Tuesday: History 12-2/12-3

We began the day by checking in with the "Purges" study guide sheet.  There were no questions, so we moved on without reviewing each response.  Next, I did a timeline check-in on three main aspects of the Russia unit: the shifts in leadership, the shifts in economic policy, and the crises that fueled the Revolution.  Here are the board notes from that:

Can you follow the connections?

We also read an excerpt from Donald Rayfield's Stalin and his Hangmen.  This piece outlined the means Stalin employed to force compliance with collectivization.  In the small class I shared my "bullet point" notes from my reading of the article and then offered a topic sentence.  I asked students to take the bullets and combine them to create a succinct paragraph of about four sentences.  We didn't have time to do that step in the big class.  Here are the notes:

This synthesizing activity is a scaffold to practice for today's homework paragraph

We also looked at a few quotations.  One is a (primary source) recollection of the type of treatment that was given to elicit confessions during the Great Terror:

Another was a (primary source) poem about Stalin:

Finally, we looked at the quotation at proposes the importance of CRISIS to keep any revolution going: both Stalin and Castro (of Cuba) speak to this need:

Source for the homework writing prompt

For homework, write an 8-sentence paragraph that connects this principle of the need for crisis, with the events we've examined in Russia/USSR between 1917 and 1941. (look at the board notes at the top of this post if you need help).

DON'T FORGET THAT TOMORROW IS THE EXAM RE-WRITE.

Here is a link to Newseum a site that highlights examples of how photos were manipulated under Lenin and Stalin (we'll look at this tomorrow: http://www.newseum.org