Foster Dickson's Blog, page 53
January 22, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
Next week, I’m taking two-dozen students to Troy to hear Sylviane Diouf at the university’s annual Mitchell-McPherson Lecture. Diouf is a scholar whose 2007 book Dreams of Africa in Alabama tells the story of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to enter the United States, at Mobile Bay, long after the international slave trade had been outlawed. In preparation for the visit, I’ve been reading her book and sharing some of it with students who’ll hear her speak.
[image error]For me, what has been compelling to learn from reading Dreams of Africa in Alabama is how much I didn’t understand, or rather had never considered about slavery. There is the simple mainstream conception: black people were owned as property by white people and were forced to work very hard under threat of violence, and that was wrong. Though my understanding is more developed than that, reading this book opened my eyes to how complex every aspect was: legal, economic, governmental, social, local, tribal, racial, emotional, social, personal, geographic, hygienic— from the enforcement of international laws on the high seas to how clothes were worn on the body and how hair was cut. The complexity is staggering when the realities of the slave trade and slavery are brought into fuller focus.
In her book, Diouf describes how the more than one-hundred African people who were brought to Alabama from the west-African port of Ouidah experienced American slavery as few other people did. They endured the Middle Passage right before the Civil War, were assimilated as the “peculiar institution” was crumbling, then were emancipated along with millions of African Americans, all within a fairly short period of time. After the Civil War, as other freed slaves struck out in search of lost family members, they tried first to return to African. When that was impossible, they made the best of their circumstances, being stuck in a place that was undesirable, unpredictable, and frightening to them by forging their own unique communities in the southern parts of the state.
Although the dense academic treatment in Dreams of Africa in Alabama requires a reader’s attention and effort, its lessons have been well worth it. The twenty-first century is a time of reckoning for long-standing injustices and neglected history, and if the cultures of the Deep South clash with only a half-understanding the issues we’re quarreling over, the outcomes will be as undesirable as the quandaries. Learning everything that we can about our past is necessary if we’re going to achieve some measure of truth in this culture that has long relied on myth. Next week, my Creative Writing students and I are going to take in a few tidbits of truth, what we can gain in an hour-long lecture. I hope that, even if you can’t make it to Troy, Alabama next Monday night, you’ll consider taking in a few tidbits of your own wherever you are.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read previous posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
January 20, 2019
January 18, 2019
January 17, 2019
#ClosedRanks @ Homewood Public Library, January 22
The event is free and open to the public.
Books will be sold and autographed.
January 16, 2019
#Poetry on The Plains: Third Thursdays in Auburn
Because of its understated prominence in our culture, poetry could be called “the other Southern literature.” When most people use the term Southern literature, they mean fiction – Faulkner or To Kill A Mockingbird or Flannery O’Connor’s short stories – or perhaps stories from real life like those told by Rick Bragg or Kathryn Tucker Windham, but the community of poets and poetry readers in the South hangs right in there, like a hair in a biscuit. In fact, within the position’s thirty-year history, four of our nation’s past Poets Laureate have been from the South: Natasha Trethewey from Mississippi, Charles Wright from Tennessee, James Dickey from Atlanta, and Robert Penn Warren from Kentucky. So it shouldn’t surprise any Southerner to find out that the stirrings and machinations of poets and their performances aren’t far off. We may not see ads for poetry books pop up during Duck Dynasty reruns, and there may not be a poetry section at Bass Pro, and the ballfield concession stand may not have poetry books on the counter next to the big jar of pickles, but it’s still there . . . for the folks who are willing to see it.
Dating back six years now, to January 2013, poet and teacher Ken Autrey’s Third Thursday Reading Series has brought poets from all over the nation into “the loveliest village on the Plains”: Auburn, Alabama. Autrey is an Auburn native, who got educated, lived and taught, wrote and published his poems, and came back home after retirement. According to the bio that was published when he won the Longleaf Press chapbook contest in 2013:
Previously, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, a middle school teacher in upstate New York, and a writing instructor at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. In 1996-97 he was a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan. In 2012, he conducted summer writing workshops in Guangzhou, China.
