hooked on feeders

When I got the go-ahead for my Meet the Wild course, I made establishing a bird-feeder and bird-bath station a high priority. Birding can be frustrating for the beginner—you can’t get the binoculars to work right, the birds are annoyingly high up in the trees and won’t sit still—so I figured I’d make the entry as easy as possible. I’m inordinately satisfied with the results; it’s amazing to have watchable wildlife right out of one of the back doors of the building. For my students, almost every bird that comes to the feeders or the bird bath right now is something they’ve never heard of or seen before.

Yesterday, we spent an entire class period watching the feeders and journaling. We took our first set of data to submit to Project Feederwatch—mostly as an an opportunity to participate in and contribute to conservation science, but also because doing so increased our attention spans by giving us a reason/excuse to sit patiently and just observe. Which was good, because the action was relatively slow (our class meets at mid-afternoon on Monday, well after peak feeder hours). Still, I was pleased today when we did a brief journal share at the start of class to see what they had come away from our feeder-watching session.

The Project Feederwatch methodology requires two consecutive days of observation per data set, so I went out this morning on my own during a planning period to get another tally and was positively swamped with birds this time. After a while it felt like I was sitting in a cloud of birds—birds on the feeders, in the bird bath, on the ground, in the trees all around me. Nineteen different species in all, including a small flock of Red-winged Blackbirds. The shining highlight of the session was the Cooper’s Hawk that swooped down and tried to grab breakfast right off of the platform. I didn’t think it was successful, but it never came back for another try. All the other birds scattered as it swooped in, but surprisingly they returned to business-as-usual within a minute of its departure. I so wished the kids were there to experience the fun. We’ll have plenty more opportunities in the weeks ahead.

The feeding station has also started gathering the attention of others. Several classes in the language hall in particular have front-row seats, and I got the following note and accompanying video this morning from a colleague:

We always look at it while planning during Period 1, and it has brought us so much joy! We didn’t know that we loved birds so much, but it really has been a pleasant surprise to discover that such a small thing could make these gray January days so beautiful.

Keeping the feeders filled and cleaned requires a good bit of time and attention, to be sure, but it’s now a part of my class preparation routine . . . and going forward I have an amenable labor crew in my students. The fact that Meet the Wild is an elective offering means that we’re not sacrificing time needed for curriculum coverage to maintain this station; it is our curriculum. And if some of our other classes—like 6th grade science, which covers ecology in the spring—can reap the benefits, then so much the better.

pencil miles through virtual birding

Heading into this full-semester course, I definitely wondered how we’d handle bad weather days. Ideally, I thought, we’d all come prepared for the weather and be impervious to conditions. But I should have known better; 8th grade Atlanta boys in particular will wear shorts and a short-sleeved shirt every day of the year if they can. Even a wet, grey 35 degree day like today. And although I asked them to each have a go-bag with extra layers for just such occasions . . . well, 8th graders are fairly lackadaisical with any sort of homework/class preparation.

We can’t spend all of January and February stuck indoors, so I went and raided the lost-and-found and came away with a small collection of suitably warm (and hopefully suitably ugly) extra layers. After I take these loaner items home and run them through the wash, I can be more militant about going out.

In the meantime, we’ve spent the last couple of class periods doing drawing warm-ups and then learning birds by sketching them. I’ll project a picture of a common campus bird on the screen for five minutes and let the students draw it, and I’ll play songs and calls off of my phone they can add to their notes. Then, in pairs, we’ll turn to the bird guides and figure out what it is we’ve drawn. In the process, we’re all getting in our “pencil miles” (the only way to improve), and the students are learning their way around the bird families in our field guides. For instance, today they used range maps and vocalization descriptions to figure out that they had drawn a Carolina Chickadee and not a Black-capped Chickadee.

Groups that get it right get peppermint patties—that’s been my standard classroom reward/bribe for twenty-five years now.

So far we’ve drawn White-breasted Nuthatch, Cedar Waxwing, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and Brown Thrasher. The sooner I can get out of point-things-out-and-name-them mode on our birding outings, the better.

I learn some outdoor classroom management lessons

I wrote yesterday about how our trip to Otter Pond and back left only a short window for journaling, one short enough that I decided not to spend time on any front-loading beyond “find a spot to sit and journal” and briefly reminding them to use the “I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of” prompts. I certainly did not get out the mini-white board and do an instructional demo for them.

Well, today we started class with the round of sharing that we also didn’t have time to do yesterday, and I discovered that the range of engagement on this outing—at least in terms of journaling in the short time available—was quite wide, to say the least.

