i accompanied a classroom of emotionally- and behaviorally-disturbed 5th grade boys and their teachers to a community garden yesterday and watched the miracle of what happens to your emotions and your behaviors when you work.
voila.
on monday, in this same classroom, i was cussed at, laughed at, ignored, and pushed. i had the pleasure of being flicked in the eye with broken-off pieces of pencil and i was told to "get the f outa my face." and that was within the first 5 minutes. i had been treated very similarly in my many previous visits to this class.
in the garden, i felt like royalty. (not that my goal is to feel like royalty, but when it happens, you don't argue.) :)
i was there for 2 hours and during that time, there were zero instances of "meltdowns." nobody pushed anybody. not one single kid griped or complained about a single damned thing. not one.
nobody hit. nobody cussed. they referred to me as "ms. nancy." instead of %$#^*@. which is what they usually call me.
they didn't argue. i have never once not seen these kids argue.
they didn't tease, they didn't bully.
they didn't tell their teachers to go to hell.
what they did was, they hauled bag after bag after bag of topsoil and mulch from the truck to the field. trip after trip after trip. one little guy was having trouble at first, trying to figure out how to carry the heavy bags successfully. one of the "worst kids in the class" showed him how.
for 2 hours, in the hot sun, they did this. about half-way through, somebody started to whistle. whistle! i didn't know they even made whistling anymore!
a neighbor who lives next door to the garden had been observing the boys' hard work and stopped by with a tub of cold, bottled waters. without prompting, all of the boys said, "thank you." all of them. (that's HUGE, folks.)
and so, as i stood there and observed all of this, i thought several things. one, every school in the whole wide world ought to be outside.
two, yes. the basics of life do. matter. take all the high-tech, sophisticated, worldly stuff you want, but in the end, pitching in and helping your neighbor, through good old toil and sweat, is what makes this world turn. or should.
i think they used to call it "all for one and one for all."
Lord........i couldn't really be a liberal, could i??
