When the hurly-burly’s done

From the Times:

Monkeys Control a Robotic Arm With Their Thoughts

First, I read Jose Vilson, who has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers:

Whether it’s at the movie theatre or my schools, many of our youth have become more superficial, less integral, more belligerent, and more careless with themselves, more than anything.

While it’s easy to point at the parents, I’m of the belief that the village raises the child. When communities as a whole set a standard for how their neighborhoods like, for what their children should know, and how their offspring should behave in any given environment, I strongly believe that translates into higher success for the communities in general.

Hmm, I thought as I picked my way through the layer of trash on the floor of our student center, stepping around kids making out on tables and past the pharmaceutical trade show that clearly doesn’t, couldn’t exist in such an Affluent Suburb Where No Children Are Left Behind. There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when an entire section of sophomores rolled into my classroom five minutes after the bell, claiming they weren’t late “because nobody was there,” I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

And when, at a house meeting in the middle of the week, we were told that the reason why we can’t go to the Board of Ed with an Actual Attendance Policy was that not every teacher in the school consistently enters his/her grades into the attendance database after school every day, I thought, There sure are a lot of things wrong here!

I don’t want this to be a complaining post. Nobody likes reading those, for starters, and May is such a great time of year to try to be happy. So instead, I’ve been thinking about things I can do which will raise my ability to respect myself as a teacher, which should translate into improvements, at least in my immediate sphere.

It really comes down to one thing: I will not teach behaviors that I do not want to see in my students. Or, if you’re more of a positive person, I will teach by example the things that I think are most important. I think this is the only way to counteract what Jose points out.

Thing One: Environmental responsibility

I’m not dumb enough to believe that this high school is going to become even a little bit more environmentally responsible. Replace our non-opening windows and inefficient HVAC system with fresh air? Naaah. Stop allowing students to drive to school? Nope. Rising gas prices (we’re over $4.00/gallon in these parts already) aren’t going to have much of an impact on rich kids driving inefficient SUVs. The school-wide campaign to recycle clean printer paper and print on the other side hasn’t gotten much traction. They’re still selling Poland Spring bottles in the cafeteria line.

I don’t entirely agree with Michael H. Schneider’s comment on UnFogged that it’s not in the American character to change our consumption patterns:

I’m confident that life in this country will get steadily more nasty, brutish, and short. I expect that anthropogenic climate change will accelerate and wipe out most coastal communities and totally disrupt agriculture.

I’m not doing a thing to prevent it. Judging by the election results of the last few decades, people like me are in the majority. Sorry, kids.

However, there are days when I can’t help but nod when I read this bit:

I just hope it happens after about 2035, because that’s about as long as I think I can possibly live. People in this country like being ignorant and bigoted and selfish and stupid, and we’ll choose to stay that way until it kills all of us.

If we could see the impact of our bad decisions, if we could see the impact of our good decisions, I think we’d have a lot more people willing to work to curb their excesses and pitch in. But I also think we need role models for sound stewardship of the resources (natural and unnatural) we’ve got left. Because it’s not just about global warming and the impending fuel crisis; we’re running out of food and money and pretty much everything (except for blogs).

So that’s why I’m planning on going paperless with all of my classes next year. I don’t want to photocopy anything, because all those papers wind up in the recycling bins, which, because of cuts in the facilities department, wind up getting emptied into the same trash cans as everything else. The papers clutter my desk, leading me to discard them, and things get wrinkled and coffee-stained and meet all sorts of other fates. It’s not worth it.

I’m thinking that setting my students up with the Google online software suite would be the way to go: papers could be “handed in” by sharing them on Documents (and I can write comments directly on them). Homework could be posted on Calendar. Announcements via a group on Gmail. Etc, etc.

Thought: does having a computer on to do all this use more resources than using a copy machine to make handouts?

Thing Two: No More Timewasting

My mantra this year has been “another committee…another meeting…another hour spent doing something that doesn’t directly benefit my students.”  I’m on the Senior Internship Committee, which, while a good cause, is really inefficient; I’m doing something involving figuring out which non-special ed support services are available to which kids, which has so far consisted of brainstorming the same things over and over again and writing them on chart paper and yellow legal pads; I spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for students who aren’t in my classes to show up for CAPT test remediation, which nobody wants to deal with; the cringe-inducing tech committee.  There are more, of course.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about my desire to refuse to go to these things anymore (especially because I wasn’t given much of a choice in the first place).   Why is it that I can complain about these meetings and events, pay little attention when I’m there, and not complete my assignments while if my students did that in my class, I’d come down on them?  Is not the behavior I’m modeling the behavior I’m getting?

