November 5, 2015 - 12:49
“The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert Ch.5 notes and class teaching plan
By Grace, Creighton, Beatrice, and Caitlin
- “On The Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm” – It takes time to understand paradigm shifts, in the chapter the example of the cards are used, the point being that “novelty emerges only with difficulty”
- what parts of nature are we too ignorant to realize
- Ordovician period experienced a massive extinction: changed the way the scientific world viewed extinction
- Past and future are always connected
- Uniformitarianism vs. Catastrophism
- Rats will inherit the earth, think about the future and how our histories will be read, how we will leave our stratigraphic signature
- Possibly a fatalistic perspective of the earth
- Nemesis as a testament to the difficulty with which humans have to confronting hard truths
- Anthropocene term: how it came to be, what it implies
- Pg.108 for examples of humans negative effects on environment1````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
- Define the period, make sure there is consistency
- Getting information out of students
- What are their inputs?
- Some of the things that we are changing in the environment and how we are restructuring it
- Take everyone through a timeline
- How do you teach?
- Draw the Earth, ask students to draw what they believe they have done to the earth without looking at the bulleted list in the text
- The amount of food people waste: camp activity that Grace could discuss
- MAIN POINTS OF THE CHAPTER
- Getting to the anthropocene that is quietly occurring and the damage we are surreptitiously doing
Start with:
Drawing of the earth
How we perceive and interpret extinctions
Explain the Ordovician period, uniformitarianism and catastrophism, how real life appears to be a hybrid of the two
It takes a long time for people to recognize a paradigm shift, it takes a crisis and perhaps a willingness to fully acknowledge the shift
--main point being that the hesitancy to