Brianne's Blog

Today in Western Civ class, we worked on taking notes and watching to Guns, Germs, and Steel video.  Before we started the video though, Mr. Schick brought us some bread that included several ingredients that we talked about the class before.  Some from China, The Americas, and Africa.  In the video, it told us all the 14 different animals that have been successfully domesticated.  Those 14 animals are goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, bactrian camels, Arabian camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer, yaks, mithuns, and Bali cattle.  None of these animals were native to Papua New Guniea, Australia, subsaharan Africa, and North America.  Such America had the llama and Asia, North Africa, and Europe had the other 13.  The 4 big livestock animals are cows, pigs, sheep, and goats.  It is known that civilization began in the Fertile Crescent.  Gwar was in the crescent and it is a 9000 year old civilization.  That is all we learned in ...

Today in Western Civ class, we continued taking notes and watching the Guns, Germs, and Steel video.  We learned that Draa is one of the oldest communities grew their own plants 11,500 years ago.  Plant domestication is being able to control what you grow.  Thousands of years ago China frew rice, The Americas grew corn, squash, and beans, and Africa grew sorghum, millet, and yams.  All of these items that were grown were natural and could be stored for a long time unlike Papua New Guinean people who grew sago and it only lasted for a couple of days.  Sago was their main plant so sometimes they would eat spiders too.  Later 2,500 years later New Guineans found goats and created a pen for them.  Before the Industrial Revolution, the used horses or ox to plow dirt.  We learned that there were only 14 animals that have successfully been domesticated.  Finally, at the end of the day, we got to watch Mr.Schick pretend to be a zebra and kick his leg...

Today in Western Civ class we went over our notes that we took on the video called Guns, Germs, and Steel and then Mr. Schick surprised us with a pop quiz about the video.  He thought that since we knew all of our notes that we were ready for the quiz, but I didn't think I was.  The questions on the quiz were easy except for number 3 because I didn't remember the answer.  After we passed the pop quiz in, we went over the answers and I realized I got one wrong.  After we finished the quiz, we got to work on our blogs because Mr. Schick didn't want us to fail our first three blogs, so he gave us a free pass and let us work on all of our blogs that we had to turn in this week.  The class was pretty chill and we just had a nice day.

Today in class we watched a video called Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The video was about a man named Jared Diamond who visited Papua New Guinea and got to know the people who live there.  Jared Diamond is an author, a professor at UCLA, and a biologist.  In Papua New Guinea, people still live like they did 40,000 years ago.  One New Guinean man said "Why you white man have so much and New Guineans have very little."  In the movie they told us that all great civilizations have advanced technology, large population, and well organized work forces in common.  13,000 years ago no matter where you lived, everyone were hunters and gatherers.  Wild sago is a big part of the Guinean's food and diet but it is low on protein and can't be store for very long.  Two big grains they grew were barely and wheat.  Draa is one of the earliest permanent villages in the world.  One interesting thing that I learned during the video was that a granary is where t...

Today in Western Civ class, we learned all about the class rules and how to set up our blog.  I met my new teacher Mr. Schick and he told us all of the rules in the classroom especially no playing video games because that is an automatic DETENTION!  I also met some new people in my class that I never even knew were in the freshman class.  We got our new seats and I sit behind Jackson and Alexa sits behind me.  In Western Civ this semester, we are going to learn about Mesopotamia all the way through til the 1700's.  Then, we started to set up our blog and created a new account.  We had to create a title and an address then we had to email Mr. Shick our blog website.  For our blogs every night, we have to write about what we learned about in class each day and what we took notes on.  The blogs have to be 150 words or more and we upload them to get 2 points each blog.  We got to begin working on our blogs and then we got off track because Sydney...