Picking green beans at the Heifer International Ranch.
We worked in the fields this afternoon: picking beans and planting garlic. Clear skies with a cool, early October breeze; warm, but not hot.
It was enjoyable work. The fields were small and there were a lot of us. Lots of conversation.
We picked somewhere close to 64 lbs of green beans, which, according to our guide, sells for somewhere around six dollars per pound (organic beans). Three hundred and eighty four dollars. Took us about an hour.
Earlier in the morning, we’d had a discussion about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Heifer ranch is a CSA. People from the surrounding towns buy shares in the annual crop, and the ranch brings them a basket of produce every week for the season. CSA’s are great: fresh local produce, for about the same price as in the store. You tend to get a broad enough variety that it helps expand your cooking repertoire. And you avoid all the externailties from long distance transportation and factory farming.
Finding out how much workers make in CSAs vs industrial agriculture.
They (our guides) had compared CSAs to the “typical” industrial agricultural system. Students read out notecards as they went through the all the jobs of the people who get your tomatoes to you. One student, who represented the energy going into the system, had to do a lot of jumping-jacks and pushups – situps too. There are eleven different jobs in the industrial system, with the people actually picking the crops – migrant workers – getting one cent for every dollar you pay at the store. They are three jobs within the CSA, and the farmer gets 80% of the sale price.
The presentation was a little problematic, unfortunately. Heifer is a CSA after all. Trouble started with our facilitator’s terminal question, “So which one do you think is better?” The first response was, “Well with the economy these days, won’t you loose a lot of jobs with the CSA?”
Fair point. But it might be argued that the industrial system might take one big farm and 11 jobs to bring 1200 tomatoes to market, it might take 4 CSAs, and about the same number of jobs (12), to do the same. Although the each person in the CSA system gets a little less, the money is more equitably distributed.
The second question, cut to the crux of the problem, “But what are the notecards leaving out?” Cynical? Perhaps. However, I’d like to think of it as healthy skepticism.
So now our guide was stuck. How could she, an obvious advocate for CSAs, convince the skeptical? Not easy, perhaps not even possible. By being too strong of an advocate for her side, she’d have a hard time convincing even the impartial.
It’s not easy making an argument that you’re passionate about. Not at all.
Snapping green beans. Students agree that beans you pick yourself taste better.
I made sure I had a small discussion with the more skeptical students, to make sure they realized that even if you distrust the credibility of someone, you can often learn something useful. In fact, that’s why you should always look for multiple sources of information. Also, while CSAs are great for some things, local farms in Arkansas or Missouri aren’t going to be producing a lot of tomatoes in January.
That’s why I’m glad we picked the beans later in the day. And it was important that we did the accounting.
It took sixteen of us one hour to pick $384 worth of beans. That works out to 24 bucks per person per hour. Since the migrant workers only make 1% of the final cost, we would have made about 24¢.
24¢ for an enjoyable hour of gardening on a pleasant day. But what do you do when you’re hot and miserable in the middle of the summer, and hour after hour after hour of the same work is what you need to feed your family. And you’re missing school to do it.
Planting garlic.
I’m not sure that students will intuit the difference between what we did and what migrant farm workers do; neither the time we put in, nor the effort we expended were anywhere near equivalent.
I think making that distinction is important. Recognizing what migrant workers do, many who are the same age as my students, might make the point of what organizations like Heifer and Human Rights Watch are trying to do better than just talking about it, or simulating it, in the classroom.
I think it might make a big difference to hear the voices of these workers.
So I’ll show the HRW video advocating for the CARE Act to reduce child labor among teen migrant workers, and see if it has an impact.
Link to live video feed from the ROV ROPOS surveying a cable on the ocean floor at the Juan de Fuca midocean ridge.
Live science. The remotly operated submersible ROV ROPOS is surveying an undersea cable recently laid across the the Juan de Fuca midocean ridge.
This scientific expedition will be going on until the end of August, and there’ll be live feeds every time the rover is deployed (which depends a bit on the weather at the surface).
If you have questions, they’re also answering your tweets.
Right now, the rover’s heading toward the caldera of the axial seamount volcano. It should get there some time tonight (if they don’t have to stop for anything). So far, we’ve seen dumbo octopuses, crabs, weird fish, brainless worms, sponges, deep sea corals, starfish and lots of pillow basalt. The basalts are unsurprising because these are the rocks produced when volcanos erupt under water.
