Kevin Gant
Other than sheer panic and terror, what is the best guide for designing new projects?
A week ago, I wasn’t sure. I certainly had plenty of the panicky terrors, with little to answer for them, as I tried to resurrect work from last year in an effort to bring forward an understanding of binomial distributions, Poisson distributions, and perhaps some cellular respiration, for my upcoming project…if I could generate an idea.
The funny thing was that I had a driving question in hand: “Why or why not should the US approve the Keystone XL pipeline?” Plenty of opportunity for debate, and certainly you can calculate the probability of leakage based upon previous leaks in the pipeline (Poisson distribution), and you can explore bioremediation for those inevitable leaks.
School and the Real World: Kevin Gant at TEDxABQED
But my students have reached that stage one faces in taking (and teaching) environmental science: everything is so HEAVY. The depressing statistics can quickly stack up, and so I found it increasingly important to remind the students, and myself, that there are local issues that are worth addressing, even if the globe continues to warm, and species continue to disappear. Not only are those local issues worth addressing – there are some problems about which students can make a difference in our fair state.
Read the complete post on @gantalones Blog: Intrepid Ed