All posts by Danny Sanchez

Danny Sanchez has taught Social Studies in Florida for the past 13 years and has specifically taught AP® Human Geography for the past 7 years. His ninth grade students have far surpassed the national and state averages every year despite it being the very first AP® course they have taken. It is his ultimate goal to reach as many students as possible and help them achieve success on the AP® Human Geography Exam.

The World Cup: From Folk Culture to Globalization

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The World Cup is in full swing and it is, without a doubt, the biggest event on the planet. Billions of people will watch the international soccer (or football as most of the world calls it) tournament over the course of the next month. In the United States soccer is considered a second tier sport behind American football, basketball, and baseball. For years I have tried to explain to my students that while we in the US have paid little attention to soccer for most of our history, in the rest of the world it is far and away the most popular sport. For me personally, I was exposed to soccer at an early age, growing up in a Hispanic household ignoring soccer wasn’t really an option.

The question I get asked most often, why is soccer so popular in the rest of the world? It is simultaneously a complicated and simple question to answer. To better understand the question one must understand the origin of soccer as a folk tradition in England. Hundreds of years ago while excavating a historical site the head of a Danish soldier was discovered, what does one do when discovering the head of an invading soldier? They decided to kick the thing around, it later morphed into a game as two villages took turns kicking the head back and forth to each other. Thankfully, they eventually stopped kicking the head around and played the game with a ball, over the years rules and a playing field were established and soccer took on the form we are much more familiar with now. Continue reading The World Cup: From Folk Culture to Globalization

What is Human Geography?

New York
New York City Skyline. (Photo by Philipp Henzler, Courtesy of Unsplash.com)

People often look at me with a perplexed face when I tell them that I am a Human Geography teacher. They either think I am making students memorize lists of countries and states or I’ve even been asked if Human Geography is a science course where we study the human anatomy. I explain to them that Human Geography is trying to understand why the world is the way that it is. Our topics range from urban patterns in New York City, to farming techniques in Western Africa, East Asian fashion, the impact of humans on the physical environment, and just about anything and everything in between. To understand such a wide array of topics I teach my students that the world is highly organized, nothing is random, and that coincidences don’t exist.

Human Geography is an Advanced Placement® course, meaning my students take an exam created by the College Board® scored on a 5 point scale. The objective of students on this exam is to score at least a 3 and earn a college credit. The primary benefits of earning that college credit are: one less class to pay tuition for, one less class to have to prepare and study for once they reach college, one step closer to college graduation while still in high school, and lastly it is a critical building block for a solid college application. While my ultimate goal is to have my students better understand the world they live in, I am constantly pushing them to create the connections that make that knowledge applicable to passing the AP® Human Geography exam.

While the exam is challenging, only about half of test takers nationally score a 3 or higher each year, I have been able to help my students achieve a high level of success on the exam. Each year I have taught the class my students have been double digit percentage points above the national average. When compared to other students in our home state at the same grade level, my students have doubled the success rate of their peers. I have also privately tutored several students for this exam and I am quite proud to say that their success rate has been nearly 100%. If achieving this type of success on the AP® Human Geography exam, or just knowing more about the world around you sounds appealing, this site will be a valuable resource for you.