I taught 8th grade Earth science for the first time. I had taught it before as minute parts in chapters but it was a wonderful experience to do it in full blast. I learned just as much as the students have about our world. It is in fact OUR world, and no matter how complicated the lessons can get, it is always relevant. Living anywhere on earth, anyone is prone to one kind of a natural disaster or another. To avoid human loss, one MUST be prepared. To prepare, you need to understand how it all works.
Last year my students and I watched a Discovery Channel documentary called Volcanoes. Seeing is believing. We were blown away by how powerful volcanoes are and their local and global effects. The questions that followed were:
Where are these volcanoes?
Can this happen here?
Instinctively, human beings seek shelter and protection from such force, and the best way to do it is to study volcanoes and their behavior to plan for evacuations ahead of time. However as one of my colleagues once pointed out, there are too many volcanoes on earth to be monitored and a disaster can happen any time.
Another natural disaster we learned about was tsunamis which arise from ocean floor earthquakes creating ripple waves of great height as they reach the shore. They move very fast which may not give inhabitants of nearby areas a chance to evacuate.
Most natural disasters have two main problems: 1) they have low predictability, and 2) there is usually very little time to take a resulting action to save people. However people on Earth did not know much of what we know now in this day and age. We have already avoided many catastrophes and saved lives through predictions, evacuations, and even pre-planning. For example, houses in areas known to have earthquakes are now built on large springs that act as shock absorbents and can withstand the shake better than a regular house. The idea is to teach our students what our mother Earth is capable of, teach them what we already know and have succeeded at accomplishing, and hope that they can use this knowledge to predict, plan, and hopefully even avoid any human loss in the future.
Volcanoes. Discovery Channel Store. Retrieved from http://store.discovery.com/detail.php?p=267629&v=discovery#tabs
