Sunday, February 04, 2007

Weekend Roundup & looking to the FUTURES...

Not really got time for this, as I have a great deal of stuff to do for tomorrow, but then I've already spent far too much of my own time this weekend doing work.
Firstly, thanks to Danny O Callaghan for the resource pictured above, whih we shall be using soon. Nice piece of work.
Tony Cassidy has finally moved on to MY PLACE and has sent me some predictably useful resources that I shall add to my growing digital archive of Pilot materials ready for next year, and will also develop for the revision period as well. Thanks Tony!
He has also sent me some very useful resources relating to the Rural dimension, which will certainly be useful for a number of ongoing projects and courses.

Thanks to John Lyon from the Geographical Association for bringing the GREEN LEARNING site in Canada to my attention. This includes a large number of very useful resources. I would recommend that for the Tuesday lesson you will use this, but I will post the work tomorrow so that you will have it for Tuesday - remember that we can't afford for you to waste time: we need to keep up the momentum.

You should also pay a visit on Tuesday, when I'm not there, as I'm taking some 6th form students to a conference at the University of East Anglia - that might be some of you in a couple of years time I hope !

Down to London at the weekend, and on the way down, I read the first quarter of the book "Estates" by Lynsey Hanley. Some fascinating material for landscapes of housing and the effect of these social divisions on the country. Astonishing to read about the CUTTESLOWE walls.
See what you can find about this - it's the complete opposite to what is being planned for the community in South Lynn...

Picture courtesy of Oxfordshire County Council Photographic Archive - please let me know if you object to its use here for educational purposes...

On the way back, I was talking to a colleague about some ideas for teaching about Landscape, and we discussed lots of useful ideas. Also read more of my book of the moment: Stuart Maconie's wonderful "Pies and Prejudice" - loads of stuff for Cultural Geography and the identity of the North compared to the South... Plenty of that to come in Year 11 !

We also have more links with China coming up shortly. We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which means there will be closer ties between our schools.

To finish, a quote from Rex Walford, who still came into KES until recently to see the associate teachers which we have in the department. It relates to the idea of FUTURES.

"In urging that we teach a Geography of the future, I do not mean that we should give up teaching the geography of the past: but we should make the past the servant of the future. If the future is unavoidable, let us at least not walk backwards into it..."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lovely quote... cheered me up after the rammel that Year 11 have produced.

I'm sure I watched a programme on the walls, when I first saw this I wondered why you had a picture of Berlin!

Alan Parkinson said...

What's amazing is that the walls stayed up as long as they did !