Introduction
Teaching is one of the most generative, selfless and inscrutable of human encounters, requiring that we leave ourselves behind and that we bring ourselves along, that we deny ourselves and use ourselves, that we surmount our personal histories and rely on them to understand personal histories in the making.
Children's hearts are quickly won and their imaginations gladly sparked by teachers who reveal in their own lives the virtues they expound. A teacher whose mind remains open to enchantment will enchant the young. Teachers or coaches who speak from the passion of their own unfinished explorations will inspire others.
I have learned about teaching in gardens: one an outpost at the edge of a nearly impenetrable and fecund forest in Northern Maine, another on a high altitude farm in the Adirondacks, a third in the suburbs of Denver and a fourth on the coast of Maine. In each, my presence has been that of a horticultural colonist. I have presumed to rearrange things, to make what I considered order out of what I took to be disorder. Of course there was an order of sorts in each of these landscapes before I plunged my trowel into the soil. It was the order that wind makes of leaves; it was the tangled bank in which the strongest plant is pre-eminent.
The raising of raspberries and the teaching of children became, for me, companion activities. The one informed my understanding of the other. The virtues of a gardener -- patience, realism, regularity of effort, careful and long-term planning, a willingness to prune as well as cultivate, a capacity to survive disappointment -- were, I discovered, the virtues also of a teacher. A child wants tending as much as a garden. The most beautiful strains of character or flower are often the most fragile and require the most careful cultivation. Neglect and a want of love are the greatest enemies of gardens and children.
The nurturance of living things is the particular calling of the botanist and the teacher. One must love growth to choose such work and be able to reckon his life in seasons. No more than flowers do habits of the mind and heart spring full-grown. What is required of a gardener or a teacher is an active and tireless labor that appreciates things as they are and realistically imagines what they might become.
Giving Children Words
We like to put our mark on things -- things that are unknown, that seem intractable, maybe hostile.
I remember rafting the Green River in Utah once with a group of teacher-colleagues. It was frightening at the outset. The river had secrets, moods, and tricks to play. We would pull our rafts up on the shore before a set of rapids and walk down to examine them. We learned their anatomy. We named their parts: "rooster trails," "holes," "tongues,” and "eddies," and in naming, tamed them.
We learn the incantations that give us power over nature: formulas, codes and lines of poetry. We make order out of the un-named and unknown.
Sometimes it is a matter of learning the names that have already been given. We call a rose a rose and live amicably with a gerund. But we also invent and transmute.
Young children, un-intimidated by lexicons and eager to get on with the work of setting the universe straight, make up names for things.
We listen as they begin to break the code of language itself, as they sound out their first words. The WH sound and the Y sound. Wuh...Wah...Whhh.... listening for the sense of it to emerge.
Eee... Iiii... suddenly it is there: Wha...wha...wha –Y...WHY! The excitement of it. The power of it!
I sit by the fire on Chesuncook Lake with three-year old Sam filching my corn chips and point to a plume of green feathers at the base of the fireplace. "That plant has a name, Sam," I say. "Do you want to know what it is?"
"It's a FERN!" he says, dissolving into paroxysms of delighted laughter and, while I look, amazed, at his father, pinches the last of the chips.
Middle aged children haunt the tops of staircases and scour medical texts in search of physiological revelation, reminding us that the words we best hide are, like locked rooms, the most sought out.
An aspiring young scientist makes up a nonsense phrase in order to learn the periodic table; a music student hums to himself: This is / the sym-pho-nee/ that Schubert wrote/ and never fin-ished!
We tame the world and take it home to lie down by the fire.
The more words children learn the greater their capacity to know and accept the world outside themselves. It is the unknown and the un-namable that frighten us into superstition, suspicion, and hostility. The dark shapes in the cellar, the people who live "over there", unfamiliar and unnamed.
