I am a new teacher, and will be teaching Advance World Geography next semester. I have no books, no teacher edition manual, and do not understand the curriculum. What do I need to do? Where do I find material. I am currently teaching Intro. to World Geography which I have some classroom books, but no teacher edition book for that. The class will be juniors who have already taken Intro. to World Geography. Help, Help what do I need to do?
Never heard of Advanced World Geography before and I taught Geo my first 10 years teaching - is it a course that has been taught at your school before? Have you checked with your state standards to see is taught? What about the curriculum don't you understand? That seems the most troubling to me . . not having books or material shouldn't be a huge problem but if you really don't understand the curriculum, that is a HUGE problem. Can you post standards and see if we can help?
What do you mean when you say you don't understand the curriculum? Is it that you don't understand what you need to teach or that you don't understand the material?
What exactly is the curriculum supposed to be? Do you have a syllabus or outline? If not, then a good bet is to search one out. I taught a class like this as an independent study for a small group of seniors. I essentially taught them an introductory regional geography course from the college level, using a 100-level college text. Is this something you could do? What type of geography is this meant to be? World Regional? Human? Physical? Etc.
When I said I don't understand the curriculum, I meant when I read the objectives, I didn't understand exactly what needed to be covered because it was so vague. This course is taught at my school as an elective because they don't have art, or foreign languages. Here is an example of one of the objectives: 2. Understand the physical environments of the world along with the processes that shape them and the problems they present to human occupation and use. a. Explain and analyze the concepts and processes that create, maintain, and modify physical environments around the world and explain the patterns and distributions of physical environmental characteristics that result from those processes. b. Analyze problems associated with the complex interactions between human activity and the physical environments around the world (e.g., natural hazards, drought and redistribution of water, agricultural production and food security, movement of air and water pollution, etc.). 3. Understand how population, migration
Is this asking for you to discuss how migration has changed our world. When people move from one country to another, they bring parts of their culture and traditions with them. Thus blending with the cultures and traditions of the locals. Maybe the students could look for ways that their culture has been changed from immigrants.
I teach Geography, and this is the first time. when i looked in the book, I saw country after country, and wasn't sure what order to go in, what to cover, etc. The national standards didn't help a lot. I asked the teacher who used to teach this class, and he said what I can do is pick a skill and use a country to teach that, that's kind of how it is set up. This made sense, because yes, students need to know what's going on out in the world, but most likely they will not remember the details or facts about different countries, but they will likely to remember the skills, especially if they're revisited. And the skills are what they will probably use if life, not so much the population of Sweden, or the highest point of China. So what i have been doing is to for example teach "reading population density maps" and focus on that with Russia. We covered a lot of info, and vocab, etc, but I did skip some things. I focused on reading physical maps, (and creating them), reading charts, etc. in the teacher edition book it actually shows what skills are focused on in each chapter. We're learning about the US now, and revisit the population dens. map, etc. Each country is set up similarly, with the same categories (culture, land, population, history, economy, etc). This has worked so far, but I am looking for ways to change things around, just not sure how.
