I have not posted in a long while.   After the pandemic I chose to retire when my school refused to restart its programs of sustainablity.  For the past year I have been working with a group of concerned citizens to force the district to live up to its promise to become sustainable.  The promise was made in October of 2020 followed by a proclamation honoring the district for this bold move which supported the city's sustainability goals.  

I will post more about this as we move forward.  

Today I was reminded that each day we meet children who wear a happy face despite some overwhelming realities.  I was alone in the library shelving books when a first grader arrived.  She checked her books in and carefully placed them on the sorting shelves.  As she took her position looking for a book nearby, I asked her if she had a good Thanksgiving.  "Yes," she said, hesitantly.  Wondering where the hesitancy came from I probed a bit.  Did you have Thanksgiving with Mom and Dad?  What followed changed the rest of my week. 
"Well, it is just that my family has lots of fights, so we can't all be together at the same time." Then she explained how she had spent time with Mom and then with Dad, but woven in was the narrative of "big fights."  Sometimes grown-ups can act more like children than children, and it is so sad that many children suffer through adult behavior that reflects all that we are trying to help our children learn to eschew.

Her demeanor and the expression of the depth of her sadness over what had taken place over Thanksgiving  lead me to change the Native American story I haad planned to tell this week in celebration of Native American month.

I told the Pueblo Tale, A Heart Full of Turqoise, which I learned from Joe Hayes when I lived in New Mexico.  I used the story with the children whose parents had come to the Clovis Carver Public library to learn how to parent.  Many were mandated by the court to attend because they were abusive.  I told this story the first night because it is highly engaging as children participate in the story and learn to sign for the things as indigenous Americans might have done.  

It is a bit brutal.  At one point in the story the good giant takes his hunting knife and kills the evil giant.  He cuts the evil giant "from his navel to his nose" exposing a heart full of thorns and cactus burrs and prickly things. The children look horrified, but the story doesn't end there. The good giant reaches into the evil giant's heart and removes them.  Then he pours in the finest rose quartz and turquise from his medicene pouch into the empty heart filling it. The good giant sews the evil giant back up, and when the evil giant wakes up HE becomes the protector of the children of the Pueblo.  Those children asked for that story every week for the 12 weeks of the program.  In the end I understood what the children saw in this story that they desperately needed to be true. They found hope that their parents could also be transformed.

When I told the story to third graders today I asked them why they thought the story was so powerful.  It amazes me when children this young get the message so clearly, and while they do not use words  like "ressurection" or "transformation"  they are quite capable of expressing the deep meanings of literature.    They told me enthusiastically that the evil giant turned good.  You can't ask for more than that.  

Traditional stories have deep and layered meaning that is important for us all to hear, share and retell.  These stories give us hope and sanity in a chaotic time of pandemic and divisions in our society. The children who listen so intently in front of my storytelling rocking chair give me hope that the future can be different (transformed) from the past!

Where Plants Come From

We had eager garden helpers on Friday!  We searched for and found a pinecone to turn into a bird feeder.  It is always fun to make this project with children.  We slather the cones with lard, then pat the seeds into the lard liberally (and onto the floor and surrounding table).  We use cotton twine to tie to the top of the cone so that it is easily hung in a tree or bush.  

We then talked about some of the seeds and berries in the garden and who benefits from leaving them rather than "cleaning up the garden"  We discussed the birds that migrate and those that stay behind in winter.  The kids were particularly interested in the Milk Weed --Asclepias Tuberosa!  It makes the most remarkable and orderly organization of the seeds inside the pod!

Inside a Milkweed Pod

Monarchs sipping nectar

When we pulled seeds out they were fascinated by how light and soft the silk around them is and we talked about the many ways that plants get planted.  They were quick to point out that birds eat them and poop them out, but they were shocked by the idea that wind, rain or even other animals can plant seeds as well.

All this was in the name of fun -- not one mention of what the kids had to learn!  I will wager that they will remember this even without any attempt to teach because they were fascinated.  Other questions that came up were;  Why are all those pine needles on the ground in the garden?  What are those purple berries that look like blue berries?  They were excited when I told them that they are poisonous to use, but not to the birds.  HOW come?  These are real questions and when a child is curious it builds their ability to critical thought.  HOW many teachable moments are lost to the corporations who script the lessons we must teach with "fidelity?"

Lawns are the enemy!

Westmeade works to be a sustainable community!  As part of my personal journey, during this time of sheltering in place,  I have been reading Douglas Tallamy's "Nature's Best Hope" which explains why lawns are an environmental disaster and offers how we can change that! 

Here are the five reasons we should rethink our lawns!

