Day 10

I had my goals meeting with my division head yesterday. It started out as a standard run of the mill meeting. He asked the usual questions. Nothing new; nothing major.  Then he asked how the new classes were going and I perked up a bit. 

I’ve had a few changes to my schedule this year. As I stated before, this is the first year I’m teaching AP Human Geography and I’m starting to love it. While it has a dense curriculum, a big struggle for me, its oddly flexible. The concepts, so far, can be applied to almost any current situation. As students are exploring their own interests, the can apply principles from the course. Again, so far, the way I’m setting up the class, the students have a large degree of freedom to explore what they are curious about. I’m only imposing a curriculum on them for a brief amount of time each period.

It’s not perfect, but its a good start. So far, the kids have explored the global water crisis, detainment centers around the United States for migrants, global GDP density, and poverty rates for Latinos in the United States. The students are writing questions they have from each of these explorations and are able to explore answers to those questions.  Some of the students have questions I have never thought of. Some of them are coming up with answers that are rich and deep. I hope to share those as they develop them further. 

On to day 10.

Student Contributions by Kordilia

What We Did In Class

Today in class, we started off with a short mini lesson about environmental interaction and about the two theories regarding the interaction of the environment with societies. Then, we looked at a thematic map about detainment rated in the United States. We wrote down what we noticed about the map and what we thought about it. Lastly, we discussed what we wrote down with our table groups and as a whole class.

I really like being able to write things down and have conversations with my table group because it involves more interaction and allows me to understand the topic more than writing notes down on an iPad. I also really like that each lesson is recorded so that if you forget something or when ur studying for the AP exam you could go back and review the different types of topics more easily.

Have you grown as a learner?

Since it is the beginning of the year, I feel like I haven’t grown much as a learner. I still feel like I have a mindset where I memorize for a short period of time and then forget and I also still procrastinate a lot. But for the past week, looking at different types of maps has started to help me connect ideas to other topics and learn things I didn’t know before.

My Thoughts

I gave most of mine earlier in the post. However, I do record a portion of the class for students to go back to or in case any student is absent. I wondered if any of them were using those recordings yet. It’s nice to see them highlighting that they are using it. Recording it doesn’t take much time to upload. I’ll keep doing it.