Category: Grade 12

New Media 10 Core Competency Assessment

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I can do many things. One of which is being able to relate to Christopher with his experiences of both being neurodivergent and struggling to communicate to various people he interacts with. For our podcast we used Audacity, which no one knew how to use. It all came together in the end after some fumbling with the program. As for the content we discussed, I really wish that I was able to talk more about the relatability of the story, but the time constraint made it very difficult to do so. The only good part was that I was able to squeeze a little in. I was unable to properly express it concisely. It felt as though I barely contributed to the book’s discussion. Hopefully I didn’t talk too much about things that would spoil the book, since it was also hard to describe it all without spoiling what happened. My group and I never had any major complications with one another, which made it fairly easy to record the audio. It was awkward at first, but it didn’t take long for the tension to settle. I would say that Luca and Andrew had done a great job with the podcast. They said a lot of very good and interesting points during the recording. I’m probably going to be docked marks for being unable to edit the audio (because I couldn’t bear to hear myself speak), but the rest of my group was good to edit it instead.

John Henderson Talk Reflection

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All of what he shared about how he was treated and how his friends were treated as children stood out to me. It was all shocking, despite having read numerous articles and watched multiple videos on the topic. None of it would ever dampen the impact of trauma, let alone make me less shocked by it. The enabling of tyranny (as Henderson described it) had metaphorically burned a hole in me, especially when he started talking about physical abuse. That instance made me remember some things that had happened in my life, which I will not specify for obvious reasons. If my experience with physical abuse managed to affect me how it did, I could only imagine how it would have been like at a Residential School. 

Henderson said that “they tried to take my tongue,” which is similar to Rita Joe’s poem. She wrote “the talk you took away,” and “Let me find my talk / So I can teach you about me,” where both go hand-in-hand with what both of them went through. They were told by the Residential School workers that they were “stupid,” or “no good,” only because they couldn’t speak English. 

Last week, I wanted to help him with painting the tables and still want to. It wasn’t because I felt bad, or felt obligated to do; It was out of my innate desire to help people. I also find it to be really cool to learn about and help with. Hearing his story does inspire me to want to help him and other people, though my extreme amounts of fear (due to overstepping, or coming off as someone who enjoys tokenism) stops me from doing that.