1. Lawns displace the natural world! use two times the land area of all parks and reserves put together in the U.S.  They have wiped out the natural wildlife corridors that once existed in our landscape.  We add 500 sq. miles of lawn every year!
2. Water use!  In the east 30% of our water supply goes to irrigation of lawns while in the drier west it is more like 60%.  That is 32 gallos for every person EVERY DAY!
3. Chemicals.  
• 40% of all lawn chemicals we use in the US have been banned in other countries because they cause cancer.  A big problem for pets and children who play on the lawn regularly!
• 40-60% of these chemicals end up in our ground water and streams where they go on disrupting that food chain by killing plants and animals in the water.
4. Time. We spend 3 billion collective hours on our lawns every year!  Think what that would look like if it were invested in growing food and perennials that keep the ecosystem healthy, store water and put CO2 back in the soil.
5. Lawns are not productive!  They don't 
• produce as much O2 as the native plants which it replace
• produce food, 
• provide habitat (especially for native bees), 
• store water effectively or cleanse it as it is returned to the aquifer,
• sequester CO2
• or create soil by pulverising the bedrock as would perennials and trees do. 

Ponder this and tomorrow we will see what we could do differently!

Nature will nurture,

Soon I will be giving our families things that Warner Park Naturalists are designing for us to do with our kids in our own backyards or parks!  This poem by Mary Oliver is exactly what happens when we focus on the natural world!

"This morning, at waterside, a sparrow flew 
to a water rock and landed, by error on the back 
of an eider duck;  lightly it fluttered off, amused.
The duck, too was not provoked, but you might say,
was laughing,

This afternoon a gull sailing over 
our house was casually scratching 
its stomach of white feathers with one 
pink foot as it flew.

Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us to us, if we
only look, and see! 

The three gifts that I would like to give to my young friends are the gifts of curiosity, wonder, and self acceptance.   I want them to turn to reading when they explore their world. I want them to turn to reading to ferret out the worlds wisdom.  I want them to turn to reading when they doubt themselves find that others have had the same struggles. zero waste school with a focus on nature education. I want my young friends to love every moment of the exploration. If they do these things they will have the observational and critical skills to live well and solve problems in the real world.  Virtual worlds are fine but our attention to them and has left us fraught. It is, in part, this recognition that drives us as we move to be a

NOW I worry that we force children to abandon the very things that make them children. We force their teachers to abandon that wonder of reflective time with children for a more focused, forced and formulaic approach to learning. Some of this push has been helpful for teachers to learn better methods of teaching and questioning, but the constant collection of data and the push to have all children achieve at the same level (determined by the chamber of commerce and its educational report card) is destructive.

I am writing this because the mother of a 1st grader (the kind of parent you love to have--one that is so engaged and supportive, well educated and wanting the very best for her child) was utterly distraught as she read a note about how her student was falling behind...

I encounter this child daily in the library and I want that parent to stop worrying. I want his teacher to stop worrying. I want them all to be able to enjoy learning together. The book "How to Raise a Reader"points out just how many of the things we have been told about reading are simply not true.  Reading early does not necessarily indicate much about a child's reading success.  So relax.  If your kindergartner isn't reading stop worrying.  We used to teach real reading in 1st grade, but now we push it out to ever younger populations.

I was the kind of child who would have engendered such a note, but when I was in 1st grade parents didn't get such notes.  As a young reader I saw no point to read the books I was being handed at school.  They were not nearly as engaging as what I was hearing at home in the evenings.  As a family we read books like "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" every night before bed . The basal readers of my childhood were nothing short of hideous! I lived in a rural part of Iowa, and there was no library in our town so the only books available for me to read were those from school like the Dick and Jane series of readers.

I hated reading until we moved to California and I went on bi-weekly field trips to the public library. My lovely new school did not yet have a library, so believe it or not we were swept away to the public library where I found a very old copy of "A Child's History of England" It was the first book I chose and read on my own. I loved it!  How could a non-reader go to a fluent one in such a short amount of time?  It is part of what makes learning so appealing to someone like me.  It is not linear!  Things that have been planted and are lying dormant can suddenly spring to life and surprise everyone, even the young reader.

I had the time and space and opportunity to find my place in education, to become a reader to not feel the sting of judgment at the age of 9!  What we do to children when we allow corporations to sell us everything we need from programs to workbooks to formulas for education is utterly antithetical to the transmission of knowledge. This kind of "education" may make some people wealthy, but it devalues teachers who watch as thousands of dollars go to expensive subscriptions for computer programs.

Someone I love and honor posted a meme.  It is not significant what the meme said.  What is significant is the fact that the meme was completely false and generated by someone knowingly creating it with the intent of promulgating misinformation on social media.

