Whew... planning a field studies package is tough

Double post for today since the first post does not fit into this topic.

Honestly speaking, I never knew preparing for a Field Studies package can be so tedious. Whew...
The recee part was alright. But the difficult part comes when we had to think of appropriate activities for the students to do. We found ourselves going back to the objectives of this field studies trip as we planned our questions and activities.

Tourism, being a Human Geography topic, is a tough nut to crack.
1) As contrasted to Physical Geography topics, Human Geography topics lend themselves strongly to interviews and surveys. This was brought up in the last lesson with Mr Yee when we were grappling with the issue of communication and language problems. This, I must acknowledge, that would be a limitation of any fieldwork conducted by students. Conversing in dialect with elderly is something that I can do at ease. However, there is a need to consider that there will be non-Chinese speaking students doing fieldwork too. If you hadn't guessed by now... my group chose Chinatown as a fieldsite. I guess one solution is to make sure that every group must have at least 1 who speaks Chinese. Even then, students may not be able to converse in dialect when they want to interview the elderly in Chinatown about the impacts of tourism. This is perhaps one failing in the field studies package. The only solution that I can think of is to tell the students to look for someone who can speak Chinese and English.

2) Thinking of appropriate activities to be done within a two-hour period is a headache. We originally wanted students to do interviews, landuse mapping, sketch buildings and pedestrian counting. But we rapidly realised that this is overly ambitious for secondary school students. The toss was either to get students do all 4 but teachers will allocate different tasks for them to do and then they will come together to work as a collaborating team; or to cut down on the activities. We wanted to do the former originally. Happily and passionately discussing and planning away when we realised that this was too time consuming for teachers. Not very realistic. So, we dropped the idea and decided to do the latter instead. Didn't want to do interviews initially, but we realised that if we don't do interviews, we would not be able to document any changes over a certain period of time. Sketching buildings and pedestrian counting were activities that we were banking on. But someone pointed out that they did not fit our objectives, and so down into the rubbish chute they go. Landuse mapping was the most viable activity to complement interviews. So we stuck to that.

3) And then there was the safety issue to consider. We picked Pagoda Street and the HDB flats area because there would be no traffic. Students need not cross any roads. But, they would have to look out for pickpockets etc. Bringing students out is not that simple and straightforward after all. Not to mention that we kept reminding ourselves that the ideal teacher:student ratio ought to be 1:20. This means that we had to split the class into 2 groups and do all the logistics in ensuring that all the students can finish their fieldwork in 2 sites. Not going to be easy. a) We need to keep an eye on students, b) on top of that, we have to take note of our time.

We were berating ourselves for choosing a human geog topic as our Field Studies package by the end of our discussion. We were totally drained by then. But it was a good experience though.
I will never ever trivialise a fieldtrip or field studies trip again. As students, we thought that such trips were easy because we did not understand the tedious process of planning a good and educational trip. After this experience, I think I am starting to understand why teachers feel so pissed when students do not appreciate such experiences.

Off to do my FSP stuff!!