The Power of a Plant by Stephen Ritz

Author:Stephen Ritz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Much as I welcomed the many opportunities afforded by our green classroom, I still wasn’t satisfied with the setup. The green wall wasn’t quite perfect for classroom use. In fact, my students and I started tinkering and modifying our first wall almost as soon as we had it assembled.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem,” I announced at the start of class. “The custodians are mad at us.”

Every teacher knows that you want to stay on the good side of your janitorial staff. I never wanted our hands-on learning to leave behind a mess that they had to clean up. But that’s exactly what was happening. The first time we watered our green wall, some of the growing medium washed out onto the floor. When the night custodial crew arrived, there was a muddy mess to mop up. I asked them to leave it for my farmers to clean.

Students were furious. One day earlier, they felt like they had invented the wheel by assembling and planting that green wall. Now they had to do grunt work. As I handed out sponges, I challenged students to think while they mopped. “Look, we don’t want to have to clean the floor every time we water, right? And we can’t stop watering or the plants will die. So what do you think is causing this mess?”

“Gravity!” one kid blurted out, getting right to the root of the problem. Because we had set up that first wall at a ninety-degree angle to the floor, any water we poured on top made a rapid descent to the bottom, washing out soil along the way.

“Man, how can we ever fight gravity?” I challenged him.

That got everyone analyzing the wall instead of grumbling about the mess.

We designed experiments. How much could we tilt the wall without tipping the whole thing over? Students who had never understood slope in algebra class now got it. We sketched and prototyped our way to solutions. But there were always more variables to consider.

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