Hello everyone!

I am back again with another blog post for my school work. For the past month or so, we have been working on a very ✨snazzy✨ project – a mock trial! Everyone got put into a group with a revolution. I got put into the French Revolution group. There was also the American Revolution, Xinhai Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. In this post I will be going over what we did for this project and hopefully you’ll be able to see how much work, research, and time went into this very cool project.

First off, Nation X. Basically this was a simulation for how things can go terribly wrong in a society with an unfit ruler in charge *cough cough* Colton *cough cough*. We were put into groups (A, B, C, D). Each group was assigned roles and got paid a certain amount every day. You could buy things from the store. There was definitely a huge gap in between the wealthy and poor. Groups A and B were the labourers of the society while groups C and D had all the power and could arrest anyone when they felt like it. The entire goal of this simulation was to see if we could create a fair and functional society. I am sad to say that we definitely DID NOT do this as the boys and girls (with a few exceptions) separated and built a wall in the middle of the classroom. This overall was a fun and interesting start to this project because we got to see a glimpse of what the content of our revolutions would be like. You can read more about the rules of this simulation here and you can read my reflection below:

Next, Crane Brinton’s Theory of Revolution. Now, this does sound daunting however it’s quite simple. There are 4 stages: incubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery. What we did was listen to Ms. Maxwell give a long speech on them. It was actually very interesting and, well, we had to pay attention otherwise we would have been very lost on the activity that we would be doing. What we had to do was interpret and re-tell Crane Brinton’s theory in a visual way. Below is what I decided to do:

A very important piece of building knowledge was the graphic organizer. I will keep this short seeing as I could ramble on and on about this assignment but this was pretty much where we had to do our own research on our revolutions with provided sources and create something to organize all of our information in a concise way that would be easily presentable. For this, I definitely chose a more simplistic route for this because I didn’t want to be reading paragraphs and paragraphs when I had to tell other people about the French Revolution. So I kept it simple with a few key triggers/key characters/continuity and change. I really liked how I delivered my presentation in more of a story form rather than a lecture. I think this assignment was a great was for me to understand what events happened in the French Revolution. Here’s my final graphic organizer:

Another important part of this project was Animal Farm. This was a book written by George Orwell that we dissected and discussed until we found every hidden meaning in. This story of animals rebelling on a farm was an analogy for the Russian Revolution. Every week we had new chapters to read and after every one, we had to write a little summary of the chapter with any questions we had. When we came into class, we would have to discuss what we read about and about our thoughts and feelings towards what we read. I really liked this because I got other people’s perspectives on the same thing I read I and I found it interesting how people interpreted the same thing differently. I also like how we tried different ways of have discussions. My favourite was the leader one where one person would start it off with a question, then we went around and talked about it. Once we had talked a lot about this book we had to connect it to Crane Brinton’s Theory of Revolution. I think that this was a great way for me to use Crane Brinton’s Theory of Revolution to show my understanding of why revolutions happen.

Ok, so now things get more interesting. Once all the building knowledge on our revolution was done, we moved on to preparing for the trial. This included building an affidavit to swap with the defence, preparing a witness, and writing a script. The first thing we did though, was put together an affidavit. To start off, everyone went home and researched some evidence to help their side. During this time we also picked a witness that we would be directly examining and the defence would be cross-examining. We chose Helen Maria Williams, who later, in the mock trial would be played by me. After we were done writing our affidavits, we swapped them with the other team. Once all the swapping was finished, we came up with cross-examination questions for their witness. After they did this for our witness (Helen Maria Williams), we came together to create one massive script. We ran over it a few times before presenting it in a full dress rehearsal. This was a great way to see my knowledge of how legal teams prepare for trials. 

I’m so proud of our team for going onstage and giving a very cool and interesting mock trial. Thank you so much to Carter, Cooper, Cole, Theryn, and Makenna. With all of your hard work, we ended up winning the case! Great job!

Thanks for reading this post and I hope you enjoyed it!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. I almost forgot! Here’s our a video of our final presentation: