The Movie!

Today in human geography we had Mrs. Stathis as our substitute. We talked about what notes we have been taking on the movie so far and we also talked about how the boys must have felt about living in the refugee camps for a really long amount of time. They were there so long and once they were done with learning everything they could while they were there they must have gotten bored. Then we went on to continue the movie at chapter 15. Daniel, Panther, and John Bul Dau have all gotten jobs to support themselves. John works 3 jobs- 1 in a factory, 1 in the McDonalds, and he is also a night guard. Daniel works in the downtown part of Pittsburg processing checks. Panther is working as a busboy in a high class restaurant. Later they all talk about how different the people are in America, they are less friendly and they said that they used to know everybody but now they know no one.  Also one of the boys goes missing and then the police find that he has gone crazy and he is admitted into a psychiatric ward.

the lost boys coming to America!

Today in human geography we continued the watch “God Grew Tired of Us”. We picked up at the part where Daniel, Panther, and John Bull where getting on their first plane ride to America, Daniel and Panther in Pittsburg and John Bull in New York. When Daniel, Panther and some others first get into the house in which they are to live in they are totally amazed at how the electricity works in the house, like the refrigerator and the lights, and also how taking a shower works. They were also amazed at some of the foods that we eat in our daily lives, when they went to the store to buy food they were totally shocked from seeing so many different foods that they haven’t tasted. John Bull talks about how awful it was when he was back in Sudan, and then when the boys were travelling, he said that 13 year olds should not have to bury their friends and others but he had to along with some of the other boys. He said that since everyone was dying and all this tragedy had struck, he figured that God had grown tired of them, because of all the war and death. When one of the other men was interviewed he said that even though this opportunity was very good he and the others were sad because they left the camp and are in a good place now, but the others are still in a bad place. Everyone said that they wanted to have this opportunity, to support themselves and have a good life here. The government is giving the boys three months to get jobs and eventually pay back the money that was paid for them to fly to their destinations.

Going over tests!

Today in human geo when we walked in we got chocolate chip cookies! After that we said our prayer that we said every day. Then for the rest of class we spent our time going over our quiz and making sure that the answers were right, because they will most likely be on our midterms. We pretty much zipped through the quiz except we all kind of gave answers and talked about our answers for the push and pull section of the test. The last thing we did was try and get to the place we left off in the movie that we are currently watching(God Grew Tired of Us) it kind of took us a little while to see exactly where we left off, but we had left off at the part where Daniel and Panther are about to leave for Pittsburg  and Daniel gives up his corn rations in order to get candy for all the little children, and then they sing a song to all their friends to remember  them, and then the bell rang ending our class for the day.

"God Grew Tired of Us"

Today in human geography we had our first test; it was mainly about all things having to do with the population. After the test we started watching this movie called “God Grew Tired of Us”, the parts we watched today started out with 3 people being interviewed, their names were Leopard, John, and Daniel. They were all talking about having a war come to where they lived which was Sudan, this war was somewhat over religion, children were locked in houses and burned to death, and all males, no matter what their age was, were to be shot and killed. People fled the city and walked through the dessert and found refuge at a refugee camp for boys, at this camp they were known as “The Lost Boys of Sudan.” At this camp they were provided food and clothes, then later on they had to walk back through the desert, the international aids came to their rescue in the desert and took them back to the camp, they provided the boys with education and clothing, but some of the boys got to come to America which they were really excited about. Some of the pictures that were shown in this film are really gruesome, children of very young ages had almost starved to death and looked like skeletons, watching this movie really makes you realize how good we have it where we live and we should be grateful.

projects!

Today in human geography we got a surprise, no test! The reason we didn’t have our test today is because Mr. Schick wanted everyone to give their presentation before we went onto the test, which will now be Monday. My group went today; we did our project on the country Indonesia. During our presentation we talked about a few things, we talked about push and pull factors for our country, like Indonesia has a high death rate from HIV/AIDS and they also have a number of other diseases there, this would be a push factor- making people want to leave the country. We also talked about the net migration rate which was – 1.08 migrants per 1,000 of the population, the crude death rate was 6.28 deaths per 1,000 of the population, and pretty much the last thing we talked about in our presentation was the crude birth rate, this was 17.76 births per 1,000 of the population. That was the end of our presentation.

presenting our projects

Today we started our day off with our prayer, and we started reciting what the President of UMBC told us in our assembly that we had with him the other day. After this we all got with our groups that we did our power Points with and we checked with each other to make sure that our emails had gone through to the person that was building our project, and sending it to Mr. Schick. Then after talking to our group members we went on to begin presenting them. There are a lot of things that we learned from other people’s power points that we didn’t know beforehand, our group hasn’t gone yet but I think others will benefit from our slides, just as we did theirs. I think this project really shows how helpful the world fact book is, I mean we just started this project yesterday and the website has everything you need right under the country’s name that you are looking up.

