Welcome to Home Education Matters, the weekly podcast supporting you on your home education journey.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Home Education Matters.

And today we are talking about geography.

And geography is the podcast I've put off doing because I'm very prejudiced against geography.

I put it all down to my school experience because geography was taught by the headmistress of my school.

And I remember that we were forced to memorize the population of China, which was 3, comma, 0, 9, comma, something, something, something.

It was like 3 million.

And I remember thinking at the time, at age 14, this gotta be changing by the day.

This is the most pointless thing I've ever had to do.

Anyway, we are doing geography.

I'm overcoming my prejudices.

And I'm joined again by Jake from Humanities Learning.

I'm very pleased to have Jake here Cause I know he's a bit of a geography expert and I'm hoping he will counterbalance my prejud geography.

So, Jake, thank you so much for joining us again on the podcast.

Ah, thank you for having me.

Lovely to see you.

And it's a good example of ridiculous geography that.

I mean only that this year there's been a study out saying that they may have grossly underestimated world population.

It might be at 12 billion rather than 8.

So if that's the case, China's got.

Yeah.

And no one could ever possibly count all the humans.

It's far too difficult.

It's a bit like home education, isn't it?

You know, when they ask for home education figures and every time they say home education figures, I think, nah.

And it's a bit the same with people, isn't it?

How could we possibly count the amount of people on the planet?

Like, that's just crazy business, isn't it?

Let's talk then about geography.

We're talking specifically, really about secondary geography.

And when I say secondary level, I'm really talking about gcse.

Because my theory, as everybody knows who listens to the podcast, is it's kind of irrelevant what you do until you get to gcse, because you can just play around around and enjoy the subject and, you know, make beautiful little models of the water cycle.

And that's all wonderful, but when you get to gcse, there's certain things you need to know, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And there's quite a sort of a good choice for GCSE geography out there.

I personally teach the IGCSE because it's far easier with remote students.

So the IGCSE means that you don't have to do sort of formal field work and get it all signed off, which is very useful when you've got students in different countries or just spread around the uk.

So is the GCSE geography, is that, is that really hard for home educators to do?

Is there a practical component?

Yeah, there's a practical component.

I have taught it with one to one students, but you've kind of got to make a portfolio where you take lots of photos and you gather lots of data and you put it all together and it's signed off by your tutorial, which is very good.

But you know, like I say, when you've got one kid in Ghana and another one in Australia, it's not practical.

So most home educators would go for the IGCSE where you still do the practicals, but you're just tested on those practicals in the exam rather than needing that portfolio.

Okay.

And so to all intents and purposes it sounds like IGCSE for home educators is the most straightforward choice when it comes to exam centres and being able to self study.

Okay, so you talked about the igcse.

Now I know for a fact that there are, there's Cambridge IGCSE and then there's edexcel igcse.

And I think you do the edxligcse, don't you?

Yeah, that's correct.

Yep.

I think that is extremely sensible.

As somebody that has attempted to put their child through the Cambridge Geography igcse, I can say that that is partly also responsible for my prejudice against geography because, yeah, we were doing Cambridge History, so I thought, okay, well let's do Cambridge Geography.

And it turned out that that was a mistake.

Actually turns out they' Cambridge History was a mistake as well.

So there you are.

Chalk that one up to experience.

But the Cambridge Geography syllabus for IDCSE is really different to the edexcel geography syllabus.

And geography is one of those weird topics, isn't it, where you can have quite a disparity between exam boards?

Yes, I think it's because of the breadth of the subject.

It's like history in many ways.

There's so many different units that you could choose and do.

So I mean, even within the same exam board, you know, I teach a certain set of units, but another teacher might choose a completely different set of units and they'd still get the same qualification at the end, but will have learned entirely different stuff.

Ah, so it is like history or classical civilization in that you can choose.

You like kind of cherry pick the units that you get Examined in.

Yeah, that's right.

And so for.

For me, I teach rivers and hazardous environments and urban environments and economic activity and energy and fragile environments.

But I could do a different suite completely, which is nice, because it means that I can sort of go with what I think my strengths are or what I'm more interested in.

Kind of like you.

I was put off by geography at school by having to do a very long, boring coasts unit about longshore drift.

