In 1942, on a squash court in Chicago, the nuclear age began with the first-ever human-created atomic reaction.
On a recent Saturday morning on an old tennis court at the Colorado Springs middle school where I teach, I think I saw evidence of a similarly miraculous turn of events.
When I first started teaching at Galileo, a school that had shut down and restarted as a math and science magnet in 2008, the tennis courts were unused patches of cracked asphalt, a few weeds the only evidence of life. Sitting hopeless near a busy arterial, they seemed the personification of the decline of the neighborhood, built in the 1950s as Colorado Springs’ military bases energized the economy.
Today, the houses are small and shabby, the stores have moved north, and until the mini-Walmart opened across the street, the neighborhood was almost a food desert.
A few years ago, the school won a grant to build a greenhouse on the disused courts. But the rules that came with it were discouraging: just a few kids at a time could visit, they couldn’t touch anything, and the first picture of the greenhouse published on the district site featured not kids, but members of the school board admiring the lettuce.
The lettuce was destined for the school district’s cafeterias, but I kept thinking, what’s the point of having a garden on school grounds when the kids don’t get to go there? In my science class, I used the pool of water that was the greenhouse’s heat sink to illustrate the usefulness of water’s high specific heat, but I couldn’t take them to the greenhouse and show them.
But then, slowly, things changed. Principal Richard Law hired Christine Faith, a local urban farmer and sustainability educator, to create and run a gardening education program. Soon there were 20, then 80 raised beds covering the old courts. Master gardener Scott Wilson ran the actual garden and helped supervise the students working there.
There was a curriculum. Kids wrote about the rules of working in a public garden, then about the process of how plants turn water and light and carbon dioxide into sugars and oxygen. They learned to follow directions, because they couldn’t be in the garden if they couldn’t behave. They started to take the food they’d grown to the senior center down the street, learning how to talk to people courteously and how to run a cash box.
On a recent weekend, they organized a plant sale on the old tennis courts. I volunteered to help, and expected to spend my two hours herding teenagers. Instead, I wandered around, practicing chord progressions on my ukulele as the kids carried baby plants to sales tables, listened intently to directions on how to deal with and even bargain to make sales, and then cheerfully helped customers.
Before the gate opened at 9 a.m., there was a line of 30 people. They bought the plants that we all knew they could get cheaper elsewhere, they admired, they were curious, they socialized.
I bought my two tiny thyme plants and drove home, knowing I’d witnessed the birth of something new and wonderful.
Is the job done? During the incessant rains we had recently, a few sixth-graders tried to startle me, showing me an earthworm as I walked to the door. When I informed them that most of their food comes from soil that largely consists of worm poop, they responded with a chorus of, “Eww!”
Nope, we aren’t done. But we are getting there.
Eva Syrovy teaches in Colorado Springs. She was a member of the 2010 Colorado Voices class.
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