Visit 4 11/13

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” 
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

This quote represents the fundamental issue of both Drama and Social Studies. Everyone wants something. Wanting something is almost never inherently a good or a bad thing. What cost people are willing to pay, however, that's another story.

Our lesson today began with a prime example of someone chasing something that they are unlikely to ever obtain. There's a character with whom many within the sound of this blog will be familiar with, and that is Mr. Wile E. Coyote. His objective, or what he wants, has always been the same. He wants to catch and eat the Roadrunner. While his tactics, or the way he goes about seeking for his objective, may change, the goal always remains the same. I showed students the first couple minutes of the following video. 

After each failed attempt of the Coyote, I asked the students to identify his tactics, how they failed, and what might be a better way to go about it. We also discussed the roadrunner. The Roadrunner's objective was not only avoiding being eaten, but was to bother the coyote for doing so. His tactics then had to meet more than one objective at a time. The time when he ducks the rock to let the Coyote take the brunt of it is a good example of this. 

Then we got into a much trickier subject. With some better planning on my part this might not have been such a leap, but I trusted the students to put their thinking caps on and learn from the work they'd done so far.

I reminded the students that they'd represented five different nations the week before. Each nation had some kind of objective, and used some tactics. So I started out by asking what the different nations wanted in that period of history. The students weren't quite sure how to answer, so I asked more leading questions such as, "What did the famous exploerers do?" and "What were they looking for?" This led the students discuss some of the motives from the end of our lesson on 11/6.

Some of the students grasped it, but I wanted to help all the students really get a handle on it, so I asked the students to imagine that they had all come from the countries that they had been assigned to before, and they discovered a new land full of all the things they could want as a country. What things in this new land could there be to help them? Students offered up answers like "Gold" "Land for growing food" "Spices" and some other natural resources. In an effort to guide students towards other things that may be of interest to a nation, I asked the students what had caused the Native Americans to be defeated and they pointed out that  diseases and differences in technology had been a big problem for them. So I drew the picture on the right, and divided the land and resources amongst the different nations. Some had all the gold. Others had all the medicine, but little land, and so on. I asked each group to consider what their greatest need as a nation was, and what what they could do to obtain what they wanted. In other words, I helped them see that they as a group could have an objective, and as a nation they could use tactics to try to obtain what they wanted. At this point the students were very excited and came up with a wide variety of plans. They sent forth ambassadors to a great conference to share their plans with one another. 

The Native Americans had spices and a lot of land, but what they decided was most important to them as a group was Gold, which was held by the Portuguese. They figured that if they waited long enough the Portuguese would get tired of eating gross food, or may even starve from not eating, and so they could charge extreme prices for their spices and food. However if they refused to pay they would simply attack them when they were weak.

The Vikings had by far the most land, and the best quality of land. They determined they would trade with everyone but the Spanish and give up some land for some better resources, or do land swaps. 

The Portuguese proposed trades with everyone but wouldn't offer good prices to many people. 

The United Kingdom couldn't come to a conclusion and so they divided their Kingdom (fitting for who they represented) and came up with two plans. The Northern Kingdom decided to declare war on everyone since they had the best medicine, and had been notorious pirates in their home land, and figured they would beat anyone else. The Southern Kingdom was far less blood thirsty and simply wanted to be able to move into other Kingdoms and be doctors and nurses with their medicine. Then they could have more land by spreading out, but also help others. 

Finally, the Spanish who held the technology, wanted Gold and lots of it, so they offered peace to everyone but portugal and threatened to invade unless they were given most of their gold. 

Below is a chart of how the different nations responded to the proposals of the others.

Clearly, there were some differences of opinion. No one was approved of by more than 60% of the other nations, though most countries were ok with Spain invading Portugal. Tough crowd. This led to a short chat about how our choices are perceived by others. 

Until Next Time!