Western Civilization

Today we started out by completing the class survey for Mr. Schick's class. I have done this survey for many other teachers and they have all been the same. Then we continued to watch the video with the Swedish man, Hans Rosling, from the other day. We saw the change in people from 1948 to 2009. Everybody seemed to move up the chart which is good! The world is becoming wealthier and less folks are living in poverty. The class went into a long debate which Mr. Schick initiated. His question was: Should the government increase or decrease spending for the U.S. Military? I answered by saying yes because much of the weaponry the military currently uses is outdated and needs to be replaced. Some replacement parts needed for planes are not even produced anymore. The debate later went into what we should do with North Korea. This was a previously debated topic in our class. Nothing much has changed other than the fact that now, North Korea has an ICBM that is capable of reaching U.S. mai...

Today we furthered our discussion on population pyramids following up on the last chapter. Mr. Schick told us that today would be a video day and he was correct. We spent the entire class going through two videos which dealt with population pyramids. The first was about five minutes long and came from a group called TedEd. The other video was with a Swedish man named Hans Rosling who cast a projection of a population graph through the last century. The title of our notes today was 'Demographic Transition.' A few key notes I took down were: A pre-industrialized society turns into an industrial society and, then to a post industrial society. Industrialization is simply the process of becoming industrial. In this case, life expectancy goes up and the child mortality rate goes down. This is logical because if your technology is better, in s community, for example then you will be able to take better care of your people. We ended by looking at Hans's projection of a population ...

Today Mr. Schick handed back the tests from last week. There were many A's in the class and many more one hundred percents and beyond. The highest possible grade you could earn was one hundred and four points. The two extra credit questions I mentioned in the blog from test day were worth two points each evidently. The second question, the one I was unsure about, turned out to be correct. The replacement rate indeed needs to be two point one in order for a population to increase. As mentioned in a previous post, this fact is in some cases, the only thing that some of Mr. Schick's students learned in his class. Overall the test was fair. We then went around in the same fashion as previous tests and read the answers aloud. I am very gratutious for the extra credit points and possible points from the Kiva activity. Mr. Schick then scolded us for not donating to Kiva in the extra credit opportunity.  Our semester exams are coming up in two and half weeks. We will have one more tes...

Kiva is an organization which asks donors for amounts in twenty five dollar increments. These sums of money, coined as micro loans, go to budding entrepreneurs, which help them alleviate poverty in some cases. In other cases, they help them realize their potential, by starting a business or or fulfill a life long ambition. Kiva claims to be an international nonprofit which was founded in 2005 and based in San Fransisco. Their mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Taken directly from their website under the 'About' section, "We celebrate and support people looking to create a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities. From this you can take away that they are a helpful organization with the goal of helping people who want to make their life better and the people around them. I did some additional research in trying to figure out the meaning of the word Kiva. the closest I could come to was meaning 'nice' in Fin...

Today, as a way to show love across the world before Thanksgiving, Mr. Schick introduced us to this charity called Kiva. Their website is right here: kiva.org. This is an organization that gets entrepreneurs to rally money for themselves in the form of micro loans. The main outline of it is this; you pitch in some money to someone in need of it to start their own business and then you most likely will have your micro loan repaid to you. This is different than how some charities like the ones we researched for the project, including Feeding America, UNICEF, and others, where they just take your money and then help the people. This was a real eye-opener, as Madison stated in class. prior to class today, I did not know that an organization like this existed. There will be extra credit opportunities offered to us by Mr. Schick which will be mentioned in the next post. 

To finish off our week, we took the test on population and settlement. As Mr. Schick had said yesterday, he would not be here today and we would have a sub who turned out to be Mrs. Collins. We started with the timed section of the test with the fifteen questions we were to answer using the CIA World Factbook. These turned out to be very easy just like the practice ones from yesterday. The test was six pages just like Mr. Schick had promised. The extra credit was my favorite part of the test. Mr. Schick asked what is the net migration rate of the world, which as we all know is zero. There are no aliens on Earth who have migrated here from another planet. The other one I believe I did not get. The question asked something about a replacement rate but the closed I could configure was the 2.1 Total Fertility rate a country needed in order for its population to grow. The rest of the test was simple. The section that was the most thought provoking for me was the one dealing with push and p...

Today was all about review for the test. But first, Mr. Schick started out by scolding all of his other sections because he wrote four detentions in the last one and a half days. All of those were written to people outside our class. We should keep this up. Next, Mr. Schick gave us a preview of the test. The test will be six single sided pages. On the first page we will have fifteen minutes to navigate the CIA World Fact Book and answer fifteen questions. We should average about one question per minute. Later when we practiced, the class figured at we average anywhere between ten and fifteen seconds with practice questions from Mr. Schick. The questions were rather easy, the trick is to know under which category search for each question. For example, if you are looking for literacy rate, you would need to look under communication not people and society. There will be no multiple choice on the test.