I learned two important lessons:

1. I was so intent on using the time to work in my own journal that I didn’t circulate among the students and offer feedback or redirection. I just didn’t have enough time to both model the journaling mindset and make myself available to them. Given those two choices, I need to prioritize the latter, at least at this point in the semester.
2. I also probably made the wrong judgment in not making several of the boys move to new locations when they all walked out and sat together on the dock—admittedly the most intriguing and attractive spot at the pond. They seemed quiet and focused out there, and I was anxious for everyone to get started so we could maximize our time. But I got focused on my own page and didn’t really look up again or I would have seen that they weren’t getting into gear. They weren’t distracting each other, exactly, but as a group they seemed to reinforce each other’s inertia. I definitely need to be clearer with my “sit spot” directions and make sure we establish enduring norms soon.

Nonetheless, those students who did find spots to sit alone slipped quickly into journaling mode and produced pages that positively radiated attention and curiosity.

Moreover, we used today’s critique and discussion to better understand the journaling elements that develop these qualities. To that end, I gave them each the following list to tape to the inside front cover of their sketchbooks:

we go on some walkabouts

We’ve enjoyed nice weather this week and have made the most of it, but I am absolutely kicking myself that I haven’t thought to take pictures over the last couple of class days to catch the students in action; I just get so caught up in what we’re doing that it hasn’t occurred to me until we’re walking back into the building.

On Tuesday, our focus was birding. We started by taping printed copies of Georgia Audubon’s “Checklist of the Birds of Atlanta” into the backs of our journals and checking off the three species we saw last week on our brief feeder visit. And then we distributed binoculars, left the journals in the room, and headed back to the feeders.

We had spectacular action even before we got there; just a few steps out of the doors we came across a Cedar Waxwing sitting just overhead in a short landscaping tree right at the top of the Amphitheater. It was maybe fifteen feet away when I first noticed it. Half of the kids got a fantastic look at it, while the other half were looking futilely in the tall trees behind it, my breathless directions (“In that tree right there”) being a bit lacking. We’ll see lots of Cedar Waxwings in the coming weeks (I’m amazed that these indescribably exotic-looking birds have been seasonally omnipresent my whole life but I had never seen one before I became a birder), but this was a glorious opportunity to excite the novices. And I half blew it.

So then we spent a few minutes talking about how to give clear directions so other birders can get on a bird (like “it’s sitting at eleven o’clock in the small evergreen right in front of us, the closest tree, about a foot in from the branch tips”).

Over the course of the whole class period, we probably walked two hundred yards in total. At times I felt like I was fire-hosing them with information, but for the most part I was really pleased with their engagement as new birders. We had maybe ten minutes-worth of waning attention spans?

It’s clear what our next rainy day activity will be—we’ll stay inside and get pencil miles sketching common birds (stationary birds!) from pictures projected on the screen.

Today, we made the trek back to Otter Pond. I know I wrote last week that this probably wouldn’t be a regular destination for us, but the kids were absolutely itching to go. Who was I to deny them?

Once again, unfortunately, we saw no otters. In the next week or two, we’ll set up a remote wildlife camera to see what we can capture.

Anyway, the outing was successful in that we made it there in enough time to actually journal for a bit before coming back. Not enough time to give them any more detailed instructions other than “find a spot to sit and journal for the next fifteen minutes,” but my students settled right in and seemed pretty happy and focused. Ideally, we would have had more guided journaling lessons before giving them this sort of open-ended creative autonomy, but on the other hand maybe not? We’ll start class tomorrow looking at what each of us observed and recorded during this time, and I hope to find examples of each of the elements of the “every journal entry should try to have” list that’ll I’ll teach them tomorrow.

we start journaling—and make a cool discovery

Today I handed out the nature journals and sketching supples to everyone and we did an opening exercise where each student had a winter twig to sketch. When the allotted time had run, we put everyone’s journals and the twigs on the floor and then tried to match the pages to their subjects. The students knew when they started their drawings that we’d have this little challenge at the end of class, simple as it was, and this game-like element provided nice motivation and energy. Moreover, we established right from the start an expectation of sharing and critique (in the broadest, most supportive sense possible).

