Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Historical Significance (Remembering December 6th & Gitanjali Rao), RAFTS assignment, wise words

Healthy Living

Today, as part of our introductory class on Healthy Relationships -- from the Healthy Living part of the Health and Physical Education curriculum -- we took a look at a couple of related issues.

The first one concerns the shooting of 14 Women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.  We discussed how gender based violence was connected to this event and the thinking of the killer, who had very narrow and hateful thoughts on gender.  Here is a list of the women on a plaque in Montreal.

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/remembering-the-polytechnique-victims
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ecole-polytechnique-massacre-ceremonies-mark-25th-anniversary/article21982230/

Challenges do remain for Women who are interested in entering STEM-based careers.  The number of women entering the field of Engineering is increasing and there is still a lot of work to do (https://engineerscanada.ca/diversity/women-in-engineering).

Gitanjali Rao is a young girl, aged 11, who was inspired by the water contamination issue in Flint Michigan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis) and created a testing system to assess for the level of lead in water.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41685582
Location of Flint, Michigan:  https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Flint,+MI,+USA/@43.2209742,-83.9234679,7z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x882378fba5977317:0xc1853a098e33686b!8m2!3d43.0125274!4d-83.6874562

A clip of her explaining her invention:

History:

While most of the details of the RAFT assignment are on GC, I can summarize the journey we have been on with this image.


This image explains the process I have modeled for the students with an example of the assignment.  The entire RAFT [ it is actually RAFTS:  Role, Audience, Form, Topic, Strong verb] has been explained on the Google Classroom History page; the due dates for each class are posted, as well.

Parting Thoughts:


Eleanor Roosevelt, Activist
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.



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