Guest reality check by David Middleton
8 Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any ClassroomApril 25, 2019
ANYA KAMENETZ
NPR/Ipsos conducted a national poll recently and found that more than 8 in 10 teachers — and a similar majority of parents — support teaching kids about climate change.But in reality, it’s not always happening: Fewer than half of K-12 teachers told us that they talk about climate change with their children or students. Again, parents were about the same.
The top reason that teachers gave in our poll for not covering climate change? “It’s not related to the subjects I teach,” 65% said.
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That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
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1. Do a lab.
Lab activities can be one of the most effective ways to show children how global warming works on an accessible scale.
Ellie Schaffer is a sixth-grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C. In science class, she has done simulations on greenhouse effects, using plastic wrap to trap the sun’s heat. And she has used charcoal to see how black carbon from air pollution can speed the melting of ice.
These lessons have raised her awareness — and concern. “We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”
Many teachers we talked with mentioned NASA as a resource for labs and activities. The ones in this outline can be done with everyday materials such as ice, tinfoil, plastic bottles, rubber, light bulbs and a thermometer.
2. Show a movie.
Susan Fisher, a seventh-grade science teacher at South Woods Middle School in Syosset, N.Y., showed her students the 2016 documentary Before the Flood, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio journeying to five continents and the Arctic to see the effects of climate change. “It is our intention to make our students engaged citizens,” Fisher says.
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3. Assign a novel.
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Not A Drop To Drink belongs to a subgenre of science fiction known as “cli-fi” (climate fiction) or sometimes eco-fiction. You can find lists of similar books at websites like Dragonfly.eco or at the Chicago Review of Books, which has a monthly Burning Worlds column about this kind of literature.
4. Do citizen science.
Terry Reed is the self-proclaimed “science guru” for seventh-graders at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School in Honolulu. He has also spent a year sailing the Caribbean, and on his way, he collected water samples on behalf of a group called Adventure Scientists, to be tested for microplastics. (Spoiler: Even on remote, pristine beaches, all the samples had some.)
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5. Assign a research project, multimedia presentation or speech.
Gay Collins teaches public speaking at Waterford High School in Waterford, Conn. She is interested in “civil discourse” as a tool for problem-solving, so she encourages her students “to shape their speeches around critical topics, like the use of plastics, minimalism, and other environmental issues.
6. Talk about your personal experience.
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7. Do a service project.
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8. Start or work in a school garden.
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Here are some more resources
After the publication of our climate poll story on Monday, we heard from people all over the country with dozens more resources for climate education.
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The Zinn Education Project (based on the work of Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History Of The United States) has launched a group of 18 lessons aimed specifically at climate justice. Some are drawn from this book: A People’s Curriculum For The Earth: Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis.
NPR
NPR = Nitwit Pinko Radio
Nothing on that list of 8 idiotic “ways to teach climate change” is even remotely related to climate science… And citing Howard Zinn as a resource? Really? Citing Howard Zinn as a resource for anything other than Marxism is academic misconduct writ large. Yes, I know Howard Zinn is dead… So are Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao… Your point?
The article actually included an informative graphic:
55% of the teachers surveyed said they did not teach about climate change in their classrooms. 65% replied that it wasn’t related to the subject(s) they taught and 17% said the didn’t know enough about climate change to teach it… My hunch is that >97% of teachers, including the 45% who “teach” about it, are insufficiently familiar with the science to teach it.
Instead of having English teachers focusing on climate change, maybe they should just teach English…
–Ellie Schaffer, sixth-grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”
But then again, you can get, like, an Ivy League degree in, like, economics, you know, like by speaking this way. You can even, like, get elected to Congress, like you know, whatever…
I really liked this bit…
Terry Reed is the self-proclaimed “science guru” for seventh-graders at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School in Honolulu. He has also spent a year sailing the Caribbean, and on his way, he collected water samples on behalf of a group called Adventure Scientists, to be tested for microplastics. (Spoiler: Even on remote, pristine beaches, all the samples had some.)
Who needs science teachers when you have a “self-proclaimed ‘science guru’ for seventh-graders”? A veritable Gardner McKay version of Bill Nye. Terry Reed studied geology and journalism at Ball State University and now sails around collecting bits of plastic… Green Adventures in Paradise! However, he apparently missed out on some important science lessons from George Carlin…
Sorry, George Carlin, Plastic Is Biodegradable
“The planet … is a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’”
Instead of showing the Leonardo DiCappuccino flick, they could just show “the American scientific film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, which demonstrated ‘the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change'”…
That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
It belongs in earth science (geology, meteorology, oceanography, etc.) and physical geography classes for science majors in colleges and universities… Not in grade-school social studies and English classes.
