Dear class,
Tons and tons of energy today. Maybe a little too much. You are definitely a hard group to try and guide when we get off track. I'll have to try and think of ways to remedy this - it's obvious that the status quo isn't really working. All in all, a good day, but next class, expect a seating chart. I'm sorry, but it's time, and you know it. I will try to make it bearable for everyone - please let me know by e-mail if you have any requests for one person you really think you would work well sitting next to and/or people that you probably would not work well with. Other than that, I was interested to hear your thoughts on repairing Somalia once again, and to develop that final class list of recommendations (more on that below). Recap time!
Essential Questions: How does conflict arise and in what ways have various people responded? Is Somalia repairable?
Soundtrack: "We Can Work it Out" by The Beatles. Lyrics here. Picked because of the optimism that we so desperately need in order to have hope that things in the world can be fixed. You are in school because your generation will rule the world someday! We HAVE to work it out! Relevant to our ideas on repairing Somalia as well.
AGENDA 2/3/09
News Brief
Mustafe's Pictures
Debrief Last Class
Five Points Compilation
Game Time (Whoop!)
Homework: Finish and turn in any late work. Read class recap blog!
As for your homework, I am not kidding around. If you do not have one of the two items that I have asked you to do so far turned in, please e-mail them to me ASAP. This is getting pretty ridiculous. Just counting up the number of five point plans today after class got me frustrated. We had 21 students out of 33 turn in the plan - which you had almost all the main points of done after you left the class on Friday.
Folks, that is a 63% turn in rate, which is BARELY a D. Granted, we had three students absent today and four students absent last Friday when the paper was assigned - still no excuse for not e-mailing me and checking the blog at the very least. We will definitely be talking about ways to go about solving this problem on Thursday. Even for those that DID get the assignments in (thank you), you still need to be talking to your classmates about it. This is a team effort.
News Brief: I asked the class about the weekend and (as always) got some interesting stories. I mentioned my weekend that consisted of Pack the Pit, the Blazer game on Saturday night, the Australian Open until 5 AM on Sunday morning, sleep until the Super Bowl, watching The Office, and finally, the HUGE come from behind win against New Orleans last night and the 24 episode on right after. No "exaggerating," it was a crazy weekend!
Robert then presented this article: British soldier was killed in Afghanistan by 'friendly fire'. As I mentioned in class, "friendly" fire has happened in Afghanistan many times before - most memorably in the case of Pat Tillman. I don't toss around the word "hero" a lot, but to me, Pat Tillman was pretty much everything you could possibly want from someone. He followed his convictions, even at the cost of enormous sums of money if he had continued to play professional football.
We also talked a little bit about Afghanistan itself - an extremely volatile place that nobody has tamed completely in recent history. Here's the Newsweek article I referenced in class: Newsweek.com: Could Afghanistan Be Obama's Vietnam?. A place that will continue to be directly relevant to the United States. I know people I graduated with from High School that are currently involved in the fighting over there. It is entirely possible that you will too. Something to think about - thanks for bringing it in Robert! Brandon, you are up next for Thursday.
Mustafe's Pictures: I thought these were really interesting, but there was so many of them that I had to go pretty fast through them all. Please ask Mustafe or me if you'd like to see them again. Many of them can be found just be searching around the pages of Wikipedia. Always interesting to see the real home perspective, thank you so much for bringing them in Mustafe!
Debrief Last Class: I was hoping to have a little discussion on how the seminar went last Friday (which I have received great feedback so far about). However, as Mrs. DeFrance point out to me later, this lasted about 3 people before we moved on. I need to be better about calling on people that don't usually talk, especially with feedback on that particular class, because that's who I need to hear from. The deck of cards will be coming out again very soon, I assure you. Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts about how last class went - I would love to hear them.
Five Points Compilation: This is where I asked you to turn to a partner and discuss your homework, while listening for the best points you heard. We then came together and organized a class list:
First off, I'm glad that everyone gets to enjoy my handwriting again. That's always good times. Secondly, it should be pretty clear that the most votes were obtained by:
1) Organize Government (27)
2) Remove Warlords (24)
3) Take Ownership of Law Enforcement (21)
4) Develop a Legitimate Education System (19)
5) Get a Military (17)
Initial thoughts on this? To me, it looks like the authoritarians, the "Somalia needs drastic outside intervention" people in the class won out. Especially #2 - even when I mentioned the Black Hawk Down incident, many students were still insistent that the warlords be removed. I'm definitely glad to see the Education system make it in. I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with that one. Now, who's in to go teach in Somalia?
Game Time (Whoop!): As you probably guessed, this is what we didn't have time to do last class (although I'm glad, because I would have simply just written the numbers and categories down on the board instead of the amazing little PowerPoint. I found the template to use on this website (should you ever want to use it for a class presentation or if/when you become a teacher - in Somalia): http://teach.fcps.net/trt10/PowerPoint.htm
I just downloaded and used the "30 Question Jeopardy Template." Here is the one I created to use in class - this might be helpful in the future for quizzes and tests:
Here are the answers:
Geography – 1: The "Horn of Africa." 2: Mogadishu. 3: Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti. 4: Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. 5: Jubba and Shabele.
Culture – 1: Sunni Muslim. 2: Somali, Arabic, English, Italian. 3: Somali, Bantu and other non-Somali Arabs. 4: 6300. 5: Islam and poetry.
Colonialism – 1: 2,500 years. 2: 1880s. 3: England, France, Italy. 4: British, French, Italian Somaliland. 5: England and Italy grant independence in 1960 – France from Djibouti in 1977.
Black Hawk Down – 1: 1993. 2: Civil War and famine. 3: Running the Mogadishu Mile. 4: 1995. 5: Mohamed Farrah Adid.
Somalia Today – 1: A Failed State. 2: A base for al Qaeda. 3: 1,000. 4: 700,000. 5: Sharif Ahmed.
Somalia Basic Facts – 1: Texas. 2: 10 million. 3: 11%. 4: 1%. 5: 37.8%.
Congratulations to everyone, because you're all winners in my book. This was a lot of fun, but got really chaotic very quickly. If I use this next time, I am going to have to think of a new system to run it. Hopefully it was a lot of fun for everyone though. :-)
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Okay, that should just about do it! I will not be in the building tomorrow, because Lewis and Clark was getting a little upset at how much time I spend on site each week (in theory, it is supposed to be 15 hours - I've been putting in about 20 for the whole year), so I am now not coming in for the second B day of each week - that is, until the schedule changes again and I am a full-time teacher! Woo hoo!
Other than that, get any late work in, let me know about seating preferences, and as always, post comments or e-mail me if you have any questions, concerns, or comments. Go Blazers tomorrow night at Dallas (5:30 - CSN and NBATV)! Have a wonderful afternoon!
Hey I found this song called "Somalia" by K'nann.
ReplyDeleteI haven't listened to it yet but I thought that you might want to choose it as one of the songs you play in the beggining of class.
This is my first post by the way, so I finally did that assingment.
PS Haze wants me to tell you that I saw it on his Ipod.
Zach,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post! I had actually considered playing something by K'naan, but went with Maryam Mursal, simply because I had to pay a dollar to download any of the songs from iTunes, and that one was the one I felt I would get the most airplay in my own iTunes folder. We're moving on to Nigeria on Thursday - got any suggestions for that?
Nice to see you on here!