Teaching APHuG

As I am beginning my journey as s geography teacher, and being introduced to so many new concepts and ideas, it's hard (and seems arrogant) to consider myself a geographer. It seems to take away from those who have been practicing geographers for many years. I am a teacher, that I am confident in. I am an educator, and I know that I can help students learn.

I liken the difference to the same thing in language when learning a second language. When do you know when you are truly fluent? When you dream in your new second language. I think a similar threshold exists when deciding on when you've become a geographer compared to a geography teacher. When you start to think spatially and speak in geographical vernacular, then you've arrived at being a geographer. To add to this, I think true geographers contribute actively to the field in some way.

As a teacher who works in international schools, I am lucky in that I get to travel and see new places frequently. I get to experience first hand many new experiences and then talk about those new experiences to my students. To date, I have lived in Taiwan, Venezuela and Brazil and each place has been so different, wonderful and challenging.

My favorite part about getting to move to new locations is that I get to see cultures up close that I would never read about in a textbook. I've been shocked, humbled and inspired by the local cultures I've interacted with. I have many stories that I know will entertain my students and help them understand many of the concepts that are found in the course.

Our world is getting smaller and smaller. Our economies are changing, and we are participating in global culture in a way we've never seen before. The people of the world are going to have to wake up to one another and understand that everyone everywhere is going to play a role in our future. To hide behind national boundaries or behind speaking a single language is going to leave individuals behind. The future it global, it's interconnected, it's diverse and it's dynamic. APHUG teaches students to understand and hopefully love the complexity of the world we live in. Knowledge is power, and this course will empower students with the knowledge and skills to walk confidently into the ever changing world unfolding in front of them.

“It does seem that the world will deplete its natural resources as other countries reach higher standards of living. “If the whole developing world were to catch up with us, world consumption rates would increase 11 fold. It would be as if the world had a population of 72 billion people.” deveddotie, Consumption in a World of 32:1 (2012), 2012, 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aQbMrHbKWE&feature=youtu.be.

It trying to answer the question: what can we do about this?

It seems obvious that this trend will only exacerbate the problems we already have such as climate change, population growth, food security, and health.

The first step in addressing these issues will be finding sustainable food growth solutions, and technologies that reduce pollution and help secure enough food for our growing populations. Government spending in these areas will be key to affecting any real change, and the innovation in the private sector will help develop the cutting edge technologies necessary to see these changes through.

As I look through the CED and at unit 2, the very first topic is 2.1: Population Distribution. In the video by Hans Rosling, he introduces us to the pin number of human population. As our current world population is 7 billion then our pin # is 1114. This means 1 billion people in the Americans, 1 billion people in Europe and 1 billion people in Africa. The remaining 4 billion people are in Asia. The CED states that teachers teaching APHuG need to focus on the three methods for calculating population density: arithmetic, physiological, and agricultural.

The method used to calculate population density reveals different information about the pressure the population exerts on the land.

This is something Hans Rosling helps us understand from the video too, as he demonstrates the projected population growth until the year 2100. He demonstrates this again with the pin. As it will grow from 1114 to 1145. This means that the world will grow in population, not in the Americas or in Europe, but by 3 million in Africa and by 1 billion more in Asia. The CED along with Hans Rosling's insights helps us know that many of the strains from population growth will be found in Africa and in Asia. This makes focusing on these areas especially important to understand.

Also, section 2.8 of the CED is about Women and Demographic changes. The essential knowledge states:

Changing social values and access to education, employment, health care, and contraception have reduced fertility rates in most parts of the world.

