Should a President's Character Matter?

Here is a link to a 2012 Republican debate.

The candidates are discussing how much weight we should put on a presidential candidate's character.  This is largely in reaction to the public's questioning of Newt Gingrich's character (in light of his affairs).

I am using this as a lead in to my discussion of Bill Clinton.  My objective is to have students use evidence to support an argument for Clinton's presidency as a success and for Clinton's presidency as a failure.  

Bill Clinton Impeachment Lesson Plan

http://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/educator-resources/lessons-plans/presidents/clinton-impeachment/

Here is a link to a lesson plan about Bill Clinton's impeachment.  I haven't totally looked through this lesson plan yet but I may want to reference it for my lesson this week in U.S. History.

This movie from CNN reports on the fall of communism in Bulgaria. It is a great movie, in addition to the 30 of 30 ESPN movie called "Once Brothers" that focuses on the Yugoslavian fall of communism.


The Bulgarian movie is called "Autumn of Change" and is on the CNN video website. 










Communism

A young CNN reporter talks in a video about the fall of communism in Bulgaria.  

This would be good to look in to communism and East vs. West Europe.

WWII Movie

A student recommended the movie "Empire of the Sun" to me because she had watched it in her AP World History class.  She said it was a great way to learn about WWII in Japan.  It is an older movie with Christian Bales as the main character (he was 10 years old at the time).  She said you could watch it instantly on Netflix.

This same student recommended the movie "7 Years in Tibet" as well.

Can you change your personality?

Tomorrow we are having an "Exploring Yourself" day in AP Psych.  We have been learning about all different types of personality perspectives and personality tests so this is our chance to tie it all together.

We are going to discuss these questions:

What is your "personality"?
How reliable are personality tests?
What if you don't like your personality?
Can you change your personality?

I found this video clip from Huffington Post that discusses 5 things you can do to try and change (what you can) of your personality.

Latin American Dance

For our Culture Day for Latin America, I had another student teacher Lynette Yorgason come in and teach my class about different dances.

It was fascinating to learn that every state in Mexico moves their skirt a different.  As a result, you can tell where someone lives by the way you move you skirt. This is great to emphasize with students because it helps them see that there are differences within Latin American culture.

Here are the three different dances that were learned about:

 1) The dance from the Mexican state Jalisco.

This dance has you stomp your feet in triplets. You begin by stomping your right foot hard, then step with your left foot and then right foot.  Then you stomp hard on your left foot and do lighter steps on your right foot then left foot before you stomp hard on your right foot again.  You repeat this over and over again.

We had the class move in a circle clockwise stomping their feet.

The boys clasp their hands high behind their backs.  The girls pretend like their holding out a big skirt and moving it side by side.

The reason there is so much stomping of feet is because their music doesn't have a strong beat in it, so they make their own beat.

Type "Jalisco Dance" into YouTube for a video.

2) The dance Cumbia from Colombia.

This is an interesting dance because it shows the influence between the natives of Colombia and the African slaves.  The African slaves had chains around their ankles so they could only shuffle their feet. As a result, Cumbia dance is the shuffling of feet.  They made it more interesting by rotating their hips.  The women hold up large skirts and move their skirts around as they dance.  The men put one hand high on the back while they tip their hat and shuffle their feet.

Type "Cumbia Dance" into YouTube for a video.

3) The dance Capoeira from Brazil.

This is a fight dance.  I don't know too much beyond that and would need to do more research.  We didn't actually do this dance in class but we watched a video.  It is amazing because the entire dance is a choreographed fight.

The boys especially liked watching this video.

Look for this movie in YouTube: "The best capoeira video ever"

The students really enjoyed learning about the dances and participating in them as well.  I would definitely try to replicate this again. It took about 20 minutes to explain, dance and watch the video clips.