Have A Great Holiday Break!

Lecture Slides: Industrial Revolution

Unit Test on Friday

We have been working on this study guide, on and off, in class since Monday.

UNIT TEST STUDY GUIDE   Forms of Government∙ The Political Spectrum

Fill Out The Political Spectrum Line:

ß—–1————-2—————-3——————4—————-5—————-6—————7——–à

Terms/Concepts  Write a basic definition, example or description of the main idea or explain why it is important.

State of Nature:_______________________________________________________________________

Social Contract________________________________________________________________________

Monarchy____________________________________________________________________________

Democracy (Representative)_____________________________________________________________

Democracy (Direct)_____________________________________________________________________

Oligarchy_____________________________________________________________________________

Aristocracy___________________________________________________________________________

Anarchy_____________________________________________________________________________
Republic_____________________________________________________________________________

Tyranny______________________________________________________________________________

Demagogue___________________________________________________________________________

Mixed Government_____________________________________________________________________

Dictatorship___________________________________________________________________________

Revolution____________________________________________________________________________

Athens_________________________________________________________________________________

Sparta_________________________________________________________________________________

Rome__________________________________________________________________________________

Hunter-gatherer_________________________________________________________________________

Tribe__________________________________________________________________________________

Agricultural Revolution____________________________________________________________________

Cyclical View of History____________________________________________________________________

Linear View of History_____________________________________________________________________

Left____________________________________________________________________________________

Right___________________________________________________________________________________

Anarchist________________________________________________________________________________

Conservative_____________________________________________________________________________

Moderate_________________________________________________________________________________

Radical____________________________________________________________________________________

Reactionary________________________________________________________________________________

Liberal____________________________________________________________________________________

Republican Party____________________________________________________________________________

Democratic Party____________________________________________________________________________

Independent/ Swing Voter____________________________________________________________________

Negative/Attack Ads_________________________________________________________________________

Positive/Self-Promoting Ads___________________________________________________________________

FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO ARE ON THE TEST WHO YOU NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT:

Thomas Hobbes    John Locke     Polybius     Ibn Khaldun     Machiavelli     Caligula     Confucius      Edmund Burke

REMINDER: PROJECT DUE DATE !!!!

MONDAY DECEMBER 7th

All projects are due on monday December 7th

MONDAY DECEMBER 7th

Metacognition: Thinking about Thinking

Two items struck me as useful advice for sharpening our mental edges.

First, I read  an excellent series of posts by Dr. Eric Drexler of Metamodern. All of them were good but I particularly liked the following one:How to Understand Everything (and why)

….Formal education in science and engineering centers on teaching facts and problem-solving skills in a series of narrow topics. It is true that a few topics, although narrow in content, have such broad application that they are themselves integrative: These include (at a bare minimum) substantial chunks of mathematics and the basics of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, with the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics close behind.….To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest. By knowing the outlines of a field, I mean knowing the answers, to some reasonable approximation, to questions like these:

What are the physical phenomena?What are their magnitudes?What are their preconditions?How well are they understood?How well can they be modeled?What do they make possible?What do they forbid?

And even more fundamental than these are questions of knowledge about knowledge:

What is known today?What are the gaps in what I know?When would I need to know more to solve a problem?How could I find it?

It takes far less knowledge to recognize a problem than to solve it, yet in key respects, that bit of knowledge is more important: With recognition, a problem may be avoided, or solved, or an idea abandoned. Without recognition, a hidden problem may invalidate the labor of an hour, or a lifetime. Lack of a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Secondly, reading through Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count ( see this monster, two-part, book review by James McCormick at Chicago Boyz), the intriguing findings of the “Venezuela Project” run by none other than the late Richard Herrnstein of Bell Curve fame. Nisbett writes (74-75):

Herrnstein and his coworkers devised a very advanced set of materials geared to teaching seventh-graders fundamental concepts of problem solving that were not targeted to any particular subject matter. In effect they, they tried to make the children smarter by giving them handy implements for their intellectual tool kits.

What were those non-subject specific, cognitive skills?

• Basics of Classification
• Hypothesis Testing
• Discovery of Properties of Ordered Dimensions
• Analogies
• Simple Propositions
• Principles of Logic
• Constructing and Evaluating Complex Arguments
• Weighing opportunity costs vs. probability of success for a goal
• Evaluating credibility and relevance of data

I would have added metaphors, pattern-recognition and intuitive thinking games but it was a fine set of skills and the results were remarkable, according to Nisbett:

The instruction resulted in big changes in children’s ability to solve problems that the new skills were designed to improve….for language comprehension, .62 SD [ standard deviation]; for learning how to represent ‘”problem spaces,” .46 SD; for decision making, .77 SD; for inventive thinking, .50 SD. In short, general problem solving skills can be taught, and taught moreover in a brief period of time.

In psychometric terms, for a 13 year old, these scores represent phenomenal improvements in cognitive performance and indicate the plasticity of some aspects of measured intelligence.

We need to think of lessons and learning not just in terms of content or broad “critical thinking” but also the very specific cognitive actions that we want the students to experience – and the students need to have opportunities to use them across all subjects.

Lecture Slides from the Start of Unit

I finally managed to get the file uploaded without stalling out. These slides were from the first lecture before we studied Forms of Government.

Political Science Spectrum Project – The Requirements

POLITICAL SPECTRUM RESEARCH PROJECT

OBJECTIVE I.  To research one point on the political spectrum.

OBJECTIVE II.  To improve and increase your research skills.

OBJECTIVE III.  To make a product or presentation that accurately and comprehensively explains your point on the political spectrum while meeting all the criteria for an excellent grade.

TOPICS:

Each group will research one point on the political spectrum, chosen by drawing

Each group member will choose 2-3 subtopics from a list to do their individual research

RESEARCH REQUIREMENTS:

Research and the creation of products or presentations are two separate phases of the project and are graded separately. The research grades are individual assignments.

Topics:  Each group member will research 2-3 Spectrum Point subtopics

Sources:  Eight (8) sources per group member, minimum. Four (4) must be non-reference sources

Bibliography:  Each group member must turn in a Bibliography of their sources ( use NoodleBib)

Source          Pages/URL       Copyright Date                        Heading for Card  3 – 5 significant pieces of information in bullet point format, or A single quoted paragraph

Note Cards: Each group member must complete forty (40) correctly completed note cards

                                                                                         

                                                                        Do not write on both sides of the card

                                                                        Note cards should be legible

                                                                        Note Cards need to follow the example  format

                                                                        Points are given only for 100 % completion

 

DUE DATES and POINT VALUES:

Subtopic choices   11/13         10 points

Note Cards             11/23         40 points

Bibliography           11/23         25 points

Product/Present.    TBA            25 points

 

Modern News for the Father of History

This post is just for fun and to show how history can touch the present day.

Herodotus, the “Father of History” has received some new props in terms of his reliability from archaeologists digging in Egypt.

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

….”We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.

Herodotus was long disparaged by historians as an entertaining and unreliable mythologizer, who instead upheld his younger and envious rival Thucydides as the model of ancient historical purity and accuracy. The empirical basis for this position is eroding fast and while Thucydides has his own greatness that can never be denied, the shadow he long cast over Herodotus has waned.

Confucius and Machiavelli

Questions are due on Friday

Political Spectrum Part II. Lecture Slides