Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Apr 08, 2007 Posts: 488 Location: Cleburne, TX, USA
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 8:29 pm Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
Many good posts above. I agree that you should not put forth a lesson plan that stresses peak oil in any sort of doomerish way. I told my 19 year old step-son about it and now he goes aroud saying stuff like "What does it matter, the world as we know it is going to end anyway."
Teach them whatever you can about how to live with less energy, as others have suggested already. But, also teach them about population and resources. A combination of both will give them the basic info they need that should allow them to reach their own conclusions regarding peak oil later at an older age.
I keep telling my stepson that just because things look bad, that is no excuse for giving up. I tell him that we can't give up now and we can learn now to deal with it when it comes. _________________ My new Peak Oil T-Shirt Design
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 8:42 pm Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
I talk about peak oil in some of my classes, but I try not to be too doomerish about it. We have a recycling group and we had a sustainable future club, but it proved to be unsustainable.
I think we have to project a positive future. Actions speak louder than words. We need to model some positive actions.
Kids are bombarded by doom all day. Global warming, the economic collapse, etc. They don't really live in that world anyway. They have their friends, their activities and their studies to deal with. Doing things like recycling is what makes education relevant and fun.
Make it fun. Really.
Here's a youtube movie of a project we did a couple of years ago:
Joined: Jan 11, 2005 Posts: 580 Location: southern Wisconsin
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 9:03 pm Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
When I was in fifth grade, I was studying potential fallout patterns for my home area. I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my father to build a fallout shelter.
The threat of a nuclear holocaust was a real fear and understood in all of it gory details by many of my friends.
Kids are resilient and, ultimately, optimistic. Somehow, I, and most of my friends, survived to geezerhood.
I'd recommend presenting the facts about peak oil (and other finite resources).
The best teachers I had challenged me, didn't give me pat answers.
Keeping the next generation ignorant of the biggest challenge they will face in their lifespan does none of us any good.
Joined: Dec 07, 2005 Posts: 2025 Location: Australia
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 10:57 pm Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
Tell them but don't dramatize and keep timeframes and consequences open.
i.e. stick to things like how important oil is and what it is used for, that it is finite and talk in an encouraging way about getting off oil dependence and use of alternative energies.
Also mention some other negative effects of oil and other fossil fuels like polution etc.
Maybe also talk about costs. Like how much food is shipped.
If that food was grown in the backyard you could save that money to buy candy and other stuff or whatever. (leave them with a positive association to growing own food.)
As you already know at that age they can't comprehend the whole concept of PO but plant a seed that they can remember.
We don't know if it will do any good but it sure won't hurt and you have done what you could.
Good luck. _________________ It's not a bailout, it's a buy-in" - Nancy Pelosi
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1438 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:30 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
I'm with retiredguy, when I was in grade 5, nuclear war was an ever present worry and we survived. I think peak oil should be brought up in social studies and history. It is very important to teach kids that the world changes and that the world they raise their children in will likely be very different from the world they are being raised in . (To the kids going into grade 5 there has ALWAYS been a war over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. ) If we don't prepare the kids for the possibility that things can go disastrously wrong our society is doomed to be unprepared for a crisis. It is essential in my opinion that kids learn to think about the long term in school because our entire society is geared towards the short term. If they don't get taught the idea in school they certainly won't get it anywhere else. _________________ Biofuels: The "What else we got to burn?" answer to peak oil.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:35 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
I think a restrained, informative discussion of peak oil would be good for the age group you're teaching.
I agree with the other posters that it's best to leave the doomerish aspects out. I think a good way to frame the topic is under the heading of "oil depletion" (you may want to completely avoid the term "peak oil"), and I'd use the government's (EIA's) peak estimate of 2030. I'd also make the point that American indepedence from oil will make the nation safer (a point agreed upon by all parts of the political spectrum).
Here's a sample of the kind of language, tone and conceptualizations I'd use (while in university I worked summers as a canoe instructor for that age group, so I still remember a little of what it's like teaching to kids):
Quote:
The problem America and the rest of the world faces is that as we use up more oil, eventually it will be harder to get, so one day oil will be a lot more expensive, and we will have less of it to use. Because we use oil for so many things--ground transportation, air transportation, growing food, all kinds of plastics--having less oil means we will have to make a lot of changes in how we do things, and especially where we get our energy from. There are a lot of things we can start doing right now to make the transition from oil in the future easier. We can practice conservation with the things in our lives by reducing, reusing and recycling. We can practice conservation with energy by making simple energy-saving changes like washing our laundry with cold water, which gets clothes just as clean as warm or hot water. We can also help change the future by asking our parents, teachers, neighbours and leaders to make sure we are doing all we can to switch to sustainable forms of energy like wind and solar power. The change from an oil-powered world to a green-powered world may sometimes get difficult, but the sooner we start and the more we do now, the better our future will be.