The Third Thursday series originally began at the Gnu’s Room bookstore and was coordinated by owner Tina Tatum and her assistant Jason Crane. After the bookstore moved and later closed, Autrey and another poet Keetje Kuipers, who was then at Auburn — the two were also neighbors — decided to pick up the series and continue it, first for short stint at the Bell and Bragg Gallery, near the original location of the Gnu’s Room. By 2014, Autrey and Kuipers worked with Scott Bishop, the education director at the Jule Collins Smith Museum, to have a more permanent location. “It really has been a wonderful, cooperative endeavor,” Autrey told me.
With the museum as a partner, the series has also grown through funding assistance from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and Auburn University. Rose McLareny and Rajiv Mohabir have been among the university faculty who have been particularly supportive.
“We feel good about the way it’s going,” Autrey said, then added, “We certainly encourage students from Auburn to take advantage.”
To date, the Third Thursday series has held nearly sixty readings, some featuring groups of poets rather than individuals. About the readers, Autrey said, “We try to feature local poets, some poets from elsewhere, some fly in from around the country. It’s a balance between nationally known people and strong local poets.” Featured poets in recent years have included Barbara Wiedemann, Peter Huggins, Melissa Dickson Jackson, Madison Jones, Kyes Stevens, Frank X Walker, Tina Braziel, Lauren Slaughter, Natasha Trethewey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jeanie Thompson, and Adam Vines, with workshops conducted by Jericho Brown, Garrett Hongo, and others.
[image error]The Third Thursday Reading Series restarts for 2019 with tomorrow’s event— Thursday, January 17. The readings start with an open mic, then shift to a featured poet. This month’s is Rebecca Gayle Howell, a Writer-in-Residence at the Hindman Settlement School who is also the 2018 Egerton Scholar and the poetry editor of the Oxford American. Copies of her book Render/An Apocalypse will be available for purchase.
Other featured readers through this winter and spring will be Landon Godfrey in February, Janine Joseph in March, Adam Vines in April, and Gregory Fraser in May. Last fall, the program had Justin Gardiner and Rajiv Mohabir, both from Auburn, in August, followed by Melissa Range, Camille Dungy, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Ann Fisher-Wirth.
To follow the series, you can check the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts calendar or Like the Facebook page.
January 15, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
I would argue that no person has done more to improve life in the modern Deep South than Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps someone else could argue for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Depression-era New Deal, or further back, Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery. But I would argue for King, whose birthday is today. (He would turn 90, if he were still living.)
Despite the broad range of intelligent and skilled men and women who comprised the leadership of the Civil Rights movement in the South, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. whose calm charisma, earnest and expressive face, and wonderfully rolling cadences embodied the ideals of the movement for public consumption. From the early successes in the Montgomery Bus Boycott to his last stirring speech in Memphis, King provided the imagery, both visual and verbal, that were the impetus for many Americans to embrace a change for the South, because to apply to him those haunting negative stereotypes of African Americans was impossible. He may or may not have been a saint, but a man of character, intellect, and eloquence he clearly was.
Moreover, Martin Luther King, Jr. not only put his strength and effort into the struggle for the rights of African Americans in the South— he worked for the rights of all people. In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he wrote:
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
[image error]In this region that has long suffered from the pitfalls of dualistic ideas about society – black and white, men and women, locals and outsiders, us and them – King advocated for a greater comprehension of our common humanity and consequently of the truth in that old adage, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Despite the contention of traditionally minded white Southerners that conflated the improvement of black people’s lives with the diminution of their own, King’s words gave an eloquent expression to people in strife that the pursuit of fairness and justice is not a zero-sum game.
