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Posts Tagged ‘Geography’

  1. But Why?

    19 February 2015 by shartley

    I love the curiosity of younger kids.  I love toddlers who ask “But why?”  I don’t like that by the time they arrive at high school many have lost their enthusiasm.

    In Year 7 Geography we start with ‘What is Geography?’  I have some beautifully enthusiastic boys who are keen to contribute, one in particular is quite earnest.  The other 20-something students already view school as a chore.  Which is sad.

    What is also sad that their answer to ‘What is Geography?’ just focuses on knowledge and understanding.  I spent several minutes this week saying, “but why?”, to encourage further thought and development.  It was painful, but eventually we arrived at:

    • To care for the world
    • To solve problems like global warming and floods
    • To prepare for the future

    The next day I revisited the question and it still took a while to arrive at the why.  When did children stop thinking about the why?

    In Year 11 Society and Culture this week we discussed the differences between interactions they have at home with their family, with their friends, with people they know at school who aren’t close friends, with people in their sporting clubs and how they may be influenced by media and government.  Again, I had to be persistent with asking, “But why?”  Thankfully this is a class of thoughtful students.  I can almost see the cogs turning in their heads as I probe for more and more and their fascination increases as they learn more and more.  This is a class that will bring me joy.

    Even in HSC Business Studies I was asking, “But why?”  Why do businesses need to monitor, control and look for continual improvement?  Why do they want to offer after-sales service?  Why are stores laid out certain ways?  I’m tired of students thinking that all they need to do is make comprehensive textbook summary notes to achieve well in the HSC when synthesis and problem-solving are also important.  A couple of my more diligent students were reluctant to think about the type of customer service a bicycle shop could offer their customers at the point of sale and beyond, and thus wrote a single sentence response so they could tick the mental box that the task was complete.  When I had the discussion with them to push their thinking further they came up with some brilliant suggestions.  The trick now is to transfer that thinking into a pen and paper exam.

    But why is it such a struggle to push students beyond a memorising mindset?


  2. Perfection

    9 February 2015 by shartley

     

    I have worked for over 20 hours this weekend on preparing units of work, mainly for the new Society and Culture syllabus for Year 12.  Popular Culture was in the old syllabus but there are some pertinent changes.  We do a focus study on Social Media which I developed two years ago as a workbook based on an existing format that had been created before I had arrived at my current school.  I used the workbook as a basis because I didn’t want to stomp on toes within the first few weeks of starting.  I am also taking the opportunity to move it into Google Drive, make it current and increasingly an interactive learning experience.

    Water Management for Year 9 Geography was the other main area I was preparing.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the most frustrating aspect of teaching Geography for me is that the resources are boring.  Not being my area of expertise or even interest, I find it harder to find quality resources for Geography than for Economics or Business Studies.  When I teach Geography I prefer to do it in PBL style and for NSW Geography that means following the Research Action Plan laid out in the syllabus, not mere secondary research and regurgitate.

    So as I was thinking about what I would write for this blog tonight I thought about my striving for perfection.  Upon a quick Google search I discovered 14 Signs Your Perfectionism Has Gotten Out of Control and straight away I want to correct the word ‘has gotten’ in the title to be ‘is’.  I’ve reduced the original list down to the ten most appropriate for me:

      1. You’ve always been eager to please
      2. You know your drive for perfection is hurting you, but you consider it the price to pay for success
      3. You’re a big procrastinator
      4. You’re highly critical of others
      5. You have a hard time opening up to other people
      6. You know there’s no use crying over spilt milk…but you do anyway
      7. You take everything personally
      8. …And you get really defensive when criticised
      9. You’re never quite “there yet”
      10. You have a guilty soul

     

    I wouldn’t say I’m eager to please but I’m eager to do the best for my students because I don’t want to let them down (1).  I’m constantly surprised that other teachers don’t have the same drive and inside my head I am highly critical of them even though I can see their perspective, I just can’t relate to it (4).  It hurts me because I don’t sleep or exercise enough as a consequence (2) which I feel guilty about, and the lack of time I spend with my own children (10).  Yet I am a HUGE procrastinator, sometimes taking all morning to surf the Internet for trivial things rather than start a project I know will take all day (3).  I take just about everything that happens personally, in the emotional sense (7), even though logically I know most events around me are not actually about me so when I am actually criticised it hurts incredibly deeply and I am defensive but the words to my defence may not be spoken (8).  I used to cry a lot (6).  About everything and anything that I perceived as having gone wrong.  But the tears have dried up.  I think the tears of release were better because now it feels like a huge weight inside.

