Category: 2018-2019

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Which is the Real America?

The first cohort of Liger Leadership Academy is going to take SAT in the 6th of October, and since the history and literature sections of SAT are closely tied with American history, Literacy Round One has focused on the theme of America.

In this class, we were given six American-history texts from CommonLit to read and analysis each week: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s Writing on American Indians, Causes of the American Civil War, America’s Shifting Views on Immigration, Excerpt from The Jungle, and The Great Depression. To further understand these oppressive issues, we also read additional articles from Newsela and watched videos and part of a documentary series.

Within each text, we had to read, annotate, answer multiple choice and writing prompt questions, research the meaning(s) and part of speech of each vocabulary and write a sentence for each part of speech as well as discuss the text and related topics with our friends and learning facilitator. To better manage our time, we usually talked about the text and any word that we struggled to understand on Monday, discussed about multiple choice questions and writing prompt(s) on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, and worked independently on our “Vocabulary Exploration” and answered the questions on CommonLit on Thursday.

Personally, I am always eager to learn about world history because it helped me to understand the past events that affect each country today. For instance, when I read and discussed about Causes of the American Civil War, I now fully understand why racism is still a reality in America. Hundreds of years ago, black people were considered an “inferior” species until the point that they were used as “property.” Even though that we now in the 21st century, many Americans still suffer from discrimination, injustices, and exploitation.

In addition to the importance of learning history, these texts has taught me that the America that I used to think of is not always the truth. I used to believe that America is a land that fills with amazing opportunities and happiness; however, after reading these texts, that is not always the case: America has suffered and currently face with many atrocious issues. So, which one do you believe is the real America?

Causes of the American Civil War

Question: Analyze how the differing views on slavery between the North and South resulted in the Civil War.
 
As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 called both the North and the South to form “a single federal government,” there was a dispute among the two colonies: they had different perspectives on slavery. The North viewed slavery as a sin and therefore should be eradicated; whereas the South, they believed that slavery is “the basis of Southern life”‒ therefore ending it will threaten the Southern way of life ‒ and declared that it is ”ordained by God.” Because of these opposite stances, they had lead to virulence and violence. To abolish slavery, the North “volunteers patrolled streets to rescue fugitive blacks from the slave catchers.” This action has caused the southerners to respond “with an increasingly virulent hateful attacks on their critics.” This shows that the South really did detest the North’s effort to free the slaves. In addition to the adverse effect of their views, two days later after a “scathing speech” was delivered in June 1856, a Southern congressmen “severely beat the abolitionist with a gold walking cane.” This reflects the antagonism that the southerners had toward the abolitionists. These heterogeneous viewpoints on slavery demonstrate how they contributed to the cause of the Civil War.
 

America’s Shifting Views on Immigration

Excerpt from the Jungle

The Great Depression

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Toyota Impact Challenge – Semi-Final Pitch Night

On the 14th of August, I participated in an event, hosted by Impact Hub, where six passionate start up teams “pitch to a panel of judges for 6 months incubation.” All of their apps have to link to one of the themes of the Toyota Impact challenge:  road safety, smart cities, future of transport, and environment.

After the first session, I went to talk with a girl who is the founder of JisDer app, which could possibly solve the issue of traffic jam in Phnom Penh. Basically, the users can see if there are people going to the same place as them and connect with the driver to pick them up too. Then, the driver will receive money from the user. After she reintroduced me to her app, I asked her multiple questions, especially about user’s and driver’s safety.

One of the teams in particular that I love has developed a TosJis app. They noticed that public transportation is very popular all around the world, except Cambodia. To combat this problem, they created an app to show the route and real-time updates of each bus. In the future, they plan to implement GPS trackers on all the buses so that the users can receive “accurate arrival and departure time.” Because of their business model and feasibility, their team got selected for the 6 months incubation program with the other two teams.

 

Click on the link to read more about the other 6 teams: https://phnompenh.impacthub.net/2018/08/14/toyota-impact-challenge-semi-final-pitch-night/