This week I learnt, part 2. You know the drill! Hello! 

After a few days of lessons about the 1950’s, and a few days of reading Macbeth, I found myself gaining an interest in the TV aspect of the 1950’s. While coming up with what to write for this blog, I began to see a solid link between the 1950’s television and the activities Elizabethans would do besides watching theatre like Macbeth in the 1500’s. You wouldn’t initially think the 1950’s and a Shakespeare play would have similarities, but my class and I have discovered… There is plenty! So how are the 50s and Macbeth (1500’s specifically for this post) connected?

Ah, the one thing that keeps us all sane…. Entertainment. Now a days this can be anything, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, Tik Tok, the list goes on. But, even less than 100 years ago, it was dramatically different. And then even farther, the 1500’s… What would you watch or do if you had absolutely no form of electronic, or couldn’t even read a book? (A lot of people in the 1500’s didn’t know how to read.) We are so used to entertainment and the media we are fed by the world, that we don’t even think about it. For the Elizabethans, they really had to do the most to find entertainment. They would do normal things like sports (wrestling, archery, juggling) and then really odd things like visiting prisons, and watching bears battle dogs. But one of the most respected and popular things they did was watch theatre. 

Theatre was a big thing in this time period. It was something to do, and the closest thing they had to television. They would watch hour long plays, either standing in the pit or in the side stands, seen in this picture beside this text. An example of a play they would watch would be Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and all those classic Shakespeare plays we study to this day. I think the things people develop in times where entertainment is what gets you through the days, is very interesting. How do they come up with these things? How long does it take to become normal? We never think about these things as now in 2020, everything is normal, but back then new ideas were constant. 

In the 1950’s, television became really popular. The price of a TV went down and 3/4 of Americans ended up having one in their house!

They didn’t watch the type of shows we are used to know, they were very stereotypical scenarios of the time period. This was to reenforce the “normal” on the country to maintain a picture perfect country. Anyways, thats not the point I’m making today. The point I’m making is that once war was over, people had money, houses, and families, they could settle. They had the luxury of the chance to watch TV, and enjoy their free time. This was crazy as in the war it was the opposite. Television/entertainment became a large part of Americas culture as they had actually had the time and resources to enjoy life.

These graphics I created represent entertainment and the way it can evolve and form through the years, and a compare/contrast of the outcome of evolving.

This one here shows a 1950’s television family cast on stage in the 1500’s.

And this one shows a 1950’s family watching a scene of Shakespeare play on stage, on their television.

Entertainment is valuable, and humans are very attracted to it. You can see that throughout every year humans have been around. We will create things to distract us from life even if it is going to a prison and watching the prisoners be in prison… (*cough cough* elizabethans)

Hi! It’s that time of year. MPOLS! A time where I get to talk about myself for seven minutes. This is honestly a really valuable part of the year as Its a time where you’re forced to think really deeply and reflect on your work. This year has been going by so fast MPOLS is like a freeze frame to think about you and your work ethics. This post is going to be mainly on the opportunities I have for improvement, but there will also be some highlights of the year so far, and ending it off with a laser focused question that I need answers to!! I like MPOL’s. They remind me, no matter how many times I do this, I will never run out of thing I can improve on and learn... First though, here is the POL deceleration. 

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and weaknesses. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

GOAL #1 STOP TRUSTING MYSELF 

You may be thinking, uhhhhhh, what? When you read that caption, but let me explain. I trust myself when it comes to school. I know I can get done what I put my mind to. This trust has grown over the past 4 years of high school, and you would think its a good thing but its not 100% good. Its good in the way where I have high self efficacy in my school category, which helps me succeed, but it’s bad where It kind of ruins my days. I think Ive mentioned this before but I can do a lot of work in the mornings before school. I sometimes find my mind is most awake then, and the pressure of the 8:30 school time makes me go 10x faster than I would normally. Thats good I guess, I can produce quality work in the mornings. Some of my best blog posts have been written in the morning.

Why its bad is because the homework I have to do is constantly hanging over me like a sad rain cloud, and I sometimes just loose overall motivation to actually do it in the morning. Or, I don’t have enough time. A goal I made in PGP was to get my work done right away at 3 while I’m still feeling motivated, and I am going to try really hard to stick to that. I want to be nicer to myself by not leaving homework to the morning. 

GOAL: #2 MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE

While reading atomic habits, It gave me a new perspective on the way I personally approach schoolwork. I’ve noticed that I’m way more likely to do something when I’ve made myself excited for a certain aspect of it. The 2nd law in atomic habits is all about that. Its called “MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE.” Ive kind of had this overall idea in my head for a while, but never laser focused my thoughts and actually developed something connected to the idea. My goal is to use some of the rules from this law to help me gain more motivation to do my work.

