a few updates

John was looking for estate sales today online...
Mr John: Where's Jefferson Hills?
Mr DeBor: I don't know.
Mr John (to students standing in the office): Do you know where Jefferson Hills is?
students: Ummm...well, he's not in our class...


So I'm teaching all of the 8th-10th graders at Summer Academy PLUS the seniors for environmental science senior seminar. Yeah, it's a good time...I just have to keep telling myself that I can do anything for five weeks! (actually I have the seniors for two hours a day for four weeks...and not on Fridays...so it's not quite as bad as it sounds)

Anyway, it's been fun to talk about some of these environmental science ideas with them...things they've never thought of, like how decisions that we make in the US can affect the rest of the world and how everything is connected. So we talked about population growth today and the consequences of having an increasing population in the US and in the world in general.

student: Then all these immigrants have to come in, and then they start having babies! Oh. Wait. I need to stop talking. That's my mom.
(her mom's from Jamaica)

Also, her first suggestion for how to slow population growth was to tell people to stop having sex. Right. I see no reason this could not be legislated tomorrow.



And finally, I'll just share something that I was excited about that happened in environmental science this past week. We had just finished watching Planet in Peril, which ends with a short segment that discussing what they call "environmental racism," meaning that environmental issues affect non-whites disproportionately (like how landfills or pollution producing industrial plants are more likely to be built near an African American or Latino neighborhood). When I asked them what they thought about that idea, one of them was quick to speak up to say that he disagreed. "It's not racism! They aren't building the plants there because they're black, they're building them there because they're poor and can't do anything about it--it doesn't have anything to do with their skin color, they're just saying that because it's more common for black neighborhoods to be poor."
The kid definitely had a point.