Intro to Environmental Ed

For the last month, I have been teaching four days a week in one of the local high schools. I am working on starting an Ecological Club at the school, and to generate interest, I’ve been asked to teach during the elective hour.

(From my understanding, elective hour is generally spent playing soccer. So in essence, they are getting forty minutes with me instead of forty minutes of soccer.)

But because every class has three free hours per week, I have mas o menos replaced their free hour with an ecology hour.

(In the Ecuadorian high school system, the students remain in the same classroom all day long and the teachers rotate between rooms. The students don’t have unique schedules. They do everything with the same group of classmates. It’s like homeroom every hour)

And I’m cool with that because it gives me a chance to help develop the environmental conscience that is lacking in this community.

I know that this conscious is lacking because, of the ten times I gave my “introduction to the environment and the responsibility of the human beings in this environment,” the students merely talked about the preventative role that human beings have, such as not cutting down trees, not contaminating the rivers, not throwing garbage in the street, and not burning garbage.

While it was good that the students could repeat these messages, I only heard three or four ideas of what human beings can do to improve the situation of the environment and prevent its continued degradation. As in, of more than a hundred students I talked to, three of them knew the three “r’s (In Spanish, the three r’s are “reducir, reciclar y reutilizar”).

The ultimate message of my chat was that human beings have a responsibility to care for the environment and that we need to take an active role in that process because passivity will not change the world for the better.

So, hopefully, a few students got the message, and some of those are interested in starting this club.

My “introduction to the environment and the responsibility of the human beings in this environment” class was merely the first lesson in my environmental curriculum. We have also done activities about the competition for natural resources and how we need to share these natural resources with the rest of natural world, chats about why people shouldn’t burn their household garbage, a demonstration about how long garbage takes to decompose, and we started planting some fruit trees.

From every class that I teach, I try to wrap it up with some action or some way that the students can change their behavior to take this active role in conserving our environment.