Something I really liked that the author said was to pair something you WANT to to with something you HAVE to do. Ive found that if I switch up the way I do my assignment, like writing it on paper instead of my iPad, or just making a bunch of coffee/tea and settling down while doing my work. I need to attach an attractive and positive activity with the work I need to do, or I honestly lose all motivation. An example of me doing this since I read atomic habits is during this new Macbeth unit. I find Shakespeare quite hard to enjoy and understand, but I’ve been taking notes at home on the scenes writing it out and drawing things connected to it makes me actually enjoy reading Shakespeare in class. 

What project did you struggle with?

This year has been full of projects that aren’t necessarily my favourite “genre” of projects. I like really open ended projects with not a lot of creative constraints. I find thats the best way I learn, as its an attractive and fun thing but also forces you to get to know the unit content really well. This year they have been very writing based, from the New Mexico book (partially creative as it includes photo and video) to the Lord of the Flies Essays, to The poetry book, its been a lot of writing. I have expressed before that I have a hard time with writing as I just don’t like it that much. But obviously, I am still going to need to do it. The Lord of The Flies unit was quite challenging for me in the motivation category.

Writing is something I get better at every year, but it takes a lot. To see progress, I need constant critique, motivation, and dedication to revise. This unit I was missing the critique and motivation. It was a lot of writing assignments, and I’d write them and think they were great, then a week or so later get a bunch of critique on them and feel disappointed and have little to no motivation to revise and I couldn’t even remember my thought process. This was a very mentally challenging project for me, and I think it was because I just simply didn’t enjoy it and that caused no motivation. I lacked the motivation and inspiration to create and write. I handed in a lot of stuff late, and felt like I was always behind. Writing isn’t something that comes to me naturally, and I need to remember thats okay, I’ll just have to work a little harder.

So, what am I going to do to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen again? I need to start relying on myself and ways I can make myself inspired to do something I don’t enjoy. Here’s a book you have to read, you don’t really like the book, and you have to write about it. A lot. I want to be able to take that un enjoyment as an opportunity to find something I enjoy about it. I don’t know how Ill do that yet, but I’m going to test out some ways as the year continues. For this project I could have taken a large interest in the film aspect of LOTF as that’s something I love, or even just taking notes each chapter to keep me motivated. 

What project surprised you? 

In the beginning of the poetry unit, I expressed my weird dislike of poetry. I didn’t hate it, just never felt an interest or connection to it. So, that’s why this project surprised me so much, because it was my favourite project out of all of them this year. I think it was a perfect combination of history, poetry and creativity.

 

I liked the amount of openness we had and freedom to do anything we wanted. Like I said earlier, writing doesn’t come easy for me, but once
I wrote a few poems and got over my weird fear of writing about poetry being cringe, it came pretty easy. I think the most nervous I’ve been all year was before a dress rehearsal in our class. I had to read 2 poems I wrote just in front of my classmates and Ms Maxwell. I was so so so so scared for some reason and remember feeling my heart beating out of my chest. I think I was so nervous because poetry is so personal and reading it out loud can be hard. 

After the dress rehearsal, my eyes opened up and I really decided I was going to take this poetry unit as an opportunity to take risks and do things I normally don’t like. This project was a learning lesson for me as well as a successful project. I learnt I need to always go into a project with an open mind, and take risks!

Laser focused question!

So we have to come up with a question to ask our parents and teachers, and mines more about you than me. I want to know how you handle a situation I personally struggle with, so I can learn from it and help myself. I find hearing about how others deal with something can help inspire me 

When motivation is lost, what route do you take to re-inspire yourself and get it done?

I know as adults you guys must be plenty of things you don’t want to do, but you have to do. I experience that more and more as I get older and I want to know what you guys do, because it would really help me out.

Hello! This is my first post about Macbeth, but definitely not the last. We are starting a new thing called “This Week I Learned” aka a TWIL post. We are learning a lot of new content Macbeth related, but also 1950’s related! So much new information has entered my brain in the past week, and I’m going to share it with you and the connections between Macbeth and the 1950s!

In grade 9 I did a project on the yin and yang and Taoism in Star Wars (learning portfolio post linked here.) Why am I telling you this you ask? Well the themes I learnt about during that project and what I took away from it still lives with me today. Yin and yang touches on the questions about good and bad. What’s good? What’s bad? Are they the same thing? Do they compliment each other? This touches on our driving question for this project “Using Shakespeares Macbeth and the history of the 1950’s, how can we use film to explore the theme of appearance vs reality and comment on what’s changed and whats stayed the same?” The theme of good and bad in Macbeth and the 1950’s is very visible to me. Let me explain both sides of it. 

