The Olympian

Issue date: 1/29/08 Section: Campus

Media Credit: Sophie Siemion

Olympic College students will be exposed to practical, real-world solutions to global warming as they participate in the largest educational teach-in in the history of the United States on Thursday.
The program is called Focus the Nation and will be occurring at over 1,110 colleges and universities across the nation, including OC.
A teach-in is a group of teachers at a school all teaching one subject for a day. In this case teachers from OC will be educating their students on solutions to global warming.
Focus the Nation's Web site explains that the program is an "unprecedented educational initiative on global warming," and it is "preparing millions of students to become leaders," in the largest challenge to civilization the world has ever faced.
The goal is to teach the students of today about how to implement environmental practices into their line of study so they will have the tools to fight global warming as the work force of tomorrow.
Kim McNamara, twho convened the environmental task force of OC, learned about this program at a sustainability conference.
After listening to Dr. Eban Goodstein, focus the nation program director, McNamara agreed to work toward recruiting 50 OC teachers for the teach-in.
As of now, 20 teachers have signed up for the cause and have agreed to spend 30 minutes of class time on Thursday to teach how their particular subjects can help provide a solution to global warming.
Most teachers will find ways to show how sustainable practices can be used in their particular subject. For instance, math teachers have the chance to teach the students how math was used to discover the climate change, and how mathematicians are constantly monitoring various statistics regarding global warming.
For some teachers, the Thursday teach-in doesn't really work for their curriculum, so they have chosen another day to join the event organized by Focus the Nation. You Tube videos will also be used as teaching tools for this program.
Instead of teaching environmental values on just one day, some teachers will teach sustainable practices throughout the year.
Dr. Jeff Brown has created an environmental-friendly engineering course entitled Innovations in Design, Engineering 120.
Brown said the course is about "green engineering," or renewable engineering practices. It also teaches about the social responsibility engineers have to the world.
According to the winter 2008 version of "The View," Engineering 120 is a course about "revolutionary technologies and how they have shaped the world."
Math and engineering are not the only departments with a platform to teach on this issue.
Business students will be exposed to pro-environment business practices and science classes will be talking about solutions each area of science can bring to global warming.
Even English professors could spend their time teaching about global warming by having their students read literature regarding the issue.
McNamara said the main purpose of educating the students about adopting suitable business practices is to generate hope for tomorrow; so the future generations do not have to live with the effects of global warming.
"I want our conversations at Olympic College to be about how we can find a solution to move forward," McNamara said.

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