At this point, I should definitely give credit where credit is due—nearly everything that went right with this activity stems from the nature journal teaching methodologies I have absorbed up from John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren’s outstanding book How to Teach Nature Journaling. While I’ve taught courses with a nature journaling component off and on (mostly off, unfortunately) since 1999, Laws and Lygren’s astonishingly thorough and thoughtful book completely changed my game. My discovery of this book about a year ago was the direct impetus for my proposing this course to our Head of School, and I learn something new every time I open it. Our activity today was “To Each Its Own” from the book. Laws also has a terrific website brimming with tutorial videos; we’ll be doing My Secret Plant from his Nature Journal Connection video series soon.

Today’s Laws/Lygren-inspired game-changing teaching trick: using a portable whiteboard demonstration to develop a journal page mock-up/blueprint before turning the kids loose.

As for the twigs themselves, I went out and pruned some branch ends off of trees around the building earlier in the day so we could work indoors. And pretty much the first tree branch I approached offered up a treasure: some sort of woody cocoon or gall—and a first opportunity to use a new reference title I had purchased for my bookshelf, Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates.

As far as I can tell, it’s the cocoon of Megalopyge opercularis, or Southern Flannel Moth, a cocoon which has some pretty distinct features.

But the story here goes a step further, as no adult moth ever emerged from the cocoon’s clearly intact “lid.” Instead, it would seem that something exited from the side.

University of Florida Entomology’s web page for the Southern Flannel Moth specifically mentions in-cocoon parasitization by Lanugo retentor, an ichneumonid wasp.

In my hopes and dreams over the past year for teaching this class, this is exactly the sort of wonder I envisioned we’d be uncovering this semester.

first two days in the book

So far, so good. Because a number of students (and faculty) are out after this week’s COVID tests, I only had six kids in person for our first day of class. After some preliminaries, we set off to take a walk on our first day together down to Nancy Creek to look for otters. No journals yet, or binoculars, just a field trip on day one.

We saw no otters, unfortunately.

(Interestingly, the buzz at lunch today was that my students went to their next periods and told everyone they had. I guess it’s a good sign that they are already mythologizing our time together?)

From my perspective, this first outing was an important success in that I wondered if we could make a round trip to the place I’ve started calling Otter Pond, a far corner of campus, in a single class period and still have time to do anything meaningful. The answer is yes, but just barely. We kept a leisurely pace throughout, taking the time to listen to Red-shouldered Hawks and Carolina Chickadees and American Crows and to admire and wonder about squirrel nests and even do a short (albeit slightly rushed) round of “I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of” with items picked up along the way (inspired by and modeled after the following outstanding BEETLES video).

I think we can get to Otter Pond, do a journaling session, and return in a single class period, but it won’t be a regular destination.

Today we added a seventh student. Because class straddled lunch, as it will every Friday on our rotating schedule, we had two roughly 25-minute blocks to work with. For the first, I passed out our brand-new binoculars (Pentax Papilio II as per Jack Law’s recommendation), and we spent time unboxing them and affixing the straps and whatnot and learning how to use them. Then we went outside to check on the feeders. With only a few minutes before lunch, we were nevertheless rewarded with a couple of Cardinals, a pair of Pine Warblers, and six Dark-eyed Juncos. I’ll write more about our feeding station later, but for now I’m inordinately pleased with the immediate benefits of having feeders rightoutsidethebuilding.

After lunch I sent the kids outside again with directions to grab a leaf that could hold their interest for a while. They brought these back to the classroom, and we did another round of “I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of” while seated at my tables (it was pretty cold today). Between our having more time and having done it once before—and perhaps because the kids are still more comfortable in the classroom—today’s round of “iniwirro” was more focused and rewarding, and the energy in the room was great. One other thing that made a difference today: because we had an odd number of students, there was room for me in a pairing.

My student partner, Robert, had pulled a glossy evergreen leaf off of one of the landscaping shrubs right outside. One of his questions was “how long will this leaf retain its green now that I picked it?” and he positively lit up when I suggested we pin it to the bulletin board and find out.

All in all a solid start. I wanted buy-in on the premise that observation and curiosity are skills that can be learned and practiced and improved, and I got it.

I’ll hand out the journals next week.

gearing up

My students are coming to me a little later this morning, so I thought I’d take a moment to go over the journaling supplies we’ve got lined up for everyone.

To start, each student gets a sketchbook (custom ordered from Sketch for Schools) and a little pencil pouch containing a pencil sharpener, a retractable measuring tape, and one pair each of mechanical pencils, Micron pens, and non-photo blue pencils. They also each get a simple folding sit-pad, a simple hand lens, and a pair of Pentax Papilio II 8.5 x 21 close-focus binoculars. These last two items I may hold in reserve for a few days and make their introduction more of an event.

