Back to Hot, Flat and Crowded Welcome Page

A ”Teacher’s Teacher“ Led a Session

Locate your pointer in the middle of the picture.  Click to enlarge it.
Use the web page back button to return the picture to its normal size.

More than 35 participants from AAUW Fremont Branch and the public attended the Hot, Flat and Crowded discussion session on Monday, November 29 at the Fremont Main Library.

David Ellison, well-known and respected Bay Area teacher, referred to as a “teacher’s teacher,“ orchestrated the book talk as only a practiced educator can – he engaged all 35 participants in a spirited and engaging debate.

“You should know,” said Dave, “ that when a teacher leads a session everyone will be able to have their say.”

At the beginning of the evening, AAUW Fremont Branch member Kathy Bray introduced Dave Ellison, pointing out that he’s really done it all in teaching.

He’s taught middle school, high school, college, worked as a principal and was 1996 Teacher of the Year.   Dave is currently fourth grade teacher at Kitayama Elementary School and an Argus columnist in his spare time.

After the glowing introduction, Dave started out by saying he felt it was a mutual admiration moment.

“I have been so impressed,” he said, “with the role AAUW Fremont Branch has played in sponsoring reading for the Fremont community.  It’s meant a lot to me.  I have spent my life getting people to read.”

He also passed along a grim statistic:   some 25 percent of Americans did not read one book last year.

To facilitate the discussion of Thomas Friedman’s book, Dave handed out quotes from the non-fiction work on slivers of paper.  He asked the participants to talk to as many people as they could about the quote so they could meet as many new folks as possible.

“Ah,” said one session participant, “like speed dating.”

His next mingling exercise was to hand out a page of quotes and have little groups come together to agree, disagree and generally discuss what the ideas meant to them.

Then, to sum up, the group passed along their perspectives on the book and its significance to them.  Here are a few of their thoughts:

• “What I got from the book is that today the environment and the economy are both unsustainable.  As a result, we’re in a fix and what the book is all about is discussing the fix and what to do about it.”
• “After reading the book I thought:  Can we keep going on like this? And the answer really is no.”
• “It’s clear that things aren’t working. Everyone has to put something into the kitty.  I think this is a good time to quote Kennedy:   ‘Ask not what your country can do for you rather ask what you can do for your country.‘”
• “I don’t believe anything will happen until a Pearl Harbor-like event happens environmentally.”
• “This is not just an American problem.  It’s a global problem. To solve it, we need to connect with global leadership.”
• “I’m afraid that bad things have to happen in order to wake us up.”
• “The truth is we can’t expect our leaders to do it all. It’s up to us to help bring about change  like the civil rights movement.  Things change when people act.”
• “We think of ourselves as God’s children and that we have a divine right to consume as much gasoline as we want.”
• “As Friedman says, we don’t need 12 scientists working in Los Alamos to produce a bomb.  We need hundreds of engineers and inventors tinkering in their garages like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.   That’s the way we can end up with clean, cheap electrons.

The consensus of participants was that this is a powerful book for our time and our city and that Friedman feels there is an urgent need for Americans to be the ones to address and fix these problems for the world.

Back to Hot, Flat and Crowded Welcome Page