And although it's really interesting now, I'm still slightly scarred by that.

So I do rivers instead of coast.

I had this.

I had a similar experience with history at school, where I was forced to do the Industrial Revolution.

And I remember learning about spinning jennies for about three years and it was like.

And now for history, you can.

Yeah, you can choose World War II and really fun stuff.

And it's like, I got spinning jennies and you get Stalin.

That seems unfair.

Anyway, so for the geography, actually, that seems a really good thing.

Now I think about it out loud.

But for the geography, you say that there's a lot of units.

So how many units are there and how many do you choose for Edexcel?

So for Edexcel, there's, I think, 10 possible units and you teach five of them.

Any compulsory?

I believe the only compulsory one is the economic activity and energy.

I think that one's compulsory.

But then you can.

Then on top of those 10 units, you've then got field work to do, and that field work is connected to whichever other units you do.

So I do rivers and then a rivers field work section, and I do urban environments and an urban fieldwork section.

But you could, if you lived near a volcano, you could do hazardous environments.

And not great for the uk, because we don't really have any hazardous environments.

No earthquakes, no volcanoes, no chance of a tropical storm.

But that's the truly international part of it.

You know, if we were in Italy or somewhere, it'd be fantastic to do that.

So when it comes to fieldwork, how does that get examined?

Is it like science igcse, where you have to know, you have to study it in order to answer questions in the exam about it?

That's right, yes.

And what I do is, each year we actually go and do fieldwork.

So most of my students will come and do field work with me.

We do that in and around Derby.

But if there's a student who cannot do that or hasn't, for whatever reason, they can just sort of say, this is what I did on my imaginary field trip.

So we do all the theory.

And we sort of learn the best way to answer the exam questions as if they had done it.

But it is nice because I had a kid in Ghana who would do his fieldwork for rivers in a river with hippos in it.

And then they can talk back to students in the UK who don't have a hippo.

So it keeps things exciting, I suppose, but it's quite flexible like that.

Okay, so the field work you offer, like a residential almost, for the field.

Work, where people are not quite a residential.

We just do a day trip.

So we.

Because I do rivers and urban.

So we go to Derby, we spend the morning in the city center.

The students will go out and they'll question the local population with their questionnaires, which they're always utterly terrified of until they start doing it and realize that actually, if you've got a lanyard and a clipboard, people tend to answer your questions and be quite nice.

Especially if you're young, maybe not so much if you're older.

And then once we've done all the sort of civilized stuff in the city, we move to a park where there's a nice river.

We get in the river and measure sediment and water speed and all that kind of stuff.

So we can do it all in that one day, which is quite nice.

How important do you think it is for geography to have that practical element?

I mean, I'm thinking of science where science is one of those.

Where it's really nice, isn't it, to do the experiments?

Is geography a bit the same way?

It's like it makes a difference to your learning if you're able to get out there and do this stuff.

It definitely does, I think, possibly slightly differently from science, though.

The wonderful thing about science is you do the experiment and it works the way it should, assuming you do the experiment correctly.

Whereas my science experience, I have to say, where almost all my experiments went wrong.

But, yeah, clearly you are better at science than me.

But with geography, it's the opposite.

You, you know, you learn all this stuff in the textbook about how a river behaves and what a population in an urban center will be like.

And then you actually talk to them and you actually measure the river and it doesn't fit.

So that's.

It's kind of a good lesson that, you know, maybe you shouldn't just trust the textbook on everything.

And maybe the particular population that you question have some very different views than the textbook suggests they might.

Which is good.

That is good.

And it sounds like it's well suited to home educators, who, in my experience, home educated children love proving things wrong.

So when it comes, when it comes to textbooks, my prejudices against geography are that the textbooks are exceptionally dull.

Certainly the Cambridge one was like, oh, dear God, don't make me read this book now.

What's Edexcel like?

Is that any better?

Or are geography textbooks just a bit of a nightmare?

The Edexcel textbook has been updated recently and they've gone from something that was quite boring to something that's way more boring.

I don't know how they've managed it.

Brilliant promotion.

They've sort of made it just loads of dense paragraphs.

I mean, the joy of geography is the using the examples.