Though he stood outside of the process for their legislative passage, King’s work also laid the groundwork for two important pieces of legislation that have changed the Deep South: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The federal protections from these laws have enabled generations of people to have opportunities for education, jobs, and voting that could have been and once were denied. The long-term benefits can’t even be measured.
Yet, though Martin Luther King, Jr. made great strides, neither he nor the Civil Rights movement solved the problems, and we still do have some unfortunate dualistic, zero-sum ideas in the Deep South. We hear notions that protecting women from sexual assault and harassment somehow limits the rights of men. We hear concerns that same-sex marriage degrades the marriages of opposite-sex couples. We hear about fears that people immigrating to this country must, unlike “hard-working Americans,” have harmful goals and unproductive attitudes. All of these equate opportunities for The Other as a denial or degradation for everyone else. As a consequence, because he and his movement didn’t fully succeed, we still need what King gave to all of us: not only the words and ideas to combat injustice, but perhaps more importantly, the sense that prejudices truly can be overcome.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read previous posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
January 14, 2019
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Point to Something Red”
This poem, based on a personal experience, was written in April 2011. It doesn’t need much explanation, since the narrative is fairly clear and not veiled or obscured. The experience that led to the poem was a straightforward one, so I felt like the poem should be, too.
Point to Something Red
Our elderly docent, already frowning and frustrated
from some of the dozen five-year-olds needing
a bathroom break before the museum tour, lost
it over their tugging the two stuffed animals
she had handed out— two for a dozen five-year-olds!
Terse and edgy, she stood stiff and stoic in front
of tall, arched, etched windows depicting
a mythic star-shower adored by an up-looking crowd
of contorted folk-Byzantine figures, some playing
music, others under a quilt, one painting the scene,
all gazing at three round-breasted angels flying
in a midnight-blue sky, among white firework daisies,
which the children all thought was the ocean,
much to the shameless chagrin of our elderly docent.
Our elderly docent attempted to recover by going back
to basics, asking, Who can point to something red?
Hands shot up, and she called on my bouncing blonde
daughter, eager to be best, who then charged out
of the middle of the cross-legged children toward a red
tulip, with her arm outstretched, finger in the lead, and
as she came close, our elderly docent, in one swift
motion, grabbed her wrist and wrenched her forcibly
away, before succinctly stating to the suddenly
silenced, now-attentive audience: Don’t touch the art.
Later, returning to the scene of the crime, in that gallery
alone, I did not see a midnight-blue sky full of stars
and angels, but instead the rolling ocean insisted upon
by shouting five-year-olds, until the reminder of the red
tulip took me back to her little shocked face— a shock
itself that witnessing her little loss of innocence could
overpower color and image, history and light, and all other
artists’ efforts at meaning.
About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:
(Unpublished) #Poem: a haiku series
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Don’t Nobody Even Like You”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Yes, I Know”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “They Come, Growling”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Lost Things”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Taking Root”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”
(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Greatest Unknown”
January 12, 2019
The Unholy Trinity of Social Media Verbage
I see it probably every day on social media, and it’s exhausting: Read this incredible article, or Look at this awesome picture, or Check out this amazing feat! As a writer, teacher, and editor, I am one of the people that William Zinsser called “the guardians of usage,” the sometimes good-natured curmudgeons who you dislike for correcting your grammar but who you like because we know how to spell things. And I object to the overblown language that has been made popular by quantity-over-quality internet advertisers and clickbait producers, language that has somehow been absorbed into our modern American vernacular . . .
For example, the adjective incredible means that the thing-described is so wildly out of the ordinary that it does not seem believable. Thus, it is in-credible— not within the realm of credibility. I get on the internet as much as anyone, and I have yet to see any article or poem or interview or blog post or video that was so astounding I didn’t believe it was real, that must have fallen from Heaven, that made want to me drop my fishing nets and follow.
