At its best, teaching is an essentially open source pursuit. As a teacher, you should steal/borrow as many ideas as you can, mould them to your students' (and your own) strengths, and pass them along to anyone who asks. It's many things but teaching is not an art, in which your individual creativity trumps your commitment to making everyone around you better. Half of the struggle as a young teacher is learning enough activities that might work (and when to use them) in various classroom situations, so that your teaching is varied enough to keep the kids engaged in your lesson and on board with your goals.
I share, borrow and steal at will from any and everyone, whether from supervising teachers during my pre-service days or from friends at schools or from my teachers whose lessons or activities or even just their classroom persona have stuck with me for a long time afterwards. I had a couple English teachers in Grades 11 and 12 who had a "Words of the Day" exercise. One word would be a "serious" word that we might be able to use in essays and the other would be "silly" one, usually ridiculously long, complex or completely made up. At Brimbank, I lifted the concept and added a "Words of the Day" wall to try to improve the concept by making the words literally part of our classroom landscape. I'd refer to the words posted during lessons and implore the kids to use the serious ones when they were working on essays or questions or debates we'd do in class.
In Mongolia, though, I've been mostly teaching Geography (and one lone class of World History), which has meant that the bank of learning activities I'd been building up has been mostly useless. One activity though that has carried over after a slight tweak are the Words of the Day, which has been recast as the "Country of the Week." Basically, I choose a country and, for the first 10 minutes of class, we talk about its location, its size, its literacy rate, its population, its major products and 3 or 4 issues that it has to deal with.
The idea is to expand the kids' knowledge of the world, especially in regions like the Middle East or Africa or South America that they have have no direct experience in or have ever been taught. So, even if they've struggled through say the concept of the linear model of rural settlement, they've taken on some cool facts about Argentina's massive production of soybeans and its detrimental effects on the country's environment. When it works, the kids will be offering their guesses about the country's literacy rate or its major products, and I'll either confirm their guesses or, more usually, offer the real facts and tell some stories about the country. Sometimes, I spin off activities off of it to connect with the concepts we're working on in class (mapping, population density, agriculture, tourism, etc.) and, other times, we move on and talk about something else. I'm still refining what I do and what its exact purpose might be but my general idea is that the students are so deficient in world awareness and geographic skills that any activity that sticks with them is a plus.
During the last week of term, with a 3 week holiday approaching and midterms on during the mornings, I had a series of classes with all of my Geography classes which were generally useless for starting new topics. Some of these classes took place before the Geography exams, so we did some revision for the test, which was, to be honest, half hearted since they were mentally exhausted after 4 or so hours of exams. In the middle of the week, I decided to do a special Country of the Week instead of studying. After considering something tiny like the Holy See or something famous like the United States, I decided on Mongolia since, basically since the start of the year, the kids had been calling out for it to be anointed as my CotW. As soon as I announced the week's CotW, a cheer rose up from the class.
As we went through the usual facts and stories, what was most striking wasn't that the kids knew their own country but they had no idea about its facts, its challenges, its strengths, or its fuck-ups. When I asked if anyone knew the number one product of the country, no one knew it was copper, or of the importance of copper at Oyu Tolgoi to the country's present and its future. They didn't know about corruption or how widespread it is in Mongolia or why it might be even a problem to pay bribes from time to time. When I asked about the country's problems, the answer I got back was universally China, which in some respects is completely true. When I asked why China was a problem, they answered that the Chinese were inferior, weak, racist against Mongolians, and plotting to take over the country. Their views, I have little doubt, are just parroted versions of what they hear from their parents, on TV, in the school yard and in the streets of UB. Their personal experiences with Chinese (in Beijing, in UB) were, for the most part, "OK" in their own words. The nationalism of youth is a purer form, untarnished by cynicism and buttressed by a type of unshakable confidence that we usually lose when we become adults or else become sociopaths with southern cross tattoos (or your own county's equivalent).
In the end of the activity, I led a discussion of what Mongolia needs to do to lead to the future that it desires. We talked about the need to improve the relationship with China and that discrimination is a two way street and that both sides must improve their approaches to one another. We talked about how they could be the ones who start that process, and that the ideas that we hold and the way we practise them will influence the future. We talked about why corruption was a bad thing for the country as a whole. We talked about how Mongolia needs to diversify its industries, to move away from mining to avoid the dreaded resource curse that has befallen so many other nations (and a few previous Countries of the Week). In this discussion, I found myself in a position that I never thought I was at all going to ever end up in: teaching Mongolians about Mongolia.
As the class ended, I asked if they had thought they had learnt anything about their country. A quiet murmur ringed around the room as they thought about it. And then a student put up her hand and said, simply, "Yes."
