School Begins

How to break down the walls of a classroom? My CEL Academy colleague suggested just start opening windows and get eyes off the screens. I have all these visions for my urban school-- bee hives with long chimneys for bees to exit and enter high above the playground activity like the one at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. I want all kinds of edible plants, but also plant guilds, and historical gardens to help teach the environmental history of the school yard before its concrete. I have so many inspirations in the Bay Area and now also in my mom's town of Essex, CT where vegetable gardens make the old colonial houses look like 18c. homesteads again. It's so critical with children and adults to as Carolie Sly at the Center for Eco-literacy says: make it simple, make it real and the opposite of boring. Not as simple as it sounds. So I revisited the CEL webiste and found the essays on the Change page to be another important starting point. Big breath-- o.k., so be it.