Excerpts from e-mails sent by teachers about the many ways they are using the Hurricane Katrina disaster to help students learn:
Raquel Marshall, computer science and business teacher
Blake High School, Silver Spring, Md.
Our pre-engineering class is researching the impact of the levee design failure.
1. What were the design flaws with the New Orleans levee system?
2. What are the possible solutions for the levee design? Who is responsible for the new design?
3. What is the total national impact of the current levee design?
Based on this research, I am planning to have teams of students model some of the possible design solutions. (The planning for this project is still in the works. I need to ensure we have enough materials.)
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Danielle Wilson-Saddler, 1st and 2nd grade reading teacher
Germantown Elementary School, Germantown, Md.
I am planning to teach how to write a friendly letter by having the children write letters to child victims of the hurricane.
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Carim Calkins, science teacher
Frost Middle School, Livonia, Mich .
My students are designing a hurricane-resistant house for extra credit. It is a modification of a lesson during which they are supposed to make a house with metric measurements. Now, they are adding hurricane-proof components to the house and describing how the components are useful. When they are done, they will have a pair of scaled drawings of the house, a list of the hurricane-resistant modifications, and at least 20 metric measurements on the house.
The assignment gave us a chance to talk about the hurricane and its effects on the planet. We will be studying it more as we enter our next unit on weather. Later in the year as we study ecology we will look at the logic of placing any city in the Mississippi Delta. One student even brought in the article from the May 05 Popular Science magazine that described how a hurricane could destroy New Orleans (it was very accurate).
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Pete Siarkas, health teacher
Sherwood High School, Sandy Spring, Md.
I'm using Katrina in Health when we are talking about how environmental factors affect your life. We discuss how bad the city of New Orleans is as a result and how long it will take to clean it up and make it safe to return.
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Allison Finn, English teacher
Blake High School, Silver Spring, Md.
Since literature is all about the human condition, we have been talking about the people in New Orleans and what they must be going through. For the team-taught students, the lesson begins with simply explaining to them what is happening. They ask questions like "why would they stay there if they knew a hurricane was coming" and "why don't they just leave now" and Dana [Lewis, special education teacher] and I try to help them understand that sometimes acting is not that simple. We talk about this tragedy as well as others in the world and in time, and hope that they just take information, if nothing more.
For the AP students, I have been contemplating teaching Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" this semester instead of next; the hurricane scene in that novel is something that has come up in class already. Some people decide to leave, some decide to stay. With this tragedy so close, it certainly would be easier to understand the character motivations (and vice versa) and to make the story become more real. We also are talking about the human condition, and we refer back to the people of New Orleans (more than anywhere else) any time we question choices that characters make -- and in a sense question their humanity.
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Sharon Glass, English
Penn Cambria High School
Cresson, Pennsylvania
Quite coincidentally, my senior Academic English class began the semester with a unit on the theme of heroism in World Literature. One of the selections was even called "Man in the Water," an article about an extraordinary, yet everyday, man who saves survivors of a plane crash by handing over the only life ring over and over to others, until finally his own life is lost. This story, in particular, generated an intense discussion about the lives lost in the aftermath of Katrina.
Some of the best questions asked were: Who will be considered the heroes of this disaster? Why did it take so much time for the government to lend aid? When will the survivors be reunited with family? How can we be helping so many others in the world and not be able to help our own? What could have been done to prevent more people from suffering? If the media could get to the difficult locations, why couldn't help?
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Kevin Yates, social studies teacher
Sherwood High School, Sandy Spring, Md.
My U.S. history classes are studying the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. I'm using Katrina and the Reconstruction of New Orleans as a way to relate a historical event to a very recent event. I am using washingtonpost.com to show students photos from New Orleans. Students are discussing the difficulties of the current situation and the amount of work involved in rebuilding the city. Students then discuss the difficulties associated with rebuilding the economy of the entire south. Very interesting, timely.
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Siimone Mansfield and Keri Simpson, fifth grade teachers
Hawthorne Elementary, Boise, Idaho
Our students have been making posters and studying the Gulf states and how they have been affected. We spent time in the computer lab researching statistics, and gathering information on how the Red Cross helps victims. Students visited each classroom in our building to give a talk regarding the importance of a fund raiser and the impact that Hurricane Katrina has had on our nation. . . . Every day our students come to us with more stories about the destruction and how our nation is trying to come together to help those in need. Each student is doing a focus study on a state and these discussions have made our students aware of what goes on outside of Idaho. This whole experience has given our students an awareness of national events and a sense of compassion and determination to help those in need.