    Given all this, I probably shouldn’t be a teacher because there is no finished product.  The Geography lessons I’ve been preparing are for 30 students and it is just impossible to have it perfect for every single one and they aren’t finished products to be packed up and sold, they are constantly developing human beings.  Concentrating on me, I feel I am never “there yet” as a teacher (9).  I am constantly striving to be a better teacher and to help others to improve.  It’s incredibly frustrating that there is no obvious end goal.  And don’t say students’ results are a measure of a teacher’s success because they aren’t.  Sometimes success is keeping students interested enough to simply stay at school and not drop-out.  Sometimes it’s just helping them to find some pride in their work.  Sometimes it’s just a positive conversation about learning or life itself.  These little moments are what makes the experience worth it.

    I am well and truly over my 28 minutes so I’ll end this here.  Except, the one frustrating aspect of this #28daysofwriting is that the time restriction and the commitment to post every day means I don’t have time to truly perfect the writing and I feel guilty about some of the drivel that has been posted from this process.  So sorry!

     


  3. The Unmeasured

    6 February 2015 by shartley

    As HSC scores and ATAR results roll into the school’s conversations and the media coverage, we find ourselves evaluated and judged on the basis of these.  The media only has access to the Band 6 (90 and above) results of students in each subject so schools are ranked on this basis.  In this post I want to discuss the unmeasured outcomes.

    In Year 12 Society and Culture today I was meant to be covering the dot-point in the syllabus about the future directions of the country we had chosen to study for the topic of Change and Continuity.  We have been studying Vietnam.  In class, students were organised into small groups and were supposed to use all that they had learned about Vietnam to predict what would happen in the next 5 to 10 years.  They had spent several weeks studying Vietnam at the end of last year and had a refresher lesson and a half this week.

    However, they struggled to focus, which could partly be because it was Friday, at the end of the first full week back, on a day of an assembly that went for over an hour and that they are keen to move onto the next topic, Popular Culture.  Every bit of pleading and guiding failed.  So I let it go.  I decided to give myself a break for 10 minutes and leave them to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss.  The group that most interested me included a girl who suffers from anxiety and the most chilled girl going around.  They run in completely different social circles but they were using this time to find out about each other and their attitudes towards school.  It was fascinating to eavesdrop on the conversation as Miss Chilled gave Miss Stressed advice and Miss Chilled learned how much other students care about results and doing their best to perform at school.  Miss Chilled expressed how much she loves school because she lets all the hard bits just wash by her.  Miss Stressed couldn’t believe that people like Miss Chilled exist in the world.  What I was most fascinated by was how much they listened to each other intently and learned about different perspectives and attitudes towards the purpose of school.  And isn’t that what Society and Culture is all about?  Yet this conversation will never be measured or recorded except in this blog and possibly in their own memories.

    All up, the three groups came up with some good basic fundamental future directions for Vietnam but mere bones which need a lot more flesh.  I’m frustrated that I feel the need to do one more lesson to expand their ideas when my schedule says we should be starting Popular Culture.  How often do we ignore learning opportunities because of our plans based on content driven syllabuses?  Thankfully in Society and Culture we have more scope and space than most other subjects except for the timing requirements of the Personal Interest Project (PIP) but I’ll save discussion of the PIP to another day.

