“What will You Do with Your Power?”
They were working on preparing their cases for their endangered animals when Julia raised her hand.
“Mr. Brock?” She asked. “What were the three criteria again?”
“You mean from the ecological triage article?” I responded.
“Yes.” She nodded.
“A unique job or niche in its ecosystem. Preserves genetic diversity. And is a species rich ecosystem.” I told her, ticking each item off with my fingers. “Since we are only looking at specific endangered species, only the first two apply in this case.”
She grimaced and replied, “Then I think we have a problem.”
I walked over to where she and Reilley were sitting and asked, “What’s that?”
“Genetic diversity,” said Reilley. “There’s only one of our tortoise left, and it’s a boy.”
“Yeah, can we change our animal?” Julia asked.
I shook my head. “No. You all picked the animals you wanted to save, and your task is to make your best case for us to choose yours over everyone else’s.”
“But how can we save something that can no longer reproduce?” asked Julia, plaintively.
“Look,” I replied. “All of the Galapagos tortoises are subspecies, right?”
“Yes, that’s what we’ve found.” Reilley stated.
“So I know that scientists have brought back the populations on some of the islands by cross-breeding.” I told her. “In fact, that could be part of your case for preserving the unique genes of your tortoise.”
Reilley shook her head.
“They’ve already tried putting him in a pen with two females from a related species. He’s refusing to mate with any of them.” She said.
“You could always make the case for artificial insemination.” I replied, refusing to let them off the hook. “Zoos have been making ligers for years now in order to keep their lion and tiger populations from becoming too inbred.”
“NO!” came an outburst from Cassidy across the room. “Really, there’s such a thing as ligers?”
I turned to nod and witnessed a sudden flurry of activity on everybody’s laptops.
“They’re so cute!” declared Kitty, followed by a chorus of “Aww!” from several others.
I snapped my fingers twice. “Okay, people! We need to focus. Remember, we’re trying to make this a homework free zone right now, and you are giving these presentations next class no matter what.” I turned back to Julia and Reilley. “Including why we should preserve your tortoise and not someone else’s animal.”
They both gave a sigh of acquiescence and started typing on their laptops again.
“Mr. Brock?”
I walked over to where Lexi and Rebecca were working.
“Yes?” I queried.
“I think we may have a similar problem.” Lexi stated. “Ours won’t breed in captivity because whenever anyone tries to capture one, they die from shock. They are very temperature sensitive and live only in the northern Gulf of California.”
“Remind me your animal.” I told her.
“The vaquita.” She replied.
“Yeah…” I said slowly. “I won’t lie; you all have a tough sell. Because even if we do save it, climate change is probably going to heat up their environment faster than they can evolve to adapt to it. And they can’t leave where they live because the Pacific Ocean is too cold.”
“Mr. Brock!” Lexi protested. “Why would you then let us choose this one for our endangered animal?!”
“Yes. Why?” Rebecca added.
I shook my head. “I said ‘probably.’ Remember, there is always a chance. The whole point of this Issues in Science assignment is that humans have already done too much damage for us to be able to save everything. So we are going to have to make choices on how we use our power to preserve.”
I looked up to see the rest of the class paying attention to the conversation.
“Remember,” I announced. “That’s the point of this whole project: what will you do with your power?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Emma spoke up.
“Which one would you choose, Mr. Brock?” She asked.
I looked at her and shook my head.
“You know the rules.” I reminded her. “You don’t get to hear what I think about an Issues topic until after you have all completed the assignment; I don’t want me influencing your response.”
Lexi was not prepared to let me off the hook.
“Then what about the other big environmental problems you’ve been teaching us about?” She asked. “Which of them would be your priority over the others?”
There was a general mixed chorus of “Yeah!” and “Come on, Mr. Brock!” from the rest of the class.
I relented.
“Okay. I will allow a brief digression.” I told them and turned to direct my response to Lexi. “You want to know my top three priorities for dealing with the environmental crisis and the ‘bottleneck’ we are headed toward as a species?”
She nodded eagerly, and the rest of the class leaned forward in their seats. I began to count off with my hand.
“First, find ways to empower women in the developing world.” I said. “ALL the data shows that where women are educated and economically in control of their own fates, the quality of life for the entire society goes up and the degradation of resources goes down.”
I turned away to face the rest of the class.
