Class Day!

When we got into class there was paint that Evan brought in.  So I decided to put some on my face without even realizing “Oh it said were not allowed to wear face paint today” Oh well I put it on and it looked fantastic.  Actually Maddie put it on my and I put some on Maddie.  Then I ended up using the mirror on my computer and put some more paint on my lips.  It looked odd, but I kept it anyway, School Spirit!  Then I just like reviewed some of the stuff for the test Friday, and that was it because it was a fun class.

Questions for Test

Jake yet again had another shadow!  It actually very impressive, especially seeing that it's Jake.  Anyway his name was Dylan, but Mr. Schick nick-named him "Shark Boy" because he was bit by a shark in Ocean City.  I missed a lot of it because I had to use the potty.  The entire class we discussed questions that should be on the test and I had some really good ones!  I'm not so sure others liked them though.  I don't remember any of the questions that were requested but I do know that I wanted to do the tricky ones, but everybody kept dissing that idea.  Switching the spelling though would be a really good idea.  We talked about what the quiz was going to be, it's all Religions and the culture, because most of us thought it was just religions.  There was a question that was about Columbus, the Vikings and the Native Americans.  OHHHH, the BEST part: Doori was laughing for no reason apparently and then started actually crying.  It was really funny, she did it twice.

Jake actually had a Shadow

Jake actually had a shadow on Friday which caused things to get started a little bit later.  His name was Franco, he does soccer with Jake (so I guess he's good) and Jake said he's really smart.  That's all I remembered about Franco though.  Mr. Schick actually asked him a few questions, and he got them right! I'm not so sure how well the rest of us would have done.  We looked over the world religions and were so close to finishing.  Most of the PowerPoint was basically on Buddha and how he was actually stick thin in real life, instead of really fat.  That was interesting actually, and we talked about Nirvana a good bit.  On the low part of the spectrum are like bugs and stuff, but I don't see anything wrong with being a bug.  They have no worries except to watch out for things that want to kill them.  We didn't do much for Hinduism and what because its hard for Mr. Schick to find anything on it, oh and Kishan taught a little bit of another section because his mom is Hindu.  Then we looked at Judaism and it is a really small religion, only 14-16 million people in the world practice it and most of them are in Israel or spread between America and Canada.  That's basically all we learned and talked about in class on Friday.

More Information

So we actually just went over the PowerPoint all class.  I actually did the silent thing where the people with red tape on them had to do, but i have no clue what it was for, I was just silent the whole class.  It was really hard, I feel bad for people who had to not talk ALL day.  That sucks.  We almost finished the PowerPoint, there was like one left, if that, but we finished Islam, I believe we did not finish Buddhism though.  We then talked about all the extremest, oh, also and how the one guy (forget his name) was stuck in his house until he was 29, and was supposed to be king but wanted to help others.  Also talked about Nirvana and how it is the best of the best.  We get side-tracked a lot also, like usual.

PowerPoint

We went over some of the PowerPoint and talked about the Hutu and Tutsi Tribes who dominated over practically all of the other tribes around them.  Turns out though, the Hutu's were the number one tribe and persecuted the Tutsi's.  Ethnic heritage can united or conflict people, in this case it caused conflict between Rwanda and Burundi.  US and Switzerland have been two successful countries and peacefully merged many ethnic groups.  Korea and Japan and other places on the other hand aren't too similar because most of all the   people there have Japan or Korean back-rounds.  We got side tracked a lot so that took a while, but when we got on the religion blog thing, we discussed all the questions.  I don't need to put them down because they are all in a blog that is a couple scrolls down from this one.

Mr. Perry

Mr. Schick wasn't in class on Friday so we had Mr. Perry as the sub.  It was actually all quite amusing, Matt yawned without covering his mouth, so he had to stand on his chair and yawn ten times covering his mouth.  Also, whenever Damon would make scoffs or sighs Mr. Perry would look up and ask if he was alright.  It seemed most of us were scared of him so the entire class it was quite.  All we did was work on the assignment that was posted on the blog for the entire class period.  I got done only about two religions when class ended, so the rest was my homework for tonight.  So, I did have a little bit of homework for this class, but on the plus side it was really funny to see Mr. Perry yell at the boys for slouching and etc. so you should have him for a sub more often. (But don't worry he's not as cool as you).

Religions

Christianity

Christianity was founded in the first century in Palestine by the disciples of Jesus.  Christianity is the worship of only one God, so this is Monotheism.  Christianities holy book is the Bible, and it also claims to be possible the largest religion with 1.7 people who are Christians.  The central figure of this religion is God/Jesus.  For the geographical concentration, I have no idea what it mean so when I looked it up it gave me nothing.  Then after lots more searching it said that it is where the most amount of those people live per capita.  When I finally found it, it told me that United States was the country with the most Christians  and that is a reliable source and it sounds good.

