Final+Essay+Exam+KJ

There will be many issues that the Hoosic Falls community will need to face. They will experience illness caused by the chemicals that have leached into the ground water from the PFOA manufacturing company. This will cause severe emotional distress and feeling like their government has failed them and forsaken them. They will have to worry about how their children might process such a tragedy. Then they will have to deal with making change with the government, and fighting them on different decisions that need to be made. So far the community does not feel like they have been listened to or like they are part of the process of change. They have had to put their own lives on hold in order to get the attention of governor Cuomo and other lawmakers. They will have to continue to advocate for themselves despite feelings of hopelessness and abandonment. They will have to read and analyze the information regarding whether they should get a new water source or filter the water source they already have. Here are some sessions that might be helpful to Hoosic Falls students:
 * Given the issues the Hoosic Falls community will be facing in coming months and years with their crisis, propose a program of 6 60-minute sessions for students at any grade level. At the outset, characterize the issues, then propose specific educational interventions that would prepare students to deal with these issues.
 * History of the Teflon and PFOA companies in NY
 * In this session, students will learn what factors went in to deciding to create Teflon and PFOA plants and how they affected the local communities in that time. They will learn more about the history of their town and what caused the companies to grow there. They will learn what went into the improper disposal of the chemicals that caused the crisis today. They will also learn why the chemicals were so popular so they can begin to think about new popular technologies that are booming now and how they can anticipate potential problems.
 * Actual mechanism of chemicals and other chemicals in other superfund sites across the country
 * In this session a scientist will explain what the chemical is, why it is useful and how it is harmful to the body. This last part will have to be expressed with sensitivity. A medical professional may want to talk about the symptoms of poisoning and the potential treatments although they will have to express that they cannot give medical advice in the context of this session. There may also be a utilites provider there to explain how the water and chemicals travel through the pipes to the homes and the school and the potential problems with lead pipes.
 * History of various superfund sites across the state and the country
 * This session will talk about a few other examples of superfund sites, how they occurred and how they are being remediated. This will help the community not to feel so alone in their crisis. It will help them learn to identify the factors that go into environmental and health strategies so they can be informed about them later in life.
 * How to make change through the government structure of your community, in general and in Hoosic Falls
 * This session will involve a civics lesson on the NY state government. It may focus on the shortcomings of the government including why it took the government so long to help the citizens of Hoosic Falls and include them in the decision making process going forward. I would like this session to teach how to unite communities and communication and show the importance of a tight knit community while facing tragedy.
 * Importance of meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy
 * This session will provide evidence of meditation being helpful for people suffering anxiety and stress and guide people through a meditation session. It will also discuss the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy for post traumatic stress. It will highlight the school’s effort to engage students in meditation daily and how it has helped the students.
 * The future of water and water rights in the world
 * This session will talk about the history of famous water right’s disputes such as the problem in isreal between the isrealis and Palestinians. It will highlight the tragedy in Flint Michigan. It will ask students to think if drinking water is a right.
 * Watch (Bill Moyer's) [|Kids and Chemicals] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">(50 minutes), list five points in the film that sparked your attention, then use the film to complete this <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">long view chart <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">on sustainability education.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">My first thought is that parents have to become advocates for their children in place of their government. If one person feared their child got cancer from something in the environment like a chemical spill they might be considered paranoid, but if there is a cancer cluster, not only are they justified by their fear but it is imperative that they get to the bottom of what is causing cancer in the communities before more children get sick.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Asthma is the leading cause of children hospitalization and missing school and it still is now, 15 years after this documentary was made. There have been a lot of advances in making city buses create less air pollution, and there has been a lot more awareness, but we still have problem in other countries like China and India where there is hardly ever a safe air quality day. We really need to take a better look at this issue.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Pesticides degrade more slowly indoors. In general I think people might be unnecessarily worried about agricultural pesticides and GMOs in our food. This video made me realize that although pesticides do degrade and are washed away outdoors, once they are indoors they don’t degrade as quickly and aren’t washed away by rain. This constant low level of exposure might not have been considered by those doing tests to see if the pesticides were toxic. They also may not have checked for toxicity in fetuses.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The lead companies were downplaying the dangers of lead and pursuing the scientist threatening to out them. It is now so obvious how dangerous lead is to children, yet I didn’t know the extent that the lead industry went to to hide its dangers. The most tragic part is that lead paint is still a problem today in low income households. In fact I was watching an episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and he used clips from this EXACT documentary to highlight how ridiculous that we STILL have not eradicated lead from all homes in this country.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Again it is very frustrating to see how the government did not do its job to protect the people in the town of Herculaneum. They discovered that there was no law to force the company into compliance with safety standards and the parents had to advocate for themselves and their children in place of the government. Luckily they were in compliance by the time the documentary aired.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Stakeholders in United States Education || <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What Should United States K-12 Education Accomplish || <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Forces Shaping K-12 Education in the United States ||
 * * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Parents
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Children
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Everyone depending on intelligence of the future of Americans. || <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">There should be a safe amount of concern for the environment and environmental toxins but not too much (not along the lines of conspiracy theories and paranoia). || * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Overall health of our young people
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Funding that goes into making children healthy
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Funding for teachers and programs to help raise environmental awareness. ||

