The leftist buzzwords fly fast and furious in this
article:
"There's learning that can happen in really rich ways beyond the growing, planting and harvesting," said Rachel Martin, who co-founded a school garden at Midvale Elementary School six years ago and is now the director of the sustainable schools program for Sustain Dane, an organization that works to incorporate sustainable programs in school districts, municipal governments, business and neighborhoods.
Students can do math by counting the number of zucchini on a vine or read a book next to a cluster of sunflowers. They also can observe seasonal changes, such as what it means for a plant to go to seed in the fall and drawing pictures of decaying tomato stalks in the winter.
What's going on here is that someone likes gardening and wants to spread the message and then they rationalize ways that gardens can help learning. "See, students can count zucchinis" and so this is a way to teach math. Yeah, well students can also count race cars so does that mean the school should take a daily trip to the race track and let students watch NASCAR?
Eventually, the group would like to pool its resources to pay someone who would travel around the Madison district, helping teachers conduct lessons related to gardening and that support a hands-on, integrated approach to learning, Michaud said. The goal is to pass on ways of living sustainably to future generations, she said. "Gardens are a big tool to do it."
And the truth comes out - it's not really about "learning" it's about indoctrinating students into leftist claptrap about gardening being equivalent to living sustainably.
Lubarsky said students participating in a Madison School & Community Recreation program do most of the work at the garden now, but incorporating it into curriculum is "definitely a goal for the future."
Teachers don't need to go out and dig in the garden; they can simply hold math class among the tomatoes to get students thinking about the environment and being outside, he said.
The students are used for manual labor and the organizers are going to think about how to incorporate these gardens into the curriculum sometime in the future. Again, another snippet of truth, it's about pushing a religious/environmental agenda.
If teachers want to rebut their image of being people who are extremely prone to adopting fads then then they need to be forcefully rejecting kooky ideas which are disguised as educational methods but are really implemented in order to push a religious/environmental message onto students.
