Day 105

Student contribution by Aaron and Evrem 

The College Board provides a curriculum guide for each of it’s courses. It’s dense and uses a lot of jargon from the discipline. Decoding it is difficult. The wording of learning targets is vague and specific at the same time. The students struggle with the language of the course guide. However, that wording is how the exam questions are written.

To help them with that, I gave a section of the course guide and in groups they are attempting to make sense of it.

“I wish we were doing more detailed reviews on the things we learned before.”

In the image above, the phrasing of “Because of the nature of new modes of transportation, both internal and external migration increasing relocated to cities.” This is a fancy way of saying trains and steamships allowed people to move to the cities for jobs. At first glance, it appears difficult; then, it becomes something they know and are familiar with.

As Evrem puts its,

“I wish we were doing more bigger group work. Individual partners help, but in my opinion I learn more when we work with more people due to the fact that this creates more chances for me to learn from other people. Everything else we do in class helps me out daily and I can take a lot from it.”

I put them in groups and had them work through their understandings. They were able to work with each other to make the unfamiliar familiar. It’s been a grind this week and not particularly the most enjoyable lesson. However, we are nearing the end of the semester and tuning into the test we are about to take becomes increasingly more important.

They are creating a visual display of the unfamiliar to decode it and re-code the information with what they know. Here is a sample of their work.