What a cool project! Read on …

Solar Education: Students to get dose of math with greenhouse vegetables

by Dale Rodebaugh
Herald Staff Writer

Credit: Jerry McBride/Herald Staff

A photovoltaic system installed at Escalante Middle School will make a campus greenhouse operational and allow students in Sharon Orr’s elective “greenworks” class to do more than grow vegetables.

The project is a collaboration of Durango School District 9-R, La Plata Electric Association, BP and Four Corners Solar. A similar photovoltaic system was installed at Bayfield Middle School last year.

Electricity generated by the Escalante photovoltaic system to power lights and fans in the greenhouse will offset the power the school ordinarily would have to buy. But beyond the immediate benefit, the system will open to students a panorama of educational disciplines, including mathematics, science and geography, Orr said.

It will work this way: A wireless link on the roof of the school will connect the Escalante photovoltaic system to the Fat Spaniel Technologies telemetry network. Fat Spaniel allows renewable-energy producers to display their energy production data and environmental credentials on the Internet.

There, Escalante students can see characteristics of their system and what it’s doing in real time or on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Information available in graphic form includes the amount of power being generated, ambient temperature, temperature of the photovoltaic cells and how much carbon dioxide the system is offsetting.

They also can compare their campus system with others connected to the Fat Spaniel network wherever they are. The comparisons they make would put to the test their ability and knowledge of mathematics and geography.

“Our greenhouse has been here for a couple of years,” Orr said. “But the photovoltaic system will get us up and going and allow us to grow vegetables year round.”

In preparation for planting, Orr’s students on Wednesday were weeding an outdoor plot next to the greenhouse for the arrival of topsoil and additives.

Eighth-grader Sheldon Wy-man, 13, wants to pick up pointers to apply to the care of strawberries and watermelons he’s growing at home.

Sheldon isn’t a stranger to agriculture because he’s familiar with the ranch in Craig where his great-grandfather and grandfather raised hay, potatoes and corn.

Reiley Waldo, 12, a seventh-grader, weeds and waters tomatoes and flowers at her house in Rafter J subdivision, southwest of Durango. She was enjoying the garden work Wednesday, which she said was more enjoyable than her physical education class.

Orr, who is scheduled to receive her master gardener certificate at the end of the month, would like to make the “greenworks” elective available to all Escalante students.

The class of 24 students will be doing a lot more than greenhouse work, Orr said. She plans to introduce vermiculture, composting, pollination, plant identification and food preparation before the year is over. In inclement weather, the students can investigate what’s happening on the Fat Spaniel network.

Mark Schwantes, manager of corporate services at LPEA, said the cooperative wants to place photovoltaic systems at the three middle schools in its service area that don’t have them – Miller in Durango and Ignacio and Pagosa Springs.

“Middle school is the best level to engage students,” Schwantes said.

Libraries and elementary schools are potential recipients of similar projects, he said. Photovoltaic systems would fit into educational programs at either schools or libraries as well as serve a utilitarian purpose.

Grants from LPEA and BP paid the cost of design, hardware and installation of the photovoltaic at Escalante by Four Corners Solar. LPEA, which owns and will maintain the system, contributed $12,445 and Orr received $10,000 from BP for the photovoltaic portion of the project. She received $10,000 from the Durango Foundation Educational Excellence for garden fencing and irrigation.

The Escalante photovoltaic system is connected to the LPEA grid, which means that whatever electricity is produced but not used by the greenhouse will be available to other customers. The 3,200 kilowatt hours of power the system should generate annually is about 38 percent of what the average home uses, Schwantes said.

I recently took the time (20 minutes) to watch “The Story of Stuff,” an indictment of our unsustainable habits of consumption, and am eager to see this video expand its already impressive (6 million views) reach. In May, The New York Times did an article about how the video by environmental activist video Annie Leonard was being embraced by teachers around the country.

“Many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years,” the article reads.

The illustrations and simple language put the sustainability dilemma into terms that kids and adults alike can really get their heads around. It’s a great educational tool for a generation that is being bombarded with marketing messages of frighting sophistication. (Might I also recommend, for younger children, Dr. Suess’ “The Lorax”?)

Obviously, one basic way we can conserve resources is recycling. I find the complexity and limitations of our recycling system consternating. The city is looking at building a new center and will take citizen input at a meeting scheduled for at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in City Council chambers, 949 East Second Ave. Maybe some young people out there would like to show up and make their opinions heard, too.