Later in the semester we’ll look to add more art supplies, specifically either colored pencils or a simple watercolor kit, depending how things go. Thinking too seriously about art supplies is way above my pay grade as of yet.

Just as important as the supplies we’re providing is the stuff I’m asking that they bring with them, specifically clothes that will allow us to be outside in all but the most awful conditions. Here’s the letter I sent home to parents before Christmas Break laying out our expectations. We’ll see how prepared they are today; I’d like to take a fairly long walk today in our introductory session, and it’s a cloudy 45 degree morning in Atlanta.

about my new class this semester

Today I’m at home enjoying an unexpected “snow day” (there’s been a delay in getting back COVID testing results so we can resume in-person learning), but when (if) we resume tomorrow, I’ll be meeting my new class for the first time. It’s a nice, small group of ten students, many of whom I’m already teaching in my English classes.

This will be a semester-long elective built around the idea of getting outside and paying attention to the natural world using nature journaling as a tool for cultivating observation and curiosity. I’ve got much, much more to say on these subjects, but part of my goal in reviving Postcards is to keep these posts relatively short and just do so more frequently.

And so for today I share with you the video I threw together to sell the class to last year’s seventh graders as they registered for the next year’s classes. It’ll at least give you a sense of how I hope the class will work. The daunting reality is that I have to sustain this enterprise for a full semester. The good news is that I have a full semester to work with, a complete change of seasons from midwinter to early summer.

like seismic activity under a long dormant volcano

Well, I think I’m waking up the blog.

I have more time on my hands than I used to—having stepped down as Head Coach for Varsity Girls Soccer after fifteen years—and I’m looking forward to revisiting and further exploring the overgrown paths my teaching used to travel.

This blog at one time served an important role in my life as the place where I thought and wrote most deeply about parenting and teaching. A lot of my core beliefs took shape in these posts and in conversation with my readers. I hear myself to this day repeating—almost verbatim—ideas that I first composed and refined here. I have missed the practice.

Nevertheless, I’m more than a little nervous to open this door again. For nearly eight years my blog has sat abandoned without explanation, like a house whose occupants have vanished leaving half-eaten breakfast on the dining room table. Maintaining the blog had become a chore, an open loop demanding attention and energy in short supply. Moreover, while I appreciated the public nature of blogging—being accountable to an audience really pushed my thinking, and who doesn’t enjoy having a voice?—at some point I burnt out on the need to maintain the particular tone of earnest engagement and polite criticism and guarded optimism that all my posts seemed to hit. And it took a lot of time. I’m not a fast writer in the best of circumstances.

Still, I think I’m ready to give it a go again. At least for a while.

Why? Well, I’m teaching an 8th grade elective course this spring that I want to document. It’s an undertaking that I’m both excited and nervous about, the realization of a vision I first articulated in this post from twelve years ago. I’m not necessarily convinced that this format is my best option for documenting and sharing this adventure; blogging seems so 2010ish. I could probably share much more widely and successfully on other social media platforms.

Maybe I will do that, too (at least on Twitter—this old dog doesn’t really understand Instagram, much less TikTok).

But for now, Postcards is back. Maybe for a limited time, likely with a limited focus, almost certainly for a limited audience.

Or at least it will be as soon as I hit “Publish” . . .

river trip on the horizon

Today I registered the boys and I for Paddle Georgia 2014, the 10th anniversary trip for the Georgia River Network and the fourth consecutive year of participation for the boys and me. This year’s trip will pass within a couple hundred yards of our house on its run down the Chattahoochee River from Buford Dam to Franklin, GA.

7 days, 115 miles, 1 great time.

There’ll be plenty to say about the trip later, but for now I’ll take the opportunity to post a poem about our 2012 trip down the Altamaha written by my older son, Will, last year in 5th grade:

Altamaha

The little Amazon

Egret flies,

its great wings spread,

covered in feathers,

from wing to head.

Spanish Moss hangs,

swaying in the wind,

Covering the trees,

almost pinned.

Current flows,

gentle and slow,

leaves float,

to receive water’s tow.

Drift wood sits,

on the bank all tangled,

  lying untouched,

scarcely handled.

Bluffs tower,

cliffs old,

and weathered,

towering high,

too tall to be measured.

Mussels lay,

 on the river floor,

abandoned shells,

washed ashore.

—Will Meyer

The boys and I and the Meyer family canoe (over 1000 river miles now) on the Altamaha, June 2012

We’ll be back in river mode soon enough.