1950s

We learnt a lot about the beginning of the Cold War, how it started, and the power involved. Also just post war, before the Cold War. Here are some of my notes, incase you want to read a very detailed and long amount of information connected to pre Cold War. If not, let me give you a very mini run down of a few (not all, that would be a long blog post) major things that happened and its consequences. 

YALTA CONFERENCE

There was the Yalta conference which was where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin all met up to discuss how the post world war will work and how they will handle it. This was quite significant as it later caused a lot of problems. This comes into the theme of good and bad/appearance vs reality. They were discussing peace, and had good intentions, yet it still caused conflict in the long run. To connect it to Macbeth, although he murdered King Duncan, he had good intentions. Good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes though, and we see that in both Macbeth and the 1950s. 

THE UN

The UN is created, this is made for the specific reason of world peace. There are 5 permanent members, and 10 elected non permanent members. Something significant that came from the creation of the UN is what they made Germany do. Germany was put to cleaning up the mess they made, and along with that their was the Neurobeurg trial which was the trial that led to the executions of many Germans who had high powers in the concentration camps and overall german crimes. Is killing the answer to killing? What’s good and bad? Was killing them the right thing to do? I think they made the right decision at the time, but I don’t know if it would be the same consequence now compared to the 50s. This connects to Macbeth a little bit by asking, was King Duncans murder the right thing to do? 

MACBETH

Macbeth is all about power. Power leads to so many questions and so much confusion. Who should get it? Who’s better? Are they doing their job right? We ask ourselves these questions while reading Macbeth. In act 1, we hear a lot of quotes that fit into the theme of good vs bad/appearance vs reality perfectly. 

QUOTE #1

“Fair is foul and foul is fair.” This is all about how appearance can be not what it seems. Is fair foul? Is foul fair? Are they the same thing? All that is good to someone, is foul to another. Looks can be deceiving is something we learn in Macbeth. An example in the book that kind of visualizes this quote is when Macbeth murders King Duncan. He’s killing him, but for a good reason? He wants to take the power, but not for an evil reason (that we know of.) Does the fact Macbeth will probably be a good king, balance out the fact he killed someone for it?  I personally think no, King Duncan was doing perfectly fine at being the king, but if he was bad at his job and treated his people poorly, would the murder be justified? What fair is foul and foul is fair…

QUOTE #2

“There is no art to find the minds construction in the face.” This is my favourite quote from the play so far. It relates to how Macbeth and Lady Macbeth could act normal (less normal for Macbeth) around King Duncan, when they both knew they were going to kill him tonight. There isn’t an instruction sheet, or rules to figuring out how someone is feeling/thinking from their face, and that’s what makes life interesting. This relates to the Yalta conference. Stalin was there, and even though he said he wanted peace, how were Churchill and Roosevelt supposed to know later on he would go against them? There is no art to find the minds construction in the face. 

OVERALL

Even though Macbeth and post war/Cold War were in dramatically different time frames, the overall themes in both connect well. This shows humans don’t really ever change deep down. The actual situations aren’t identical obviously, but the good vs bad theme, appearance vs reality theme, and the power thirsty individuals all make the 1950s and the 1500’s look more similar than we initially think they are.

Hello! This blog post is going to be about poetry, specifically beat poetry. Beat poetry was a literary movement started by a group of authors who did sort of avant guard style of poetry, meaning they started going against norms and exploring American politics, rules, culture, etc. This began in the 50s post war era.

Before I get too into everything, here was the driving question for this unit.

“HOW CAN WE USE POETRY TO REFLECT OUR PERSPECTIVES ON PEOPLE, PLACES, ISSUES, AND BELIEFS?”

This driving question shaped the whole project.

THEIR BEAT POETRY 

So why did we study this and what did we do with it? We started focusing on the 50s era to see what we were working with, then studied poetry from the Beat Generation, as well as literary devices. We would read poetry from beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and discuss them in the class which was a very valuable experience. A poem that stood out to me as it was one of the first ones we read was “A Supermarket in California by Ginsberg” which is linked right there. Take a look at it if you want to see an example of a beat poets writing, it’s a very interesting poem.

AMIRI BARAKA

A milestone we worked on prior to the actual big project was studying an individual poet. Mine was Amiri Baraka. We had to learn about their life/worldview, and talk about one of their poems.