This meme has been picked up and published and re-published across the internet adding to the culture of those who say, "you have your sources and I have mine"  The internet has been a force for good in many instances, but fearfully it has also allowed the promulgation of malicious misinformation.

I responded to the meme by asking, "If you knew that this were false, would you publish it anyway."  The response I got was not a thoughtful one. "We are not to comment on each other's posts. I have honored that."  So we are to live in silos of belief.  If I believe the earth is flat --- so be it.  Do not engage me with information to the contrary.   This is a huge problem for someone who grew up, completely enamored of Jefferson's words, 

"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."                                                                                                                     - Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, December 27, 1820

But what if reason is not left free to combat error?  What then?  Jefferson never expected a world in which a lie could simply be repeated enough to win the day.  How did we arrive at this point?  I remember studying history and being fascinated by the role of propaganda in the rise of Nazism across Europe.  I remember thinking in a sort of naive "American Exceptionalism" way -- That would never happen here because the press would expose such a lie early and often.

Now a year into Trump's presidency I am disabused of such a notion.  The president simply says whatever is expedient at the moment and changes his statements depending on current perceptions of his base.   Our press has done a good job of exposing these lies, but the president has marginalized that with has his own network (Fox)  and his constant  tweets obfuscating and producing a confusing string of words.  We are called on to simply believe the most recent tweet.  We are not to look into the past tweets to compare.

Early in the campaign, I noticed these memes and tried to track them down to confirm their veracity.  I couldn't find their source.  It was so hidden that one could not find the original writer.  Some of these were particularly egregious, like the one about the Pizzeria in D.C. where Hillary was supporting child trafficking. Another report which had an "FBI agent suspected in Hillary email links found dead"  This one turned out to trace to  the Denver Guardian.  In checking on the Denver Guardian I discovered that it wasn't a real site at all. The Denver Guardian was nothing more than a web site with links that did not work, with no way to learn who was responsible for it.  It even had a fake street address.  So the information was created for the sole purpose of misleading and getting people to click on other fake news stories.

How do we fight this kind of thing in a world where my dear friend says he doesn't want to hear anything that might contradict what he believes?  Perhaps you are saying that I do the same.  I assure you that is not true.  For example when I see a meme or post that I really want to be true, my go to thought today is to check it out before I repost it or forward.  I acknowledge my bias to be sure, but I want to know the truth beyond that bias!

INTENTIONALITY - and the four "R"s - REDUCE, REPAIR, REUSE, AND RECYCLE!

What does repairing a Reynolds Aluminum Box have to do with the School Garden or sustainability?
This question which is often accompanied by a quizzical look.  One of the biggest problems with making our world more sustainable is that our entire society is based around two things; consumption and convenience. 

I was cleaning the pantry because we had a wee mousie in the housie!  I picked up the box of aluminum foil (which I try to use sparingly and recycle when it gets used). The roll of aluminum immediately fell out of the box exposing that both ends of the box were broken.  I remember this moment of frustration from many previous encounters with this box.  I am at a turning point.  Either I am going to ditch this nearly full roll and go out to buy a completely new one (which has the potential of being equally quickly broken)  or I am going to have to repair the box making it possible to use up the remaining foil. 

I immediately started weighing the value of my time versus just getting a new box.  By now you are probably rolling your eyes and maybe even you have stopped reading.  But let me encourage you to assess things in your own life in this same intentional way.  If I throw this box away I will at least put the aluminum to be recycled.  That recycling will cost effort, time, and money.  I do not have the sophistication to determine exactly the cost comparison, but between my time/recycling foil/getting a whole new box. What I do know is that if things are going to be sustained we need to add INTENTIONALITY and REPAIR TO THE repertoire of things we just take for granted.  We cannot continue to live for personal convenience and gain alone.


This weekend I was dying for a coffee.  It was pouring rain (the remants of Harvey), I had gotten wet and for the first time since last June, I felt chilled.  I pulled into Dunkin' Donuts.  I was ordering my coffee, when I realized that they put their hot coffee in Styrofoam.  OOOpps!  I quickly changed the order to iced coffee....not what I had envisioned and explained to the clerk WHY I had changed my order.  When she tried to hand me a straw with my iced coffee I pulled out my stainless steel straw and explained how bad straws are in our environment.  Then when I came home I contacted the website and suggested that they switch to paper cups for the coffee, and use paper straws....Again, it is a small thing, but the beaches are made of small bits of sand (and now thanks to us - PLASTIC!  
We must become INTENTIONAL, PEOPLE WHO REDUCE  REUSE, RECYCLE, AND REPAIR!