The solution I’ve come up with here is not to start going happily to crappy meetings.  It’s time for someone else to pick up that slack.  But I want to focus on giving my students only meaningful work to do, only things that have a clear value to them.  the trick, I suppose, is to figure out what those things are.

Henny Penny was wrong: The sky is not falling; like the Wicked Witch of the West, it’s melting. And only the scientifically illiterate deny that we’re causing this problem, and exacerbating it with simple waste.

Clay Burell’s written a provocative entry in response to the LA Times’s coverage of the Green University Pledge. Basically, a ton of colleges and universities have committed to taking real steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their campuses. Clay wonders when K-12 schools are going to join them.

When I look around my school, I see endless opportunities for conservation (please note that none of the following is meant to disparage the hard-working custodial staff, who work tirelessly to fix and clean what they can and are generally awesome people). First, the building is a fuel waster. It was built back in the 70s with windows that can’t open, so all climate control comes via a collossal HVAC system that a) does a poor job of regulating temperature consistently, b) spreads germs like crazy (it’s like working on a 747), and c) consumes huge amounts of energy. With some exterior doors always propped, heated and cooled air leaks out of this place at an alarming rate. It’s gotten to the point where I need to bring my classes outside on some afternoons because the classroom has become too hot and humid to make any work possible. A couple of the Environmental Action Team members looked into a biodiesel retrofitting for the HVAC system, but unfortunately nothing came of it.

There’s also a lot of physical waste and garbage in a school. I tell my students that when archaeologists excavate our civilization a few thousand years from now, they’ll call us the Poland Spring People. I still don’t understand the popularity of bottled water in a society in which a) tap water is safe and delicious and b) there are plenty of working water fountains. I’m a thirsty guy, and I try to keep myself hydrated at all times. A couple of years ago, I dropped $10 on a 32 oz Nalgene bottle that I can fill from my tap at home or the water fountain at school. I’ve had that same bottle ever since. When it gets funky, I wash it. I refill it a couple of times a day. I keep it clipped to my school bag for portability’s sake. It’s great. The GHS Environmental Action Team, back when they existed, tried to sell the bottles as a way to cut down on the number of Poland Spring bottles sold in the cafeteria, to little avail. If the club is revived in the fall (it’s been dormant, but there are rumblings) we’ve got plenty of bottles in storage that can be sold for cheap. Of course, the food service will make a lot less money (what’s the markup on water, like 100%?), so that’ll be a problem. We better make sure we pass the state exams next time so we get fully funded.

My goal this summer is to reconfigure my classes so they’re as paperless as possible. Any tips anyone can give me along those lines will be huge. I learned yesterday that students should have digital lockers when they arrive in the fall, which will be a huge help in this regard. Although I need as many copy paper boxes as I can for my move at the end of June, I’d love to be able to say that through my own actions, I greatly reduced the paper consumption of the school.

Our conspicuous consumption has moved beyond offensive and toward the realm of dangerous. When students (and teachers) who live within a half a mile of the school drive even when it’s 75 and sunny, that’s dangerous. When the plastic water bottles are ankle-deep on the cafeteria floor at the end of the day, that’s dangerous. When our behemoth HVAC system rumbles to life for yet another futile day of trying to keep the school well-ventilated, that’s dangerous.

I challenge anyone at GHS who is reading this to help make our school less environmentally scary next year. Let’s start by making less of a mess in the Student Center, in the classrooms, in the halls, and outside. Throwing a bunch of trash on the ground for a custodian to pick up means that that custodian’s going to be able to spend that much less time fixing the AC and stopping inefficient air leaks. Stop buying water bottles every time you need a drink. If you must have the bottle (and I admit, they’re aesthetically quite pleasing), buy one on Monday and use it for the week before you recycle it. Carpool (egads!). Show some pride and some humility; stop assuming someone’s going to clean up the building, or the planet, after you.

Please?