Learning+Log


 * LEARNING LOG....** Where I log all of my learning....

....This is so FREAKING CONFUSING!!!! I don't understand how to work this website!!!!! *(Please insert angry face here)* But anyway, I signed up for my expert topic, and I chose the Indian Removal Act. It sounds pretty awesome. I've always been interested in Indians, so this should be fun.
 * August the 24th, of the 2 thousandth and 9th year:**


 * August 26, 2009:** I started learning about the Indian Removal Act. It's really interesting. It's about when the US wanted the lands that the indians lived on. It leads up to the event where they forcibly made the Cherokees move. The trail they went on is called the Trail Of Tears. I'm actually more interested in the Trail Of Tears than the Indian Removal Act. I think that when I'm done learning about the Indian Removal Act, I'm going to learn more about the Trail of Tears.


 * August 28th, 2009:** Ok, so I finished my page about the Indian Removal Act. I got all of my info from this [|web site]. It's such an interesting topic. In my opinion, the US is so obsessed with expanding their territory that they don't even think about the people that are already living on those lands. And then they force them to leave. I think that it's really stupid. I mean, it's not the Indians fault that they live there. The US should have been smart enough to realize that they should have left them alone. How would they feel if they had been living in one spot for a while, and then some strangers came and told them that they couldnt' live there anymore?? Anyway... On Monday I'm going to start learning about the Trail of Tears, which is going to be AWESOME! I'm also thinking about doing a page about the Salem Witch Trials (which should also be awesome).


 * September 1, 2009:** Guess what? It's september! Scary, huh? Anyway.... I started learning about the Trail of Tears today. It was pretty awesome. I figured out that there is a song about the Trail of Tears. It's by Europe and it's called "Cherokee". It's a pretty good song. I've liked it for a while, but I didn't really know what it was about until I started researching the Trail of Tears. Now that I know about it, the song is even cooler!!!


 * September 3, 2009:** So pretty much, I'm having trouble knowing what I'm supposed to be learning. Because I've been working on my expert topic, I haven't really learned about stuff that is on the test. I know a little bit, but probably not enough to pass. I haven't even started on my group expert topic yet... well i started learning about the war of 1812. i haven't had a chance to put any info on the page i created for it though. but i will next time.


 * September 8, 2009:** started trying to learn about the war of 1812. it's a freaking boring subject. and there's also like a lot of different aspects of it, and i'm not sure what i'm supposed to be learning about. and all of the sites i've found for it are really hard for me to understand. this sucks, big time. it made me so frustrated. and since i was frustrated, i couldnt really focus on the 1812 stuff that i didn't understand so i was reading about more info about the trail of tears.


 * Septemeber 10, 2009:** Still trying to learn about the war of 1812... it still doesn't make much sense to me... but i am going to check out a book from the library about it. so it will kill two birds with one stone: it will give me info about the war fo 1812, and it will also be my homework! yay! it makes me really excited. and in class we talked about colonialism and mercantilism and a few other ism's. and we talked about a trade between new england, africa and america. it was pretty sweet.


 * september 14:** today we talked about some other people's expert topics. we talked about george washington, benjamin franklin, the salem witchcraft trials, and religious freedom in new england. they're pretty good topics, i guess. the most interesting one was the salem witchcraft trials. that subject has always fasinated me. alot of people were accused of being a witch, but only 20 something people were actually convicted. whenever i think of the salem witch trials, i always think of the movie Hocus Pocus. anyway... and we talked about ben franklin and george washington. they're pretty good guys. i like ben franklin, because he does what he wants to do and he's not afraid of what anybody else thinks.


 * september 16:** wiki wasn't working, but i started reading reading a little bit about the educational reform.


 * september 18:** today i was learning about the educational reform. its kind of hard to find info about it on the internet, so i was reading about it in the actuall textbook. it didn't have a lot of info, but it had some pretty good stuff. i started putting stuff on my wiki about it, and next time i'm going to put some more.


 * october 1:** we talked about some expert topics today. we talked about the declaration of independence, the revolutionary war, the valley forge, and french support during the war. its pretty good stuff. i enjoyed learning about valley forge. it was pretty awesome. its cool to learn about how they were starving and freezing, and people were deserting, but they still trained for the spring to beat the british. and because of that, they were able to win.


 * October 5th:** today we looked up information about some of the founding fathers from the different colonies. My groups colony is Pennsylvania. and the guy i had to look up info about is Benjamin Rush. he's a pretty big medical dude. you should check out my page about him


 * Oct 7:** today we looked up stuff about our colonies. and my colony is pennsylvania, so i was looking up stuff about colonial pennsylvania. apparantly they were going to name it just Sylvania (which is latin for forests), but then they decided to combine it with the guy who owned the land: William Penn. It was pretty boring.


