5 Page Test

Today in class we learned that our unit test is currently 5 pages. The one section of the test we talked about for majority of class was the first 15 questions on the test. The directions for this section is we have 15 minutes to look up 15 facts on the CIA World Factbook. We practiced for a couple questions and some of the easy ones we can get in under 10 seconds. After reviewing a few of those questions, we looked through more questions on the test. I learned my lesson last test after not studying and getting a 70%. For this test I will study and remember about this test. We did talk about how to prepare for this test and we came up with a few things. Playing around on the World Factbook, charging our computure, and like normal just looking over the notes. Mr. Schick said we still have a few topics to learn so the test shouldn't be for another week or so.

So Many Facts

Today in class we spent the first few minutes making sure there was nothing wrong with our grades (mistake wise) and getting everything figured out. After fixing all mistakes and errors, we started talking about our blogs from the past class. We shared and discussed facts from all of our blogs and I learned many things about our world and also our country. One fact that we learned that I found specifically really interesting was a fact about schooling around the country. The fact is labeled under the people and society portion in the world option. It is titled School Life Expectancy, and it basically means how long the average person on Earth goes to school. For both males and females the SLE is 12 years. This surprised me because I would've assumed it was much lower because of 3rd world countries that don't have many education opportunities. After learning about this, Patty decided to go up to the board and teach about who knows what. Then class ended because it was a D day and classes were shortened.

World Factbook Facts

The World Factbook, like mentioned in my last blog, is a website we have started to use in Mr. Schick's class this unit. It has information about every country there is and while going through the website, there were a few facts that stuck out to me in particular. The first thing that peeked  my interest was the transportation of the United States. More specifically, the amount of roadways we have. The United States has a total of 6,586,610 roadways, and we're ranked #1 in  comparison to every other country in the world. Another fact that stuck out to me was under the topic of communication. The United States has 395.881 million subscriptions to mobile cellular telephones. That is way over our population meaning a great amount of our population has 2 or more phones. The third fact I found interesting was the Pitcairn Islands, the smallest country/nation on the website in population, has a total population of 54 people. They currently have a growth rate of 0%, and the islands are located between Peru and New Zealand. While on the page of these islands, it shocked me that the size of these islands are less than 3/10 the size of Washington D.C. That is less than 50 sq km, and the coastline is only about 51km. The fifth and final fact I found that surprised me was that the highest growth rate was of 3.83%, and it was for the newest country, South Sudan. This came as a surprise to me because South Sudan is not in anyway a rich/ luxurious country, so why would the growth rate be so high? We then discussed this in class and found it was because the country of Sudan is in such a dangerous place people don't go to South Sudan by choice they go there to get away from Sudan. I am very glad we were assigned this because I have learned many interesting things that I most likely would not have learned on my own.

CIA World Factbook

Today in class we continued on with life expectancy and we talked about a new thing, TFR. This stands for total fertility rate, which is the average amount of children per women in an area. After learning about this, we hopped onto a website called the CIA World Factbook. We discovered that you can see a lot of information all in this one website. We started on the country of USA, and while clicking through we could see how it was ranked on the life expectancy scale, the TFR scale, and the infant mortality rate. Once we clicked on the scale, we could also see how every other country in the world was ranked. This showed us some facts we had learned previously, like the life expectancy of Chad and Monaco. This is by far my favorite unit as we are learning facts that are interesting and aren't all straight from a textbook. We are able to see how different things are in other countries and how it affects their lives.

Population and Growth

Today in class we continued on with our third unit on population and growth. We started the class learning the difference between immigration and emigration, and how it affects the population growth of each country. Immigration is shown by a positive number and emigration is shown by a negative number. After this slide, we went into the topic of life expectancy similar to yesterday. We talked about how Manaco has the highest life expectancy which is not surprising considering they are a very rich and well-off country. Chad, a country I had never even heard of before has the lowest life expectancy. What I found crazy was the average life expectancy is only 48 years old, compared to Manaco's almost 90 year life expectancy. 

New Unit

Today in class we started our new unit. At the start of every unit we write down 4 key issues that by the end of the unit we should know the answer to each question. So to start off class today we got our new questions and wrote them down on the first page of this unit. We then started with our first topic, population of the United States and of the world. We learned that every second the word population grows by about 2.5 people, and by the end of the class period the population would have increased by around 8,000 people. Right now the word population is a little over 7.5 billion people. We learned that it took the world 10,000+ years to get to its first billion, but recently its only taken the world 12 years to get to the most recent billion, 7. We also learned that over 90% of our world population growth is from undeveloped countries, like Africa. This information surprised me because you would think since America is developed and has the resources to properly care for children we would be having more kids than in countries like Africa where they have limited resources. After talking about population, we went into the topic of life expectancy. We learned that life expectancy is significantly higher for women than it is for men. We talked about why this might be and came up with a few ideas . We thought that although it is changing as the years pass, it is mostly men in dangerous and sometimes life threatening jobs. We also came up with the fact that women generally care for themselves more than men and go to the doctors more often. These were just a few examples of our brainstorming but we did find quite a few reasons that could be the cause of women having such a higher life expectancy. I was very interested by the information we learned today and I am excited for this unit to start.

