Portfolio of Harry R. Marriner-Troubled Waters Lesson Plans

Troubled Waters Lesson Plans
Water Fables

It’s in a lot of cases a mindset. People just have their sprinkler systems running, even when it’s raining, you don’t really need to have that, plants have plenty of water.
--Dr. Courtney Hackney, Professor, UNCW Biological Sciences
Fables and parables have long been used to point out human foibles and foolishness, and to provide wisdom to the observers of those follies. World water usage provides many cases that could use a little wisdom. In the video Troubled Waters, Dr. James Leutze points out, “We take water for granted. We don’t give it a second thought unless something drastic happens like a drought. Only then do we realize how crucial water is to our lives,”

The amount of water in the world is finite--we have the same amount of water now that we have always had. But we use it as though we had an endless supply. We stand at the sink brushing our teeth while gallons of water run down the drain unused. We dump pesticides on the ground without realizing that those pesticides will eventually find their way into the water supply, poisoning our water as well as the pests. When the water in the river or lake is low, we suck water from aquifers, draining repositories that have held quality water for thousands of years, and draining them fast. John Morris, Director of the North Carolina Division of Water Resources, approaches a parable when he points out, “We’ve taken out more water than [the aquifer] can recharge and so it’s like having a big bank account and a small income, one day your banker calls and says, ’I’m sorry, son, but you’re going to be broke next week.’ Now the solution to that is that we have to gradually reduce the amount of water we’re withdrawing from those aquifers.”

Climatologist Ryan Boyles has pointed out a human foible that hurts us when it comes to water management. “We tend to have a shortsighted view of the availability of water," he says. "Unlike flooding, which comes quickly and goes quickly, drought sneaks up on you very slowly and leaves slowly... People say: ‘Oh, we’re never going to actually run out of water. We’ll get rain eventually’. The problem is eventually may be too long.”

Billy Ray Hall, President of the North Carolina Rural Center compares our attitudes toward conservation to another important resource. “Most people thought electricity was plentiful, no problem everything is fine. Fran came through and knocked down literally thousands of electric service. Electricity is a critical thing. We have to have it… If you get up tomorrow morning and don’t use any water, you won’t have to be talked to for very long about let’s find a way to provide water.”

Selfishness is another human trait that is exemplified by our uses of water. Those who live upstream get to the water first. What they do to it, and how much of it they use, affects not just themselves, but also everyone downstream who uses water from the same source. "The people at the top of the mountain, how concerned are they about the quality of water that they release, eventually, to the people [downstream]?" asks Allan Horton, Vice Chairman of the Deep River Coalition. "I would say that they haven’t been concerned about it to the degree they need to be, because it’s out of their neighborhood…they’re just dumping it, downriver. If they had somebody dumping upriver from them, they’d be a little more concerned about it."

The present and future consequences of our water use habits are rife for drawing morals to teach and to live by. A good fable or parable, due to its simplicity, clarity, and reading appeal, is a perfect vehicle for pointing out these morals. In this lesson students will write fables and parables that point out the unwise ways that humans use water, with morals to teach them the error of their ways.

Grade Level: Middle School/High School

Subject areas: Art, Language Arts, Earth Science, Character Development

Skill Areas: Reading, writing, identifying literary styles and devices.

Vocabulary: didactic, metaphor, moral, fable, epigram, personification, parable, upstream, downstream, conservation, aquifer, aquifer depletion

Class Time: Two class periods

Materials and equipment: None

Procedure:

1. View the video Troubled Waters with the students. Discuss the issues of water scarcity. Include in the discussions both causes (drought, waste, aquifer depletion, pollution, climate) and effects (disease, death, crop loss, water wars, upstream/downstream disputes) of water scarcity. Discuss with students where their water comes from (hydrological cycle, inter-basin transfer, aquifers, natural bodies of water, man-made reservoirs) and where it goes (aquifers, rivers, treatment plants, estuaries). Discuss how different communities in different situations deal with water scarcity (community cooperation, conservation, inter-basin transfer, desalinization, pricing, war). Lead the students to express their feelings about how the world now deals with water and the potential problems if the behavior continues. From this discussion, the students should derive many ideas for morals to write their fables about.

2. Read some fables with students, such as those by Aesop and LaFontaine, or Eastern fables and parables, such as the Parable of the Stonecutter. Depending on the grade level and amount of time one wants to spend, the teacher may choose to read longer works such as:

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

George Orwell, Animal Farm

Paul Coelho, The Alchemist

More modern fables of a political or sociological nature may also be explored, for example:

Viktor Frankl's Fable of Death in Tehran

Elie Viesel's Fable of the Just Man

Mark Twain's Fable of the Mirror

Richard Wilbur's A Fable

3. Discuss the fables with the class, attempting to get the class to induce the elements of a fable:

a. It can be a short story or a poem.

b. It usually has animals for characters.

b. It is didactic, attempting to teach a lesson.

c. It uses personification to express abstract ideas in human terms.

d. It has a moral at the end, either stated or implied.

4. Once the students understand the structure and purpose of fables and parables, assign them the task of writing one or more fables or parables to express important lessons that will make people understand the foolishness of wasting water. Present these steps to aid them in planning their fable:

A. From your reading, infer a moral that people should understand about their attitudes toward water.

Here are some examples for morals that can be inferred from passages about water usage.

Quote	Possible moral for a fable.
“Unlike flooding, which comes quickly and goes quickly, drought sneaks up on you very slowly and leaves slowly.” –Ryan Boyles	A flood barges in the front door; a drought sneaks up from behind.
“One rain doesn’t necessarily end a drought. It can take months of below-normal precipitation to create a drought, and it often takes more than one good rainfall to catch up.” -(http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dvn/ahps/dvn_drought_info.pdf)	A single drop of water does not fill a bucket.
“At Columbine High School, we had a tragedy that stunned everyone in the United States, probably in other countries too. But everyday 630 times that many children die needlessly because of poor quality water.” --Paul Simon	Water-borne diseases cause many deaths but few headlines.

Here are some quotes by famous authors that could be used as morals for water fables:

“Water is taught by thirst.” -Emily Dickinson:

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” -Benjamin Franklin:

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” W. H. Auden

“Trickling water, if not stopped, will become a mighty river.” -Chinese proverb

“Beside a stream, don’t waste water; even in a forest, don’t waste fire wood.” -Chinese proverb

The link below will take you to a diagram that in itself may suggest a moral:

The Hydro-illogical Cycle (http://www.drought.unl.edu/plan/cycle.htm)

B. Plan what characters they think will best tell their fable.

C. Plan a setting for the story, the complication (conflict), and the resolution.

D. Write the story, putting the moral at the end.

Extensions:

1. Create illustrations to accompany your water fable, using whatever medium you chose, including computer graphics programs.

2. Read some of Aesop's Fables. Choose one you think might illustrate human's attitude toward water consumption and retell it in that perspective. You may change the moral at the end if you think it will help. The sites below have some examples of rewritten fables:
Animated Fables (http://www.umass.edu/aesop/contents.html)
Rewriting a fable (http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/rewritea01.htm)

Resources:

Glossary of Literary Terms

New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/19981002friday.html?searchpv=learning_lessons#ic)