Classroom Post 14

Monday, November 5th, 2012

This is the first time I'm making one of these posts in a while, seeing as how last week was spent working on our integrated assignments, which you can see the final result of posted below.
 In class on Friday, we started the introduction into our new unit, the civil war, and consequently, slavery. We broke up into different groups of three and read different stories about slavery written by those who had experienced it. In one of the narratives, it talks about how the village the narrator lived in did have slaves, although they were treated almost as equals save for extra work and the usual social limitations that would have followed seniority anyway. I thought it was an interesting comparison, the slaves of the African tribes versus the slaves of the west. Both are in fact slave, but the western slaves are treated worse. Although how his tribe treated the slaves could have been and exaggeration on his part. The second reading was about a girl who was born a slave and thought her life was good for the most part, but looking back realized how ignorant she was. We made storyboards about each of the stories, which was a little confusing seeing as we had no idea what was relevant to what we were supposed to be writing down.
In class today, we shared our storyboards and copied down the information into Venn Diagrams, comparing the two stories and finding similarities between the situations as well as the different outlooks of someone who was born into slavery and someone who was forced into slavery. After that, we broke for lunch and were greeted with worksheets upon our return. The sheets had information about an important political figure, and my group had Abraham Lincoln. We didn't have time to read through the sheet, so we skimmed quickly in search of the information needed. We filled out our portion of a diagram sheet, and then broke up into different groups to get information about the people others had studied. We didn't finish, though, so I'm missing two of the five people.