‘No way! I can't write that!"
Prices at the local pump had just topped $3.40 per gallon, and I asked my students to write down a word or phrase they'd heard recently about gas prices.
I knew I was on the right track.
This was the beginning of a two-week unit on the social implications of our driving economy. I wanted students to use math to come to a reasoned judgment of the causes and effects of rising prices.
My 8th grade students would apply their understanding of equations for linear and nonlinear relationships to analyze increasing consumption of fossil fuels. They would learn to use statistics to analyze driving habits in their community; they would make histograms and box-and-whisker plots to understand how much their families were spending on fuel. At the same time they would study the economic impact of rising prices on people from different socioeconomic classes and occupations. Their understanding of graphs would allow them to look back at the gas crisis of the 1970s and look ahead to the effects of peak oil.
Peak oil is a phrase that's shorthand for the point in time at which the rate of fossil fuel extraction is at its peak. After this theoretical peak, supplies will gradually decline as remaining reserves become more difficult, expensive, and energy-intensive to access. Without social, economic, and technological changes, shortages in fossil fuel supplies are likely to cause widespread social and economic upheavals. My students would learn some lessons about peak oil from Cuba's experience when the supply of Soviet fuel abruptly came to an end in the early 1990s.
Throughout the two-week unit, they considered the question, "What is the future of driving?" on a personal and societal level. Ideally, I wanted my students to get past personal outrage to consider the social, environmental, and economic impact of our dependence on fossil fuels.