Monthly Archives: January 2023

My Favourite MPOL

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Hey y’all welcome back. Tis the MPOL season.

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 opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

MPOLS are all about growth, and you know what? I think I’ve grown a lot. So that’s what this post is all about.

Let’s compare: what did my work look like last year?

Last year, I wasn’t very invested in my own growth. I didn’t try my best, I didn’t care about my work, and I wasn’t ever proud of my work. Everything was a halfhearted attempt because I didn’t really care about school. An example of this is in the humanities project New Beginnings, when we made our visuals to represent an aspect of New France. I chose survival.

What does my work look like this year?

Well, I care a lot more this year. I try my best to try my best, and I work as hard as I can to hand in good quality work in a timely manner. While I don’t feel the most motivated because I’m not as surrounded by my friends in the classroom due to them being in different classes, I’ve been pushing through and I’m glad that I’ve been able to produce good work that I’m proud of. For example, I was really proud of my work in the Power of Geography, because I feel my finished product really showed my thought process throughout the project.

What do I want my work to look like in the future?

So right now, my work is something I’m proud of, and I put a concerted effort into the things I do. In the future, I want it to stay that way, but I also want to make use of my time better as well. I want to be able to get all my work done in class, and I want to be happy with my work all the time.

I’d like to especially talk about how much better at time management and organization I’ve gotten since last year. I’ve handed in almost nothing late, and I’ve given myself enough time to create work that I value and I’m happy with. I feel on top of my work, and it’s really helping me with my mindset at school.

Last year, we learned all about growth mindsets or the “PLP mindset.” This is a mindset of growth, a mindset where you’re ready to tackle the tasks you’re given, and try your best in the things you do. It’s also about looking to the future and knowing how you want to be, and making a plan for yourself to get to the point you want to be at. When we first learned about the PLP mindset, I thought it was a bunch of junk that we get told to motivate us to put more effort into our work. Or at least it was something I didn’t have and I’d just have to go on the way I was: handing in my work late, it being rushed, and not being happy with it. Somewhere between then and the start of this year, I lost that mindset and took on the PLP mindset. I come to school ready to try my best and put in a real effort. I actually care about my work and doing my best, and I really try to hand everything in on time.

Looking to the future, I’m ready to head there and see what it has to offer. I’m excited to grow as a person and a learner, and I hope I improve in the same ways that I already have. 

One thing I could really grow on is my interaction with my peers and teachers. Sometimes in class, I’m really distracting to people because I get off task. Usually, I can redirect myself and still get my work done in class, but it’s really distracting to the others. It also comes off as disrespectful to my teachers when that’s not what I’m trying to do. My goal for the rest of the year is to improve on this by always making sure I’m working on what I need to get done for the class while I’m in class.

I think that over the course of this semester, I’ve grown a lot, not only as a learner but as a person, too. And even though I’ve grown a lot, I also know that I can still continue to grow, learn, and thrive throughout the rest of the year and even farther into the future. I’m excited to see where my growth takes me.

Thank you, 

Susan

We Put a Revolution on Trial… Kinda

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How do revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world? Well, before this project, I could’ve given you some rambling, wordy answer about Hamilton (the musical) because I had an obsession with it in Grade 7 and 8. Now that I’ve gone through this project, I can tell you all about revolutions and the full answer to the question. That’s what I’m going to do now.

What is a revolution? That’s kind of what the first activity in this project taught me. If you read my blog post about Nation X (click here to read) then you would know how I learned this. If you don’t want to read it, basically we did a simulation of a society. I was placed in the upper class, and there were a couple people placed in the top class, as members of the king’s court. There were a bunch of people placed in the two classes below me. The top class got paid $10/day, The class I was in was paid $5/day, the class below got $3/day, and the lowest class got $1/day. Basically different challenges in society had to be faced, but in facing those challenges, people were treated unequally and society fell apart, with people fighting one another and many deaths. What happened was basically a revolution. Now, how can we describe and define a revolution?

To do this, we made diagrams that reflected Crane Brinton’s anatomy of a revolution. I chose to do a hamster on a wheel, falling off and then starting over. Here’s the diagram:

After we did this, we chose which revolution we wanted to work on for the whole project. I chose the American revolution, mostly because I already knew a little bit about it from my past obsession with Hamilton that I mentioned, and I was really interested in digging deeper.

Once we chose our revolutions, we got straight to work making graphic organizers about them. Here’s mine:

As you can see, the graphic organizer basically gives you a crash course on the American revolution. The research I did to create it told me almost everything I needed to know for the whole project. 

After that, we started to work on our affidavit. We chose the evidence we would feature and our arguments. At first, I was a little bit confused with what I was arguing for, but me, Cameron L, Jupiter, and Jessie pulled through arguing for the American Revolution being effective. I applied my research from the graphic organizer into the affidavit. It turned out really good and we had a pretty good argument. In the mock trial, we were going against Charlie M, Julia, Keaton, Silas, and Magnus, Makai. They were saying that the revolution was ineffective.

Once we had finished our affidavit, we started working on a script for the mock trial. Very soon after we started working on it, Mr. Harris, the DRI (directly responsible individual) of the project, had to leave because he was having a baby! Sadly, because he was gone, we had to pivot the project. Instead of doing a mock trial in front of our parents, we started working on a video. We were still writing the scripts in collaboration with the ineffective side, but for a video of a trial as opposed to an actual mock trial in real life. After about a week, though, we pivoted again. We started working on scripts as just our side of the argument. We did it more like the show Court Cam. We were given a due date for our videos and then Ms Maxwell spliced our video with the ineffective argument’s video.