So you can take anything from the textbook and then you can find really exciting examples for it, either the extremes or sometimes the opposites.

I mean, it struggles, like most GCSEs, I suppose, to keep up with our changing world, because everything's changing all the time.

So still within the syllabus we learn about population increase and the dangers of population increase, but we don't look at the dangers of population decline, which in much of the world is actually going to be a more direct problem.

But then as a teacher, you can bring that in and do the comparisons and talk about, well, why is that population decline may well happen as well as population increase, and then you can connect the two together and there's always 101 different exciting examples for even the most boring thing.

So it is what the teacher does with it, I think.

And those examples that you find, and often the best examples are not ones that I found at all, it's the ones that students bring with them.

They've seen this weird documentary on YouTube or they've read this weird book and then they've got their own examples.

I can imagine that would help a lot if you have teenagers in a group who are bringing their own examples of things.

I know that when I was doing the Cambridge Geography, one of the reasons we stopped it, apart from the sheer unadulterated boredom, one of the reasons we stopped it was the amount of case studies that we were forced to memorize.

It was very case study heavy and you had to memorize case studies, you couldn't just, I don't know, know them.

You had to, like, actually memorise lots of facts about the case studies and it was just a lot of memorising.

Is that the case for Edexcel?

Is it?

You mentioned about examples.

I'm guessing you mean case studies.

Yeah, examples more generally.

But also there are Case studies.

But one of the reasons I like the Edexcel one is that at no point will they ask you to give precise facts and figures and numbers.

The textbook.

This is where it is good.

It will give you a case study for everything you need.

And instead of saying in the exam, you know, you have studied China, answer this question about China.

It will always say, you've studied a developing or developed or emerging country, tell me which one you'd like to talk about and then tell me about that.

So you can keep it simple and do the ones in the textbook and kind of use those as your examples.

Or you can go completely off piste and decide, well, for my developing country, I'll do Botswana instead of Nepal or whatever they've decided.

So it's totally open, like for that.

Which is good, because you've got, again, students all over the place.

They can write about the countries that they're in or the countries they've visited in.

And it doesn't have to be the group learns specific things about specific countries.

We're never going to need to know the population of China to the decimal point, which is good.

So that keeps it nice and flexible.

But the case studies are still a thing.

They're definitely still part of it.

It's just there's much more flexibility in what country you actually choose to talk about.

I know that there's always two things I get asked by parents when it comes to which exam subject they choose.

One is how much maths is in there and one is how much writing is in there.

So I'm guessing there' not a lot of maths in geography, am I right?

No, there'll be a tiny bit within the fieldwork section, so they'll give you some data and they'll say, you know, find the average of this data or something like that.

But it's across the entire gcse, it's about four or five marks.

That's always reassuring.

But for the essay writing, what are we talking here?

Is it like history, where you have like 10, 12 mark questions you need to answer and you need to know the kind of vague structure and how to answer it?

Or is it.

You're nodding.

Is that what we're looking at for geography?

Yes.

Yes.

So it's for the Edexcel at least.

Each section of the 5, 6, 7 sections you do is sort of rounded off with an essay at the end.

The vast majority of them are worth eight marks.

And it's really straightforward point evidence.

Explain.

What they do is they give you figures, so that could be a photograph, or it could be a bar chart or a pie chart or something.

And they'll say, explain how this helps you understand whatever the topic is.

And so it's a simple case of making a point, referring to the figure I see in the figure, a man with a fruit or whatever it might be.

And this tells me that.

And so in terms of complexity of essays, it's nowhere near history, where in my experience with history, you have to learn a different sort of essay structure for each of the different types of questions.

With this one, if you know the eight mark structure, you can do any eight mark question.

So it's there.

It's a really good sort of stepping or first step for students who are maybe a bit unsure or a bit frightened by essays because it's very formulaic, it builds their confidence.

So often students will do geography and then maybe progress on to do history.

It's not really progression really, but to them it feels like it is.

In terms of writing, it's a progression from one to the next.

So it's there, but it's manageable.

And all the rest of the marks are made up of much shorter questions where you're far more direct.

So name this thing or explain this concept.

