Homework for Friday

Congratulations, you've now made it through the two major types of assessments we deal with in this class.  Believe it or not, they don't get harder than what you just did--they just get regular.

Part one of your homework: compose a blog post reflecting on the test and the essay. You can use these questions as a guide: How do you think they went?  What was your reaction to them? Were you prepared? What would you do differently going into the next test or essay?

Part two of the assignment is to review the themes of the course listed below.  The College Board has identified five themes around which this course is structured.  Since virtually all of the essays and nearly all of the test questions connect to these themes, you really should know them frontwards and backwards.  We will be starting a project tomorrow that will introduce you to these themes, so you can get a jump on it by becoming familiar with them. They are:

1. Patterns and impacts of interaction between humans and the environment (demography and disease, migration, patterns of settlement, technology).
2. Development and interaction of cultures (religions, belief systems, philosophies and ideologies, science and technology, the arts and architecture).
3. State-building, expansion, and conflict (political structures and forms of governance, empires, nations and nationalism, revolts and revolutions, regional, trans-regional and global structures and organizations).
4. Creation, expansion, and interaction of economic systems (agricultural and pastoral production, trade and commerce, labor systems, industrialization, capitalism and socialism).
5. Development and transformation of social structures (gender roles and relations, family and kinship, racial and ethnic constructions, social and economic classes).

You'll notice that a lot is fit into each heading.  This is good, because it gives lots of leeway.  This is bad because it gives lots of leeway.  You'll see...