Student Causes

Today in my classes I did a discussion and poll on "causes" that the students supported. The comprehensive list included over 35 causes. We had a vote and narrowed our listing down to the top six most popular causes to the students. They came up with these as top causes:
Cause 1: Fighting for a Reduction in Drinking and Driving (Poor Decision-Making) There were so many more students who were passionately against the concept of drinking and driving than I had ever imagined. It was a very popular choice to support, with almost 100% of students vocally anti-intoxicant combined with driving. This was the brainchild of Hope Jackson, a student at LHS.

Cause 2: Feed My Starving Children (http://www.fmsc.org/) An organization of volunteers devoted to packing and providing food as humanitarian relief to children around the world. This was brought to the forefront by Hunter Haygood, from HHS.

Cause 3: Keeping the Arts Alive in Schools... this was also a very popular choice as one might expect with a group of young artists. This cause was Katie Price's idea, an HHS student.

Cause 4: Ending Cruel Whale Killings - Whales are often dragged behind boats until they drown - this is a process that many in the class did not know about until one young lady explained what she had seen and read to the rest of the class. This was brought to the fore by Charlotte Kimball, a senior at MHS.

Cause 5: Women's Body Issues: Amber Jackson told the class about weight and esteem issues in the modeling industry, most especially in Europe and Japan. Amber is also a senior at MHS.

Cause 6: Feeding Homeless in the Community: A homegrown grassroots effort of young people who ride bicycles through cities and feed burritos to poor people that they have prepared to help fight hunger in their area.

There was a great deal of passionate discussion about many other issues, such as gay marriage, the Iraq war, pro-life, Veterans' issues, child abuse, natural resources, over-urbanization, recycling, nursing home improvements and elder care, organ donation, human trafficking, and obesity. It is amazing to me how thoughtful the students were about what they believed and what good verbal discourse they had on some of the topics. This should prove to be an interesting project. Way to go, higher level thinking skills were being accessed in my class today.

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