    The assembly today was a celebration of the 2014 HSC students who achieved an ATAR of 90 or more.  It was a well ran event with one of those students performing a piece out of the musical Chess, a guest speaker, the Head of Curriculum speaking and two of the 2014 HSC students speaking, ending with the student who achieved the top ATAR mark for the grade.  Both the students spoke about balance and tried to provide advice for how to approach the HSC, study and school life in general.  They had both very thoughtfully constructed speeches directed at their peers.  The seeds they may have sowed today will never be measured because the cause and effect of HSC results to speeches like these are not measured.  My daughter is in Year 12 this year and a similar event occurred at her school and the highlight for her was similar advice from a past student but her outward behaviour will not change in any detectable way. I’m a big believer in sowing seeds that may blossom immediately or may take an age to show life.

    Today I had 10 minutes with a colleague who is resistant to change and having to learn new things but she is thrown into a circumstance where she must.  I showed her how to use the technology required for our Year 7 program and provided some tips along the way to make it easier and more efficient.  All these little moments of teachers learning are not measured; it seems that only the big registered courses that count in the teacher accreditation process.  The 10 minutes snatched here and there are precious in the teaching world but are not valued enough.  Teachers learning from each other, planning together and even teaching together is vital for the modern age but there isn’t enough of it.

    Ah, my 28 minutes are up.  I’ll sneak in here at the end stuff about my last class of the week with Year 7, my second ever Geography class with them, with both lessons having a focus on the technology set-up rather than the subject itself, and that’s fine.  While they were learning about the technology and some basics of high school Geography, I learned about them.  I learned how a boy interrupts me mid-sentence every time he had something to say (and I wonder if he is allowed to interrupt his parents at home), how another could not stop talking no matter how hard he tried, how some boys have patience and resist the hardships being dependent on technology can bring, while others want to give up at the first sign of difficulty.  I learned how strongly independent some students were, and they weren’t who I expected.  I learned that most of the students started the year with a concept that Geography is all about nature and that the human element is a perspective of Geography many hadn’t considered before.  I don’t know all the students’ names yet so I don’t have comprehensive notes of all this but this information is invaluable for deciding my attitude and approach to teaching them.  How can this sort of thing be measured?

    At the end of the school day I gave my congratulations to Year 7 for making it through their first full week of high school and was very corny by asking them to give themselves a pat on the back but they were happy to do so.  I imagined giving myself one too.  Survival, resilience, resisting temptations, and letting go of control…these things are hard to measure but are so important to life and learning.  When are we going to start valuing the unmeasured more?


  4. One of those days

    5 February 2015 by shartley

    LoveHartley

    I had one of those days but I still feel positive about it.  It has been over a year since I last had to teach all five lessons in a day so I was a little wary of the load before me as I arrived at school and felt a little under-prepared for my Year 9 Geography class after they achieved more than I expected yesterday.  I arrived at school at my usual 8am, just 20 minutes before I had a meeting, so after checking email and other notices I opened the PowerPoint that was listed on the program as what I should be teaching Year 9 today.  It was a horrendous PowerPoint of four slides: a title, a map and two covered in text.  I quickly spread the text over a few extra slides and then searched for images and interesting tid-bits on the Internet to accompany the slides.  I was about half way through this exercise when I had to go to the meeting.

    Meeting completed, Home Room done and then Period 1 Year 11 Society and Culture where we went through the Fundamental and Additional Concepts, followed by Period 2 Business Studies where students looked at an airline/tourism case study regarding goods and services and then examined Domino’s Pizza Operations Report from their 2013 Annual Report.  All this went without a hitch.

    At recess I skipped returning to my staff room so I could have some time to set-up for my first proper Geography lesson with Year 7 and steal some time to finish the PowerPoint…ambitious for a twenty minute break.  Even more unlikely when a colleague grabs you for a conversation en route.  Absolutely impossible when you arrive at the Year 7 classroom and realise you left your computer cords in your regular classroom.  A quick trot back and forth and it was almost time for the students to arrive.  Two of the other Year 7 teachers arrived and there was talk of classroom swaps.  I bowed out graciously and continued my set-up.

    The Year 7s were quite good and 27 of 30 students successfully copied the worksheet from the original into their own newly established Geography folders in Google Drive.  The other three were unsuccessful due to internet issues.  However, being Year 7 they had loads of questions and I ran late to Year 9 Geography back in my regular classroom.