I used my class time very efficiently during this project. The only time I handed anything in late was my graphic organizer, because I was sick for a lot of the days we were working on it. I’m proud of how I used my time well. I’m not quite as proud of our finished project. I feel like it wasn’t the best that it could’ve been, and our group could’ve put more effort into it. Next time, I’ll strive to be at the point where our group is putting a full effort, or at least I am.

Thank you for reading my blog post!

Peace out,

Susan

Exhibition and Racism – What a Way to End 2022

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What does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today? Well, up until this last project, I didn’t even know what Avatar was about. I’m going to assume that you don’t, either.

Basically, Avatar is a movie about this guy. His name is Jake Sully. Jake’s twin brother was a scientist, but he died, and since they shared DNA, they sent Jake to take over his brother’s job. Jake got sent to Pandora, a far off planet, to transfer his consciousness temporarily to the body of a different species – the Na’Vi, a race of humanoids that are blue and have tails. He gets lost and runs into Neytiri, who is the daughter of the leader of the Na’Vi. Neytiri saves his life and brings him to the clan. It’s decided that he can learn the ways of the Na’Vi. He learns all about the flow of energy and respecting the world around him – which is a completely different worldview than what the humans have. After that, the rest of the humans start fully colonizing the place: destroying their home and all the land around it in an attempt to get to unobtainium, a rare mineral buried under the home of the Na’Vi. In the end, Jake basically switches sides and fights the humans alongside the Na’Vi – but he’s still an easy target, because at the click of a button, his consciousness can be removed from the Na’Vi body and back into his human body, a much weaker form of himself. Anyways, there’s a lot of gritty details but in the end the Na’Vi win and Jake has his consciousness permanently transferred to his Na’Vi body. Oh yeah and he fell in love with Neytiri, but that’s a completely different part of the story that you can see by watching the movie.

The film was full of different themes, and it was really easy to sort of sift through them and get a deeper look into it. For this project specifically, we had to choose a theme we saw and work through it along with others looking at the same themes. The theme I chose was racism, because it’s a relevant issue in society today and it was shown very clearly in the movie. 

Our final product for this project was a documentary showcasing our theme and how it connects Avatar and the real world. We spend about 2 weeks working on this video. We conducted interviews, collected clips from Avatar, and learned about making videos. Here’s my video:

In the video, I touched on the racist terms used in Avatar that can easily connect to the real world. I also talked about micro aggressions and blatant racism, and I found recent stories to look at. I interviewed 2 people of different ages, which helps show what different kinds of people experience.

Something I didn’t talk enough about in my documentary was how the film itself could be racist. While I was researching for my video, I stumbled across an article that mentioned the people are finding it controversial. I didn’t pay much attention to it and moved past to other articles, but it kind of stayed in the back of my mind. What could that mean? If it’s bringing issues like racism into the spotlight, how can it possibly be bad? After the exhibition, the thought sort of started to snowball and now there’s this whole idea that I have.

The first idea that anyone put into my head was about the plot line. This is because they thought that it’s “just another movie where there’s a race that needs help and a white guy swoops in and saves them.” I see where the point can go, but there’s really not much other evidence to back it up, because you don’t see many other similar cases in the film and it could just be dumb luck that Jake is white. After pushing the thought to the side for later, I realized something. I didn’t see many people of colour throughout the entire movie. I saw white people, and the blue Na’Vi people, but looking back, I can remember only noticing one face that was a person of colour, and he was a background character in one of the scenes with all the people in the military. This bring another question into light: was this intentional, or just showing actual racism in the real world? Obviously, because of discrimination, it would be more of a struggle for a person of colour to get to the point that they can have a role in a big movie like Avatar, but to that extreme? Or did James Cameron sit down and say, “hey, maybe we can make racism even more of a central theme in this movie by showing less people of colour.” Because if so, it worked, and it shows that the humans in the movie, despite being 100 years ahead of us, still display a discriminatory nature. 

Looking into the cast of the movie, there are actually many people of colour. But most of the main roles played by people of colour are Na’Vi people in the movie – so they’re covered in effects and CGI so much so that skin colour does not matter to the role at all, and has no impact on the racist theme in the movie. Almost all of the main human roles are white, which makes me think that it was planned by James Cameron. However, I’ll never know unless someone asks him themself.

Anyways, that’s a lot of my thinking on the racism portrayed in the movie. Once we finished our documentaries, we started planning for the exhibition. In order to show how privilege works, and how some people get an easier starting point than others, we had two sides of the room. On the side I was placed in, there was a game where you throw a ping pong ball into a box through the holes. On our side, you were close to the box, and got more of the prize for doing it successfully. On the other side, it was dark, you were farther away, and you got less of the prize even though you had to put more effort in. The other grade 9’s on our side were Silas and Mackenzie. We set up the room to showcase the work of the grade 10’s and 8’s. It was nice because everyone in the room had chosen to dig deeper into the theme of racism.

I believe that the theme that everyone chose really says something about those people, and specifically, their worldviews. I think that because that’s true, everyone in our room worked well together and it was really nice working with a great group of people with similar views and values to mine. It was really interesting to have a look at a movie and be able to apply it to the real world. In some ways, the line between the fictional and real world blurred. Maybe it’s because the fictional world is supposed to be like this world, but in the future. I really hope that it isn’t our future, though. I hope that we can advance our views and how we treat other people so that one day, we don’t have all the crazy technology that’s in the movie but not be able to treat everyone with the proper respect they deserve.

Maybe I’m ranting a bit too much.

Susan