Activities for Lesson 2: Waste Is In the Eye of the Beholder

Time Required:  

• 2-3 class periods  

Materials:

• Jump ropes, hula hoops, or other fun exercise equipment (optional)
• large bottle(s) of cold soft drink
• bag of candy treats
• Simple “costumes” for Romeo and Juliet (hats, name-tags, capes, etc.), and a very small paper cup with about ½ – 1” of water
• a “note” from Romeo, folded into a paper airplane
• 2 laminated copies Romeo and Juliet script
• Visuals 1, 2, and 3 – overhead transparency or powerpoint slide
• classroom bucks, 6-8 per student
• student handout – 1/student
• Download: .doc files for Lesson 2: Handouts, Visuals, Answer Guides

Procedure

1. Announce that students will begin a study of an important contemporary issue – the use of our precious water resources – by watching a play about a well-known historic romance.  Ask for volunteers to participate in a short and very famous play about two lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Give the laminated scripts to the actors and give them a few minutes to read over the script and get into their costumes while you discuss the water use with the class:
2. While the actors are preparing, the class will consider a few preliminary questions about water use.
   • Do you think wasting water is a problem in today’s world? Elabo­rate and give examples. (Accept a variety of responses.)
   • What is a wasteful use of water? How did you determine that it is wasteful? (Accept a variety of responses.)
   • Why do people waste water? (Accept a variety of responses.
   • How do we try to stop people from wasting water? Why do you think we are successful or unsuccessful in these efforts? (Accept a variety of responses.)
3. When the class discussion is finished and the actors are ready, set the stage and prepare the class for the play:
   • Ladies and gentlemen, you have surely heard the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers of old Verona who died for each other rather than deny their love. William Shakespeare has immortalized their story in his famous play, which still has the power to move theater audiences to tears. But Shakespeare did not tell the whole story the story of how Romeo almost blew it even before things turned really bad. Ladies and gentlemen, we now present the TRUE tale of Romeo and Juliet.
4. After the performance, discuss
   • What did Romeo do wrong? (Romeo got Juliet something she could easily get for herself.)
   • Was Romeo right? Is water precious? Why? (Romeo was right. Water is precious.  We need it to sustain life. But that doesn’t necessarily make it valuable in this situa­tion.)
   • Was Juliet dumb to expect diamonds rather than water? Why? (No. Juliet expects Romeo to find her something rare and won­derful that she can’t easily get for herself.)
   • Why would Juliet rather have diamonds than water? (Accept a variety of answers, pointing to the idea that Juliet, and probably most people, think of diamonds as very rare and thus precious.)
   • Display Visual 1. Which is more valuable, diamonds or water? (It depends. What do we want or need the water for? How easy is it to get more water?) Explain that economists refer to this as the diamond/water paradox:  we say that water is more valuable than diamonds because it’s essential to life, but we don’t act that way.  Our Romeo and Juliet scenario illustrates that paradox.  Romeo gives Juliet something essential to life, but she’s not impressed and throws it back in his face. 
   • Would anyone other than Romeo rather have water than diamonds? Why or why not? (Again, it depends. Most people know that they can get water easily and so can everyone else. Ordinarily, then, they would rather have a diamond, which they can’t get so easily. However, a person dying of thirst would rather have water.
   • Do you think Juliet knows that water is precious? (Yes.)
   • Was she wasting water when she threw it in Romeo’s face? (Who gets to decide if it is wasteful? The value of water at that minute was related to its usefulness to Juliet for expressing her displea­sure. And she certainly didn’t have to worry about getting more. There was plenty of water in old Verona.
   • Would Juliet have acted differently if she had learned in school that water is valuable and throwing it in people’s faces is waste­ful? Why or why not? (Probably not. The most valuable use to Juliet at that moment was to throw it. No incentive at the moment encouraged her, say, to pour it into a flower pot instead.)
5. Step two in examining the diamond/water paradox is to answer the question of  why people would use something precious for an ordinary purpose, and why it doesn’t do much good for us to scold them about it or ask them to change their behavior?
   • To do this, students are going to need some money – classroom bucks.  In order to get the money, they have to exercise.  Quiet the cho­rus of groans by telling the students that you will pay them classroom bucks for exercising and after the exercises they may spend their classroom bucks at a snack auction. Set out the jump ropes, hula hoops, etc, and list acceptable exercises: jog­ging, jumping rope, twirling hula hoops, doing sit-ups, push-ups, jump­ing jacks, and so forth. Explain that the more students exercise, the more you will pay them.
   • Rules for the exercise period:
     • Exercise time will last for ____ minutes (3-5 suggested.  Set a timer.)
     • You may stop to rest whenever you want to and for as long as you want to.
     • You may change exercises whenever you want to.
     • While you are exercising, I will pay you for your efforts.
     • Put a sheet of notebook paper with your name on it on the floor near you before you start exercising.  I will put classroom bucks on your paper as 1 walk around and will tell you how many bucks I’ve put there.
     • You may not leave the room to get a drink or drink from a water bottle