 * Octover 9th:** today we talked about the articles of confederation. they basically say that theya re no longer a part of england and this is how their government will be. there are 13 articles. and then we talked about something called shay's rebellion, but i didn't really understand it.


 * October 27th:** today we took the third question on the test. since i studied, it was pretty easy. i did "compare the different settlements". I talked about jamestown, massachusetts and pennsylvania. to see all of my test questions, go to my test question page. the other question i did were "how did religion play a part in the forming of the colonies" and "compare the early political parties-- the federalists and the democratic-republicans". i hope i did good on the test.


 * October 29th:** well, as it turns out, i did pretty good on the test. yeah! i'm glad i got a good score because i thought i was going to fail. today mr little told us what we're going to do next term. its pretty much going to be the same, except we have to make a movie about something between the yars 1607 and 1910. i have absolutely no idea what i'm going to make a movie about. everything i want to make a movie about doesn't fit into the time zone thingie. i wanted to do a video on the korean war, but its in the 1950's. so that doesn't work. maybe i'll make a movie about world war 2. that would be pretty cool.


 * November 3rd:** we talked about life in the southern states today. they had lots of farms and their houses had tall white pillars. about half of their population was black slaves. i don't really remember what else we talked about.


 * November 5th:** ABSENT. but apparently we talked about the northern states.


 * November 9th:** talking about the western states. i got we talked about the monroe doctrine and i got to talk about the indian removal act (which is my expert topic). look at my page about it. basically the indian removal act is where the u.s. wanted the lands that the indians were living on. they figured that the indian's "right of occupancy" was subordinate or the u.s.' "right of discovery". so andrew jackson (who was just made president at that time) made the indian removal act which says that the u.s. can kick the indians out of their land. some of the indian tribes gave it, but some of them tried to fight for their land. so the u.s. soldiers had to come and forcebly remove them from their homelands. thats what happened with the Cherokees, except they were fighting with legal means. but they were tricked with an illegimite treaty and they were forced to leave their land. they then were forced to walk for thousands of miles to a indian reservation. the Cherokee's journey is known as the trail of tears. i also have a page about the trail of tears, you should check it out.


 * November 11th:** today we talked about lots of stuff. i got to do my presentation about the Educational Refrom. You should look at my page about it. it was a really cool subject. it was kinda difficult to find information about it, but after i found some info, it was really cool. we also talked about women's rights. we talked about what rights that the women wanted and how they went about getting those rights. those women were actually the first people to picket the white house. There's an oldish movie call "The Great Race" that shows stuff about women trying to get their rights. its cool to see stuff like that in good movies. anyway... we also talked about some other things, but i can't really remember what they were.


 * November 13th:** FRIDAY THE 13TH!!!! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Today we talked about Texas and the War with Mexico. It's a pretty cool topic. texas is originally part of mexico, but we have our war with mexico and we win texas. and then we bought more land from mexico that included California. and speaking of california, we also talked about the gold rush. i've always been fascinated by the gold rush. i can just picture all these dirty old men with teeth missing sifting through the dirt in the chance of finding gold. hahaha! it always makes me laugh. It's acutally a really cool subject. then we talked about the trade unions, and labor unions. thats also a pretty cool topic. i think its cool that a bunch of people will work for the same cause and fight for what they want. its awesome.


 * November 23RD:** today we had the whole class to work on our documentaries. the main thing we needed to have done today was have our topic picked our for what we wanted to make the documentary on. I think i'm going to make my documentary about the Trail of Tears. Its a really good and interesting subject that i like. and i already know some information about it, so it seems like a logical choice. i though about making it on the Indian Removal Act, but that seems a bit too broad. so i narrowed it down to just the trail of tears. i'm actually kind of excicted for the documentary. i've never done something like this and it seems kinda cool. It should be an interesting experience at the least. But what makes me really happy is that we don't have this class for the rest of the week because of thankgiving break!!! Yeah!!


 * November 30th:** today we talked about several things. we talked about the compromise of 1850, the underground railroad, abolitionism, bleeding kansas, john brown and the 1860 election. it was really interesting. i really liked talking about the underground railroad and john brown. i've always liked hearing about the underground railroad, i'm not sure why. there's just something about it that interests me. it was cool to talk about john brown too. he was a guy that would come from the north and go to the south looking for slave owners. when he found a slave owner, he'd usually kill them. he was kinda part of the bleeding kansas thing that was going on. i think it was cool that he believed in something and that he actually did something about it. i know that killing usually isn't the best way, but at least he did something about it.