But words do even more than this. They create. The incantations of children become the inventions that free the spirits trapped under the earth and in the stars. Whether they prove hostile or friendly spirits may depend upon the names they are given!
I think often that this is what schools, at their best, are all about: A unending treasure hunt for nature's hiding places and for a nomenclature of the human spirit.
Generativity
It is one of those memorable September days that, without the presence of children and fresh tomatoes would seem less remarkable. There is a fragrance of change, of things “past, passing and to come,” a promise of fruition. Walking to school for morning chores I pass Gregg, Winona and Evelyn on their way to the barn. They are filled with the adventure of their new school. Evelyn, at 8, spends every spare moment caring for animals. She is princess of the barn; the other day she found a newly hatched chick. An enterprising hen had, in protest of egg harvest and defense of her own procreative rights, found a quiet place to nest. Evelyn and Winona are looking out for the newborn.
A row of late raspberries right next to the greenhouse ripens late for the first time in several years. School children pick the sweet hoard as usually only the summer children do. The school building is strewn with buckets of flowers harvested against an omen of frost, to be dried, pressed and turned into lip balm. Our small community is, like Robert Frost’s, mower,
filled with morning gladness to the brim
even as the leaves color and fall, as frogs disappear into the timeless mud of pond bottoms. The harrow turns the stubble of fall harvest under the warm cover of dark earth as the children unpack their summer stories and new clothes ready to begin again. We come to life, like late-night celebrants while the earth prepares to sleep. The children will create this place all over again, heedless of seasonal imperatives, fleeced and feathered against the cold winds of winter, sledding where summer’s children sunned, skating where summer’s children swam.
Here the land teaches us all, practitioners and learners alike. What is the lesson in this paradox of beginnings in endings and endings in beginnings?
Perhaps it is the lesson taught this time by a determined hen and an insistence of raspberries, the lesson of generativity. To generate, to cause the coming into being of new life, of something that wasn’t there.
If this is a virtue in nature than why not in our lives, among our purposes. Isn’t this what brings us to teaching as well as to parenting? Not replication, continuity, generation upon generation alone, but the possibility of something new. Not just another one of us, but someone different from us who tweaks circumstance into new possibility. Not only mastery of what has been but the cultivation of what might be.
To educate, to lead out what is incipient and unique. Not to shape, but to allow. To make safe, as a greenhouse makes safe incipiencies that they will move to a world of unpredictable weathers. To make Rugged, Resourceful and Resilient
To make trusting so that the bud of possibility may open, so that a child will open rather than close his mind, his heart, his imagination.
Each moment here offers a thousand possibilities, insists that by advertence or inadvertence we choose. Each gesture in a classroom generates insight, interest, engagement, possibility or is lost. A child’s interest may come to life or lie untouched. A child’s faith in himself may flourish, lie dormant or atrophy.
Nature, we observe, is generative by indirection. It is not a careful and exact repetition that causes a species to adapt but the anomaly, the mutation, which sets a new direction. Perhaps there is something here which nature also teaches teachers. There is history on this farm welcoming the child who is different. In difference is the possibility of novelty; in novelty lies invention; in invention lies the possibility of a better future.
Children need roots; the deeper their roots, the bigger their hearts and the higher their aspirations. Children become securely rooted when the ground stops shifting beneath them and they can find and hold their balance. Here children put down roots. They walk the mountains and learn that they can find their way. They plant and return for the harvest. They learn to trust. Trusting, being rooted, they are then ready to come out of whatever hiding places they have brought with them and to grow.
To make new is the work of a teacher or a farmer. To create order from what is random, whether cells and neurons, possibilities, the compost of a garden or the compost of history. To bring into life an idea, a new configuration, a hypothesis, a willingness. To help a child learn words, formulas, conventions, patterns so that some day he might make a new one. To plant seeds. To birth animals. To offer a harvest when the hope of harvest was past. To sit quietly in a safe place and hatch possibility.
