Monday, November 28, 2016

Module 6: Assignment 1 – How Do I Love Thee: Modeling & Dimensional Thinking


As I was reading the dimensional thinking Chapter of Root-Bernstein’s Spark’s of Genius my thought’s wondered to my son and his current experience in kindergarten.  He is bombarded in his class with worksheet after worksheet was one or two letters.  I can see from the creases, scissor nicks and coloring on both sides that he is struggling to ‘make’ something from the otherwise numbing flat white piece of paper.

My son learns in a similar fashion as me. I love to build and do - rather then read and repeat.  My husband is still struggling with son’s learning style.  He could read at age 2, whizzed through flashcards and aced any and every test.  He still pulls out flashcards with numbers and letters to practice with our son – and our son will take all those cards and create an elaborate 3D puzzle with them.  I was inspired to read about Geller, in Sparks of Genius, and how, “she learned her 3-D skills from her father, a crystallographer at Bell Labs, who bought any kind of toy that had anything to do with geometry.  Geller’s experience suggests that playing with any type of 3-D puzzle can be useful.”


I love models as well.  This module assignment is exciting to me.  I do think it is very challenging to depict environmental justice in a model.  One of the first models around Environmental Justice that comes to mind (that I loved pulling together and pulling apart again) is a model I helped to create with my organization and the network we work within called the Just Transition.  The concept of the Just Transition is to end the era of extreme energy: by creating transition pathways to end the era of extreme energy like fossil fuels, nuclear power, waste and biomass incineration, landfill gas, mega-hydro, and agrofuels, and implement a Just Transition to Local Living Economies in which good, green, and family-supporting jobs are created for unemployed, and underemployed people, and workers formerly employed by extreme energy industries.  You can view the model below:





For environmental justice I first drew out and example of a local environmental justice concern that I thought may appeal to everyone in this course – air pollution near schools.





After I drew the model by hand I created this model with one of the online modeling programs I found:




It was difficult to figure out the best type of model to depict Environmental Justice.  I originally wanted to do something 3-D (inspired by Sparks of Genius and my son) but once set that my mind was currently confined to 2-D I got to sketching.  Next I set out to list out the components or variables: The obvious: teachers, students, volunteers; then the not so obvious: time of exposure (on playground, walking to school, in school bus), baseline on current health, facilities (garbage trucks, incinerator, international bridge, HIGHWAYS) type of pollution (suffer dioxide, nitrogen oxides, dioxin and furans, PCBs, PM (particulate matter - which includes: heavy metals lead, mercury, methyl mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic - that I know of).  The Particulate Matter seemed (to me at least - I'm not expert) - both large and small.  So I looked at the main facilities, people that are most impacted (by PM), and levels of exposure.  The amounts were massively estimated (full disclosure).  The components were all connected in that they impact children's environmental health and caretakers.  The incinerator (which in the case of the school I was using as the “case study” – GoLightly in the Cass Corridor Detroit) is a large connecting factor for impact, and the school is the main “target” as the impacted. The trash trucks are delivering trash to the incinerator, they are coming across the international bridge with international
garbage.


The most fun I had with this was creating little icons to represent the multitude of variable within the Environmental Justice/ air pollution found near school – such as the stick figure teacher and students:




Along with iconic icons like the Detroit Incinerator and the Ambassador bridge!:
















Which, of course, I could use none of because I could never figure out how to upload my cute pictures into the online software (or figure out if it was even possible).  But such is the creative process!



For those of you worried about my son and the worksheet factory he is currently enrolled in – don’t worry!  We are in the process of transferring him to a play based school experience.  Do, however, worry for the condition of charter schools in Detroit? (Due to the learning environment and industrial environment outside???)

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