Heaven Bound and Glory Be

Three times a week I walk over wood chips, pine needles and asphalt as wind whips fiercely past me and several dozen students.

Recess.

I love recess. I find everything about it wonderful. Being outside. Being in the gym. Observing... mostly the observing. Everything.

Usually ball tag takes the jungle gym, kickball the pavement, football the grass. Some students stand on the teeter totter until I notice and remind them that seats aren't for feet(s). The seventh and eighth graders usually play tether ball.

But not the fifth grade girls. No. They farm.

Every day six or seven on them gather under the pine trees with two rakes and a hoe. And they farm the dirt. They move pine needles from side to side. They rake the sand. They dig surreptitiously. Surreptitious, because no one seems to notice or think it strange that a handful of 11-year-old girls choose their fleeting seconds of freedom to be used in thankless and baffling labor. Surreptitious, because I'm starting to find it normal as well. 

Sometimes I wonder how much we could accomplish if their steady, earnest farming were translated into reading or writing or thinking or learning. But such raw dedication can't be manufactured or stolen or simply created. It has to grow, like the fifth grade girls' dirt garden.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm working on growing a dirt garden.