I wont talk too much about him as there is a full essay right below this about him that I wrote but this assignment was very important. It focused on the circular competency HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE. A big thing about beat poets was their story prior to poetry. How did they end up here? Why do they have the perspectives they have? These things are discovered through researching the individuals past, what they experienced while growing up, any crises they had, their family life etc. I believe my essay does a good job at explaining the different perspectives he had, as he was a man of many beliefs, constantly changing, and I did my best to explain why he did that and what influenced it.

The HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE  side of poetry is one of my favourite parts about the Beat Generation and people involved because its genuinely fascinating to me. Seeing how a piece of someone’s life story can almost be fully interpreted by a poem that has absolutely nothing to do with their life. Someone’s poem about suppose, uh… a piece of concrete, could have an underlying meaning about some sort of childhood trauma they had or a good memory they remember. I like how words can do that, and its all about their perspective. 

DAILY WRITING

Studying poetry, poets, and the techniques involved in poetry set us up for successful unit of writing. One of my favourite things from this unit was that every morning as class started we would have a topic to write about, and we could write about it in any way we wanted. It was supposed to be imperfect and not too thought out, which is something I rarely do when it comes to writing so it was a good activity to help me get out of my comfort zone. Here are some of my writings from these writing prompts.

This activity demonstrated the competency CREATE. This whole daily writing activity was about developing and focusing on our literacy skills. Finding out how we like to write, speak and what we want to represent in our text. From poetry to just free writing, this competency was constantly used and ill mention it more later on. 

THE CANTINA  

So, why are we writing this poetry? The winter exhibition! This year’s winter exhibition was Star Wars themed (because of the new movie release) and we wanted to create an awesome combination of Star Wars and the Beat Generation. Our specific Star Wars theme was the Cantina on the planet of Tatooine, which you may be wondering, why? Trust me, there are more connections to The Cantina and beat poetry than you think. The Cantina is a place where the rebels and outcasts would go to hang out. That’s basically what beat poetry was about. Rebelling against the normal and talking about things that were going on that could be controversial. People in The Cantina and people in the Beat Generation both weren’t afraid of being ridiculed and being different.

Anyways, we decided on creating The Cantina in the weight room, and have everyone perform 2 acts (around 2-3 minutes each act) of beat poetry! We split the task of turning an ugly weight room into a beautiful and authentic cantina into 4 groups. Atmosphere, food, music and decor which was my group. My group was Giorgia, Isabelle, Kai, Tamara and me! We did plenty of planning, and I’m very proud of the overall outcome. I was in charge of the tables (alongside with kai) creating the sign, and overall managing. No one really stepped up as the main leader in the beginning which was okay as we all had individual tasks, but when the night came I became more vocal and decided I’d lead if no one else was going to. It was important for me to do this as there were many unanswered questions everyone had and someone had to  answer them. Things like where does this go, what are we doing with this, do you need this, were questions I had to decide and solve for all night long. It was challenging but when it comes to exhibitions, I am used to doing that. 

MY BEAT POETRY 

Lastly, for the timeline of this project was the actual performance of poetry. But, what did I perform? Throughout the month or so of studying beat poetry, we all were writing poems. It was a sort of do it on your own time in your own way thing which I really enjoyed and hadn’t experienced in a while. I wrote poetry during the whole unit, but wasn’t too happy with it as poetry isn’t my strongest suit, but when we were assigned to create a poetry book, I had to really get down to business. 

Being honest, poetry isn’t something I’m confident in at all. I feel quite goofy writing it and have a hard time writing about emotion specifically. I feel confident writing about facts and opinions, but when it comes to emotion and being vulnerable in writing, I get a little scared. So, I wrote. A lot. A lot a lot. Tens and tens of poems. I had to get comfortable writing poetry and the only way to do it was to DO IT! I wrote and re wrote until I felt confident in around 8 poems to put into my book. Here it is.

I’m very proud of it, and I feel my poems represent me well. I’m not saying they are amazing or outstanding, but for me and my writing skills I am proud of them. They are unfiltered, honest, and goofy, which is okay! I was so scared of them being cringe to read but that’s literally was poetry is. Not every one is going to like every poem you write and thats okay! I used the competency CREATE the whole time I wrote this book. I used the literary devices we studied, and as well explored things beyond that. I really had to focus on what I wanted to represent in each poem, and once I did that they would just come to me. 

THE PERFORMANCE

Here is a short video of my act #2 performance. 

 

This was a kind of terrifying experience as a) I’m reading poetry I’ve written, and b) so many people were staring at me. But once I read a few lines, and saw smiles on peoples faces, I felt okay. I had to be confident in my writing and know it was all okay. The poems I read in this act are both included in my book. 

