TCE Contamination and Cleanup Curriculum
Focusing on What Is Important
Author: Catharine Niuzzo Honaman
Editor: Stephanie Nardei
Time: / 3 classesPreparation Time: / 1 hour to read the supporting materials and to go over the lesson
Time is also needed to reserve computer lab or library for the last two days of the lesson
Materials: / “Tucson’s TCE pollution went unseen for decades” from the reprint May 1985 series of The Arizona Daily Star
Abstract
Students will begin this lesson by reading a pertinent article about the history of the TCE contamination and reviewing how to find the main ideas and significant details in order to write a summary. They will continue by doing research to answer questions generated in engage lesson, which will also help them to write a paper for the apply lesson.
Purpose – This is the explain lesson. Students will look for answers to the questions generated in the engage lesson and take notes correctly.
Objectives
Students will be able to:
1) Read with understanding texts dealing with environmental health issues
2) Learn and practice the skills of summarizing main ideas and picking out significant
details from texts about scientific matters
National Language Arts Education Standards:
Standard #1
Students read a wide range of print and nonprint text to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world, to acquire new information, to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace, and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
Standard #5
Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
Standard #7
Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and non-print texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
Standard #8
Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
Arizona State Standards
READING
Strand 1: Concept 6: Comprehension Strategies
PO 2. Generate clarifying questions in order to comprehend text.
PO 4. Connect information and events in text to experience and to related text and
sources.
Strand 3: Concept 1: Expository Text
PO 4. Organize information from both primary and secondary sources by taking notes,
outlining ideas, paraphrasing information; and by making charts, conceptual maps, learning logs and/or timelines for a research document.
Teacher Background
Knowledge about the historical background to the TCE contamination problem in the south side of Tucson and the current state of the clean up is important to be able to teach this learning cycle.
The lessons for social studies, government, and the sciences contain valuable and interesting information that provide an excellent background to the TCE contamination problem. Reading these lessons would also give you the same information that your students would be receiving in their other disciplines.
Resources and Related Websites
Activity
1. In this lesson the students will be doing research. It is important whenever they research information that they appropriately document where they found their information. For language arts classes they have certainly already had experience using the Modern Language Association format of citing sources. You may wish to review the MLA formats with your students before beginning this lesson.
2. Another area that is always important to review is how to summarize information from a source so that students are not just copying whole passages word for word and possibly unintentionally plagiarizing. In The Arizona Daily Star reprint of their series on TCE from May of 1985 there is a good background information article entitled “Tucson’s TCE pollution went unseen for decades.” This is a good article to use to practice summarizing, finding the main ideas and significant details, before the students begin doing their individualized research.
3. The article is not long. Read it aloud to the class (or have some volunteer readers help you out). Now have the class analyze and summarize the article with you:
The main idea of the article can be found in the headline:
“Tucson’s TCE pollution went unseen for decades.”
Now, you need to explain what this headline means. The first thing that you are probably wondering is, HOW did we get this TCE pollution?
There are two answers provided by this article:
1) A lot of industrial solvents were used by the military in preparing for the Korean War and by Hughes Aircraft Co. in manufacturing aircraft parts and electronic components.
2) TCE was used carelessly and it was sometimes even just dumped in the desert.
You are also probably asking WHY such a toxic chemical was used in the first place. Once again the article gives us two parts of the explanation:
1) TCE was not tested until the 1970’s when it was shown that it could “cause cancer in workers who handled it.”
2) “Only now is the magnitude of the problem beginning to sink in.”
To understand headline, you should be asking. “Where has this TCE pollution been found”.
Six active Tucson wells have been found to “contain TCE above the state guidelines.”
This brings us to the second main idea of the article, which is that the TCE problem needs to be cleaned up. WHO is going to do this?
1) The Air Force will clean up the areas contaminated by Hughes Aircraft Co.
2) The city of Tucson will clean up the city wells
Finally, and connected to the issue of cleanup, we should ask if TCE is still being used and where it is being disposed of.
The last two paragraphs of the article address these questions. It is not specifically stated who may still be using TCE as a solvent and where this is happening.
Even though it is known how dangerous TCE is, “users may still dump up to 2,220 pounds a month in Arizona landfills.” However distressing this figure is, the article does end on a slightly reassuring note. “Because no local landfill will take TCE or any other toxic waste, most companies have it shipped to a certified site in California.”
The students can use the information obtained from this article in the paper that they will write, but they need to go one step further. Since this article was written in 1985 they would need to contact the appropriate waste management office or city office to find out if the information about TCE disposal is still current. The guidelines may be much stricter now.
4. Now that the students have gone through how to summarize an article it is time for them to do their own research in your library and/or computer lab to find the answers to the questions that they first posed in the K-W-L organizational chart. What did each student want to know? After completing the above activity on summarizing your students should probably have two days to do their research.
5. One last thing to tell the students before they begin their research is that the paper that they will be writing for the apply lesson will be approximately five paragraph long. It may be longer.
6. The students will write using a traditional five paragraph expository theme format about the TCE contamination problem in the south side of Tucson using the information that they have researched. The purpose of the paper will be to explain some of the problems encountered with TCE in a specific community and to propose solutions to which both the individual and the government can contribute. The emphasis of the paper is to describe the problem accurately, using as much scientific terminology and evidence as possible. The paper is to have a neutral tone. It will be a vehicle for the students to demonstrate understanding of the problem and acknowledgement of the solutions, which are working.
Closure
It is important to remind the students that whenever we look at a problem, especially one that affects us, our families, our community, we always need to keep on one eye on possible solutions. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the difficulties and complexities of life in this very industrialized, chemical laden modern world. However, we must always ask what we can do to solve a problem. We become victims when we wait for others to take care of us and do not investigate the problem and the possible solutions ourselves.
Embedded Assessment
Student learning for this lesson can be assessed by how engaged the students were in analyzing the article about TCE contamination and how well each student conducted his or her research. You may wish to do a check of the information that each student gathered in order to write the paper for the apply lesson.
Homework
The students may wish to do additional research on their own time to gather additional information for the papers that they will be writing in the apply lesson.