On Saturday I attended an apple grafting workshop. Though I have no particular inclination to learn how to graft apples, I do have a passion for small-scale sustainable farming and orchards are almost always included as part of the design of sustainable homesteads. So, I went to the workshop and came home with six tiny trees, which if I learned well and the grafts grow, will kick-start my someday orchard.
As the instructor began he gathered information from each of the 20 learners so he could make sure we had the knowledge and tools we needed to turn his buckets full of twigs into trees that would someday blossom and bear fruit. Some of the things he learned from us were:
- People love their morning coffee! But some people don’t drink coffee. (There was also tea and water).
- Some people were chilled to the bone as we were in a barn on an early spring northern Iowa morning. (There was a very noisy heater but some people preferred hearing the instructor over heat).
- Some people were farmers with many acres of land. Some people lived in condos with room for a pot on their patio. (There was standard and dwarf tree rootstock offered).
- Some people use words as their daily tools; some use mechanical or hand tools, such as grafting knives, as their daily tools. (There were hand-outs and bandages for the former.)
He identified these four elements of the class and there were a myriad of other things that created the conditions for the workshop setting. However well-prepared our teacher was with his 30 years of propagating trees for a living, there were countless seemingly unrelated, but certainly necessary individual needs to meet in order for him to share some of his knowledge and talents with this group of students.
I thought to myself, he’s a good teacher. He knows his subject matter well, knows how to communicate the subject matter, and he knows that how cold my toes are will contribute to whether I can remember how to properly care for my apple tree. Yes, he was a good teacher.
Then I thought about what a public K-12 teacher must know and be able to do in order to make sure their students go out in the world full of knowledge. It’s an incredible expectation and challenge—in addition to the content knowledge, there must be thousands of dynamics within a learning setting for a teacher to identify and manage every day and many of those dynamics change daily. My workshop instructor was good but he had the benefits of having an audience who self-selected through their own interest to be there and had all the resources needed to be present and ready to learn. He was set up to succeed.
In our work at West Wind, we talk and hear a lot about how to support teachers so they can know how and be able to attend to the innumerable needs of their students. The apple grafting workshop was, for me, both a fun time of learning and also a reminder of how important it is to keep working toward policy that supports teachers and to not underestimate what we are asking of our K-12 public school teachers.