We wandered in the rock engineering wilderness for weeks thanks to our professor not framing the subject properly in his lectures. We were mature enough to understand this and take the necessary steps to ensure that we kept up with what was some very challenging subject matter.  Find out how we can keep our young students engaged and provide them with the context required to assist them in making sense of their world.

My favourite tunnel in San Pellegrino, Italian Dolomites.

We stumbled out into the bright light of day, dazed and confused.  We had just been subjected to an hour of torture – or so it seemed. The topic was ‘convergence’ and our rock mechanics lecturer had tormented us with page after page of mathematical formulae – thrown up onto the screen by an overhead projector. Some of you may remember those things.

We left clutching photocopies of those self-same lecture notes, and this at least gave us some degree of comfort, knowing that we could now go back to the text books to work out what had just happened. It wasn't so much the difficulty of the subject matter - we had gotten used to difficult concepts - rock engineering, foundation design, stresses, strains, soil mechanics - but the fact that our lecturer had not framed that particular days topic for us.

For the record

Like you, when we showed up at that lecture we had no idea what 'convergence' was.   For the record, ‘convergence’ is what happens when you drive a tunnel through a mountainside – the diameter of the tunnel actually reduces or ‘converges’ as the stresses are redistributed around the newly-formed opening, and the rock adjusts accordingly.  The amount of convergence varies according to the rock type, its strength, and the spacing and orientation of the rock joints. 

Our lectures were wanderings in the wilderness

Now if our professor had only spelled that out at the start of the lecture, we would have been much better prepared for the broadside of mathematics that came our way.  I don’t know why one of us didn’t ask what ‘convergence’ was, but all our rock mechanics lectures were pretty much wanderings in the wilderness – although the ‘convergence’ lecture was the cherry on the top.  We were always forced to go back to the text books after every lecture, which in itself was a good discipline, and there is a lesson in that too.

Which brings me back to the geography syllabus.  Here at Rock and Sky we aim to frame the various topics in the same way that the rock engineering lectures should have been framed.  We provide the context and the examples and teach concepts.  We also try and make it as exciting and as interesting as we can.  Of course we have to dive into the nuts and bolts of the various topics, but we also are very aware that we live in the information age where a quick online search will provide way more information than what is to be found in a single text book or what we can provide here in a number of lessons.  

Prove to be key in getting the buy-in

So teaching the concepts is what we aim to do.  We also take things a little further to ask even bigger questions – questions as to why we are studying a particular subject in the first place which may also prove to be key in getting the buy-in from you - whether you are a teacher or a student.

This provides the framework in which we can then operate

It would be so very easy to write another dull text book with rehashed extracts from Wikipedia and what have you. Rather my aim is to ‘romance’ the topic way more than it is being currently done.  Wading through the material that is currently available is a big yawn – it takes me back to those grey, lifeless text books which we had to copy excerpts out of into our geography note books.  My heart sinks.  Yes, we have to cover the syllabus and provide you with definitions of the various topics, as this provides the framework in which we can then operate.

We are working away furiously to get our courses up and running, so if you want to know when we are going live with some of them, and how they can help you, please leave us your name and email address and we will keep you posted on developments.

A promise - no spam, no nonsense, no passing on of your details

If this resonates with you and you think it may be valuable to others, please share.