Students,
Recently, I caught the movie Castaway on network TV and watched it from beginning to end. What a great movie! Surely each of you has seen this movie at least half a dozen times, too? Tom Hanks was phenomenal in it. Do you remember how he finally gets rescued after being stranded on a remote island for four years? Well, it was a GIANT shipping shipping / cargo container ship that spotted him adrift on his raft.
Across all my classes, students are always curious to know more about the international shipping industry. How do goods get from one place to another? What path did that item you just bought at Target come along? Did the ship carrying it go through the Panama Canal to get to a port in California? There are so many fascinating things to know about ports, transportation, logistics, etc.
A few years ago, my husband and I took an amazing vacation to the Central American country of Panama. We spent a day checking out the canal, looking at the “locks”, and taking a day trip on a ship through the canal. I have also been to several seaports including Long Beach in California (that and the Port of Los Angeles combined make up the 6th busiest seaport in the world) and Singapore (also, one of the busiest ports in the world after Shanghai).
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to teach this lesson and I’m finding that videos are so far the best way to really help the students understand the enormity of this topic. (A field trip to a port is ideal, but you’ll need to do that on your own. Long Beach offers paid boat tours of the port and you get to see the Queen Mary in port).
Here is a video that is about 4 minutes long and is a traveler’s personal experience viewing the busiest port in the world: Shanghai (Links to an external site.).
Testimonials
