Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Government, Day 1 - Class Recap


On the roof of the Bundestag building in Berlin, Germany. This is where the government of Germany meets. Photo taken in 2013.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to a shortened week, with Veterans Day on Friday and a staff development day on Thursday! I really enjoyed the discussion today in class. I'm sure it was a nice change from all of the writing students have had to do in the last few days for the class! Here's what happened in class:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 17: I can explain how and why world societies organize themselves and how power is established and maintained.
Communication LT 1:  I can use language and  style that is appropriate to the content area.

Soundtrack: "The Final Countdown" by Europe. Selected for today because it is the final countdown (of hours!) until the end of the 2016 Presidential Election! Lyrics here.

AGENDA 11/8/16:
News Brief – Makayla
The Election
Culture Presentations
Forced Choice

Homework: Read the blog. Watch the election night coverage tonight! Next news brief: Caleb.

News Brief: Makayla had the news brief today and selected an article about this story: CNN.com - Philippine militants claim German kidnapping after body found on boat. We found the Philippines in our world maps and noted that we did a news brief on the country, before moving on.

Caleb was selected to do the next news brief.

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

BBCNews.com - One-minute World News

I also asked about the weekend and what people were up to.

The Election: Because today is the presidential election, I made sure to go through what is happening and when to expect results. We went through a few websites for this:

1) The FiveThirtyEight.com election forecast. I have been showing this all semester in class, and it appears that the polls have recently tightened a bit, though Hillary Clinton is still favored to win a majority of the time. As a reminder: it is not who wins the most votes in the country, it is who wins the amount of states that add up to at least 270 electoral votes that wins.

2) A map of poll closing times for each state, when results begin to be announced. Yay for geography and maps! I pointed out some keys in the early states to look for in terms of who might be ahead. Virginia and Georgia at 4:00 PM are two examples of important indicators. At 8:00 PM on the West Coast, polls close, and it is likely that within the next couple of hours after that, we will know who will be the next President of the United States.

3) A map of how long it took to determine who won each state in 2012. Helpful to know how long things might take!

Culture Presentations: Because I wanted to give as much time in class last time to writing the DBQ, we did not have the time for presentations (for the students who chose to do a presentation for the culture project). I enjoyed everyone that went today! Thank you for your effort in crafting great presentations and visuals.

Forced Choice: We will start this activity next class! It was cut short today because of the DBQ time.

See you on next Monday, when we will surely have lots to talk about! :-)

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