Thursday, March 13. 2014

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

D Block Social Studies 10 - Today we'll look at the ethnic "diversity" of Canada in the 1800's. I'll have you use the information from page 59, Figure 2-18, to construct a pie graph showing the percentage of the 1871 population who were: French, Irish, English, Scottish, or Other. We'll look at the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman and Mary Ann Shadd. Lastly you'll need to work on questions 2, 4, and 5 from page 64 of the Horizons text. For more on the Underground Railroad see:
The Underground Railroad (Scholastic)
The Underground Railroad (National Geographic)
Tracks to Freedom: Canada & The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad: Freedom Trail
PBS Africans in America: The Underground Railroad
Mary Ann Shadd Biography
Black History Canada: The Underground Railroad

B Block Geography 12 - Today your Orting - Mount Rainier case study is due. Please ensure that I receive your assignment by the end of the day. OK from the COTF website consider the following:

How do you estimate the annual probability of an occurrence of a particular type of natural disaster--especially of disasters that don't happen every day? Count the number of the type of event over an interval of time and divide the sum by the number of years in the interval. For example, based on geologic evidence, the 14 Cascade volcanoes have erupted 50 times in the last 4000 years. So the probability of eruption for any given volcano in the Cascades in any given year is 50/[(14)(4000)], or about 1 in a thousand (10^-3) per year. This translates into about 1 or 2 eruptions among the 14 Cascade volcanoes each century. All of these 50 eruptions were relatively small ones -- even the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens! However, there is geologic evidence of eruptions more than 100x larger than Mount St. Helens in the Cascades. How often do these very large eruptions occur? Four eruptions in about a million years. This implies a probability of eruption of about 1 in 250,000 per year. Now, how accurate is this estimate? We must be careful because the so-called "statistics of small numbers" can be very misleading. In statistics, we are looking for typical events, not unique ones. If we compare the probability of small Cascade eruptions with the probability of large eruptions, we find that small eruptions are much more likely than large ones. This result is consistent with much experience in dealing with many other types of natural phenomena (earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc.): large events are much less probable than small events of the same kind.

Also, today is your Tectonics Unit Final Test. I hope you come prepared and if you did study (you did have an extra day yesterday) then I'm sure you'll do fine. You'll need the entire block for the test. Good Luck!

A Block Social Studies 11 - Today is your Government of Canada unit final test and if you prepared for it I am certain you will do well. You have the whole block to complete this test. Your first order of business is to relax, there are no trick questions on the test and the questions are fairly straightforward in nature. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask me during the test. We begin our history unit tomorrow in class and should be through the end of World War One just before the end of term 3. Good Luck!