I A Ride In A Chariot
"The eternal mystery of the world," Einstein wrote, "is its comprehensibility."
That in itself must sound to many of us and on many occasions like a testament of faith. Lacking either Einstein's breadth of intellectual vision or his aesthetic sense, we are often perplexed by the random and apparently accidental events of our own lives.
Imagine then the task for a child. Or an adolescent. Especially an adolescent! How, at a time when change is the norm -- change in physical self, relationships, social mores as well as, in many cases, families and environments -- can a young man or woman hope to find a still and quiet center to things, what Conrad Aiken once called
Peace in the shining instant
The hard bright crystal of being, in time and space.
It is through a painting, an experiment, an equation, a poem, the architecture of a chord, the golden rectangle, or the orderliness of a conch shell that, as teachers and parents, we reveal this order. It is in the comprehensibility of these things that we discover the truth of Einstein's observation. Here we can show that the world has design and that man is not an alien within that design.
And so we teach the act of creating. For man's greatest gift is that he can image through his own efforts, this mysterious but comprehensible order. Creating in and from the world around us provides the most luminous moments in our lives, and remembrance of these gives us hope through which we organize our personal histories.
As teachers and parents we reveal this edifice of order room-by-room, day-by-day. Taking that tour with the young has been historically one of the most important of human actions. A good teacher aims to compose a class such that it evokes in the participant, like a good poem or photograph, that moment of surprise that leads to new apprehension and understanding. This is not to say that the teacher is a performance artist and that the pupil is his audience, though that may be a part of his technique. It is more a matter of composition than performance, a selection of materials, sequence and arrangement such that the pupil understands the order of what was only moments before, random. We seek – children seek – a harmony and unity of parts that will be pleasing to the eye, calming to the spirit and valid to the intellect. A teacher aims to encourage and inform this search.
Coleridge said that poetry was "the right words in the right order." Teaching is the right questions in the right order.
There are times when a good and imaginative teacher will intuit a particular mood or immanency within a class and serve as a midwife to its expression. Perhaps it will be at the conclusion of researches, which the class has carried on and which require now some dramatic combination -- an epiphany. Perhaps it is taking advantage of an unexpected event that has a broader meaning and radiance within the class -- seizing a metaphor.
Socrates writes of the journey of a soul before it enters a body -- in a chariot, touring the heavens where it apprehends, room by room, the perfection of things. It is the remembrance of this perfection, he tells his listeners, which encourages us to aspire to a measure of perfection in our own lives. A school is, at its best, that chariot.
Freeing Children
Much has happened in our culture over the past twenty years to help us care better for and about children. We are more able than were our forebears to understand the deprivations, losses and sadnesses of childhood -- the traumatic advertencies and careless inadvertencies of our caretakers. We have been able more and more to tell our own stories and we have understood in the eyes of our listeners that we are not alone.
In this measure we have increased our empathy as a society and, since empathy opens the way to knowledge and knowledge, in a media society like our own, is quickly transmitted, we agree today on certain things that our grandparents would not have so readily accepted. We have stopped being sentimental about childhood. We have stopped thinking that it is wasted on children. We have begun listening to children and to respect their separateness from us. In a very real sense we have given them their freedom.
Freedom for the child is not only freedom to, but also freedom from. And most significantly in our times that is a freedom from the displaced and projected needs of parents. Or teachers. The teacher who expects, perhaps needs, and therefore finds a class troublemaker, a princess, a star athlete in the making or a child “just like me.” If a teacher needs to have these roles played, children will be found to play them.
We say to one another when frustrated, “What are you trying to say?” We should also ask, “What are you trying to hear?”
There is a Sanskrit saying: "Our actions follow us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are." And our histories as well, making it often difficult to see others as they are -- especially when they inspire in our imaginations, a replay of that history. As teachers and parents we are particularly vulnerable. Many people come to teaching for what an objective observer might call the wrong reasons. Like the mother who wants a child to have everything she did not have, a teacher may act out year after year her own drama with hope for a happier ending.
