Lessons from the Lonely Garden

SHARE THIS STORY:

When I learned we were assigned to work from home in March, my anxiety about the safety of my family lessened, and was immediately replaced with mild panic over whether our school garden* would be left to die. 

At first I was hesitant to approach my principal with the question, since I was certain she was handling a shifting set of urgent decisions and policy implementations. I was afraid if I mis-timed my request to go water the plants, the answer would be no, since there would be no time to come to any other solution. The weather was cool, so I waited a few days… and was relieved to be told I could go to campus, with gloves and mask if I had them (I didn’t) and to report the exact areas I went and what I touched so they could be disinfected.

My first visit to the garden, I was overwhelmed with how empty it was. The plants were plugging along, living their lives, but the absence of smiling faces, hands in the dirt, and pencils on composition books filled my heart with sadness. As I mulched the plants, I thought of how the students would enjoy this task. I missed the small arguments over who got to use the watering wand, and whether they could take cilantro and lettuce to the guinea pigs in Ms. Dopudja’s room. I even missed the sound of the basketball game likely being played by the small group of boys who rushed through their garden journals.

When I asked to take on the school garden this year, my only hesitation was  a fear that I wouldn’t follow through and do a good job, that I would get busy with other projects and not find the time to work on the garden, but the truth is, the garden came to drive the rhythm of our weeks.  It provided a connection for my students, who are learning English, to our school community. They took pride in it, and I loved seeing the instant engagement it provided for many. Working with my students in the garden was by far the most rewarding part of my job this year, even though our harvests were uneven. 

Now that the year is wrapping up, and I have spent eight lonely weeks in the garden, some lessons for education occur to me. These are a few.

Lesson 1:  Ask, and you might receive. For years, one of my personal tenets as a teacher has been that if I see something I want or need, I will ask. People can tell me no, but sometimes they say yes. In general, if we don’t identify and express our wants and needs for our classrooms, how can we complain about not having them? This year, I had monetary and other support from administration, a nonprofit, several teachers and classified staff on campus, and even parents I had never met. 

Lesson 2: A teacher’s goal is 100% student engagement. Plan for that, but if you get 70% engagement, and that engagement is inspiring and will clearly have a lasting impact on those students’ relationship with school, and you find yourself unwilling to deny them their fun and learning just because the other 30% runs away early to play basketball… maybe that’s okay, as long as you don’t give up on finding a way to get that 30% on board at some point!

Lesson 3: If the learning is authentic, you can let go a little bit of control, and things won’t dissolve into chaos. The first time I took my class out to see the new garden planters, a group of boys got very excited about the soil, and started plunging their arms deep into it, knocking a quantity of soil over the edge and onto the ground. I stopped them and let them know that the soil was important and not cheap! They walked inside filthy and maybe a little embarrassed. But in the spring, when the gardeners came to visit and put the same boys around a planter we were transitioning, and asked them to mix up the soil, eight boys stood around the planter elbow deep in the soil, churning it around happily, knocking almost none of it onto the ground. They planted  dozens of watermelon seeds in there. It was a good day.

Lesson 4: Sometimes things don’t work out the way you planned, and there is little to be done about it. In early March, we harvested our beets, the last of our lettuce, some last bits of broccoli and a few radishes and carrots, and enjoyed a salad. We planted our corn and tomato seedlings, and some watermelon and sunflower seeds, among other things. Since the school closure, kids have trespassed onto the empty campus and pulled up the remaining broccoli plants, pulled any carrots that were mature enough to eat, and destroyed some of the sunflowers. Many seeds I planted to replace things we harvested never sprouted as the weather heated up. There were few potatoes in the potato harvest. But then again, the kids aren’t there to see or journal about all of that, and we didn’t plan on school closing, either. What’s to be done when you have done what you can?

When I went back to care for the garden that first time in March, I decided to share it with my students by posting garden updates on Instagram. The word “amateur” comes from the Latin word for “love,” and the videos are surely amateur in every sense. The quality is questionable, but they give me a way to send my love out to my students. Some of them have found the videos. Most haven’t. Pretty much like the rest of remote learning. My hope, though, is that the garden has still provided a lasting feeling of connection to our school. 

*Our garden this year was funded by Kohl’s Mindful Me, through Phoenix Children’s Hospital. Brandon and Alyssa from Greenie’s Garden designed and built the planters and consulted throughout the year with us, even coming to work directly with the students in the spring. I am incredibly grateful for the learning and love my students and I experienced this year in the garden.

Amethyst Hinton Sainz

Amethyst Hinton Sainz is National Board Certified Teacher in Adolescent and Young Adult English Language Arts, and is constantly trying to live up to that standard! This year she will begin teaching at Westwood High School in Mesa, Arizona as an interventionist. She has taught junior high ELD and high school English in Arizona for 25 years. She has been a Stories from School blogger since 2012. Amethyst’s alma maters are Blue Ridge High School, the University of Arizona and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Philosophy led her toward the College of Education, and she soon realized that the creative challenges of teaching would fuel her throughout her career. Her love of language, literature, and culture led her to Bread Loaf for her master's in English Literature. She is a fellow with the Southern Arizona Writing Project, and that professional development along with, later, the National Board process, has been the most influential and transformative learning for her. As a board member of the Mesa NBCT Network, she works with other NBCT’s to promote this powerful process throughout the district. She supports candidates for National Board Certification, and loves seeing teachers realize and articulate their teaching and leadership power! She enjoys teaching students across the spectrum of academic abilities, and keeping up with new possibilities for technology in education. Last year she had the privilege of running our school garden, and will really miss that this year. She is currently learning more about social and racial justice and is striving to be an antiracist educator. She lives in Mesa, Arizona with her family. She enjoys time with them, as well as with her vegetable garden, backyard chickens, and the two dogs. She also enjoys reading, writing, cooking (but not doing dishes), kayaking, camping, and travel, among other things.