POP QUIZ!!!!

Today, a really big surprise awaited us in Western Civilization class. Actually, let’s make that two surprises. The first was that we had a pop quiz today. The second is, even though I’ve had Mr. Schick last semester for Human Geo, I never thought Mr. Schick would give us an honest to goodness pop quiz. Today’s quiz was actually a short one, a scantronette as Mr. Schick called it, with only five questions. Only he did not waste any paper on this quiz. He just wrote all out on a powerpoint and read it to us and we just bubbled in our answer, and if we missed a question, well, “TOO BAD!!” Mr. Schick just read the question stayed on the slide for about ten more seconds then we moved on. However, the quiz was not difficult as long as you took some time out of the time given to us to study.    

John Green video

Today, in another exciting edition of Mr. Schick’s Western Civilization class we watched a video that provided another source to back up Jared Diamond’s theory of geographic luck. The narrator of this video is someone by the name of John Green. Due to the speed of which he delivered the information to us, Mr. Schick told us that we don’t have to take notes on the video and just absorb it. Also, In my opinion, I think it would be sort of redundant to take notes on it any way, since we already have notes on the textbook. After watching it once over, Mr. Schick replayed it for us a second time only this time we paused it throughout the video to discuss what John Green was talking about. However, we only got six minutes and twenty seconds into the video when the bell rang and everyone had to go to advisory.

The Agricultual Revolution

Today, in West Civ. with Mr. Schick, we discussed the textbook reading that we did for the BLOG assignment over the weekend. In addition to this Mr. Schick changed his prediction about the class from wonderful to irksome. Partly because of people not understanding what their expectations were for the BLOG assignment. Well, in any case, we wrote down some important looking information in our notes. These notes include things such as the fact that the first humans appeared in Africa around 200,000 years ago. We also learned that there was a global Human Race around 14,000 years ago. Some more vocab to add to our list, we learned that the Paleolithic Age refers to the Old Stone Age, whereas the Neolithic Age refers to the New Stone Age. The Agricultural Revolution, which was probably the most important thing that we learned today, took place during the Neolithic age and included a major leap for Humanity. This leap was in many different areas such as rising of population, farming, a more distinct social hierarchy, religion, and technology (primarily the invention of the wheel and plow).

Geographic Luck BLOG assignment

After reading Learning Objective 1(and partly into LO² by accident) in the text book, I think that Jared Diamond’s theory of geographic luck is accurate. First, before we look at the historical evidence for this theory, it may help to review what Jared’s theory was. Diamond’s theory of geographic luck states that the ultimate reason to why some civilizations are so successful and some aren’t, is not because some races are genetically superior, but rather, due to how geographically lucky a particular group of people were. Those groups were lucky because the plants and animals that led to a successful civilization just happened to thrive in one area, the Middle East. Now let’s take a look at the evidence that I read in the textbook. In LO¹, I read that the first permanent settlements that actually thrived were generally located in the Middle East. The key word here is “permanent,” because in the hunting and gathering life style, you can move to different areas as the food and resources move, whereas with a permanent settlement, you need the required resources to be able to handle the climate which you are living in. It just so happens that these resources include wheat and animals such as pigs, cattle, camels, etc. What do these species all have in common? They are all able to be tamed and they can all survive in the Middle East! These lucky nations are some of the prosperous civilizations that you read about in your history text book that have influenced our society today. These civilizations include Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, Egypt, etc. However, Mesopotamia did not have as great of an impact on history as Rome or Egypt did because many of their villages were abandoned due to a major climate change in the area, causing the failure of crops and other resources that had the climate requirement.   

LO-1

Friday was our second day of Mr. Schick’s Western Civilization course, and unlike day to of Human Geo, we actually took notes! In class we read and took notes on the first page of LO¹ these notes consisted of the following. The first piece of info that we took note of were the basic features of Human Existence, language, religion, art, technology, farming, family life, and village communities. We also wrote down a definition of prehistory, which is made up of the millions of years in which humans advanced in organization and skills, but did not write anything down. We also read was that early humans developed writing, religion, science, technology, art, and literature. If you look back in the notes we took you’ll notice that some of these early skills are some of the basic human features. The last major concept that we read was that once their nation was developed enough, they would communicate with other civilizations that had cargo they wanted and they either traded or went to war. For example, if Mr. Schick’s people made contact with the Danvilonians and Mr. Schick found out they had awesome llama products, they would either say “Want to trade?” or “OUR LLAMAS!!!” and go to war.

Fresh Start

Today, I shall no longer be blogging for Mr. Schick’s Human Geography class but rather, his Western Civilization course! Mr. Schick is foreseeing that our class shall be a great one; and so it shall!!! Once everyone is set up with their g-mail account, we are going to start rocking and kick off what is going to be a great semester! For Mr. Schick’s returning students he instructed us to go to our blogs, and create a new BLOG (not a new g-mail, but we just went to our BLOG and just clicked the “new BLOG” button, and were done. Thus, the real challenge we need to tackle is getting all those new students set up with a BLOG, and pray we don’t have to have any strongly worded E-mails to Google again to get our BLOG’s fixed again. Though I highly doubt that we will have any trouble with that because we’ve seen it happen and we know how to handle it.