Begin with Ninth Graders, Add Humanities Curriculum - and a Few Goats?

by Abigail Chew

I didn't grow up on a farm. I didn't grow up walking through the pristine woods I saw in the pictures of Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder. I grew up in a trailer on U.S. 40, where my dad was a mechanic and my mom worked at my elementary school. There was an old dump behind our place, a junkyard full of old washing machines and wreckers, even an old AutoCar truck. I played there. I didn't have a cornfield or a beloved horse. But I did long for the kinds of places I read about in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and later in poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote about whole woods responding to the cuckoo bird's song, and Wendell Berry, who says in "The Peace of Wild Things," as he wakes up in the middle of the night and heads out into the trees, "I go and lie down where the wood drake/ rests in his beauty on the water,/ and the great heron feeds."

So when I began teaching at Olney Friends School in the Appalachian foothills, on this rolling 350-acre farm surrounded by creeks and ridges, it felt, in a way, like coming home. I felt pretty darn lucky—even luckier to be able to work with teachers, farmers, and gardeners to integrate my Humanities curriculum with the land.

Leonard Guindon, who graduated from Olney in 1970, teaches ninth grade biology. Leonard and I like to hike and camp. We thought our students should spend some time outside, too, so we started taking them out of the school building on adventures. We'd hike along Captina Creek, search for hellbenders (a giant, rare salamander), camp along the creek side, cook over fires, and tell stories about other camping trips we'd been on. That first year, one of our students, Khenti, now a senior, hated everything about being out there with us. She hated the bugs, the water, the itchy grass, and she didn't like Leonard or me too much either for making her go. Leonard and I kept the faith. We were sure we could make a change in how our students felt about the outdoors and about the way they interacted with the land around them.

That was the same fall the farm manager, Don Guindon, had some extra hay and a neighbor had some extra goats. So we made a swap, and the ninth graders had themselves a little goatherd of three wethers. Goats are small—they're not as scary as horses or cows—a young teenager could handle a goat, we thought. As the ninth graders studied the early- to mid-1900s, a time of great strife and suffering in the world, they would have these animals depending on them. They could learn to take good care of something that needed them. I was excited, though I did worry about what would happen in the spring, when the goats would be slaughtered for use in our kitchen. As much as I advised against naming animals we would eventually serve at dinner, the little guys were quickly christened—Dante, Euclid, and Plato.

All that fall and winter the ninth graders helped take care of their herd. They helped feed, trim hooves, and treat illness. In the spring, the goats had grown up, less like the puppies they'd called to mind when we'd gotten them and more like their mountain-loving cousins—they stank, as goats tend to. They chewed on our clothes and butted their hard little skulls against our thighs, though they still followed us out to the pasture in the morning and came running back to the barn when we called.

I had doubted our students' ability to cope with sending the animals to be butchered, but I was proved wrong. These kids knew what conventional livestock farms looked like, how those animals lived and died. Our goatherd was nothing like that. They ate grass, climbed on a big rock pile, bedded down in fresh hay. These were animals that had lived with dignity. The ninth graders researched, planned, and cooked an Ethiopian meal for the whole school. They made injera flat bread, goat stew, and a raw eggplant salad. They cleaned up after. And as I watched them chopping onions and garlic in the kitchen, serving a meal in the dining room—a meal they had started preparing the previous fall when they first split open a bale of hay for their new animals—I knew we could do something real with this new project. We could make a difference in the way our students thought about food, the planet, animals, and their own responsibility for those things.

A few weeks later, Leonard and I took the ninth graders camping along Captina Creek, where they would take their final exam for biology. I know it sounds a little contrived, but I promise you—Khenti, the ninth grader who hated the lake on our campus and who didn't want to touch the water, stood in the middle of that chilly creek and threw a Frisbee with her classmates. She was happy doing it, laughing. She wasn't totally at home there yet—she stayed on the slabs of slate that lined the bottom of the creek and didn't want to touch the muddy bottom—but she was out there. She was in the water.

After the success of that first year, Don has traded for more goats, and the ninth graders have helped raise them. The animals have become valuable brush clearers, eating multiflora rose, tree of heaven, and poison ivy, as we've decreased the amount of acreage on campus we keep mowed. Last spring, we had our first kidding, and our little herd of six does grew to eighteen animals in a matter of days—each doe had twins, and we ended up with six males and six females. Students were present at many of the births, naming the females after our seniors and asking if we couldn't name the males, too. I nixed that last year. As I write these sentences, in early May, we're two days away from cooking our goat meal (this year: Jamaican curry with coconut rice) and weeks away from another kidding season. The ninth graders ask me every day: How long until the babies come? When are we going to start cooking on Friday? Do we get to see the babies get born? Do we have all the ingredients we need? I am proud of them. They are committed workers and committed caretakers—of those animals and of the fellow members of the Olney community they will help feed.

As for Khenti, she's a senior this year. She has grown into a leader among her peers and a talented photographer. Again, I am going to tell you something that seems a little trite, as if it came out of a storybook, but it's true. Khenti's main subject, her muse, is nature. She takes pictures of grasshoppers and flowers and nasturtiums and goats. She's got an eye for what is growing around her.

Tomorrow, the ninth graders will frost the chocolate rum cakes, snap the beans, and mix up a marinade for their goat meal. I can't wait to see what they'll be doing in another few years, how they will begin to see the world through the lens of taking care of it and of each other. I don't think there's any better way to teach them to see.

Conservative Friends and the Natural World: An Interview with Leonard Guindon, Science Teacher at Olney Friends School

interviewed by Kirsten Bohl

Q: Why is it important to know things about the natural world in which you live?

A: Our students competed in the Envirothon [statewide environmental education competition for high schools] recently. One of the advisors from another high school said, semi-seriously, shaking his head, "It's not knowledge anymore that's being transferred, but access to knowledge." That really bothered me. Knowing how to find the right information is a really critical skill to have. But the problem with that, that I see, is that we become separated from the world by technology. We are one step removed from the world. To know about your place, to know about the natural world around you, is to give you that connection that you wouldn't have as strongly otherwise so that you can care about the world around you.

Q: What is the connection between conservation and Conservative Quakerism?

A: I've grown up with people who love the natural world. Everybody I grew up with was a naturalist. They knew the names of birds, trees, flowers. The Conservative Quaker history here is a farming history. The same would be true of Quakers anywhere, almost—except perhaps in Philadelphia, where Friends really did start out in business. We are not so far removed from it as others are. Stewardship of the Earth is critical as a farmer. If you farm the land, you have to take care of it. It's about love of God's creation, but there is also the practical side of it. When you farm year after year after year, you have to take care of the soil.

Abigail Chew is a Humanities teacher at Olney Friends School in Barnesville, Ohio.

Abigail Chew