Thursday, October 15, 2015

Culture, Day 2 - Class Recap


Another part of my culture is having dual citizenship, due to my mom being born and raised in the United Kingdom.

Dear students,

Today, we got back to work on our new unit of culture. We learned a little bit more about the "iceberg" model for it. I also made sure that everyone had their geography packets graded and back, so you know what to improve on. Here's what happened today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 15: I can explain how culture both reflects and shapes society.

Soundtrack: "American Pie" by Don McLean. Selected for today because we were talking more about American culture, and this song famously contains lots of references to it. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 10/15/15:
Grades/News Brief – Anna
States Quiz
Our Culture
Cornell Notes

Homework: Read the blog. Check your grade in Student VUE and improve it, if possible. Next news brief: Matthew M.

Grades/News Brief: I wanted to make sure to explain how I assigned grades for the Geography unit and packet. I wrote comments on your self-reflection papers, which I would appreciate you reading, because they certainly took a lot of time. Also, grades are now posted in the room (by student ID number) as well. You should always know exactly what you have and how to improve it! I will definitely accept revised work, so please do it correctly and thoroughly, and get it to me as fast as possible so we all don't have to stress even more about it. It's still early - you have time, but don't dig yourself a huge hole right now. Let me know how I can help!

Anna brought in this article to talk about for the news brief today: NBCNews.com - Firefighter Accused of Arson at Syrian Refugees' Home in Germany. We found Germany in the world map packet (the Europe map) and continued to talk about the situation with the Syrian refugees in Europe. Thanks, Anna! Matthew M. 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):

States Quiz: So, this went poorly for a large majority of the class, which is pretty frightening. Next class, I will give an opportunity for a retake. Be studying, please! For those that passed it, I will give you something else to do during test time next class.

Our Culture: After the states quiz, we moved on to looking at what our own culture is like. I split students up into groups and had each group brainstorm the following: What is our culture like? With your group, brainstorm aspects of what culture is like at the following three levels. Use your culture traits from the slideshow last class!

American Culture
Portland/Beaverton Culture
Westview Culture

I had a lot of fun listening to the examples given for each of these, which did do a good job of highlighting different elements of culture! Here is what the class came up with:


This took longer than I expected to go through together, but that's okay. I think it was really fun and productive in understanding culture. We stopped here and will pick back up with culture next class.

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