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Responding Through Education
"They’ve been debating the long term and short term environmental impact of the storm and studying documents that have real life uses."
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By Sophie Simon-Ortiz
In most schools around the country, students were just heading back to school when Hurricane Katrina hit in late August. For teachers, the question became whether or not to abandon/scrap their prepared lesson plans to examine the issues the disaster raised. Even though it meant extra work, many teachers around the country saw the unfolding events as a rare opportunity to connect usual classroom material to a live national conversation around questions of race, economics, the environment, and the role of government in disaster response.
A few weeks after the Hurricane, I stopped by my old school, Berkeley High, to say hello to some teachers. That’s when I met first year history instructor Biko Eisen-Martin and realized this natural disaster was changing classrooms as far away as the West Coast. Even though the storm hit the same week Biko started classes, the 23-year old history teacher tossed aside weeks of lesson plans…
BIKO (on tape)
We just halted our syllabus or what ever our curricular goals or what have you, and we just studied Katrina.
SOPHIE
For the first two weeks of class, Biko’s ninth graders had a writing and reading
workshop using Katrina news articles and speeches. Students bonded on a level Biko says wouldn’t have been possible had the focus been away from what he called the most important event of the year…Because Biko is young and a poet, he was excited about the opportunity to bring his history class alive. You can imagine the excitement of science teachers used to looking at blank faces…like John Rogers at Andover Academy in Massachusetts.
JOHN (on tape)
I mean you don't want to feel like you're taking advantage of a tragic situation, but on the other hand, students...kids need to process this stuff just like adults do and when you can allow students to process a tragedy at the same time that they're learning something about it, that's great...i mean that's a great thing. It doesn't make Hurricane Katrina a great thing of course, but it makes the learning opportunity a great thing.
SOPHIE
John switched his syllabus around to start with Global Warming and climate change, using Katrina as a motivator. They’ve been debating the long term and short term environmental impact of the storm and studying documents that have real life uses.
JOHN (on tape)
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has some pretty great satellite images that they compile into video so you can watch a hurricane gather strength as it goes across water or you can watch a storm dissipate, and so we did look at a number of those to try to understand the phenomenon of hurricanes and storms and how hey change as they move over water.
SOPHIE
That’s a lot cooler than mixing chemicals in beakers all day in science classes, especially since the hip thing right now is Googling satellite images of your house.
When major events happen, there’s always a connection to be made in school. I was a sophomore in High School on September 11, 2001 and the event changed the lesson plans of many of my classes. My teacher Rick Ayers led workshops throughout the year. He says with both events – September 11 and Hurricane Katrina - young people in the Bay Area found ways to relate…like looking at our own natural disaster risks post Hurricane.
RICK (on tape)
Around here I think another conversation that should be had—it certainly is happening in our house is ‘we better get ready for the earthquake’ and the truth is though when the earthquake comes, the same thing’s going to happen in terms of privilege. Clearly my family and I are going to have enough food and clearly someone who doesn’t have enough resources won’t. Now am I gonna stop when we’re fleeing for every poor person who’s walking along? I hope I would stop and pick other people walking along and not flee with an empty backseat, but it’s easy to talk about it.
SOPHIE
Reading the news, I’m processing the disaster in a different way. And I’m curious about the science issues as well as the political ones. But my knowledge on things like environmental damage is really limited. And even though I’m not in any rush to go back to high school, I wouldn’t mind taking these classes to help fill in the gaps.
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