Who Cares and Why Bother 📣

Why should any younger adult vote in Canada? What’s the point? We’ve already got people making decisions for us, all we have to do is deal with their conditions. And I know most of us aren’t going to dedicate our lives to any sort of political job so why should we even be learning how it works?

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“Who Cares and Why Bother” may sound like a common project you find in all sorts of different schools but I assure you this one was different. Although the final goal was pretty clear, there was a lot of in-depth thinking, comprehension, understanding, and relating in the process of making a 10-minute presentation on why young adults in Canada should vote.

From what I’ve learned over the years, to be able to properly give advice and guide others to make decisions you have to be educated and have the experience to know what you’re saying. Unfortunately, instead of being out and thoroughly analyzing societies and communities across the world we are stuck at school learning whatever the education system forks down our throats, right? Anywho, to make up for the missing analytical skills and practices in our life we read Lord Of The Flies, a fictional book written in 1954 by William Golding.

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In short, this book was about a group of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who reverted to savagery. The way I understood it, the point/message of the story was to display an effort to relate human nature’s flaws to society’s flaws. I made a set of notes for each chapter of the book, capturing key moments, shifts, characters, representations of society, and more. The whole point of reading this book was to further improve our understanding and comprehension of allegories, but there was a lot more (like I described above) to it. Of all of the books I’ve ever read this was the most challenging but also the most interesting. I say challenging because the end goal wasn’t to just read the book – it was to be able to depict its text, extract information from it, and be able to relate to the real world in a group discussion at the end. I do think that this was a great practice for me because while I was just reading a book, I was also constantly using the Understanding competency to analyze the characters, the shifts in the book, the aftermath, and how it all fits within modern societies.

If you don’t mind the spoilers you can check out my chapter/discussion notes in the document below ⬇️

From this point on we began working in groups toward constructing a 10-minute presentation about why young adults in Canada should vote. I worked with Ava, Dana, and Dylan and to be honest this was an effective, task-achieving, and proactive group. Our presentation had to include a short video explaining how the Canadian government works. My group split the video information four ways and I ended up explaining part of what the House of Commons is and how/what each seat represents.

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This is where I began to notice the same challenge I faced in the past project which was depending on everyone to get their work done. Again, I won’t say names but 3/4 members of the group including me had everything finished and were being held back by one group member. In the end, our video had a consistent theme and animations to accompany our information and then there was a chunk that stood out from the rest. I seem to keep finding myself in these situations and I’ve learned that instead of trying to do all the work myself, I just gotta focus on what I’m being accountable for, pull my weight, and continue to challenge myself to create better and better work. The way I had thought of it is that if I can ensure that my work positively stands out compared to the others’ work, that’s all I’ve got to do.

We were now in the final stages of the project where we were working on the rest of the presentation. Our group concluded that Healthcare, Cost of Living, Environment, and Post-Secondary Education were four of the most important issues for young adults in Canada. With that said we each researched an individual topic in regards to what its situation is in Canada, what the political parties aim for, what is its background, and what proposals are being made towards improving the topic. I researched the healthcare situation in Canada and I learned that right now, the healthcare system is suffering from a lack of medical staff, high burnout rates among staff, and long wait times for citizens.

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I generally don’t follow what the situations in Canada are like but I could understand why we were in this situation concerning Healthcare. COVID-19 made everything so much more difficult and even though the pandemic has been over, economies are still recovering all over the world. Canada is a 1st world country and we are still struggling to get back on our feet which shows how serious a government with a strong system and plan is. I thought that this task was eye-opening because even though it was only a Google search away, I probably wouldn’t have learned about this on my own which proves how significant it is for students to learn about their economies, government, and local situations or else we might all be screwed in 15 years.

With all this information, our group decided that we were going to make a “simulation-like” presentation to show what political parties the audience members align with. Our goal was to start with our video explainer, then talk about each of the four topics we researched, and then give anonymous presentations on what each party aims to do for each topic (anonymous because we never gave the audience the names of the parties).

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At this point of the project, I began to see myself organizing tasks and envisioning how things were going to end up laying out. I helped guide my group to our success by offering different feedback, explaining the different scenarios/views that may occur, brainstorming ideas for visuals, and ensuring that our presentation was flowing nicely.

I’m very happy with my contributions to the group. As I said before, I offered my organizational and visualizing skills to succeed but I also brought up the idea of our simplified presentation, and our physical infographics, and I wrote the entire conclusion and split it up so that each of us had an equal say. Throughout the project, we had highs and lows but I made sure we were moving as a group and that we weren’t leaving members behind. Unfortunately, we did not record our presentation to show whoever ends up reading this but in short, I thought it went well. As I expected, our presentation was consistently interrupted by the projector which kept malfunctioning but each of us did our job and excluding the interruptions I’m confident we got our message across.

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If I had to do it again, I would have made sure our explainer video was shorter so that we had more time to express ourselves and overall feel comfortable while presenting. I did like the visuals we had on screen and our physical ones as well but after this presentation, I realized that a presentation that has to engage the audience either has to have very high-quality animations to catch the eye or include more physical media to do the same trick.

Like any situation, our group could have benefitted from more practice and critique but considering our timeline I’m not too worried about that. In the future, I now know I should take extra time to visualize where I’m going to stand when presenting, ensure I know what equipment/tools I’m going to use, practice presenting in general (including raising and lowering my tone, speed, and memorizing lines) and use multiple periods to engage with the audience.

I began to create an answer to this question after I finished reading Lord Of The Flies because I noticed how there were two groups in the book; one had a sense of organization, democracy, and priorities while the other was self-centred, vicious, and prone to collapse. I bring this up because the second group seemed less intelligent or unprepared for the situation and I believe that even though most people don’t care about politics, we need to know how things work in case someone who doesn’t begins leading the country to disaster. As the future generation in power, we need to ensure that we have our priorities set while ensuring a clean, safe, comfortable, and sustainable country and the only way to do that is to be involved – involved in learning, involved in voting, involved in sharing opinions, involved in government. Even if it seems useless, a small action toward a better future is better than none at all.

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We need a serious, strong, and reliable government to run such a big country because although we have the same population as the state of California, we have so many systems to run to ensure that Provinces, Cities, Towns, and Communities continue to thrive. Touching back to the four main topics my group believed affected young adults the most, people need to share their voice with the government so that we can get movements going in support of the future we want. There will never be a perfect government but if we can vote for leaders that will make a change in favour of our needs, we will have the bright and sustainable future we are owed.