Week Twelve - Continuing the study of the Holocaust

This Week

On Monday and Tuesday we finished up our unit on the Armenian genocide. Students gained an understanding of how and why it happened and we began to see how the 8 Stages of Genocide were at work in the Ottoman Empire and (later) in Turkey as the genocide against the Armenians unfolded.

On Wednesday, we began our unit on the Holocaust. Students explored the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's website while taking an accompanying quiz over the materials contained therein. This quiz and other quizzes during this unit are formative assessments and are designed to ensure that students are reading and comprehending the material and are always revisable. Please advise students to revise if they receive a low grade on a quiz. A number of the questions asked them to analyze maps, which is a key skill for the upcoming Ohio Graduation Tests, which they will be taking this spring.

On Thursday students read about the killing centers that operated during the Holocaust and on Friday they analyzed the role of race and eugenics as examples of symbolization in the Holocaust.

Upcoming Week

Next week, students will be working on a project whereby they will analyzing the lives of families living in pre-WWII Europe. The goal is for students to compare and contrast their lives with the lives of Jewish families living in parts of Europe that were affected by Nazi takeover and the Holocaust. Students may be asking you to help them find photos of your family in similar situations. Any help you can give them in accomplishing this task would be a great way for you to talk with them about what they're learning. For a great example from one of my previous students, check out Vidur's Prezi.

Check out Vidur's Prezi here to get an idea of the kind of research students will be doing.

Students will be presenting these in class next Thursday and Friday and all Prezi assignments will be graded then.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who volunteered to join us on the field trip to the USAF Museum on Tuesday, November 25th! We have enough chaperones for the field trip now and will be leaving school at 9:30 and coming back from the museum at 1:25, so the trip will take place entirely during the school day.

Just to clarify a few things - students only need to pay for a lunch if a) they are buying a lunch from the cafe and b) they are not on free/reduced lunch. If they did order a box lunch but are on free or reduced lunch, they should pay whatever they normally pay for a school lunch (either nothing or the reduced lunch price). If you still have not turned in your money but need to pay, I will still be accepting lunch money past today's due date. Hope this clears up any confusion.

Have a great weekend and Happy Halloween!

~ Mr. Grieve

Week Eleven - Beginning the study of conflict and genocide

This Week

On Monday most students presented their creative projects for the greatest achievements of the 20th century. Many of the presentations were very engaging and presented the information in a creative way. Special shout-outs go to Maddie and Starr for their creative writing pieces, which were very well-written. Nice work!

This week we also began our next unit on the study of conflicts and genocides of the 20th century. This is obviously a difficult topic, so I would ask that you please communicate with your son or daughter at home and ask them how they're processing the subject matter and alert me of any issues or concerns I should know about. We study the 8 Stages of Genocide as a way to systematically study the process of how and why genocides happen. If you're interested in learning more about this framework for understanding genocide, please click here for a PDF of the 8 Stages of Genocide and discuss this subject with your son or daughter. Right now we are in the middle of studying the Armenian Genocide.

One video we started in class on Tuesday (but didn't have time to watch as much of it as I would have liked) was the reproduction of Stanley Milgram's classic experiments on obedience. We discussed how these experiments helped show that genocide can happen anywhere and be carried out by people everywhere in the world if it is not stopped in its early stages. You can watch more about these experiments below:

 

Upcoming Week

Next week we will be continuing our study of the Armenian Genocide and then moving on to studying the Holocaust. Students are creating Prezis that track their journey through understanding genocide from a societal perspective as well as its legal evolution over the course of the 20th century, so you can ask them to show you their Prezis at home, which they should be working on this weekend (if they did not finish the assignment today in class).

We will also have our second Western European countries quiz, which students can practice for here. 

Since this is a new unit, we also have a new Conflict and Genocide Assignments Tracker.

Things to put on the calendar

Field trip to the USAF Museum is on Tuesday, November 25th. Students who are on free or reduced lunch will pay whatever they normally pay (or do not pay) for a boxed lunch. Others should pay $4.75. Please turn in this money by next Friday, October 31st. I'm still looking for about 3 parents chaperone volunteers, so if you're interested please email me at arch.grieve@wright.edu.

Have a great weekend!

~Mr. Grieve

Week Ten - Finishing up Societies in Transition

This Week

This week students are working on their "creative projects," whereby students research an area of innovation or an invention that changed society, travel, communication, or the economy over the course of the 20th century in a significant way. Students were given the following resource (greatestachievements.org) to help inform the projects, but the method for presenting their information was left up to them. It could be a podcast, a poem, a video, a creative writing piece, or any other creative means they can think of. Students have been working on this every day this week and will present to the rest of the class on Monday, so ask them to show you what they've worked on this weekend!

Upcoming Week

Next week is parent-teacher conferences. If you would like to meet and talk about your son or daughter or are concerned about your student's performance and would like to schedule a meeting, please use the pick-a-time website that the school is using for scheduling conferences. I'm always happy to meet with you if you'd like to discuss your son or daughter's performance or learn more about what goes on in the class, or would just like to walk through their grades in more depth. I also like having the students be a part of the conference as well, so please know that they are welcome to join us if you would like.