In Don't Panic, Hans Rosling focuses on a case study with a woman named Taslima Khan, who lives in the highly populated country of Bangladesh. Bangladesh has seen a population increase in the last 60 years from 50 million to 150 million. The sterotype of countries like this is that birth rates are out of control because the population is uneducated and poor, but as is exemplified by Taslima Khan, she's very conscious of how big her family is. She and her husband made the decision to limit the size of their family to only two children. Not only this, but Taslima also goes village to village educating women to take charge of their family planning in order to limit the number of children their families have. She hands out condoms and teaches them about other contraceptives options. In 40 years, Bangladesh has gone from familes having an average of 7 kids in 1972 to families having an average of 2.2 kids in 2011. The lifespan for these kids has grown tremendously as well. This trend comes as shocking news to anyone who doesn't pay attention to the numbers. The CED focuses special attention to these issues as it asks teachers to focus especially on:



Changing social values and access to education, employment, health care, and contraception have reduced fertility rates in most parts of the world.Changing social, economic, and political roles for females have influenced patterns of fertility, mortality, and migration, as illustrated by Ravenstein’s laws of migration.

My introduction to Langfocus and the informative and quirky, Paul.

Paul Jorgensen has created something great. He's created an informative Youtube channel with videos that help people learn about a variety of languages from a geographical and cultural perspective. It's an excellent addition to any APHuG teacher's repertoire. As I've looked through a couple of his videos, I find some videos are incredibly informative, helping make concrete murky concepts in linguistics. Others, I find more playful and not necessarily important enough to use during class, but still fun to watch nonetheless.

The video above is an excellent example of how Paul can take a murky concept with language and make it concrete. The topic he covers the distinction between a language and a dialect. A textbook explanation is dry, and pretty unclear, linguists such as John McWhorter will highlight the entire debate leaving the reader to decide what they think the distinction is, and yet Paul, has a simple 3 criteria method for helping distinguish between the two which is both simple and effective. He states that if it's mutually intelligible, uses the same written standard, and shares a national or ethnic identity, then it's a language. If not, it's a dialect. This video would be very useful to use in an APHuG class. Maybe better used as a flipped class.

Not all of Paul's video's will be useful in class. The next video I watched was where he spoke Esperanto the entire time. The concept of Esperanto comes up in the text, but it's not a topic that I think needs a lot of time and attention. Using this video might be better suited as an optional task for students to watch so they could better understand what it sounds like. click below to watch Paul speak Esperanto for 4 minutes. It's fun.

·     What is the Shengen area? Why was it formed?

The Shengen Agreement was signed in 1985 and allowed people traveling in Europe to travel across borders without having to show ID or go through customs. As a result, travel around Europe has become phenomenally easy throughout what's known as the Shengen area. 26 countries are a part of the Shengen area along with some islands located off the coasts of Africa and Europe that are officially European territory.

·     What countries belong to it? What significant countries do not belong to the group?

  Austria ,  Belgium ,  Czechia ,  Denmark (except the  Faroe Islands  and  Greenland ) , Estonia ,  Finland   ,France (except  overseas regions and territories ),  Germany ,  Greece  , Hungary  , Italy ,  Latvia  , Lithuania ,  Luxembourg ,  Malta ,   Netherlands (except  Caribbean islands ),  Poland ,  Portugal ,  Slovakia ,  Slovenia,   Spain (with partial exceptions for Ceuta and Melilla*),  Swede n,  Iceland ,  Liechtenstein ,  Norway (except  Svalbard ), and  Switzerland 

"Although the Schengen Area and the EU are closely connected, they're not the same thing. Some countries are part of the EU but not the Schengen Area, while others are part of the Schengen Area but not the EU.

The most important difference is that the EU is much more than just the Schengen Area: it's also an economic union, with unified customs and tax laws and its own currency, as well as a political union with an elected government that manages shared laws and foreign policy for all the member countries."

·     Why has the Schenger borders and participating countries been more fluid in the past 5 years?

·     How has the COVID pandemic affected the Schenger borders/Area?

Coronavirus: Schengen Border Controls Timeline March 1-27, 2020Border controls have proliferated within Europe's "Schengen Area", where there's normally no ID check required to travel from one country to another.

King Corn, the King of AP Human Geography Films

King Corn is a popular documentary to use with AP Human Geography students. The film makers set out to make the film because as they say in the beginning, upon graduation from university they learned a harsh truth. They were going to die. What really terrified they was that they were going to die younger than the generation above them. Why? Because of what they ate. It turns out, they were mostly corn. And to figure out why, they decided to grow an acre of corn and see where it all went.

