The Pacific Ocean

I learned the value of good classroom resources in the four years I taught Geography at Chalvedon School in Basildon, where classroom control was.... challenging. We had a policy of sharing out the work of creating worksheets and workbooks, and spent a disproportionate amount of the department's budget on filling our filing cabinets with ready-to-hand-out materials.

I enjoyed the creative side of this: collecting of suitable information, finding photos, doing the drawings, the laying out of the master sheets. It had the further advantage that, as I moved schools, I travelled with increasingly fat folders of accumulated resources.

This sketch of the structure of the Pacific basin was the culmination of this creativity. I drew it while I was teaching at my last school, The Plume School in Maldon, and it was sufficiently simple to be used with GCSE students but could also form a useful resource at A level. It was drawn in phases, starting with the eastern half and steadily growing across to the west. I used to hand out black-and-white copies to the students who, if they could do nothing else, like me enjoyed colouring it in.

It was the only piece of original geographical artwork of which I was so proud that I added in the bottom left-hand corner, using Letraset, ©JEHaylett. I kept it for years before handing it on the Rachael in the hope that, as a Geography teacher, she might be able to use it in her lessons.