【正文】 like the best thing ever to prepare you to be a good teacher. Professor Well, I’m glad to see you feel that way, Mathew. You know, that’s the goal. So, I’ve been reading over your observation notes and I’m quite interested in what’s going on, in particular what’s the astronomy unit he’s been teaching. Student The astronomy unit? Professor It seems that Mr. Grable has mastered the interdisciplinary approach to teaching — the way we’ve been talking about in class. Student Oh! OK, yeah, so like when he was teaching them astronomy, he didn39。t have to rely on each other too much and they really don39。s the amount of time it takes for them to grow, right? So it would be five months? Professor Umm? Oh, uh… I’m sorry but no. It has nothing to do with that. It39。t just teach them the names of the plas, he used it as a way to teach mythology. Professor Really! So, how did he do that? Student Well, some of the students could already name the plas, but they didn’t know that the names had any meaning — the stories behind them. Professor So, he… Student He introduced Greek and Roman mythology as a way of explaining. Like, you know, how like Jupiter’s the biggest pla, right, and how Jupiter was the name of the king of the gods in Roman mythology, right? So since Jupiter, the pla, is the largest pla in our solar system, it’s like the king of the plas, like Jupiter was the king of all the gods. Professor Oh, Mathew, that’s a great example. Student Yeah! And each student chose a pla and then did research on it to write a report and make a presentation. They went to the library to do the research, then they made presentations about the pla they chose. Professor So, in one science unit, in which the focus was astronomy, the students also learned about the literature of Greek and Roman mythology, used research skills in the library, wrote a report and practiced their oral presentation skills. Student Exactly! He used this one topic to teach thirdgrades all that stuff — how to use the books in the library, to write reports, and even how to speak in public. Plus they had a great time doing it. Professor You know, Mathew, this is just what we’ve been talking about in our class. I’m sure everyone can learn something from your experience. You know, Mathew, I’d love for you to talk about this astronomy unit in class on Wednesday. Student Really?! Hmmm… ‘cause I don’t really think I’ll have any time to write my paper by then. Professor Oh, you won’t need to write anything new just yet. For Wednesday, use your class observation notes and explain the things we’ve discussed today. Student Ok, that sounds all right. Lecture Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in an archeology class. Professor OK, we’ve been talking about early agriculture in the near east. So let’s concentrate on one site and see what we can learn from it. Let’s look at Catalhoyuk. Ah… I’d better write that down. Catalhoyuk, that’s about as close as we get in English. It’s Turkish, really. The sites in modern day Turkey, and who knows what the original inhabitants called it. Anyway, uh…Catalhoyuk wasn’t the first agricultural settlement in the near east, but it was pretty early, settled about 9000 years ago in the Neolithic period. And ... umm... the settlement...ah...town really, lasted about a thousand years and grew to a size of about eight or ten thousand people. That certainly makes it one of the largest towns in the world at that time. One of the things that make the settlement of this size impressive is the time period. It’s the Neolithic, remember, the late Stone Age. So the people that lived there had only stone tools, no metals. So everything they acplished, like building this town, they did with just stone, plus wood, bricks, that sort of thing. But you got to remember that it wasn’t just any stone they had, they had obsidian. And umm... obsidian is a black, volcanic, well, almost like glass. It flakes very nicely into really sharp points. The sharpest tools of the entire Stone Age were made of obsidian. And urrr... the people of Catalhoyuk got theirs from further inland, from central Turkey, traded for it, probably. Anyway, what I wanna focus on is the way the town was built. The houses are all rectangular, one storey made of sun dried bricks. But what’s really interesting is that there are no spaces between them, no streets in other words, and so generally no doors on the houses either. People walked around on the roofs and entered the house through a hatchway on the roof, down a wooden ladder. You can still see the diagonal marks of the ladders in the plaster on the inside wal