Mr. Mathoslah's Island - Part 1

There's been a terrible and confusing accident and the classroom has somehow been marooned on a deserted island! After spending a day exploring the island the students must establish their own society in order to thrive and survive in their new home. How will they establish leadership? Commerce? Law and Defense? What resources will they care about protecting? Which will they overuse? Over the course of a class week each of these questions will be answered while the students interface with and review their knowledge of government, economics and law.

Class -

for the following two week unit please use my blog-recaps to think about what's happened in our class and in the simulation. For those of you who cannot attend every lesson, I will post a narrative of the classes as they happen, along with my own reflections about what I think the class has learned.

As always - post your questions and comments so that I can address them for you.

Please also refer to our class Wiki - where we will be defining our terms on this unit's assignment page.

Please also check back with our Documents where we'll keep track of certain resources and other metrics for the simulation.

Thanks for your participation!

What's the difference between a RULE and a PROCEDURE?

A rule is a dare, a procedure can't be broken.

Think of it! When is the last time you broke the speed limit? Now when is the last time you drove your car while it was in park?

A Rule is a dare you express, students will take that dare.

A Procedure is just what you have to do to get things done. Students need procedure just as much as they resent rules

Racing to the Bottom Holding the Top, Game Theory and You

Today's lesson is about the games that we play. We talk about Game Theory, but we're not talking about a little amusement, a simple diversion, but very certainly the difference between life and death, success and failure, riches and poverty.

You see the relationships between these opposed states aren't arrived at singularly. You can work hard, save, invest and struggle through as many advanced degrees as you can - and you might still be poor. Because Poverty, let us say as an example, is one side, or Axis of a continuum, and without co-operative Game Play, you will loose. Game Play you see is a method for getting along with people best, because the best interaction is one where everyone benefits equally.
The above image represents a classic system in Game Theory. This is important in economics because it explains, as with all economics, Human Behavior.

Here's the format of this lesson:

I - You're in the 11th grade and this is an economics course.

II - ODE standards and indicators - This lesson will help you learn something useful about personal finance that is appropriate for all job seekers and workers. If you're a disadvantaged worker - that is, if you lack collective bargaining and or are part of the working poor - this lesson can help you. This lesson is meant to teach you how collaboration and group planning/thinking will beat individual selfishness.

III - You will need: Access to the internet, a pen and a 3x5 index card.

IV - Procedures

1 - You're going to jail. Look at the person sitting next to you. You and that person have done a crime together. You're going to jail... Here I'll elaborate the scenario.

2 - Now we're bidding for a Grade. Write on your card the exact number of pages you're willing to write to get an A in this class. The highest number of pages submitted will get the A - while a scale sliding down will establish what grades everyone else gets. Answers and analysis to be posted on our class' wiki. Remember you each have a page set up to post questions and I expect to see acceptable comments made by each of you.

3- I'll give you another example, this is a real world situation from life that you can exploit and that you can learn from...

Liberty Ford TV Commercial Ohio Market @ Yahoo! Video

Notice the pricing as a point of sale? Here's what that means to you: These auto dealerships compete only on price, they are in effect racing to the bottom - each of them will outbid the other to get your business and deny it from the other, in this way - both dealerships make a very small potential profit, so you can use their lack of game play as a bargaining technique.

V - Now that the tally is in we can look at who will get an A. If you understand Game Theory you'll all have chosen wisely. If not, well, you might have committed yourself to more work than you'd rather do.

VI - Ideally students should realize that remaining unified and making collaborative choices yields a far greater return than acting for pure self interest.

Lesson Plan/Lecture for THE DUST BOWL

Living as we do in Cleveland, we often think that the weather is against us personally. Often enough in the course of human events the weather really IS against us. The Dust-Bowl of the 1930's is one of the larger instances of the weather trying to kill America.

From 1930 to 1940 a good deal of the American prairie dried up and flew into the air, creating a huge sea of dust, which wreaked havoc on most of the midwest, ruining the lives of many, many people. As with all great ecological disasters, some amount of blame inevitably falls upon the victims. In the case of the Dust Bowl, people had been farming on shallow soil while using terrible land management techniques. Ignoring sound, time tested strategies such as Crop Rotation, Lying Fallow the settlers has made matters worse by denuding the land of the native prairie grasses, which left the thin layer of topsoil present loose and ready to blow up into the sky.



Of course, human folly is only properly exposed in a calamity. As has been said: When the tide goes out you see who's been swimming naked. When drought came to the midwest the indifferent farming practices of the recent settlers made matters far, far worse. The loose soil sprang up at the merest wind and filled the sky, sometimes billowing as far to the East as New York City. The whole cover of topsoil of the region ended up blowing straight into the Atlantic Ocean.

On to the Lesson:

I - Description: This lesson is meant to teach you about the Dust Bowl, how it came about, how it affected our past society and how it informs our present. It is hoped that you will see the potentially negative effects of human behavior on the environment so that you can come to understand the scope of human activities and their influence on the natural world. You should also see the effects of natural disasters on your countrymen for the unfortunate, terrible and consequential things that they are, it is hoped that you will learn to have some sympathy for people so badly mistreated by the elements. Finally, you should be able to parse value and meaning from Original Primary Sources, as well as to Analyze those Sources successfully.



II - Goals: When we've completed this lesson you should be able to:

a. Explain why why they left the Dust Bowl, where they went, and also explain why some chose to stay.

b. You will be able to use your primary documents as an analytical tool to help you compose a diary entry from the perspective of one of the Dust Bowl's Victims.

c. Geography: You will be able to name and identify the places where the Dust Bowl Struck

d. Ecological Consciousness - You will understand the role that people have played in modifying the environment, sometimes to their dismay.

e. History Analysis: You will be able to read between the lines and discover what true meanings lie behind the Primary Sources.

III - Standards: You need to do these three things to pass this lesson:

A. Use Primary Source Material.

B. Explain the specific effects of the Dust Bowl on the greater nation

C. Attempt to understand the plight of those less fortunate

IV - You Will Need: You will need access to the internet and the ability to find and link
text, video and images. You will also need a word
processor. Alternatively you will need a pen, paper and library card.

V - The Lecture Element: In exchange for your participation I promise to educate you about this terrible period of our history as well as I am able.

Think about Dust. Think about it settling over you in a sheet, a blanket, imagine if the whole sky was made of dust. This is what people living in the 1930's in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles dealt with. They lived under the dust. Think of it ruining your water, spoiling your meals, clogging your nose, hurting your lungs. The dust hung in the sky for ten years, and still people stayed and endured it.

Most left. The Dust Bowl caused the greatest migration in American history. Two and a half million people left their homes and everything they couldn't carry behind and they went... West. The dust blew east to the Atlantic, and so the Okies, as they were known pejoratively, went west, to California.

Let's talk about these things...

VI - Group Work: You will now break into groups as I assign you and using the links provided in this entry create your diary entries based on the source material and the lecture. Use photographs, videos, and whatever else you need from the provided links and handouts. In the meantime - here are some musical selections contemporary to the Dust Bowl.










Finally, for the sake of inspiration and comparison - this is the video project of a high school Senior.