Erin's sister arrived on Wednesday and is visiting for two weeks, and it it's nice to have her around. I like Erin's family alot, and Deidre is good company. AND she cooks good snacks and made me coffee this morning while I was getting ready for work. I think we'll keep her around for awhile.
Oh, by the way, the title of this post is NOT about her (I know at least one of my smart-ass readers was fabricating a connection) but about a line from the movie Hot Fuzz, which was made by the guy who did Shaun of the Dead, which we saw tonight. It was very funny,so long as you like Brit humor. Go see it if you want to have a laugh and hear some especially witty dialogue.
Hmmm. What else?
Well, two of our 4th grade girls, in honor of Earth Day , organized a "clean up the wash day" by convincing our headmaster that they wouldn't get mugged, stuck by needles, bitten by rattlesnakes or otherwise damaged while scouring the wash outside our school for trash. It really was all their idea, though I really didn't think there'd be enough trash to keep 58 kids busy for 45 minutes, and I doubted that most of them would actually be willing to pick up anything even slightly unsanitary.
How much more wrong could I have been?
In the first place, although I look out on our wash every day, I haven't really seen it until today. Years ago I used to cart my class down for water samples for science class (cool little microscopic critters in there!) but I haven't been down there in a long time. There was so much trash there that I was literally amazed. Honest. I was just dumbfounded that I could look out there every day and not register that there must be literally tons of visible trash in the mile or so I can see from my classroom window. There definitely was NOT going to be a shortage of trash to go around.
Then, to my surprise, these kids, who by any and all acounts live very sheltered and very pampered lives, were not afraid to go after any bit of trash they saw. Dozens of them actually crawled into the center of these thorny desert bushes to get at pieces of trash. They also picked up all kinds of icky things, from bags of doog poop to dirty undergarments (while wearing gloves of course) along with other things stranger still. Among the weirdest were a plastic model lighthouse, a large porcelain figurine of a girl looking into a well, a well-preserved tortoise shell with bones still inside (the odd thing about it is that this species isn't found in Nevada!), a heavy duty HD motorcycle boot, a Sega dreamcast controller, and a faded Chinese newspaper (one of my Chinese speaking students identified it as such.) I was horrified that there was so much refuse right there in front of me, and I somehow missed it . I think it becomes second nature not to see it, because dwelling on the magnitude of the problem (or even acknowledging it) for any length of time makes you feel like we're totally and completely fucked as a species. Keep in mind that this trash all came from a wash, a good 1/4 mile from the road, and with no vehicle access. Fascinating, and scary.
All in all, we collected 32 large bags of trash. We only covered the wash from the road out to the boundary of our school property, a distance of maybe a sixth mile, and we didn't even really put a dent in the total amount of trash in that limited area, but still... I was proud of (and surprised by!) my students, and 32 bags is a good start.
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4 comments:
Las Vegas. Even the trash there has an interesting story to tell.
Idea for a cool creative writing project -- have your students pick one of the odder pieces of trash and, from that piece of trash's point of view, tell the story of how it ended up in the wash.
I would have eaten up an assignment like that in 4th Grade.
Our species is fucked up. That's why I live in a cave.
I hope the gloves were latex free, due to allergin possibilities. You did bring antibiotic spray didn't you? Of course, the children wore maskes to ward off airborne pathogens, and protective eye gear. And I am certain you made sure all the parents knew, got permission slips, and a change of clothing for each child so when the project was over they wouldn't sit around in filth for the rest of the day or risk contamination of the other children. Right?
Glad to see you're still living "for the children", Elaine. Bless you.
I would like to add something constructive here but I'm on a mission. I can't disclose the details but I do have a question: Has anybody seen my turtle?
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