The parent or the teacher who lives life again through a child is now very much under suspicion. And a good thing too! Of course a child should be protected from deprivations that we may have experienced, but he should not have to pay for this with his freedom. Neither the parent's nor the teacher's life should be a maquette upon which to model the child's, or an old drama cast with bright young stars.
Less obvious but no less at fault is the parent or teacher who seems to decline entirely the role of manager or director, the narcissist, for whom the child is no more than a genetic manifestation. Who has not encountered, at a concert, in a public waiting area or perhaps on a flight to Seattle, the parent with the nirvana smile whose child babbles and gurgles during the andante, tears up your New York Times or dribbles over the top of the next seat onto your lap. We wonder where the parent ends and the child begins and whether the child's apparent freedom is a real freedom. Ten or fifteen years from now will this parent be the one standing at the side of the stage, or rink or tennis court taking notes.
On the whole I would rather suffer the ruination of an andante than the subjugation of a child's spirit, if that's what it comes to. But it need not come to that. If we take care to help the child encounter, explore and embrace the world outside of ourselves and eventually herself; if as teachers or parents, we value above almost anything else, the emergence from the chrysalis with which we have been entrusted, a unique and separate human being. Then everything that we need to bring to this nurturance will come naturally, including mutual respect and an increase of freedom -- for both nurturer and nurturee!
Four Sketches from a Farm SchoolI
I
It was a perfect Adirondack summer morning as I carried my compost bucket to the barn. Only months ago from these newly green and fecund fields we harvested pumpkins, dried beans, carrots, sunflower seeds and 600 bushels of potatoes. Now it was all happening again. The peas were about ready to eat, the carrots and beans lengthening into fall, the potatoes secret beneath the soil.
Just before the bridge I switched the bucket to my other arm and looked at the piles of black gold that John had been piling up for the past several weeks, compost for this year's gardens, our leavings of a winter past now transformed to life-giving nutrient. This decision in behalf of compost is not different in kind from our decision in behalf of children – a decision for renewal, a belief that what might sour or clutter – whether in a young life or on a farm – can be made instead to regenerate life.
It was Bucky Fuller who coined the expression, Spaceship Earth. That was the time that we began to understand that resources were limited, our rivers were dying and that we were beginning to trip over our yesterdays.
We have to recycle things. There is no alternative. We have to make our refuse work for us, not bury it where it will haunt us. That is not just a fact of life; it is a metaphor for life. It isn't just old tires, it's old relationships, unresolved issues, old and inarticulate anger. It all needs to be renewable somehow. This is something we have to teach our children, and compost is as good a place to start as any.
Seeing children strewn amidst the grass with books and friends, growing through the seasons, I feel a sense of renewal. I take my example from them. I see them refreshed, their fingernails encrusted with summer earth, their boots sprouting bog plants after a long hike, their bodies healthy and their hearts open and trusting. That is renewal. That is turning what might have cluttered life into the soil from which new life springs.
II
We’re ready for frost. The rolls of garden gauze are out alongside the lettuce waiting for the weatherman’s first serious warning.
I’ve been told that ours is the highest working farm in New York State. At 2200 feet I can believe that. When we listen to the Eye on The Sky weather report we generally subtract ten degrees any time of the year.
Two summers ago we had just 30 days from frost to frost. What we have here is a sort of glacial moraine. There are monoliths among the rhubarb, good places to sit on an August day with a fresh pulled carrot. One visiting farmer from Coon Rapids, Iowa, thought it was downright ornery of us to try taking farming to such heights. I explained that we did it for the children. Not just to feed them but so that they can learn some lessons about how to do more with less. Less time, less sun and no chemicals.
Our children have been making compost since 1940. That old soil produced 600 sacks of potatoes this last September, enough so that we could give some to the local food bank.