The Project!

Today in human Geography we started a project. This project was about finding information on the world fact book and using the terms that we used in class the other day, like death rate, immigration, net migration, emigration, and some other terms. We were put into groups and each group was assigned a country, one person from each group would organize the information that the other group members found, and would put it onto a PowerPoint later that day using the key terms that we had learned and we looked them up on fact book. My group’s country was Indonesia, some groups had a choice between two countries, our was between Indonesia and Japan, we chose Indonesia because it isn’t really as popular a country so we figured others could learn more about this country though our PowerPoint. Most groups didn’t finish this assignment during class so we had to finish it up for homework, and then tomorrow we will present it to the class in hopes that they will learn from each PowerPoint.

Absent

Today i was sick so i didn't go to school, but i looked on Mr.Schick's website and it looks like you guys talked about population and everything that goes with it, like net migration, immigration, emigration and some other things!

The future!

Today’s class was super fun! Even though the first thing we talked about wasn’t son fun. First we talked about what we would have to do to evacuate the building in case of an emergency. Then we started getting into the video that we watched the other day, we each talked about different topics from the video that we thought were cool. We really started getting into the technology subject, talking about how people used to listen to albums on records and now we can listen to well over 1,000 songs on a little I pod. Then we got into the subject of inventing a small microchip into your brain that lets you listen to music and do everything, all you have to do is give the command! The next topic we talked about was how a lot of people are getting married that met on internet dating sites. While we were all talking about meeting people online, everyone kind of said the same thing that it’s kind of sketchy because that person that you are talking to could be anyone, you won’t know who the person is until you finally end up meeting with them. I think the world is going to be very different 30 years from now.

The 21st century!

Today in Human Geography we went over the rest of the questions we had for homework. Then we talked about how far cell phones have come in this time. They used to be really big and bulky to carry around.     Then at the end of class we watched a video on evolution during this time, and it was really interesting. The two things that I thought were the most interesting were 1: how Face book has    845 million active users also 2:   I thought it was truly amazing that in 2049 there will be a “super computer” that is smarter than the entire    human species. Our human race has become so intelligent and technology dependent and everything is on computers. We have grown into probably the greatest version of ourselves that we could have ever been. We are getting smarter and smarter and I can’t wait to see what our lives will be like 20 or thirty years from now!

Today in class!

Today in human geography we talked about a lot of different topics. First we talked a little bit about 9/11, and how Mr. Schick had two students that had families involved- one who had a father and one who had an uncle in the accident. A few of the students were asking if it was going to be the start of world war 3, but no one knew. We went over our questions for homework, we talked a lot about the country that exports the most goods which is China and how if you go to any store you are most likely to find things that were made in China. We also talked about how the United States is at the top of the list for importing and consuming oil. To answer the questions we had for homework, we used a website called fact book, which has been proven to be very helpful in finding out information on all different countries. We also got smarties for some of our important questions. 

Looking on factbook!

Human geo-questions and take 2 questions that are important-brief description of the 2 questions that you thought were important

1.       The United States population is 313,847,465

2.       The 5 largest countries in the world by population are- China, India, U.S, Indonesia, and Brazil

3.       The population in Pakistan is 190,291,129

4.       The U.S government is Constitution based; federal republic; strong democratic tradition

5.       The unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is 95%

6.       The largest country in the world by area is Russia

7.       The country with the third greatest number of airports is Mexico

8.       The country with the greatest number of exports is China

9.       Saudi Arabia exports more oil than any other country

10.   The country that imports more oil than any other is the United States

11.   The country that consumes more oil than any other is the United States

12.   Yes women can serve as combat roles in China’s military

13.   GDP is a total of all taxes and revenues received by the national government during the time period indicated

14.   The Country with the highest GDP per capita in the world is Afghanistan and the percent is 8.7%

15.   No the U.S. is not in the top ten for highest GDP per capita

16.   The countries with the highest birth rate can be found in Africa

17.   11 of the top 12 countries with the highest number of deaths from HIV/AIDS can be found in Africa

18.   Another country in the top ten is Kenya

19.   The U.S. ranks 18^th in the HIV/AID deaths

20.   No the U.S. is not #1 in the number of cell phones

21.   23.9% of the U.S. is Roman Catholic

22.   76.5% of Mexico is Roman Catholic

23.   Net migration rate is the figure for the difference between the number of persons entering and leaving the country during the year per 1,000 persons

24.   No the U.S. does not have the highest net migration rate

25.   The current population of the entire planet is 7,021,836,029

  My two Questions I thought were important:

Number 4 is important because as Americans we should know what kind of government we have.

Number 10 is important because we should also know how big of a necessity oil is for the United States, and we are the country that imports the most oil.

