Monday, December 19. 2016

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

A Block Geography 12 - Today we begin watching Twister; one of the greatest yet silliest disaster movies of the 1990's. Your job is to identify as many errors in meteorology as possible AND you'll need to figure out which character is MOST like Mr. Young.

Some errors are easy - NO! It is not possible to survive an EF5 tornado strike above ground tethered to drainage pipes. Some are more subtle - the Fujita scale was introduced in 1971 and in the 1969 flashback scene (at the beginning of the film) the weather reporter on the television (portrayed by Oklahoma City KWTV 9 meteorologist Gary England) said an F5 tornado was about to strike...two years before the scale was introduced by Dr. Ted Fujita! Remember I'm a weather nerd.

Now as to characters...as I said above there are bits of Mr. Young in most of the characters in the movie your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to figure out who Mr. Young is most like. The mission is not impossible so is it Dr. Jo Harding? Bill Harding? Dustin 'Dusty' Davis? Robert 'Rabbit' Nurick? Jason 'Preacher' Rowe? No, Mr. Young is not like Dr. Melissa Reeves or Dr. Jonas Miller so let's get that over with now :) Let's have some fun with the movie

Alan Ruck is Robert Nurick "Rabbit" (and Ferris Bueller's friend Cameron too!)
Bill Paxton is Bill Harding "the Extreme"
Helen Hunt is Dr. Jo Harding
Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dustin Davis "Dusty"

B & C Blocks Social Studies 11 - Today we'll go over the military strategic movements in Europe and the Pacific at the beginning of World War Two. You'll look at the Fall of France, the Battle of Britain (Operation Sea Lion & the Blitz), along with Barbarossa in Europe; while in the Pacific you'll look at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong. For this you need to:

1. List out the events in chronological order
2. Identify what happened during these military conflicts and
3. Explain Canada’s role (if any)

After you'll watch “The Razor’s Edge” as well as “Dieppe” from Canada: A People’s History. When you’re done, you can work on questions 1, 2, and 3 on page 110 of the Counterpoints text.

D Block Crime, Media and Society 12 - You have today to finish up your clique posters, your sociological criminology questions from last week and your social influences poster. Then, because we never got to it a while back, today we'll watch Batman: The Animated Series Two Face (part 1) and Two Face (Part II). These episodes provide an alternate origin story to Harvey Dent / Two Face than the movie The Dark Knight. The animated series was a sort of watershed for crime serial animation in that it was styled after a "film noir" format (a gritty and dark Hollywood genre of crime dramas from the 1940's and 1950's). This episode is over 20 years old (yep from 1992) and is a brilliant example of a cartoon series taking its audience seriously. It provided gripping, intelligent, and compelling episodes that did not shy away from important issues and was adept at examining crime from a criminological perspective.

from TV.com...Harvey Dent, campaigning for a re-election, vows to rid Gotham of Rupert Thorne's crime and corruption. The tables turn when Thorne gets a hold of Dent's psychological records and discovers his alternate personality the violent Big Bad Harv. Thorne attempts to blackmail the DA with this, and the following fight in Thorne's chemical plant hideout results in an explosion that scars the left side of Dent's body, despite Batman's attempts to save him.

So when we finish the episode we'll try to make sense of what messages the episode tries to pass on to its audience (remember it's children)and also what the episode says of crime.