Ok sooo my first live journal post, I would like to address this issue first and then I will get into my discussion of water. Reflection is a practice I enjoy doing in the comfort of my own home, the lights low, the itunes playlist shuffling through some light jazz music and the warm coffee filling the room with its delightful aroma. I realize I am a fourth year ryerson student and as one I should be able to figure my life out and work through issues that come up, but for me a reflective journal is more for my benefit than for the marks I am being given for doing it. So rather than go through the motions and write a few paragraphs in a computer lab or an internet cafe, I decided to wait until I had internet up and running to full figure out what this live journal thing is all about and how I can use it to reflect and further my learning. The bad thing about doing this is that I have no idea if my posts will be satisfactory to the grading scheme or not, but as I stated previous a grade is only a grade, the real goal I have for this journal is to extend my learning. Ok enough about my (what would appear to be) laziness, and moving forward to the ideas I have about water.
Water, the first ingredient to life. A bonding substance that holds together humanity in that we all need water to live, and without it we all die. Yet at the same time it is what I believe will end up dividing humanity and create our eventual demise. All of the conflict that is going on in the world today over crude oil, a substance that human beings naturally do not need to survive (it could be argued that we have created a world where we now need it to survive) seems almost trival while we are slowly but surely depleating the amounts of clean fresh drinkable water available to the population. I am extremely scared for humanity when I look at the conflict in the world and the covert politics that surround the "oil wars". If we (humans) can do such damage to each other over a substance that is not naturally life essential, imagine the carnage when our water runs short. I have read a few articles about the United States having a potential water crisis in the near future...
http://www.hermes-press.com/water.htm,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3747724.stmhttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0605_030605_watercrisis.htmlAs a Canadian, living in a country who holds an extremely high percentage of the world's fresh water (7% of which is renewable)
http://www.ec.gc.ca/water/en/info/misc/e_FAQ.htm#1more than enough for our low population, I am counting down the days until we become a target for our fresh water. The United States has gotten alot of bad press for their involvement in the "war on terror" there was even a major motion picture called "Jarhead" that made a strong statement to the pop culture public about the "war on terror" and so I am not going to just sit here and spout off that USA equals bad, the rest of the world equals good. There have probably been more than enough blogs about all of that. What I want to touch on is a much more local thinking than global thinking. It's about humans its about our thinking our brains.It's the freudian Id
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego influenced thinking. The animal inside humans that is still not tame. Why is conflict always the answer? Can we as a race not be more creative in our problem-solving than..."oh you have something I need, so if I remove you from the equation, than I will have what it is that I need". If we look back at the major conflicts through the eras of humanity they all stem to basic you have this I want it, give it to me or we will fight and the winner will get it. As ECE's we teach children to share, why is it that as adults we can not do such a simple and basic thing as repecting each other and sharing. Ok this has spiraled a bit away from water.
Water, it surrounds us, it is us, yet we never really pay attention to just how valuable a thing it actually is. It rains we get mad, because we might get wet, or possibly ruin our precious hair dos. We turn on the tap and boom, water, but we never really think about the process that it making water come out of that tap, or that shower, or that water fountain. Have you ever stopped to think about how many water fountains, toilets or taps there are in Toronto, or even in Ryerson, or even one building at Ryerson. That is alot of water outlets. Yet we never really think about this, its just taken for granted like the rest of the planet we call home is. it is disgusting to think how bad we are hurting the world, and it is even more disgusting to think that most of it revolves around the new "life essential" element.....money....I want to leave it there and pick it up next week with money and my hatred for what it has done to us for another blog.
Ok so I read some of my friend's posts and I am seeing I need to add a teaching and theoretical piece to this blog. Also some info from the textbook would help too, because this is a tool to evalute my understanding of the material in that book. First in my practice as a teacher, I agree with my friends' statements that water should not be feared in the classroom, other than if it's on a slippery when wet floor, you don't want someone to slip and fall. I think that if you can connect children to nature they will end up having a greater appreciation for it and maybe just maybe a generation will be born into the world that can turn this mess around. From the textbook I have sort of already touched on the respect and appreciation for water (all of the earth) that I would incorporate into my classroom. The coolest thing I noticed about the textbook's chapter on water, was how many different concepts ideas and activities that were presented in the chapter. Everything from evaporation to snowman making, sinking and floating, fresh to salt, soluable to insoluable there are so many really cool things that all connect to water. Who would have thought water drops had a particular behaviour? When we as educators sit down and give quality thought to what it is we would like to teach I think we gain better understanding, I know even just reading the chapter I re-learned some things I had forgotten (taken for granted) about water and it is a really cool feeling to think about something a "simple" as water and look at it deeply with quality thought. I loved the part about the centre who had build a flowing "snake-river" into their property and allowed children to freely explore the properties of water.(p.188 "Science Experiences for the Early Childhood Years", Harlan, Rivkin)
The in-class activities based on what I read from the textbook were ok. We did a dam building exercise similar to what we had done when we built our habitats for disaster (the 1st presentation from the science centre) and i felt like the focus was more on building the dam that worked than on the properties of water. I think as adults we have had enough experience with water to know what being wet is like, but as we are designing these activities for children, I think maybe we could have gotten wet, we could have atleast touched water, or tried to change the water from a liquid to a solid or a gas. these things are a bit more telling of water than asking us to build a "dam" out of mystery materials to avert a natural disaster.
cheers,
Matthew
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