Students Come to Grips With Nuclear Age : S.D. Schools’ Program Teaches Them to Grapple With Modern Issues

Midway through discussion of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the postwar nuclear arms race in his U.S. history class last week, Point Loma High teacher Jack Dray asked the 11th-graders what solutions they saw to the stockpiling of doomsday weaponry.

“I guess I compare (nation-to-nation negotiations) to our classroom,” Marci Collette answered. “There’s always someone in the classroom who you’re not getting along with. You try to get along with everyone, but after a while, you just get on each other’s nerves.”

Dray countered that he has students each September who “hate me at first,” but by the end of May, “We get along better . . . and what about the (Reagan-Gorbachev) summit? Isn’t it good they talk?”

Collette stood her ground, backed by several other students. “I just don’t think that everyone will ever get along. . . . The (arms race) won’t get solved by a meeting of the minds.”

Similar Discussion

While Dray’s classes wrestled over whether the future inevitably includes an arms race, third-grade students at Zamorano Elementary School in Paradise Valley were thinking about whether talking to someone about a problem can keep it from boiling into a major dispute.

“Doesn’t poor listening and a lack of cooperation by individuals perhaps lead to a conflict,” teacher Elena Browne asked her 30 students, “where one person has one idea and a second person another, and the ideas don’t match?”

One student said that he would not want to play four square with someone who wouldn’t listen to him. A second said he would feel like socking the other person in the mouth.

“That would be a real breakdown in communication, wouldn’t it?” Browne asked.

The discussion of conflict and communication at two different grade levels last week was no accident. The two classes were part of a districtwide goal introduced by San Diego Unified School District officials this spring: expose students to issues central to the nuclear age.

‘Students Not Prepared’

Browne and Dray were using the nuclear-age education curriculum drawn up after the Board of Education decided last year that students are not equipped to deal with the large issues of nuclear war and nuclear energy that could be central to their future. A community task force, working with school officials, created a two-to-four day unit for every grade, kindergarten through 12th.

For example, the kindergarten-through-second materials emphasize conflict resolution and second-through-fourth the importance of an individual in influencing decisions, all within the context of human relations and without specific reference to nuclear terminology.

Fifth- and sixth-graders learn the rudiments about global interdependence in matters such as energy, which are followed by units on peaceful uses of nuclear technology in grades seven and eight. The questions of nuclear war and the future are intertwined around high school history and world affairs courses.

“At each level, the unit asks the students to do something, an activity, with the data,” said Harvey Prokop, the district’s coordinator for social studies. “And the way we have written it, no one can say we stacked the deck (either pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear).”

The task force will review the program this summer and revise it, if necessary, after comments from teachers on the difficulty students had with concepts and on areas where explanations are incomplete. Officials emphasize that a smooth articulation of the curriculum from grade to grade, as written in the planning guides, will take several years.

“We talked about conflict and how to resolve problems at home and school,” said Janice Kennerly, a second-grade teacher at Green Elementary School in San Carlos. “The kids talked about what happens on the playground, in the classroom, at home, when not being able to get their way, about what conflicts come up if they don’t do their share of work.

Learning the Terms

“We didn’t talk about anything concerning conflicts between countries, but I think just talking about responsibility reinforces things we’ve taught all year. (The unit) was used in place of the race/human relations unit (previously taught).”

Danny Good said his sixth-grade students at Foster Elementary School in Allied Gardens picked up on ideas of global energy issues once they got the basic meaning down of words such as “universal,” “global,” and “nuclear technology.”

“I took it nice and slow, wrote down the definitions, and they got it little by little,” Good said. “The kids knew very little about nuclear technology. Mostly, all they knew about was the bomb . . . though they knew what Chernobyl was (site of Soviet nuclear plant accident in May, 1986).”

Good would like the number of days expanded and written explanations made simpler. “And I think that it would be nice to have some (regular) math and reading lessons keyed to the unit so that the nuclear curriculum could be (related) better,” Good said.

