My initial reflection:

Tomorrow I will be in my car off to the Adirondack State Park for a 5-day exploration of the region. This is a new experience for me as I haven’t been without my family for an extended period of time since I got married 7 years ago. I love nature and being outdoors and look forward to a peaceful exploration of nature. One of my most enjoyable pastimes is photographing nature and I am looking forward to some new beautiful shots (like Carl Heilman has done).

Before I became a teacher I was a trader on Wall Street. The last product that I was working with was real estate. I have always had a fascination with architecture and will enjoy seeing first hand the structures of the Adirondack habitats. In the early 20^th century the richest Americans went to the Adirondacks for summer and built great camps. The architecture they chose was unique in the region, drawing from the Japanese covered walkways and Swiss chalets. Many of these enclaves are still around today and I am hopeful we will be able to see many of them while we are at Raquette Lake. I hope to learn more of the history of the region when we go to the museum on Thursday.

For many years I have pondered about “climate change” or “global warming”. Although I am not a scientist, I know how to read data and know that scientific data can be interpreted many different ways. I have not come to a definite conclusion that man causes global warming. The data that points to us coming out of an ice age and being in the heating up phase makes logical sense. I do believe that man is expediting this process, and more importantly depleting our resources due to population growth and wasting resources. We will have to do something or else life will starve itself and disappear. We are destroying our Earth as we continue to utilize “stuff” that is not biodegradable, and do not always consider how we pollute our land and water, creating acid rain and depleting our soil. This is something that needs to stop and the main way to do this is teaching awareness and caring.

In my classroom I constantly question students to think. I always state I will not give answers; my job is to ask questions. In the beginning of the year when I am discussing why we compost with students I ask the students if they have ever seen a landfill, then I show them pictures of a landfill, and then more landfills and finally I ask them what will happen if we keep throwing EVERYTHING away in the garbage. They realize that there will be nowhere for us all to live. They realize that it is up to them to make it so their future doesn’t require them to live on a landfill. It is up to them to compost and recycle and try to conserve as much as possible and not be wasteful. They need to learn to care about where they live.

Last year I did a period of Internal Suspension everyday. On most days as long as the 1 to 4 students didn’t have an assignment due that was imminent, I would take the students out to perform community service in school. Some acts we would do were cleaning up the cafeteria so the custodial staff wouldn’t have to, working with the community-based classroom (Special ED Inclusion Class) in the nursery, or my favorite act which was walking around school grounds and picking up garbage. For the most part the students took this job seriously and were very productive. These activities taught them to care for their school environment.

At present I am almost ¾ of the way through the book and will have it finished by the book talk. I really enjoyed seeing how the windmill changed the “doom and gloom” of Balsam Corners and brought the community together. I also appreciated how the community service changed the mindsets of the high school seniors and feel that community service should be a part of everyone’s high school requirement. It creates a feeling of caring and selflessness that is needed so that our human race doesn’t kill ourselves off.