    When I arrived the Year 9s were making a lot of noise outside the class.  When I let them in we had a talk about appropriate behaviour and my eyes scanned the room detecting the lock box as opened with the remote for the IWB missing.  I kept looking and some of the boys said a teacher had told them to tell me she’d put it on…something.  They obviously hadn’t heard her clearly but couldn’t be bothered to clarify.  The remote couldn’t be found so I sent a boy to the teacher who was then off class.  She said another teacher who she named may have taken it.  I sent a kid to that teacher and thankfully he came back with it, without a message to accompany it.  Right, now I could show the PowerPoint, half improved.  But no, in the meantime my computer had encountered an error, had restarted and I couldn’t find a recoverable file (stupid me hadn’t saved the half-improved version) so in a bind I ran with the boring original.  I surprised myself with how much I knew about reading a map and making it interesting for the students but then we hit the text.  Groans.  I handed out post-it notes for students who finished first to write ways people could reduce water usage and just single notes as the slower writers finished, to fill the gap of catch-up as students finished writing.  I rarely use PowerPoint and this is one of the reasons why.  More groans with the second slide of text.  Four boys had passively resisted working and just didn’t write or type most of the material so were kept in to finish at lunch.  One of those four had “I love Ms Hartley” on a post-it note on his forehead, his friend had one with “Hit Me” written on it but just on his desk (at least my name was spelt correctly).  I’m guessing that originally they were put on students’ backs.  Mr Forehead Guy now has to see his Dean about it since I passed it up the line due to the personal nature of it.  The Deans are really good at dealing with the boys who are pushing at boundaries like this.

    Despite this boring text writing lesson and the resistance to work from a handful, I think it went well.  I’ve worked out I don’t like teaching Geography because I’m not passionate about it but also because the resources in programs at both this school and my last one are incredibly boring and I become tired of reinventing the wheel every time I’m placed on Geography.  I was ashamed today to put up such a boring PowerPoint and the boringness was reflected in the boys’ behaviour.  So I can do battle with the resources before going to class which generally takes two hours for every hour of teaching it or I can just battle disengaged students.  I prefer to do the former normally.  The four boys I kept in were quite friendly and understood that it was caused by their own actions (or lack thereof) and didn’t hold a grudge, or even some begrudging respect for recognising their resistance to work.

    After a short lunch last period was Year 12 Society and Culture where one of the students conducted a focus group for her PIP.  She hadn’t thought through seating arrangements so it took her a while to work that out and then the class was argumentative and loud but she handled it well.  I stayed out of the whole thing to maintain the integrity of it being her focus group.

    At the end of the school day I had to chase down some printing I lost the previous day, wrote up the demerits and merits for the day and then did that PowerPoint even though I will probably never use it, simply because I had been half way there and the websites I had used were listed in my History.  I left school at 5.30pm, half an hour after my self-imposed time limit for this year, and last to leave in my section of the school, but pleased that I had managed the day calmly and reasonably successfully despite the hurdles and hiccups along the way.

    HomeTime


  5. Expectations

    4 February 2015 by shartley

    WaterCycle7 WaterCycle11 WaterCycle10 WaterCycle9 WaterCycle8 WaterCycle2 WaterCycle6 WaterCycle5 WaterCycle4 WaterCycle3

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Boys can’t draw.  Year 9 Boys are horrible.  So many kids with special needs in that class, you’re going to struggle to get anything done.

    These are the sort of statements that have been tossed around as I prepared to teach Year 9 Geography this week.  The game was a huge hook but now I had to follow up on it.  I found a lame but mildly entertaining video clip on YouTube to cover the Natural Water Cycle and then asked the students to draw an A4 sized diagram of the Natural Water Cycle in the workbooks.  There were mutterings of “I can’t draw” but all but a handful just got on with it.  The first step for most of them was an online image search for a diagram and then they copied it into their books.  As the first few were finishing I added to the task that they had to introduce 2-3 examples of the human impact on the Natural Water Cycle and then to write a paragraph about these human impacts.