I also want to note that next week we are starting our Conflict and Genocides of the 20th Century unit. If you would like to learn more about what we study, I would encourage you to check out the video and description about this unit on our website (click here) and learn more about what we focus on in order to get an idea of the content we will be covering. In an age of ISIS, intractable conflict in Syria, regime changes in the Middle East and other flare-ups around the world, now it is more important than ever to study the conflicts and genocides of the past in order to ensure that we know how to stop those that are happening in the present. Specifically, we will cover the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, the Bosnian Genocide, the conflict in Kashmir, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This unit will go into 3rd quarter and most likely we will finish sending letters to our Members of Congress and creating posters about certain conflicts sometime in January or February. Posters will most likely be on display at the Wright State Educational Resource Center sometime next year, so look for a post about them early next year!

Lastly, we will have a great opportunity to visit the US Air Force Museum on November 25th. I'm looking for a few chaperones to help me with this trip, so if you are interested, please email me at arch.grieve@wright.edu and let me know whether or not you would be available during school hours. You would be assigned a group of 10 students and would travel with them throughout the museum during their scavenger hunt. It's a big place and involves a lot of walking, so please make sure you're ready to walk if you would like to come! It's always a good trip and one of the reason we go is that students have the opportunity to hear from a Holocaust survivor, which is unfortunately an increasingly rare opportunity. They will also be led on a tour of the Holocaust Exhibit. This is a powerful and moving experience for the students and it is great that we have such a powerful exhibit right here in Dayton.

Learn more about the exhibit here: USAF Museum website

I look forward to seeing many of you next week!

~Mr. Grieve

Week Nine - End of the Quarter!

This Week

We began this week with a mini-unit on a society that changed a lot in the 20th Century by looking at Berlin and briefly reviewing the Cold War, which students learned about last year in US History. Students watched a video that talked about the Berlin Wall both from a historic standpoint and an engineering one, which you can view here. Students also spent time reflecting on their work and their growth as learners this first quarter in order to prepare for their portfolios throughout the year. You can read more about the changes to portfolios this year by checking out the student responsibilities portion of the DRSS Portfolio Handbook, or by watching the video below. I would encourage your son or daughter to work on this throughout the year so they don't fall behind or feel pinched for time at the end of the year. You can also watch the following video on new portfolio requirements if they get confused about what they need to do to showcase their learning.

Finally, we kicked off our unit on transportation on Thursday, which is the final part of our Societies in Transition unit. Students traced the journey of Wilbur Wright through the following primary source document of his September 13, 1900 diary entry. In it he describes his journey to Kitty Hawk, NC, to test out their glider. Students then researched how to travel the same route today and compared the ease of travel 114 years later with the much longer journey that he took.

Grades should be completed and at this point will not be changing for 1st quarter. You can check your son's or daughter's grades on ProgressBook. The class average was high this quarter and students appear to have taken my advice not to have missing assignments, as there have been relatively few this year. Consequently, the class average was high at 90.6%. Great work!

Upcoming Week

 

Next week students will be continuing their look at transportation and inventions/innovations of the 20th century and working on creative projects that demonstrate the importance of a particular engineering achievement of the 20th century.

Have a great long weekend!

~Mr. Grieve

Week Eight

This Week

Students this week finished up the movie Invictus, wrote an essay on racial reconciliation, and participated in a simulation whereby they re-enacted the 1986 Coca-Cola Shareholders Meeting. For more on the roles they played, you can find the simulation at http://southafricanhistorysimulation.wikispaces.com/. It was a fun experience that allowed students to see how individual, institutional, national, and international decisions interact with one another. Students also got to research primary documents through this activity, and one I'd encourage you to read is the 1986 LA Times article describing what actually happened at the shareholder meeting the students re-enacted.

Today students also had an opportunity to hear from our first guest speaker for the year, Dr. Jennifer Subban, a Wright State University Urban Affairs professor originally from South Africa who is also a parent of a DRSS graduate and current student. She came to speak to the students about South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, specifically about the progress and shortcomings since the end of apartheid. As someone who grew up under apartheid and continues to travel back to South Africa to take WSU students on service learning opportunities, she has a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experiences to share. We only wish we had more time with her! Thank you very much Dr. Subban for coming to speak to the students.

Thanks so much to Dr. Subban for coming to speak to all of the students today!

Finally, students all got to go to the Scholastic Book Fair today. Thanks to the parents who volunteered to help with this.

Students browsing in the Scholastic Book Fair room

Upcoming Week

It's hard to believe, but there are only four more days in this quarter! Next week we finish the quarter, and it seems to be going faster than normal. Our Societies in Transition unit may end up spilling over a bit into next quarter, but there will be no more major projects due before the end of the grading period.

I'd encourage you to check ProgressBook and look at this unit's assignment tracker to see where your son or daughter could still have a chance to improve their grade. If there's nothing left that they can turn in, a conversation may be necessary to see what strategies they may need to implement at school or at home in order to improve their grades next quarter. As a benchmark, the average class grade right now for all 93 students in my class is a 90.3% (A). The single greatest reason for any grades that are below this mark is failure to complete assignments, so please stress this to your son or daughter for next quarter. First quarter often serves as a wake-up call for many of our students who go on to improve their grades over the remainder of the school year.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please email me at arch.grieve@wright.edu.

Have a great weekend!

~Mr. Grieve