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">A lot has been said lately about the link between our bodies and learning. This past semester Mrs. Bailey mentioned how certain body movements can help her 1st graders focus (grabbing the chair and pretending to be a rocket ship helps the students refocus for example). At the Hoosic falls water contamination panel, the superintendent of the Hoosic school district stressed the impact that meditation had on the student body dealing with the tragedy, he even had a neuroscientist explain the mechanism of meditation. The future of the American education system could utilize movement, meditation and other mindfulness activities to aid in the learning process. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">How does the link between the body and learning work? It was found that the same part of the brain that processes movement also processes learning (Jensen 2005). Additionally the parts of the brain that develop first are the inner ear and the cerebellum, which are important for balance. That’s why activities involving balance like swinging could be helpful for the young brain. The education system today tends to compartmentalize movement, education and emotions, but it could be advantageous to acknowledge that all three are intertwined. Improvements could be having students role play with physical movements, or simply walk while discussing how to proceed in a group project. Some children psychology websites recommend a practice called progressive muscle relaxation for children with ADHD (Koeppen 1974). It is supposed to help them relax and have better attention for learning. It is interesting that psychologists would recommend a technique that has such a focus on mindfulness in the body, showing again that there is a link between the mind and body. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The goal of meditation is to be in the present moment, which can be done by focusing on various parts of your body, or the heartbeat or breath. It helps to relax by deactivating the sympatheic nervous system and activating the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympatheic nervous system is what is responsible for the fight or flight response, which causes stress and anxiety. The parasympathetic nervous system calms and activating it can help people feel less stressed by certain stimuli, particularly those in work or school. This could explain why the superintendent of the Hoosic Valley school district noticed such a great difference in his students who were meditating when they were faced with adversity. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Should movement, meditation and other mindfulness activities be more integrated in the American education system? I am not sure if students should be forced to meditate or something that they don’t want to do but I think schools should start to acknowledge the link between the body and the mind and learning. It’s possible we would have fewer students bored and dropping out of school, and those that do learn how to meditate might be able to handle adversity and the real world better. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Jensen, Eric. //Teaching with the Brain in Mind//. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005. //Http://www.ascd.org//. Web. 6 May 2016. <http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/104013/chapters/Movement-and-Learning.aspx>. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Koeppen, A.S. (1974). Relaxation training for children. Elementary School Guidance and Counseling, 9, 14-21. <span class="citationtext" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Web. 6 May 2016. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"><http://www.yourfamilyclinic.com/adhd/relax.htm> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Jane Elliot experimented with children and racism. She told the students that one eye color was better than the other. Instead of brushing it off, the students decided to separate themselves and treat the “bad” eye color group badly. This occurred even though they were taught the golden rule and were lead in a discussion about racism in America before the experiments. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">She told the class that one eye color was better and said a lot of quick examples of why that color was better. She gave the good eye color privileges, and then continued to point out examples about how the “bad” eye color was bad. The children that were friends felt separated from each other and were fighting. The “good” eye color people were teasing the “bad” eye people for their eye color, just because the attention had been called to it in the experiment,. She also saw how long it took them to get through a phonics card pack. She even asked why the “bad” group thought they worked more slowly and they said being part of the worse group caused them to do more poorly. She then asked how each group thought about their day being the “bad” eye color. The students promised not to discriminate later in life. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Upon asking the students several years later they had a lot of impressions with them still from the experiment. They remembered the feeling of being part of either group. They were able to notice better when other people were racist and were even able to catch their own racist thoughts. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Elliot knew it was time to deal with racism in a concrete way. When she heard white male commentators talk about minority groups like they were not part of the community, she realized something had to be done. She realized that they hadn’t made progress with Native American discrimination so she knew something had to be different this time. This is what inspired her experiment. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">I think this is probably a good teaching method for children because we still deal with these issues today and it feels like nothing has changed. The students in the experiment emphasized that going through the experiment first had is necessary to fully understand the message. On the other hand I could see a lot of parental push back to the idea because America is becoming more and more polarized with each political ideology feeling like they are right. This would include people in America who still hold racist beliefs. They probably would be opposed to having their students be in the experiment. The experiment also seems a little traumatizing, so I could see school officials also not allowing it for this reason.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">**My own topic**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Describe and evaluate the teaching experiment portrayed in [|//Frontline: A Class Divided//]<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> (45 minute video about race-awareness educator Jane Elliot).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Sugata Mitra started off by describing the predominant education system we have today. It was made to standardize people so they could work for the British bureaucracy where ever they were in the world. It emphasized good handwriting, performing math in one’s head, and reading. Today computers do these things for us, except we do need to read still, just more discerningly. This means our education system is not helping us as much as it could, as it is preparing us for a situation that no longer exists. Mitra also noticed that students with access to computers were considered more gifted than their impoverished peers. Mitra wanted to level the playing field for these students so he invented his hole in the wall teaching technique. He would leave a computer somewhere and the kids would teach themselves how to use it, including teaching themselves English. He then wanted to see if they could teach themselves advance science topics. It was hard at first and the students felt frustrated, but Mitra found that some encouragement from an older person helped them learn better and even achieve passing grades. He wants to apply this teaching model to the entire world, where the students are self-motivated and the teachers are only there to pose the question and encourage. It is a good teaching model because it makes learning more pleasurable and less threating. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> If I were to make a sustainability education SOLE class, I would do something like the curriculum innovation created by Matt. It would have the students figure out what in their daily lives was affecting climate change and then think of solutions. It would help them understand the complex causation of their daily activities and air pollution and therefore climate change. Then I would ask them if there would be a better way to frame the issue to convince the world that something would need to be done to stop climate change.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Describe the <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[|2013 prize-winning TedTalk by Sugata Mitra,] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">and the child-centered "SOLE" methods he advocates. The propose a SOLE (self-organizing learning environment) for sustainability education.