Final Exam Study Guide

UPDATE: Your flashcards are ready! Here's the link. Note well that there are some gaps and perhaps some inaccuracies. So, please fill in any gaps and correct any errors. Help each other out!

As a class, you will divide and conquer the study guide for your final exam. Click on this link to get to your collaborative study guide. Edit the cells in the second column to identify or answer the content in the first column.

Sit together and work in the following groups on Monday:

• Chapter 13: Thaddeus, Julia
• Chapter 14: Taylor, Gabe
• Chapter 15: Matthieu, Kevin
• Chapter 16: Maya, Fred, Raoul
• Chapter 17: Michelle, Silvia

You may share your handwritten notes or previous quizzes/tests with other groups. If your group is finished with the assigned chapter, feel free to split up and help other groups with their chapters. Be careful not to edit the same cell at the same time. The document will be closed for editing on Tuesday afternoon. (You will still be able to view the document until your final exam.) So, work on this outside of class on Monday afternoon or evening, if necessary. This is an ungraded assignment. Your incentive is helping yourself and your classmates to learn and achieve higher scores on the final exam.

p.s. Pressing control+enter is the same as pressing enter within a cell.

p.p.s. The truly OCD students can "clean up" the accuracy, grammar, and spelling in other students' work.

Chapter 16 Study Guide

PDF Link: Chapter 16 Study Guide

Crash Course: WWII

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Discussion Questions

1. What did you think of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? What did you particularly appreciate? How did your emotions change during the course of the story?
2. If you have read John Boyne’s novel, how do the two compare? Do you think the changes are helpful or unhelpful? Why?
3. Do you think Boyne was right to look at this subject from the perspective of a naïve young boy? How effective do you think this was in helping you to approach the subject?
4. How did you feel about Bruno and his family when we first meet them in Berlin? To what extent did you struggle to identify with them because they are a Nazi family?
5. What did you think of Bruno’s character? What did you like about him? What didn’t you like?
6. To what extent could you understand Bruno’s adoration of his father, and his struggle to come to terms with what he was discovering?
7. How did your feelings about Ralph (Bruno’s father) change during the film? Was there a turning point in your feelings? If so, when?
8. Why do you think Ralph did what he did? How would he have justified it to himself and to others?
9. What do you think drove Obersturmführer Kotler to be so cruel?
10. Why does Gretel change? What impact does this have on Bruno?
11. How would you describe Elsa? Were you surprised that Elsa (Bruno’s mother) was unaware of the true nature of the camp? How would you have responded to this situation if you had been in her position?
12. ‘Elsa doesn’t think. She doesn’t think for herself, she doesn’t think deeply. She chooses to be oblivious, concerning herself only with the safety of her family and her position in society – everything else is beyond her periphery. She’s a sort of accomplice and assistant to her husband’s ideals, his desires, his morals and his ambitions.’ (Vera Farmiga)
    To what extent do you think she is morally responsible for what happens?
13. How would you describe the friendship between Bruno and Schmuel? What makes it a good friendship?
14. Why did Bruno betray Schmuel? Why was their friendship able to survive this?
15. How do you think the family, and Ralph in particular, would be impacted by the final scenes of the film?
16. How do the characters in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas exemplify Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’, that evil arises out of the tendency of ordinary people to follow orders, to accept what they’re told by authorities, to conform to the prevailing opinion? How easily could such evil arise in our own society? What might lead to it? What could prevent it?
17. To what extent is Bruno’s friendship with Schmuel like God’s love for human beings expressed in Jesus Christ’s incarnation? How is it different?
18. In what sense is this a redemptive story?
19. Does The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas fill you with despair or hope? Why?
20. What would you identify as the most important messages from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas?

Answer five questions of your choice. Due on 18 April.

Source: Tony Watkins

Professional-Quality Fonts (Free!)

Want to make your presentation look sharp but tired of the same old Microsoft font collection? Want to stand out from the crowd? Here's a couple articles that link to deliciously free designer fonts:

• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
• 75+ Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design

Presentation Rubric

• Content - 40%
• Accurate - 15%
• factual
• no personal opinions
• debated points presented in a balanced way
• Informative - 10%
• connects to class discussions
• adds to class discussions
• Thorough - 15%
• detailed information
• no trivial information
• Presentation - 40%
• Organization - 10%
• Structure
• chronological
• modular
• physical
• spatial
• problem/solution
• issues/action
• case study
• compare/contrast
• matrix
• Transitions
• Voice - 5%
• loud enough for everyone to hear
• moderate rate of speech (not too fast)
• Slides - 5%
• few ideas (ideally one) per slide
• minimal text
• at least 20 slides (not including title slide and works cited)
• Images - 5%
• quantity
• quality (appealing; high resolution)
• appropriateness
• citation as footnote on individual slide or all image citations on one slide at the end
• Color Scheme, Text Animations, Slide Transitions, and Fonts - 5%
• appealing
• "less is more" when it comes to animations and slide transitions
• appropriate to content/structure
• Audience Interaction - 5%
• asking questions
• fielding questions
• handouts
• participation
• Time - 5%
• between 7-10 minutes
• Sources - 10%
• Credibility - 4%
• Quantity (at least three in addition to your textbook) - 4%
• MLA Formatting - 2%
• Effort - 10%
• Creativity - 5%
• Planning - 5%

