INTRODUCTION
To my high school students, any event before their birth is the equidistant past: dinosaurs and payphones seem equally premillennial. This perspective of the near and far future as an equally nebulous cloud can be attributed to both youth and trauma. 169 young people have been killed in Richmond City since I began teaching here, almost all of them students from our school district. 1 This trauma of losing classmates, friends, and family to violence has rippled through our school system, noticeably in a “sense of a foreshortened future”, a recognized symptom of trauma. 2 Some students don’t see a point in planning for a future that may not come. Yet we are in the direst phase of the Anthropocene, and their choices will majorly impact this future.
I believe this problem can be reckoned with through our study of history. In this curriculum unit, students will establish what a millennium truly means - a millennium in the past by looking at the artistic legacy of the Pre-Colombian city of Cahokia, and millennia in the future by looking at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project. This will better equip students to both truly understand the depth of the past, the depth of the impact of the past on today, and the depth of their responsibility to the future.
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