I hate to say, I’ve tried to pretend it isn’t so, but I have a severe case of summer-itis. I’m longing for the unscheduled summers of my youth. In particular, I’m remembering the summer after we moved from Loveland, Colorado, to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In a new neighbor with few other kids, I turned to books for entertainment and companionship. The most memorable book I read that summer was Island of the Blue Dolphins, about a native girl who is left behind on an island by her tribe. I envisioned myself in her role and suddenly my solitary summer seemed noble and heroic. Out of boredom was born a life long passion for reading. In this vein, what follows is a list of “Best Children’s Books — Ever!” by New Yorks Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Besides being entertaining, books, he notes, are like vitamins for the brain, helping kids retain learning during the acedemic lull. Hooray for books!

By Nicholas D. Kristof

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding IQ points?

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

A mountain of research points to a central lesson: Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading. Let me help by offering my list of the Best Children’s Books — Ever!

So here they are, in ascending order of difficulty, and I can vouch that these also are great to read aloud.

1. Charlotte’s Web. The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but House on the Cliff is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. Wind in the Willows. My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is Freddy the Detective or Freddy Plays Football. (Avoid the first and weakest, Freddy Goes to Florida.)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

6. The Harry Potter series. Look, the chance to read these books aloud by itself is a great reason to have kids.

7. Gentle Ben. The coming-of-age story of a sickly, introspective Alaskan boy who makes friends with an Alaskan brown bear, to the horror of his tough, domineering father.

8. Anne of Green Gables. At a time when young ladies were supposed to be demure and decorative, Anne emerged to become one of the strongest and most memorable girls in literature.

9. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. This is a hilarious, poignant and exceptionally well-written memoir of childhood on the Canadian prairies. (Note: If you prefer sweet to funny, try Rascal instead.)

10. Little Lord Fauntleroy. This classic spawned the Fauntleroy suit and named a duck (Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy). An American boy from a struggling family turns out to be heir to an irritable and fabulously wealthy old English lord, whom the boy proceeds to tame and civilize.

11. On to Oregon. This outdoor saga, written almost 90 years ago, is loosely based on the true story of the Sager family journeying by covered wagon in 1848, in the early days of the Oregon Trail. The parents die en route, and the seven children — the youngest just an infant — continue on their own. They are led by 13-year-old John: spoiled, surly, often mean, yet determined and even heroic in keeping his siblings alive.

12. The Prince and the Pauper. Most kids encounter Mark Twain through Tom Sawyer, but this work is at least as funny and offers unforgettable images of English history.

13. Lad, a Dog simply is the best book ever about a pet, a collie. This is to Lassie what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes. The book was published 90 years ago, and readers still are visiting Lad’s real grave in New Jersey – plus, this is a book so full of SAT words it could put Stanley Kaplan out of business.

You can post your own suggestions for best children’s books on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. My own kids have the temerity to think they know better than I which books they’ve enjoyed, so I’ve deigned to post their recommendations there. But listening to one’s children is dangerous: I advocate reading to them instead.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times. Reach him c/o The New York Times, Editorial Department, 620 8th Ave., New York, 10018.

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — A school district in Boulder is considering a junk-food policy.

The Boulder Valley School District board was discussing a draft Tuesday that says kindergartners through eighth graders wouldn’t be involved in, or have access to, the sale of sweets and sodas at school-sponsored events or fundraisers.

It would discourage junk food at school parties. Ads of unhealthy food and drinks would be banned on places like scoreboards and school publications. Growth hormones, hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup would be kept out of meals offered to students.

Bake sales would be allowed — in moderation.

Still, the district’s interim director of nutrition services, Ann Cooper, says she’s not looking to be “the cupcake police.”

(Also see this New York Times article about why we find junk food so appealing).

 Loading ...

Who didn’t relish belting out “School’s out for summer, school’s out forever” at some point in their academic career?  Fun as it was, is our educational schedule breeding laziness and academic inferiority? A column in the latest Economist offers some interesting statistics:

-American children have one of the shortest school years anywhere, 180 days compared with 200 for East Asian countries.

-German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

-American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden.

The article stated that “the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. ”

It argues that over the long haul this will make Americans less competitive for jobs in the international marketplace.

I would argue that while many of those children aren’t in school, they are still participating in activities that are mentally stimulating. Unfortunately, in our system, the onus is on the parents to provide those opportunities, often at significant additional expense. This is especially disadvantageous for poor families, whose children may end up in front of the television for lack of an affordable option. And it can be exasperating for parents to cobble together child care and educational activities for all the hours their children are out of school but the parents have to work (Durango mom Audrey Crane adroitly chronicles the dilemma in this blog post on the subject). The article asserts that this is a holdover from our agrarian past when children were needed on the farm. Maybe it is time the school year caught up with today’s reality.

 Loading ...