School (conclusion)

Our farm is a classroom for Carver and me. Our school, to tell you the truth, is not. In many ways, these two places that are so instrumental to Carver and me are on opposite ends of the spectrum from each other.

Our farm is 160 acres of fields, meadows, trees, and streams to walk over, crawl through, climb up, and swim in. It is there for us to explore and investigate and we spend as much of our free time as we can exploring and investigating it.

Our school is a ramshackle shanty, not built of brick and stucco and filled with teaching supplies like the white schools but pieced together with rotting wood and tar paper, empty of desks and textbooks. Carver has 47 students in his 2nd grade class and I have the same number in my 5th grade class. We are shoulder to shoulder and back to knee in our classrooms!

Our farm has a stream that runs along the back side of our property line. Carver and I like to stand in it barefooted on summer afternoons and feel the smooth rocks against our heels and the wet sand between our toes. We stand as still as we can and look at the life living just below the surface of the water. We talk about all the things we feel, see, and think about.

Our school doesn't have indoor plumbing, so we don't have water fountains and flush toilets like the students at the white schools have. We drink water from dippers in open buckets and pee and poop in an outhouse at the back corner of the schoolgrounds. Sometimes we can't play outside on hot, humid days because we have to stop and gag when we breathe in the putrid air. We help our teachers clean up our school each day because we don't have janitors to help us.

Our farm gives us all the space in the world to run freely until the calves of our legs throb achingly and the cheeks on our faces glow brightly. When we want to see how the little world around us is living or passing on, changing or staying the same, growing or fading away, it gives us all the room we need to walk at our pace asking questions, researching ideas, making hypotheses, doing experiments, and talking about our findings. Yes, it gives us our own space, our own room, to be us, to be Carver and Carter.

Our school is a long way from our farm so when we get there in the mornings and back here in the afternoons our calves are throbbing and our cheeks are glowing but it's not from running freely or walking leisurely. It's from marching dilligently the nine miles to school and the nine miles home. Yes, we walk eighteen miles each day to school and back home. And that is how my story begins.