    By far the majority of the diagrams were fabulous and the students were on task and even engaged.  I’m not sure why.  Every time I congratulated a student on a good drawing they swelled with pride.  When I took photos of some of the better ones, again they were pleased.  It doesn’t take much.  There are only four boys out of the 29 present today that had sub-standard drawings.  I’m quite pleased with that result.

    At the end of the lesson I introduced the class to the Google Class I had established for them and chaos ensued as they all encountered various issues with joining the Google Class.  I had a student expert in the room who helped and eventually we had just about everyone logged in.  Then the silliness commenced as they chatted within the Google Class page.  I said they had an hour to take the messages down or there would be consequences.  One student asked how they were to take them down and I said if they could figure out how to do a comment they could figure out how to delete them.  A few hours later I checked and they were all gone.

    There was a similar occurrence with Year 7 last week as they were being introduced to various online tools within a ‘Getting to Know the Library’ exercise.  A task asked students to add a sticky about their favourite book in Padlet.  Like it was with Year 9, silliness prevailed and there were silly comments all over the Padlet page very quickly.  We talked about the first impressions they were making of themselves online and in person, that Year 7 was a fresh start and a chance to establish the person they wanted to be and how they wanted to be seen and respected.  The silliness subdued after that.


  6. Game

    2 February 2015 by shartley

    Game

    Game on!

    Last period today I finally met my Year 9 Geography class properly.  We are starting with the topic of Water Management and on the weekend I found this wonderfully appropriate game called Catchment Detox.  So today I introduced the course by just asking them to play the game for the whole 64 minute lesson, briefly raising the idea of showing them how to play, but they assured me they could work it out for themselves and in the most part, they did.  The game involves taking 100 turns and at each turn deciding upon how to raise money through industry (eg various forms of agriculture and/or tourism), how to manage water supplies (eg investing in water research and/or building dams) and other ecological decisions (eg whether to make national parks).  I dangled a prize of a packet of lollies for the highest score by the time of our next lesson on Wednesday.

    Some students went slowly and carefully while others went at great speed and played nearly three times in the time period.  They were allowed to play in pairs or individually with most choosing individually but openly discussing tactics with each other.  As some became more adept at the game they helped others.  Some were competitive, trying to find out each other’s achievements.  Interesting, even though I had said score/rank was what would win the prize, most of the focus was on how much money they were earning.  I heard conversations about cows versus pigs, orchards versus rice and excitement about investing in viticulture.  Questions of each other were asked about salinity, where one should build a dam and the merits of logging.  A handful of students listened to music with ear buds and one played music quietly on his laptop, muting it whenever I came near, as if I couldn’t hear it unless I was standing right next to him.  Other than looking for music, I didn’t see any screens not on the game until the last few minutes of the lesson.

    Many students were scoring in the 500,000s (I achieved 599,602 in my only game yesterday) but then 5 minutes before the end, a student who already shows signs of being disengaged, low achieving and disruptive in a ‘regular’ class environment was excited to achieve 642,000+ and was very pleased to have a fuss made about it. When I say ‘signs’ I guess I mainly mean his attitude or perhaps just my teacher’s sixth sense.

    I learned about lots of the students’ behaviour (who swears, who becomes loud when excited, who is competitive and so on) and they had a lot of fun.  They left class feeling good about themselves, with most of them thanking me for the class.  The next lesson will be about what sort of issues Australia faces in regards to water management and I bet they’ll have heaps to contribute now.  I look forward to seeing them with their thinking caps on, applying the game to real life, and hopefully engaging in authentic learning.  I’m glad I was game enough to throw them into chaos from Day One.


  7. Cabin Fever Ramblings

    26 June 2013 by shartley

    TheOffice

    I’m fond of looking at my life from the perspective of an alien on a fact finding mission on the behaviour of Earthlings.  This concept served me well in a Year 12 English assignment that a good friend continues to cite as the moment she knew I should be a writer.

