Following Che...

Categories: Geography General, Writing and Assessment, Population, s1 and s2
Well, not really, but I have been playing around with this idea for two years now. I sometimes think that when some students have worked really hard and finished all of the assignments in class, their reward is more work. To this end, I have thought of assembling a small library in my room with an assortment of books from novels to personal accounts, all of which have fantastic examples of Geography in them. The idea is that pupils will be expanding their geographical knowledge, while hopefully enjoying the different medium. For upper school, I have lots of books such as 'The Motorcycle Diaries' following Che Guevara and his friend across South America, lots of Kerouac, and some excellent travel writing by less famed individuals, and I have loads of documentary style books-Palin, Planet Earth, Geldof etc, as well as some weightier tomes with more theory etc. Accounts of people's road trips and so on have often inspired me to find out more about certain places and different cultures, and hopefully will inspire others to do the same.
I was pleasantly surprised by the input from my s4 to today's revision task-lots of good ideas for topic revision involving other members of the class (labelling exercises, building mind maps through class collaboration, malaria quizzes and so on). I should say, for the record, that I am not questioning the effort or previous originality of this class, which has always been superb,but to get this kind of response after the Maths prelim... Well done! Tomorrow, I'm going to let you dish out topic past papers after you're presentations to the pair of your choice...just to keep people on their toes!
Higher and s3 have textbook work tomorrow, I'm afraid. We spent most of the period talking about circulation cells and surface winds, and brought in the idea of convergence/divergence zones, which we'll come back to. I also have all of the notes photocopied now.
s1 are looking for assessment results, and I am looking for a copy of the Simpsons in Rio! In the meantime, will finish the mapping and do a little background work on Brazil's geography-a huge and very diverse country, hopefully challenging some of the assumptions about climate, relief etc from our opening exercise.