For the essay sections, the evidence bit, the point, evidence, explain is that when you need to bring in your own knowledge of certain facts and figures.

I know you said that Edexcel doesn't really need you to know that much, but is that where you would need to know, for example, that in Mexico there's an aging population because the birth rate is X and Y?

No.

So you would just need to use the data they give you.

So the essays are much more sort of general knowledge.

I mean, it's great if you can put in your own examples and things, that definitely wows the examiner, but you can do perfectly well without that just by literally using the images they give you.

Where the case studies come in would be shorter questions.

They would say, give me the country you want to talk about and then have a four mark question about it.

Give two ways in which they reduce energy usage in your chosen country, or two reasons waste disposal is a problem in your country and you're completely open to choose what country you want.

So that doesn't really come into the essays.

So it's a little bit more like environmental management in that way, in that a lot of the information that you need is on the paper and you're just kind of disseminating the information and analyzing the information.

Yes, yes.

So all of the Eight mark questions.

They start with the word analyze.

So yeah, it's perfect.

It's just pure analysis which is good.

Environmental management is such a beautiful classic starter GCSE for home educators, but it's unusual in schools.

Is there much of an overlap?

Like if you do em, does it help you do geography or are they really very discreet subjects?

What do you think when it comes to the, the, you know, the complementing of the two of them?

Yeah, they do complement well.

I think environmental management first and then geography is a good order to do it in.

But I think the biggest, biggest difference is environmental management is wide.

So there's a lot of different things to know but none of them in massive detail.

Whereas geography is zoomed in on just a few different topics and then you really get deeper into them.

So there is crossover.

But it's like geography deepens the knowledge of EM or deepens your understanding of em.

I suppose students do sometimes go geography and then em and that helps a lot because they find the EM sections that they've covered in geography.

They sort of over know they know more than they need and then they can spend more time focusing on the other units that they're not so familiar with.

You know, it's a bit of an easier journey through the environmental management then.

So doing it in either way is good.

I've also had students who do them simultaneously and that's pretty good.

Except there's one thing that always annoys me.

According to the environmental management syllabus, an Ocean must be 60 meters deep to form a tropical storm.

But according to the geography syllabus it needs to be 50 meters deep.

So there you are.

They just have different ideas, but there's very few of those sort of weird conflicts.

Most of it is in line with each other.

The objective truth of knowledge that nobody cares about.

So who is geography a good exam for?

Like, is there other particular skills or interests or passions or things that you think would be a good fit for a home educated child for geography?

That's a good question.

It seems to sort of appeal to a wide range of students for some reason.

It's particularly popular with like sporty in inverted commas with my fingers there with the sporty crowd.

I'm not sure why that is.

I don't know if it's just because it's more physical and the ideas are more physical and concrete or it might just be a completely random thing that, you know, a lot of sporty kids are in my geography classes, but there seems to be something, it's very Practical.

What I don't get is much crossover between students who take geography and students who take religion or philosophy.

That seems to be two different ends of the student experience.

So it's definitely much more concrete, closer to science, I guess.

Not that I've ever taught science, but I imagine it's a similar sort of crowd there.

Yeah, it sounds like it's drifting more towards maybe the science end of the spectrum because you're called humanities, your company and so you do the humanities.

Geography must be the furthest outreach for you.

Is it?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm a philosophy and religion is my sort of the way my brain works best.

So I'm more sort of naturally suited to that.

But then I love the geography and then I can bring in all the human things, all the human elements to that because of course, everything's connected.

It's the study of humans.

And it's always interesting.

You'll get some of.

Because the IGCSE exam is split into two sections.

You've got your physical geography as your first exam and then your human geography is the second exam.

And that's, you know, some students will love paper one and they won't like paper two so much.

And then some students will be the opposite.

It really does trigger two different sides of your scope, I suppose.

Yeah.

The students who sort of get on better with paper one are the more scientific ones because it's much more.

Learn the process, explain the process.

The process is always right.

And then it's far more subjective on the human geography side.

How long are the two papers?

Paper one is an hour and 10 minutes and paper two is an hour and 45.

So they're manageable time.

Yeah.

Neither of them are particularly horrendous.

I think geography paper 1 is the shortest paper that I teach for anything.