     • You may not pick up the money from another student’s paper
6. When there are no more questions about the rules, ask the students to push all the desks to the sides of the room and to take their name papers to an exercise spot. (Or take the students outside or into a hallway.)
   • When the students are safely situated with room to exercise, start the timer. Go around the room, encouraging and paying exercisers. The purpose is twofold:  to make the students thirsty and to give them income to spend. It doesn’t matter how much money you distribute, so use it liberally (5-8 classroom bucks per student) to encourage students to persist throughout the exer­cise period and to make them very thirsty. However, because you want all students to participate in the auction, make sure that no student gets sig­nificantly more than anyone else.
7. End the exercise period. Direct students to pick up their classroom bucks and count them; then to move forward and sit on the floor in front of the snack bar. When the students are ready, bring out one glass of soft drink with ice, keeping the rest hidden. Say that you forgot the candy, but promise that you will have it tomorrow and tell the students that they may save their classroom bucks to buy candy then. (Without the candy, the students will tend to spend all their money on the cup of soft drink. Offering the promise of candy, however, provides an alternative for those who don’t want a soft drink and/or a reason for saving rather than spending all their money.)
   • Auction the glass of soft drink to the highest bidder. During the auction, keep track of which student is the second-highest bidder. Let the pur­chaser gloat a little bit while you discuss the following questions with the class
     • How valuable is a drink? How do you know
     • [To the student with the drink] How valuable is the drink to you
     • How much money did you spend?
     • How much money did you have? (Accept a variety of answers, but encourage the students to realize that in market economies such as ours the value of a product is determined by how much people are willing to pay for it.
     • [To other students] Were you willing to spend that much? Why didn’t you? (Solicit a variety of answers to show that people not only have different incomes, but also different tastes and prefer­ences.)
8. Identify the second-highest bidder. “Discover” a second glass of soft drink behind your desk and ask the second-highest bidder if he would like to purchase it for his bid price in the previous auction. After the drink has been sold for the second-highest price, ask:
   • Were the two drinks the same? (Yes.
   • Why was the drink worth more to the first bidder than to the sec­ond one? If the drinks were the same, why were they valued differently? (Value depends on the buyer’s willingness to pay.)
9. Bring out a tray with 10 to 15 cups of soft drink. Auction them and record the sale prices. Ask:
   • Why were the bids lower this time than in the previous two auc­tions?
   • What factors seem to determine how valuable the soft drink is? (It should now be more apparent to students that the determination of value depends in part on people’s expectation of how hard it would be to get more. As more cups of soft drink were available, the price fell.)
   • What would you predict would happen if I brought out 20 more cups of drink? (Prices would go down even more. Some cups of soda might not be purchased at all!)
   • [To the purchaser of the first drink] Supposing that you had enough classroom bucks, would you be willing to pay the same price for a second cup of drink? For a third? (Probably not. It is obvious that more soft drink is available).
10. Remind students that they can spend their remaining bucks on candy tomorrow—but only if they keep the secret about more drinks in the auction, and don’t tip off your other class.
11. Now turn your attention to how people use water, keeping in mind our analysis of the soft drink exercise. On what basis do people make decisions about water use? (People’s use of water depends on price and on their expectations about the future availability of more water.)
    • How much would each of you have been willing to pay for that first cup of soft drink? How much do you suppose people who have no water would be willing to pay for the first cup? (This will be difficult for some students because they will have trouble imag­ining a world without water—where that first cup is literally the difference between life and death. It might help some of them to think of a lost-in-the-desert scenario or of a real natural disaster such as the devastation wrought by the earthquake in Haiti 2010. What would you pay for a drink in these cases? You’d pay anything you had.
    • If water is so valuable that you would be willing to pay anything or everything to get it, why is the price we normally pay so low? (Note that there are two parts to this answer. First, we usually are not bidding for the first drink, and the 80th drink is not as valuable to us as the first one. Second, we usually are not worried about where or whether we’ll be able to get the next drink.)
12. Help students connect the two activities – the play and the drink auction. Ask:
    • What is the same and what is different about the Romeo and Juliet story and our activity involving soft drinks? (Encourage students to point out the obvious differences—water versus soft drink, dif­ferent uses for the liquid, and so forth; but then concentrate on the similarities. Emphasize (a) that the value, in each case, depended on the perceptions of the person involved, and (b) that those per­ceptions were shaped by personal preferences and tastes, and by the supply of the good.)
    • How could you change the Romeo and Juliet story so that Juliet would be overjoyed with Romeo’s gift, and the audience would find it believable? (What if they had been stranded on a desert island for two weeks?)