Islamic

The Islamic Religion was founded in the seventh century by Muhammad, and was founded in what is now Saudi Arabia.  This religion is also monotheistic, they believe that there is no God worthy of worship except for Allah.  Yes, Islamic religion does have a holy book, and it is called Quran. There is about 1.57 billion followers of this religion.  Most of the followers are in middle east, such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan etc.

Buddhism

Buddhism was founded in the sixth century in India.  Buddhism is basically monothestic because it is all only Buddha, the central figure of the religion, even though there may be more than one form of him.  There is no actual holy book for this religion, there are between 300 and 500 million followers. Ninety-five percent of Buddhist live in Thailand.

Hinduism

Hinduism was founded in India in the early 1500's.  This religion is polytheistic, they do not really have a main worshiper because it is polytheistic, so they just worship all of the goddesses and gods.  They have several holy books, one being Vedas.  It is the third largest religion in the world, with 900 million followers.  Most Hindu's are found in India.

Judaism 

Judaism is one of the oldest religions today that are still in existence.  There is no exact date of when it was founded but people believe it was during 2000 BC, and was founded in Israel.  This religion is also monotheistic, and their central figure would be God, they believe that God is in existence.  Their holy book that they worshiped is called the Torah.  There are about 14 million followers in the world today, while the majority of them are still in the place where it first started, Israel.

Cultural Geography

Apparently this past class was supposed to be one that would make our blog gigantic.  Who knows?  Anyway we took notes from a PowerPoint about Cultural Geography.  The characteristics are the parts of a group’s everyday life, the ideas and themes which the group teaches and they can link or divide a region.  Three examples of this are language, religion and ethnic heritage.  I had no idea that English is the number one world language, I thought it was mandarin but the most amount of people speak that language, but isn't necessarily the world language.  Also, Canada is a bilingual nation: French and English.  The French wanted to for a new country but that obviously didn't happen.  I wonder why Switzerland has multiple languages but no controversy; it's just such a happy place.  France apparently is our biggest ally and also that Brazil might be the only South American county that doesn't speak Spanish.  With the Ethnic Heritage one Yugoslavia had so many ethnic groups, but one their leadership died out all of the ethnic groups broke out and caused many civil wars amongst.  I never knew that America didn't go to Moscow in 1982 because of a political disagreement!  That would make SO many people mad.  Also, apparently fighting will stop  countries for the Olympics, why don't they just compete that way instead of slaughtering everybody; it seemed to have worked, because for that time it is stopped.  That was when we ran out of time and the bell rang.

Presenting Power Points!

First thing first, Maheer and Jake played with a slinky while a bowl-like thing was used to make noise.  Once we got settled we pulled out our PowerPoints and presented!  The First to go were the Native Americans, from their presentation I learned that they cam during the ice age period which was 12,000 to 17,000 years ago.  Also, they migrated south over time, from what the map said, it said that they came from Siberia (don't know if that's completely true though) went through Alaska, down into Canada and to North America.  So basically came through present day Alaska, Canada and North America.  There were no other people there when the Native Americans came, and weren't sent by anyone also.  The only time they fought was when the Europeans came.  Lastly about the Native Americans is that they took great care of the lands and worshiped it.  Then my group went and we told everybody about the Vikings,  they didn't stay long because they landed where the land wasn't so great, and would have been a lot up upkeep.  So they left shortly after their arrival, but there are still Viking sites that you can visit.  When we finished the Columbus group went, and that was the majority of the boys (so you can imagine how this turns out).  So in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria came, they landed in the Bahamas and loved it. (Originally they were aiming to go to India)  Native Americans were already there, but Columbus went back to England told everybody what he found and quickly said back to conquer the Mayans.  He won, but in the presentation the boys said that he didn't conquer them, and something like there was no one there when the English arrive.  Which by-the-way is completely false.  So their PowerPoint was ehh, but the other two were fantastic.  After the presentations we looked at a map of what people in America call soft drinks.  A bunch of states/counties call it pop.  While most of the east cost call it soda.  Much of the south calls it coke, we also looked at Nevada because they have so many people calling it so many different things.  This is because when people migrated to Nevada, they didn't want to change their culture and so carried on calling it what they wanted.  (120,464 people were interviewed for this).  That was the end of our Tuesday's class.