Project: World War II - Topics

Michelle: Holocaust Survivors
Raoul: Resistance Movements
Silvia: US Women
Fred: Technological Advancements
Matthieu: Hiroshima & Nagasaki
Gabe: Hitler, 1938-1945
Maya: Concentration Camps
Thad: Russia, 1938-1945
Julia: Treatment of Jews before/during WWII
Kevin: Submarine Warfare
Taylor: General Douglas MacArthur

Your first assignment is to find three credible sources (in addition to your textbook), due Monday, 18 March.

Project: World War II

Topics: Invasion of Normandy (D-Day, June 6, 1944), Bombing of Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941), Concentration Camps (Choose two or three), Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Atomic bombs dropped here), Italy ’s Involvement in WWII, Benito Mussolini (Italy’s Dictator during WWII), Russia (The Soviet Union) 1938-1945, North Africa and WWII, Japanese Internment in the USA, WWII Prisoners of War, Hitler: 1938-1945, WWII Nazi Medical Experimentation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt during WWII, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during WWII, The Battle of the Bulge, Nazism and WWII, Treatment of the Jews before/during WWII, WWII Resistance Movements, Holocaust Survivors (the stories of at least two), WWII War Crimes Trials, Submarine Warfare, General Douglas MacArthur, US Women, The War in the Pacific

Choose a topic from the list above. Your presentation is due on Friday, 22 March Monday, 25 March.

Updated: Note the new due date.

PowerPoint Tips

Here's the presentation that I shared with you in class. Credited and linked, as promised.

Don't Be A PowerPoint Felon from Nick Smith

This one has more tips on slide design. A bit more artsy and certainly more humorous in its sarcasm/meanness. Let's just not be mean about each other's (or our own) presentations. :)

You Suck At PowerPoint! from Jesse Desjardins - @jessedee

Priming

Here's what I referred to in class today:

The psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement—and the number of items they got right was cut in half. As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker’s ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of “smart”?*

*Gladwell, Malcolm (2007-04-03). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (pp. 56-57). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition. 

Credible Online Sources

How do you know if your source is credible or not? Here's a few guiding questions that I found at a university library's website*:

• Does the site have a scholarly apparatus: a bibliography and endnotes?
• Is there a clear author?  What are the author's credentials, biases, and perspectives? 
• Who is the publisher?  A university or historical society?  A company? 
• Is the thesis built on a foundation of primary source material?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the site?
• How does the site help me understand my topic?
• What questions are left unanswered by the author?

Tips on finding credible sources:

• One clue that can help you decide if a site is credible is the domain name.  In general, sites that end with "edu" (educational sites), "gov" (government sites), or "org" (nonprofit organizations) offer more credible information than sites that end with "com" (commerical sites trying to sell something).
• Google your topic along with the keyword "library guide" or "libguide".  This will lead you to library web sites about your topic, and librarians generally list only high-quality sites on their pages.
• Specialty Search Engines
• IPL2: works like Yahoo, but finds mostly quality sites discovered by librarians
• InfoMine: scholarly internet collections

*http://guides.lib.ua.edu/content.php?pid=126639&sid=1087764

Herbert Hoover: "American System" Speech, 1928

Source PDF: “American System” Speech by Herbert Hoover, 1928

1. What is the American System?
2. What changes were necessary during the Great War?
3. What is the tendency of government after a war?
4. What does it mean for the government to be "an umpire instead of a player"?
5. What would the government propose as a solution to Prohibition?
6. How would the government propose to help with agriculture?
7. What consequences of increased involvement of government in business does Hoover fear? Give at least five.

A Kingly Sum

Here's the video that gives some perspective on the queen's salary.

Chapter 15 Study Guide

PDF Link: Chapter 15 Study Guide

Chapter 14 Study Guide

PDF Link: Chapter 14 Study Guide

Chapter 13 Study Guide

PDF Link: Chapter 13 Study Guide

New Year, New Blog

Hello, students of KICS. I'll be experimenting with posting relevant class activities to this blog for your good. Enjoy.