During the Cold War everyone from Western Society was scared of two things in general, 1. Communism, 2. Bombs. But the big word everyone should take away from that first sentence is Scared. Fear ran the world at this point in history, and there is no other way around that fact.

Today I am going to be talking about our latest project on the Cold War, Fallout. This post might look a little bit different, but that’s only because I am trying a new writing strategy to make my work more clear and easy to understand. So without further ado, lets get into it!

What was the Learning Focus of this Project?

As you know by now, during this project we focused on the Cold War, but what were the key parts of the Cold War we looked at? Well I would say the first and probably biggest piece of this project was learning about fear. I already touched on the idea of fear in the begging of this post, but I will expand on that now. Fear is defined as: an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.

Now if we apply this to the Cold War, we can see how Fear was present. The Cold War was essentially a Mexican Standoff between USSR and the US, except if one of them flinched their country could and most likely would be nuked, which as we learned from the last project is not a very nice experience.

The second part of this project was learning about power. In PLP we have learned about power a couple times throughout all of our projects. (link to previous post about power) Power is defined as the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events.  

   When we apply this definition to the Cold War we can see once again that this idea of power was very present. A few examples of power being shown is NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO was essentially a group of countries  that thought communism was bad and would corrupt the world, and the Warsaw Pact was another group of European countries that were essentially  forced to join by the USSR so that their country wasn’t destroyed. The Warsaw pact is a great example of power being shown over another person or country, or in this case group of countries. The Influence that the USSR had during the Cold War and even WWII was only matched by the US’s power. 

How did we learn about the Cold War?

In this project we had three major mediums for learning, Socratic Seminars, Lectures in class, and the book Fallout by Todd Strasser. Now out of these three forms of learning only one is new, Socratic Seminars, something that i’m sure all of us in PLP will either prove to love or hate. The whole idea around a Socratic Seminar is that half the class at a time can have a meaningful conversation about a specific topic, in this case the Cold War. We had three Socratic seminars over the span of this project, and personally  lets just say that I have quite a bit of room to grow in them. Its not that I don’t have ideas to contribute or hadn’t prepared enough, more that I couldn’t  find a clean entrance into the conversation often becasue people in the class had selfishly led the conversation onto another topic that they had personally researched that the class wasn’t meant to be discussing.

The other forms of learning for this project was pretty standard for a PLP project and we knew how to operate around them quite easily. I took some notes on all the lectures we got, here is a photo of the page below.

Did I meet my Goals this Project

If we look at my goals for this school year we can see that I wanted to balance my work load with extra curricular activities. This project had quite a bit of home learning ranging  from reading a whole book, to preparing notes for the Socratic Seminars we had quite a bit of personal responsibility. 

I feel that I balanced myself very well this project, specifically getting the help I need from teachers and handing work in on time. If I were to give myself a grade based on these two focuses I would probably give myself a high proficient, like a 88-92%. 

Overall 

What surprised me most about this project was how interesting fear actually is. I used to think of it as something bad, but now I see how it shows who we are when we’re under stress.  This project helped me grow as a learner by showing me that my best ideas come when I’m actually curious about something and when I let myself be creative instead of overthinking it. If I could do something differently I’d plan out when I was going to read the chunks of the book,  and when I would do my work after school rather than leaving it to the last minute.