OVERALL REFLECTION

Ive reflected on stuff individually already in each section of this post, but for an overall reflection I believe this was a very important unit. I talk about this a lot but writing isn’t something I’ve ever been confident in, so every time we do a writing based unit, it is very helpful. I know I can make things look pretty, but I want to also be able to write. And not just write, write with a meaning and reason. I believe my writing skills have improved because of this unit, and I’m leaving this unit with a strong understanding of both competencies, and a new found respect of poetry. 

Before I finish off this post, I need to mention this as it was the highlight of the whole unit. A lady I’ve never seen in my life before came up to me after my act 2 and complimented my poetry and asked me if I write often. I told her besides school assignments, no, and she told me I should write more and that she really liked my poetry. I was feeling really scared after act 2 as I didn’t know if people liked my writing, so this really meant a lot to me. Someone genuinely  enjoyed my poetry, and that makes this whole unit worth it x10. 

Hello blog! Last month we started the classic high school assignment, reading Lord of the Flies. I’ve always wondered what grade I’d read this book in, and the time finally came! I’m a total nerd when it comes to survival stories, I love them, always have.

So, I was excited when this project came around. I was a little nervous though as this project was fully English based, and I don’t have the easier time with writing, but I was excited to improve my writing skills. Our last project was very history based, so it’s always nice to switch it up! Anyways, the driving question of this project is…

“WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TRIBALISM IN SOCIETY”

The outline for this project was reading the book, doing writing prompts/journal entries, choosing a tribe to do a project on, relating the tribe to the book, taking a book analysis test, and then presenting a keynote. To switch it up, I’m going to show you the final product of this project first, then explain all the work I and my classmates did to get there.

You have no idea what this means, let me explain from the start.

READING AND WRITING 

Once we began reading the book, deadlines were set and assignments were assigned. Every week we had a certain to chapter to read to, and a journal entry with a given prompt to write about. While reading I took notes, which was helpful while writing because I had exact events and quotes written down. Here are some of my journal entries. 

In this category of the project we worked with the curricular competency READING AND PERSONAL TEXT RESPONSE. The whole goal of reading this book was to understand the concepts and themes behind it, and we did that through group discussions and writing. Writing helped me further developed the ideas in my head which made the outcome better. Something I realized while reading and writing about this book is that its not just a survival story, its a theme about humans that’s told THROUGH the survival story. The boys, the island, the conch, were all just things Goulding used to express his beliefs.

Here’s a little video on the summary of LOTF Incase you haven’t read it but want to know the plot!

STARTING THE PROJECT

So, as I mentioned earlier we had to create a presentation. But on what? We had to choose a tribe to compare to LOTF and with that, we had to answer the driving question. My group Adlih, Lucas, and Giorgia, and I decided on doing Hells Angels as our tribe choice.

We were a little worried at first when we started researching, because honesty there isn’t much information about them on the internet. A lot of the articles about them are very brief and kind of too picture perfect to be true. They are a tribe related to a lot of suspected crime and such, so its hard to find definite facts about them. But, we researched plenty and developed a good base of information. Here is some research we did!

We then split up the presentation between us four. Lucas was on overall research, Giorgia was on tackling the driving question, and Adlih and I split up the task of relating it to the book. I focused on the theme of how people are always looking for a sense of belonging, and Adlih focused on how humans look for a sense of protection and hierarchy. These are two themes we came up with by using the competency UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION AND INTENT. This means through research and reading of the book we recognized the understood the roles and themes being shown. I wont go too the actual presentation as I have footage of the actual presentation, which I will show below. The evidence for this competency is the actual presentation which I showed earlier.

PRESENTING THE PROJECT 

So you’ve seen the video, but let me show you the deck of keynote slides we used! We all tried to choose photos that represent what we are saying well. These match up with the slides shown in the video.

Developing this project was surprisingly challenging. I thought because we had spent so much time on the book, and because we had so much research that it would be easy. I was wrong, the actual thinking part of this project and coming up with ideas and way it connects to the book, was hard. But, after much much thinking and talking about the book and Hells angels, we came up with points we felt were solid.

THE TEST

I know, I know, a test in PLP… Crazy. It wasn’t a regular test, more of just a timed assignment. We knew it was going to be 3 quotes from LOTF and we had to choose 2 to analyze. We had to talk about the plot surrounding the quote, the theme/significance of the quote, and any other connectors. I was nervous for the test but I knew I’d be okay because of my understanding of the book. So, here’s my responses on the test!

Being honest, I felt pretty confident while writing this test. I know I’m not the greatest writer ever, but I felt the points I was making were good and highlighted my LITERARY IDENTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS skills. (The bolded means curricular competency.) I feel a deep understanding of the characters and themes in the book and I hope it paid off in my test! 