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Paula Throckmorton, fifth grade teacher
Porta Central School, Petersburg, Ill .
I had my students think about what they've seen, read and heard. Here are a few of their thoughts and feelings:
* It makes me mad that they just let those people die. ( Zane Holliday)
* I feel bad, but I feel good too because we can do something about clothes, diapers, and food. . . . I felt bad that I had a house and they no longer had a house. (Caroline Koch)
*I feel that it's not fair that we have food and clothes and they don't. . . . It must be tragic to live where Hurricane Katrina hit. (Haley Scheina)
*I was also mad when the hurricane hit Louisiana because I heard on the news that the staff from a nursing home left old people to die. (Ross Buie)
* I am a little mad because we were not ready for this disaster. . . . but I am glad for people who have been raising money for the people. (Jonathan Fricke)
* I feel really depressed. I want to know why the president can't do more. . . . every morning we see it on TV and it makes me want to do something. (Owen Ford)
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Joyce Saadi, social studies teacher
Sherwood High School, Sandy Spring, Md.
In my African American Experience class we discussed the hurricane in terms of the federal response to the crisis. Our class discussion focused specifically on the implications of race/class, i.e., was there a racial bias that delayed the response? We looked at articles describing the demographics of New Orleans to try to determine if the delayed response was a result of poverty, and if so, we tried to answer the question, "Does poverty have a racial face in America?" We looked at news coverage to see if there was a racial bias, e.g., reports of African Americans "looting food," but white people "finding food." We evaluated some of the statements of the famous (e.g. Kanye West -- well, famous to the kids, at any rate) to see if their negative comments about government were supportable. We tied Jesse Jackson's description of the Convention Center as "the hull of a slave ship" to our current unit on slavery/The Middle Passage.
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Gregory M. Williams, math teacher
Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Germantown, Md.
Our first unit in math is data analysis. I gave the students the tracking info for Hurricane Katrina so they could use the wind speed data to create a stem and leaf plot. The 8th grade science teachers also used this data to track Hurricane Katrina.
We were also analyzing maps with color in the math class, so I printed color maps of Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, which displayed the size of the state, compared to the size of the United States. This idea came from a statement on the news that an area over 90,000 square miles was affected by the hurricane, which represents the area about twice the size of Virginia. From this, I could show my students that this area was about seven times the area of Maryland. Using the state maps and the satellite maps of the Night Light before and after the Hurricane, I could emphasize the importance of maps displaying data.
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Laurie Whitehurst, third grade teacher
Wahl-Coates School, Greenville, N.C.
Greenville was flooded in 1999 after Hurricane Floyd struck this area. My students were only 2 years old at the time and do not remember the details although many of their families were displaced. My students will be researching New Orleans, hurricanes, floods, and Mississippi. They will also gather facts about Greenville and Hurricane Floyd so that we can compare the two areas and the events. Students will also conduct a penny drive next week. Many of them have had lemonade stands in their neighborhoods to collect money. These activities will correlate with our social studies objectives since we teach citizenship and community, and they will give them a better understanding of the events.
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Dennis G. Queen, English as a Second Language teacher
Kingsview Middle School, Rockville, Md.
In ESOL 3, kids read an article about wind (types, strengths, where it comes from, etc.) and we then pulled in Katrina and discussed how hurricanes contain high winds, what happens to people and buildings, etc.
In ESOL 1 and 2, we are talking about family. I have pulled in how the hurricane has affected families in the stricken areas -- how they feel, what has happened to them (injuries, death, missing, separated because of rescue evacuations, or just happy to be alive and together), and how they have come together in times of crisis. This is what a family is.
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Rosemary deRosa, family and consumer sciences teacher
Kingsview Middle School, Rockville, Md.
We are discussing anger management in 7th grade Family and Consumer Sciences class. Students identified "triggers" -- things that get them angry. Children shared how their parents dealt with "road rage" as they were driving. My students said parents could just tell themselves to "chill" for if they compared their problems to those suffering from Katrina they would realize they have few problems.
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Ken Osneek, social studies teacher
Poolesville High School, Poolesville, Md.
I have used Katrina as an example of the weaknesses of a representative democracy:
1. Decisions can take time
2. Red tape in lawmaking (relief process)
3. Blame game (the other parties fault, the federal/state/local governments fault, etc.)
4. Media involvement in government (media bias, media role in information citizens) .