Is Wal-Mart Good for America?

Recently my class spent time on the global economics portion of our curriculum. I typically do not use full - length films because the students lose focus easily (I prefer shorter clips) but this documentary published by Frontline for PBS was just too good to pass up.

The documentary is "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" and it shows how Wal-Mart as a corporation rose to success by relying on international trade. It really brings up a lot of good points and uses a lot of our vocabulary in action (trade deficit, for example). I recommend this documentary, which is approximately one hour and streams from the web without downloads (perfect for our smart boards).

Wal-Mart full length documentary from Frontline PBS

I recommend guiding questions for your students. This helps them keep up and understand what is going on in the movie. I also stopped between "chapters" to summarize with the students.

Because my school is doing an all-class writing initiative, I used this movie as a prompt. I asked the students to answer the title's question of whether Wal-Mart was good for America. They could pick either side but they needed to stick with that side and use details from our lectures and the movie. I found the class was split down the middle, which was interesting.

Submitted by Kathryn Jasper, Central HS

Chart and map for use in teaching agriculture

source: CIA Factbook

We're teaching the economy portion of the curriculum currently. Before break, I taught about economic activities - emphasizing the difference in the four types of activities. To tie that lesson in to our lesson today on agriculture, I found the above chart online, which I put in my power point lesson. It shows the decline of primary activity as the world has become less reliant on subsistence agriculture and more reliant on commercial agriculture. I asked the students if we are eating less - they said no.. in fact, the world is consuming more food due to population growth. Yet the distribution of employees in the primary sector is down. This emphasized the shift to commercial farming.

The second graphic featured is a map of agricultural output. The dots show, in size and color, the amount of food and other agricultural products that are produced and exported by country. In our lesson on subsistence versus commercial farming, we looked at which countries still rely on subsistence farming (and why). This map helped emphasize that point.

**Both images are copyright free and available for use. For the full file instead of copy/pasting, go to this link.

Posted by Kathryn Jasper, Central HS