Eco-Literacy 2014

We will be staging our "art gallery" in Dalton 212A on Monday @ 2:30--
just so we'll have a little more space to move around, enjoy what we are seeing...

Over this past summer, I read President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, and along with some other books I read, a few specific passages prompted me to rethink the education I had had so far, my academic and educational settings, and my ability to receive such education in the first place. I cannot remember or directly quote the exact passages, and perhaps what I remember is slightly altered due to how I interpreted it, but there are two main things I remember. Obama worked as a social worker and community developer in a neighbourhood in Chicago for some time, and he comments on the schools and school systems he observed. The first thing he observes is that schools function as prisons for children, keeping them off the streets and away from criminal or dangerous activities, rather than spaces of fostering growth and curiosity in learning. The second, as I remember, is that the institution of a school is meant to be where children can learn about their cultural history, to learn how they as members of their community fit into their society. In an impoverished and predominantly black neighbourhood, children are taught a curriculum that reveals a violent and oppressive history working against their cultural community. Coupling that education with the deteriorating condition of their immediate neighbourhood and surroundings, there doesn’t seem to be message of welcoming and encouragement coming from society to these children.

ECON 136:  Week 8 Tasks

Updated 3/17 to incorporate reading for Wednesday.

Hope you had a renewing and (where needed) healing Break. 

Individual Conferences

I’d like to check in with each of you about how the semester is going.   If you’ve fallen behind in some of our tasks, this is a good time to talk through how best to catch up.  If there is a topic in the revised syllabus you’d like to cover in more depth, let’s discuss.   This might be a good time to go over one of your midterm  rewrites.  (If you haven’t picked up your graded exam, copies will be available first thing Monday morning in Dalton 114.)

Before you retire Sunday night, please choose a meeting slot in the Week 8 block in the Working with Economic Data Moodle site.

Monday:  Solving Externality and Public Goods Problems

Five hardy souls made it to class on the 7th.   So I’ll ask them to take the lead in helping the rest of us work through the sort of problems someone who understands the externality and public goods market failure ought to be able to solve. 

Preparing for class:

Review or  complete the  Week 7 Tasks.    I’ve reset the Sapling Learnng problem sets to be due Monday at 3am.

When I was in sixth grade, the summer camp I attended annually stopped letting us climb the rocks.  I had always loved clambering up the boulders, feeling carefully for stable hand and foot holds; slower than many of my peers, who scrambled up without worry of falling, but always victorious when I finally stood twenty feet above the ground and gazed out over the nearby world.  But for reasons I don’t remember—perhaps a camper hurt themself, perhaps there was just concern that a camper would—one summer the counselors told us that we couldn’t climb the boulders anymore, at least not without strict adult supervision.  We still climbed occasionally after that, always with several adults stationed nearby, but it never felt the same to me.  Perhaps we were safer then, but we were also less free.

Somebody came up and said, "You talk about your home as if it were part of your own body." And they were right, this landscape is a living, breathing part of me. I consider it something to protect, like I would my own body. That's an idea that's been passed down from generation to generation. - Judy Bonds (found here)

    Much of our ecology and ‘Ecoliteracy’ 360 began with conversations and questions about home, community, and belonging, and that makes sense, doesn’t it? I certainly thought so, until I came across Timothy Morton and his Ecological Thought, at which point I didn’t know what to think; his argument simultaneously illuminated complexities and made them more confusing. Morton argues that "Fixation on place impedes a truly ecological view" (Morton 26), a claim that I find problematic based on personal experience people I know. Morton says that in order to improve the various crises faced by our world and the human species, it is necessary for us humans to stop thinking of ourselves as apart from Nature-with-a-capital-N. What we need, he says, is ‘the ecological thought’, which he defines in many ways: "a virus that infects all other areas of thinking…It has to do with love, loss, despair…compassion…depression and psychosis…capitalism and what might exist after capitalism…race, class, and gender…society…coexistence.” (Morton 2) He goes on to even broader and more abstract descriptions of the ecological thought:

After looking through all of the readings we have done so far in class I decided I wanted to focus on the readings that coverered bilingualism in public schools as well as focusing on disabilities in the public school system. The main focus for this essay is on accessibility: Accessibility for people with learning diabilities or language differences in the public school system as well as accessibility for people in nature whether it’s in natural parks or in playgrounds with man-made structures. For this essay I looked at Lapayese’s essay on bilingualism in public schools, two essays on disabilities, as well as Price’s essay which focused on the idea of access. I also wanted to tie in my own experiences with disabilities and school systems.

A handful of postings ago, I wrote a short one called “Everybody’s Them & Porous Perspectives” and it was about viewing our self and everyone else’s self as a center point; we are all center points. So, if everyone is their own center point, somehow our centrality or individuality cancels out with everyone else’s exact same position, so we are a bunch of me’s. A bunch of points. Points on a grid, evenly spaced out, spaced into infinity. I wonder if it matters that there is a finite amount of me’s currently on our planet. But then to consider and calculate our vastness over time, our growth, our expansion, and our already finished presences — I think if we cannot count and determine an exact number, than it is incalculable, hence, infinite. Effective infinity. There is a certain peace, a certain relief in infinity. A lessening of burden. If we know we cannot comprehend infinity, we can accept that, and then not try and deal with the whole. We can deal with our immediate range of vision, the section of the grid points we can see, and the spaces we can see.