Thursday, September 15. 2011

Today's schedule is D-C-B-A

D Block Social Studies 11 - Today we'll spend some time looking at the Legislative Branch of the Federal government. Our focus will be on the "legislative process" - creating laws in Canada.

An idea to make a new law or to change an existing law starts out as a "bill." Each bill goes through several stages to become law.

1. At first reading, the bill is considered read for the first time and is printed. There is no debate.
   
2. At second reading, Members debate the principle of a bill — is the idea behind it sound? Does it meet people's needs?
   
3. If a bill passes at second reading, it goes to a committee of the House. Committee members study the bill carefully. They hold hearings to gather information. They can ask for government officials and experts to come and answer questions. The committee can propose amendments, or changes, to the bill. When a committee has finished its study, it reports the bill back to the House. The entire House can then debate it. During report stage debate, Members can suggest other amendments to the bill.
   
4. Once report stage is over, the bill is called for third reading debate. Members who voted for the bill at second reading may sometimes change their minds at third reading after seeing what amendments have or have not been made to the bill.
   
5. After a bill has passed third reading in the House of Commons, it goes through a similar process in the Senate.
   
6. Once both Chambers pass the bill in the same form, it is given Royal Assent and becomes law.

You will have to draft a simplified bill that you would like to see made law, where you'll write the idea in a simple sentence or two and then use the Make It Law handout to organize your ideas. After this, you'll create a comic strip demonstrating the process of how a Bill becomes a Law in Canada for Monday.

C Block Law 9/10 - For the first part of today's class, you will continue drawing what you think the typical victim of an assault looks like. We will go over the demographic statistics about victims and the factors that add to the risks of being a victim (consider age, gender, social status, relationship status, race or ethnicity, prior victimization, behaviour, location, culture, etc...). With this information , you'll get a better idea of who can become a victim of crime and why.

B Block Geography 12 - Today we'll finish our look at spheres in geography. Next, we'll work on time zones, latitude and longitude, GPS, and the remote sensing technology of GIS (We'll watch a Brainpop video on GPS with Tim & Moby). There are five questions in the week one handout to complete in class. Your homework yesterday was to look at figure 1.8 (p.13) and figure 1.9 (p.14) in the Geosystems book and try to interpret the relationships amongst the four spheres as a result of humans burning fossil fuels. If you're having trouble with this consider the carbon cycle (pages 634-5 in text) or look the links on yesterday's blog entry for more help.
For more on GIS check out:
USGS GIS Poster
ESRI What can I do with GIS?

A Block Criminology 12 - Today we will finish our look at the history of crime and law (looking at Hammurabi, the Mosaic Code and the development of Common Law in England). We'll learn what Actus Reus, Mens Rea, Mala in Se and Mala Prohibitum mean along with taking a look at the differences between Indictable, Summary Conviction and Absolute Liability Offences. We'll see what defences you can use and what the goals of criminal law are for society. You'll need to work on question at the end of class and then next week we'll discuss crime trends and how we tabulate crime statistics (UCR, PRVS, Self-Reports). The question at the end of the class is...

In order to stay safe from crime, would you want to live in a country that has harsh penalties that are swift, certain, and severe or would you be willing to risk crime being done to you and not have harsh penalties for criminals that are swift, certain, and severe? Why?