Reflections While Gardening

"Reflections While Gardening" is published on the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) website.

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Teachers Need Soup

Teachers, you need soup.

Good soup. Immune-system-bolstering soup. Vitamin-rich, high-protein, thick-with-veggies, bounce-back-from-long-days soup. Homemade soup.

If you think you’re too busy to make soup during the school year, think again. This over-scheduled, corner-cutting working mom makes a vat of soup every Sunday afternoon (and lives off of it all week long).

First, one caveat: quick soup is still slower than boxed pasta or a frozen meal. You soup will be ready about an hour after you start cooking it. Fortunately, you can grade papers for most of the soup’s cooking time.

Second, please don’t expect gourmet soup. I’m an over-scheduled, corner-cutting working mom. This is survival soup, people. If you want foodie soup, come see me over winter break.

Third, all soup is pretty much the same. Soup recipes follow a similar 3-step template. There are many delicious permutations – this one is really simple and will perk your immune system right up.

WINTER ROOT VEGETABLE SO…
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Monty Python, Matt Damon, & Teacher Powered Schools
By Megan Olivia Hall

When it comes to film characters, I’d say I most identify with Dennis the Constitutional Peasant from Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. Well, Dennis and his nameless mother. You remember the scene where King Arthur comes upon two peasants mucking around in the fields, and they engage him in a political debate? My favorite line:

Dennis: I’m 37! I’m not old!

Just kidding. Although I do like it when Dennis says this. I just turned 37 and was starting to feel old. Problem solved by Dennis. Here is my actual favorite line:

Dennis’s Mother: I didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

Like Dennis’s mother, I embrace the delusion that I’m working in an autonomous collective. I’m not – I teach within a very large, very hierarchical school district – my work is in no way autonomous. By the grace and mystery of the universe, my teacher colleagues and I occasionally …
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I’ve been imagining happy biology students. Indulging in summertime rest – feet up, ice water in hand – I love looking forward with optimism. When I imagine effervescent 14-year-old biologists, they're talking. In Designing Groupwork, Cohen and Lotan note research showing that learning is significantly related to talking on-task. I’d love to get my students talking next year, but figuring out how to group them has always been a stumbling block for me – it’s a job that’s time-consuming and riddled with potential potholes.

Then I read Sarah Brown Wessling’s blog post on making magnets for student grouping. She sprayed black board paint on business card magnets, and then wrote a student name on each magnet. Sarah keeps the magnets on her white board; this allows her to moves student seamlessly from group to group.

I wanted to try Sarah’s idea, but …

Megan + paint = disaster.

So I found adhesive chalk labels and stuck them on business card labels – a perfect fit!


Come Sept…
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