9/24 Entrance Slip

My main curiosity from the article is about the third point: that a campus garden should be involved in teaching the curriculum, not just as decoration or food, or else it is easily discarded.  I am curious as to specifically in high schools, what sort of teaching would be done such that an administration wouldn't simply tell them to switch it up and go back to what they were doing before in the same way that they could for a food garden.  I would guess it would be something like long term projects in biology that would build a strong enough argument for keeping the garden for schooling purposes.  Or are there stricter rules around what administration is allowed to do when something is used for education purposes that means that the garden's staying power is stronger?

In regards to teaching math in a garden, a few ideas come to mind to begin— planning a garden necessitates talk about perimeter and area, gardens could be used for data collection for graphing/statistics, they are naturally full of symmetry, trigonometry, and other geometric features.  It can be a way to both give students a real world grounding in the subject matter and to get them outside to experience math in a different way.  The difficulty that I would foresee would be that many upper level math subjects are harder to link to nature.  For example, I'm not sure I could make a lesson out of polynomial factoring.  Of course, we don't have to spend every lesson in the garden.  It might be a good enough start to even just have a little bit more time in nature in the parts of math class that more smoothly can be related.

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskySeptember 24, 2026 at 9:11 AM

    I agree— not every class has to be in the garden, but many topics do lend themselves to working with the natural, growing world. Administrators are usually fine with field trips (especially those that don’t cost anything or need permission firms), as long ng as kids, parents and teachers are happy and productive.

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