The GREAT Seminar of 8C!! -by Christine L.

In today’s class, we had a seminar on week three immersion. This week’s immersion focused on the middle passage, the triangular trade route, which were basically the factors that led to development of slavery in the colonies. Other main ideas were the conditions of slavery ships going through the middle passage, what role the religion played in helping the New England colonies get established, and how the political, economic, and social situation of the New England colonies and the Southern colonies differed and how they were similar in some ways.

As usual, our seminar started out with Walter’s clear loud voice. Not only introducing new facts and answers to the factors of slavery development, our class students also brought up the ideas that we discussed last week about slavery. Soho gave a very good description of how the triangular trade route worked in detail. What the middle passage is was also discussed though the facts about the conditions of slavery ships bound for the middle passage were not discussed in depth. I think we got great explanation from Patrick about the role of religion played in the establishment of New England colonies. While talking about the role of religion, we got in depth with the Catholics and Protestants which also introduced to the topic of Separatists, Pilgrims, moving to Plymouth Bay on Mayflower which led to Mayflower Compact and then to Great Migration of the Non-Separatists group to Massachusetts. Our class also did a good job with compare and contrasting New England colonies and the Southern colonies.

We had a lot of information that we had to cover this week so in the seminar we also had many facts and ideas to talk about. Because of that reason, I think we ran short on time and several people did not get to participate in the seminar. But still it was a good discussion time with our class and we were able to understand better on the main ideas we covered this week.