A Perspective on The Sea

[Sean Nash]

Last night we did a little silent spontaneous writing from a visual prompt. This image is very powerful. I appreciated it the minute I laid eyes on it. I knew it would help me get a bit of a baseline on your thinking and understanding. As a teacher, I think it is important to access your understandings and perspectives and record them in time. This allows us to track our path to learning. *Our visual prompt to begin the year:

Being able to track conceptual understanding over time is really important to me as a teacher. It is the best way I know to follow your progress closely in order to make adjustments in my upcoming strategies. How else can you deeply reflect on your learning as time goes on? Freezing your thought at different periods of time...  after subsequent learning events...  allows you to not only access what your current understanding is, but to also look forward to what you need and want to learn more about into the future. I hope you will find this focus useful as well.

So here we go: What were your initial thoughts and questions concerning this image? It is certainly striking, but why so? What do you observe here? What might be surprising about this? What was the strategy of the artist? What was he trying to convey? What questions do you have? What are you uncertain about? What does this make you think? What about this approach to starting off a unit of learning? I look forward to reading your thoughts from last night and your ensuing discussion to follow...

[Rylie Wilkinson]

Where has all the water gone? The ocean is drained clean. All you can see is the dirt. What is the significance of the blue dot? When I look at this picture, it makes me wonder if we did this. Are our daily activities destroying the ocean ecosystem or what is left of it? I feel like the artist is trying to say that we are using up all the water and not doing anything to put it back or help the ocean. We are over fishing and destroying the sea life. Something else that comes to mind when looking at this picture is the fact that the dot is over North America. What about the other countries? Does North America have the most impact on the ocean. If so, are we doing anything about it?

[Shelby Mills]

Picture 1: The earth looks dry, desolate, and large. There seems to be one bubble of water in the middle of the United States. I kind of want to walk across the expanse that was once water. Is this trying to teach us that so much of the earth is water, and so little land, that through this picture, the opposite is conveyed? Where has all of the magnificent blue gone to? Why is the blue ball of water (?) placed right there? The world looks much flatter and it is deprived of life and beauty. Without the ocean and its plants, life as we know it will wither away. Did sand replace all of what once was water? Imagine how many tons of sand that would take....to fill that deep. Where did all the fish go to? Without that world we call ocean, our earth looks so lonely. Even more interesting is what is on the other sides? I see a reflection of sunlight on Africa. Sun is a friend to plants and greenery, but is it enemy to sand and desolation? The earth is parched in this photograph. Somebody get it a tall glass of ice water, stat.

[Shelby Mills]

The second picture that we were shown was a very interesting representation of the earth in comparison to how much water our oceans contain. I found it peculiar when Mr. Nash said that if we were to poke a hole with a needle into that blue bubble that it would fill up the amount of our oceans. That is kind of difficult for me to wrap my head around. One thing that I do know for sure is that there is much life that relies on our oceans. Our oceans are vast and intriguing, with depths so far that we may never be able to fully understand. Who knows what knowledge and unknown specimens are down there and how far we can advance with them....

[MacKinzie Lillian Conard]

This picture of the dried out earth leaves me with a sense of horror almost because it's earth with nothing but a spot of water on a part of its surface. All I can say is that something very dramatic would have to happen in order for the earth to dry up like that. I imagine that this picture may perhaps be conveying how little of the water that covers earth's surface is fresh and usable for a drinking source. It really opens my eyes to how truly precious water is to earth and it's inhabitants.

[Zachary Rich]

Now knowing, this very small ball of water is the only water on earth, I'm confused on how there is supposed to be 75% water. It's still intriguing how this minimal source of water doesn't run out and how we can fill oceans lakes and rivers with it.