Mining, what's that?
Submitted by Kim Portwood on Tue, 2017-06-20 00:00
Since I am from an agricultural community, I don’t know how receptive the lessons about mining practices would be since students don’t live here and see the impacts. I might be able to make a correlation to agriculture in some way. Both mining and agricultural practices both hurt the environment in different ways. We could study mining and since they see the impacts that agricultural practices have on the land, they could certainly compare the two.
Comments
Mining
With many students in my classes with family members in the mining industry, you need to tread lightly on this subject. When the mines are at work, high paying jobs are plentiful and many families have worked there for generations. I don't think the environmental issues are as important as the safety issues are to these workers. I could be wrong, but that is the impression I get from conversations with them.
Common Ground
I think a good exercise that could be done as a class would be to have the class come up with pros and cons of mining. That then would help take some pressure off of you when it comes to the negatives of mining practices. Then I think you could further this by showing how even some of the negative impacts of mining have been improved over the course of the last 100+ years. Hopefully that's another way to look at difficult concepts.
Mining's Impact
Hi Kim Portwood. I'm not sure what subject you teach, but you could start with explaining to students how and what cell phones are made from mined materials as an open to a lesson on mining. Just a suggestion of course. I think mining can be connected to everyone in some way. It can be a fun way to teach students about mining and resources.