Teaching Moment

I get up in the morning; make myself a cup of coffee. I don’t make my bed, never did. It’s nobody business if my bed is made or not. You don’t like it, don’t look into my bedroom.Nobody will suffer if my bed is not made. I have completely different attitude towards my garbage. My garbage is everybody’s business. The more garbage I produce the less space is there in the landfill for you.

How did it happen that I started to care about garbage? I started to teach Environmental Science class and the more I learned about the problems of today the more changes I made in my every-day life. I started as any teacher who has to teach this course with the balance in an ecosystem, and biomes, and food chain etc. But I got bored too soon because it was the same material I usually teach in Regents Living Environment class. Why should I do the same stuff with a different course? So I changed.

This time I did mention the information my students had learned in other science classes too, but this time I was building on top of what they already knew. Turns out other people concerned with the problems in the environment also made the same changes. You can find textbooks that rearranged the material around human needs for air, water, land, food and energy. This is the way to go. How do we use our land, or air, or water? How do we damage environment to get our needs met? What problems do we face that must be solved in order for the future generations to continue their normal life? This time I didn’t get bored. I learned a lot about today’s problems, more, than I would ever know if I didn’t teach this course.

Most of my learning was happening when I was reading my students projects. They learned and I learned with them. We learned about organic food and organic farming. We learned about the solar panels and the wind mills. We learned about cars that run on water, and the cars that run on compressed air. We learned the three principles of Green Living: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. That still didn’t feel enough. I had to change more.

My students are high school kids. They are almost adults. Many of them work. Many of them are taking some college courses. All of them without exception tell me that they want to recycle. OK. We placed recycling bins all over the school. Now I observe how my environmental science students who want to recycle drop their unfinished food into recycling container instead of garbage, but the empty bottles still go into regular garbage can. What is going on? I don’t understand.

I spoke to our school custodian, wise man, he told me not to worry, it takes time to change the people’s set of mind. We all know how to keep it clean by putting everything into garbage. The fact that it’s not clean at all is not common knowledge. One of my students had an “Aha” moment last week, he said: “So, when we clean we make it [Earth] dirtier!?!?!!!” Our landfills are full and New York exporting its garbage to other states. Just think about it: we pay our taxes to transport our garbage to other states.

What we have to start doing is: SEPARATE OUR OWN GARBAGE. Nobody can separate your garbage. The custodians will recycle what we separate. It is not in their job description: separate recyclable and reusable from the rest of the garbage to save space in the landfill. No, it is the responsibility of the person who throws the garbage. Stop for a second and think: where should MY garbage go? It turned out this step is the hardest to take. Like the addict’s first step to recovery is to admit that s/he is an addict, our first step to cleaner future is the realization that if we don’t separate our garbage our kids will live on top of a huge landfill.

So here I am every Friday morning with my cup of coffee, a large blue bad of recyclables, and mess in the bedroom :)

I have this blog posted in 2 different places. This problem really bothers me at the moment.

Good Old Times

I hear it from all over how good it used to be. Old good times, everybody wants to go back there. I don't. I don't believe anybody needs to go back there; it was not better at all. Don't believe those fairy tales. Let's think about it rationally. Work was much harder without all this vacuum cleaners, washers and dryers, cranes, and bulldozers. This one is obvious, nobody will argue. When they talk about their "good school years", it's always a white city person talking. Schools were segregated and limited. Many kids had to start the hard work at very early age. I should say majority of kids. I think farmers kids could not go to school at other times but winter, because the rest of the year was work. Contagious diseases were killing people of all ages, but especially children. No vaccinations, no modern medicines. Health problems didn't stop there. Because of the hard work, back pain, muscle and ligaments pulled, pain in joints, and more suffering without any hope for help. This is why old people from the past are always bent and crooked. I can't hear when people say that people used to be healthier than now. I'll continue this topic later, enough for now.

What are references for?

Many years ago, when I was a 7^th grader my math teacher said something that affected my views on learning. He said that the amount of information people collect is growing so fast that he believed his generation was the last generation that had individuals of encyclopedic knowledge. He predicted that people would need to become more narrow specialists in the areas of their choices. He was the teacher who told us that we should not try to remember some general data which is recorded in the reference books and is easily available in the libraries.

Do not memorize, understand and move on - that was my mantra for years. This is why I can watch people playing Jeopardy, but I will never encourage anybody to play it. I will never understand why you would need to remember so much information that can be easily found if needed.

There is another aspect to this thought. More and more discoveries are made on the borders of different fields of knowledge. For example, new methods of treating diseases are found on the border between Biology and Physics. To create a simulation on the computer the programmer must understand the science behind the simulation. So we can’t really become narrow specialists. There is a contradiction :) We do need to be a little educated in more than one area.

I was happy to see old RCTs (tests required for High School Diploma in NYS) gone and exchanged by Regents Exams (New tests) because the new tests require less memorization and more thinking on the spot. In Math instead of calculations students have to solve problems. In Science instead of checking the tricky vocabulary words the students are asked how they would think in different situations, same in History, and even in English they have to write what they think about what they've read.

So I have positive view on the changes in education. I am also happy to see how many talented and devoted people work in this field, how many new ideas are there. Plus we have computers, the tool of the future, in the hands of our students.