Likewise, I have seen or read very little that was shared on social media that was awesome, which means that the thing-described inspires awe, that state of being overwhelmed and even stunned by an experience. I will admit that a few photos of natural wonders have given me pause, and every once in a while a bike or skateboard trick earns my respect— but awe? I don’t know about that. And I can promise that I’ve never seen anything awesome come from any twenty-something jackass with a GoPro on his parents’ suburban lawn who began his schtick with a wide-eyed “Hey guys, check it out!”
The final offensive term in this unholy internet trinity is amazing. Although this one gets closer to any real emotion that might result from a social media post, it’s still far-fetched. Once again, I will admit that the first time I watched one of those videos of people in squirrel suits gliding among mountains, it came close to amazing, though once I’d seen a few, they became . . . meh, do I have to watch this again?
There are other words whose use has also become aggravatingly mainstream in the Internet Age, like hilarious and great and outrageous, but they’re not as egregious as the unholy trinity of incredible, awesome, and amazing. I know that we all want to share and promote the things we like, especially our friends’ efforts, but let’s choose better words— especially you, writers. The English language is chock-full of gloriously specific and nuanced words that can describe any experience with media watched or read. Maybe that poem you read – and want us to read – was sensitive or uproarious or charming or proverbial. Maybe that article or essay that you read, the one that offered a perspective you hadn’t considered before, was insightful in its complexity or sublime in its presentation or striking in its revelations. And if you need a thesaurus, use one— none of us will ever know.
Being bombarded with these pop-culture misnomers is numbing our senses, mine in particular. Now, when I see a social-media urging to view something awesome, all I think is: I doubt it. These posts are the social-media equivalent of old TV commercials who had a guy named Crazy Eddie yelling about the huge deals in his store. At some point, the yelling became annoying, and 80% off seemed passé, rather than . . . say, incredible or awesome or amazing.
January 10, 2019
Disrupters & interlopers: Charles Gomillion
To borrow the wording from his New York Times obituary in 1995, Dr. Charles Gomillion “led the fight that brought political power to the black majority in Tuskegee, Alabama.” Gomillion was a sociology professor and dean at Tuskegee Institute when he took on the Alabama legislature and its gerrymandered voting map of the Macon County seat in the late 1950s. His civil case, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, went all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Born in South Carolina in 1900, Charles Goode Gomillion left his inadequate African-American school at age 16 to attend Paine College, a historically black private school in Augusta, Georgia. He later came to Tuskegee Institute in 1928. According to the King institute’s webpage about him:
In the 1930s, Gomillion attempted to register to vote several times, starting in 1934, and was finally successful in 1939. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Gomillion, by then the dean of students at Tuskegee, worked to register voters, which prompted the state legislature to redraw the borders of the city in 1957 to maintain white political power.
In 1941, Gomillion founded the Tuskegee Civic Association, which worked to for Civil Rights causes. Its “Crusade for Citizenship” organized a boycott in 1957 and 1958 of segregationist-owned businesses. While the boycott was successful in putting economic pressure on white merchants, it also caused some businesses to leave Tuskegee.
It was efforts like these that led the Alabama legislature to redraw the voting district for Tuskegee from a square shape to the now-infamous 28-sided polygon that excluded all but twelve black citizens. The redistricting also omitted Tuskegee Institute entirely, which disallowed many professors and students from voting in local elections. So, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama:
Gomillion and other petitioners, black citizens of Alabama and residents (or former residents) of Tuskegee, alleged that the act violated the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They claimed that the redrawn city boundaries disfranchised black voters; therefore, the act had a discriminatory purpose. In fact, the act’s author, [Samuel J.] Engelhardt, was executive secretary of the White Citizens’ Council of Alabama and an advocate of white supremacy.
After the case was dismissed by the usually pro-Civil Rights judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and having that ruling upheld by the appeals court in New Orleans, Gomillion v. Lightfoot reached the US Supreme Court in October 1960. There, a unanimous decision stated that what had been done in Tuskegee was now allowable.