    More than 20 years later and I have written little, in the literary sense anyway.  If an alien had been observing me the last few days it would think I was a sloth, moving only from bed to toilet to kitchen to couch repeatedly.  The toilet visits are quite frequent due to the copious cups of tea and glasses of mountain stream water, delicious straight from the kitchen tap in my holiday cabin.  However, the kitchen visits are also for the naughties I bought for this stay the tiny town of Talbingo.  I consumed half a family-sized packet of lollies the first day and half a packet of Mint Slice biscuits the second, the remainder being consumed by my husband and children who actually earned the calories by skiing each morning at the Selwyn Snowfields while I stayed holed up in our cabin.

    FrozenCar

    My alien watcher would see me flit from phone to book to papers in what may seem a fruitless shuffle.  There is no phone coverage from Optus in Talbingo so I can’t text but through the magic of a wifi dongle I still connect around the globe, even to my dear Twitter friends attending the enormous International Society for Technology in Education Conference in San Antonio, USA.  Other Twitter friends attended a TeachMeet in my home town, Sydney, last night but the commute was too far from here for me to attend.  As they went to a TeachEat afterwards, my family and I walked to the Talbingo Lodge for the All You Can Eat Pizza Night, which was surprisingly pleasant, helped by a bottle of red wine.

    The Talbingo Lodge had been locked up for about a year, looking for someone to love and care for her.  Three months ago a new owner came along, a regular holiday maker in Talbingo, originating from Cootamundra where he has a similar establishment.  Perhaps I should interview the owner, for a general piece of writing, or for a Business Studies case study for my class or for an EdAssist article.  The Talbingo joint is eclectic with various paraphernalia stuck around, like caps and hats hanging above the bar, skis and golf clubs stuck on walls and ceiling, a games room for the kids, including an X Box with a car racing game which won my son over.  He played against a kid he’d never met before.  The Mum approached my thirteen year old to explain the loud competitive eight year old boy was autistic and my son volunteered that it was fine by him because he was autistic too.  The owner was concerned about the loud behaviour of my son’s new friend because people were trying to watch the rugby.  Well, sort of.  It wasn’t a big deal of a game.  That’s tonight.  We’re returning to the Talbingo Lodge tonight for the Stage of Origin, booked our now favourite table, by the fire, in front of the large TV screen.

    Marking

    So here I am, having completed the essential marking of 45 Society and Culture essays in two days, giving myself a reprieve before I tackle the less essential marking.  I’m reading ‘The Office’ by Gideon Haigh and it could be describing me as it provides the history of clerks working irregular hours, fitting in their own writing as much as possible a la Dickens.  Except I seem to do a lot of thinking about writing but not much writing in itself.  I completed a Masters of Arts recently, majoring in writing and literature and discovered I had a gift for script writing (thanks Deakin for the HD).  Unfortunately for my students I’m also excellent at Editing, another HD subject.  I have a couple of scant plots mapped out for scripts but I just can’t seem to find the oomph to dedicate some real slabs of time at it.

    Instead I tend to focus on the here and now, so I end up immersing myself in all things related to school.  This year I am teaching six subjects and am on the Innovative Learning Team (ILT) which is currently constructing a report about the future direction of pedagogy and technology in the school.  The ILT is saving me from being downtrodden by my numerous classes – I’ve never had so many before.  Plus I’ve stepped down from management positions to start afresh at a new school so I’m not used to facing so many students in recent times.  It’s a hard slog!  I’m constantly being encouraged to keep being innovative and try new things in my classroom by two of my four superiors.  One of the others is remote and simply trusts me and another prefers old school, but that’s OK because I just balance traditional with my ‘keeping it real’ style in Business Studies anyway.

    I have volunteered to speak for 7 minutes at a TeachMeet in a month’s time on Chaos Theory, planning for it to be about my Year 10 Geography class where I have a class of 30 boys, most being quite boisterous in nature.  This class was noisy when they were arranged in rows and given traditional worksheet learning so now I conduct it more like Project Based Learning (PBL) and it’s slightly louder.  Less evidence of learning is being produced and they probably won’t perform as well in an exam as the other classes but I believe they understood the concepts much better as a result of the PBL style.

