Overview
This unit intends to look at the impact air quality has on human health, specifically respiratory health. When I was a student in elementary school many years ago, knowing a child with asthma was a rare thing. There were possibly one or two students with asthma in the whole school. Even when I got to high school, I do not recall being acquainted with anyone who had asthma. Now as a teacher, I continue to be startled every year by the number of students with asthma and asthma-type symptoms. Now instead of one or two students in the entire school, it is likely that there is one or two in every classroom. In my particular school this past year, there were 57 students with diagnosed asthma out of a population of 950. There were many more than that with asthma-like symptoms but not an official diagnosis. In the United States, asthma cases nearly doubled between 1980 and 1995. 1 I will be looking at some of the pollution problems in Charlotte, North Carolina where I teach and discuss some of the harmful effects this pollution has on the overall health of our students.
I am designing this curriculum unit to provide a bridge between two very different content units taught as part of the North Carolina seventh grade curriculum. North Carolina is one of only a few states left that has an integrated science content curriculum in middle school. Students have a mix of physical, life, and earth science throughout sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Seventh grade students begin the year with a unit on atmosphere and weather and then move into a unit on human biology. This unit will help to make a meaningful connection between those two seemingly unrelated topics and to help students see the connections that exist between the various fields of science. We will be looking at the impact of air quality on human health, particularly respiratory health. Every year it seems our general health is more determined by external influences and less so by genetics.
The ultimate goal of this unit is to improve the scientific literacy of my students and make them better citizens who are able to make responsible choices about their environment. I hope to make them aware of ways to protect their respiratory health and help them learn how to understand air quality as it relates to their health. I also want them to be able to make informed decisions when voting on issues and for people who will determine the course our country takes on environmental issues. I want them to understand the impact all individuals have on the amount of pollution in our atmosphere and that continuing to produce as much as we do may have devastating implications for their futures. There are so many types of pollution that affect every part of our Earth and environment that it would be impossible to cover in a unit of this type, so I will be looking specifically at a couple of types of air pollutants and the type of harm they can cause.
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