Here is my recommended song for this post.

 

For the past month we have been doing a unit all based around the idea of how we organize ourselves. We read the famous novel, Lord of The Flies, did a debate and many activities where we learned about the Canadian government system.

We began the unit by putting ourselves in teams of 4-5. We did this by way of class oraganizing. Ms Maxwell left the room and told us to organize teams that are fair and include people with varying skills and personalities. We needed up with some pretty alright teams except it was very chaotic when it came to figuring it out. By the end of it I was in a group of 4 with Kate, Isobel and Simon.

 

After determining teams we began reading Lord of The Flies. I had previously read LOTF when I was in elementary school (I read it on my own because I was interested in it). I did not like it very much when I read it the first time so I wasn’t very excited to read it again. I found the book very confusing and dense. Nonetheless I still began reading and focusing on the team quizzes and the information we would need for it.

Every week we would read a certain section of the book and then have to do a quiz with our team answering various question about the section. My team always got 9/10. Which is really annoying because if we got 10/10 we would win points.

Throughout the unit we had a points system and each team would receive points for good deeds and having work in on time. My team came dead last. Some of my group members weren’t the best at keeping up to date with their assignments so we lost lots of points because of that. Other than that though we did pretty well.

For the first three weeks of the unit we read LOTF but we also did some activities.

We focused on two things. Governments and the different types there’s are and then how Canada is governed. We also did various activities that helped build our debate/public speaking skills.

 

For government we looked at Canada and created a tree of power going from ministers all the way up to the queen.

We also also looked at the different election systems. Currently there is a lot of people in Canada who want to move to a different election system so their was an article on the different electoral systems that Canada has considered adopting.

Since our final project was a debate podcast the public speaking activities were really helpful. My favourite was called pass the buck.

It’s where your group gets an item and one person in the group is given a topic. They then discuss this topic, without telling everyone else what it is, until we are told to swap. The person holding the item, who was also speaking, then throws it to someone else who then has to talk about what they think the topic is. It then goes around until everyone has spoken. The activity helps with thinking on the spot and processing what everyone else is saying and using it to better what you say.

 

After those first three weeks we began working on our debate. We would debate in our groups and be plotted against another group. We also had a few different topics to pick from to debate about; Power and Authority, Humanity and Inhumanity, Violence and Destruction, Human nature, Civilization and Savagery, and Individualism and Community. My group picked Civilization and Savagery. We were then partnered up with the group we would debate against. My group ended up debating against Robbie, Willa, Reid, Sofia and Calum.

Our statement was “Be it resolved that to survive you must be savage.” My group was pretty happy with the statement and we were also arguing for which was really fun.

We spent a week coming up with different arguments and points and counterpoints. The one problem was one of my group members (Kate) was going to be away during the debate day. (because of field hockey, of all things). We had to make sure our points were only from the units we have done this year which took out a lot of our ideas but we were still able to come up with a few. We focused on LOTF and a little bit on WWII but tried to also cover some general statements about savagery and it’s involvement in the creation and survival of humanity.

 

On the day of the debate I was pretty excited and confident in what I was going to say.

Overall the debate went went well but I struggled a little with keeping with the flow of the debate because I wanted to keep everything mostly centered around the units we did this year and I think that cost us. I really wanted to draw from other units and other knowledge but I refrained from doing so which was really hard. It definetly would of been a little more beneficial to my teams arguments and we might have had more of a chance of winning the debate.

We ended up losing 10-8. It was pretty close but I felt we were slowly losing after each exchange of statements and it was hard to get back on top with the way it was all going.

Overall I really enjoyed the unit it was really helpful for me to work on my speaking skills but also look at the philosophy behind government and the ways we, as a people’ organize ourselves. The biggest skill I want to focus on going forward is my debating and arguing skills. I think it will be really beneficial in the future and I want to take every chance I can in speaking my mind and debating different points.