Observing Nature Turns into a Tragedy

This week, I didn't observe nature outside my house. I've just been observing the normal snow melting, birds chirping, and the sun finally coming out. Over in Japan, we have been watching on the News of the Deadly tsunami that hit the coast and left thousands missing, and many loved ones lost.

This natural disaster was a tragedy for everyone to watch and read about in the news. How would you like to get home from work to see your house underwater and your family missing? I would be devastated if that happened around me. It is just terrible to know that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent this, natural disasters occur all the time around us and all we can do is just sit back and watch them happen, and pray for the best for the families who lost their loved ones. I can't imagine having that happen to my home and my family. 

There is so much science around how these things happen and what is done to cause them. Just listening to a clip on the Fox News Website, listening to an geologist speak about the tsunami for just a few minutes caused so many questions to run through my head. He was reporting things like the speed of the waves, and approximately how many hours there were between when the tsunami was threatening to hit the U.S. Coast. Think about how many years of school that this man went through to report these findings about the Tsunami. He had to probably go through every single science class to be successful as a geologist.

We may not realize it, but science is literally all around us. There are so many questions we might have about the world and things like different natural disasters that only certain scientists can answer for us. Even if we just research the basic questions we have about these things, we still may never know all the answers to our questions.

In my future classroom, I think that it is so important for my students to keep up with studying current events and how they relate to the scientific world. I would do this activity about once a week, maybe ask the students to bring in a current event article or talk about something they saw in the news and explain what it means to them, then relate it to a science topic. I think that this is so important for the students to do and the younger they start with these kinds of activities then the more helpful it will be to them in the long run, it allows them to be more independent and eventually do scientific research when they're older all on their own.

Here are some after effects of the devastating tsunami in Japan: