Environmental Unit Reflection

For the past several months, our NEW School class has dove into a unit involving the environment. Our focused learning within this unit targeted the preservation and maintenance of our environment around us and around the world through researching, collaborating, developing, and applying with our learned skills.

One of the biggest subjects in the environment we were concerned about was our water sources. We learned that we are able to drink less than 1% of the world's water since most of the fresh water is either frozen or underground. Of this drinkable water, cleanliness has always been an issue, which we learned in a student-led teach-back lab about water composition. This lab looked at the different types and concentrations of contaminants in water sources such as the ocean, ponds, and tap water.

Some of the most valuable information, in my opinion, was the pH of the different water sources. The ocean's pH was ~8 according to pH strips, which is lower than it ever has been and continues to go lower. This was one of the first times that the class was shown evidence of the environment being in danger as of now, and lead us to our next deeper learning opportunity. 

         In UC Davis's Bodega Marine Lab, we learned about the current state of danger in the Ocean.   

Located on a small peninsula on the coast, the lab overlooked the ocean and had access to the reefs. We learned about how the carbon dioxide (CO2) from our cars are turning into acid when it's absorbed into the ocean, corroding the shells of animals. We also learned about how the pollution into our drains has a huge effect on the animals that live close to shore. This lead us to believe that humans have a much bigger impact on the world surrounding us than we (or maybe just I) expected. After this trip, we were inspired to try to develop a way to save the environment ourselves.  

          In February, we started our deepest learning yet, involving individual research into world environmental problems. To do this, the project had to be focused on learning the skills involved to find, verify and write about information from a credible source. I enjoyed developing my research paper project since I got to choose the subject of my study, and in this case, it was groundwater contamination from the production stage of hydraulic fracturing. After meticulous hours of decoding highly technical text in reports and executive summaries, I came to the conclusion that stopping fracking leaks would be best done in the casing connections (the ends of the pipes where they screw together). My solution involved adding a spacer across all the threads of the male connecting casing, as well as adding an outside locking mechanism to keep the slip probability low, keep torque as a constant, and fill the spaces between threads with the elastic pressure of the rubber spacer.      

           The last part of our environmental unit involved a teach-back about fuels. This teach-back looked at the environmental and political implications of fossil fuels and renewables. We covered the obvious about global warming from fossil fuels, but also looked at the weakness of the renewables in which are set to replace them. Several fuels were put in the spotlight such as coal, natural gas, and oil. I tried to teach the importance of fuel for the world in a shaky and rushed 10-minute presentation and didn't hit my mark until I recorded a flipped classroom video for other students to watch on the class website later. This taught me how to improve on a skill I thought I mastered, public speaking, as well as how I deliver a sensitive topic unbiasedly.

          Overall, I enjoyed this unit the most out of all of our previous units, but to be fair I thought that was true of every unit. My learning in this unit definitely hit where I needed it, especially for making a claim and supporting it with evidence. My major takeaways for this unit is just to have the reminder in the back of my head about how as a human I should be mindful of my impact on the world and to try to leave it better than when I got here. It's not a question for me anymore whether the environment is being destroyed or not, it's now about how far I'm willing to go to help protect and save it.