Compare everything to Star Wars. And weave history into a Star Wars-style narrative. Like, not a bunch of disjointed dates, but rather, set the scene, center on a group of people and their struggles, talk about all the drama.
I don't know much about Star Wars to give examples of things you could compare to it, but if he were into fish, say (just to give examples of the basic idea), you could elaborate on medieval diets, and how they weren't allowed to eat meat on certain days, so they kept fish for that purpose. And you could elaborate on which fish they could eat where. You could teach math by working out how many cardinal tetras and how many bandit cories would happily coexist in a 40-gallon given that you want equal numbers of each (this last being utterly arbitrary). You could use the nitrogen cycle as a step-stone for the rest of chemistry. (So, in your case, figure out whether wookies are k-strategists or r-strategists. What domain do they go in? Eukarya? What kingdom? Animalia? Are they actually related to other members of that kingdom, or do they just look like it-- homologous structures or analogous? Remember, Dear King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti-- or maybe that should be changed to a Star Wars mnemonic.)
There's no reason to teach arbitrary math problems about trains-- make it about the Millenium Falcon and the Death Star racing... or something. Except actually make it plausible in-universe (you'll probably run into serious pickiness about saying stuff that makes sense-- you can't just toss out random names from Star Wars).
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I'm using a non-verbal right now. I wish you could see it. --dyingofpoetry
NOT A DOCTOR
15 Jan 2011, 4:13 pm
