Hydropolitics and human trafficking at Thurgood Marshall

Jumaina and I taught a lesson on Monday, April 14 to Amanda Flynn's senior seminar on global issues. The six students in the class are preparing for an MUN conference that is happening later this week and will be participating in debates on freshwater resources in Qatar and Israel and human trafficking in Qatar and Kazakhstan. The class was 90 minutes long and, because there were so few students and we assumed that they would be reasonably well-informed on their own topics, Jumaina and I figured that the hard exchange of information would occur as more of a discussion than a lecture. We came in with maps, articles, handouts, notes, and a lesson map specifying how long each part of the class should take rather than a defined lesson plan.

Overall, I would say the class went ok. The students didn't know nearly as much as we thought they would, which didn't lend itself well to a free-flowing discussion. Jumaina and I had also planned to take the students on in debates of their topics, but neither of us felt that they really had enough knowledge yet to debate well. Of the five students who were there, I thought that perhaps only 2-3 of them were really engaged at any given time, although perhaps that's to be expected in April of their senior year.

On another note, maybe I was just really paranoid that I wouldn't know enough about hydropolitics because it's not one of my strong subjects, but I spent roughly 16 hours preparing for the lesson, including synthesizing what I thought was important into one-sided worksheets on the key issues that Israel and Qatar face in this field and the ways in which they have gone about dealing with them. In the future, I think I'll spend less time preparing, although have any of you gone into a classroom and felt that you weren't adequately prepared and knowledgeable about the materials you were teaching?

-- Ariana (my user name is DDFI because I run another blog at work. :)