YWP: 'Teach Me Climate'

[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.

Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.

Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.

Sun setting behind a field of dried grass — Photo by Sam Aikman/YWP Media Library

If the purpose of a K-12 education is to provide each new generation with a basic understanding of the world and the ways to maneuver within it, an argument can be made for the necessity of a curriculum that now includes climate change as a core subject. This week’s poet, Sophie Dauerman of Shelburne, champions this very idea, acknowledging she feels uninformed and ill-prepared to address the continually mounting challenges faced by Earth and her inhabitants.

Teach Me Climate

By Sophie Dauerman, 17

The first lab I ever worked in
was my backyard.

I was a self-proclaimed botanist,
taught by the wildflowers in the woods
and a soil-stained flower encyclopedia.

I researched the yellow flowers bursting
along the wood’s edge,
and noticed the book’s map of North America
said their range didn’t extend up to Vermont.

So why are they here? I pondered.
Isn’t it too cold?

At the age of 7, my environmental knowledge
was built on observation, not explanation.
I could see climate change sprouting
before I learned the word.

10 years later, I can tell you that the Earth is warming.
I understand the news stories about greenhouse gases,
solar radiation,
species migration.

But despite the flaming headlines,
I know more about mathematical slopes
and Shakespearean sonnets
than about the very Earth on which I live.

I’ve learned nothing more about the yellow flowers
still blooming in my backyard.

Our world is changing,
and it’s time for our schools to do the same.

I demand a climate education in school.

Teach me about the oceans, the trees, and the atmosphere,
about climate refugees, inequality, and social change.

Prepare me for catastrophic floods and political instability.
Prepare me for the future that’s forced upon me.

Teach me about the flowers in my backyard,
for I’ve lost my flower encyclopedia
and the Earth is already slipping away.