Something that made me stop while going through the article was the author's description of the disconnect between classroom education and urgent societal problems such as climate change, "a growing disconnect between the preoccupations of my professional life and the increasingly loud calls around me to attend to the problems of ecological sustainability" We sit in our air conditioned classroom, with rows of desks and projectors and laptops, and we talk about abstract reasoning and calculus and all that. If I were to guess the percentage of content on climate change or any other social issue in math would likely fall below 1%. Sometimes seeing people who protest holding up sign saying the Earth is flat and climate change is not real, it makes me think whether we have done enough as educators to inform people about issues and ways to research and verify with sources.
Another quote that surprised me was "many adults are having a hard time comprehending large number and as a result find it difficult to relate to issues of the environment". I am probably one of them, and so are many of us. When we see some large technical figure, we just gloss over it because it's someone else's problem, but if we are talking about carbon emission of cars on the road, it's everyone's problem. When you go and try to enjoy a bike ride but a shiny pickup truck just loudly approaches you, you can feel the air quality. How can we integrate this into our teaching? I really like the analogies the author has referenced about Co2 and throwing bags of garbage out on the road and the efficiency of forming protein in red meat vs vegetables.
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