I did it! We did it! Week 1 of the 2016-2017 school year is over, and it ended with such success. Our classrooms are growing into the beautiful utopias I wrote about previously, and already I am overwhelmed by the kindness my students are showing each other in discussions and group work.
My teaching partner, Mark, and I have started a quick mini-project about water and the social justice issues surrounding safe drinking water in the USA; this project is inspired by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Thursday was our kick off. We pushed our students to grapple with how water may become contaminated and how people could learn to decontaminate their drinking water on their own. We then took a short field trip to Manoa stream to collect water samples and document our sample site photographically. The students, Mark, and I came back to the classroom and started testing our local water source with at home contamination testing kits. We were excited to be using the kits, but very nervous about what we may have found in the water so many of us encounter daily. Thankfully, most of the very serious contaminants were non-existent or present at very low levels. We are still waiting for a gut-wrenching result from our Coliform (feces and waste) test. I think we are all hoping that our samples come back clean.
Today we researched more water contamination crises in the USA through a viewing of Viceland's America's Water Crisis. Viceland is a documentary-based program. Exploring all sides of an issue while simultaneously being fearless of the politically incorrect or being hesitant to chase after answers relentlessly are paramount to the program. Our students seemed to be completely captured by the stories of California, Florida, and New York's water crises. We are going to finish off the documentary activity with a jigsaw and discussion on Monday.
Next week we launch THE water project. The kids are going to be grappling with some hard decisions and some hard choices. They will be put in front of community members and pushed to defend their thinking. They will be relying on their research and analysis skills to defend their claims successfully. But more than that, in my hopes at least, the students will begin to understand that environmental issues don't affect everyone equally. They will learn about environmental justice and dissect the marriage of environmental problems, racism, and classism.
We start the hard-hitting, controversial issue discussions Monday and I am thrilled. This is what I live for; this is the teaching I crave. I get to drop huge, unanswerable, seemingly unsolvable issues on my students and watch their innovative, peace-making, understanding minds make more sense of them than any adult I know. I am given this rare opportunity to understand that the future generations HAVE GOT OUR BACK. They care. They fight. They solve.
Standby for the inevitably insanely creative words from our progressive minded, future world leaders.