    TMCoast

    The ILT is grabbing my real passion as I like to push students to achieving their best but not in the traditional sense of scoring well in exams.  Since I have a broader goal for students I am a bit of a trumpeter for changing the ways of teaching.  However, I am about balance, having just left a school that was going too far in the one direction, in my not so humble opinion.  Two aims I have just jotted down in my steadfast companion of a notebook are probably not achievable in the near future but I think, wouldn’t it be great if I could help students to map out their own educational path, mentor and guide them, plus help each student create a portfolio of their achievements.  I’ve only looked at a couple of online programs that would do that but they didn’t tickle my fancy.

    One of the other activities I have flitted about on is consideration for my son’s education.  He attends that school where I previously taught and I’m trying to conceive a plan for him to fit into the school, achieve traditionally set school goals and achieve some goals of our own.  Today I emailed a reply to his Case Manager (due to his autism) about a meeting for next term.  I’m hoping to present a mildly radical plan of action for the rest of the year, involving dropping Art and arranging self-directed project time for him instead which he would need to report in the form of Tumblr or the like.

    So here I am, having just spewed out 1000 words in what should be organised into several different pieces of writing.  I’ll let this sit for a while and return to it later.  Perhaps this afternoon, perhaps tomorrow, we’ll see.  I am a procrastinator.  And besides, it’s time for food and a cup of tea.

    [I ended up being distracted by the Rudd/Gillard PM leadership battle and the Texas filibuster so nothing productive occurred this afternoon]


  8. Commerce – Travel

    5 October 2009 by shartley

    The Travel topic was scheduled to commence just a couple of lessons before the holidays but I held off teaching syllabus content so the teacher taking over the class next term could start at the beginning. The class was not aware of this change

    Lesson 1: Travel Trivia

    Main aim: engagement and fun way to introduce topic

    I had 15 identical copies of the Traveller section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I found 20 obscure facts from it and turned them into a Traveller Trivia Quiz. Students worked in pairs to find the answers in their section. It was a very close race and at the end four teams were vying to have exactly the correct answers for first place. All four teams were rewarded with edible prizes in the next lesson.

    Lesson 2: Round the world ticket

    Main aims: engagement and fun/memory practice/familiarity with cities of the world and Google Maps/Google Earth (also appropriate for Geography)

    1) Memory Game: The first student says “During the holidays I plan to travel to…” and states a city in the world, eg Paris. The next student says “During the holidays I plan to travel to Paris and…” and adds a city starting with the end letter of the previous city, eg Stuttgart, and so on until the last person in the class repeats all the cities that have gone before. Students are not allowed to keep notes. Meanwhile the teacher writes all the cities down.

    2) Teacher displays list of cities (I simply used a Word doc with an overhead projector). Students need to find all the cities in Google Earth or Google Maps and then find either the shortest or the quickest route around the world via these cities.

    Problems when I did this lesson:

    1) Students unable to think much beyond home. Solution: ban cities from home country. However, some students would struggle. Could allow access to atlases (online or book format).

    2) Students lost interest in memory game quickly (it was the second last lesson before the holidays)

    3) Google Maps only provided walking, car and public transport routes, no flying and Google Earth showed direct distance. Some students were very resourceful in their methods to overcome this, such as combining Google Maps and Google Earth for research and making calculations in Excel. Many students gave up. Everyone ran out of time.

    Since this was my last lesson for the term and was meant to be fun and engaging but simply felt like it was a lot of work to maintain decorum in the classroom for little reward – very disappointing for my last lesson with them. I did hand out a bunch of award certificates in the last 5 mins which helped to end on a positive note. It has been a hard class to manage with a wide range of behaviours and abilities. In this class I have thrown one boy out once (for throwing the bathroom pass at the back of my student teacher’s head) and another twice (for slapping a girl on the thigh and for throwing his friend on the floor while shouting abuse at him). For the four years before this I hadn’t chucked anyone out. Oh well, I’m exchanging this Commerce class of 28 x 14-16 year olds for a Society and Culture class of 7 x 16-17 year olds. I’m looking forward to easier behaviour management.


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