Raising kids and carrots isn’t all that different. Childhood, like this farm school, is pretty hardscrabble at times. A lot has to happen if an adolescent is to step confidently and competently into his size ten Reeboks and then stand for something, have a point of view, have the resources stored away in his root cellar for the years ahead.
A child can learn a lot about himself from the land. The ten-year-olds have a worm farm in their classroom. Margaret was showing it to me the other day. All the leftovers from snacks, shredded waste paper and droppings from the aviary go in there, she told me. She dug down with her finger. That’s soil, she said. Next spring we can grow things in it. How do they do it? I asked. Very patiently, she said. They just keep at it all the time.
III
We have been dealing with an immigrant population here on the farm this year. Their presence has upset our old routines and we have spent more than a few hours and a few dollars trying to do the right thing.
It began about eight years ago when the beavers settled to the north of the farm out near the Back Woods Road. We weren't using the land and we really couldn't complain about a family of beavers moving in, but we did feel we had some pretty well established rights of easement in the area. The horse trail to our summer outpost went right through there. The beavers paid no heed at all to those rights, however. In a few short seasons they created a pond wide and deep enough to close the road. We shrugged our shoulders and started carting the horses by truck.
Then two years ago a few of their number migrated. Just packed up, closed up their lodges and moved to the other stream that comes down from Pitchoff Mountain, the one we got our water from. Come the end of summer we realized we were having a problem. Some people call it Beaver Fever; some call it Giardia. It's a little thing that gets into the digestive system and raises havoc. Because it's a microscopic cyst it's impervious to the purifying charms of chlorine.
We felt besieged. There the beavers were, camped out in the woods, building forts and contaminating our water supply. Not satisfied with cutting us off from our outpost they seemed determined to send us packing. We realized we'd have to drill a well so we brought in some water dowsers – three of them, one at a time. There was one site they all identified and so we hired a drilling rig and went to town. At 400 feet we gave up.
Then we brought in a scientist who considered magnetic fields, pulses from the Atlantic Ocean and gravitational anomalies in the earth. We drilled again and this time struck it rich. 30 gallons a minute. War with the beavers was put off once again. There was a time of détente.
Then this fall Leslie went out to bushwhack the ski hill so it would be ready for the first snow. What he found at the end of the road and just at the bottom of the ski hill was – you guessed it – a pond. Our neighbors had moved downstream and with an impressive degree of engineering know-how had created an elaborate system of dikes and dams sufficient to impound the whole creek.
That's when we called the town meeting.
Jack, whose grandfather is a five-star general, said we should shoot them. Leslie suggested trapping them. Larry thought that we should take out the dams, lay culvert and let the beavers rebuild over the culvert. Graham observed that the beavers had settled this area long before the first French trappers and that the first act of war had been initiated two hundred years ago in behalf of the beaver hat.
Finally Nancy reminded us that the first principle of this place is to live as harmlessly and cooperatively as we can on this land that we share with so many other living things.
We decided to set up a committee. Larry, who proposed the culvert, and Meghan, who is new here and looking for a good cause, agreed to be its co-chairpersons. Last week the committee members went out to the new pond to look things over. They were impressed. These beavers know their business, Meghan said. This is very sophisticated hydro-engineering. But there was a way, they thought, of taking out a couple of dams and a few dikes and draining enough water to make the ski hill accessible.
They did that and the water did drain. We got the brush cut and then the other day Larry announced that the beavers had repaired the damage and that the lake was back.
OK, that's it, said Jack. This is war. That afternoon after classes he and five other boys, barn-booted, armed with spears and homemade bows and arrows went out to have it out with the beavers. When the boys got to the lake they found it was covered with a thick coat of ice. They looked the situation over, called off the war and returned to school. Guess what? Jack said. We've got a new skating pond right by the ski hill.
No one is quite sure what the lesson is in all this. Neighbors can be difficult, someone said. Getting along isn't always easy. It's just like the world, Timmy said.
