Thursday, September 13. 2012

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 Criminology 12 - Today we will 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. Today, we'll examine where we get our information about trends in crime (UCR, PRVS, Self-Reports). We'll look at the BC Crime trends from 1998 - 2007 and then we'll talk about the disparity (difference) between the public perception of violent crime and the actual rates of violent crime in Canada. This will set us up for our next blog entry on Monday.
UVIC Study on Violent, Property and Drug crime rates in BC

Some people think that since there is so much crime happening they feel the need to take on crime themselves. There are some costumed "super-hero" vigilantes in Seattle - members of the Rain City Superhero Movement. Check out the Seattle PI article on them here. You can see the article on "Phoenix" Jones with pictures here. You can check out the article and video from Good Morning America on Phoenix Jones broken nose here. You can watch the Young Turks video on the Rain City Superheroes here.

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 Law 12 - Today I'll need you to hand in the questions from page 21 of the All About Law textbook that I assigned yesterday. We'll have a discussion about rights afterword. we will have a discussion in class about your rights that you have guaranteed through various legal documents in Canada (including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the Canadian Human Rights Act and the BC Human Rights Code). Expect to partner up and you and your partner will need to combine your lists of ten rights into one. After that your group of two will partner up with another group of two, combine your lists on a large sheet of paper, prioritize them and then we'll present these to the class.