Bullying Campaign Experience

During this experience I have discovered that time management is very important. I have also gained the skill of putting a video together on movie maker and being able to add music along with cutting pieces of the video out. This experience has been one that will benefit me in the future and one that will help me in further education. During the process of making this video and getting the information needed it has been hard and fun at the same time. I have found that people are very secure with what they tell others about themselves and are also very afraid of letting others know their faults. It is always easier for other to say ‘I have been a healer’ as supposed to them saying ‘I was bullied because I am fat’. I have interviewed numerous people about perpetrators, victims, bystanders and healers and from these interviews most people have identified themselves as healers because it is the easiest to say. Throughout the course of gaining information I would say that the hardest thing to do has been to get people to participate. It has been a challenge for me to persuade adults and teenagers to share with me some of the experiences with bullying that they have faced but with that comes time. It takes people time to overcome the discomfort of sharing that.

I can say that I have gained a lot of skills from developing this campaign and I know that it will benefit me. I have 1 more week to complete the campaign fully and do the best I can. It has been a pleasure to interview different people and hear their views on what bullying means to them. 

Comparison between Maus and Shindler's list

Shindler's list is a movie about a German man by the name of Oscar Shindler. His aim is to turn his factory into a refuge for Jews. He manages to save 1,100 Jews from being gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Maus is a graphic novel about a little boy by the name of Art, he wants to receive information from his father about his memories from the holocaust. Vladek, which is Art's father, starts the story with his life as a young man in Sosnowiec, Poland leading up to the World War 2. Vladek meets and marries a lady by the name of Anja who is a very intelligent woman from a family who helps Vladek to own his own textile factory. 

The movie Shindler’s list is introduced as a man who is creating a business from a Nazi Perspective as Maus is introduced with Vladek and wife Anja escaping from the Nazi’s. These two introductions are completely different and I prefer the Shindler’s list view on the holocaust story because it creates a better and more realistic idea.

In Maus I found that the novel was negative towards the Jews and Shindler’s list had a more positive effect on the Jews from what Oscar has portrayed. Something that is very obvious between the two would be the difference in how they made the Jews and Germans obvious to the audience. Maus did a better job at this because they used a unique technique in doing so. The author of Maus used a mouse head for the Jews and for the Germans, a cat head. In Shindler’s list there was no clear difference between the two. It was not as easy to see the difference, which is very important. Another very obvious difference between the two would be the fact that Maus is graphic novel, which is more interesting in comparison to other kinds of literature and Shindler’s list, is a movie. In this case I preferred the movie to the graphic novel because, I understood Shindler’s list more due to the fact that there was a lot more detail and Maus was not as detailed.

At the end of the movie it does not create a lot of suspicion because everyone goes to lay a stone on the graves in comparison to ending with “murder.” I prefer the mysterious type of ending because it forces the reader to continue reading, which is a good technique that the author of Maus has used.

 

A few things I noticed that are very similar is that they both give a fair understanding of the holocaust and the separation between the Jews and Germans. I also noticed that in both of the films were in black and white. There was no color in the novel or in the film. From doing further research on this book I also discovered that Maus was the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. Overall, I think that both were fantastic but I really enjoyed the way that the author of Maus used creative techniques to make the story interesting.

 

Teaching Experience

During the duration of my bullying campaign, I was given the opportunity to teach two classes, one with children of lower English skills and the other with children of a higher level. If I had to pick one thing that I learnt from this experience it would be the ability to stay patient while teaching people as they tend to take a while to comprehend some of the concepts. During my first day it was scary and nerve racking to know that I was going to teach. The minute I walked into the classroom I felt the joy in my heart that I was going to leave knowing that the kids learnt something new that day. I enjoyed the first 30 minutes of class but, after a while, it was hard for me to continue explaining the terms perpetrators, victims, healers and bystanders. The second day of the teaching was harder for me as the students were not able to communicate clearly with me what they understood and what they didn't . The class also rarely engaged in any form of discussion, therefore it was challenging for me to get information from them. In relation to this I chose to make them act out what they had learnt. This helped me to get the information that I needed for my bullying campaign. My goal was to ask questions regarding my survey and to get information from students on their opinion of the 4 terms mentioned before. I am thankful for my opportunity to teach the kids and I hope that they have gained some information about what a perpetrator, bystander, healer and victim are.