Yeah.

Hour and 10 is pretty, pretty nippy.

They're in there and out there before they've really realized what's going on.

My son had a one hour exam for Cambridge History.

It was the.

The paper four, which is the optional, if you're not doing the coursework one.

And it's literally you choose one essay question and write for an hour on it.

And it was like, whoa.

Yeah.

And apparently it's very, very hard to get good marks on because all the teachers complain and all the private school teachers who do it, they like moan all the time about it.

Anyway, okay, so it was interesting you were talking there about philosophy and religion because it got me thinking about how in those kind of subjects in history, classical civilization, that kind of Thing, there's a certain nuance, there's a kind of gray zone that isn't really existing in geography.

But how much is there a chance for those children that like a bit of ethics, that like a bit of disagree, do you agree or disagree?

That kind of, that kind of slightly give my opinion stuff.

Is there much of that in geography?

There is.

So mostly in paper two.

Paper one you can always find some.

You know, the classic one is all rivers behave in this way.

You know, they will flow to the sea.

And then someone will always point out that the Mekong doesn't.

Sometimes it flows backwards.

So there's always some, but it's not really open for discussion.

But paper two, there's a lot.

So there is.

The only other essay in the whole Exam is a 12 marker in paper 2, which will always be about something to do with deforestation or global warming or desertification.

So something to do with humans and the environment.

And you'll be given a statement like we should chop down all the trees or global warming is a myth.

And then you've got to argue both sides.

It's exactly the same as a 12 mark question in religious studies.

You have the structure back forth, back forth, give a conclusion.

So that really does open up to discussion.

But again you sort of get that breakdown between the class.

There's half the class who just want to stick with the paper one stuff and do what's concrete and then you've got the other who are much more happy to be arguing the point.

Yeah, there's definitely room for all different types of brains in there, which is good.

That's good.

Okay, so for those people that love their geography and have SAT their GCSE and then want to do A level or briefly, what are the A level options when it comes to geography for home educated students?

Because obviously that is limiting, isn't it?

So this is less on my experience because I've never taught geography at A level.

So there you go.

You know, you've got your standard A levels out there.

You've also got your.

You can go and do environmental science, which is very popular, or you can even go off and do sort of more specific things like geology, which I don't know many people that have done geology, but it's definitely an option.

Doors to lots of things.

Very useful if you want to go off and study marine biology or marine science at A level as well.

So it's very useful for opening up avenues into lots of subjects.

You don't have to sort of just do geography, GCSE and then geography, A level.

I know that it's quite a popular one with the military.

They like their intake to have a A level or even a degree in geography because that shows that they can find their way around and find places on a map.

Yeah, that's it.

So there's definitely, you know, you can go into a whole load of different pathways with it.

You don't have to join the guillotry, of course, that would be weird.

But in terms of the actual what A levels are out there on off a photographer, I don't really know.

I've never really looked into it.

When it comes to the spectrum of GCSEs in my mind, as someone who's put their children through lots of them, I kind of place them all on a little spectrum for how easy they are.

Now, obviously, bear in mind that obviously some children will find maths insanely easy, other children will find maths very, very difficult.

But generally, you know, I've got at one end things like travel and tourism, environmental management as nice, easy, accessible, you don't need to memorize too much, you don't need to write very long essays.

The mass is really manageable.

Then at the other end of the spectrum I've got things like history, which is very, very content heavy.

I've got also got things like.

Which is controversial, but I've also got things like religious studies, which takes a kind of brain that is able to deal with back and forth and nuance and hold different arguments in its head.

But then obviously things like further maths or whatever it's called at GCSE I can't even remember.

So you know those kind of things.

Where would you place geography?

Bear in mind obviously that all children have different skill sets.

Whereabouts would you place geography on that spectrum?

I think geography is actually.

It might be bang in the middle.

I agree with you that environmental management, marine science are really nice GCSEs to get started in.

There's some technical stuff in there.

There's a bit more maths than geography, which will put some students off.

But then there's no sort of large essay writing to do at all.

So in a sort of literacy sense, I agree that those are sort of on the easier side of things, with history and RS being at the other end.

But I think geography is nice in the middle because you've got.

It's kind of like there's a little bit of everything.

