Day 2 - Clicker Quizzes and Periodization

     Today in WHAP, we discussed clicker quizzes, continued our discussion on Periodization, and were assigned our first Crash Course video.

     First, we talked about clicker quizzes, which are basically a multiple choice quiz, except you use a little clicker (hence the name) to select the answers. I'm looking forward to these clicker quizzes, mainly because I was quite the Quiz Bowl stud back in 2012, and while this isn't a competition like that was, there are a few small similarities. On top of this, by completing a worksheet well, Mr. Profit will guarantee that you will get a 100 on the clicker quiz, just in case you feel nervous or pressured during the quiz, and can't perform as well.

     After this, we briefly watched the first 30 seconds or so of a Crash Course video. During this time the host, John Green, made a joke about "that student" who always asks the question: "Is this going to be on the test?" His response to that really got me thinking, as he implied that the real tests about history aren't the tests that we're handed in class but they're in the real world and everything will be on it. To me, this means that we need to be able to understand the mistakes and successes of the past and be able to prevent these events or in some cases, tragedies, from ever occurring again.

     Moving on from this, we continued our discussion on Periodization. The highlight of this discussion, in my opinion, was a video we watched during class that summarized all of history into about seven minutes, with each second representing a certain measure of time. This video really emphasized that civilization developed very slowly at first, and then all of a sudden there was a huge growth, which in the video was depicted as more and more events started to appear in shorter periods of time. After the video, each of us made our own division of the events, and everyone at my table had a different setup for the division, further emphasizing how the boundaries created to divide time are very shady and subjective, with a lot of gray area.

     Now back to the end of the video, where events started to speed up as the time grew closer to today. Whether this sudden increase in events means that we'll keep growing at a faster and faster pace, I'm not sure if that could be predicted right now, in the moment. However, I think it will be interesting to observe the changes occurring over the next few year, and see if we continue to grow at increasing speeds every year.

With that, the bell rang and we were dismissed. Until tomorrow!

Jack Corrales