Note taking

Today in human geography we talked about taking notes. We talked about this because in college we are going to have to take a lot of notes while the teacher is giving lectures. A note is a fragment of information that will become a complete thought in the writing process. So in order to prepare us on note taking during a lecture Mr. Schick read us a short paragraph on Illinois, while he read to us we had to jot down as much information as we could while still being accurate, so we made a practice blog out of the notes we took. After that Mr. Schick had a few of us read ours, to see how well we could complete this task.  I thought that this exercise was very helpful because we need to learn how to take notes in a different way, and in college you really have to pay attention because in a big class the teacher is not going to pay special attention to you and answer all your individual questions.

Website watch out !

Today’s human geography class was very interesting.  Today we talked about Wikipedia and if it should be trusted to find information on. We also talked about other websites; we looked at some websites that could be trusted like fact book. One of the main concerns about finding good websites is sometimes you can’t tell if the website is trustworthy or not. You can tell it is not trustworthy if it doesn’t have a lot of work put into it and it just looks like poor work, also you have to check and make sure the website is not based on opinions, just facts. If the website URL has .gov in it, and it can usually be trusted because it is from the government. So we mainly just talked about what to look for in a good website, and what to watch out for incase the website has just someone’s opinions on the site or is just not a very good website to look on for good information.

Essay 3- five point plan

My five point action plan would have to be this- one: I would begin by improving my study habits. In the classroom I will always pay attention to what we are talking about and I will not distract myself on the computer and I will participate and also I will take notes when appropriate. At home I will not let things such as the TV,  the computer or my family pull  my attention away from my studies, I will review what we went over in class by quizzing myself on the notes we have taken. Two: Try to develop a routine for myself that allows me to complete my homework and my studies but also allows me to get an appropriate amount of sleep. Three: To help prepare myself for when I graduate and go into the real world, I will start to work on my social skills and I will work on developing a self-help plan to prepare me for interviews that I may go to. Four: Extracurricular activities are important when it comes to applying to college. I will work to get into an activity that I will benefit from; this will also help me in trying to be a little more social. Five:  My fifth would have to be completing my service hours. I will strive to complete my service hours early; I will do this by trying to attend the beach Mont camp so that also others will benefit from my contribution. This is my five point plan to being the best person that I can be. 

Essay 2- Elbert and Socrates

If Elbert Hubbard and Socrates time travelled to the year 2012, they would both have different opinions. First Elbert Hubbard- I think he wouldn’t like how we do things in this year because we definitely have gone downhill from the time when he was a child. Sadly we are a lot lazier, we have a lot of technology now to do things for us, in “A Message to Garcia” they had to find information about Garcia through other people, but know if we wanted to know something about someone we could just Google it, it’s that simple for us now. Also when they wanted to find someone to do a certain job like Rowan’s, he did the job with no questions, and there are a lot of people now that would be too lazy to do the job. I think even though he wouldn’t like some of our methods that we use today, he might like some of the really hard working people who work their whole lives to get something they want for instance people who run their own business; they would have to work very hard to achieve their goal. Socrates would be different; I think he would like how people are these days, because a lot of people share their opinions, no matter how crazy. We have never stop asking  questions, we learn new things every day, there are some knew religions that people are into that show how open and confident people are when it comes to their beliefs. This generation is not afraid of asking questions, even if the answers are far out there, because we want to learn and we don’t want to give up on finding new information that will benefit all of us.

Essay 1- Arete

My definition of arête would have to be that is striving to be at the top of your game at all times, never wanting to give up and always wanting to stand up for what you believe in. I think that Socrates demonstrated this because no matter how badly anyone judged him on his beliefs, he went on believing, and then taught about his beliefs, he taught his students to never give up on finding the answers to their questions and to always question the popular opinions of everyone else, even if they would be seen as different. Also he demonstrated this by dying for what he believed in, and not apologizing for what he thought was right. The Greeks demonstrated this by creating the first ever democracy. It used to be that only the wealthy and powerful citizens had a say in what went on, but then there came to be some kind of voting system where everyone had a say, and everyone could have their own opinion. I think all of Athens demonstrated arête.

Human Geo day 5!

On our fifth day of human Geography we learned some new vocabulary.  Here are the vocabulary words: arête- This term means being the best that you as a human being can be, being at the top of your game.

Polis- the city or city state.

Socrates- He was a Geek philosopher who took on the mission to correct people’s ignorance, he was the first to use rules and logic to talk about important issues.

The death of Socrates- he was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, put to death by drinking poison from a hemlock tree, he could have escaped before being put to death but he chose to face his punishment.

The Socratic Method- Socrates taught his students to repeatedly ask questions, the point of this is to teach the students that through the use of critical thinking, reasoning and logic.

The date 508 BC- When a democracy was formed in Athens; the Greeks invented democracy.

Agora- This is central to every Greek city and town, a market place, and also a meeting place.

If the ancient Greeks called you an idiot- if you didn’t vote then they thought you were selfish and that you thought of yourself as too good for them.