You've got your essays, you've got your shorter answers, you've got a bit of maths, you've got a bit of analysis of sources.

It's not quite the same as history source analysis, but it's, you know, good stepping stone there.

So I think it's a nice, all rounded gcse.

It doesn't, you know, RS is brilliant if you can write very quickly and you've got lots of different, you know, you've got that kind of mind that likes to balance things and question things, whereas geography, it's great if you can do a bit of that, but there's also a bit of this.

So I think it's a really nice, well, well rounded one, probably towards the easier end of the spectrum, but it's certainly not easy.

I don't think any of them are, but, you know.

Yeah, in terms of gcse, it's definitely towards that end.

I think I can safely say that travel and tourism is very easy.

As someone whose daughter has sat it, I can safely say that it's right there at the end of the spectrum.

Yeah, that's my tip.

For anyone who wants a really easy PCSE for geography, is it the case that you need to use particular kind of language terminology, keywords?

Is it one of those where you really do have to get your lingo right?

Yes, very much so, for two reasons.

Firstly, they don't sort of sugarcoat the questions.

So if there's a question that asks you about the discharge of a river, for example, if you don't know what that is, you're not even going to be able to start answering the thing.

So it's important that you understand all the keywords so that you can access the questions in the first place.

But it also, if, and this is similar to others like environmental management, marine science, you can save a lot of time and get the marks much more efficiently if you use a keyword.

So you either use the keyword or you write two sentences describing the keyword, which means you're going to run out of time in an exam.

So for all my students, I do keyword glossaries, so they can do flashcards or whatever and get them drummed into their heads.

Definitely a lot more of that in paper one than paper two.

So with the physical geography, you need to know all the different forms of erosion in a river, but also all the forms of weathering and transportation.

And so you've got.

You end up with these siloed little lists of keywords that you've got to be able to fit in.

In paper two, it's nowhere near as bad.

It's more sort of general theory that you need to learn.

But there is still a dollop of keywords in there.

So, yeah, keywords are important.

That's the short answer to that one.

I seem to recall.

My daughter started doing geography with you and I know that she did the water cycle and in actual fact, I want to thank you for that because that was the first unit I think we did.

And she ended up writing a gay love story based on the water cycle.

From your.

She didn't do the job for gcse, but she wrote this amazing gay love story.

I was like, that, I'm taking that for the win.

But when it came to the water cycle, there were specific things like precipitation and things that you needed to know that word.

Are there questions in the exam like these very short two mark questions like in re religious studies or whatever, where you, where you're asked, what does precipitation mean?

For example?

Are there that kind of.

Is it.

Do you have that?

Yeah.

So you'd have one mark questions that would literally give you a keyword and say, what does that mean?

And then you'd have two, two mark questions, usually where they say something like describe one transfer in the water cycle.

So you might talk then about precipitation.

So you name it and describe it to get two marks.

So it is.

Yeah.

Some of the questions are directly keyword based.

The essays, the keywords are going to save you time and they're going to help you sound more geography.

So you're probably going to get better marks.

But you could potentially, if you wrote fast, you could sort of ramble your way through that without hitting too many keywords.

There's no spelling, punctuation or grammar marks for geography.

It's one of those that.

Because in lots of subjects like history rrs, you get awarded extra marks for using key terminology from a sort of literacy point of view.

But that doesn't happen in geography.

It's more about accessing the actual question.

Okay, that's good to know.

I know that when I used to do my examining for religious studies, I loved children that used keywords because it meant that I could just scan my eyes down and then tick off the keywords and then they got there.

Everyone's a winner.

So before I ask you about the resources, your sort of recommended resources for geography, I want to ask you for edexcel geography, what are your top tips for a student that wants to A pass?

And.

And then a student A wants to pass get a 4, student B wants to get a 9.

What are your, what are your tips for each of them?

Okay, so for our student aiming at 11, a grade four, I think probably the most important thing would be to know your keywords and the focus would be less on losing sleep over how to do an essay, but to be able to identify the word, explain what it means, you'll be fine.

Too many students, and I think this is common in lots of exams, especially classical civilization as well, they stress and they go and they spend all their time working on the essay structure and then they forget to actually learn the content.

