Lord Of The Flies is what our final humanities unit of the year was called. This unit was the end of our grade ten year at high school and it was a very interesting one. One of the main focuses in the unit was to learn about many different concepts to do with humans and how we act . Some of our focusses were Power and Authority, Humanity and Inhumanity, Violence and Destruction, Human nature, Civilization and Savagery, Innocence and Evil and finally Individualism and Community. Our final part of this project was a debate that we would focus on one of these topics.
One of the first things that we did in this unit was start to read and discuss the book. Lord Of The Flies is a book that came out a very long time ago and is still used in today’s classes and is a very interesting book to read that can teach you a lot. There were a few things that we had to do for this unit and one of the first things was being put into groups that we would then do some of our work in. One of the things that we did was create a list of rules and punishments that we would use if we were stranded on an island like the boys in the book. Another thing that we would also do in our teams was different quizzes that were based on certain parts of the book as we read it.
There were a couple of different writing sections that we had to do for this unit. One thing that we had to complete was concept journaling. This was based on the concepts that I listed before. We got to choose which concept we were doing and focus on an event that showed that concept. There were many different things that we could have chosen to write about, but the concepts that I chose were Violence and Destruction and Humanity and Inhumanity. This writing was something that helped us grasp a better understanding of some of the examples and how humans act. One of the main part that I focused on was the Vancouver riots of 2011. This was something that was close to home for me and wrinitng and researching about it was very interesting.
During our reading we had to create a character analysis chart that we would fill in while reading the book. We had to keep filling out the chart for different characters to make sure we knew the differences between them and we were actually reading and understanding the book. One of the final assignments that we had to do for the book was to fill out a sheet that had to do with symbols of things that were in the book. It gave us an object and we had to write down what we thought that object symbolizes. This really made me think about what I had read in the book and really find out what the author was trying to get across to the audience when we wrote the book.
Another part of this unit was about politics and the Canadian Government. Not a lot of the people on the class knew a lot of about the Canadian Government so one of our assignments was to find a lot of different people in various positions of power in the Canadian Government. This helped understand who the people are that are running our country and now we understand a lot more about our country and how it works.
On top of learning who was in our government we also learned about what kind of government we use compared to the rest of the world and what kind of electoral system we use. There were a lot more forms of governments in the world than I thought there were and it was very interesting to learn about them. As for the electoral system we use, we were tasked with looking at many different types around the world and luckily for us we have the most basic system in the world as it is just based on how many votes each seat gets. This made it very easy for us to understand how different our government is from the rest of the world.
The final part of this unit was all about public speaking and speeches. There were a lot things that we did before our debate to help us prepare for it. For example one thing that we looked at was the 7 secrets of the greatest speakers. This was something that helped us gain a much better understanding of what makes a great speaker and we would eventually use some of the things later in our debate.
The debate took place in teams of 4 and we were arguing for and against a statement. The statement that our teams had was, “Be it resolved that power leads to corruption”, this was the statement that our team was arguing for. Right off the the bat our team was at a disadvantage because this statement was not something that we truly believe in. Debating for something that you don’t think is true is much harder than something that you think is correct. Either way we started planning for our debate by making opening and closing statements and preparing for what the other team was going to say. We based a lot of what we were going to say on the book and things that we had learned previously learned in the year like WWII and Hitler. Over all I think the debate went very well considering we had never really done an actual debate before and even though our team lost I think we did well.
These are the final debates put together by Sam, Aiden and Isobel.
This unit helped gain a lot of skills that I think I will need in the future. Public speaking is something that everybody has to do at some point in their life and this unit really helped me get a better understanding of it and how I can use different things to my advantage. I really enjoyed this unit as the book was something that I really enjoyed reading and I think it helped a lot with what we were learning in class. Thank you very much for reading this post as it I my last humanities post of the year and I hope you enjoyed reading it.