Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Native Americans, Day 7 - Class Recap


A river near Balanced Rock in Idaho. Western Idaho and Northeastern Oregon was the territory of the Nez Perce, which we learned about today in class.

Dear class,

Welcome back! We are winding down our unit on Native Americans, as this will be the last full week of it. Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets Addressed: 
Behavior LT 3: I can communicate and work effectively within a team or group.
Critical Thinking LT 5: I can justify and support arguments or interpretation with appropriate evidence.

Soundtrack: "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" by Ennio Morricone. Selected for today because of the showdown between the Nez Perce and the United States Army in the excerpts of the documentary we watched.

AGENDA 10/23/19:
News Brief - Himari
Letter Answers
War and Nonviolence
Chief Joseph

Homework: Read the blog. Turn in all missing work ASAP. The next news brief is assigned to: Ephram.

News Brief: Today's news brief was brought in by Himari, who selected an article about this story: NYTimes.com - Trump Calls Impeachment Inquiry a ‘Lynching’. We discussed this article for a bit, and then moved on.

We also checked in to see if anyone was up to anything interesting or fun outside of class this weekend.

Ephram was selected to do the next news brief.

As part of the news brief, we also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):


Letter Answers: Last class, we investigated what assimilation meant for Native Americans. To begin this, I passed out this set of definitions and questions for the PowerPoint:


Before going through the PowerPoint, we looked at the defined terms together as a class. The bottom of the first page was space for any additional notes students wanted to take on the presentation:


The last slide of the PowerPoint is a reference to this letter, which was sent to the Grand Ronde School in 1902:


Students were asked to answer questions about the 1902 letter on the second page/back side of their vocabulary sheet with notes. We went through these answers together in class today, as we did not last class.

War and Nonviolence: To begin this section, I asked students to say which of the following quotes they most agreed with:

"Whensoever hostile aggressions..require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1806 in a letter to Andrew Jackson

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence."
— Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, 1964

The main question here is: is war sometimes necessary, or can problems always be solved nonviolently? I had the class think about this and then we debated it together.

Chief Joseph: We then watched clips from the Ken Burns documentary "The West: Episode 6 - Fight No More Forever" (available on YouTube here - queued to start at the main segment we watched). The lesson we followed (roughly) is available on the supplemental materials to the documentary, here (just Activity I). As we watched the film, we paused to have discussions based on the questions posed. I also had students answer these questions as we watched:


We did not finish this in class, due to the shortened schedule for Wednesday. This is where we will pick back up on Friday: After the film, I showed this map, which will be related to a question on the DBQ (Documents Based Question) that students will be completing, starting next class:


After this, it was work time to complete any notes or activities missed so far in the Native American unit, as we will start preparing for the DBQ next class. See you then!

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