With hurricane Sandy and other natural disasters there is
always room for students to learn and help.
For this I always refer to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. I was in
college when this happened and in early January 2005 while taking a geography
class we spent a lot of time covering the tsunami. It was obviously still heavily covered in the
news and it proved a great opportunity for our class. With college there is more leeway but we ended
up straying from the normal curriculum of the class and ended up focusing the
whole semester on the tsunami. We
covered everything in open forum discussions from the loss of life to economical
repercussions. Obviously globalization meant that this
disaster would have an impact on everything like ecosystems and even refugees
fleeing the wreckage. In the long run I
felt that the whole experience opened me up to being culturally sensitive and more
in touch with what is going on in the world and media. As a side effect the whole class felt this way
and we all contributed to Red Cross relief funds.
Obviously I feel that sharing current events can have a huge
impact on how students view science.
Natural disasters are no exception.
Now in public schools we can’t spend too much time away from curriculum
but I feel that it is good to expose your students to big events like this, show
how they are significant to science, politics and on a global scale, and even
encourage those who can to help out in anyway.
The Red Cross is always a way to help but sometimes there is ways to
emotionally help. With every tragedy
there is fear and anger and it often hits close to home. I teach in a culturally diverse area and it’s
likely that I have taught people whose family may have been affected by some
form of disaster. A simple assignment of
writing a poem about or for survivors can really be uplifting. Even now with social media it is easier to
share this kind of stuff and in the long run it could make all the difference
by either cheering up a person or inspiring another to donate.
