The Washington Post reports on the care needed to teach global warming to public school children in Oklahoma:
The students didn’t know it yet, but they were about to engage in some myth-busting about perhaps the biggest menace to their futures: climate change.
[Melissa] Lau, 42, has taught science for seven years at Piedmont Intermediate School, which is housed in an airy, modern building overlooking a wheat field and serves predominantly middle-class families, many of whom work in the oil and gas industry. For much of that time, she has sought to acquaint students with the basics of the planet’s warming.
On this next-to-last week of the school year, Lau was squeezing in a lesson exploring the link between increased carbon emissions and extreme weather events such as floods and hurricanes. A goal was to give students the knowledge to debunk the argument often made by climate change deniers that a few frigid days disprove climate change; even in a warming climate, there will still be many cold days.
The science behind climate change is complicated and evolving, and most teachers aren’t prepared to teach it well. Many textbooks don’t touch the topic, according to science educators.
Then there are the politics, especially in ruby-red Oklahoma. Educators here say they occasionally receive questions and pushback from parents when classes cover climate change. A state agency funded by the oil and gas industry pumps money into teacher training and classroom materials, including books featuring a cartoon character called Petro Pete, with the goal of promoting fossil fuels. State lawmakers also routinely introduce bills that critics say would encourage teachers to spread misinformation on evolution and climate change.
“Every year, we have to fight one or two bills,” Lau said. But she added that even here in Oklahoma, there's a growing hunger for accurate information on climate change, saying: “I don't get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it's getting harder and harder to deny.”
Teaching about climate change got a boost six years ago with the release of the Next Generation Science Standards, which instruct teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes beginning in middle school. To date, 20 states plus the District have adopted the standards, and many other states have embraced a modified version. All told, 37 states and the District recognize human-caused climate change in their science standards, says the National Center for Science Education.
Oklahoma’s standards are based on the Next Generation Science Standards, but while they discuss human effects on the environment, they do not directly attribute climate change to human activities. Even so, some state legislators called the language on climate science “one-sided.”
Jewel, the sixth-grader, said the second day of the lesson left her more worried about the Earth’s warming. “Now that I know more about the facts of climate change, it’s a little bit easier to believe,” she said. “It feels like more of a threat.”
Her classmate Dan Nguyen had a darker outlook. “Now, I’m thinking that we’re in a crisis.” It made him a little angry, he said, and he felt people “should be more careful of what they are doing, what they are using.”
Dan’s fears aside, there’s something of a disconnect between the urgency of the scientific view of climate crisis and the relatively dispassionate manner in which Lau must talk about it. Globally, children have been among those raising the alarm on climate change and calling for action, through a lawsuit and school walkouts. But Lau’s students are still young, far from voting age, and she says she has to tread carefully, to find a way to teach the subject “compassionately but head-on.”
The good news is that it has become significantly harder for climate science deniers to deny the climate situation. Petro Pete and the “other side” appears to be increasingly less plausible and influential.
B&B orig: 7/8/19
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