ON CAMPUS
New mathematics course tackles climate change, weather trends One can be hard-pressed to deny that environmental changes occurring around the world are, in part, due to climate change.
For Marshall, the course is an opportunity for students to apply their academic studies to real life situations.
Whether it’s visible through flooding and heavy rains in historically dry areas, increased occurrences of major storms, or the melting of glaciers, climate change is all around us.
“As a math teacher, so much of what we teach kids is X’s and Y’s, and kids always ask, ‘When am I going to ever use this in my life?’” reflected Marshall. “To be able to teach math through a real-world application that they can get their minds around, it helps them actually understand and make decisions. That’s a more worthwhile way to teach math.”
The question is what we can do about it. For six students last fall and eight this spring, they’re determining ways that they can make an impact by learning about the implications of climate change and the effects it has not only on the environment, but on the world. Mathematics teacher Tom Marshall spearheaded the new class, called Modeling Climate Change, a one-semester math elective that became available to Cheshire Academy students this past fall. As part of the course, students learn about the environmental, economic, and global impacts climate change has on the general public and use their knowledge in the fields of mathematics and science to better predict future weather-related outcomes.
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the magazine of cheshire academy
Dean of Curriculum Marc Aronson said the new class serves as “a perfect example of how our curriculum delivers the Academy’s mission to our students.” “This course really engages students in the practice of combining critical thinking skills with both real-world applications and students’ senses of themselves as global citizens,” Aronson said. Marshall first began compiling plans in the fall of 2018 on how he could implement modeling climate change into his pre-calculus and statistics classes. After conversing with the rest of the Math
