
Most Teachers Don't Teach Climate Change; 4 in 5 Parents Wish They Did - derchu
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/22/714262267/most-teachers-dont-teach-climate-change-4-in-5-parents-wish-they-did
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slumos
Terrible headline. My first thought was that most teachers don’t teach math.
Lo and behold, once you page through half the text, 65% of teacher don’t teach
climate change because it is irrelevant to their subject.

(Definitely we should be teaching climate change—in science classes. Maybe
even history classes. But in >50% of all subjects? eh...)

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labster
It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of
fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform, see if the
second derivative means we're all gonna die, etc.

One of the weaknesses of my mathematics education was not enough real world
applications, so I never cared about what I was learning. In Calc II I was so
bored by Taylor series because when am I ever going to use this? Fast forward
two years to meteorology classes and it's Taylor series and numerical methods
everywhere.

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gus_massa
For a proper Fourier transform you need to wait until the first years of the
university, perhaps the lasts year of secondary school in some places. Anyway,
it doesn't look like a nice function for a Fourier transform, because the
border effect will be huge.

In the middle of secondary school, if you are lucky you can try fitting the
function line a polinomial plus a trigonometric function with Excel. You have
to pick an initial value of the parameters that is close to the function,
otherwise solver will never get a good fit.

I'm not sure how many math teacher are prepared for this. I have more faith in
physics teachers that have a better training in dealing with noisy real word
functions that have to be fitted to a model.

> _see if the second derivative means we 're all gonna die,_

I think that even the worst model don't predict the humanity extinction,
perhaps a huge amount of displacement and the following wars, problem for
crops and food production and the following hunger, change of rain pattern,
sea level increase, and other very nasty stuff, but not extinction. Also, the
timeframe of most of the catastrophes is more than a century, so there is
plenty of time to dance on the Titanic.

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bkohlmann
If you have 2 or more teachers, odds are very good you’re being taught about
it. I had 6+ teachers as a senior in high school. No need for my band, math,
English, or even history teacher to teach it. This headline is not alarming.

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jedberg
At my wife's elementary school, they taught climate change and what the kids
could do to help (recycle, conserver water and energy, etc.). But you know
what actually got the kids to start doing all those things and making their
parents recycle and turn off lights?

The movie "Happy Feet". It scared the kids into thinking the planet will melt.

What we really need is more cartons about climate change. That's what will get
kids concerned and their parents.

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ykevinator
Yes but what to do about the adults who deny a problem exists and the news
network that reinforces it?

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vixen99
Difficult one! How do you get people like Bengtsson, former director of the
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner of the 51st IMO
Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in
numerical weather prediction, and Richard Lindzen, ex-Professor of Meteorology
at MIT, Freeman Dyson plus a couple of physics Nobel prize winners and a score
more, to see sense? If only they'd listen to Greta Thunberg!

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wsdfsayy
Strange...I remember learning about climate change in kindergarten in the
90s...

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scarejunba
How is that strange, dude? 42% of teachers teach it. It's almost literally a
coin flip whether you get it or not. Not exactly rare odds.

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tomupom
Interesting to see how high the percentage of people who want to be taught
more about climate change in the US (among both Republicans and Democrats
too!)

Here in New Zealand there isn’t any standardised content/curriculum
specifically focused on climate change as far as I know, but it is very much
talked about in the classrooms of most schools.

