Friday, May 16, 2008

Overheard in a Classroom . . .

"Wait . . . . so 'The Philippines' is a real place?"

I love geography.

5 comments:

  1. Heh heh heh. Hey, they'll be running our country one day!

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  2. Well, at least now he knows where the Philippines is. (Are?)

    We play a "Caravan" game at the end of the year for a couple of weeks. We begin the year with geography, but officially, 6th grade is "World History." That means we spend most of our time on human origins, early migrations, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the ancient Hebrews, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and then an individual ly-chosen chapter from the ones we didn't cover, usually on India, China, or the Muslim world.

    Then, for the last three weeks or so of school, the kids divide into small teams and try to earn gold pieces from "T. Bobby Billionola" by collecting items from around the world for his museum. They earn the points to travel by filling out dossier sheets on nations around the world, with extra credit if they can bring in artifacts from the nations they've chosen. They pick any countries they want (plus a few places like Puerto Rico and Hong Kong) and most kids do at least two per class, so even the slower kids learn a lot of detail about 30 or more nations during that time, plus whatever they pick up from their teammates.

    I think it works pretty well, but it is frequently hilarious.

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  3. When I used to do tech support, now and then I would get easterner callers who thought Utah was on the west coast of the US.

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  4. It's definitely a place on my to-visit list... even if the beautiful nature spots aren't up to par with much of the rest of southeast asia from what I hear, and it's not the safest country in the world, I'm a martial arts enthusiast and would love to train in pekiti tirsia kali at the source... not to mention, the women are among most beautiful in the world(many regard them as THE most beautiful), rrrrowr.

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