Year 8 agenda

I am a little bit disappointed that only one person from 8N handed in their homework that was due Thursday 21st. As it is exam week and then next week I am in Gredos I will expect it first thing Monday 8th. May or you will be in a Humanities detention at lunchtime. For those of you who have lost it here are the questions and the link to James Nachtweys photographs.
1. When was the Vietnam War? (30 secs)
2. When were the 10 IRA prisoners starving themselves to death? (4 mins 20 secs)
3. What does IRA mean?
4. When was the second intifada? (5 mins 30 secs)
5. What was the name of the Palestininan refugee camp? (6 mins)
6. In Yugoslavia who were the three main groups fighting? (6 mins 15)
7. What did the Xhosa tribe do to the bodies of young boys in Transkei? (7 mins
8. What was used as ameans of genocide in Southern Sudan) (8 mins 50)
9. What is genocide?
10. What is an NGO?
11. What is the UN?
12. How many people wer slaughterd in Rwanda? (10 mins 30)
13. What is NATO?
14. What was Agent Orange?(14 mins 20)
15. What was the active ingredient in Agent Orange?
16. Who are MSF?
17. When did he go to Darfur? (16 mins)
18. Who are the Taliban? I18 min 20)
19. What country is Bagdad the capital of?
20. Where did the Shiites go to observe Ashura? (19 mins)

8R will be considering the mystery of why Kanye West doesnt want to wear his bling whilst 8N are going to be watching the Film Blood Diamond as part of their work on the geography of conflict, and both 8R and 8N will have an oppotunity to see the following short video.



This I feel helps to put both the human and physical side of both the legal and illegalside of the diamond industry into perspective. When I was a child I lived on a diamond mining compound in Namibia and I remember my father telling me how all the yellow diamonds were thrown in a bin to be ground into powder to be used for industrial purposes, how times change now they are very highly prized for the colour! We also had to be X rayed everytime we went off site to see if we had any uncut diamonds on our body, because if you did you could be thrown into jail for 15 years for theft, the laws however were just a market control. The diamond marketing strategy is to keep them scarce. If the diamond fields were really mined, diamonds would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth cutting or selling them. So they are hoarded, and only a carefully calculated trickle are ever released into the global market.



Both 8N and 8R also have a homework for the week of the first of June, it isnt too demanding and will really help you get to grips with some of the issues that we have explored in recent weeks regarding the crisis in Darfur. It´s also fun! I recommend you have a go at playing it, the IB students and I found it strangely addictive. Darfur is Dying

For the last lesson after you have seen the video, Kanye Wests song about Diamonds from Sierra Leone is going to be up for consideration, with you asking yourself why he refuses to wear his bling anymore.Could it have something to do with the mining of blood diamonds. You will just have to complete the exercises and find out.

Then for the last two weeks of term we shall continue with war and conflict focussing on how and why the map of Europe changed after World War II and how conflict is redefining the landscape in Pakistan and Afghanistan.