Hello, Internet.

So, you may know the book Lord of the Flies. It’s a pretty common read for high school students, and centers around topics such as society, innocence, human nature, evil, and killing pigs.

We read Lord of the Flies in Humanities recently, following which we took some time to create a character chart analyzing the symbolism of different characters within the book.

The main character is a boy called Ralph who becomes the chief of a group of boys trapped on an island. Ralph is a born leader, and spends most of the book trying to follow the best course of action to get the boys saved, such as setting up camp, and keeping a signal fire going.

The story features two main deuteragonists: a boy called Jack, who is also a leader, but functions very differently from Ralph, and a boy called Piggy, who does his best to help and support Ralph in his role as chief. Jack is the leader of a group of choirboys, and he spends most of the book slowly turning more and more to the darker side of human nature as he goes from hunting pigs to being the head of a tribe of savages. Piggy, on the other hand, is one of the only characters who stands by Ralph until the end, eventually getting killed by a member of Jack’s tribe.

Over the course of the book, we see the group of boys get further and further from civilization as they attempt to function on their own. Eventually, those who are still alive are rescued, and they seem to come back to their senses a bit and regret what they’ve done.

 

We held three debates that addressed some of the themes of this book. My group argued against the statement that “in order to to survive, you must be savage”.

We had to draw from the subjects of some of our past work this year, such as WWI, social justice, Silicon Valley, and WWII. While it was fairly easy to reason why savagery was a bad thing in terms of the world wars and the history of social issues, it was a little more difficult to draw on our knowledge of Silicon Valley.

We won our debate, which one of our classmates then edited into a podcast.

In order to prepare for our debate, we listened to a podcast featuring professional debates, watched some videos and did some exercises pertaining to improving public speaking skills, and held a practice debate in class.

Another part of this unit was learning about different systems of government, including anarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, and dictatorship. We talked about different ways that parties are elected: first past the post, proportional representation, ranked ballot, and mixed member proportional. We also learned more specifically about the Canadian government, the charter of rights and freedoms, and the constitution.

As someone who enjoys both debates and general public speaking, I really enjoyed this unit and the exercises we did to prepare for our debate.

Toodles.