Journey: Session 6, Week 2

Welcome to week 2 of session 6!

We started this week with genre, learning how to conduct an audience analysis and how to make your speeches ones that your audience will never forget. Then we moved on to Quest. On Monday, we had two quest challenges, and the first one was about presenting evidence. We practiced this by going in-depth on the O.J. Simpson TRial and identifying the techniques that his lawyers used to prove his innocence. We also stated our opinion of what we would have done if we were the prosecutors. The second Quest challenge was to work on our arguments for the character we would be playing in the Socrates trial, and we began drafting our openings. 

On Tuesday, we started the day off with Civ after core skills. This Civ was really interesting, and it was about Muhammad and the Dawn of Islam. The Civ discussion raised a wide range of diverse points and unique opinions. After Civ, we worked on Quest. For our first quest challenge, we conducted a critique of our opening statement and practiced reading it aloud. For our second Quest challenge, we read facts from a criminal case and wrote 100 words concluding the statement defending the client. We then wrote 100 more words explaining which facts we would expect the prosecutor to focus on. 

On Wednesday, we began with Genre, learning about the different parts of a great speech. We then read or listened to one of our heroes' speeches and identified the separate elements they used in their speech. Then we moved on to Quest. For our first quest challenge, we composed a response to any statement or question made by one of the sides in the trial, and we wrote a 100-word response. Then we wrote down a sentence explaining a belief that each of us held very firmly, and then we wrote 100 words as the other team trying to attack our beliefs. We then moved on to our second Quest challenge, which was about rebuttals and supporting arguments. We practiced this by drafting a point-by-point rebuttal, and finally, we drafted any additional arguments to help each of our opening statements. 

On Thursday, we began with Genre and learned about the Heroic message, then watched a TED talk on public speaking. Then, we wrote down our three most important lessons learned from the TED talk and the articles provided. Finally, we identified the taglines in the speech and created our taglines for our speeches. For our first Quest challenge, we continued working on presenting evidence, this time focusing on the trial of Sextus Roscius. We then wrote a closing statement for another trial, which was very similar to yesterday's. This time, we read and discussed our partner's warm and cool feedback on our statements. Thursday was the last day of school this week, as we had Alpine on Friday. That concludes week 2 of Session 6!