You might make a group project to find out (at a broad, age-appropriate level), what is and isn't being done in your neck of the woods to change to sustainable energy, and write a group letter (or individual letters) to your area representatives expressing support for sustainables.
Other projects might look at the question of what the school can do to save energy? One recent move by my company was to turn off the backlighting on the vending machines for snacks and soda. They put signs on the machines letting people know they still worked, and why they weren't lit up as usual.
Best wishes on helping this newest generation build a foundation for an active role in the challenges of the peak oil future.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:47 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
I think it is very important teach the kids about PO, as the kids go home and teach their parents. They might protest, because it is not what they read in the cooperate media, but some of them might wake up.
For the kids it is important to know what they're expecting and teach them practical skills.
Maybe it would be a good idea to organize some speeches in the school / church/library about PO at the same time you're introducing the topic to you kids or even a bit earlier.
Joined: Jul 12, 2004 Posts: 184 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:26 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
There are a lot of good ideas shared here. I teach social studies and history. I printed a pdf file of one of Simmon's speeches and put it on the wall, but have to say virually no student has looked at it other than to tag it - our school is at the bottom of the social spectrum. You just have to be gentle about it and not come over as " we're all gonna die" One of my students likes to tell me every day what the price of oil is. Most kids want glamorous and energy intensive carreers, pilot, air hostess etc and I encourage them to have a plan A , B, C etc. Kids live in the " now".
Joined: Jan 16, 2005 Posts: 322 Location: Delft, Netherlands
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:43 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
PeakingAroundtheCorner wrote:
I keep telling my stepson that just because things look bad, that is no excuse for giving up. I tell him that we can't give up now and we can learn now to deal with it when it comes.
Indeed. Giving up is never an option. Just because the world 'is about the end' is not an excuse to throw in the towl. That sort of attitude is the attitude of misers and ignorant lamenters, earthbound animals. It is the attitude of the lowest type of person.
Whatever happens in the world, there are always opportunities to practice nobility, humility, sacrifice and courage, which are among the highest and most rewarding activities we can hope to be engaged in. Perhaps the advent of peak oil and the end of frivolous consumption and decadence even makes for more of such opportunities, rather than less.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 6:15 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
Hi, Steven:
You are a good guy for going into teaching. You probably passed up a higher salary and put up with a lot of grief from the administration and parents in order to try to influence the lives of these young people.
The story I always tell is of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Solon. She was trying to teach us our multiplication tables, and she said the following: "You need to learn this stuff. No one can carry an adding machine around with them all the time to do these problems."
Of course, she could not see at the time that she was wrong. You can, indeed, carry more computing and communicating power around in your pocket than she could possibly have imagined in 1964. There is no way to tell whether anything you teach these little kids will have any applicability at all, when they are adults in 2050. Her training and education were set up to teach us how to get along fine in the society of 1945, when she went to school. She had no idea what was about to hit us in 1975, and certainly could not imagine the kids in her class texting one another, and communicating and collaborating like they do now.
So, give them a tool kit of skills, and the confidence to use them. Start off by not bogging them down in the doomer stuff. Teach them to observe the world around them, realize that they are part of a bigger system, that they have an individual impact, and by working through things logically, they can either solve problems or adapt to change.
Taking measurements is important. As they say in the quality systems business, you can't improve what you don't measure. There are a dozen things in your school that you can measure and monitor in order to understand how your ecological and energy systems work. That will help them think objectively about problems on the basis of data, rather than on something they hear in the media.
Don't spook them out. They have problems enough as it is.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 6:52 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
Being new to this board (and off of message boards in general for several years), I am really stunned and impressed by the number and quality of responses I've received so quickly. Wow! Thank you all so much, and if anyone has further thoughts or resources, keep them coming.
One thing I have in my favor is a good reputation at my school and very supportive parents. It is an interesting school. The neighborhood boundaries include some of the city's wealthiest and some below the poverty line, all in the same classroom, which is very unusual -- it is normally much more economically homogenous. So I have kids who have never experienced much beyond their few blocks sitting next to others who fly off to Vail for the weekend. We are building a rooftop greenhouse and other green initiatives, and, as liberals, in general the parents are VERY supportive of environmental education (at least in the abstract), so whenever it can be done, they support it.