In his book, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America, Frye Gaillard described Gomillion as “a slender, well-dressed man with high cheekbones and closely cropped hair— the very portrait, some people said, of a black intellectual. [ . . . ] He chafed at the racist condescension all around him— that pervasive assumption among many whites that they were inherently superior to people who were black. For an educated man like Charles Gomillion, it was an insult that cut all the way to his heart. [ . . . ] But his goal was an interracial democracy, not a black oligarchy that ruled like the whites.” Ultimately, a victory in the court case that bears his name was one step closer to that goal.
The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo. To read previous posts, click any of the links below:
January 9, 2019
A Moveable Feast: the Rebirth of a #schoolgarden
[image error]In the winter of 2014–2015, a handful of students and I began work on a school garden in an unused gravel-and-sand plot on the far side of our campus, between the teacher parking lot and the fence. Through the chilly months of the school year, we tested the soil, laid out a grid, and built and arranged six 8′ x 4′ raised beds with a small grant from our school’s non-profit organization. I bought the wood from a local lumber yard and the pea gravel and soil from a local supply yard. Friends and other supporters helped us, too: the Old Cloverdale Community Garden folks gave us a composting bin that they weren’t using, and a friend gave us rain barrel made from a Coca-Cola bottler’s citric acid container. The work was completed in the spring of 2015, and we planted our first crops, mostly Southern staples, which were ready for eating by the time we left for summer break. We were using my tools from home and carrying most of our water a hundred yards across the campus, from the nearest outdoor spigot, two watering cans at a time. Moreover, despite being a novice “farmer,” I was insistent that we would use no chemicals, neither fertilizers nor pesticides.
[image error]What followed in subsequent school years – 2015–2016, 2016–2017, and 2017–2018 – was a rollercoaster of lessons in the fields of natural science, psychology, sociology, economics, and fundraising. The year that the summery Alabama weather held at 90 degrees and bone-dry until Thanksgiving taught us that you can’t grow a fall crop when fall doesn’t come. Another winter with repeated deep-freezes and a few instances of snow in January, February, and March made us aware that farming even six small raised beds was a challenge. Accustomed to being able to flip a light switch or adjust a thermostat, my millennial students and I got a taste of how Nature doesn’t consult us before doing its thing. The students got see that there’s no app for pulling weeds or taking the sting out of an ant bite and that there’s no make-up work in farming. But we managed during those years to produce several successful crops, albeit in small quantities.
On top of one unfortunate fact of school-based urban agriculture – students aren’t at school during the summer – I’ve also learned some important lessons about being an educator, including that students can tend not to show up when it’s cold . . . or when it’s hot . . . or when it’s early . . . or when they might get dirty. Our school garden is an extracurricular, not a class, and not particularly well-resourced, so enthusiasm is harder to come by. However, each year’s small group was typically devoted, though numbers would dwindle during those weather-induced fallow periods. I also learned that I’m not a charismatic motivator. Students who appeared in my doorway and asked, “How do I join the school garden?” got my simple reply: “You show up. If you come out there, you’re in it. If you don’t, you’re not.” It’s not much of a sale pitch, but I’m more of a straight-talker than a shit-talker. There’s an old saying that “you’ve got to fish or cut bait”— I don’t need people who don’t show up. (I can also share that some of the one-time visitors to our garden came strolling up to be in the group shot for the yearbook. They got sent away.)
[image error]However, the greatest obstacles to overcome in operating a school garden, I’ve learned, are money and time. Our school garden never had a regular funding source and had always been a before- or after-school thing, so using my own resources, making asks of friends, and having students working outside of school hours has been the norm of this fledgling operation. But it has worked. I built a low-slung toolshed a few years ago from some wood that my father-in-law had stored under his sister’s house. A student who is now about to graduate brought a bunch of Mexican petunias and daylilies for us to plant along the fence line. The same friend who gave the rain barrel taught me how his grandfather planted strawberries in cinder blocks. We’ve learned new ideas and hacks from having little or nothing to work with. But, I will say, having some money sure would have been nice . . .
