Room 611: Wednesday, May 3. 2023

Today's schedule is BADC

B Block Criminology - Today we'll

look at gangs and gang activity in Canada. Your job will be to make a gang information poster about organized crime in Canada. In Triads (groups of three) you'll need to:

Identify the gangs we have in Canada (aboriginal crime groups, cartels, ethnic crime groups, and outlaw motorcycle gangs - be specific) and
Explain the activities of each group: What do they do? How do they do it? What do they control? Where are they based in Canada?

Organized crime by nature (according to Howard Abadinsky) is monopolistic - in other words organized crime groups want to have a monopoly over a specific geographic area for the illicit activity they wish to pursue. (Note: use the section in your text to help as well). For more stories about organized crime (especially a particularly interesting court case in Ontario and Manitoba involving the Bandidos) see:

The Canadian Encyclopedia Organized Crime in Canada

Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia (OCABC)
Organized Crime - Vancouver Sun
Preventing Organized Crime - Government of Canada
Canada's gang hotspots — are you in one?
Hells Angels Under Pressure
The Aboriginal Gangs of Winnipeg
Girls and Gangland
8 Brutal & Violent Canadian Gangs You Never Knew Existed
Organized Crime in Canada - RCMP
Organized Crime in Canada - CISC
Youth gangs in Canada: What do we know?
The Nature of Canadian Urban Gangs (look @ section 2.1 - Definitions)
Public Safety Canada - Organized Crime Research
CBC News: Biker Gangs in Canada
Prime Time Crime: Gangs in Canada

A good video of the article from Vice above is:

A Block Legal Studies - Today we'll finish up the violent crimes section of this unit. First we'll review assault and sexual assault. In Canada, there are three levels of assault, based on the level of severity and corresponding penalties:

Level One: assault (max penalty 5 years)
Level Two: assault causing bodily harm (max penalty 10 years)
Level Three: aggravated assault (max penalty 14 years)

These levels are identified in section 265 of the Criminal Code. All assaults have two common elements:

1. The accused must have intent to carry out the attack and cause harm.
2. There must be no consent by the victim (for example, as in a boxing match).

After our discussion I'll have you work on questions 2, 3 and 4 on page 231 of the text. To help...

CC 264 Uttering Threats

Implying death ( bodily harm or burning property (burn/destroy) *Must be believable and Must be imminent

CC 265 Assault
Any unwanted application of force against another person
Level 1 simple assault
Level 2 assault causing bodily harm
Level 3 aggravated assault

CC 273 Sexual Assault

Any unwanted sexual contact
Level 1 any touching (molestation).
Level 2 with a weapon
Level 3 aggravated (endanger life or wound/maim/disfigure)

To end the morning, you will get a "Key Components of Criminal Code Offenses" worksheet and I would like you to work on this activity in partners. For the Elements that Must be Proven section you will need to identify both the Actus Reus (yes that means explain what the physical act or omission that it is which constitutes the crime) and the type of Mens Rea (yes that means explain what the Intent, Knowledge, Recklessness or Willful Blindness is for the crime - you have this in your text but you do not need to worry about general intent or specific intent for this activity) in each scenario you're given. For the Maximum Penalty section feel free to use the Wikibooks Canadian Criminal Sentencing/Appendix/Offence Charts.

D Block Physical Geography - Today we'll start looking at glaciers and we'll make sense of how they erode the landscape and examine the land forms they create. We'll understand the differences amongst the various alpine and continental glaciers and we'll define: cirque, arete, pyramidical peak, hanging valley, truncated spur, esker, drumlin, kettle lake, and fjord; along with some questions from your Geosystems Core text.

For glacier websites check out:
Geoscape Nanaimo ice age legacy
USGS Glaciers of Canada book
National Snow & Ice Data Center All About Glaciers
Tongass National Forest Icefields & Glacier facts
USGS Glacier terminology
Eastern Illinois University Department of Geography glacier notes
Encyclopedia of the Earth: Glaciers
Rocky Mountain National Park glacier basics

2X Faster: Glaciers disappear as more rain falls in winter
Receding before our eyes:’ Vancouver Island glaciers likely to be all gone by mid-century

And please consider this question...What Happens to a Town’s Cultural Identity as Its Namesake Glacier Melts? From the Smithsonian article...

Most people in the Comox Valley know the Queneesh narrative, with its curious resonance to the biblical story of Noah. One detail from (Andy) Everson’s telling, however, is often left out: Queneesh didn’t just save the K’ómoks—it anchored them in place. “You almost can consider this an origin story,” Everson says...The critical fact is that glaciers were, and to varying degrees still are, seen in First Nations’ cosmologies as beings, just as Queneesh is in the K’ómoks story.

It’s one thing to read about Greenland in the news, or to lose some lovely part of the local scenery. It’s quite another to lose your spiritual anchor or a lodestone of your identity. “People in the community are wondering what it means if the glacier goes,” Everson says. “If there is no glacier, is it still Queneesh?”

Comox Glacier 2013 to 2018 Ice Loss

C Block Human Geography - Today, we are in the learning commons/library working on a language project. Your job will be to create an information graphic poster on an endangered language. For your endangered language you’ll need to:

Show where the endangered language originated and diffused to (yes on a map).
Show the connection to the family, branch, and group of the endangered language. (Use your best judgment on this).
Show where the language is spoken today, indicate how many people speak it.
Show Unique features of this endangered language (What makes it different to and similar than others?)
Show examples of how the language is written and or spoken
Show why your endangered language is important to save
Show how your endangered language is both being threatened (contributing factors) and being saved
Show how people can find more info (links...sources cited)

From Lera Boroditsky in Scientific American:

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human.

From A silenced tongue: the last Nuchatlaht speaker dies

Without a geographic and population base to cling to, minority languages seldom tread water for more than a generation or two before going under. Chances are, if your grandparents came to B.C. speaking something other than English, you can’t speak their mother tongue...The question has to be asked: Why fight the tide? The answer: Language is key to retaining culture...That’s not just important to those within the culture, but to all of us. “What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth,” argued Canadian author Mark Abley in his book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Lose a language and you lose the nuanced perspectives it contains, the ones that offer a different view of the world.

And from Wade Davis

“Language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the …mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”