May 6

Social 20-1

I went through a PowerPoint presentation on plagiarism at the beginning of class. I also finished off talking about the "Recipe for Success" for essays. You will get your essay question sheet tomorrow. You completed an opinion survey on issues related to nationalism and internationalism, and then we had a brief discussion about the statements in the opinion survey. I also started a PowerPoint presentation that corresponds to Chapter 9 material called "Nations, Nation-States and Internationalism". Your Unit 2 Final Exam is on Wednesday, May 12th, please see the study guide here. Please check your e-mail this evening, I am sending you some documents and the plagiarism PowerPoint presentation.

Social 30-1

We watched a short video on electoral college system, if you want to watch it again, here is the hyperlink. As we watched this video I stopped it occasionally to point out a few quirks with this system, namely that you can win the popular vote and still not win enough electoral college votes to become president. The other day, I talked about the 2000 election. In that election Florida was the key state. Previously in class I've talked a little bit about the differences between the types of ballots used in Canada and in the United States. In many counties in Florida during the 2000 election they used what's called a butterfly ballot where you punch holes in the ballot to indicate which candidate you are voting for. I think the following graphic illustrates nicely what this ballot looked like.

I think you can see how this might have caused some confusion. If you can't see the ballot clearly, just click on it and you should see a larger view. If you want to look at past U.S. Presidential elections and see the U.S. electoral college maps for the past ten elections, have a look at Real Clear Politics. Have a look at the 1984 election, that was extremely one-sided!

I'm adding some links under the Social 30-1 Links on this page to help you out with your USA-Canada Political System Comparison Chart assignment (which is due next Thursday). Here some websites that I think will help (permanent links will appear on the right-hand side of the blog under Social 30-1 Links):

• Ben's Guide to U.S. Government
• Elections Canada
• Real Clear Politics
• Canadian Parliament
• Canadian Senate
• Government of Canada: Democratic Reform
• The White House
• The United States Senate
• The House of Representatives
• The Electoral College System
• USA: How a Bill Becomes a Law

We also looked at the system of checks and balances in the American presidential system.

Here is a link to the Examples of Students' Writing from the January 2010 Diploma Exam. Obviously, you don't study their responses because the three sources will be different and the text-based source for the WRA II will be different too. But this should give you an idea of the standards for the Diploma.