Monday, April 26, 2010

General Announcements:

• Share Your DC Pictures!: Pick up to 20 of your best shots from DC to upload to the group account at Photobucket. Sort photos into the albums for Monuments/Memorials, Museums, People, and Other. Email Grace if you need the login information. The account is private, but I have a separate guest password to pass along to parents, grandparents, etc. which grants view-only access.
• Due Friday, 4/30: Come to school dressed in a black T-shirt and dark pants/skirt. You will be wearing what you wore for other Prism productions at All-School for Earth Day. Bring a change of clothes with you if you wish to wear something different the rest of the day.
• You must have an independent reading book every day. If you are getting close to the end of one, have the next one at school and ready to go.

Math:

• 7th Grade:
  • Due Tues., 4/27: Complete open response question #9 in MCAS review packet. You may use the grid provided in the booklet, but you must show all calculations which explain how you got your answers in a well-organized way on a separate sheet of paper.
• 8th Grade:
  • Due Tues., 4/27: Answer the open response quesion #9. Pretend you are writing you answer(s) in the Answer booklet. Use white, lined paper. Follow all directions as given. Also, format your answers so all is very legible and that the reader can easily follow your thinking and computing. Use the symbolic method if solving an equation. These may be shared with a peer as well as your teacher.

Social Studies:

• Due Tues., 4/27: Thank You letter to Rep. John Olver for taking time to talk to us when we visited the Capitol:
  • ¶ 1: Thanks Rep. Olver for his time (much more than most Reps would give a class) and answers.
  • ¶ 2: Describes your most memorable moment from visit to the Capitol (ex. some specific moment when talking to him, something that happened during our visit to the Congress session, etc.)

Science:

• Due Wed., 4/28:
  • Read excerpt "The Forgotten Pollinators."
  • List 3 things you found interesting in the reading
  • Pick one of those topics and write a more detailed reflection on it

Language Arts:

• Due Tues., 4/27: Either convert a poem written for Music into a stanza that can be chanted like an American Indian prayer or song OR write a new poem (a stanza that can be chanted) that is in the genre of American Indian song/prayer (Refer to those read and discussed today in class). It is to be a final, edited copy — preferably typed.

Spanish:

• 7th Grade: Lee capítulo 9 en Piratas (quiz mañana sobre cap. 9).

• 8th Grade: Lee capítulo 8 en Robo en la noche (quiz mañana sobre cap. 8).

Moment of Zen:

The G-Word?

You may recognize the inscription above from the Holocaust Museum in DC. It ends with a question, "Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler uses this question as a justification of the mass murder he has authorized. So who does remember the annihilation of the Armenians these days? Who knows enough about it to remember? Beginning 95 years ago, on April 24, 1915, Ottoman Turkish government forces began a systematic cleansing of Armenians from their territory, which at the time included modern-day Turkey and large portions of Armenia and the Arabian peninsula (See map), in response to the rising Turkish nationalism which was at a height during the First World War. When actions ended with WW I, 1.5 million of the 2.5 million Armenians living in Ottoman territory had been killed - about 60% of the Ottoman Armenian population. Although the Turkish government put in place immediately after WW I tried and convicted some nationalist leaders of murder in relation to the Armenians, but it has not formally acknowledged the systematic, ethnically-based extermination. Not only has Turkey never quite owned up to that stain on its history, but no American president has been willing to use the specific word genocide to refer to what happened to the Armenians. The word itself, though formed from classical roots (genos, Greek for "race, kind" and -cide from Latin caedere, meaning "to cut down, slay), was not used until 1944, when it was coined to describe the Nazi's systematic elimination of Jews, and was a term officially recognized by the UN for broader usage in 1948 - thirty years after the end of the Armenian situation. Emerging from a precedent like that certainly presents it as a word that is not to be used lightly. Different governing bodies, including the European Parliament, the Israeli Knesset and the Russian Duma have officially recognized the losses of the Armenian Genocide as such, but such official acknowledgments did not begin until the 1980s. American presidents have historically shied away from the g-word, expressing condolences to the Armenian community regarding their "tragedy" (Bush, Sr.'s descriptor). Even Pres. Obama has demured from using it during his presidency (though he's used it in the past), acknowledging it as a "massacre" and an "atrocity" in his speech about it on Saturday (Apr. 24, the international day of remembrance of the event), but carefully not referring to it as "genocide." So, why is the word so important? While words like massacre, tragedy, and atrocity highlight the grief of so many deaths, they avoid the cause of them: one ethnic group specifically, and systematically trying to eliminate another. A deadly earthquake is a tragedy. A small group of unhinged extremists can cause a massacre. Nobody necessarily has to die for it to be an atrocity. Genocide requires the complicity and action of a larger system to eliminate a people and their culture. The Turkish government has never made any formal acknowledgement of what happened, nor an apology or restitution to those that survived. People, especially important world leaders, using the g-word not only commemorates the tragedy, but puts pressure on the Turkish government to examine and air out some of the skeletons every nation has in the dark closets of their history. As the chilling quote above from Hitler illustrates, a lack of honesty, openness and responsibilty for moral failings can lead others to believe that they can get away with them, too. Further Reading: Historical Overview of the Armenian Genocide "Obama Marks Genocide Without Saying the Word" (NYTimes, 4/24/10) Background on Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict (Armenian race-based violence against Azeris)