There are over 225,000 court cases every year in British Columbia alone but I didn’t think I would be a judge in one at 14. Hi, I’m Zachary Veitch and this is my story.
Ok but in all seriousness, the project we just finished was about a tone of different revolutions, you would get put into a specific one and you had to go to court debating wether or not it was effective or not. The group I was in was trying to say that the french revolution was effective and the group we were agains was trying to say that it was ineffective (Spoiler alert, they won). In short, you had to determine the effectiveness of a revolution (as legal teams). And that exactly is the driving question. In our summative posts we are supposed to answer the driving question. So here is my answer. But first just to clarify, the specific driving question was “How can we, as legal teams, determine the effectiveness of a revolution?” And my answer is “by using the criteria for an effective revolution established by the PLP 9 court”.
If you are reading this and you are not one of my teachers or classmates then you are probably wondering what “the criteria for an effective revolution established by the PLP 9 court” is. The criteria for an effective revolution was made by our class based of off the Crane Brinton theory on revolutions. We also studied the five biggest revolutions in history and read the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell, so we had a pretty good understanding about what made a revolution good or bad.
Now Im going to go all the way back to the beginning of the project to the infamous “Nation X”. Nation X was a simulation of sorts. We got put into one of four groups and depending on the group you were put in your nation x experience would differ. Group A would get payed 1 dollar a day, Group B would get payed 2 dollars a day, Group C would get payed 5 dollars a day and Group D (the one I was in) would get payed 10 dollars a day. Group A would write about their daily life all day, Group B ran the store, Group C were the police and Group D were the king and the kings right hand men or women. My favourite part about Nation X was that the people from Group A, B and C weren’t allowed to talk to the people from Group D without their permission, so if they did I would put them in jail. If you want to know more about Nation X read my reflection here.
Right when we got assigned to a specific revolution, we had to research as much as we could on it. To remember all the information we found, we had to put it into a graphic organizer. We had 2 or so days to do it and it had to also tell a story (I just made a timeline). To get my information I mostly watched videos, one of the ones that I really enjoyed is called “The French Revolution Oversimplified”.
You can see my graphic organizer here.
Remember when I said we read animal farm? The innocent book about some cute farm animals who take over their farm? Well its actually based off of the Russian revolution. When I heard that I was very surprised but I started finding some similarities between the two. The most notable of them was that the pig named Napoleon was based off of Joseph Stalin. After finishing the book we had to write a response to explaining the anatomy of t he revolution in animal farm through the use of Crane Brinton’s Theory. I also added some things about the Russian revolution into it. Here is my written response if you want to read it.
Paragraph Russian English written animal brinton multi revolution farm response
The final product for this project is a “Mock Trial” and are teachers wanted it to be as close to a real court case as possible. So they made each group do an affidavit. It had to include everything that a real affidavit would. For example; the names of everyone in the prosecution and defence, a list of exhibits, photos of each exhibit and the signature of all the people involved with the affidavit. We had to redo it a couple times which sucked but in the end it was a very good affidavit. Here it is if you want to read it.
And of course, thew thing that ended it all, the “Mock Trial”. I played in two different “Mock Trials”, once as a judge and once ad a lawyer. I played a lawyer in the French Revolution Mock Trial, and I volunteered to play a judge in the American revolution Mock Trial. It was really fun doing the acting but I think the funnest thing that we did that day was going around and seeing the things that the other groups were doing. also if you wanted to read the script for the french revolution it’s here.
To conclude this blog post, I always thought that acting with your classmates was weird because every time I did it in elementary school I had to sing. But I found this experience overall very fun and hope that I get to do more of it in the future.
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