Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 20, 1990 TAG: 9004200774
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ROCKY MOUNT LENGTH: Medium
"I cut the water off today when I brushed my teeth," said Petrina Trout, a 16-year-old junior.
"I stopped going to McDonald's," said Candy Cooper, explaining that she now choses fast-food restaurants that use less plastic foam packaging.
The students' environmental awareness has been aroused by research papers that English teacher Raymond Williams has assigned to coincide with Earth Week.
"Some people think you have to have them research a literary topic for a paper," Williams said. "I don't believe that."
With the help of computer technology, 47 students in two 11th-grade English classes are researching world environmental issues by communicating directly with teen-agers from around the world. They get a first-hand perspective on the Valdez oil spill from students in Homer, Alaska. They debate rain forest deforestation with students from an impoverished Peruvian village. They are told by a student from Indonesia to stop preaching to Third World countries about their environmental practices because the United States is the world's leading polluter.
Through their computer discussions, students have learned to think of their pastoral community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge as part of a fragile planet.
"I have little cousins," said LaShawn Patterson, 17. "What is the world going to be like when they grow up? Will there even be a world?"
The students are tied into World Class III, a computer conference linking 70 schools around the world. The five computers in Williams' room and the computer time are funded by Middlebury College in Vermont, where Williams attended graduate school.
Williams' course tries to balance innovation with strictures of the county's curriculum.
The students have been divided into groups that research a particular environmental problem. Several group essays are to be shared with schools participating in the computer conference. Finally, students will compose separate research papers.
Williams said students will learn the same skills - researching a topic, synthesizing information and compiling a bibliography - that would go into papers on more traditional literary topics.
"It's a good balance between structure and freedom," said Williams, a committed environmentalist who offered to pay $1 to any student who caught him sipping coffee from a plastic foam cup.
The students said they enjoyed the program, although some were disappointed that Franklin County did not have a high-profile issue such as the Alaskan oil spill to share with the computer network. Their research papers have focused on global concerns: ocean pollution, global warming and the depletion of the earth's protective ozone layer.
The students did not tackle more issues closer to home partly because there was little or no information about them in the school library. "We don't know much about it," said Ken Holland, 17, about the furniture and paper products factories visible from their classroom window.
"Nuclear waste and stuff like that we understand," added Roy Davis, 16.
The research into environmental issues had prompted some students to conserve water when bathing or stop using aerosol sprays.
Many, however, seemed to agree with a New York student who wrote that some environmentalists had gone too far in pushing their lifestyle on others. "You don't have to give up your lifestyle to save the planet," the student wrote. "We all have to change a little, but conserving water doesn't mean never flushing the toilet again."
by CNB