Entrance Slip: Climate Crisis

As educators, we are the ones who expose students to new information and teach them important lessons. We are also an adult students learn from, so we are also role models to them. Therefore, it makes sense that we should also bring awareness to students about important events that are happening in the world that will likely affect their lives. 

I do think that we, as teacher candidates, have the ability to make changes to the way we teach our subject areas, in this case math, because we are new and still forming our own ideologies about teaching and what it means to be a teacher. Having new teachers learn about ways to integrate topics such as global warming into their own classrooms is a great place to start in bringing awareness of these issues to future students. Furthermore, I liked how the article mentioned that doing so is also a great way to allow students to "have opportunities to reflect on how mathematics is useful" (p.176), since one of my goals is to make math more relevant (and interesting) to students. It was interesting to read about how other teachers had their class participate in real-life problems and data collection and used their research mathematically to make inferences, connections, etc. I think this would be a great learning opportunity for the students and, if possible, I would love to try doing such an activity/project. 

Climate change is unfortunately a really great issue and I can really feel its effects from the weather I've experienced over the years (especially from the extreme heat waves and higher occurrences of forest fires). I do want to work towards slowing down global warming, but I never know where to start and I feel this is the case for many other people too. Even though people bring up the issue and awareness of it, I think it doesn't do much if people don't know what some steps they can take are and/or the things they can think of are too difficult to do/completely upheaves their way of life.