“Second,” I continued. “Find a way to get the phosphate runoff from the fertilizer back out of the water column; we do not have 250 million years to wait for it to cycle back through the geological phase of the phosphorus cycle after we’ve mined all of it out of the ground.”
I looked back at Lexi.
“And third,” I told her. “Somehow get the carbon back out of the atmosphere.”
She gave me a “thank you” look, and I turned away again to address the class.
“IF we can accomplish those three things,” I said to all of them. “THEN I think there is a fighting chance that our civilization will still be here on the other side of 2050. But it is all going to depend on how you answer the question ‘What will I do with my power?’ A question that you will ultimately answer with the lives you choose to live.”
I then glanced back at Lexi and made a sweeping gesture with my arm to indicate everyone in the room.
“As for me,” I told her. “That is the one Issues in Science question you already know my answer to.”
Lexi just grinned.
The Lives We Live
There is a coda to this story I need to share. Shortly before graduation, the seniors in this class unexpectedly arrived en masse one afternoon at the doorway to my room, looking slightly sheepish. They handed me a tall bag with a long story about how they had originally hoped to have this done for the AP dinner but that there had been production problems…. They went on until I finally had to hold up my hand to stop them and told them that no one should ever feel the need to be apologetic about giving a gift. There was a lot of nervous laughter in response to that, and I took the bag from them to open it up. Inside was a tall rectangular glass vase with the following inscription:
To Do List
- Economically empower women in developing countries
- Fix the phosphorus problem
- Get the carbon out of the atmosphere
- Bring back the Tortoise
We won’t disappoint!
AP Biology 2016-2017
I keep that vase, along with some other gifts from my students from over the years, in a location in my house where I can see it each morning as I am eating breakfast. I do so so that every day, I have a permanent reminder that since actual learning changes who we are, then the act of learning has an innately moral character to it and to remind myself that what that encumbers upon those of us who teach is that we have to get our students thinking about the quality of their knowing. It is not enough to develop their capacity to make meaning using the metaphors of a particular subject. We must also empower them to understand the inherently ethical nature of this activity and the consequent moral accountability they bear for how they pursue it and the kinds of meanings they choose to make.3 It might be as simple as reminding someone during a test not to look at a neighbor’s paper, but in all that we do with our students, we must deliberately and purposefully confront them with the direct link between the quality of their thinking and the quality of their self so that they will learn that how they think determines who they are. We must make them realize that the life they live exhibits the real knowledge and understanding they possess and that they haven’t truly learned something until they have somehow fundamentally altered their life in response to it.
That is why it is just not possible to authentically engage in learning without exploring the essential truth of the knowledge that results. You cannot educate someone in the sciences, for instance, without addressing what counts as experimental evidence and why, and you can’t study history without determining your reasons for listening to one account of events instead of another. Math, literature, languages, art–teaching itself–they all require understanding ultimate meanings in some fashion or another.
That means, though, issues and questions about the intangible elements of a subject need to be a core part of the curriculum, and dialoguing about their implications needs to be a central feature of the instructional process. Everything we teach needs to include some exploration of the ultimate values underlying what students are doing in the classroom, and what results may be as axiomatic as speculating about the reality of numbers or as conjectural as pondering whether “myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods…that now lead to scientific knowledge.”4 But only exercises and explorations like these can truly enable students to know what they are learning fully, and therefore, what we must ultimately do as a consequence of our awareness of learning’s moral nature is to seek ways to enable children to “struggle against unthinking submergence in the [current] reality that prevails”5 and to reflect actively and regularly about what it means to live what we learn.
However, like anything in education, the only way to get kids intentionally and consistently thinking about their own learning is for teachers to do likewise and join in this process themselves. We, too, have to ponder the worthiness of the meanings we make together with our students, and we, too, have to show that the fulfillment of this moral imperative is the essence of true learning, modeling in our own actions what it looks like to embody one’s knowledge in one’s living. We must, as the old cliché goes, “practice what we preach,” and since what those of us who are K–12 teachers ultimately “preach” is how to construct the self, the authentic identity we disclose in our own struggle to become fully human is what truly teaches our students to do the same. Hence, if we fail to recognize the ethical quality of our own thinking, we risk trapping us all in a world “where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible…to find room for [another] in our minds.”6
And where there is no room for another, there is never real learning of any kind.
Light a Candle 