Another Day

Today in Western Civilization things shifted back to the normal side of the spectrum, yet again. Mr. Schick is no longer M.I.A. We had our class in our usual classroom. We first started out on more of a mellow note. We had the usual few minutes of settling. After that then a couple people made up their quizzes. It has now been on my agenda to check my grade for that. After those people finished, we went over the answers to the quiz. Then we watched a slide-show type thing (prezi?). We reviewed about Pharaohs and Egypt. We took notes and just briefly discussed each slide. We didn't have time for much else.

Mr. Schick Gone M.I.A. ?

    Today in Western Civilization we had a substitute teacher. We were in this foreign room with an unfamiliar teacher. To be quite honest, I don't even recall her name. Mr. Schick had been M.I.A.? Since he wasn't here today, we were given an assignment. Usually when a teacher is absent we get quiet independent work. And that is exactly what we did today. We read Learning Objective three. We were to take notes of what we read. Luckily, I almost finished. Because, if we were not able to complete the assignment it would be homework. Maybe tomorrow will be a less silent class.

Our First Quiz..Of Many?

Today in Western Civilization we were given a quiz to complete. The first few minutes of class were laid back and we were all getting settled. You would not have seen a pop quiz coming. And that, is the trickiest thing about pop quizzes. You never see them coming. They strike like a thief in the night. On that note, we did, inevitably have to take the quiz. Don't get me wrong, quizzes are definitely not on my list of hobbies or leisurely activities, but the quiz wasn't all that difficult. I have faith that I did some-what decently on the quiz. We then discussed the joys of language. We talked about how language came to be, and how we've gotten to all of the intricate, advanced languages we have today. Mr. Schick explained that cavemen probably started language by first using noises that signified certain things. His example was that if something, such as burning yourself would be the outcome of an action, one caveman would warn the other by making a whiny noise. Just shortly after this, we were informed that we had a two our delay because of snow, you would've thought some kids had never heard of such a thing. Half of the class was near exploding with excitement. And with that, I would like to say that it did indeed snow.

More John Green

            Today we did something similar to what we did yesterday in class. We finished class part-way re-watching. So today we continued the re-watching. I was already aware of everything from the video, but I still enjoyed it the second time too. John Green makes it so much more fun than it would have been with someone with a very boring, monotone voice, blabbering on forever. John Green is very upbeat but not in a fake type of way. Last night, I actually took matters into my own hands and looked up the video series on YouTube. I watched week thirty-eight’s video about World War 2 and I actually learned a lot. The videos catch my interest. 

John Green

        Today was our first real class of Western Civilization. First, we were given our new assigned seats. This took a couple minutes, but afterward we settled down and began. We started to discuss last week’s homework assignment. We were to write a couple hundred words on whether or not the first few pages of our textbook does or does not correlate with Jared Diamond’s theory of geographic luck. We did a few brief slides basically summarizing our assignment, and had a very miniature discussion on our opinions as well. Then, we were introduced to a new video series. It is with John Green, hence the title of this blog post being “John Green”.  This series is titled Crash Course In World History. I really loved it. John Green distributes the knowledge in a manner in which regular kids are able to easily understand and enjoy learning. He puts it in such a way where instead of feeling like you are being taught, you feel like you are just generally being informed of what's going on in the world. Hopefully, we continue watching this series. 

Learning Objective 1

           Jared Diamond’s theory of geographic luck is proven to be true from the passage in the text book. Though the text book never correlates the Fertile Crescent, which Jared Diamond speaks highly of, the passage did prove Diamond’s theory. In Diamond’s theory, the basic thought is that some civilizations are more advanced than others because of their geographical location and factors that relate to location. For example, Diamond says that the Fertile Crescent had good soil, good labor animals, and this was easily spread East and West because the East and West share the same weather conditions, daylight hours, and et cetera.

            In the passage read, it discusses how the people from the Paleolithic Age were nomads. They wandered and found temporary homes, gathered plants and such. They would travel in small parties of twenty to thirty people. Though over time they evolved into inhabiting one place in the Neolithic Age. In this age, the Agricultural Revolution occurred, and then people were starting to stay in one place, acting as a community. It is most likely that they would have stayed in a geographically lucky area, which makes this passage correlate with Diamond’s theory of geographic luck. Civilizations were much more able to be set up in good climates with good resources.

            For example, two of the most prominent first civilizations were places like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Both of those civilizations were very near in location to the Fertile Crescent. This also leads us to believe that the Fertile Crescent had really been a place of popularity even back then, being able to spread some of it's resources. It also gives supporting evidence to Diamond’s theory that from the Fertile Crescent, the resources and technology were spread around the Fertile Crescent that led to civilizations like Mesopotamia and Egypt. 

Today...

Today was the first day of our new semester. We are now doing Western Civilization. I was introduced to my new teacher Mr. Schick, which is a change because I previously had Mr. Powell. First in class, Mr. Schick introduced himself. We then proceeded to take roll. After our name was called we received our new text book for this semester. Last semester we didn't have any books, so this will be a bit of a change. We then spoke about our daily homework. Our daily homework is in fact the blog post that you are reading right this second. That's also what we did in class. We created this blog dedicated to our Western Civilization class. We also spoke about our assigned homework. We have to read out of our book and then write a couple hundred words based on the ideas we read. We didn't have much time for anything else, so that in summary, is what we did in class.