A Pinnacle in My Career

Today, my lesson was garbage. Literally.

There's a three day Earth Day Conference at Maui Community College going on. I took half the kids yesterday. It was so sparsely attended in the morning that if it wasn't for us there would have been 3 people who showed. So I was going to bring the other half of the group today. Well, I got a call yesterday afternoon telling me that the activity planned was canceled and that there's nothing happening until Noon. We couldn't swing that, so I was without an activity for today.

I couldn't come up with anything...at least this last minute. I called the other teachers...nothing. We're starting a quarter long project on our Carbon Footprint (Check it out here.)and I needed the activity to be connected to that so I started gripping a little.

I started running through my mental lesson plan file...for some reason, the lamest thing I've done this year kept popping up in my head...when we went to the beach and wrote haiku's. Then it hit me...we won't go to the beach...we'll go to the dump!

And so we did.






The county workers looked at me like I was nuts when two vans full of kids pulled up. One guy sent me to the supervisor's office and I had to talk to three people. They weren't comprehending what the hell we were doing there. (I left out the haiku part - I just told them that we were working on a project about pollution) So they let us hang out on this hill to observe and take notes. Of course the kids are complaining about the smell, even after I told them not to because it's their garbage out there - they made the smell.

Then a couple of workers in a golf cart tools up and told us that we can't stay there and there's this big bruhaha. So we're getting ready to go and one of the dudes asks how much time do we have...plenty...so he took us on a van tour of the landfill, including how they're starting to capture the methane gas - but unfortunately just burning it off, they're not using it for energy consumption, yet.

As we're finishing up the tour, one of my kids asks the guy how he got this job. Turns out he has a degree in engineering & biology...seeing as how we're a STEM school they all moaned as if when they graduate from here they're doomed to working at the dump.

Then we came back and wrote freakin haiku's about the dump. I've learned that my kids either don't know what a syllable is or they can't count to 7. Either way...