Call MR. HELP: Your Idea Generator
5 Ways Geography Themes Enhance Ideas in all Subjects
Back in college on a gorgeous Saturday a couple of roommates took me grouse hunting. I’m not a sportsman. My family didn’t hunt or fish and I didn’t develop an interest.
I joined my buddies that day out of insatiable curiosity. I remember it vividly.
When grouse take flight from the forest floor, they make a loud, sudden sound like whooshing wings.
It’s sharp and intense. Leaves and branches rustle as the birds push off the ground, creating a dynamic sound bursting through the trees.
After the brief startling, I enjoyed each time we coaxed the birds into flight.
That feeling jumps back to mind whenever I hunt for new ideas to improve my subject matter planning. I want to coax ideas into the open for capture.
The Dilemma: My subject is BO-ring!
Certain concepts we have to cover as teachers and trainers sound boring. Heck, maybe they are boring. But you still have to teach them.
Take geography. For nearly ten years I had to get seventh graders jazzed up to study the Five Themes of Geography. Ugh! Even I start to nod off with that tedious sounding title.
Let’s make it less boring by personifying it.
Let’s call it all “MR. HELP.”
Meet "MR. HELP”
Check out the acronymical qualities:
M ovement
The travel of people, goods, and ideas from one location to another.
R egions
Areas with distinctive characteristics: human characteristics, such as demographics or politics, and physical characteristics, such as climate and vegetation.
H uman-E nvironment interaction
How people interact with the environment and how the environment responds (with three key concepts: Dependency—Humans depend on the environment, Adaptation—Humans adapt to the environment, and Modification—Humans modify the environment.)
L ocation
Two different types: Absolute location—described by its latitude and longitude, street address, etc. and Relative location, a location as described by where it is compared to something else.
P lace
An area defined by everything in it. It differs from location in that a place is conditions and features, and location is a position. Think place names, culture, physical features, the size or composition of the population.
If you’re still reading you’re wondering what happened to the grouse. That’s coming, I promise.
MR. HELP works for you
Like walking through a covey of grouse, applying MR. HELP to a topic can help stir up new ideas.
You can approach it in several ways. Try looking for examples around you. I’ll use our family trip to Key West, Florida:
Movement - thousands of tourists stepped off a massive cruise ship into downtown. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on souvenirs, meals, and tours before sailing away that afternoon.
Region - Key West has always attracted people seeking refuge from other states and countries. It’s a mix of races, ethnicities, and social strata that draws millions of tourists to its laid back image.
Human-Environment Interaction - People have modified the Florida Keys for centuries. Some buildings are hundreds of years old. Others are recent, due to hurricanes making modifications of their own each year. Fresh water is pumped in from the mainland via pipeline.
Location - 24.5551° N, 81.7800° W (absolute) or at the end of a 120+ mile archipelago of islands called the Florida Keys. It sits in the Florida Straits, ninety miles north of Cuba (relative).
Place - Key West’s temperature varies little throughout the seasons, keeping in the 70s. It’s prone to hurricanes. It’s location has made for a blend of music from Jimmy Buffett’s island escapism to Bob Marley’s reggae to that loveable street musician’s awful attempt to play Here Comes the Sun.
You can view stories, features, and other aspects to life, a subject, etc. as specific examples of one theme or another.
The societal shutdowns imposed by governments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic caused an economic catastrophe for small businesses dependent on customer traffic. Large marketers like Amazon and Walmart flourished with movement of goods to stores allowed to remain open. Paper container manufacturers benefitted from the explosion in home delivery services like Fedex, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service.
Human-Environment Interaction abounds everywhere. Electric vehicles reduce emissions from the car, increase emissions at the power plant, and result in heavy pollution at the African mines where battery material is extracted from the earth.
The possibilities are endless. They’re springboards to further study and classroom discussion.
Each time you apply MR. HELP is like rousing grouse off the forest floor. It feels a little clunky at first. The ideas soon follow (don’t shoot them—just write ‘em down and get ready for the next ones).
Shout out: Back in the 90s, it was Mrs. Stanchik who coined the “MR HELP” acronym.
For more examples, read my article Driving Ideas: How to Harness Commute Time Through Different Lenses.
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