I think for a student aiming for a 4 or 5, get those keywords down and you can't really go far wrong if you just sort of remember them and how they're used.

Whereas for somebody going for a grade nine, that's where you really need to be.

Not just understanding the keywords, but making connections.

So being able to say this is a process in the water cycle and this is affecting potential flood risk in this way, or this is what's happening with human demography and the fact there's more people is going to lead to maybe increased pollution and that's going to lead to this problem and sort of connecting those things together.

And that would mainly be happening in the essay questions, which, assuming that they know their keywords and they've got all the basic information down, that's the difference between a sort of seven, eight and a nine is being able to really bring those things together.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So they're able to kind of analyze it and make and see patterns and be able to explain the impacts of those things.

Yeah, that's it.

Okay, so what about then, some ideas for resources for geography?

I know that when back in the day, and I don't even know if they still do this.

Memrise used to do lots of courses, not just the ones they did.

People could upload their own course and there were loads for things like keywords for different exam syllabi.

I don't know if that's still the case, but I remember I found that very helpful with my children.

What are any resources that you would recommend?

YouTube channels, podcasts, anything at all like that.

Books even?

Well, I suppose one of my favorite things, it's quite old school, but it's still really useful, is make your own keyword glossary, make your own flashcards, even if you never actually use them.

Just sitting there and working through the glossary and writing them out and hopefully thinking about them works very, very well.

So you can kind of do that with the textbook, because they usually have glossaries in them anyway.

But to go wider than that, I Mean, there's nothing really that beats David Attenborough.

Still, that's pretty useful stuff.

There's lots of wonderful documentaries out there about volcanic eruptions or earthquakes.

The news helps with.

We've just had Hurricane Miranda and I literally was teaching about that this week because it's happening now and it fits with the syllabus and so that's brilliant.

You can find keyword, key, case studies.

Sorry, all over the place.

I know that there are some very good sort of geography revision guides, things out there, not really for the IGCSE specifically, though.

So just be aware that if you're going to use CGP books or whatever they are, you're probably using one for a GCSE syllabus.

The content will still be useful, but might not be structured in the same way or sort of presented in the same order that you might be.

Might have gaps as well, right?

Yes, there might be some gaps in there, Things that aren't covered.

So they're definitely useful.

But, yeah, just use with caution, I suppose.

In terms of podcasts, I don't.

I'm a terrible binger of history podcasts.

But not geography, I'm afraid.

I'm sure there must be some amazing ones out there.

I know history has really amazing YouTube channels designated Mr.

Sales.

Does history, or is that English?

I can't remember.

But there's.

There's quite a.

There's quite a few.

I just can't remember the name of any of them because it's years now since my son did history.

But there's some really nice history YouTube channels.

Are there any geography YouTube channels that you can think of?

Not that I've explored.

Now, that's not to say they don't exist, but in my experience, if I'm ever trying to sort of show a video about the formation of something or something else, I usually end up with some American thing with nice cartoony graphics.

But, yeah, I'd like to think there's some nice things out there and that I'm just not aware of them, hopefully.

Probably because I'm just a bit too stuck in my ways.

And so I've got all my own little bits and pieces that I show the students.

But, yeah, you could do it, especially if you were learning it at home, not within a classroom environment.

You've got the freedom to go and look at so many different things.

I've had students who have.

We've mentioned a case study and they've gone away and written eight pages because they've been on a deep dive and they've watched the documentary and it's just something about it has captured them and they just want to know more.

So you can really, if you're doing it individually, your student or child can take it in so many different directions, hopefully build a real passion for it.

I know that you won't mind me saying this because I know that you're very over subscribed and have like a waiting list and then your courses sell out like in a day.

So yeah, I know you won't mind me saying this, but geography is also very easy to self study, isn't it?

It's quite a straightforward exams, self study.

Yeah, I mean like any.

I think all the exams are good to self study if you've got a real passion for it.

I mean there are definitely some that are easy, others I think geography is easier than say history, because history, I think at least at some point you need to talk to a tutor about exactly what the examiners are looking for because they don't always make it obvious.

But in geography it is pretty straightforward.

You know, the mark schemes are written in a way that you can understand.