First to Discover America

We got our test back in class today, and I got a bell! (I got an A)  We went over all of the test answers and I only got one wrong, and one word misspelled, which was Syracuse (I spelled it without and 'e' at the end).  So, overall I was happy with with my score.  Out of all the three sections we had the lowest average, but we got the second most amount of A's.  Our section got and 82.6% average with 7 A's, and 4 failing grades, section 2 got and average of 86.8% and 8 A's and no fails.  Section 3 beat us by .1 average!  They only had 4 A's, but only 2 fails.  Once the test was over Mr. Schick pulled up Eryn's Blog.  This was from 6 days ago, and had lots of information, and was used as the "perfect" example.  We also talked about the discovery of America, who really discovered America?  Not Columbus, he just got all the credit for it because he went back to England, told everyone and said "Look what I discovered!"  Hudson was before him, and the Vikings were before both of them!  We sectioned ourselves into three groups and worked on a PowerPoint about three people to look up, we had the vikings but I cannot remember any besides the vikings.  While doing this research I learned that the vikings arrived in 1000 AD, and even though they slaughtered people/enemies they took care of their land very well.  Also that they named their ships. Supposedly, there was about 20-30 million Native Americans living in America before anyone got there.  The Indians/Mayans/Native Americas were really smart too, because they could perform eye surgeries etc.  What we didn't finish of the PowerPoint was homework.

Movie Test

I completely forgot we had a test on Friday actually.  Thankfully though, we got to take fifteen minutes before-hand to review our notes.  I tried to study all my notes best as I could.  When the fifteen minutes were up, we sat in our seats, and he announced that we were allowed to use our blog to take the test.  I did put most of my information in there but I didn't have have everything written down in it.  Overall though I felt I only got one or two wrong, and no words misspelled. I was one of the last people to finish but we everyone had to be completely quiet while others were finishing. (Some people don't know how to be quiet though).  When the test was done we talked about how we all though we did, (one question everybody was uncertain about though)  he never did tell us what the answer was though.  Our discussion ended when the bell rang, and that was how our Friday class was.

Plausible Websites?

Section 3 added lots more websites to the document so there was about four pages!  Anyway, after we were told how disappointed he was we talked about which websites were solid and we liked.  There were several but I can only remember two:  Mercy Corps and The Water Project for Sudan.  These and a couple others would be the ones for us to actually do something.  We also discussed why they would be good, for example, the Water Project one actually helps the people learn and do things, not just give them food and water in front of them.  Then there were some bad ones which I only remember the Gabriel's Dream one.  Pat didn't like his choice and explained why.  Our class is trying to do something that will help the Lost Boys, we wanted to have John Dau to come and talk to us but that is too expensive, so maybe Skype!  Another option would be to go to other schools, show them the movie and inform them.  All of us want to either do a walk, Skype or go to schools.  Our entire class was the discussion since it wasn't one of the longer classes.

More Lost Boys Research

There was a quick discussion about the websites we found last night and what we could do.  Apparently our section was the class that was the most excited about doing something for the lost boys.  After that we got in four groups to try and find more.  There was an assignment online that all of us could type on and post the websites we found for the Lost Boys.  That took so much effort seeing as there was lots of annoying people who put their names in everything, deleted them, etc.  After he asked us if we could do better, we all did it one more time. Finally we got it all done, with the wrong and deleted and everything else on the page.  We found several websites that were good!  Once was The Lost Boys Foundation, Water Project for Sudan, Alliance for the Lost Boys, Sudan Foundation, and Outreach Africa: The Lost Boys Foundation.  These were just from our group, there were many others.  That is all we did in class today.

The Really Long Class

When the bell rang for class to get started today, we talked about how class went on Friday without Mr. Schick there.  Then only for five minutes (A timer was set) we would talk about the blogs, why were people not blogging?  Every week the ratio has gone down and he made it clear that we need, to do them, and it is an easy way to get points.  Then we went on to watch the movie.  From what we watched today was that all of the lost boys me up at a reunion, but John was getting mad at some of them because they weren't sending money and helping their people back in Ethiopia.  Also, that they were dressing like "Americans" and "Gangsta's"  and just too worried about cars and those sorts of things.  (The Dinka tribe is where they were all from.  Very tall people.)  John met up with his mother and sister and in the airport they started crying.  His mom was on the ground crying, then doing this loud scream type thing to express he joy, also, throughout the airport she was dancing.  Panther is going to Africa to build a school in Sudan since he has his high school diploma and his associates degree.  Also, he went mainly to marry the woman he loves, so he did.  John is helping his family and people constantly even while he wants to open a medical clinic.  John has his bachelor's degree at Syracuse, and is the president of the Lost Boys Foundation.  Sadly, Daniel never found his family, but he joined the Job Corps and is supporting himself.  After the movie we had some discussion about what we as freshman students could do to help the Dinka tribe and people who are in those refugee camps.   Some things I have come up with are listed below:

• Donate Money to the refugee camps or the foundation of Lost Boys
• Send Supplies
• Go to Sudan and Physically help out
• Go to events and walks (if they are near)
• Sponsor events
• Get other people involved
• Spread the Information!