One depressing thing about middle school is that you never go on field trips, except for our big trip to North Carolina in the 8th grade. But we got to take one for our Writing Workshop class-and it lasted all day!

Our first stop was Georgia Power Plant McDonough, where they announced in 2006 that they are making the switch from coal to natural gas. To do this, they had to build a nineteen-foot pipeline from the plant to Union City, which they said took a couple of years. Apparently natural gas has 50% less emissions. Here are the specific emission rate reductions: 99% nitrogen oxide, 95% sulfur oxide, 100% mercury, and 50% carbon dioxide. A Ms. Farner introduced us to the plant and their project with making the switch with a slideshow presentation. After learning about the plant and what the switch would cause, we saw the control room (where temperatures and such are monitored) and went to the roof to have an aerial view of the construction. We had to wear hard hats, safety glasses, and ear plugs, since we were walking by many of the machines, which were even pretty loud with ear protection! (You can learn more about Plant McDonough and their switch to natural gas here.)

Next our twenty-five-student group (gasp! 25 13 and 14-year-olds at a restaurant?!?!) went to 5 Seasons Restaurant for lunch, since it provided locally-grown and organic food. Everybody said their food tasted delicious, and actually tasted real. I had the Vidalia Onion Turkey Burger, and if you ever go there, I would recommend it.

Our last stop was the Southface Institute, a non-for-profit organization that promotes sustainability. Their website says: “Southface is a nonprofit organization that for more than 30 years energy-, water-, and resource-efficient workplaces, homes and communities throughout the Southeast.” We got a tour of their building, which was 90% more efficient than other office buildings that size (about 10,000 sq ft). The actual office space had virtually no lights on-the only one was from a desk far away from the windows. The windows, walls, and ceiling were designed to that light bounces around the room more, eliminating the need for electric lights. The building also has what they call solar tubes, which focuses light from the green roof (picture below) through a lot of magnifying glasses into the office. There are other features like motion-sensor lights, composting toilets, and counters in doorways to determine how many people are in a room and how much air conditioning is needed. (The hyperlink doesn’t seem to be working, so Southface’s website is southface.org.)

The green roof at Southface

This trip really brought home many of the things we’ve learned this past semester. Leaving this class is going to be so hard, and I think it will be for everyone else.

THANK YOU MR. MEYER AND MS. DOBBS!!!!! (and for putting up with my terrible memory of schedules!)

I came into this course thinking that we were going to do a lot of research on how to stop climate change and write a whole bunch of papers on it. Now, I would describe this class to someone as a class where you do research a lot of things but you present it in a fun way. I can also describe the research as using interesting ways to research. I am glad we took this class. It was fun, especially because all of the fun things we did. This class would probably be good for kinesthetic learners. This class is one of the “funner” classes and it was stress free. The only homework was the blog posts that you had to post like once a month. This class was fun and informational. I think the co-teaching worked in this class. There were more people that created a bigger audience and a bigger audience has more opinions. Opinions help me learn better. The best activities in this class were probably making films, class discussions, and taking a field trip. The activity I did not like were the blog posts. I mean, I understand that this is a “writing workshop” but sometimes I had nothing to write and when I had nothing to write, I started getting headaches because of thinking about what to write. However, I do feel that I improved on my writing skills. I have been getting better grades in English(especially in writing). I could work on my conversation skills though. Agreeing with Ms. Dobbs, I guess I was “too polite”. I was letting other people talk the whole time trying not to interrupt. Ms. Dobbs and Mr. Meyer were both great teachers. They had great work ethics and they had a fixed lesson plan. This class was great. I don’t want to go to economics .

This whole year in writing workshop has been great. I have learned so much! From this class I have found myself questioning what people say, not in a bad way but just so I can really get what they are talking about. Through this first semester I am glad to say that I now know about global warming and I know what I am talking about. I can make informative comments on the subject instead of just talking about something I do not know about. We have had many great Skype calls with many knowledgeable people.