As others have mentioned, kids today are growing up exposed to far more than most of us were. Even if we were exposed to the Red Scare -- and it was no doubt scary -- none of us were relentlessly bombarded by media the way kids are today, since the media simply was not as pervasive.
The Red Scare, the threat of nuclear holocaust, is an interesting case study, it seems to me. As one born in the summer of love ('67), this was before my time, but I see some useful parallels. While the threat was great and ominous, it never materialized the way doomsayers were certain it would (at least to date). So, helping kids understand the very real threat, which later led many of them to activism against nucs, etc. was a good thing; on the other hand, wherever it was framed as inevitable doom, kids were made terrified about something that didn't materialize. We must always hold out hope, whatever other information we are giving them.
I am convinced that PO will change everything, and I am not at this point a techno-optimist who believes we will be able to fix it in time with a miracle pill. I think life WILL be much different. My job, I believe, is to do whatever I can to help my students discover (for themselves to whatever degree is possible, the best way to learn anything) the truths that life on the planet is changing. This is nothing really new to them. And while alternative energy and conservation may not be able to completely rescue us from the over-indulgent lifestyle we cannot sustain, these are important things for them to know, for they will help, either large or small scale, and they can be taught with hope and fun.
I taught a lesson that was very powerful, and I plan on doing it again about resource distribution. We had all of the 5th grade classes together (about 60 kids) and I brought out a HUGE cake that my baker brother had made. I passed out colored slips of paper and the kids grouped themselves accordingly. I showed them a world population pie chart and pointed out that they were grouped the same way. So, if there were 4/60 Americans and Canadians, there were 36/60 Asians, 6/60 Europeans, etc. I asked them how we should split up the cake; of course they said proportionately. I showed them a second pie chart showing the ratio of resource consumption as it actually is and announced we'd be splitting the cake that way. So those four N. Americans received about 25% of this giant cake, while the Africans and Asians received what amounted to a small bite or two each. Kids this age have a high regard for "fairness", so of course this was rather upsetting.
I separated the groups into different rooms for discussion and deliberation about how they would divide their part of the cake, and it was so interesting. In the end, while a couple of the rich nation kids gorged themselves, most shared with the poorer countries. Their impulse to fairness led them to want to be generous. I made sure to point out that this was a very simplified demonstration, that I was not trying to sell them on a worldwide communist system. It opened up their eyes to the enormous inequity and wastefulness in the world. It launched further discussions at school and at home -- about corrupt dictators who get rich from our good will donations, about how we can be generous in ways that truly help people, etc. One girl asked me about how her family could sponsor a child in another country.
Another piece of this that I'd like your feedback on is finding ways to teach them that some traditional or low-tech activities/skills can bring them more pleasure in life than the mountains of gadgetry and years they will otherwise spend in the front of the glowing screen of TV. I've read on these boards about mental/psychological strength to weather the coming storms. Kids today are so saturated in media and high tech toys that they really see no other pleasure in life, despite it being rather empty in the end, IMHO. It is such a lie that everyone has just accepted. Rather than ranting about it in a negative way, I want to expose them to the fun they can have doing simpler, low-tech things. Give kids a chance and they LOVE gardening, examining the soil for insects, etc. Many of them also love to cook, maybe because it is such a novelty in their lives (they've never seen anyone do more than reheating before). Nobody gives kids a chance to build things on their own. (It's interesting...the very popular "Dangerous Book for Boys/Girls" books were given to a lot of my students last year, but I wonder how many parents showed their kid how to use a few hand tools -- if they own any -- to let them actually build or create anything on their own.)
Thanks again for all of the great thoughts and ideas.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 7:07 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
Quote:
Being new to this board (and off of message boards in general for several years), I am really stunned and impressed by the number and quality of responses I've received so quickly. Wow! Thank you all so much, and if anyone has further thoughts or resources, keep them coming.
Welcome to the forum.
Behold the power of global community.
It's our pleasure to serve you & your students. _________________ "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 7:28 am Post subject: Re: What to Tell My Students?
I guess I dont really have much to contribute , that hasnt already been said . However I wanted to chime in breifly and say how wonderfull I think that this thred is .
THIS , is constructive exchange of ideas at its very best IMO . This type of Discussion is in my mind at least . What can/does make the internet a great thing .
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