I guess I can't improve on that and I won't try.
IV
Here on the farm we're in a horse quandary. Amanda noticed the other day that Julie, one of our two Belgian workhorses, had kicked a sizable hole in the side of her stall. Weighing in at 1400 pounds Julie is no lightweight. Amanda, who is looking after her for this two-week rotation, weighs 85 pounds.
Looking after a horse is one of the responsibilities that a child has as a part of what we call barn chores. There are chickens as well. And sheep. And pigs. And goats and llamas. Taking care of the smaller livestock is a cinch. A little water, a little hay, a quick freshening of bedding and you're on your way. Not so with the horses. Every morning they have to be brought in to their clean stalls, watered, given a ration of oats, brushed down and then hoof-picked.
It was the prospect of hoof-picking Julie that gave Amanda pause. You get the horse to lift up its leg. Then you rest the leg just above your own knee and with a metal implement looking something like a bent screwdriver you dig out all the impacted and frozen mud from around the frog and sole. If the hoof and attached leg weigh as much as you do, this activity can be a little intimidating – especially when you are staring at what that hoof did sometime in the last eight hours to the wall opposite you.
Amanda is a trouper. At twelve she has climbed 10 of the local 46 High Peaks, gone off the 20 meter jump at the Olympic jumping complex and holds the speed record for her age group on the bobsled run. Amanda wants to write novels and she is storing up experience. She has also ridden Julie bareback and knows in her heart that her horse is a gentle soul.
The question remained, however. Why had Julie, gentle doe-eyed creature that she is, suddenly "lost it"? Larry, who teaches riding and who the children swear can talk to horses, wasn't surprised at the news. Neither Julie nor Linda, her harness partner, had been worked for quite a while. In the summer they pull hayrides and occasionally a plow or harrow, though more for the show of it than the practicality. But now it was January and they were bored, the way children sometimes are on a long rainy day or when they have a slight fever and their mothers make them stay inside. The barn is not the only building that takes a beating in the winter. The schoolhouse does as well. You know how boys love to dunk? And if there are no basketball hoops to leap to? Seeing if they can touch the ceiling, maybe pop a tile out of place, maybe jar loose the light bulb in a hanging fixture.
Larry brought the subject up in our town meeting. He proposed that we give Julie and Linda away to someone who would help them feel more needed and useful all year long, someone like a logger.
The children know how important it is to be needed. They take pride in the way they care for the animals; they take meaning from the fact that the animals depend on them. The animals have birthed young while the children watched. They have had illnesses through which the children worried. They are part of the family.
There is resistance to the idea of finding a new home for Julie and Linda.
"But what if Julie kicked Amanda instead of the stall?" Jack asks.
"Julie would feel horrible," Barbara says, " because she had hurt someone who loved her. The thing is," Barbara continues, struggling now to frame her thoughts, "that it really isn't in Julie's nature to do that. It would be because she was neglected."
This is a heavy thought because we all know Barbara's story and how she struggles to do the right thing despite a history that makes it sometimes very hard. Barbara too has kicked up her heels.
It is quiet for a while after Barbara speaks. We decide that for the time being an adult will take care of Julie and Linda.
It's a hard question that we are left with. Losing Julie and Linda would be like losing a part of our family. But if we can't care for them properly, if we don't have the time, the routine to do what needs to be done and there is another place where they would get both love and the attention they need – aren't we better to explore that possibility?
It's something to think about. Nothing is separate and discrete here. The restlessness of horses and of children is not entirely different. One art teaches us improvements in the other. It is even possible, I suppose, that the barnyard is our most successful classroom.
Contents
A Farm That Grows Children...........................3
The Art of Teaching.....................................41
Teachers At Work.......................................54
The Lucan .................................................94
The Principle of OZ....................................105
Raspberries and Children...........................114
Three Stories ........................................... 158
Reminiscences and Provocations.................177
The Lucan: Part I......................................193
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