Instead of doing the Island of Podiatry in the sandbox, I decided add a practical exercise as part of their Social World test.
Spits, deltas, archipelagos and more.
Half the class, the first to finish the written portion of the test, were instructed, as a group, to create as many physiographic features as they could in the sandbox. Tomorrow, the other half will have to try to identify as many features as they can.
The first group did a very good job. The kids seemed to enjoy working with the sand, and little details, like the difference between a bay and a gulf, quickly became apparent.
It’ll be interesting to see how the other half does with identification. I could not prevent myself from adding a fjord and cirque even though we have not seen them in class. The fjord should at least be recognized as a valley (definitely a steep sided valley), but hopefully this will allow a moment to talk about post-glacial features. Of course, thinking about it, I should probably add a moraine or subsurface ridge to complete the set.
I’m not terribly partial to the Island of Podiatry exercise where student produce a map of physiographic features, gulfs, archipelagos, plateaus and so on, starting with the outline of their feet. However, in considering alternatives I was thinking about how it could be made even more real, more tactile. My first thought was of having them sculpt the topography out of modeling clay, but then I realized that this would be a great use for our sandbox.
The weather’s cooled down a bit in the last week, but it should still be warm enough for students to want to be outside. All I’ll need to do is level the box (though this might be no small feat since it’s filled with sand), add about ten centimeters of water, and have them shape the island from their Island of Podiatry map. I’ll also probably need them to decide whose map they want to model.
[googleMap name=”Lake Titicaca” description=”Example of a lake.” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”7″ mousewheel=”false”]Lake Titicaca, Peru[/googleMap]
Cuing off of a comment by EV from Somewhat Up in the Air, I finally found what I think is a decent alternative to the Island of Podiatry map exercise. Instead of them altering a map of their feet into a series of topographic features, I’m having them do a treasure hunt using Google Maps. The assignment is pretty straightforward, and students can choose either option:
Use Google maps to capture images (Apple-Shift-4) of the features on the topographic features list. Put all the images into a PowerPoint or similar presentation. You may choose features from anywhere in the world so make it interesting.
In addition, I’d like to set up one of those games where they get extra points if the location they choose for a particular feature is not the same as someone else’s.
Another addendum to this, which would make a great extension to the project, is to allow students to enter the geographic coordinates of their features on a webpage that then plots all the similar features on a Google Map. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but would take some time as I’d have to set up and program its own website for the project along the lines of the Mariner AO site described here.
Lunch on Wednesdays follows our main block of Student Run Business time. It’s after they’ve delivered pizza, prep-ed for a week of bread, completed finance and its reports, prepared and processed order forms, and sorted out the plants.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve started having my students discuss the business over lunch (including finance reports presentations) and it’s turning into a regular board meeting.
Today they started assigning seating.
We usually sit around two long tables set end to end, with the main supervisor on one end and myself at the other. Today the main supervisor started laying out plates and positions. Pizza supervisor to his right, bread to his right, finances one down from bread and sales across from finances. Everyone else could find their own spot.
I was a little surprised at this unprompted expression of hierarchy. Pizza is our most involved part of the business and the core of the the enterprise so its supervisor, P., has a very important post. She was placed on the right hand of the main supervisor!
I asked the main supervisor why he did it. He said, “I don’t know.” I even had to explain the meaning of the term, ‘right hand “man”‘.
It ended up with the supervisors at one table and everyone else (and myself) at the other.
Except for the plants supervisor. Plants have been going slowly, lately, including some seedling failures. The plant supervisor sat all the way down the table, next to me.
…
I can feel it in my bones that there are some interesting lessons in all this. From organizational structure to non-verbal communication.
But since we’re dealing with positions around a table, and we’ve been talking about the importance of place in geography, the best context to discuss this right now might just be one of the importance of geography and place in the interactions among people.
So now I want to use video games in the classroom. My head of school is politely opposed. I argued it would be useful for integrating our work on the themes of geography and needs of people. She allowed me to pick up a copy of SimCity if I could come up with some sort of evidence that it actually works. Quantitative evidence. You’ll be hearing more about that in a later post.
However, while I was shopping I also picked up a cheap copy of Civilization IV because while it also goes into city building, it does so from a more regional perspective. I’d played older versions of the Civilization games before (a long time ago in a galaxy far away) so I was somewhat favorably familiar with how it works.
Unfortunately, the fourth version is too sophisticated. There are so many variables to deal with that it would be difficult to use on the relatively short time-scale that I want students to spend on this. Whereas before, founding a city on a river gave very obvious benefits (a bonus in the productivity of the land around the river), there are so many different types of land surfaces and changes that can be done to them that the advantages of the river, while still there are much less obvious.
On the plus side, if students find the game enjoyable, succeeding will take a lot of historical research and understanding the geography of cities. It would also take a lot of time, not necessarily wasted time, but a lot of time nonetheless.
Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.
If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.
Terrain view shows the vegetation changes very nicely.The physiographic regions really stand out with the continent-scale satellite view.
Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.
Transportation networks are an essential component for understanding the geography of a city.The rivers are a little more visible in terrain view.
Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.
Highway bypass loops are often significant demographic boundaries.
As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.
Human effects on the urban environment are very different from agricultural regions.
At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.
You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.
Street view of a shotgun house.
Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.
So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.
Graphic organizer for Memphis geography showing examples from all the five themes.
San foragers of the Kalahari would probably look at these two red lines and say they were the same length. (Image adapted from Fibonacci on Wikipedia)
The small window into the effects of modern life on the way we think was opened just a little wider recently by an interesting article by Joseph Heinrich and others. They sift through a large number of studies of people living the industrialized life and their more rural counterparts to find real differences in they way these different groups think.
San village
In the image above, the San foragers would be right, the two lines are the same length, but your typical Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) person would need to the left line to be about 20% longer for them to say they were identical. Why this is, I can’t say, but it might be that our visual perception is colored at an early age by the carpentered edges we see around us. Or maybe not.
And it’s not just in vision. WEIRD people think of fairness and co-operation in decision-making, and where things are relative to the self differently too, and their kids tend not to be able to identify easily with other species. The latter result is likely because of the “nature deficit“. The article clearly demonstrates that people think very differently, in very fundamental ways, if they come from modern environments.
The paper, found via Big Questions Online and Edge, is a fascinating read, and not too bad coming from a technical journal. There are a lot of interesting results summarizing a lot of behavioral science research. As a reminder to remember that one scientific article, no matter how good it is, remains just one perspective. the paper’s pdf has a number of commentaries and criticisms attached from other behavioral science researchers.
Where the WIERD people are. (Image from Wikipedia)
What I’m still trying to process, are the implications for Montessori educational philosophy. Because there are these significant, large differences in the way people see the world, we need to be aware of the perspectives of our audience. Students also need to appreciate how cultural differences affect the way we think and see the world that influence how we argue and how we behave. Yet they also need to recognize the there are some subjects, say the physical sciences, that are objective; there is a single, definite truth (for some value of definite) about the composition of a water molecule.
