Culture, Day 5 - Class Recap

On the football field at Westview, later this past summer. Athletic events are a big part of Westview culture!

Hi everyone,

We continued learning about culture today and I enjoyed hearing the Nacirema stories students came up with, as well as beginning the Time For School series of videos. Here's the recap for today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 15: I can explain how culture both reflects and shapes society.
Behavior LT 1:  I can manage my responsibilities as a student.

Soundtrack: "Represent" by Weezer. Selected for today because we were talking about how people in different cultures represent themselves. This was also a pump up song for the 2010 World Cup. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 10/22/15:
News Brief – Antonio
Share Nacerima Stories
Culture Checklist
Time for School 3

Homework: Read the blog. Turn in missing/incomplete geography work ASAP. Next news brief: Rebecca.

News Brief: Antonio had the news brief today and talked about this article with the class: BBCNews.com - Xi Jinping visit: UK-China ties 'will be lifted to new height'. We found China on our world maps (you could have also highlighted or starred the UK) and talked a bit about how China likes to try and invest in places around the world (like the soccer stadium in Costa Rica), in the hopes that those countries will be more friendly to them. Thanks, Antonio! Rebecca was randomly drawn as the next news brief.

We also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):

BBCNews.com - One-minute World News

Finally, we checked in about the upcoming weekend, and anything else that was happening, as well.

Share Nacirema Stories: I was glad to see that most students did their homework and were prepared to share their stories in small groups! I had fun listening in on the six groups, and then each group selected their best example, and had a student read it aloud as the rest of the class tried to guess what it was about. The point of this was to be able to look from an outsiders perspective at our own culture, so that we can more easily understand why other cultures might be different.

Culture Checklist: This is a new way of tracking assignments and your proficiency self-assessments on the unit, rather than the big rubrics at the end (which are connected to this). Here is the checklist that I passed out in class:

Google Drive - Culture Unit Checklist

As we progress through the culture unit (we are about halfway through), you should be writing down assignments and looking at your progress, so that you feel comfortable by the end about

Time For School 3: I really like this documentary as part of our unit on culture, because it is especially interesting to me to see how school is a part of different cultures around the world. Here was the handout that I gave to students to fill out as we were watching:

Google Drive - Time For School Documentary Handout

Again, the point to this was to analyze how we see surface culture and what deeper culture is like in different areas around the world.

We got about 38:00 in to the following video, if you missed class and need to catch up, or simply want to review it again:

PBS.org - Time For School 3 (Part 1) Documentary

I hope you are finding this interesting and engaging! See you next week! :-)