Intro to academics

Hello bloggers~

Here is a little taster of classes for the first two weeks. Teachers and students will keep us posted on classes throughout the semester. Sometimes they will share student work, sometimes they will give an overview of the course. Enjoy the academic travels...

Global Studies is a required 2-credit comprehensive course taught on all Traveling School semesters.  As a team, we design classes intended to be thought-provoking, discussion-based, and topical to the places in which we travel.  Critical thinking is emphasized in order to encourage higher level reasoning.  The students completed their first homework assignment of the semester on the plane ride from Dubai to Lusaka, in which they outlined their expectations of southern Africa; these pre-conceived notions provide a framework for discussion throughout the course.  Upon our arrival in Zambia, we were fortunate to meet folks were willing to teach mini-classes on national government and representation (by local politician Joyce Banda) and regional languages Bemba, Nyanja, and Shona.  While some classes are formal and set up conceptual scaffolding for future learning, others occur in unexpected places, like the Olympic Youth Development Centre in Lusaka.  During our tour of the facility, students engaged with Zambian youth and asked questions about life and recreation in Zambia.  The class is divided into multiple units centering on different themes: so far we have completed an overview of southern Africa and an introduction to critical thinking.  Coming up soon, we will delve into issues of indigeneity, as we enter San territory in Botswana.

- Beth, Bekah, Elsie and Quinn

Independent Life Skills

Group Dynamics class

In this course, affectionately called iLife, we provide resources for students as they learn to manage the demands of being an individual in a group setting.  Initially, we focus on personal skills: writing a letter to oneself, issues of nutrition and eating while traveling, responsibility and accountability, keeping a budget, women's health, and organization.  As students master these individual skills, we turn to a focus on group-related challenges.  On an island in the Zambezi River, for example, the teachers presented a skit outlining some anticipated stages of group development.  The performance was followed by a sunset discussion regarding personal interactions, our group dynamic, and how to approach conflict.  In the next several weeks, we will conduct more focused workshops on conflict resolution and how to give and receive effective feedback...  Students explained that they are looking forward to finding patient ways to object to someone else's smelly socks in the tent!

 -Beth, Bekah, Elsie and Quinn

This semester in Precalculus we will be exploring a wide variety of functions including linear, polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric. We will use these functions to help describe the world around us. In the first week of class, we brushed up on our graphing calculator skills by investigating the population data of some of the countries we will be visiting this semester.  In the last couple weeks we have also revisited our Algebra 2 skills and started off our Precalculus curriculum by discussing what a function is in the first place! Currently, we are learning about different ways to describe functions: symmetry, y and x intercepts, relative minimums and maximums, and slope, to name a few. This week we had our first quiz, in which the entire Precalculus crew demonstrated strong prior Algebra 2 knowledge. We have been enjoying holding Precalculus class in a variety of locations, such as a grassy lawn along side the great Zambezi River. In the coming week or two, we will be wrapping up our first chapter, which will include concepts such as transformations of graphs and finding the inverse of a function.

 - Elsie

During our first Algebra 2 class, held at the bottom of an African shaped swimming pool, we discussed each student’s math background and their feelings towards the class. Each student set goals for herself and we brainstormed ways we could support one another. Furthermore, we agreed upon our class expectations and created our systems for homework, grading and class participation.
Since then we have reviewed temperature conversions, learned the properties of real numbers and square roots, and continue to hone our skills in simplifying algebraic expressions. The students recently completed their first quiz while on the Zambezi River. Our time in Livingstone will be the perfect space to finish chapter one on Properties and Operations and create a solid foundation of using functions and their graphs to represent real life problems and situations. 
- Quinn
(PS - the pool was dry - no scuba gear needed)

Upon landing in Lusaka, Zambia our History class immediately began to unpack the term "history".  The students were asked to reflect on a personal story of their choosing and to analyze this story from the multiple perspectives of all people involved. We then proceeded to debate which perspective was more "truthful".  This lead to a rich discussion about subjectivity and bias in history.  The students used personal experience and course texts to analyze the role power plays in the construction of the dominant historical narrative.  Ultimately, we decided that this semester, we intend to collect as many stories from as many different perspectives as possible to help us understand the past, present and future of Southern Africa. 

