Hi. Welcome to the blog for my IB English B class at Jur Hronec High School in Bratislava, Slovakia. Below you will find links to other websites and discussion questions. My students are required to comment on one of these postings every month and also respond to each other's comments. Feel free to add your two bits, but be aware that all comments are monitored before being posted.
What do you
think about this school's efforts to eliminate food
waste?What might be some
disadvantages?Is our school, or Slovak
schools in general, doing all that they can?How do you and your family try to avoid producing food waste?
GJH needs a sustainability manager. This is a topic that's been on my mind for a long time now and it is really time for people to not just be semi-aware of this problem, but actually be aware of the fact that tons of food is being wasted just because "it didn't taste good today". It's sick. I often catch myself being in that same exact situation, but I do not approve of it. It’s necessary to make changes. Every day I see kids, even teachers take out their plate, half full. Do they even know where this food will go? I personally do not. We do not know whether it goes to the pigs, homes or to homeless people, however we know for a fact that the food, or better said resources could’ve been spared and not thrown away. Who knows, maybe the staggering numbers used in the article are very similar to Europe’s scale. “Researchers estimate that 40 percent of the American food supply isn’t eaten, a shopping cart worth $218 billion.”
I propose this. The children from PYP both IB and Slovak parts are quite engaged in recycling and such, the same applies to MYP, IB and their counterparts of GJH. MYP has C&S, which is short for Community & Service and IB has CAS. The MYP students could be helping out in the cafeteria or just generally participate in “the sustainability project” while IB students, older students are the managers. It could be divided into parts: The main manager and mini managers, who will be responsible for different parts of the project. The aim would be to create a sustainable school with a connected community, therefore creating a better environment. The last year’s community project (obligatory for MYP 3) was comprised of more mini projects with one of them being a composter project. It’s not that we do not have anything and we would have to start from scratch, we just have to work with what we have a build on it.
I agree with @Tomas that GJH definitely needs a sustainability manager. The amount of food waste created every day is truly alarming and should be taken into account more seriously. However, without changing the school lunch system in Slovakia completely, the effectivity cannot be improved to the extent where waste production would be on its minimum. In my opinion, one of the main problems with the lunches is that there are not enough options provided which the majority of student would choose from and actually enjoy their meal . Yet it is understandable, since the lunches are meant to be affordable for everyone and with more options, the price increases. Recently, however, the government decided to pay for scholers’ lunches and made them free. I think better thing to do here was to invest the amount of money to provide better quality of food and provide more options. Considering schoolers would like the food more, less waste would be created. Unfortunately, it would take a lot of years to build a new system and the change is necessary as soon as possible. The current situation can be improved by cooperation of sustainability managers and students. I like the idea @Tomas proposed, with engaging as many students as possible. At schools, students learn about the laws of physics, human evolution, mathematics and I think that it should be equally important to learn how to love and protect our planet Earth as well.
GJH needs a sustainability manager. This is a topic that's been on my mind for a long time now and it is really time for people to not just be semi-aware of this problem, but actually be aware of the fact that tons of food is being wasted just because "it didn't taste good today". It's sick. I often catch myself being in that same exact situation, but I do not approve of it. It’s necessary to make changes. Every day I see kids, even teachers take out their plate, half full. Do they even know where this food will go? I personally do not. We do not know whether it goes to the pigs, homes or to homeless people, however we know for a fact that the food, or better said resources could’ve been spared and not thrown away. Who knows, maybe the staggering numbers used in the article are very similar to Europe’s scale. “Researchers estimate that 40 percent of the American food supply isn’t eaten, a shopping cart worth $218 billion.”
ReplyDeleteI propose this. The children from PYP both IB and Slovak parts are quite engaged in recycling and such, the same applies to MYP, IB and their counterparts of GJH. MYP has C&S, which is short for Community & Service and IB has CAS. The MYP students could be helping out in the cafeteria or just generally participate in “the sustainability project” while IB students, older students are the managers. It could be divided into parts: The main manager and mini managers, who will be responsible for different parts of the project. The aim would be to create a sustainable school with a connected community, therefore creating a better environment. The last year’s community project (obligatory for MYP 3) was comprised of more mini projects with one of them being a composter project. It’s not that we do not have anything and we would have to start from scratch, we just have to work with what we have a build on it.
I agree with @Tomas that GJH definitely needs a sustainability manager.
ReplyDeleteThe amount of food waste created every day is truly alarming and should be taken into account more seriously. However, without changing the school lunch system in Slovakia completely, the effectivity cannot be improved to the extent where waste production would be on its minimum. In my opinion, one of the main problems with the lunches is that there are not enough options provided which the majority of student would choose from and actually enjoy their meal . Yet it is understandable, since the lunches are meant to be affordable for everyone and with more options, the price increases. Recently, however, the government decided to pay for scholers’ lunches and made them free. I think better thing to do here was to invest the amount of money to provide better quality of food and provide more options. Considering schoolers would like the food more, less waste would be created. Unfortunately, it would take a lot of years to build a new system and the change is necessary as soon as possible.
The current situation can be improved by cooperation of sustainability managers and students. I like the idea @Tomas proposed, with engaging as many students as possible. At schools, students learn about the laws of physics, human evolution, mathematics and I think that it should be equally important to learn how to love and protect our planet Earth as well.