Posted on June 16, 2018
Politics, Debates, and Some Boys on an Island
We have just finished our final unit in PLP this year and it was a big one. We learned about many things including human nature, politics, and how to debate. When we first learned about this unit I was very excited because I love to debate and I find human nature very interesting. I couldn’t wait to get started.
Our first task in this unit was to sort ourselves into 6 groups for the unit. We have 25 students in our class so we had to sort ourselves into 5 groups of 4 and one group of 6. We were given no instructions and had only 20 mins to make even groups. I know this may sound easy but we have a lot of very strong minded people in our class so this was quite the challenge. We tried to start off by using a talking stick but that didn’t work at all and by the end it was ripped apart. We then had a few people take on leadership roles but that left some others very unhappy. There was yelling, standing on chairs, and tons of discussion but we managed to make 6 strong groups of people with many different skills. This was the first social experiment that we had to do to start this unit.
Now you may be wondering what these teams are for. They would be our groups for the debate and they were also our island. For this unit we had to read Lord of the Flies by William Golding and in that book many boys had to survive on an island so that’s what we had to do too. Of course we didn’t actually have to survive on an island. For about two weeks we played a game where you had to collect points from doing good things such as handing in work on time and being a good student during class. We could also lose points from doing bad things such as forgetting your iPad or being late to class. I was in a group with Hannah, Lucas, and Aiden and we named our group the NY Islanders. Here is the points system. 
One of the other big aspects of the points game was the book quizzes. Every week for three weeks we did a quiz on 4 chapters of the book. Each quiz had 10 questions and if you got all of them write you got 100 points for your island which was a lot. I really enjoyed reading the book and I got really into it so my group did really well on the quizzes. We were one of only 2 groups to get 10/10 on one of the quizzes. We ended up coming in second out of the 6 teams by only 20 points which was pretty good. Here is the final results of the points game.
If you have read Lord of the Flies then you know that it is full of symbols. Pretty much everything in that book is a symbol for something. Symbols were one of our main focuses while reading the books. One activity that we had to do was fill out a work sheet and write down what we thought certain things symbolized. Here is my worksheet.
Another thing we were focusing on while reading the book was the characters. They are all very different and change some much throughout the book. Our job was to fill out a character chart as we read the book. Here is my character chart.
A huge part of this unit was learning about different concepts. We were introduced to the concepts at the beginning of the unit.
• Power and Authority
• Humanity and Inhumanity
• Violence and Destruction
• Human nature
• Civilization and Savagery
• Individualism and Community
To learn about each concept we started off by making posters and writing down anything we could think of that related to the concept. Here are our posters.
To help further understand these concepts we had to write paragraphs on a couple of them. In these paragraphs we had to choose a topic within a concept and explain how it shows the concept. For example I did one of my paragraphs on how Japan’s actions during WWII showed inhumanity. Here are my two paragraphs.
It was very important that everyone knew and understood these concepts because they are what are final project was based on. For our final project we would be doing a debate. Each group would debate against another group on a topic based on one of these concepts. Debating was something we have never done before so we had to do a lot of preparation for these debates. One thing we did to prepare was play a couple debate games. For example one game we played was called pass the buck. To play the game one person from the group is given an object (the buck) and they are given a topic to talk about. They then have to give a short speech to their group giving their opinion on the topic then they pass the buck and the next group member has to add on to what they said. This game helped us with quick thinking on the spot and learning how to add on to what others had said.
Many of us had no idea about the structure of a debate so we had to listen to 30 mins of a debate podcast called Intelligence Squared. I listened to one about online dating and it was really interesting. It helped get a better idea about how a debate works. Another thing we did to prepare was watched a Ted Talk about the 7 secrets to being a great public speaker. This was extremely helpful and I learned so much from it. Here are my notes from the podcast and Ted Talk.
A big part of debating is quick thinking so to help us with that a few students did impromptu speeches. Our teacher gave them a topic such as “what is your favourite sport?” And they had 1 min to give a speech about it. While they were giving their speeches we had a list of things you absolutely should not do while public speaking and we had to see if they did them. 
Finally after doing all of this preparation we were given our topic and the group we would be debating against. We got to put down our top three choices for which concept we wanted to do and my group got our first choice which was human nature. The statement we were debating was “be it resolved that it is human nature to put yourself above others” and we were debating against Mimi, Parker, Ethan, and Kyle. Both times wanted to be on the pro side of this debate so we flipped a coin and my group ended up on the con side. After we were given our topic we had about a week to prepare our argument by gathering as much information from our units throughout the year into a concept chart. Here is my group’s concept chart and preparation.
Finally after all of this was done it was time to debate. There were three different debates and they were all happening on different days. My group was lucky enough to get to go on the third and final day so we got to learn from the other debates. The debate was set up with each side having a tall table and the host in between the tables. 
The concept of the first debate was power and authority. Because we hadn’t done a debate before the structure of that debate wasn’t that great. Both sides had great arguments but we knew we had to make some changes for the second debate. One of the changes we made was spilling of the rebuttal into two one minute sections instead of one two minute section. Here is the structure of the second and third debate.
When it was finally my group’s turn to debate I was a little nervous but very excited. The debate went great. Everyone and lots to say and both sides had very strong arguments. At the end the students and teachers voted for which side won the debate and my side won! I was very happy to win because my group worked extremely hard on our arguments. In PLP we like to have evidence of our work so we recorded all of the debates and turned them into podcasts. The first debates statement was ” Be it resolved that power and authority lead to corruption” and the second groups statement was ” be it resolved that in order to survive you have to be savage”. Here they are.
Throughout this unit we also learned about politics. I’m not going to lie, I was not very excited for this part of the unit but it was more interesting than I expected. We started off with learning bout the different types of government. Each group had to do a presentation explaining a type of government and my group did anarchy. Here is our document with all of our research and pictures.
The next thing we learned about was Canada’s constitution. A constitution is a body of fundamental principles that state how an organization is governed. There are for parts to the constitution: The rule of law, freedom, democracy, and minority rights. These give us our rights and keep our country organized. After that we learned about the political spectrum. The political spectrum is the spectrum that measures how much towards one side of politics you are. For example you could be wing which is more conservative or you could be left wing which is more liberal. We all had to take a quiz to figure where we were on the spectrum and I was close to the middle but defiantly more left wing.
Another thing we learned about was who’s who in Canada’s government. To do this we had to learn about the different positions in our government and then we researched who holds each position. We had to make a picture of this and here’s mine. 
The last thing we learned about politics was the electoral systems. In Canada we have a system call first past the post. In this system the person or party with the most votes wins. It’s very simple compared to other systems around the world. I don’t even understand most of the other systems but if you would like to read about them you can click Here.
As you can see we learned a ton of stuff in this unit. I learned about human nature and many other concepts from Lord of the Flies. I learned about how to debate, the structure of a debate, and how to be a good public speaker. I also learned a lot about politics. I had so much fun with this unit because I had never really had a debate before and I didn’t realize how much I loved it. I am not a very strong public speaker so I had to step out of my comfort zone a little for the debate but I ended up having so much fun doing it. This was a perfect unit to end the year off with because we got to reflect on all of the other amazing units we did. I am so happy with how everything went this unit and I can’t wait to see what we’ll do next year.