Listening to The 1950’s
Hi everyone me welcome back to another blog post. In our most recent project we explored lots of themes into the 1950’s, and how we live different lives from the people back then. Our final product for this project was a Radio Play. Now you might be n king is, “what is a radio play??” Well a radio play is basically a bunch of people in a booth telling a story with lots of details, and sound FX. Let me give you some back story.
We started off this project by first going over some of our understanding of Canada in the 1950’s and how things were starting to change. We looked at how different minority groups were starting to stand up to the government and fight for the rights they deserve. One really interesting person we learned about was Viola Desmond, a Black Privilege activist and change maker. When she was in Halifax in 1946 she was arrested for sitting in the wrong part of the movie theatre and charged with Tax evasion. This was because back the they segregated white people from everyone else. She didn’t agree with this and so she decided to take a seat in the better seats, the White people seats. After they threw her out of the theatre they charged her in court and she had to pay 26$, which nowadays would add up to around 368$. That’s a lot of money for sitting in the wrong seat. This really stood out to me even for back then. If a little thing like sitting in the wrong seat can accuse a whole Nation to start a Black Lives Matter movement, what would something bigger than that would have caused?
photo of us recording the play:
To study for the radio play we watched the film Happy Town, where two teenagers from the 21st century are sucked into a 1950s radio play, and end up fixing the city. In this film they touched on topics of cultural diversity, women’s rights, and change. Our class decided to base our radio play off of this. We were each assigned different parts of the script to right. We learned how to satirize sentences as well as use sound FX to create a convincing story. For the presentation day, I wasn’t actually there. Unfortunately I wasn’t in the play but that was ok because I feel I helped a lot in the process of making the script among other things. The actual play went suer well and I think my whole class is proud of it.
Link to our play: https://youtu.be/_sUklZmrvyY
Overall I thought this project was fun and challenging in any ways. I found it hard to lean into my strengths in this project, but made up for it by learning new skills. To answer the driving question for this project, ‘How do we use a satirical radio play to communicate the shifts in Canadian society following WWII?’ I think the best way to answer this is a break down. The satiric radio play touched on many topics of controversy while still keeping it light and funny. As well, we showed how people changed and grew post WWII and gained a greater insight into the lives of people back then. I really enjoyed the parts of the project I was here for and would totally do it again!

The other thing that has been setting me back this year is how fast it has gone by. It feels like yesterday that I walked into the doors for the first day of Gr.10 and now we are more than half way through the year. I remember when I was in Elementary School I used to wish for the week to go by so I could get to the weekend. I used to say to myself “it’s Monday, so Tuesday’s tomorrow the Wednesday and then we are already half way through the week. After Wednesday it’s Thursday and you can look forward to Friday.” Almost to those exact words. Now I want school to slow down because I am starting to realize that life is getting serious and these are the last two years with my friends and teachers, and that has been destroying my mental state. It throws me off and I feel like the bell always rings to early and it stresses me out.








