♥ Monday, February 23, 2009 ♥
Mr heah didnt come today!
today we had to answer 2 questions.
1) Explain the distribution of Earth's Climate.
2) Why are there seasons?
We have learnt in previous lessons that is it crucial to break down the question that we are going to answer in parts. By doing so, we will be questioning the question. A recap of what we did in class for question 1: what is distribution and what is climate? You should know the answers already, since we went through them in class.
Then, we were split up into groups to answer either one of the question and my group had to answer question 2. For the Q2, you may ask what are seasons? I believe that most of you know what seasons are so i don't think i need to explain. (FYI, this is what i got from wiki "A season is one of the major divisions of the year, generally based on yearly periodic changes in weather")
Reading the notes provide us with sufficient information to answer the question. But if we have to explain our answers to our classmates, we can't possibly read out the entire stack of notes to them. So when we are asked to answer a question using the information given, we have to sift out the important points in the notes tso as to answer the question.
Today, when we were asked to explain to the other half of the class why there are seasons, one of the groups simply used one sentence from the notes to answer the question.
(The sentence is "The changing orientation of the hemispheres with regard to the sun is the true cause of the seasons".) At first, i thought this was an excellent answer, but when i tried to use this sentence to explain to another group, i realise that is it not so easy to understand that sentence! some people would just go like "huh?" when they read it.
(which they did. heh.) There is more than just answering the question, we have to understand the process which takes place as well. The sentence above does not explain how the changing orientation of the hemispheres with regard to the sun causes the different seasons. I believe that using one of the diagrams in the notes (figure 2-11) to explain why there are season is will be much more effective, allowing for the group to better understand the concept and to answer the question as well.
All in all, when we are answering a question, we can't simply copy and paste from the notes. We should understand the infomation on the notes and answer the question based on our understanding, possibly even rephrasing it in a suitable manner. Afterall, what mr heah have been emphasizing that we should understand these concepts so that we don't end up mugging and memorising like mad before the exam! :D
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Yay to Xinyi who wrote this blog post! 'Cause you don't have to anymore! whee! haha anyway!!! YES it was super duper hard to explain to the other group what makes season because the girl herself (Xinyi) was confused. Haha! Then me and Alissa were stumped by her confusion and we all got confused! So how did we finally understand? With Rong Xian's super cool marker method! Imagine a marker is the earth, tilt it at the angle and rotate it around some light source or just substitute the sun with your finger. So if one observes the marker, there is one side that is always facing the finger and when it reaches the other side of the finger, it doesn't face the finger anymore :( so it has no sunlight which is also known as no seasons! Yay! And after a few rounds around the finger, we finally got the concept and we can explain it to the other group! Hooray! But its still quite confusing on which side of the earth gets what kind of seasons once I include the fact that the Earth rotates around its own axis.
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