Updates
Summer 2024
Just letting you know that I am still around. I know the website hasn't really seen any updates in nearly 2 years. I kept pushing off updating the website for various reasons.
The year before coming back from the distance teaching was just plain crazy. I was burnt out. Many of us were in "survivor mode." We're just trying to survive the school year without taking on additional work. Let's face it. Our schools and communities expected us to pick up more work, leading more to burn out. I contemplated taking a break from the classroom. I wasn't as passionate as I was before. I was jaded. When summer came, I needed that time off to not work to give myself a mental break. Then an opportunity came to teach a new course at my school, AP Human Geography. The hope was that teaching a new course would revitalize my passion and it did! So this year has been busy on focusing on teaching a new curriculum and also my first AP class and building it up. I'll have plenty to share should you want to teach AP Human Geography/Human Geography and/or adapt resources into your own existing curriculum.
Then what happened last summer was I was told that the AP Human Geography program I started blew up in size in registration. My first class of AP Human Geography students also achieved a ~71% pass rate when compared to the global pass rate of around 50.4%. Not too shabby for a first-year AP teacher. I started the program the year before with 4 classes (around 135 students). My administration told me last summer that registration grew to 6 classes for the 23/24 school year with around 194 students. I ended up taking up that 6-period assignment, which led me to giving up my prep period. I did not realize how much work that was until the school year started! It was yet another exhausting year, but I felt good about it.
Feel free to check out the Educational Resources in the meantime.
If you have questions about thematic teaching, my curriculum, my links, collaboration, other education-related matters and/or professional outreach, please feel free to reach out to me on Instagram at @changtheworld or email jace@changtheworld.com.
June 14, 2024