Death Becomes Oil, Part 1: Teacher Training

September 19, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Back in 1996, when I was teaching at a variety of CUNY schools, simultaneously, including at one 2-year campus where I taught developmental reading to kids who possessed NYC high school diplomas but few educated skills, I had the brite idea of using a Jacques Cousteau article on global warming as a vehicle for teaching vocabulary and critical thinking on a subject larger than good grammar. In front of the class during that special session, as I explained the delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, between animals and plants, I mentioned in passing how OIL develops (of course!) from the decomposed physical bodies of formerly living same said symbiotically related (even to us!) plants and animals, thus the term fossile fuels, I can still hear myself joking… However, none of my students in that class were acquainted with these interesting OIL facts; rather, they were visibly disturbed by my inadvertent presentation of How Death Becomes Oil, And Is Therefore So Useful To Modern Life. “What did she say? What did she say?” Students broke into spontaneous discussion asides and shifted angrily in their seats. While they hadn’t been paying attention, I had morphed from their mild English teacher into a full-on mad-witch, betraying their fragile horizons with an incidental fact I took absolutely for granted. I don’t remember how I extricated myself from that particular room altercation; there were so many! Wait. I don’t remember why I started this New York anecdote in the first place. Ah. I wanted to write about Death, and its oily surfaces. But now it’s too late, and I’m cross-eyed tired, so I’ll have to sign off right here and write Part 2 next time. Pues, adios.

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