Today we watched part of an episode of The Office in class, while looking for different aspects of a revolution in it. This is me jumping for joy at finding the set of The Office, while on vacation in California in 2007. It is one of my favorite TV shows ever!
Hi everyone,
As I suggested at the start of class today, there was a LOT of talking from me. Usually, I try to stay away from that. Today, there was just so much interesting stuff happening in the world that we had to talk about, along with the introduction of some new content. Read on to get some clarification!
Soundtrack: “Wavin’ Flag” by K’naan. Selected because it is a great song and waving flags can frequently be seen as symbol of revolutions. Lyrics here.
AGENDA 3/18/13:
News Brief/Blog Recap
Poster Grading
Political Compass
The Coup
Homework: Read the blog. Next news brief: Ben G. and Parker. If you did not turn in your Russian Revolution work today in class, please finish it and get it to me ASAP!
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News Brief/Blog Recap: Magaly used this article for her news brief today: China.org.cn - Villager finds snow leopard in Inner Mongolia. This was apparently the first time the animal has been seen in the area in 70 years! Interesting to hear.
We also talked about the new pope: CNN.com - 5 things to know about the new pope. This sparked an interesting conversation about many things. I talked about the new pope: Francis I, from Argentina. This is an important moment in world history because 1) new popes are somewhat rare (there has only been two in my life) and 2) there are apparently over 1 billion Catholics in the world (the entire world population is just about 7 billion).
Finally, we also talked a little bit about the weekend, which is always nice.
Poster Grading: I really enjoyed this conversation! Again, the examples I gave in class were REALLY basic and probably inaccurate in the minds of people who would call themselves communists, socialists, or capitalists. I was merely presenting one way to think about it. Hopefully, it was obvious that there are problems that come up with any system. The Russian Revolution packet was due at this point during class.
Political Compass: This part of class was devoted to learning from two PowerPoints - we are starting your major "historical investigation" project this week, and these notes will help you answer some the main questions the project asks. Here are the presentations to review again, if you need to.
This presentation was looking at various different political philosophies that people hold. Usually, revolutions are prompted by people joining together under a similar way of thinking about what should happen. At the end of the presentation, I showed the class my own point on the political compass. If you want to take the test yourself, please do so! It is really interesting. Here it is: PoliticalCompass.org/test - I would love to see your own results, if you complete it! It is very much like the "forced choice" activity we did in class.
The next PowerPoint was about the main ways that revolutions start. You will absolutely need to know the political, social, and economic reasons for the revolution you are studying for the historical investigation. An easy way to think about this is: political = people want power; social = people want to find others that agree with them; economic = people want money and resources.
I know I sort of blazed through these. If you are at all confused, please let me know!
The Coup: At the end of the class, we started watching the episode of "The Office" called The Coup. A "coup" (or coup d'etat) is pronounced "coo" and is a French word for the overthrow of a government, usually from a small group of insiders. Thus, this episode is a perfect way to showcase the elements of a revolution (political/social/economic reasons for why Dwight is trying to overthrow Michael as boss) while also being a humorous way to start thinking about how revolutions happen. We did not finish the episode in class. We will do so next time.
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