Drop and Give Me 20 Volts: Teachers Attend Green Boot Camp

To understand the drive behind Union County College's "Green Boot Camp," look no further than the attendees. One of them is Paul Savage, a history teacher at the Union County Academy for Information Technology in Scotch Plains.

When daylight allows, he said, he forgets about his car and rides his bike to school from his home in Pennsylvania – a 50-mile, two-hour-and-forty-minute trip. When the mornings are too dark, he carpools.

The Green Boot Camp takes sustainability as seriously as Savage. A weeklong workshop for middle-school teachers at the Academy for Information Technology, its goal is to help educators learn how to better raise their students'  environmental consciousness.

"It's really about educating middle school teachers to teach their students," said Laura Inward, senior marketing leader of Honeywell International Inc., which sponsored this year's Green Boot Camp. "It's educating the students of today for the green jobs of tomorrow."

At the camp Thursday, teachers from across the country tested sustainable technology that they had  built: A wind turbine that generated 2 volts of electricity in three mile-per-hour winds, and 9.8 volts in 25 mile-per-hour winds; a $20 used bicycle that the teachers had transformed into a human-powered generator; and, perhaps the simplest of all, a rainwater storage machine.

"This collects rainwater from your roof," Savage said of the device, constructed from a plastic barrel. "It holds 55 gallons of water. You can use it for your garden."

The camp's attendees and instructors said that these practical lessons will not only help teachers better demonstrate the value of sustainable practices to their students, but also help provide those students with marketable skills in the workplace. For example, students planning to pursue employment after graduating high school, they argued, could more easily find jobs with building contractors if they already knew how to build and install turbines and solar panels. Tying green technology to the students' own wellbeing would also make the concept of sustainability far more relevant. 

"My students come from the city," Kevin Muller, a teacher in the Camden County Technical Schools district, said. "It's not important to the parents, so it's not important to the kids. We're trying to change that mindset."

The camp's attendees greeted the lessons with enthusiasm. But they also questioned how they would fit the lessons into their own curriculums and schedules.

There's nothing that I can use directly right now," said Akhtar Nasser, who said he teaches sixth-grade science in Clark. "I have to work it in."

He suggested that competitive team projects, held after school, could teach students about sustainability without impinging on limited class time.  "Competition always encourages people to strive to be better. They might ask, 'Why does yours work better than ours?' That's what science is all about." 

Regardless whether and how green lessons are implemented into classrooms, the boot camp nevertheless held immediate sway over the teachers. Belinda Jenkins, a life and physical science teacher in Greensville County, Va., said she plans to construct rain collection barrels as soon as possible. "I'm going to make one for myself and one for my church," she said.