Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

I recently ran across a very cool book that seems like a perfect tool for world geography teachers. Pretty sure we could use it in a variety of other content areas (especially economics) but I saw this and my mind went immediately to some cool compare and contrast conversations about world regions.

Titled Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, the book highlights the differences in diet of families from around the world. The book jacket:

On the banks of Mali’s Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad. This age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform diets worldwide. In Hungry Planet, the creative team presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week.

Each family’s profile includes a detailed description of their living conditions, food security, and diet.

This is the same guy who wrote the very cool book Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Together the two books could provide weeks, maybe months, of useful lessons.

To get you thinking about possible lesson ideas, take a look at the following examples. Using either the Kansas state standards or you own local curriculum, think about this:

How might you use these images and the basic data included to develop a world geography lesson?

Kids don’t hate history, they hate the way we teach it

About 15 years ago, I had the chance to drive James Loewen around for a couple of days. He was in town for a two day workshop and afterwards had to get to Kansas City for a flight. As his chauffeur, I got the chance to pepper him with all sorts of questions. And much of what I wanted to know revolved around his most recent book at the time, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

I was especially curious about the first few sentences in the book:

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it “the most irrelevant” of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. “Boring” is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it . . .

Once I got him started, Loewen went on to describe the incredible amounts of money being made by movie producers and book publishers who focused on historical topics. At the time, the viewing and reading public was fascinated with movies such as Dances with Wolves, JFK, Saving Private Ryan, and Gone with the Wind and books like Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and David McCullough’s John Adams.

Recent examples would be the recent movies Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty – or books like Unbroken and Killing Kennedy.

He was very clear about it:

Kids don’t hate history. They hate the way we teach it.

10 great 21st century book report ideas

We all remember the assignment. The dreaded book report.

Depending on the grade level, the report was to be either a simple one pager or up to ten pages of in-depth analysis. And the book? In my experience, teachers gave us the chance to pick our own books to read without any sense of content focus.

And I was never really sure why we had to read books and write reports on them. All I can remember is

Read a book and write a report describing it.

I enjoyed reading books and would willingly spend hours at the local library. I knew exactly where the best books were in the school library. But reading a book just so that I could write a report took all of the fun out of it. There was a point, I’m sure. I just never figured out what it was.

My solution?

Find a book with a really good dust jacket that contained a detailed description of the book’s contents. Boom. A simple task of 5th grade copy and pasting. Done. Of course, I never actually read the book. That wasn’t the point. The point was creating a book report.

So should kids still do book reports?

Teaching What Really Happened and 3 other interesting books you should be reading

Like many families, mine spends part of every evening re-hashing the day – sharing experiences, discussing current events, solving the world’s problems, and arguing whether the X-Men are actual super heroes.

Earlier this week, during a discussion about school, my daughter blurted out:

I really don’t do anything at school. I’m asked to learn stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me in ways that are incredibly boring.

She and I have had this discussion before. She plays the game very well – straight A’s, great test scores. She knows the rules. And the traditional view of school would suggest that because she has a nice GPA she actually knows something. But every time I hear about worksheets, answering questions at the end of the chapter, or high school students reading out loud from the textbook to one another, I’m not convinced. Research is telling all of us that these sorts of instructional strategies don’t impact long-term learning.

10 things you can do this week that will make you a better teacher

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working together with a variety of different teacher groups in a variety of different places. But all of the conversations have somehow shifted back to the same basic compelling question:

What does an effective teacher look like?

It’s a great question to ask. We’ve always paid lip service to professional development and learning but it seems as if only recently has the question been taken seriously. The Common Core literacy standards for history and the newly revised Kansas history/government standards are demanding more from our kids – and from us.

So I started thinking about things we can do to get better as social studies teachers. Not stuff organized by our administrators. Informal sorts of things that can make us more effective. I came up with ten. I’m sure there are more but ya gotta start somewhere.

What would you add? Subtract from the list?