Today there will be no hymns, no records, no ipods, no serenades...

Categories: Population, Development and Health, s1 and s2, Advanced Higher

I'm starting from a non-subject topic here, something which was just a bit of fun, but thought provoking anyway. Today is No Music Day, and idea pioneered by, believe it or not, a musician-ex-KLF experimenter Bill Drummond. Someone asked me just the other day to make a choice. If I had the choice, would I live in a world without music or without laughter? I had some interesting responses with Higher and Advanced Higher at the tail end of the period about this. I wonder what people in my other classes or elsewhere think? Incidentally, tomorrow is the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music...;-)

I think I'm going to use the worldometers site tomorrow with both Higher and Intermediate. I had forgotten about this until a work colleague brought it to my attention. It would be good if we could just spend a bit of time looking at this on our own, but I'm trying to think of a way that I could use this with the whole class. Higher might take a look at the Population myth buster, before developing some of the reasons for population growth/decline, at which point we'll be able to take a look at Demographic transition using this resource.

Intermediate will start the period with an Indicators challenge, and then I want to open out the period to see what you think leads to differences in development- a class discussion followed up by some supporting work from your texts. With s1, we'll be doing an exercise which has been entirely sourced from a great blog, strange maps. I've taken lots of the images and we're going to look at them to determine 1) What the map is actually showing, and 2) What is wrong/unusual about the map. I'll maybe put a short powerpoint here after the task. We'll then look at one of the maps, which is actually an attempt by various people to draw a map of the USA from memory. I have really enjoyed asking classes to do this previously for Scotland, and we'll maybe do the same again before deciding what constitutes a good map. I also wish I'd seen this blog when we were doing the lower course of rivers, as there's a great map showing how the Mississippi has constantly changed its course.

Lastly, we are moving away from Pearson's and Linear Regression with Advanced Higher (I thought that this went quite well, you seemed to grasp this more easily-perhaps as a result of the previous stats work?) and looking at how we can represent data on maps-dot maps, choropleth, isoline, proportional symbols etc. Don't be frightened by the terminology. I'm going to show you an atlas and ask you to tell me some information based on a variety of maps which will be familiar to you. You'll soon see that this is the same maps that you are expected to construct or interpret.