Period 4: Turmoil in the Middle East, Day 15 - Class Recap

The picture in Hsuan-Ting's PowerPoint today that had everyone really interested and talking. Really cool way to look at a response to the conflict!

Hello Period 4!

Let me just say that I very much enjoyed today and thought that it was WAY better than last class. Thank you for your focus, having your presentations ready to go (for those that did them), as well as the work on the research project. It was so very much appreciated. Hopefully we can continue to focus on getting all of this done until the end of the year!

Essential Questions: In what ways are cultures and countries interconnected?
How can the Middle East be stabilized? - This was the last day of the unit, for answering these questions! Thank you for doing your best to try and do this!

Soundtrack: "Takin' Care of Business" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Lyrics here. Selected for today because we really needed to take care of business when it came down to this paper and presentations and with finishing the year strong.

AGENDA 5/28/09:
News Brief
Student Presentations
Conferences

Homework: Find sources for your research project! Read the blog and ask questions!

At the end of the class, we had you pick up different colored sheets of paper for each source that you are going to find for writing your paper. For the weekend, I would try to find at least three different sources. Remember, I know that the book may be hard to find. Concentrate on finding newspaper and magazine sources. Use Google News to search online! If you really cannot find anything, please post a comment and I would love to try and help you out!

News Brief: Partly because I am so tired, but I do not remember much of what we had to say here. Also, there really wasn't too many people involved in actually bringing news items in to talk about. Luckily, Tyler was there with a news source to bail us out: CNN.com - Cancer death rate dropped nearly 20 percent in 15 years. This was mainly talking about the United States, but it is a really interesting article! We talked about a lot of it in class. Cool to see that new technology is really helping people overcome these diseases.

Also, I tried to remember a quote that Kanye West had about Magic Johnson, since we had a discussion about if HIV/AIDS was curable now or not. It is in the song "Roses" and it goes something like this: "If Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS/and all the broke [people] passed away/You telling me if my grandma was in the NBA/right now she would be okay?"

Interesting thoughts! Brenan, you are up for a news article next Monday. Anything currently going on around the world, outside the United States. Thanks!

Student Presentations: As I said above, I thought that most of these were absolutely fantastic. Way to go! At the end of all of the presentations (if you did not do one, please come and talk to me about how you are going to make up the credit), I had everyone turn in: the notes, the skills packet, your explanation paper, and finally, your presentation (if it was something that was able to be turned in, like a collage, or a PowerPoint). Hopefully this all made sense. I will try to get these back to you as soon as I can, but like I said at the start of class, it does take me quite a while to get through them all, since I want to respect your hard work with all the comments I can give.

Conferences: At this point in class, I had everyone get into "base groups" - you will be in these for the rest of the paper work - to conference on how the paper is going, what help you need, and finally, really be thinking about your research question and possible sources of information for it. I am not sure how well you used this time to actually be writing, but I am sure everyone is on top of this paper.

Until the end of class, Mrs. DeFrance and I tried to do a one-on-one conference with everyone. We did not get to some of you, but I do know that it was really awesome to get to talk to the people about how everything was going! We really tried to help you out with a research question and tell you exactly how you were doing in the class, along with possible ways to improve your score. Again, if you are at all interested in keeping in touch about this sort of stuff, please be coming to see either of us!

Generally, it was a good, productive day. I know that you probably feel like you have a lot of work ahead of you this weekend, but don't stress! I am here to help! Ask me if you are having trouble with the sources! :-)
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I am becoming increasingly busy it seems, but should be mostly available to post and respond to comments over the next few days. This week has been absolutely exhausting! Let's keep working hard together to finish the year! Have a wonderful evening!