I've got a brand new combine harvester...

Categories: Rural, Advanced Higher, s1 and s2

Thank goodness for the blog back catalogue, have been pillaging it extensively in the last 3 weeks while juggling commitments. Just blogging tomorrows lessons.As you can see from the picture above, rural geography figures. Might introduce my s4 (who I see once a week) to Gerald Chalmers of East Anglia. He sounds a little down in the dumps, but wondered if they would maybe like to talk to him through twitter at some point during a lesson and ask him for themselves what's bothering him. Alan Parkinson put me on to Gerald, so many thanks ;) A big thank you also to Tony Cassidy, who has let me rip the audio from Henshaw Farm, a resource which I love for a few reasons. First, it relies on listening skills rather than a visual stimulus, which in my opinion makes students concentrate on the content a bit more. Second, there is so much that can be drawn out of it too - changes to the farming landscape of Britain, changes to the farming system, farming policy and the associated problems/responses.

Advanced Higher have just about succesfully negotiated the first stats biggie, chi-square. I personally sometimes think that a statistical test just underlines something you already know, but funnily enough, one of the examples we used in class looking at land use and altitude threw up a fairly unexpected result. This was quite good for talking about the geographical study and what to do when your results don't show the relationship you expect. Tomorrow, we continue with a cross-section of the same sample area which is really aimed at showing how you can use different techniques to reinforce conclusions.

Finally, I was very annoyed with myself for not saving a file that I'd recorded of my s1 singing. I had planned to send this to my class posterous from my phone as we had some absolutely fantastic songs and poems based around the theme of the Rio Carnival, bringing the geography of migration into the celebration of culture. Fortunately, I do have the written version, so I may try to put some of these online, and depending on the efforts from tomorrows rotation, try again with the audio. 3 weeks gone already! Enjoy the weekend :)