Our first field visit was to the Zambia National Museum in Lusaka.  Though we had been told that the main exhibit was closed for renovation, once we arrived the museum curator not only opened the exhibit, but gave us an in depth tour.  This served as an excellent and extensive overview of Zambian history beginning with the indigenous San and Khoisan peoples of southern Africa.  Our tour guide lead us all the way from the migration of Bantu-speaking peoples through Zambia's independence in 1964 and to present day.  The students took away many nuggets of insight, many were especially intrigued by the role women played in the Zambian independence struggle.  

After getting off the river and getting settled in Livingston our class has focused on understanding the "Scramble for Africa," both root causes and lasting effects.  The students are using site visits, observations and interviews to explore how legacies of colonization have shaped southern Africa as we are experiencing it today.  In the next week we'll delve deeper into several case studies to explore relevant contemporary issues in neighboring Zimbabwe.    
- Bekah

Lusaka proved to be a great place to introduce Honors Natural Science to our eager students. We began with an overview of southern Africa’s dominant biomes (i.e. grasslands, savannahs, aquatica, fynbos and desert). Students presented the biomes with creative visuals including a map of our entire route which we will use to record the biomes as we travel.  


We have also delved into the key concepts to wildlife ecology - population distribution, carrying capacity, and limiting factors. We are currently studying these concepts in relation to the black rhino population in Zambia and Zimbabwe over the last two hundred years. We played a hilarious game to introduce population fluctuations and resource competition: most of the students pretended to be rhinos, while a few pretended to be specific resources (water, food, or habitat). Since there are limited resources, the rhino students had to compete in order to survive. After every round, we graphed the change in population. This gave us a solid foundation to explore the interactions in specific biomes between different species on a deeper level.


During our Zambezi canoe trip, students completed their first field journal. The field journal is one of our primary methods to document our scientific observations. We were fortunate to have  CB and Campbell as guides to identify impala scat, elephant tracks and answer all of our questions pertaining to this unique landscape and our field journals. CB and Campbell also gave us insight to issues surrounding land management and poaching on the Zambezi River. They helped us understand the complexities between federal, tribal and private lands and interests.


As we prepare for our next adventures in Botswana, the students will learn the scientific method in order to study animal behavior. Specifically, we will study elephants and other mega-herbivores at Chobe National Park. We will observe these animals on game drives and at water holes to collect information and test our hypotheses. 
- Quinn and Elsie

Honors World Literature and Composition

Literature is "a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."  --Italo Calvino

In the nascent days of this course, we explored the imaginative possiblities of expression.  Since literature intimately involves various types of communication, in our first class, students engaged in a discussion about the attributes of a skilled communicator.  From there, we read the first part of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".  This story is antithetical to Lit and Comp this semester, in that it isn't about southern Africa or by a regional author.  It does, however, pertain to our journey as a group.  After an enthusiastic conversation about various passages and themes of the story, we jumped into our first writing assignment: "in the spirit of "The Things They Carried", write at least 300 words about what you (or we) carry on this semester."  As we pondered what we carry, both tangible and intangible, the class also moved on to start our first unit on short stories...

Sitting around the edge of the pool at our campsite, legs swinging in the cool water, we considered the value of storytelling, processed Calvino's words (above), and learned the major traits of short stories as a literary form.  Soon, we are looking forward to reading a selection of short stories, as well as completing a "Drabble": a story that contains exactly one hundred words (no more, no less).  

[The "Drabble Project" (the name is apparently a reference to a Monty Python sketch) originated at Birmingham University in the early eighties.  Two British writers asked one hundred authors to turn in stories of exactly one hundred words, and a volume of the compiled stories was sold to benefit a charity. I am particularly excited about this assignment because it will provide a brilliant framework for introducing the process of revision, editing, and cutting!]

And a hint of what they did today - "Walk About Wednesday"

The no-no words list shows words they will try to eliminate from their writing in all classes this semester. Teachers will encourage students to describe the imagery with rich wording to paint the picture.