The Guardian website has some very interesting glimpses into the mind of the artist, with a series of videos where Paul Trevillion describes his thought process as he draws different players for his You are the Ref strip.
Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”
Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”
But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:
First of all, let her be bored. …
Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …
Let her have secrets. …
…
Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …
Let her make mistakes.
…
Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …
Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.
At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.
It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.
Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.
Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.
It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.
The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.
Finland - the most sustainable state, at least according to the Failed State Index.
While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.
Amount of refugees and internally displaced peoples (refugees are people who’ve crossed international borders). Both leaving or entering refugees can undermine stability.
Historical Injustice – communities can have an understandably hard time forgetting the past, just look at Isreal/Palestine.
Brain Drain – when countries start to fail, the first to leave are the ones who can afford to. Yet these intellectuals and professionals, with their college degree are vital for creating a stable and prosperous country.
Inequality – especially when driven by active discrimination (wealth inequality is something to watch out for).
Economic decline – pushes trade into the black market and increases criminality and corruption.
Illegitimacy of the state – if people don’t believe the people in government have everyone in the country’s best interests at heart, and are only looking out for themselves and their friends, then there’s probably going to be trouble.
Public Services go kaput – It’s a really bad sign when the government can meet people’s basic needs – like picking up the garbage.
The Rule of Law goes kaput – when you’re ruled by the caprice of men, and your rights under the law are not respected, you may begin to consider and agitate for other options for government.
Personal Armies – forces that are tied to individual leaders, like private militias or super-secret police for example, are very damaging to a country’s cohesion.
Fighting elites – healthy countries need robust arguments in their political class – think checks and balances – but it can go too far and lead to things like extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
Invasion – both overt invasion and covert meddling in the affairs of a country are unhealthy for that state’s stability.
It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.
Comparing the best (Finland), worst (Somalia) and the USA using the Fund for Peace's Failed State Indicies.
The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).
I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.
Our trip was not without difficulties, however. The group learned a bit more about self-regulation, governance and the balance of powers, as a consequence of “The Great Brownie Incident,” and the, “P.E. Fiasco.”
We were also fairly well cut off from the “cloud”: no internet, and you could only get cell reception if you were standing in the middle of the road in just the right spot in front of Cabin #3.
But more on these later. I have some sleep to catch up on.
At the end of each year, the Middle School puts on Dinner and a Show. As has become traditional, the students performed a play for the Show, and, for dinner, this year they did a Mediterranean themed meal: lasagna, baklava and some sort of cherry drink. The overwhelming feedback from the not necessarily impartial audience, of family members and faculty, seems to be that food and performance were quite a success. And, I have to say, the same applies from my point of view as well. The students did a great job putting everything together and pulling off the performance.
We usually work on Dinner and a Show for the entire second cycle. The first five weeks revolve around choosing the play, learning lines, and planning the meal. Our director, for the second year running, Ms. Jessica Parker, did a wonderful job with the adaptation, staging and working with the kids.
I was extremely lucky this year that I had two students who were really interested in the project. One, an eight grader, had been planning on taking charge since last year. The other, a seventh grader, really wanted to do the food. What was really nice was that, most of the time, they were the ones pushing me to get stuff done.
I’d ask questions like, “Have you started on the playbill yet?”
“Yes,” they’d reply, with exaggerated patience, “We’re still waiting for you to help with the images.”
The sixth week of the cycle, our immersion week, was dedicated entirely to the event; lots of practicing and food preparation. That’s when the students really shone. We had some help making the baklava (thanks Dr. Jen), but the next day, which was spent assembling two (and eventually three) types of lasagna, I only had a couple queries about what to use to boil water for the pasta (an electrical skillet works fairly well).
Everyone had a part in the play, but were also involved in setting things up. Apart from the cooks, there were separate crews for lighting and the backdrops. Once the crews got going, I spent most of my time staying out of the way. While I’d so like to jump in and help with everything, this is the way I think the middle school should work. I count this week as a really good one.
They have a very nice bread science page that explains what happens with the yeast and gluten as you mix, kneed and bake bread. There is a set of recipes, including sourdough and Ethiopian Injera, that my students might want to try. They even have a great links page to pretty much everything you might want to know about the science of bread and how to manipulate it.
