March 2nd 2022

    It has been a long time since Mr. Paterson last came to class, but I was glad to see him today. We had been working on the website for the past couple of classes, and today, we learned about the Russia-Ukraine war. Every day, I see news about this topic, and every day, it feels like it is getting worse and worse. On every Japanese media, they say Russia suddenly attacked Ukraine, and that is not right, or Russia and Putin are so evil, or the United States is trying to get in and meditate this situation, and so on. Since we learned about Palestine this year, I doubted these information, and I wondered if it is actually all Russia and Putin's fault. Turns out, it wasn't. First, my mom told me that there was something to do with NATO. She told me that NATO promised to not step any further to the East, but they did, and that is one of the reasons why Russia decided to invade Ukraine to stop Ukraine from joining NATO. That was yesterday, and today we had this class.

    When we got into groups and discussed what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, some people only knew the fact that Russia started a war on Ukraine and never really knew the meaning of it. I knew how NATO is involved in this situation, so I shared it with the group and wrote it on the board. Seeing the board, I was pretty surprised by the fact that somebody in every group had an idea of what is going on right now in Russia and seemed like they were not just watching the news on TV. This really made me feel that what we have learned in class is being used in our daily lives. 

    However, there was even more to it, and this, I never knew about. 

NATO was established to have even power with Warsaw Pact 

since ww2 is over, and WP is dismissed, there is no longer a reason to keep NATO

Americans didn't want Russia and Europe to have a huge trading block like expanded EU

over the last 200 years, Russia has been attacked by European countries much time

the attack has come from Ukraine

30 thousand people being killed over 10 years

    These are the notes I took during class and facts that I didn't know about until this day. I definitely didn't know these facts, and looking at the news being broadcasted every single day, I thought that there is no way the people are going to know about this situation. All we hear on news is just a superficial truth, and not the history, and never the whole picture. Again I rediscovered the importance of being exposed to different kinds of information sources and questioning everything and having the will to search things up. This conflict reminded me of the Israel Palestine conflict, as mentioned in class. As Mr. Paterson mentioned, I thought that it was weird how Israel's attack is explained as "defending," while Russia's attack is being called "evil." Even after we finish taking Mr. Paterson's course, I thought that I would like to hold on to this technique he has taught us in three years and cherish it for the rest of my life.