Period 1: Nonviolence and Gandhi, Day 5 - Class Recap

An Air India 747-400 at Newark on Sunday. If not for Gandhi, it is possible that Air India would not even exist today!
Good afternoon colleagues,

We are really getting down there to the end of the year! I think today went fairly well, though I must say that I am probably going to have to rethink what we are doing with the paper because many of you were not prepared with sources or notes. Next class, please come prepared with your homework, and we will talk one on one about how everything is going.

Essential Questions: How does conflict arise and in what ways have various people responded? How did the concept of nonviolence develop and become implemented?

Soundtrack: "Bomb the World" by Michael Franti and Spearhead. The lyrics, which I showed on the projector and read aloud in class because I thought that they were really interesting, can be found here. This song was suggested to me by Ms. V'Marie. I played it today because of the nuclear bomb test in North Korea, which we talked about in the News Brief section.

AGENDA 5/27/09:
News Brief - Exploding Nuclear Bomb (and Possible War) Edition
MLK and Gandhi
Paragraphs and Citing Sources
Rubric and Work

Homework: Notes #4 due (all other sources as well) and completed bibliography to be checked off. Read the blog and ask questions if needed!

Seriously, if you are having any questions or problems with this paper and the research, or how to do the bibliography, please ask away! I will be available on here in the comments, by e-mail, or in person!

News Brief: At the start of class, I went over the essential questions, soundtrack, agenda, and homework, then asked the class about what they did for the long Memorial Day weekend! Andrew talked about playing soccer in Florida, Jazmyne mentioned the packing up process for her, and I talked about how I was super sick over the weekend in Princeton. Still, good to have the rest!

After some good conversation here, we went on to talk about the enormous news of the weekend. I found it absolutely incredible that in both of my Global Studies classes yesterday, nobody had heard that North Korea had detonated a nuclear bomb as a test over the weekend. North Korea has also said that it will not continue to agree to the peace deal "armistice" that it signed with South Korea in 1953. Bad times. You can read all about that on really any news site. CNN.com has a special section dedicated to it, which you can find here: CNN.com - News & Videos about North Korea.

Finally, I mentioned that President Obama had selected Sonia Sotomayor to be on the Supreme Court. She has to be confirmed by the Senate now, but seems likely to be the first Hispanic (her parents were born in Puerto Rico) on the court, as well as the third woman. This is another HUGE deal, that is all over the news. Her biography can be found here: CNN.com - Who is Sonia Sotomayor?.

Brandon mentioned that there was a cyclone in Bangladesh. You can read all about that here: WashingtonPost.com - Millions displaced by cyclone in India, Bangladesh.

For the news brief section, Russel brought in these two articles: CNN.com - Pakistan: Trio held after deadly blast kills 24 and CNN.com - From Madoff to Sully, news events inspire video games. Two interesting stories (the first one being the obvious Global Studies connection)! There certainly is a lot of conflict in the world! How have various peoples responded? :-)

Zack T. volunteered to bring in a news article for Friday. Thanks!

MLK and Gandhi: I actually think this went well, though I was a little worried before class about how it would all work out. First, I had you get out your Civil Rights notes and think again about Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy. Then, we watched this video:


We talked about how there were aspects of his philosophy in that short video. I then handed out this article to read together: SFGate.com - Gandhi's Influence on King.

Finally, to complete the media section here, I played this video of MLK talking about Gandhi:


After all of that, we came back together and tried to identify aspects of philosophy that Martin Luther King Jr. said that he borrowed from Gandhi, while I had everyone write on the board one thing they knew about Gandhi.

This was a really productive and interesting conversation, thanks!

Paragraphs and Citing Sources: For this part of class, I had you get into base groups to talk about how things are going with the historical investigation, while Mrs. DeFrance and I went around to check off the sources that you brought in. After that, we talked about how to write a body paragraph in Social Studies, with an Introductory Statement, a Concrete Detail, another Concrete Detail, a Commentary, and a Concluding Statement. Mrs. DeFrance talked about her own investigation and body paragraph, which she did as an example on global warming.

We also talked about citing sources inside the text (for about 2 minutes, before having to do the lock down drill). Basically, my point here was that if you have the author of the article (or book) that you are working with, when you are writing your paper you need to cite them inside your paper to give them credit when you quote them or use facts from their work. For instance.

"Westview is the coolest school ever." (Fritz, 3) - In this case, I am citing myself! Remember that it goes (Author, page number). If you do not have the author of the article, it needs to be ("Title of Article"). If you do not have the page number, do not put anything in. I will try to explain this more next class.

Rubric and Work: I was able to hand out the rubric as you left the class after the drill, but we will come back to this. Read it, please!
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I am excited for the Lakers-Nuggets game tonight (6:00, ESPN)! Other than that, I have about a million things to get done, so I will be hard at work trying to accomplish them all. I hope that you are doing the same! See you on Friday!