I have also witnessed a growth of knowledge in my classmates, just form the beginning of the year they hardly knew anything about global climate change and now you can ask any of them and they will give you a well in formed opinion. Through the Christmas Holiday I hope to learn more about global warming and how it affects us. I think that all people want on both sides of the argument just want what is best for the world and that’s where they should start.

When you think about Westminster and Lovett, you think about how different they are. That may be true for things like dress code, classes, and sports, but as for the environment, schools aren’t that different. After going to interview Pace about two weeks ago, I realized that even though they are may not be close in size, both are doing a lot to help. The man who we interviewed, Mr. Day, laughed as he showed us their organic garden because he thought we would think that was nothing. That got me thinking about what exactly is too little? Is their a time when there isn’t even a point in planting just one tree? My answer is no. For some schools, a garden might be a lot for them. I know Lovett is doing a lot for their sustainability plan as is Westminster, but they are both huge schools and probably wind up hurting the earth more than helping it. After things like pick-up, it is gross just to think about how much gas is being put into the air from things like idling. I think that no matter what size your land is, even one plant is great- it’s one more plant than the earth had before!

It is the middle of exam week…ugh. Enough said about that. But this also means that we only have two days left of school before we have two weeks off for winter/christmas break. And as most people would expect, I am soooooo excited. The eighth grade has two parties planned, some of my friends are having small get-togethers for the holidays, and my baby cousin is going to have his first christmas. The finale of a semester is not only the beginning of a new year, it is also the beginning of a new schedule (sort of). You see, this class, Writing Workshop: Enviromental Writing, is only a one semester class. Therefore, when we get back from the cold break we have three days of this class and then I, personally, will move on to Economics with Mr. Watts. Since we don’t have exams, we are already done for the semester. And next year all we are doing is: going on a field trip and finishing/presenting our video projects. Long story short, this is my last time posting on this blog, ever. I’m excited to have Coach Watts as a teacher…but I’ll kind of miss this class.

Looking back on the year, I have learned so much its insane! First of all, I came into this course not knowing what the class even was because I didn’t know what it was. And second, before the class my head was logged onto www.global-warming-is-a-conspiracy-and-is-stupid.com. Luckily, I quickly learned that I had no clue what in the world I was talking about. All that I knew about global warming was that it had something to do with the carbon cycle from 6th grade science.

For the first  two weeks of class, ALL we did was watch An Inconvenient Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle. Being a thirteen-year-old girl I liked this class from the start. I mean, who doesn’t like to watch movies?! Once we were done, we dug so deeply into the data/facts I still remember every little detail about the two. Over the course of the semester, we “skyped” with anyone who had to do with the issue, from a scientist from NASA, to a climate journalist from North Carolina. My knowledge has expanded so immensely in the past 12 weeks that I can’t even remember not knowing this information. Now all I can do is spread the word on this subject. All I have to say to the 25 kids about to take the class in 3 weeks: “Good luck.”

Bye!

As we are finishing up the semester, I think the transition between our semester classes will be pretty difficult. New teachers, mispronounced names, the separating of our now twenty-five student class (I doubt any of us even remember who was originally in our class!) and, for most of us, entering the scary world of economics. That’s right, the dreaded elephant in the room, the thing that seems to hinder many good ideas, the natural enemy of environmental growth everywhere. Although I think it will be weird going from our open-mindset class to something as real and unchangeable as the economy, it may help us understand why some things we have learned about this past semester are impossible to do. And for those going from economics to Environmental Writing, it may be easier for them to understand things after they have studied the economy.

But really, I think all of us who have economics next semester are scared after hearing about the hard tests and almost daily readings and quizzes for Murder at the Margin…but maybe we might have it easier. At least we don’t have to read it and The Odyssey at the same time!

