Ms. Blanchard Receives National Recognition in Geography

This November at Columbia University in New York City, 50 of the brightest AP Human geography teachers in the United States will come together for the American Geographical Society’s Geography Teacher Fellow Symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for geography teachers to interact with and learn from leading experts in the business, government, and science areas of geography.

Bacon Academy’s own Ms. Blanchard has been selected to participate in the discussions and collaborations of this year’s symposium, which is themed “Geography 2050: Envisioning a Sustainable Planet”. Ms. Blanchard has been teaching geography at Bacon Academy for more than ten years now, and has been interested in the field since she was a child. She accredits her love for geography to the National Geographic magazine. “I was in love with that magazine when I was a kid,” she says, pointing out the many copies that she keeps in her classroom. “My grandmother had stacks of them and some of them weren’t even in color at that point so they were old, old magazines and whenever I went to her house she had tons of them sitting around and I just loved looking at them.”

Ms. Blanchard also loves to travel, and believes that her global excursions inspired her love of geography. She often shares pictures of her travels with students, in order to give them a more global perspective and connect geographical subjects to real people and places. She hopes to be able to use what she has learned on her trips to enrich what she can contribute to the symposium’s theme of a ‘sustainable planet’. “I’ve traveled to a number of countries where they have a trash problem… it was ubiquitous,” Ms. Blanchard commented on the issues she wishes to discuss at the symposium. “Wherever you went, it literally was trash everywhere… it ends up getting into something a little more global- it gets into the ocean and then we are going to see it here, it is going to have an effect.”

This conference will help Ms. Blanchard to take what she learns and apply it to the AP Human Geography courses taught here at Bacon. AP Human Geography is the fastest growing AP course in the United States, and Bacon Academy is lucky to have had it taught here since 2001. In 2015, almost 160,000 students took the APHG test, a count that had risen 17% from the previous year. Ms. Blanchard says she is excited to attend the symposium because it provides the opportunity to interact with people in the field. She believes this is important because, “I can bring that back to you guys. Here are people that are into geography but they’re doing real things instead of just seeing geography as a teacher driven subject, now it’s something that people can major in and then they can do all kinds of jobs, not just teaching… everything from being a park ranger to working with the U.S. Census bureau.”

Thanks to Ms. Blanchard’s exceptional work with Bacon Academy students in the AP Human Geography subject, she will have the greatly beneficial opportunity to bring back a wide variety of new and interesting geographic knowledge to share with our school!