learned about WW2 and the people who immigrated to Canada during that time. We learned a lot about the Chinese immigrants and about Vancouver’s Chinatown. Our teachers took us on a field trip to Chinatown where we met Judy Maxwell. Judy Maxwell does tours of Chinatown and our tour was super informational and enriching. We got to experience a lot of the culture in Chinatown that we wouldn’t have been able to see if we just walked around.

Judy took us to many of the buildings where the elders were playing Mahjong and Ping Pong. We also got to visit many of the Clan Association buildings. Clan associations were formed based on the assumption that having the same surname meant that you had common ancestors. Clan Associations provide protection for their members by negotiating for them and fighting against discrimination. They also keep track of family history and celebrate cultural events.

We had to make a mini project for this field trip called The Sounds of Chinatown. It was practice for recording audio and using GarageBand. Over the course of the field trip, I recorded little bits of audio in different places and then put them together into a little podcast.

GarageBand

GarageBand is a very powerful tool for making music and podcasts. The Sounds of Chinatown mini podcast we created was a great way to practice and learn all we could about the app. I learned how to automate so that all the sound levels were the same and I also got to practice my music making skills. The music you hear throughout the podcast was created by myself — minus the opening song. That song was created by Kai.

Written Work

We don’t usually a lot of written work but this unit we did. We had to write a positionality paper about how we think about experiences impact the way we interpret literature. As apart of our practice we did three writing prompts. One about age, on about gender and one about location.

The writing prompts were great mini assignments to get our minds thinking about how certain experiences impact the way we write and think. When we started writing our positionality paper I used a lot of the ideas I wrote in the writing prompts. I really liked being able to get my ideas following before writing the big paper.

The Big Paper!

After a large amount of planning for this paper, it was finally the day to write it. The positionality paper was an in-class essay. We’ve done in class essays before so it’s nothing new. Since we had been reading a book called The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, our paper needed to connect the book. We drew from our own life and from the book.

Bumps and Roadblocks

With every project, you run into bumps and roadblocks. Our group ran into many. One of the biggest problems we ran into was finding the time to edit the podcast. With each draft someone else edited but often we had people who were too busy. I stepped up and edited the first draft even though I was quite busy, I just had to make time in my day to do it.

Another downfall we had during this project was that we only had one interview. Every group was supposed to find two but it sort of slipped our mind. It wasn’t that we were unwilling, we just found the one interviewee and suddenly it was editing time. In the future, I will try and push myself and my group members to meet criteria like that even if time feels short.

That’s a Wrap

This project was a lot of work, and that’s not a bad thing. It really pushed me to stay on top of the work and to learn new things. I didn’t think id end up creating music for the podcast but I did, and I think its a role I might take up in future projects. I learned a lot about the Chinese culture and met people with great stories. I feel like I improved my writing and grammar thanks to the practice we did in class. In this unit I got to work with people I feel like I haven’t worked with in a while and that’s always new and exciting. This project went really well even with a couple of downfalls but overall I’m super proud of the product we created.

As always, thanks for checking in, I’m still in school.

Jessie

Welcome back to another destination imagination blog post! Yes, its that time of the year again. For the past couple of months, we’ve been working hard to solve this year’s DI challenges. My group (the Kabobz) chose the fine arts challenge.

This year’s fine arts challenge is called Game On. For this challenge, we had to create and present a story that integrates the research of a team-selected game. Our team chose, the game of life. We also needed to create a game gizmo that caused an action or event to occur. For this, we created a hat with a spinning top, designed to look like the spinner used in the game. At the beginning of the performance, everything we used in the solution of the challenge needed to be held in a container that then goes through a transformation and of course just as the years before, we needed to have two team choice elements.

This year’s DI challenges were extra difficult and they were by far the most challenging ones I’ve ever faced. My group, The Kabobz, included Kai, Lucas, Adlih, Marshall, and Luca. I was a little nervous to work with them because I knew they were all really close friends but they turned out to be a nice group to work with.

To come up with our solution we used a lot of different brainstorming techniques. We started by writing down any minor or major ideas we had on pieces of paper and then we grouped and sorted them. Our team came up with the idea to use the game of life as our game. We chose the 2007 edition of the game.

For the story, we decided to write about two kids who get sucked into the game of life (Jumanji style) and are forced to play out an idealistic life the Banker (game master) wants them too. The moral of our story is that being the richest by the end of the game (retirement) doesn’t make you a winner, it’s being happy that does.

The creation of the props, game gizmo and container was divided between the group. I created the container and Adlih helped me paint it. Luca built our game gizmo and it turned out really good. Hats off to Luca for that one (pun intended).

I lost all my process photos and I’m very sad about that.

Team choice elements have always been the most difficult part of a challenge for me. I must admit that these have always been the downfall of my performances. I don’t like that they are called “team choice elements” because it always ends up being “one person in the group’s strength element”. Our team choice elements for this challenge were pretty weak. Lucas made music for the performance, which was fantastic, but on show day you couldn’t hear it. Our second team choice element was just a stick, to say the most actually… It was bad. We have already started making improvements to these parts of our challenge and they will be much better for the provincial tournament.

After we had performed our solution my group felt like it had gone really well. It seemed to have gone better then we felt it would before. However, when we got our scores it wasn’t as good as we thought. It wasn’t the worst but it really wasn’t great. They gave us zero on one of our team choice elements, which was fair but at the same time, we should have gotten at least some points for having it.

Looking back on the whole thing (the tournament and the process) there are many things we need to improve. I’m very confident we will come up with better team choice elements for the next tournament. This is our last year of DI and I indent to go out with a bang.

As always, thanks for checking in, I’m still in school.

Jessie