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NPR – Long known as National Propaganda Radio
It would be nice to have a news organization that would inform and edify rather than push a nonsensical political point of view.
A good exercise would to find actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing serious global warming.
You would have to teach a little about evidence:
–Evidence of warming IS NOT evidence that man’s CO2 is the cause.
–Warming is NOT evidence of its cause
–Unusual weather occurrences are not evidence of its cause
–Correlation is not causation
–An expert’s assertion is not evidence.
–Majority belief is not evidence
–Government assertions are not evidence.
–“What else could it be” is not evidence
–Polls are not evidence
–Climate models are not evidence
IMHO the best book all time on climate change is Micheal Crichton’s “State of Fear”… I doubt you will find it on the recommended book list. I wish it was mandatory reading at every public school high.
Global warming is so serious, our summer is too long and there is no way to deal with it.
If children can be taught climate science in elementary school by elementary school teachers then what does that do the the climate scientists’ position that the opinions of deniers don’t matter because they haven’t studied climate science in college?
I’ve found that 100% of the teachers sufficiently familiar with “climate change” to teach it DON’T because it’s bullshit political doubleclaptrap.
Temperature at sea level is limited by gravity.
100% of all Glacial ice is displacing its mass in crust and magma.
95% of all temperature increases are due to land-use incursion on the sense radius of the weather stations.
When you try to average temperatures across distances you literally make your original data points anecdotal, so 100% of “climate data” is anecdotal in nature.
First International School on Climate System and Climate Chang… Something wong here?
Imagine the consequences of history teachers including climate change.
Explaining how periods warmer than today were prosperous as a result and how cooling caused climate refugees.
I thought you were joking about “the American scientific film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, which demonstrated ‘the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change’” …
until I went to the link on The First International School on Climate System And Climate Chang (ISCS) and read the official comments of this farce.
Note the “Climate Chang” … 🙂
Climate “science” is a farcical Monty Python’s clownery !
It would be of enormous benefit if middle schoolers were taught the concepts of empirical, reproducible science and high schoolers were taught the principles of the testable hypothesis and the climatological history of the world starting a billion years or so ago. But nooo, let’s have geography teachers talk about Orange Man Bad and CO2 ruling the weather.
I suggest that the schools disconnect from the grid and run off wind and solar power.
Assign a novel??? Like Camp of the Saints or Atlas Shrugged?
A few years ago I was asked by local teachers to talk to middle school kids about polar bears. The context was an educational focus on the Arctic ecosystem. In the end I had talked to about 8-10 classes.
Without exception, every single teacher was astonished to learn that there were 10s of thousands of polar bears left in the world: they all thought a few hundred.
Where did they all get their false information from? Did they all read the same book or this the result of trying to simplify the concept of ‘endangered’ species enough so that kids that young could comprehend it? A nuance like ‘might be threatened with extinction in 45 years if everything goes as planned’ probably gets lost.
This is only one small aspect of the global warming narrative. Yet every single teacher got it wrong and passed that falsehood along to their students.
I shudder to imagine the damage done when these same people try to explain how ‘climate change’ is supposed to work.
“Did they all read the same book”
I doubt it was a book.
Or even a magazine article.
Probably a half-remembered tweet from the Usual Suspects, who deal in deliberate obfuscation and emotion – all the better for the gullible to “learn”.
How about a real science experiment to see how much plants grow with different levels of CO2?
This whole “climate change” morph, what does it mean? Of course the climate has changed. We have the Midieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, the Holocene which followed the last Ice Age and many more before that going back millions of years. Yes, the climate has been changing since day one. Do you teach or believe in “climate change”? It is all a morph as to mean AGW. I do not mind teaching a theory, the scientific method, but AGW is just that, a theory and not a fact, and easily disputable and only weakly supported at best, and I would claim on best evidence that AGW does not exist. These young children are being taught it is a fact, AGW masked as “climate change.” This is indoctrination and programming. We have hordes of celebraties and politicians knowing little about it pushing the same meme and virtue signaling to join in and save the planet. This amounts to nothing more than teaching religion, not science.
“That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
It belongs in earth science (geology, meteorology, oceanography, etc.) and physical geography classes for science majors in colleges and universities… Not in grade-school social studies and English classes.”
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Leaves the question – who needs “climate change” in the curriculum:
Obviously grade-school social students and English classes.
Religious Studies classes?