The Day the Earth Stood Still - NOT!

Last Thursday my phone rang at 11:17 pm.  Since I'm a teacher, the alarm goes off early (4:45 am), so I pretty much crash out by 9pm.  I was in deep rem sleep.

It was my brother.  He called to tell me that an 8.9 earthquake just hit Japan, and that a tsunami was making its way across the Pacific and was expected to hit the shores of California in about 10 hours.  He was concerned--he was at a friend's in Redondo Beach and they were deciding whether to evacuate.

Ten hours???  I was going to be on a boat in Long Beach Harbor in 10 hours! This would be the day of our whale watching trip.  This was the trip that the kids held a bake sale to raise money ($750).  This was the trip that we have been talking about--how to behave on a boat, what to bring, how to recognize a whale in the water.  We were well-prepared for the trip, but not for a tsunami.

I watched CNN for about an hour and learned that the tsunami would hit Hawaii at around 5 am, so I went to bed.  When I woke up in a few hours, the waves had certainly hit Hawaii and were still coming.  Online I found out that a "tsunami advisory" had been issued for the coast south of Point Concepcion.  That would be us.  Even though the waves would be no higher than about 3 feet. going whale watching just seemed to be a bad idea.  Imagine the worst case scenario--Fourth Graders Perish in Whale Watching Accident as Teachers Ignore Coast Guard Warnings.

So yes, we called off the trip.  The kids were disappointed, but many of the parents who showed up to school thanked me for canceling.  It was a tough call, but there were plenty of lessons to learn.

I seized on one of those great teachable moments to have the kids do research on the tsunami.  We watched videos of the earthquake and devastation.  We looked at diagrams showing how a tsunami is created.

And then my kids wrote letters.  They wrote letters to themselves in the future, talking about the day that an 8.9 earthquake halfway around the world affected them personally.  They sealed the letters and wrote, "Do not open until March 11, 2021."

Global events always affect us--we just aren't always aware of it.  But in the case of the great earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011, our world got a lot smaller.