 * December 2nd:** Guess what?? It's december! and there's only 23 more days until christmas!! :D anyway, today we talked about a couple of different things. we talked about the sucession of the south from the north, the confederate states of america (CSA), the anaconda plan, the civil war, the emancipation proclamation, and reconstruction for after the war. it was a pretty interesting day. i liked talking about how the country split and then they were fighting each other. i also really liked talking about the civil war. it was really cool. we talked about the first battle of bull run, and how the citizens thought it would be fun to watch. so they got in their carraiges and sat on the hill and watched the battle. that would have been pretty cool to do that, but it also would have been really gross.


 * December 4th:** today we did something different from the usual listen and take notes. we each got our own article about the reconstruction of the u.s. after the civil war. all of the articles were from a newspaper called harper's weekly, which was a really really popular newspaper at that time. i was assigned number 26. it was published on june 24, 1865. it was a... interesting article. it was mostly filled with questions that were directed to the reader. so because of that, it was a little difficult to understand. but once i read through it a couple of times, i was able to understand. the author doesn't think that they need to have a fast reconstruction. he thinks that it doesn't matter how long it takes, as long as it gets done right. which i think is a very good idea. he also thinks that the north shouldn't forget the past and move on with life after the civil war, because the south hasn't really changed. they're still angry, and they're still better. he says that the only thing that changed was that the south lost the civil war. he also feels that its unfair that the north has to forget the south's wrong-doings, but the north hasn't done anything wrong for the south to forget. ... on a completely note, its getting closer to christmas!! YAY!


 * December 8th:** today we worked on our documentary movie things. i'm making mine on the cherokee trail of tears. its been kinda frustrating because i'm not really sure what i'm doing. but i don't have any specific questions to ask mr. little. its just confusing. but i think i'll be able to make it work. its kinda hard to find pictures of the trail of tears, because they didn't really have any cameras around that time. and if they did, they weren't taking pictures of the trail of tears. i have found a few paintings though. i just need to find some more. i'm not really sure what i'm gonna put in my script either, so i guess i'll have to work that out too.


 * December 10th:** today we talked about several topics. we talked about homesteading, immigration, ellis island, urban life, progressives, and the spanish american war. the part about immigration was really interesting to talk about. i learned that alot of the immigrants came from europe. and some came from russia, which is cool because that's what the Fiddler on the Roof is about. so that was cool for me because i could actually kind of understand what we were talking about. the homesteading was also fun to talk about. because in a john wayne movie (McClintoc), he's upset that the government is practically giving away the land and the settlers have no idea how the land works. You could have brought this up in class - maybe it would have made a similar connection for others. so it was cool for me to make that connection. it was also interesting to talk about the spanish american war.


 * December 14th:** today we went to the auditorium and "acted" out the case of mary mallone. it was kinda interesting i guess. mostly it was just about a woman is a carrier of the typhoid disease and doesn't know that she is. she's a cook and she has been infecting the familys that she has cooked for. some detectives figure out that she is a carrier and they take her to a hospital and lock her up. she stays there for a couple of years and the kinda forget about her. then they are trying to figure out what to do with her. cuz they don't want her getting anyone else sick, but they didn't want her to stay locked up by herself. so the court has a really hard decision to make. ....on a different note, theres only 11 days till christmas!!! freaky!!!! i only have this class 3 more times before christmas break!!!! yeah!!!


 * dECEMBER 16tH:** today we had an open lab day to work on whatever we wanted, whether it be test questions for our term 2 test, our video documentary, or just adding stuff to our wiki. i need to do all three, but i chose to work on my documentary. i'm making it on the trail of tears. i actually have an idea of what i'm doing now. i've gathered some more pictures, and i've started working on my script of what i'm going to say. i'm getting closer to being able to put it all together. its kind of fun actually. the only parts i'm not looking forward to is recording what i'm going to say, and actually watching my video in class. i really don't like the sound of my voice in recordings, but i guess i can deal with it. unless i get someone else to talk for me.... Mr. Little: Good idea. I had a couple of other educators do the voices for my movie. :) hmmm...... hahaha.

december 18th: we had another open lab day today. i worked on finding more stuff for my documentary. i was researching stuff about the treaty of new echota-- which is when a small group of cherokees signed a treaty, which gave the governemnt the land, even though the weren't the recognized leaders of the cherokee nation. it was pretty interesting- i guess.