Session 2, Friday class:
The class enjoyed the Kahoot! game that I designed to review the Manifesto, especially the historiographical ideas in it. Things were a bit chaotic because we were missing our Karl Schapper, the leader of the assembly. Thankfully, August Hermann Ewerbeck stepped up to be the president pro tem. The Bakunin character gave an excellent speech on how the state cannot be trusted because it is an instrument of the bourgeoisie and ergo it is useless for workers to organize themselves as a political party. There were some other good speeches, but that one was by far the best. Still, it was interesting to me what a difference there was between this class, which has not had the extensive coaching on what I what from a speech, and the speeches students gave in during my Athens game last semester, during which I both made clear what my expectations were during class, in the rubric and gave them time together to work on those issues.
Helen McFarlane and William Lloyd Garrison produced good newsletters. But while these are very entertaining for me to read, I wondered what I could do to make the other students pay closer attention to them. What I loved about this assignment is that it seems as if done well, would be a great example of historiography in action: the students would be providing two very interpretations of the same event.
William King made his arrest, choosing to arrest Marx. The students did some excellent gaming of the rules as well: both the followers of Marx and the Bourgeois Socialists realized that if William King and Marx voluntarily gave up their votes, their sides would not be at a disadvantage.
Nonetheless, even with these shenanigans, the voting was overall pretty quick. What was interesting is that Ewerbeck failed to convince herself that she had enough votes to adjourn the meeting, which prompted the anarchists to propose returning to the topics from Session 1. There was some interesting discussion there.
Session 2, Monday class:
Again, there were some key absences, specifically Bakunin. There was also the problem that some characters weren’t in the previous class and had not done sufficient work to catch up with the rest of the class.
The Kahoot! quiz went well, but it also became clear that the votes awarded for this work, combined with the absences, combined with the extra votes from the BINGO game in Session 1, decided the votes for the day.
The speeches were not of the caliber I wanted. It was clear that the students were too reliant on their character sheets and were not engaging with the text.
Neither of the journalists distributed their newspapers. What was really surprising was that William King decided not to make his arrest: he did some vote counting and had determined that it made more sense for him to not disrupt things.
For this class, I had the sense to create some reflection questions in advance. I gave the students ten minutes to write out some answers and then had them discuss them in small groups. What surprised me was how honest a number of them were about how negatively they had been trained to view Marx and anything associated with him and how they didn’t see much of that in the text itself. In terms of the game mechanics, there was a push for characters not to have their views on everything written by the rules.
The class enjoyed the Kahoot! game that I designed to review the Manifesto, especially the historiographical ideas in it. Things were a bit chaotic because we were missing our Karl Schapper, the leader of the assembly. Thankfully, August Hermann Ewerbeck stepped up to be the president pro tem. The Bakunin character gave an excellent speech on how the state cannot be trusted because it is an instrument of the bourgeoisie and ergo it is useless for workers to organize themselves as a political party. There were some other good speeches, but that one was by far the best. Still, it was interesting to me what a difference there was between this class, which has not had the extensive coaching on what I what from a speech, and the speeches students gave in during my Athens game last semester, during which I both made clear what my expectations were during class, in the rubric and gave them time together to work on those issues.
Helen McFarlane and William Lloyd Garrison produced good newsletters. But while these are very entertaining for me to read, I wondered what I could do to make the other students pay closer attention to them. What I loved about this assignment is that it seems as if done well, would be a great example of historiography in action: the students would be providing two very interpretations of the same event.
William King made his arrest, choosing to arrest Marx. The students did some excellent gaming of the rules as well: both the followers of Marx and the Bourgeois Socialists realized that if William King and Marx voluntarily gave up their votes, their sides would not be at a disadvantage.
Nonetheless, even with these shenanigans, the voting was overall pretty quick. What was interesting is that Ewerbeck failed to convince herself that she had enough votes to adjourn the meeting, which prompted the anarchists to propose returning to the topics from Session 1. There was some interesting discussion there.
Session 2, Monday class:
Again, there were some key absences, specifically Bakunin. There was also the problem that some characters weren’t in the previous class and had not done sufficient work to catch up with the rest of the class.
The Kahoot! quiz went well, but it also became clear that the votes awarded for this work, combined with the absences, combined with the extra votes from the BINGO game in Session 1, decided the votes for the day.
The speeches were not of the caliber I wanted. It was clear that the students were too reliant on their character sheets and were not engaging with the text.
Neither of the journalists distributed their newspapers. What was really surprising was that William King decided not to make his arrest: he did some vote counting and had determined that it made more sense for him to not disrupt things.
For this class, I had the sense to create some reflection questions in advance. I gave the students ten minutes to write out some answers and then had them discuss them in small groups. What surprised me was how honest a number of them were about how negatively they had been trained to view Marx and anything associated with him and how they didn’t see much of that in the text itself. In terms of the game mechanics, there was a push for characters not to have their views on everything written by the rules.