Now that you have been assigned a Hindu epic to act out your job is to learn the story, decide who will be the script writer/director and who will be the actors. At that point, the script writer/director will have the job of getting a script ready by Tuesday morning for a quick edit. Actors will need to begin learning their lines on Tuesday, and we will perform these at week’s end.

For the stories you are adapting, check the following suggested sites that give a solid summary of the story you are assigned.

Ramayana

• Summary. Points 6 – 10 should be emphasized.
• Cartoon version

Buddhism Part 1: Siddhartha’s birth to realization of suffering

• Summary. Only ready points 1 – 11

Buddhism Part 2: Siddhartha becomes Buddha

• Summary. Points 12 – 17

Buddhism Part 3: The Buddha’s first teaching. Returning home.

• Summary. Points 18 – 22

Bhagvad Gita

• Summary

Ganesha creation myth

• Summary

You and a partner have been given a Hindu God to research and present on. These presentations are meant to be short. This is simply a way to introduce the class to the god, goddess or demon. With that in mind, please keep the presentations under five minutes. Have a visual of appropriate size ready to display. Also, both people in the partnership need equal time sharing out to the class. We have discussed research norms. Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start, especially when the page is not flagged and when there are sources cited. However, .edu and .org as well as respected newspapers and magazines are usually better for finding information online.

Do your best to address the following questions in your presentation.

1. What is the god in question and who worships her/him?
2. What mythology exists in relation to the god you are studying? What stories are the god/goddess central in?
3. What does the god/goddess symbolize? What does the clothes or animals pictured with the god/goddess symbolize?
4. What ceremonies do the followers of the god/goddess practice?

Good luck and I’m looking forward to your presentations.

You had a chance to sit and observe the world and to develop questions about the world. Today, you will use those questions to make your first blog post in our class. Take the most intriguing question you came up with. Do a bit of research on your question. Go to your blog and post your question along with what you learned from your research. What other questions does this new information raise for you?

If you have additional time, go ahead and start your high school DP. You will want a tab for each grade, 9 – 12 and a spot for math, science and humanities.

Physicist Richard Feynman defines the scientific method in a minute.

Fantastic! You have successfully logged on to the HTH network and have found the class blog. From here you should do the following:

1. Peruse the class blog. There are links at the top of the page for Assignments, Grading, the Class Syllabus, etc. Take 10 or 15 minutes to read about our coming semester. If you have any questions, write them down for discussion later on.
2. Go to gmail.hightechhigh.org and log into your High Tech High email for the first time. Students coming from High Tech Middle Media Arts or High Tech Middle need to use the same email password they had last year. Students new to HTH should use the username and password you’ve been given to log onto the network. You can change that password once you’re into your gmail account.
3. Once you’re in gmail, click the Google Apps button in the top right hand corner of the page. Open the Blogger App and follow the prompts to start a Class Blog. Please title the blog appropriately (you will use it to submit work this year) and select a url that makes sense. I might choose – Brian’s 9th Grade Science Blog as my title and bdelgado_hthscience.blogger.com as my url.
4. Once you have created the blog, please send me an email (bdelgado@hightechhigh.org) with the following information:
   • Your blog url (make sure you’re sending the url and not the dashboard page. the url will have the address you select and blogger.com in the address. See my example above).
   • What do you enjoy about science?
   • What is challenging about science?
   • What do you hope to get out of this year?

Thanks and good luck!

I’m very excited for the coming semester. This blog is the major resource for students in my science class at High Tech High. This semester we will be doing some astrophotography, some rocketry and learning about humanity’s transition from mystical forms of thought to rational and, eventually, scientific forms of thinking. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of the students in the class and for the coming academic year.