Above All, Don’t Quash the Squash

Sundry Garden Metaphors for Educating your Own

By Amy E. Barr, Latin guru at The Lukeion Project

Pardon all the garden talk lately. It is that time of year. I moved to the middle of nowhere so I could have a big garden, chickens, fruit trees, and fewer neighbors. Before I took up the responsibilities of owning a bit of land, I fancied myself as clever about growing things. I was wrong. My horticultural efforts are only impressive to the most amateur neophytes and those that see my carefully edited photographs on Insta. Painful comparison of my efforts to successful growers comes weekly when I visit the nearby Amish community. Their lovely produce is a nice supplement to my inability to grow enough potatoes and cucumbers in any given year. I confess I did manage to produce some fine cabbages and squash this year for once. I’ve been growing things and gardening since I was a kid, but I still have a lot to learn.

If I were to give up my day job teaching Latin, it would be fun to teach gardening lessons. My first bits of advice would be: prune often, coddle seldom, and thin regularly. Since my day job is teaching young people, my advice can be a bit similar so hang in there, we are about to talk veggies.

Prune Often

Tomatoes, roses, peach trees, and most people, do best with regular pruning. When it comes to people, think of pruning in terms of well-calculated challenges. Twelve long years of bland or overly simplified education results in adults who seldom bloom. If a tomato just sprawls on the ground, it will continue to leaf, but it will not produce much fruit. Challenging a plant with a good pruning along with a bit of support and feeding, followed by several more pruning sessions is a good tactic in education. Support and nourish? Yes. Challenge and rectify? Also, a big yes. Growth, blooms, and fruit are stimulated when students encounter challenging subjects, endure a set back or two, and then learn to grow past failures and challenges while they meet new ones.

I once met a gifted student who was terrified by the thought of even the smallest academic failure. His terror was so severe that he had to be cajoled into completing every single assignment given to him. Hoping to mitigate his academic anxiety, his mother made it far worse by constantly trying to “help” him avoid those very academic challenges. She begged for extensions, she pled for special grading, she demanded a unique schedule, even though this student performed quite well whenever he decided to do so. This student had been fed and supported, but never pruned much.      

Coddle Seldom

This year I grew a bed of giant sunflowers. I love their cheerful yellow but admire their ambitions to grow to 10 or 12 feet before sustaining the weight of massive seed-filled blooms. Winds, thunderstorms, squirrels, and a few chomps from our old goat Otis (living next door) did not knock them down. They went from sprouts to towering giants in a few months. They grew strong because they were not shielded from sun, wind, and rain. They were given appropriate challenges along maturation so that I never had to prop them up artificially.

Students can grow the same way. Education shouldn’t be something done TO or FOR a child, with minimal expectations of the child’s engagement in his or her own education…yet it often is.  There’s no magic grade level in which a student can start working on challenging or exciting subjects after clocking enough hours in boring worksheets, primers, and prerequisites…yet we often think there is.  Likewise, too powerful a challenge at too young an age can stunt grown.

Learners are like young plants. The wind must blow, and the rain must fall from the start so that a student responds appropriately and grows strong enough to sustain harder challenges. Greenhouse veggies are tender, but they need hardening-off before you can plop them in the garden. Don’t keep your learner in the greenhouse for twelve years. Let them enjoy some sun and rain now.    

I once spoke with a person who bought an exotic specimen tree for her front yard. Since the tree was still small but represented a sizable investment for her landscape, she strapped a strong pole to the little trunk to make sure it grew straight and tall. After the tree had grown for two years, she decided it was mature enough to remove the support pole. She was horrified to find her little tree snapped in half after a rainstorm a week later. Strapped to external support, the coddled tree had not encountered any real challenges as it grew. It appeared to have been maturing, but appearances were deceptive.

Thin Regularly

Carrots are difficult vegetables. They don’t like to germinate and, when they do, they take their sweet time about it. Carrot experts always plant way more seeds than necessary if they plan to get a normal harvest. If one is patient enough to grow carrots, one is also aware of the need to thin those hard-won sprouts before they crowd each other and fail to grow. Thinning carrots is a tedious, but necessary task for everyone planning on a good harvest. What can carrots tell us about education?

Thin your child’s schedule regularly so he or she won’t get crowded out. Thin intelligently and in the best interest of your learner rather in the best interest of somebody else. Lots of upper level high school students forgo classes that interest them so they can pile on prestigious classes that might look good on a transcript. Sure, an ambitious student should add an AP class or two, but only if the subject is engaging to the student. I teach an AP Latin class. About three-quarters of my students love the subject. It gives them great satisfaction to succeed at that level of Latin so the AP credit is a nice bonus. About one-quarter of my AP students are there because they hope it will look good on a transcript. They are not terribly excited about the material, but they will spend a lot of energy on it anyway. They are likely taking a variety of other AP classes and they are stressed to the max. Instead of easing into their best transitional year, they are tired and a little bitter. Crowded schedules keep people from healthy growth, regardless of their age. Thin the timetable a bit if you want to see improved development.  

Don’t quash the squash

This time of the year my garden is consumed by a few sprawling winter squash plants. As the main growing season comes to an end, I don’t mind if my pumpkin vines start to crawl over the asparagus or shoot up the tomato trellis. There’s an especially sturdy offshoot headed into my cowpea patch right now. I try to keep the roots watered, fed, and relatively bug-free while vines head in all directions. If a vine is relatively healthy, I let it head off on its own unchecked. In a few weeks, I’ll look for the fruit (hopefully some butternut squash, some pumpkins, and maybe a large summer squash that went unnoticed too long under the vines). Some of the biggest and best fruit comes from healthy vines that were allowed to grow in a direction of their own choosing.