Culture, Day 9 - Class Recap

A clock in a park in Hanoi, Vietnam. Next class will be a timed write for your DBQ essay final! Today, students took a look at the documents and began to think of possible responses for the essay. Photo taken in 2011.

Hi everyone,

I apologize that I was a few minutes late in arriving to class today! That has never happened to me in six years. A huge backup on my drive in today (over 30 minutes longer than it usually takes me) was the cause. As I said in class, a minor inconvenience for me and for you, but now I really know that an accident can be the worst day in someone's life, so I am just hopeful it was not too bad.

Today was your first chance to look at the DBQ unit final on Culture. Next class, you will be writing an essay on the prompt "How does culture both reflect and shape society?" Here's what happened in class:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 16: I can explain how culture both reflects and shapes society.

Soundtrack: "What Goes Around.../...Comes Around" by Justin Timberlake. Selected for today because students started on the DBQ today in class, and will be writing the actual essay for the final culture test next class. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 11/4/14:
News Brief – Alex D.
Dancing
DBQ Analysis
Work Day

Homework: Read the blog. Have a plan of action in mind for writing the DBQ essay in class. Bring ALL of your culture unit work (to be turned in next class as a collection of evidence for LT6):

 1) Cornell Notes on Culture definitions/iceberg PowerPoint
2) Surface culture worksheet (National Geographic photos PowerPoint)
3) Nacirema writing (neatly written or typed, 200 words minimum)
4) Time for School Notes/Answers
5) USA Culturegram activity
6) Culture unit reflection and preparation worksheet.

Next news brief: Kelsey

News Brief: Alex D. had the news brief today and chose this story to talk about: CBSNews.com - A "much wiser" Mark Owen speaks out. We found Afghanistan (where Owen was when he was fighting abroad) in the world map packet and also shared some stories from the weekend and other current events, like the upcoming election (on Tuesday). Here's a link that will probably have results at 8:00 PM on Tuesday. Kelsey was selected to do the next news brief.

Dancing: Since I knew today was going to be a lot of silent in class work on the DBQ, I wanted to at least have some fun in showing this video, which is one of my favorite ever:

I just love how dancing (part of surface culture) can be used to show the common humanity across the entire world. :-)

DBQ Analysis: Since this is your first DBQ in high school, I wanted to give as much preparation time as possible. So today was spent analyzing the actual documents on the test and writing out answers to five of the eight document questions. Next class, you will use three of the five documents you analyzed in order to construct your essay (due in class).

Again, I think this is going to be a really helpful resource for you in planning what to write (especially the graphic organizers on pages 8 and 9):

Google Drive - How to Write a Document Based Question 

Remember as well to have this work sheet completed (except for the last two questions, which are done after the DBQ is graded), as well:

Google Drive - Culture Unit Reflection and Preparation

Work Time: The rest of the class was devoted to work time on looking at the test (I am not posting it online, obviously) and analyzing your culture unit documents to try and answer the question of: How does culture both shape and reflect society? This is what you will be doing next class as the final!