I attended a lecture by George Friedman, the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. It was fascinating and provided me with much food for thought. The purpose of the session was to provide some teaching points for high school history teachers. Here are just a few new ideas I gleaned from the session:

1. New Orleans, since it's conception, has been & continues to be the most important city to the US economy because of the access of the ocean from the rivers that run through it.
2. If hurricane Katrina had destroyed these ports, this could have caused devastation for the food supply & economy for a large part of the world.
3. World leaders mostly take action based on one thing, fear.
4. When we analyze world leaders, we should do so by determining their "geopolitics," what they believe based on where they've grown up. Their geopolitics literally determine what they can & cannot do as a leader. Additionally, we should factor in threats this leader might fear because this will explain many of their decisions.

The theme running through the lecture was that many political decisions are stemmed by threats based on physical location. Based on this, his plea was that history teachers pull out the maps more often in the classroom to have students analyze world events based on where the key players in the event are located in the world. Additionally, history teachers can super-charge students' critical thinking skills by having them predict world events based on location & previous history between countries. This makes sense to me. Just some ideas to think about.