Last summer, I was hoping that we would be able to have a fifth year with the school garden. However, without funding, there were serious problems to be addressed. Notwithstanding that we had no money for seeds or seedlings and still no water hookup, the wood around the raised beds was rotting, and the soil inside of them was depleted. Over the summer, hornets had built a nest in the compost bin, and the toolshed had gotten termites. I didn’t how or whether to proceed. I’ve always resisted fundraisers – I tell students, “I didn’t start a garden to have a car wash.” – but it was looking like a choice between that and quitting.
[image error]Then, about two weeks into the school year, the choice was made for me, when one of the buildings on our school’s campus burned. The building, which was across the street from the garden, was a total loss, and school system officials declared that we would be moving the whole school to a new location. Having heard for years that our school may not stay in that location, I had started to calling our garden A Moveable Feast, partly in homage to the Ernest Hemingway book, but mainly because I had been designing everything to be moved like a touring theatrical set. In anticipation of a move, nothing was nailed down. The toolshed’s floor was built to allow a forklift to put it on a flatbed truck. Though they’d crumbled, the raised beds were designed to be dismantled and reassembled by pulling up the metal stakes, then removing and rejoining the L-brackets. The cinder-block strawberry planters could be picked up. Of course, the composting bin and rain barrel were easy.
[image error]Not one to tuck tail and run, I shifted my thinking to how the school garden program could be rebuilt at the new location. Once we got moved and settled, I set my eye on a 100′ x 150′ plot of land that I could see outside my classroom window, where this former elementary school’s playground equipment lay in wait for someone to come make use of it. I’m not interested in sliding or climbing, but I could see trellises for scuppernong vines and confederate jasmine. I could also see tracts of tilled earth with rows of green leafy crops. I’ve noted, as summer became fall and then winter, that full sunshine comes down unimpeded by trees as it travels each day from east to west. I made a point after rainstorms to walk the entire plot, stomping for water-logged spots and checking for poor drainage. Everything seems copacetic— this is my spot.
Through a nice combination of luck, effort, and support, three forces aligned to put the puzzle pieces in place. First, one of our school’s alumni, who now works for the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service offered help tilling up the ground and getting us re-started. Second, I secured a grant from Montgomery’s Sunrise Rotary group to run a water line to the new site. Third and finally, our principal allowed me to use part of the money from our school’s first-place finish at the Montgomery Education Foundation’s Brain Brawl. These developments meant that we would have two things that we never had at the old garden: money and water.
This month, a local plumbing contractor will cut in that water line, and over the holiday break, I went to local nursery and picked out plants for the landscaping: a bright-red firepower nandina, a yellow-leafed euonymus, a purple-blooming rosemary, and a pink-blossomed camellia. All colorful and all hearty through the cold months. (One other problem with a school garden in the South, is that the favorite plants – crepe myrtles, etc. – are mostly leafless when we’re there and most vibrant when we’re not.) We’re only in phase-one for the reborn Moveable Feast. The vegetable beds will come once those steps are complete.
Though I’m no farmer, and have no formal training in agriculture, my desire to start a school garden was two-fold. The impetus came when I once asked students, rhetorically I thought, where their food comes from, and they all replied, “The store.” I retorted, “No, before that.” A few faces contorted in confusion and said, “A truck?” Now completely dismayed, I inquired even more emphatically, “No, before that.” A scant few said, “A farm?” It occurred to me then that none of them had experience with bringing something to eat of the dirt where they live. Which brings me to the second reason. As a person who grew up with a backyard garden plot, and who helped my father with yard work until I was old enough to do it myself, I like being outside. And though I wouldn’t change my chosen profession, it has me sitting inside at a desk, reading and grading, most of the day. Perhaps selfishly, having a school garden allows me to get away from a computer screen and out from under the electric lights to get some fresh air—and that’s something that everybody, young and old alike, could use more of.
