Community Spirit
On Pleasant Surprises
Every Friday, CCA’s entire USLR (Upper School of Logic and Rhetoric) spends the last period of the academic week sharing a time we call Community. Partly an attempt to cultivate school ethos, and partly an acknowledgment that almost nothing productive is going to happen with the weekend so very close, Community has become a time for competitions, games, controlled chaos, and general revelry. All of this is well and good, but one of my favorite iterations of Community is our annual campus clean-up, an hour when the whole middle and upper schools walk the campus armed with gloves and garbage bags, sponges and mops, gathering trash, cleaning surfaces, and generally taking responsibility for the space they’re in. It’s a time of regrounding and remembering, the sort of thing that makes you glad, however briefly, to have a career in education.
This year, our new Dean of Students approached me a few days before the campus clean-up to ask if the Classical Roots Program could use a few dozen extra hands during that hour. It was such a good idea that I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of it myself. In the end, I was given around a quarter of the student body to organize and direct as I pleased, a sort of divine gift that descended at exactly the right moment, since this is the time of year when Classical Roots has far more to do than we have time and people to do it.
I met with our Prefect and student leaders the day before, made them my lieutenants, consulted about what tasks needed doing and, when the day came, simply stood back and watched. My only real contribution to the day was getting out of the way and letting the students take control of the situation. Before long, they were scattered about in laughing, laboring, chattering groups, repairing fences, sifting compost, mulching orchard trees, planting lettuce, and dividing perennials. Many of the students we requisitioned had clearly never lifted a spade before, but they warmed quickly to the work, and the general atmosphere, out in the May sunshine with the robins and blue jays flying around curious to see what all the commotion was about, was palpably jovial. There’s a tactile pleasure to getting tasks like these done, especially on pleasant days, and the sheer selfless exuberance of fixing and planting and cultivation made even the most reluctant students flushed and happy. A very good day.
I’ve had seasons where I pushed and pushed to make people aware of the Classical Roots Program, forcing it under the noses of administrators, potential donors, and even unlucky acquaintances, working with a relentless will to make them care. But like the proverbial watched pot, these efforts never seem to amount to much. Paradoxically, it’s only when the students and I allow ourselves to get caught up in the garden, to be absorbed in its needs and intricacies and the slow pageantry of bloom and harvest, that the program seems to grow. This entire event was unplanned and largely un-prepared for, but it ended up being a highlight of the season, a concentrated moment of buy-in that I never could have forced to occur.
The lesson, of course, is that you can feed and water the plant, but you cannot make it get any bigger. There’s a kind of letting-go intrinsic to gardening that has also become a sort of rule for the Classical Roots Program, too. If it’s going to thrive, it’s going to be as a sort of unintended consequence of the daily work of cultivation that’s our real calling as students and stewards. On my best days, I’m content with that state of affairs. On my worst, I would do well to remember this particular community, which amounted to a pleasant surprise for me and for all of CCA’s green spaces.
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