For my first blog post of the second semester, I am going to start off strong and talk about my workable peace framework essay that I recently completed. My stance on the thesis, “would the workable peace framework be useful in the Athens Melos conflict” was that it would be useful in that conflict, but not necessarily all other conflicts. I’m not going to summarize my essay here, because there is not really any point in doing that, but I will talk about the assignment itself, what I liked and disliked, and any feedback I have. If I am being honest, it wasn’t my favorite project we’ve done so far this year. I didn’t dislike it, and we did do a simulation that took up a week of class before writing this, so I understand that an essay had to happen. I think the reason I didn’t love it was because it was just writing, but that’s just how school is. I was and am actually pretty interested in the Athens vs. Melos conflict, and I would even look into it more outside of class. I think the workable peace framework was also an interesting topic to write about because of the many positions you can take on it. You can believe that it will never work for any conflicts, work for some conflicts but not others, and work for all conflicts. When applied to the Athens vs. Melos war, there are even more positions that you can take. To segway to talking about the simulation itself, I want to express how much fun it was. I have always liked doing mock things in school, whether it being a mock trial in 7th grade, or this. I feel like I learned a lot from this simulation, and it didn;t really feel like work. It felt like a fun debate. So far this year, I would say that this has definitely been my favorite assignment. If I had to change one thing, I would say that maybe you as a facilitator should be more strict about the no talking except the four that is up a speaking rule. I think this would force everyone to think about what they were going to say a bit more. Another suggestion could be giving a certain amount of “time-outs” of sorts. This could mean that each team has maybe one or two times when they can choose to have a meeting during the debate, so that way theres more structure to the team meetings instead f us just begging you to have a meeting whenever we have something to discuss. This would force us to prepare better notes so that nayone in the group would be have the resources and kniowledge to debate, instead of a few people feeding them information. These are just some suggestions I have, and hyoyu don’t have to feel any obligation to use them. I think thats all I have to say about these two topics, so I’ll end there.