Closure/Debrief

• Review the paradox of water: Water is so precious that we cannot live without it; yet its price is relatively low because (for us) the supply is relatively great and the opportunity cost to get more water is low. While water is important, we have no reason to believe we won’t be able to get it when we want it. We turn on the faucet and there it is! In turn, the relatively low price that most of us pay for water reinforces our belief that there is plenty of water.
• Discuss:
  • Why does the value of water vary from time to time, even when the amount of water doesn’t? (Because water is like other goods, services, and resources sold in a market economy.  The value of water is not deter­mined by its physical characteristics but by the cir­cumstances and by people’s assessment of how much water is readily available. This is true for other things as well. Consider how the supply of certain works of art or baseball cards affects their price. In general, the greater the supply, the lower the price.)
  • Which is more valuable—water to irrigate crops or water to nur­ture a beautiful valley where people like to picnic? Water to grow lawns or water to wash cars? (Again, the answer is it depends. The appropriate response to this question is “To whom?” or “Un­der what conditions?”)
  • Why can’t we provide for all the uses of water that people value? (Water is scarce, like everything else. There is not enough water to satisfy all the uses we might put it to—and this situation is worse in some places than in others.)
  • Why do some people think other people waste water? What do we really mean when we say someone is “wasting” water? (People who accuse others of wasting water think that water is more valu­able for other purposes—other, that is, than the purpose for which the “wasteful” person is using it. What we really mean when we say someone is wasting water is that he or she is using water in a way that we think is not valuable, based on our tastes and prefer­ences and beliefs about water availability.)
  • Pose a series of questions regarding changes in people’s behavior. Ask:
  • Suppose someone you don’t know has a $100 ticket to a playoff game you’d really like to see, and he doesn’t go to the game. Is he wasting the ticket? (All you really know is that, in this instance, the person must have placed a lower value on using his ticket than on doing something else. It’s because you place a higher value on using the ticket than he did that you call his actions wasteful.)
• Display Visual 2. A farmer in grows rice in the desert in California. Rice is grown in flooded fields. The water the farmer uses to flood the fields is brought in by a huge, federal irrigation system. Much of the water evaporates rapidly; the arid weather conditions in the California desert regions dry it up. What do we know about the fanner who uses water in this way—a way that many people consider wasteful? (We really don’t know anything about the farmer as a person. We don’t know if he is smart or ignorant, what his attitude is about the environment, or whether he is rich or poor. All we can say with any certainty is that he must believe that water is readily available to him. We can also be pretty sure that he doesn’t have to give up much to get water; if he did, he probably would do something that uses less water. In other words, he probably has pretty good reasons for choosing to use water in this way.)
• Why does the fanner grow rice instead of crops more suited to the environment of this area? (Because the opportunity cost for him to get water is extremely low. Since it’s easy to get water, he chooses to grow rice—probably because he makes more money growing rice than he could make growing other crops. In fact, Texas and California, both very arid regions, are major rice producers.)
• Which of the following is most likely to be true about the farmer’s choice to grow rice?
  • He is likely to ignore protesters from the “Keep Our Canals Full” committee. (Probably true.)
  • The farmer’s father grew rice, and that’s all he knows how to do. (We do not know.)
  • The farmer isn’t very smart. (We do not know.) The farmer is generally a wasteful person. (We do not know.)
  • The farmer doesn’t stay awake at night worrying about getting enough water to flood the fields. (Probably true.)
  • The farmer probably makes more money growing and sell­ing rice than he pays for the water he uses to grow it. (Probably true.)
  • The farmer grew up near a lake and likes having water around. (We do not know.)
  • The farmer is likely to be responsive to a local government campaign to “Shut the Floodgates—Eat More Wheat!” (We do not know.)
  • If getting water to grow rice were more expensive, the farmer would consider doing something different. (Probably true.)
•  Why would people often use something precious like water for ordinary purposes, and why doesn’t it do any good for us to scold them about it or ask them to change their behavior? (People’s choices depend on the circumstances. Specifically, people’s tastes, preferences, and individual desires—and their perceptions of supply or how easily they can acquire something—deter­mine how much value they place on the resource in question. As long as water is cheap and easy for people to get, they won’t exercise a great deal of care in using it, and it won’t make much difference if we ask them to. We can change their behavior by changing (a) their tastes, preferences, or individual desires (which is what environmental groups and public infor­mation campaigns ordinarily try to do), or (b) the ease with which they can get more water (by raising the price, or issuing ration coupons, for example).

Assessment

• Distribute Activity 3 to assess student learning.

Download  Lesson 2: Handouts, Visuals, Answer Guides