Philosophy of Government, Day 1 - Class Recap

A statue of our first President, George Washington (I hope you knew that on the Citizenship test today), outside Federal Hall in New York City. Photo taken in 2009.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to your first weekend of the school year! I am definitely looking forward to resting up a bit after a frenetic start to the year. Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets Addressed: 

SS.HS.KN.ALT.04: I can explain how different ideological movements and philosophies shape politics.

SS.HS.CO.ALT.05: I can communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing.

Soundtrack: "This is How We Do It" by Montell Jordan. Mostly because of the lyrics "it's Friday night, and I feel alright."

AGENDA 9/5/14:
News Brief
Introduction Video
Citizenship
Government Overview
Philosophy

Homework: Read the blog and post a comment (if you have not already). Seth has the next news brief. Have a great weekend!

News Brief: Brendan had the news brief today and did an excellent job leading us off. He submitted his paper to me via email and talked about this article: OregonLive.com - Cover Oregon board will vote Thursday on whether health exchange goes away. We talked about what "Cover Oregon" and "Obamacare" are, as well as the information that the taxpayers of Oregon have paid $248 million (I said around $300 million in class) for a website that does not work. A super interesting way to start off the day and discussion. Thanks, Brendan! Seth, you are next up.

Introduction Video: To get into looking at our government, I played this video of high school students trying to answer questions about social studies:

We laughed at some of the responses, then I flipped the script and had the class try and citizenship test!

Citizenship: Here was the pre-test that I passed out in class. All sorts of good questions about how the U.S. government is structured and works.

Google Drive: United States Government Citizenship Test

I believe Abby E. and Luke were our high scorers, with 24 and 23 correct out of 30. We definitely have work to do!

Government Overview: Next up, I passed out another pre-assessment sheet (this day was a bit weird in structure because of the assembly schedule). The questions were:

1. What is the purpose of government?
2. What does a government do?
3. What role should the government play in people’s lives?
4. What do you know about the structure of the United States government? Draw a web!

We had a good discussion about all of this (we will get into specific details and cases here soon). Thanks!

Philosophy: We didn't have a whole ton of time at the end of class, but I wanted to start looking at some of the philosophers of government during the Enlightenment period. Here's the PowerPoint I started going through (we only did slides 6 and 7 today, and I won't go over the entire presentation, so just focus on those for now):

Google Drive: Philosophers of Government PowerPoint

All in all, a pretty packed day! Thanks for hanging in there and for reading the blog. Have a great weekend - see you on Tuesday!