Half Moon Bay Beach Cleanup

Trafton B.

July 8, 2010 - 6:45 PM

In today's activities period, the Compost/Environmental Club teamed up with the Community Service Club and headed over the hill to Half Moon Bay for an afternoon of cleaning up Francis Beach.

Along the same lines as my post a few weeks ago, ‘What is the Aim High Magic?,' the spark in today's field trip lies in the fact that we teachers were just as excited as the students to get outside. We were happy about provide public service for the community. We were excited to spend a couple hours on the beach. And, most of all, we really enjoyed being off campus for an afternoon. One of the things I'm learning (as a teacher) is that there is a limit to the amount of information one can learn inside the classroom, and if given the opportunity to switch up your settings, you should take advantage of it every time.

The first lesson we had was as we finished our lunches on the picnic tables. Jason, who has been trained in the art of "Leave No Trace" principles, reminded us to throw away and recycle our garbage, and we had to be sure that we picked up every single food scrap. Leaving food scraps -- also known as micro-trash -- creates a very large ecological problem. It can attract animals, such as sea gulls, that like to feed on our human created waste. In coming to the beach, these animals leave their former ecological niche, which could cause their predators to follow them to the new area where we're leaving our food scraps. Before you know it we're responsible for moving an entire ecosystem to our beach. All because we were too lazy to pick up a few bread crumbs.

After lunch, we headed down to the sand were we donned rubber gloves and split up into two teams to tackle the beach in either direction. It was difficult trying to keep students focused on trash pickup when we were barely twenty feet away from crashing waves. I'll admit even I was tempted to jump in the water. In the end, however, we completed our mission. We found countless plastics wrappers, old plastic shovels, miscellaneous juice boxes and even an old buried sweatshirt that hadn't been worn in months from the look of its salty stiff fabric.

I personally enjoyed the beach because I was able to talk a little bit about the California coastal ecosystems without having to point to pictures in a book on or diagrams on a PowerPoint slide. In 9th Grade Science we just finished a few lessons on Invasive Species so I was able to point out Scotch Broom on the side of the roads, Tall Fescue near our picnic tables and the layers of Common Iceplant that lined the upper beach.

After all was said and done, through threats of being buried in the sand by the students, we picked up a hefty amount of garbage. I was shocked when I needed help heaving the bags in to the dumpster. It feels good to give back to the community, and I think the students agreed.