Monday’s solar eclipse is a rare and special event. It just so happens that this memorable day coincides with my first day in the classroom as a student teacher. The sun is a giant star, and in my mind, the eclipse means the star(s), the moon and the earth are aligned for my future career.
Last weekend there were more stars, the falling kind. My family unit sat in camp chairs at Lake Almanor watching the Perseid meteor shower. I had a mental list of wishes for each meteor that raced across the sky — wishes that I would be a great (or at least adequate) teacher, that my kitty will return home, and that my hair will not turn gray before I’m 50.
EYE TO THE SKY
It must be nice to be retired, because both of my parents are traveling north to the special zone of optimum solar eclipse viewing. My dad and step-mom rented a parking spot in Oregon on land owned by a wheat farmer. Campers have been instructed that once they park, they should stay in one place until the big show in the sky has come and gone.
Dad said they’ve packed enough food to survive a zombie apocalypse. If they need more, the farmer has arranged to have food and coffee trucks available to feed the crowd.
Mom and her beau are also traveling to Oregon with a more general plan. They plant to head toward the Oregon border and are hoping they won’t watch the sky darken while stuck in a traffic jam along Interstate 5.
For my part, I’m content to watch 80-plus percent of the sun disappear over Chico, where I’ll spend Monday with 28 third-grade students, all wearing paper eye-protective glasses.
After the sun fully returns, I’ll teach my first lesson.
A solar eclipse is a tough act to follow and my amazing mentor teacher suggested I teach the students to plant seeds.
I swooned.
“Start with something you love,” she said with a smile sure to enrapture children ages 6 through 9.
To ensure I had the best advice possible, I chatted with Jerry Mendon, of Mendon’s Nursery in Paradise. He said little hands would be best suited to big seeds, and suggested planting peas.
His advice provided me an opportunity to make one of my first mistakes as a future teacher.
I bought a big bag of sugar snap pea seeds at Northern Star Mills. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized I bought the type of peas that need a trellis. They’ll sprout just fine, after being soaked for 24 hours. Yet, once they grow the children will have a big, tangled mess that looks like a massive philodendron house plant.
Luckily, Wilbur’s Seed and Feed had seeds for snow peas, the bush variety. Now I have enough seeds to plant an entire plot at the nearby community garden at Oak Way Park.
My next problem was that I was so excited about planting seeds, my mind started racing with more things I would love to teach third graders.
We could dissect fava beans. I could give a PowerPoint presentation based on the similarities between the anatomy of an egg and a seed pod. We could measure the growth of our peas each day (in millimeters), make growth charts, compare plants based on varying amounts of sunlight, visit the Chico State University Farm …
My sage mentor teacher said those were all great ideas, but my introductory lesson should be finished in 35 minutes.
The real point is of the lesson is that I introduce myself to the students, she said, rather than try to fill their minds until Thanksgiving break.
OTHER FALL SEEDS
If you’re planning your own fall projects, Jerry Mendon also suggested planting fall-sown flowers by seed, including calendula, pansies and sweet peas, which have tiny seeds but will provide just as much instant gratification.
Other seeds to start soon include cooler-season greens, broccoli, carrots and even another batch of cucumbers. Cucumbers can go from sprout to harvest in 60 days, the Monterey Master Gardeners explain in this helpful article about fall planting, http://tinyurl.com/ycs8wrbp
EXTRA SEEDS
Now I need to find some useful way to use 120 snap pea seeds that need a trellis. I’m hopeful some of the students will be so enthralled by the idea of growing things, they’ll take a handful of seeds home and plop them in the ground outside their bedroom windows. This could lead to voracious reading of stories about young boys and giant beanstalks; learning to measure growth in millimeters; calculations of growing conditions based on varying conditions; or children who arrive to class with dirt under their fingernails.