OVERALL 

This was a very interesting and engaging project. Tribalism is something Ive never really thought about, so looking at it this much in a small period of time was a really big eye opener. I feel a strong understanding of tribalism in this. I also feel like I strengthened my writing process.

Lord of the Flies was honestly a really good book, and I have one thing to say before I go… Simon was the best character in the book. Bye bye! 

Hello blog! Been a while. I’m back with a post about the trip I went on a little while ago, all the way down in New Mexico! This trip was a history based field study, but there was just as much fun as learning.

This post will be focused on the stuff we don’t normally talk about too much when it comes to field studies, which is exciting! Let’s get right into it.

What did we do?

Before I get into the behind the scenes of the trip, let me tell you a little bit about the trip. Our main focus was the Manhattan Project, so we went to places like Los Alamos, the Trinity Site, multiple nuclear history museums, and many more amazing places with amazing opportunities. For the arts/culture side of it, we went to Meow Wolf, and the spectacular International Balloon Fiesta! 

The Behind the Scenes!

We’ve been asked to discuss this driving question,

“How did you think flexibly to create, imagine, and innovate while taking responsible risks to complete your project and enjoy yourself?”

Which I think is a great question as it’s a side of Field Studies we don’t necessarily focus on normally. I’m going to go through a few examples that I think highlight this driving question for me personally. 

THE INTERVIEWS

Interviewing has always been something that F R E A K S me out. It’s known by everyone in my class and we are all used to it. I’ve always gotten over my fear enough to conduct about 1-2 interviews a trip, but I never enjoyed it. I normally discuss this topic in all my field study blog posts as its a reoccurring issue but something changed this trip. This trip, I took responsible risks (risks for me at least!) by asking for more interviews than I necessarily needed. I recorded 3 interviews for my project, but talked to many more people than this, for the only reason of getting over this fear.

It isn’t the actual recording or interviewing part that freaks me out, its the fear of going up to someone I’ve never met and hoping they are open to me talking to me/record them. So, this trip I thought long and hard about these fears and decided they weren’t going to hold back the knowledge I could be learning by talking to people on this trip. This was a ONCE in a lifetime trip, so why not take advantage of that and learn as much as I can?

So, why is this important you ask? By the middle of the trip, I actually started enjoying talking to random people. It went from being a scary chore I needed to do for my project, to an enjoyable conversation. I started looking at it in a new perspective and focused on the fact these people WANT to talk to us, and WANT to share what they know. They have so much knowledge that I don’t have, its self  sabotaging to not talk to them, just because I’m scared. I’m very proud of these interviews as it is a artifact of my growth and overcoming fear. 

THE VIDEO 

Every trip I always take lots of videos, but never really do anything with them. But, it was different this trip. I wanted to create more than just the assigned project. So, I took videos of everything I could. It isn’t a factual video focused on the Manhattan Project, its more on the activities, and the people who participated. I wanted to highlight my favourite part of the trips, but… with a little history in it.

The beginning of the video is the intro of a song that samples Oppenheimer’s famous speech titled “The Decision to Drop the Bomb.” I wasn’t going to add anything history based into the short video, but this speech was constantly running through my head no matter what we were doing so I felt I needed to include it. The thing that fascinates me the most about the whole Manhattan project is the decision to drop it, and the impacts, which is what the speech is about. So, heres the video. It’s short, but thats just my personal editing style when its not a school project video! 

OVERALL

I felt a strong sense of creativity, curiosity, and joy during this trip and I hope my photos and videos highlight that. I was proud of myself this trip for not letting my fears take over, and for the fact I could run on little sleep and still pay attention and enjoy the days! I also am glad I took so many photos and videos, as that’s my passion when it comes to these trips. For the next trip I would like to focus a little more on the prep pre-trip as I felt my prep was weak. It all ended up working out, but I think a little more preparation would have helped me out a little more.

Thanks to the teachers for planning and taking us on this trip, it was genuinely mind blowing.

Podcast time!! As I have talked about previously, my class and I have been focusing on podcasts. Its the way we are showing our learning about each unit. This units goal is to answer the driving question,
“How has the “Canadian Experience” been different for minorities?” So, lets get into the podcast and what I took away from this project!

THE PODCAST

We were given around 2 months including spring break to make a podcast about one minority group. The choices were Physical Health, Mental Health, Race, Religion and Sexuality/Gender. There were groups of three and I was put with Morgan and Lucas. Before being assigned groups we had to write a mini essay on 3 minority groups that we are interested in and why. I wrote about the Japanese (race), Bipolar Disorder (mental health), and Buddhism (religion.) I would have been happy to focus on any of these, but I was assigned with the mental health category. I was really excited to start researching and getting to know this topic as I hear a lot about it but don’t know too much.

