How does out youth feel?

 I decided to do something a bit different for this blog post. I substitute teach as a part-time job to help my community that has a shortage of teachers due to Covid 19. I decided to ask my eighth-grade class how they think the future of the climate is going in their eyes and how they felt about the issue.  My class is a small class of 11 students and at first, no one wanted to share their thoughts. However, one shy student in the back of my class kept looking at me as if they needed to say something near and dear. She finally blurted out a statement regarding the Paris accord and how she felt so ashamed of her country that our leader would withdraw from the agreement. I was extremely shocked that a student knew what the Paris accord was but more shocked by how passionately she talked about it. She spoke as though her thoughts were totally her own and not her parents or her friends. Her comment about the accord jumpstarted a classwide discussion regarding climate change. When this discussion occurred I listened carefully to weed out thoughts that resembled a parental opinion and asked them to practice sharing how they truly felt and not how their parents felt. After I offered them this type of thinking a classwide uproar of thoughts regarding climate change happened. They brought up specific issues like straw waste, and plastic 6pack Gatorade ring holders not being disposed of properly affecting the environment. It however was interesting to me that the students did not group this type of waste as a total but rather thought of the waste in the water to do specific things to oceans and marine life in them. For example, they only associated straws going up inside of shark noses, and the plastic drink rings putting turtles in half nelsons in stead of looking at the whole picture of what plastic does to our earth.  After I told the students to group improper waste all together they began to see the bigger picture of how all of these things stacked up therefore severely affecting the environment. perhaps it was the thought of losing near and dear marine life to a child or maybe perhaps we should give our youth more credit in their ability to show empathy to their environment and to each other's opinions and values.