Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog, this installment being about politics. No that doesn’t mean I will be weighing in on what’s happening in America or England, although as of this week I no longer have the right to be an EU citizen due to Brexit. Instead, this post is about political ideologies and the political spectrum.

We started the short unit with a quiz about the political spectrum which I was absent for. The results were poor and wouldn’t really have been any different had I been there. We took the same quiz the next day as well as the next 3 or 4 days. Eventually based off repetition we started doing significantly better on this quiz. I came into the unit with a very baseline knowledge of the political spectrum. I could tell you that Communism was very far left, and I could tell you that fascism is very far right, and I knew there were lots of ideologies near the middle. After a couple days of quizzes, we had a decent long lecture that spanned over a couple classes. This lecture described many of the big ideologies as well as the more niche ideologies such as environmentalism. Not that it is unimportant or a bad ideology but it’s somewhat of a side ideology.

The next step was taking a quiz that would place us on the political spectrum both left to right, and up and down. Going into the quiz I knew I would be on the left side of the spectrum but wasn’t sure how far over I would be, and I really didn’t know if I would be up or down. Here is my placement:

As you can see I was relatively accurate with my left to right prediction of being left, and when I think about it the distance makes a lot of sense and doesn’t surprise me. For up and down, in some sense I am surprised because I didn’t know what to expect, but after reflecting for a while, I agree with where it has me placed. I’m not one to vow for anarchism or anything near that, however giving a little less power to politicians is something I agree with.

After looking closely at the results here, we were tasked with another quiz. This one placing us on the same spectrum just in Canadian politics terms. I unfortunately don’t have a screen shot of this one, but I was placed very similarly on the left and right spectrum, however instead of being down, I was up about the same amount. After talking to one of my teachers about why this might be, he gave me a fair explanation that made a lot of sense to me. He said that you could pretty much fit all of Canadian politics into just one side of the spectrum, so it’s really just representative of a smaller sample size. So even though they were in fairly different locations, there’s a good chance they’re actually relatively close to each other.

The other main task from this unit was following a very specific note taking form, for our quizzes and lectures. The way that made the most sense to me was described as the “standard” way. Which was simply making headers of different topics, followed by many small bullet points under each one. If you would like to have a look at my notes you can by clicking here.

This unit was very interesting for me because it was about something I really hadn’t learned that much about. Of course I had a basic understanding coming into the unit from the many conversations that happen in my family about Brexit and Trump. So to be able to see where I really stand on these topics is useful information, not just in said conversations, but just in life. It’s very useful to have opinions in the world of politics whether they’re strong or not.