CHINATOWN

While working on our own podcast, we got to take a little field trip to Chinatown! I was super excited to do this as Chinatown is somewhere I’m always in, or near to yet I know nothing about. We spent the day in Chinatown to learn the history about how the Chinese in Vancouver were treated in the past. This was directly correlated to our driving question as the Chinese (minorities) were treated insanely different compared to other immigrants in Canada at the time. Our tour guide was very informative and I learnt some things I wouldn’t have if I didn’t go on the tour. We got to go inside buildings, walk around outside, go in a garden, and we went for lunch at an awesome Chinese restaurant! (Awesome soup dumplings!) We all had to make a mini podcast on our time in Chinatown, so here is mine!

THE INTERVIEWEES

This was the most educational part of this project for me personally. Ill explain why for each interviewee, but my perspective genuinely changed after each time I talked to these people. So, meet the lovely interviewees!

Here’s Karen, a Clinical Counselor! Aka, my aunt. She’s an amazing person who used to work with teens and families dealing with issues connected to mental health and a lot more. Basically anything that could go wrong in a teens life, she dealt with it. I interviewed Karen to get a perspective on how mental health is handled with teens, and she did an amazing job at explaining it to me. Sadly, voice memos decided to ruin my life and delete the interview I had with Karen, but luckily I was the one to interview her so I used the information she told me to write and record my parts of the podcast, the audio of her talking just couldn’t be included into the podcast.

Maia! Maia is a student at Seycove, as well as a friend of Morgan and I. She deals with diagnosed mental health issues, and she was the perfect person to talk to to open our eyes to what it’s like to deal with so much while being a teen.  Morgan and I sat down with her for a while and had a conversation about mental health and the pros and cons of Seycove for teens. This interview was amazing and I’m grateful she shared her story!

LISTEN TIME!

After much research, recording, revision, sharing, interviewing, and learning, we ended up with a final product. Morgan, Lucas and I all equally contributed to the podcast and we are happy with the message we portray in it. Take a listen!

THE ESSAY

Before I reflect on this unit, an important part of it was the in class essay we wrote. While working on the podcast and beforehand we were reading “Jade Peony” a book written by Wayson Choy. It is based around 3 stories told in Chinatown in the 1900s. The essay we wrote had to include yourself, Jade Peony, and Wayson Choy, and be based around how different people interpret literature. Mine focuses on how experiences and age are what creates perspective, which causes you to understand literature in a certain way. I’m happy with my essay and I feel you can hear my voice in it, and I kept revising it until my teacher and I were happy with it. If you want you can take a look at it below.

MOVING ON

To wrap this all up we did a class seminar to show what we all learnt. This was one of my favorite classes out of the year because everyone was so mature about talking about there subject, and everyone seemed genuinely interested. Here’s the keynote I made for my group which we presented in the seminar.

 

So, after all of this, what did I take away from this project? Besides the factual parts about mental health, I walked away with some valuable things. My perspective on mental health and people who deal with it drastically changed. After talking to Maia, and Karen, my eyes were opened. Mental Illnesses are something so common, yet aren’t really talked about.  That’s why we wanted to make this podcast, to start a conversation around it. Mental health is JUST as important as physical health. The biggest thing I took away from this project is that people who deal with mental health issues have it so hard because it can be such an invisible thing to others, yet hurt the person dealing with it horribly.

OUR GOAL

I hope this podcast can start a conversation around mental health in teens and younger. I first heard and really thought about the word mental health once I reached high school, which I think is a fault in the curriculum. How come we have gym class and education on health yet no talk about your brain and why you feel the way you do? I want everyone to talk about mental health as its so so so important!

While this podcast isn’t 100% perfect, It gets the message we want to get share, out to the world. I hope in the future I can focus on mental health awareness more.

I always am listening to music, in my headphones or blue-toothed to my speaker in my room. But, recently I’ve been replacing some of that music with….. PODCASTS! I’ve always dabbled in the idea of being a podcast listener like suppose, Kai who is constantly listening to some people talking about sports, different perspectives on topics, politics, stories fiction or non fiction, etc. Its always been one of my goals to enhance my day with a nice podcast, and well this unit I achieved that goal. Every year we have a media that we express our learning through. Grade 8 was STILL IMAGES, Grade 9 was VIDEO, & Grade 10 is PODCASTS. So, what’s the actual content for the podcast?

Last year was World War One, so this year we are tackling the just as significant and painful war that comes right after. World War Two. We began class lessons, class discussions and Individual research with the driving question in mind. 