He said that teachers at Foster found no problems with the materials being too wish-washy as a result of task force effort to present both sides of often-complex issues. “I suppose it might be difficult to teach this if you had very strong feelings one way or the other but I see no problem with letting kids make up their own minds,” Good said. “No one should have to feel they must agree with the teacher.”

Browne at Zamorano found that students in the two third-grade classes she team-teaches also had difficulty grasping concepts such as “organization,” “cooperation,” “individual,” and “responsibility.”

On the second of three days for the unit, each student was asked to draw the logo of an organization they were familiar with, and they ranged from the World Wrestling Federation to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. All but one of the logos were then pasted on a large white sheet of butcher paper, with the one blank space meant to represent the incompleteness of a project or effort when someone fails to carry out their individual responsibility to contribute.

‘Hard for Them’

Few, if any, of the students picked up on the concept.

“It’s really hard for them,” Browne said. By contrast, the “telephone game” played on the third day got across much easier the idea of how an individual can affect the outcome of a plan or effort. The students lined up in a row, and whispered a message from one end to the other. Of course the message at the end came out differently from what had begun on the other side.

“Some of the ideas came together better after the final session,” Browne said.

Dray had little problem stimulating a wide-ranging discussion in his Point Loma classes, based on readings about the debate within the American government near the end of World War II over whether to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

“I don’t think we should have dropped the bomb because they (the Japanese) were already beaten,” Tony Brannan volunteered in Dray’s fourth-period U.S. history class.

“Yeah, but what about all the evidence that they Japanese would fight until they all died?” Mike Silva countered.

“How about the idea that our dropping the bomb has stopped other countries from using it?” Dray asked.

“Yes, I think that everyone learned from that,” Jon Hardesty said. Hardesty earlier had said he believes nuclear weapons have been a deterrent to war breaking out since World War II.

“I agree it was good to drop the bomb on Japan, but I agree with the view of scientists (at war’s end) that the dropping would start an arms race, and that’s what I regret about it,” Marci Collette said.

In both his fourth-period and second-period classes, Dray found the majority of students pessimistic that they can have any effect on an arms race.

Thorny Questions

“Even if we disarmed, we have the knowledge to build nuclear arms . . . the genie is out of the bottle,” Peach Robertson said.

“The Soviets make a bomb, and we always to match it. Why?” Jenny Rider asked.

“Yeah, but if we stop, the Soviets won’t stop, and then they’ll take over,” Andrew Sweeney said.

“You just say that because your father is in the Marine Corps,” Raina Rance complained.

“I don’t say that because my father’s a Marine,” Sweeney countered. “But because it’s the truth.”

“My dad is in the military but I don’t agree that we should have Star Wars (Reagan strategic defense initiative),” Teresa Larkins said. “It doesn’t make you any safer.”

“But I don’t see any solution,” Rider said.

“What about voting?” Dray challenged, adding that he personally hands a voter registration card to every 12th-grade student in his government/economics course on the day that student turns 18 years old.

“I’ll even mail it for you,” Dray said.

Retired Vice Adm. Edward Briggs, a member of the community task force, said the goal is education about the nuclear age, not simply nuclear education.

“It’s trying to show students why they should care about something that many say, ‘Well, it (a war) would be over in a few minutes so what can I do about that?’ ” Briggs said. “We’re talking about conflict resolution all the way through, whether over a soccer ball in kindergarten or between nations at the 12th-grade level. And we’re talking about a clear presentation of individual rights and responsibilities, such as to know how to relate questions of nuclear energy to the environment and (alternative) forms (of energy).”

The new curriculum also is having spinoffs within the district. At Muir Alternative School, teacher Don Weedmark set up a course on peacemaking for seven sixth-graders eligible to select an elective study.

“I’m trying to get across the point of respecting the ‘other’, whether that is a foreign student, a plant, or another race,” Weedmark said. “Also, I want the students to understand that an individual can make a difference but that responsibility is part of the (equation). And I want them to always be willing to learn.”

Weedmark had the students one day last month put together bits of paper into a final product that turned out to be a missile.

“They did not know what it was until the end, and then they talked about how people can make little parts of something and don’t know what the final product is, yet it can ultimately be an instrument of destruction.

“We’ve had some very deep discussions.”