The article by Moshe Renert on "Mathematics for life: Sustainable Mathematics Education" inspired me to contribute more towards the prevention of climate change and mass extinctition which is increasing at an alarming rate. I honestly never thought about the connection between math and sustainability. Usually, I associated sustainability with environmental sciences and ecology.
While reading the article, the two things that surprised me: One of them is how our eating habits can have a tremendous amount of effect on the ecology of our planet. The article ponders on the fact that eating beef deprives the agricultural resources more in comparison to eating chicken. Therefore, one can reduce the pollution caused by protein production by switching to a vegetarian diet and herbivorous fish.
Another thing that impressed me is the analogy of emitting a pound of carbon with throwing a pound of garbage out the windows of the cars at every mile. This is a very effective analogy to have critical discussions between the students and making them realize that increasing the rate of carbon emmisions can eventually cause discomfort like that of discomfort caused by garbage on the roads.
It also made me curious to know the different ways to implement the two models ( Sterlings and Edwards) in math education to contribute to the sustainability of the planet. The math teaching can be steered to promote the student's creativity by incorporating the new conservation-based real-life word problems which have not even been attempted by the teacher. Hence, the teacher and the students can approach the problem collectively and work together to get the answer. Therefore, the student will not have the restriction to get to the final right answer and explore different ways to do the problem.
This can be exemplified as exploring the variation in climate over the time with the help of graphs, examining the dietary choices to calculate the carbon emissions, in addition to this one can ask their students to find out the cost of their daily commute vs the alternative eco-friendly ways of commute(carpooling, using public transit, cycling)., Moreover they can also calculate the carbon emissions corresponding to the different vehicles used where one can be more energy efficient than the other. I really liked how the author connects emotions with math, so one cannot understand the underlying physical idea vividly until one does not feel those numbers. Such as students can feel how big is one hectare by standing in the middle of the big playground.
As a prospective teacher, I will connect math with the environment conservation and sustainability context so that me and my students can realize their responsibility towards preserving their home planet.
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