We started today with our Bill of Rights assessment, which seemed to go well. About 84% of you passed it the first time through. Remember, we will look at the last amendments (11-27) starting on Monday. It will take a few days to get through everything, so you need to start reviewing material ON MONDAY to be prepped for the assessment next Friday. At that point, we will just have the summative assessment remaining for the unit, which will be given on October 3 (probably.)
We then moved on to discuss some of the topics from Thursday's overview of Liberal versus Conservative beliefs on various issues. It appears that most of our classes follow the normal pattern for younger people: mostly liberal, with a few neutrals and a few more conservatives. Additionally, the most important topics for most people tended to be the big ones that dominate politics in our country: abortion, gay rights, gun control, taxation and immigration. We discussed how certain legal and demographic shifts have made some of those issues more or less moot (look up what that means,) while others such as abortion remain contentious today.
In science, we discussed a few topics from earlier in the week: the spread of Ebola virus in Western Africa, and Automotive Engineering as a STEM career. To sum up, Ebola is scary, but the USA is well equipped to deal with it, for now. To prevent it from spreading and possibly becoming more dangerous, it makes sense to devote some of our resources to limiting it now while it is confined to Africa.
One of the major advantages that people identified for the career assignment was the salary. Auto engineers ear a median salary of about $79,000, which is quite a bit more than the current average of about $45,000 in the USA. On the other hand, you do need a Bachelor's degree from a college that requires a fair bit of science and math classes...some people identified this as a positive (only four years!) and a negative (so much science!.) Finally, quite a few of you argued that as jobs go, it asked you to work too much: between 40 to 55 hours a week!
We then talked about how the average American actually works 46 hours a week now for less money, which makes the money earned per hour worked as an Engineer pretty appealing.
Next week will be pretty challenging. We're going to work on Science a lot more, and try to put some of our ideas into practice for the Engineering project. I actually think it'll be pretty fun, but it'll take more time than we've spent over the past few weeks.
Enjoy your weekend. Relax yo' brains! See you Monday.