So if you are self studying, you can look at a mock exam, look at the mark scheme that goes with it.

It's all logical, which sometimes in history it just doesn't seem to be.

See, I think it's a really good one to study on your own or in a small group because when it comes to doing the field work, I've worked with small groups of three or four who will live in the same area and so we can go to their local city or their local river or their local coast and do the field work that's sort of very specific to them and that they understand, that they're familiar with.

So.

Yeah, and make it relevant to them.

That's really nice.

So while you're here, I can't let you go without asking you to let us know how things are going with the new GCSEs.

I know that marine science has come out.

Has it gone through its first exam?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, marine science we're now in.

Cause they do two sets a year.

So we're now on exam cycle four, I think.

And that's.

Yeah, that's gone very well.

Students are always really engaged with it.

It's got some wonderful.

It's got a surprising breadth to it.

It's sort of broken down.

It's got your physics unit, your chemistry unit, your biology units, your human interaction units and you get to look at everything from how oceans work to all the weird Freaky little creatures that live in it.

And the students.

There's a lot of that when you can just learn about golf reels or bobbit worms or whatever.

Yeah, so that.

That one's gone very well.

It's very similar to environmental management in format.

If you.

If you used to one, you could easily do the other without too much crossover.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Cie.

Yes.

So, yeah, the format isn't.

The formatting is identical.

Environmental management is just about to go through some changes.

There's a new syllabus for 2017 examination.

So I'm sort of bringing my last cohort through this current one, and then that will be updating.

I've tried not to look at that too much because I'm afraid that I'll start teaching stuff for the new syllabus with the current students.

But, you know, at some point I'll be able to go through and overhaul the whole thing.

We may have to bring you or Damien from Earthlings back on then when they change that, that syllabus, because otherwise my podcast will be out of date for that one.

What about Natural history?

Because that's.

I know that's been in the pipeline a while.

Is that still looking like it's going.

To launch with the new Labour government?

It looked for a minute that it wasn't going to, so I think it was nearly ready.

And then since the election, it was definitely put on the back burner.

I have heard rumors that they're going to bring it back, but it swallows Schrodinger's causes.

It could be alive.

It might not be.

Until someone looks inside the head of Keir Starmer, we won't know.

Why did they not want to have a natural history exam?

Is that some sort of labor policy that I've missed out on?

I don't know.

I think that I. I think originally it was, you know, we're not going to bring anything through until we've fully examined it and got our committee to form another committee.

I don't know who knows what's going on, but hopefully, I mean, the details that were out for it looked really, really interesting.

And I think from what I can gather, a lot of the work's been done.

It felt like it was just about to be pushed out the gate and then was stopped.

So I can't see any reason why it shouldn't come forward.

Unless, of course, the whole thing was just filled with Tory policy and that's why the paper covers dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs.

So is there anything else on the horizon when it comes to humanities subjects?

That we need to know about.

You mentioned about em having a.

An overhaul.

Is there anything else we need to know about with humanities subject as you're Mr.

Literally, Mr. Humanities?

Not as far as I know.

Nothing that I've been made aware of.

So that doesn't mean there's not.

Because I may just be slightly ignorant.

But no, all of the rest are just sort of business as usual.

Yeah.

So I think we're safe for now.

All right, well, that is great to know.

So all of Jake's links will be in the show notes, but I'm sure everyone listening knows how to find him.

It's humanities learning, and if you want to get onto one of his courses, I recommend you do it very, very, very quickly.

Because they go crap.

They do.

They fill up very quickly, which is lovely.

I always think one day we'll do the bookings and everyone will have disappeared.

But so far, so good.

It's all good.

It's because you're doing a very good job at what you offer to home educators.

You're a sterling example of how to provide a really good service to home educators, and we thank you for it.

Okay, Jake, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

It's lovely to have you on again.

And maybe at some point we'll get you back on for a religious stud, because even though I'm actually a religious studies teacher by background, I've never done a podcast on that one, so.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, that would be like, the opposite of this one.

Fantastic.

Thanks so much, Jake.

It was lovely to talk to you again.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for joining us for today's Home Education Matters podcast.

See you at the next one.

Have a lovely day.

Sam.