First Fish Bowl On "The Giver"

During this Humanities class, we spent almost all of the class on fish bowl. You might be wondering what a Fish Bowl is in the first place. For a quick summary it is when five chairs are arranged in a circle, in the middle of the room. Based upon the topic of the discussion 5 people who want to share their thoughts would go in and sit in the chairs. After sharing their thoughts they can choose to leave the circle or be tapped by someone who would like to speak, so you you would get up and leave the circle. The trick is that only the people in the circle are allowed to talk, and the rest that are not allowed to even comment or whisper.

I think that overall, our fish bowl could have a bit more participation and talking because a lot of the times the circle was almost empty, once leaving only one person at the end. This was different than the other fish bowls because in the others we had, there weren't really moments where only one person had a thought/opinion to share. I personally went in about once or twice to share my thoughts which is average, I think. I have to say that talking about the stirrings and all the things about it in Jonas's community was easier than the topic on "realising". This was because I already read the book a while back and I know a lot about the realising which makes it hard for me to give others a chance to figure out what realsing is on their own. Although we didn't talk as much as usual, I think we stayed on topic most of the time and we answered the main questions we had at the beginning at the class. I think our next fish bowl on the book "The Giver" will be more sucsessful than this one.

Freedom or Being Ordered???

Today in class my class talked about the "One child policy in China vs the freedom that the "octomom" (mother of 14) had in having as many children she wanted. After our discussion we created headlines in order to describe the discussion we had. I chose to do "Freedom or Being Ordered"? I chose this because I was kind of in the middle for both. My post-it was kept in the middle of the continuem, a bit more to the One Child Policy. I thought that having freedom to choose how many children you want depends on what type of country you live and the level of smartness you have. For example if you live in China then you would probably need the one child policy, since the country would run out of resources if it was over populated, unlike America where there are plenty of recources so the Americans could probably choose to have more than two or three children. Another thing I mentioned was that the level of smartness you have. What I mean is that if you are a person that is smart enough to say "Okay having more children means spendiing more money. Can I afford to have 3 or more children"? This is considering the consequenses for having a lot of children and asking yourself if you would be able to haandle it. Although there should be a balance between having freedom and being ordered having controll will give off better futures for the poeple until the people are able to handle it.