Wednesday 22 October 2014

Wednesday: Socials 11: The big 5 battles and the conscription crisis

Today we started with a short talk about today's events at and around Parliament Hill where a gunman murdered a soldier standing as an honour guard at the National War Memorial and wounded others.  I find myself thinking over and over about this sad and disturbing event.  As new information is released we will be able to see if this event has any connection to the event in St. Jean, Quebec earlier this week.  I did say that it is important for us to filter what we hear in the news and on social medial and determine what is news and what is speculation.  I feel that is important to say that we must not generalize about any group as we stand together against this horrible event.
Blackadder

We started the lesson with a quick quiz to highlight some of the main points that are connected with the five battles I asked you to research and some other important elements.  Next we watched a Blackadder satire of the British "brass hats" who were the generals leading the strategy of the war.  It is easy for us to mock the obvious futility of the frontal assaults across no-man's land that characterized the war, but this only highlights how revolutionary the Canadian plan was for Vimy Ridge in 1917.   We watched a segment of the People's History on Vimy. We also had a PowerPoint discussion on the use of propaganda and some some examples of propaganda posters from the war. We ended with a People's History clip

on the conscription crisis of 1917 (and the Wartime Elections Act that restricted some from voting while giving some women the vote).

Propaganda analysis primer
I felt it would be unfair to ram through these last points in order to meet my timeline of having the unit test tomorrow, so I announced that we will tidy up the unit and then do a proper review tomorrow and write the test on Monday.  I'm sorry to those of you who were counting on having it all done before the weekend.

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