I read on my Google Reader last week that at the end of the month of November, WMO’s scientists found a new trend in the weather this past year. The WMO’s real name is the World Meteorological Organization. WMO is run by the government and specializes in Meteorology or climate and weather. And what the WMO found was that 2011 has been one of the hottest years that have been recorded, the amount of greenhouse gases that have been trapping heat in our atmosphere have increased (and still on the rise at a rapid rate), and the amount of ice at the poles this year was at it’s second all time low.

So as you can see, it does not look good for Global Warming. The world has been going through a period named La Niña (a period of cooling in the eastern pacific), and this year has been the hottest that it has ever been during this era. Could we be going through another period called El Niño (a warming period of tropical waters in the pacific) on top of the increasing warming caused by greenhouse gases?  Also, another surprise that surprised me was that the WMO found an increase in the past year of Climate Extremes like floods and droughts around the globe. Here are some of the examples that where given.

-“Finland, Armenia, Central America, and Spain all reported record heat.                                It was the driest spring on record in many parts of Western Europe, followed in                    some areas by the wettest summer                                                                                        -East Africa experienced severe drought followed by flooding                                                -Other severe floods, often deadly, occurred in Southeast Asia, Brazil, Australia,                   Southern Africa, Central America, and Pakistan. (Read: “Extreme Storms and                       Floods Concretely Linked to Climate Change?”                                                                      -Tropical cyclone and hurricane activity was unusually low, although not as low as                 in 2010 (which had the lowest storm count since satellites first allowed accurate                  record keeping).”

The definition of all these occurrences around the earth is Climate Change. In some places around the world, the weather could be extremely hot like in some parts of Central America and Spain while other places are having extreme floods like in Brazil and other parts of Central America. Instead of the earth having an even amount of rain and sun all throughout the earth, the heating of our atmosphere is causing some strange things to happen with our eco- system. And that is why the we needs to do something about Climate Change and Global Warming before it is too late. The world has enough resources and technology. We just need to ACT. 

So today my group and I were supposed to go to Lovett. Well, that fell through because of our schedule change that we had today. We were going to meet with the principal of the Lovett high school, but we had to cancel on him. I think that it’s really cool that he was even going to talk to us. I mean, the principal of the high school must be a pretty busy guy, but he was going to take some time to talk to us. It’s really amazing how great the people from other schools have been to us. We’ve basically just called them and awkwardly asked if we could talk to them about their sustainability, and they helped us and set up times to meet. Our only problem now is actually finishing the project, and talking to Westminster, which should have been the easiest. But I think we’re going to try to knock out the three remaining schools, Westminster, Holy Innocents, and Lovett, this Monday. I’m honestly going to miss this class I enjoyed having my little group for this film project, and I enjoyed just learning about something I really wouldn’t know about. THanks!

At the end of things, it feels that you look back at the beginning. As this class comes to a close I’m starting to think about the whole year and what we’ve done in it. This was a writing course, and we got tons of great writing done, but a thing that our teachers did to make it a learning experience that wasn’t JUST for writing is that they involved Climate change into the course. They used climate change as the topic for us to use for our final project, but it also helped us have something to talk about to help us in our posts.

This class has also been a great experience because we have gotten to video chat with scientist and economist, we are also going to to on a field trip to a power plant. I also think that their end on the year project was a good idea, because it helps us build teamwork skills, and also research and making sure your information is from a credible source. I think i will miss this class very much for the rest of the year, and it helped improve my wringing skills greatly.

Finishing up our movie project and writing this last blog post is making me sad. At the beginning of the year I had no knowledge of global warming/climate change. Now I am working on “a square foot” of facts instead of a big area, meaning we have learned so much and I am now digging deeper and talking about specific things for our project. Thinking about what I knew about the environment before this semester, I didn’t know enough to care about it. Now I still don’t really have a solid opinion on wether or not I think global warming is real, but I have learned so much about it and I know that later on I will be able to make decisions because of helpful things we did like learning about reliable resources. I’m gonna miss Writing Workshop! Thanks!