“WHAT IS THE LEGACY OF WORLD WAR TWO IN CANADA?”

 This was the base to how we perceived all new found knowledge about WWII. Everyday we watched 5-20 minutes of a film that basically broke down the timeline of WWII and details about everything. We took notes, and discussed the video after watching it. Pre podcast we also came up with a long list of open ended questions we have about WWII. We didn’t directly do anything with these questions, but it opened our eyes to how there are endless amounts of perspectives and stories about WWII. We also kept a collaborative document that had all needed and necessary info to do with this project.

Getting into the actual podcast aspect of this project, we talked a lot in class about podcasts we like, why we like them, and what style they are. Individual? Fiction storytelling? Conversational? So many different types. Some podcasts people said they liked were H3 Podcast, The Life School Coach (shoutout to Ms. Maxwell), Story Corps, Those Conspiracy Guys, Unladylike, and so much more. Take a look at the links to hear some of these podcasts! 

 Through my years of PLP, there has been little logo beside the names of some programs PLP works with that looks like a maple leaf in a circle. Ive always wondered if they were connected or if I was imagining things and well long story short, I wasn’t imaging things! Our class worked with something called The Memory Project which is connected to Historica Canada, the program than ran the “This is my Canada” competition which I made a video for in grade 8, which is connected to… Encounters with Canada which is the program behind my amazing Ottawa trip! So, Ms Maxwell reached out to the Memory Project and they hooked us up with a few amazing Veterans open to doing interviews! 

I was placed in a group with Morgan and Emily with the opportunity to interview a WWII veteran named Svend Hansen. (See video above.) We were given the task to interview him, and make a 7 minute podcast with the interview. This means listening to the one hour clip of your interviewee on repeat until you decide on a part you want to focus on. This podcast was collaborative and individual as we worked together to decide things like music, podcast thumbnail, intro/outro scripts and other smaller things. This was challenging at times as 18 peoples ideas being thrown around can sometimes be hard to all look at. But, we did it and ended up on the decision of Emily J’s song, and Logan’s Thumbnail. The picture you see beside this text was the voted winner on what the podcast image is!

SVEND HANSEN!

The interview itself was a really big deal for me. I contemplated not going as talking to new people who I’ve never met, who aren’t my age, and that live far away, causes a lot of anxiousness in the luca brain… But after many many many attempts from Ms Maxwell, my mom, and Emily J to convince me to go, I decided to say yes. Less for the reason I felt I needed to, and more for the reason I thought of “when I’m writing my blog post about this project, how am I going to explain why I did go to the interview? Is not going just as stressful as the feeling of going?” Stuff like that. So I told myself I would be okay, and agreed to go the next day to Port Moody with Emily after school to interview Svend. I’m very happy I did.

This interview was such an amazing experience. Svend was one of the sweetest, smartest people I’ve ever talked to. Hearing a story come from someone who was actually in WWII at an age not higher than mine, is something I’ll never forget.

I had trouble with deciding what part of his story I would include in my 7 minute podcast, but I decided I wanted to focus on what his role was in WWII, and what his daily life was like. I don’t want to spoil his amazing story as I want you to listen to my podcast!!!! So, here it is.

“THE WIND, THE WAVES, AND THE WAR” -SVEND HANSEN

The script writing and interview were definitely the hardest parts of this project. Script writing has always been something I’ve handed to someone else in a project to do, and I would film or edit. 2/3 of the times it was like that in other projects, but podcasts you are forced out of your routine. I was stuck with writing this script and I knew It had to be good to do Svend’s story justice. So, I sat down after school and wrote, listened to his interview, wrote, listened to podcast, read over my script, revise and repeat until I had written and recorded something I was happy with. 
Editing was pretty easy as there weren’t photos or videos to crop and fix. The hardest part I found was getting to know garage band and figuring out how to use it. I’m so used to iMovie so this was definitely a big change. Before I end this blog, make sure to check out Emily and Morgan’s podcasts about svend. 

walking away from this project…

I honestly loved the outcome of this project, and can send around my podcast to my friends and family feeling proud and accomplished. I learnt so much about something I wouldn’t necessarily learn excess amounts about, the Canadian Navy’s role in WWII! I’m happy our class did something new (podcasts instead of videos) as I felt videos were getting repetitive and I wasn’t learning anything new editing and filming wise. This project was the perfect opportunity to strengthen my script writing skills as well, there are no visuals to distract from the words. With podcasts you have to make a engaging, clear, and well made way to tell a story without videos and pictures. This could seem easier than a video as you don’t need to film or do any of that, but I felt it was harder, and it was good to challenge myself. I’m ready to tackle the next podcast project!