Teacherman

My unit plan from Module 5 was based around an introduction to economics unit that every 11 th and 12 th grade AP Economics student would have to study. The standard was taken from the District of Columbia Social Studies Standards: Pre-K to Grade 12. Standard E1: Students understand common economic terms and concepts and economic reasoning. Learning Objectives: 1.    By the end of the unit students will be able to evaluate the relationship between scarcity and the need for choices and provide solutions to problems based on these concepts. 2.    By the end of the unit students will be able to make and justify economic decisions based on the concepts of marginal benefit and marginal cost. 3.    By the end of the unit students will be able to identify the difference between monetary and non-monetary incentives, and will be able to apply those concepts to realistic economic simulations. As this is the first unit in the en...

I work for a Korean international school in Qingdao, China. We use a mash-up of the American high stakes tests such as AP and SAT for students who are hoping to attend US colleges, but we also focus on preparing students for the brutal Korean university entrance exam. Around 30% of our students will go abroad to study, with the remainder attending Korean colleges.   The academic expectations of parents in Korea are sky-high and this in turn fuels high expectations in schools and amongst teachers. The score on the university entrance exam is of paramount importance and parents put a great deal of pressure on teachers to ensure that their children are not being left behind. At my current school there is an unwritten rule that the minimum grade that any high school student will receive is a B. Even if they make no effort in class and fail the final exams miserably they must be given opportunities to do extra work for additional credits to drag their grade up to a B. Thi...

How can lessons in your subject field reflect diversity?  Bringing cultural diversity into the classroom can be done more easily in some subjects rather than others. If you’re teaching English or history then there are a million different ways to make your lessons multicultural. Economics is a little trickier, as economic themes tend to be reasonably universal. For example every country has to deal with scarce resources and the need to make choices. People in every country go to work because of a monetary incentive. You can however take these broad economic themes and zoom in to make them country specific. I did this in my multicultural lesson plan when I took the broad theme of scarcity and choices and looked at how Korean students have to choose between playing computer games or studying, while children in parts of Africa might have to make very different choices. Why is it important to introduce students to multicultural content and multiple perspectives? I teach a...