Test Day

Today was test day. The test wasn't that hard but I already know I got two wrong. I had another shadow today, and because it was test day we had her take the test. She only did 12 but she got 11/12 right. To be honest I didn't really study for the test but I still think I did pretty good. Also, we sang the ICarly theme song before the test so I knew I'd do good. If you're wondering why we sang the ICarly theme song, it is because my shadows name is Carly and Mr.Schick likes to embarrass the shadows. Hopefully I didn't fail the test. (Even though he said not to, here's the whole ICarly theme song:
I know you see

Somehow the world will change for me
And be so wonderful

Live life, breathe air
I know somehow we're gonna get there
And feel so wonderful

I will make you change your mind
These things happen all the time
And it's all real
I'm telling you just how I feel

So wake up the members of my nation, it's your time to be
There's no chance unless you take one and the time to see
The brighter side of every situation, some things are meant to be
So give me your best and leave the rest to me

I know it's time
To raise the hand that draws the line
And be so wonderful

Golden sunshine
I know somehow it's gonna be mine
And feel so wonderful

Show me what you can become
There's a dream in everyone
And it's all real
I'm telling you just how I feel

So wake up the members of my nation, it's your time to be
There's no chance unless you take one and the time to see
The brighter side of every situation, some things are meant to be
So give me your best and leave the rest to me

Leave it all to me (leave it all to me)
So make it right (make it alright)
And see it through (you got to)
You know won't be free until you

Wake up the members of my nation, it's your time to be
There's no chance unless you take one and the time to see
The brighter side of every situation, some things are meant to be
So give me your best and leave the rest to me
Leave it all to me, (leave it all to me), leave it all to me, just leave it all to me)

Review Day

Today in class I had another shadow, and this time Mr. Schick didn't press her with questions. We were reviewing for a test that we have tom more, and spent most of class looking over the time zone map. We compared the time from where we are now, Bel Air, to places all over the world. There are 24 time zones, and we are going to have to know certain cities locations to figure out the time difference. I had to leave half way through class to drop my shadow off at her meeting and Mr. Schick gave both me and my shadow smarties, I did come back though and my shadow said this was one of her favorite classes. (Not trying to show off or anything but definitely think I got her to come to JC) Also, I had a chance to talk to coach Swift when I dropped my shadow off which was also very entertaining. Hopefully I don't fail the test.

Cultures, Christians, and Catholics

Today in class I had a shadow who also happened to be my cousin. Mr. Schick was very nice to my shadow and included her in the lesson. He started off by asking her about culture, which is what were learning about currently. Bella answered with religious culture, and then went on to describe traditions she experienced throughout her life. Because our class is crazy and tends to get off topic, we went into the topic of confessions and how creepy it can come across. We also talked about the different cultures around the world and how some countries incorporate their religion into their government. This is different than what we're used to, as the United States has many different religions practiced and the government is kept separate.

We Were Actually Productive!

This week has been a very weird week and with last week being spirit week we haven't actually gotten much done recently. However, today in class we actually learned and reviewed what we had previously learned. We again tried having a student be the teacher and this time it was much more productive than last week. We also talked about how in the future how much could change. 20 years from now we could be telling our kids that we used to have to carry a whole iPhone around with us. We also found out a girl in our glass who's name I can't remember almost got kidnapped as a little kid. This related to what we were talking about because she then said her mom wanted to get a tracking device put into her daughter so if she ever did get kidnapped police and authorities would know where she is. Today was not a very good day for me but class was actually semi-productive and I was proud of us.

Pop Quiz

Today in class we started off with my favorite thing of all time... a pop quiz. I honestly wasn’t very stressed about having a quiz, but when Mr. Schick told us that we only had 10 seconds to answer each question i began to freak out a little bit. Normally I am a slow test taker and I like to use all the time given. However today I didn’t have time to think about my answers before writing something down. Also, the fact that it was first period wasn’t helping me answer things any faster considering I was practically half asleep. Even with it being first period and only having 10 seconds for each question I ended up doing pretty well and only got 1 or 2 wrong. After the pop quiz, we went back to taking notes on our maps unit. Class was pretty boring and nothing exciting really happened after that. Tomorrow we take the PSAT9, so we won’t have class and I’m blog free for a day. 

Patty's the Teacher?

Class today was a little more energetic and crazy then normal class, because one it was last period, and two it's the end of spirit week. Along with already being crazy ourselves, Mr. Schick started the class off topic and talked about a crazy coincidence he had. A former student of his posted a message on Facebook about anxiety recently and he just kind of had this in the back of his mind but at the time didn't know how to help. To sum it all up, he found a paper about a youtube video in an old book from an old trip he took, and in the video the man was talking about the topic we've been learning, Socrates. And although we started off the actual lesson learning about places, location, and more on our unit we then started to lose focus and Mr. Schick told us about his new idea. So, we switched over to having a student be the teacher. (Keep in mind this was the teachers idea.) Patrick, who we all call Patty, was chosen to teach the class. Although it was quite entertaining, we didn't learn much after that. Patty tried his best but in the end Mr. Schick ended up taking over again and for the last few minutes of class Mr. Schick attempted to teach again.

GPS and Creepy Alexa

Today in class we started with the topic of GPS. We continued on the same power point from when we were doing maps and we learned that GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is made up of 3 elements, that include satellites, tracking stations, and a receiver. While learning about GPS, we started on the topic that while GPS is a good thing for many reasons, it is easily twisted bad. We started by talking about Ancestry.com and how creepy it could be. You are paying them to find your relatives while giving them your DNA. We then got onto the topic of Alexa and if she's listening to you without you asking her to. We were telling stories and unsurprisingly got off topic, and our very opinionated class decided we don't like Alexa.

Test Review

Today's class was pretty uneventful, but we spent majority of the class reviewing our tests. I think I did pretty well on the test, with a score of 95%. We learned that whenever you get an A on the test you get one ring on the bell and whenever you get an 100% or above you get two rings on the bell. As for anything lower than an A... well, you just get your paper back. We went over all the answers on the test and went through it stopping a couple times when people had questions. After looking at the test and going through everything, we started labeling more maps. This time we were to label different cities on a time zone map, and we were given 2 other maps as well. We didn't have much time to work on the maps and class seemed to go by quickly.