Cold War America, Day 2 - Class Recap

 Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Japan. Today, we talked about the United States dropping the atomic bomb. President Truman was insistent on not using it on Tokyo. Picture taken January 2014.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to your weekend! Only eight more weeks of school left in the year! Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets:
SS.HS.KN.ALT.09: I can identify how technological knowledge and innovation shapes a society, place, or region.
SS.HS.KN.ALT.17: I can explain the process of change and continuity in a society, place or region.
SS.HS.KN.ALT.23: I can describe the influences, impacts and resolutions of historical conflicts.

Soundtrack: “Bomb The World” by Michael Franti & Spearhead. Very applicable lyrics for our day of talking about the atomic bomb, including "We can bomb the world to pieces, But we can't bomb it into peace."

AGENDA 4/18/14:
News Brief /Blog Recap
Pro/Con: The Bomb
Cold War Primary Sources
Grade Conferences

Homework: Missing and/or late work to me by next Tuesday (only A day next week) for progress report grades. Read the blog! Next news brief: Ally

News Brief: This is the story that Christine brought in today: KGW.com - Reservoir to be flushed because of urinating teen. As I said in class, animals deposit waste in the reservoirs all the time. It is a little strange to flush 38 million gallons away because one guy urinated in it, but I certainly understand the perception problem.

Pro/Con: The Bomb: This picked back up where we left off last class. If you missed class or wanted to see the document to debate from again, here it is:

wednet.edu - Was the Atomic Bomb Necessary to Win World War II?

The format I used was to pair everyone up and then have one person start on the YES side for about a minute and a half. Then the second person went for the same time, with no interruption. After that, I had each side choose their favorite point that they had heard from their partner, and begin a 30 second final round by arguing the opposite side that they started, using that point. Typing all that just now, I realize that sounds absurdly complicated in print, but it really was not. Thanks for your participation here! After the debating was done, we did a 5 minute free write on these questions:

What is your actual opinion on whether or not the United States should have used the atomic bomb on Japan? What is the single best reason to support your position?

It seemed like the class was about split down the middle on whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used.

Cold War Primary Sources: After the debate, I passed out a class set of copies regarding some beginning of the Cold War sources. I also gave every student a worksheet that had to do with reading and analyzing the sources. If you missed class, or wanted to check them out again, here are the materials that I used:

Stanford.edu - Cold War Primary Sources

Along with the timeline (that I read aloud), I showed part of this clip from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, about the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe:

The other primary source that I used was this website containing President Truman's diary entries from the lead up to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan:

PBS.org - Entries from President Truman's Diary

In particular, the last one, about not dropping the bomb on Tokyo, and focusing on military targets is interesting. Of course the majority of the deaths from the bombs were civilians. 

Grade Conferences: As students were working on the Cold War primary sources packet, I called everyone up to go over grades. If you would like to improve your grade by the progress report, hopefully you know exactly what you need to do now. Remember that grades are always posted by student ID number in the classroom, as well. Keep working hard! I will try and see how many DBQs I can grade over the weekend!