Thursday, September 4

Today students were expected to have read pages 1 to 13 in Ideologies. We then went over the terms they were to know:


facts values beliefs critical thinking
tolerance ideologies societies political systems
scarcity systems resources economic systems

and categorized them according to whether they were dominantly economic, political, or both.

At this point, they were instructed to take their answers to questions about their country and decide if the answers were dominantly economic or political and highlight them in different colours.

Students were then introduced to the idea of grouping, based on freedom or control.

I used the word “black” and had them brainstorm word associations (all ended up being negative).

I then had them brainstorm word associations for right and left (right came out positive, left came out negative).

I then put up the words “freedom” and “control” and had them decide if these were positive or negative (so that we ended up with freedom being “right” and control being “left”)

I then had them draw an economic spectrum and a political spectrum

Using their answers about their countries, they now had to go through them and decide if they were geared at freedom or control.

While they were doing this, I put up the following words on the board:
Democracy
Capitalism
Public
Private
Socialism
Dictatorship

They had to determine the meanings (which we did on the board as a class) and then label them correctly on their spectrum

For tomorrow, they are to have read pages 13 to 30 in Ideologies