G. Venu with Hanuman Pavakathakali puppet
Have you ever heard of Pavakathakali? It is the traditional glove-puppet play of Kerala, Southern India. The practice is restricted to several families around the remote village of Paruthippully, who have been the custodians and practitioners of this tradition for several centuries. When I was in India in 2009 I was lucky enough to meet G. Venu and he showed me several of the puppets. In the picture you can see G. Venu and Hanuman.
School is done!!! reports are written and farewells given to departing colleagues.
As I reflect on the 150 scripts I marked I thought it useful to share some of my observations. I marked TZ1 but I feel my comments have relevance for all.
The article from Bloomberg, Starbucks Drinkers Won’t Get Break as Columbia Supply Drops, is an excellent real world example for Section 2 on Microeconomics. It reports on rising prices brought about by a increase in demand for coffee especially from a more affluent Asia, and supply issues that the key coffee exporting economics are facing. It reports that:
Coffee has almost doubled in the past year as storms hurt plants in Colombia and demand increases globally. Rising costs are prompting Starbucks to boost the price of bagged coffee sold at U.S. cafes by an average of 17 percent, according to spokesman Alan Hilowitz. The company will likely continue to be an “important” buyer of Colombian coffee, Munoz said.
In my last posting I talk about the ‘consensual view’ that Chromium has no role in the body.
But what did I mean by the consensual view?
Using inquiry to teach games goes back to Mosston (1966) and has been evolving for over 40 years through the Teaching Games for Understanding approach (Bunker and Thorpe 1982) to the Games Sense/ game-centred approaches that came out in the nineties.
I became a loyal follower of TGfU at university after finally ‘getting’ volleyball and being a strong believer that performance, a love of physical activity and conceptual understanding are all intrinsically interrelated, I recently bought the book ‘Play with Purpose’ by Shane Pill (2010) for some summer inspiration. What struck me when reading through the argument for using the game-centred approach, was that the rhetoric was straight out of From Principles into Practice. ‘Open-ended questions, challenging students to problem-solve, inquiry, inclusive of learner needs and learning styles, transfer of knowledge, student ownership, long term learning through problem-solving, conceptual learning’ the list goes on and highlights how the constructivist movement in PE since the 1960s away from traditional games teaching has been a great fit for MYP PE.
Syrian refugee children stand behind the fence of a refugee camp in the Turkish border town of Boynuegin in Hatay province June 18, 2011.
This time last year, Triple A Learning were chosen by the IB to plan, develop, create and support an exciting new initiative to raise participation in the Diploma Programme. In a pilot project, 8 schools were selected on the basis that their student profiles showed that those MYP students from ethnic and low-income families tended not to transition to the Diploma Programme in 11th Grade.
The aim of the project, known as Bridge to Success, is to support teachers in better preparing 9th and 10th graders from these groups for success in the DP.
Many of us are very aware of the increasing prevalence of asthma among our students and in our societies. As a result, many of us in the teaching profession are trained in basic first aid for asthmatic attacks. Medical anthropologist David van Sickle gives us much more to think about beyond grabbing an inhaler and calming the victim. He has dedicated his career to better understanding this disease. He is heavily influenced by anthropological methods and is clear that asthma needs to be understood within cultural contexts.
Therapy is a major focus of the Option on Abnormal Psychology. In the previous IB Psychology Course there was greater focus on students understanding the historical and cultural context of each of the perspectives. As a history as well as a psychology teacher, I thought this helped students understand how perspectives on such topics as psychopathology changed over time.
While providing an historical perspective is no longer prescribed, teachers have ample opportunity to give students this as they study each Level of Analysis and cover the optional studies.
Dear IB Music Teachers,
My name is Sergio Espinosa and I have been offered the opportunity to ‘blog’ in this space. I must confess that while I have read many blogs this is the first time that I will write a blog. Therefore, I must confess that I am rather nervous every time I type a word…
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