The young graduates both graduated from Yale University and found out that recent ancestors of theirs had lived and worked in the same town of Greene, Iowa. In fact, their grandfathers were buried in the same cemetery in town. It was because of this they decided to try growing corn in this particular town.

The town in Iowa was a typical small farming town, with acres upon acres of corn as far as the eye could see. Every 15 or so miles another small town could be found with practically the same amenities catering the farming crowd.

Iowa is an ideal place to grow corn because of the humid summers and fertile soil and flat land. The land used to be farmed by many families, however, since 1971, the Federal Government allowed farmers to grow as much food as they could and be paid to do so. Subsidy programs changed the way farmers grew, and instead of growing the right amount of a variety of food and being paid by the government not to grow too much, farmers were paid by the bushel. This pushed many families out of the farming game and has led to a take over or large corporate farms that produce most of the corn in the state.

The film makers went from Boston, MA to Greene, Iowa. After learning how to grow corn, they went to see where the corn was used in Wray, Colorado at large confinement feed lots, and then back to Iowa.

They learned along the way that although it was corn that the farmers were growing for the government subsidies, the farmers knew they were growing bad corn, and that it went to produce more food that was both unhealthy for individual consumers and unsustainable for the environment. As we watch and learn with the film makers, we can't help but feel uneasy about where most of our food comes from.

So some extent, the von Thunen model applies to the farms in Iowa, but then again, not really. The model was established to explain 17th farms-town dynamics, and you can see some of that in Iowa with the farmers not living too far away from the grain elevators to sell their yields. That said, the yields were then brought by train hunderds of miles away to processing centers that make high fructose corn syrup and animal feed.

The following  StoryMap  details some of the largest mega cities in our world currently. It traces the growth and deveopment of 10 of the worlds largest megacities. This StoryMap helps us to learn about origins and influences of why cities developed in certain places around the world. Even though some of these megacities have grown to such large proporations, there's evidence that they may not remain this way causing new problems in the future. For example:

"Although Tokyo today is the world’s largest city, young residents are having fewer children, leading to population declines that may see the city proper reduced to 7.13 million by 2100. Nearly 3.27 million of those estimated residents will be over the age of 65, making it difficult for Tokyo to have a large enough workforce to pay for health care and pensions for the elderly."

Another excellent  StoryMap  discusses how people have influenced and changed our world in dramatic ways. This StoryMap highlights the ways in which humans are more interconnected than ever before.

The National Public Radio station has published a video series titled, Planet Money makes a t-shirt. The aim of the video series is to inform the public about what goes into making a simple t-shirt that we can buy in a store. The series starts off by saying, there is nothing ordinary about a simple t-shirt.

To begin with, the shirt is made from cotton that is grown in Mississippi with seeds that had been genetically modified by Monsanto in Madison, Wisconsin. Mississippi is the largest producer of cotton in the world and 1 farm from Mississippi is able to produce enough cotton to create 9 million t-shirts. After harvest, the cotton is cleaned with sophisticated machines and refined so it can move to the next stage of the process.

Next, the cotton is bailed up and sent to Indonesia and Bangladesh to be processed. It's here that that raw cotton is turned into threads with high powered machines.

From here, the thread is sent to Bangladesh where it is woven into fabric and textiles and dyed certain colors.

The next stop is either to Bangladesh or to Colombia to be turned into garments. Planet Money's t-shirts were sent to both. The men's t-shirt was made in Bangladesh and the women's shirt was made in Colombia. The workers in Colombia made about 4x as much as the workers in Bangladesh with a salary of approximately $320 USD a month.

The final stage of the journey was for the garments to be sent back to the United States in large shipping containers. The cost of transport in the large containers was inexpensive and the shirts were delivered to Alex Bloomberg of Planet Money.

For a single t-shirt, it took 4 countries, numerous people and some of the world's most sophisticated technology to make it all happen. It's true. There is nothing ordinary about an ordinary t-shirt.

This focus on how a shirt is made connects to the AP Frame work with:

Watch the series here: Development regions and HDI, standards of living, and Consumer goods.