What Do You Wish You Would Have Known?

Copied entirely from Paul Graham here. Some minor cursing (a warning for the easily offended), but my goodness. Imagine if someone had not only sat you down and told you this when you were younger but that you had also had presence of mind enough not to ignore it. Share it with a highschooler you love.

January 2005

(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)

When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.

I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.

It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1] (added: notes can be reviewed by visiting the link above)

But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.

And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.

What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]

We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?

Upwind

I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?

Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.

To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.

Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.

I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.

Ambition

In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.

Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.

If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.

If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.

When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]

Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.

The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.

I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]

You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.

Corruption

It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.

Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]

Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.

So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?

When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.

In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.

By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.

Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.

Curiosity

And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.

A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.

Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.

One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.

If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?

It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.

The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.

And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?

Now

If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.

The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.

Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)

It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.

Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.

Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]

Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.

Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.

A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.

The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]

This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.

Creative Thinking - As Simple as Jelly and Peanut Butter

If you could think more creatively by changing one routine thing, one habit, would you?

According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, something as simple as changing your regular routine,

"...can help people break their cognitive patterns, and thus lead them to think more flexibly and creatively,” according to a research team led by psychologist Simone Ritter of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands."

Among other things, the study asked Dutch students to make a sandwich in the conventional way using bread, then butter, then chocolate chips. They asked a second group to butter the bread and then to scatter chocolate chips on a plate, using the buttered bread to pick up the chips.

First of all, butter and chocolate chips? Yes, please!

By approaching a standard task in a non-standard way (e.g., switching sandwich assembly order), participants in the study demonstrated more flexible thinking in the tasks that followed.

So what could this mean for schools?

Most teacher-training programs stress the need to establish a routine in the classroom, and up until very recently, parents, teachers and researchers have told students to approach studying in a systemic, linear fashion. This new study, although not necessarily refuting those strategies outright, could demonstrate the need for the occasional shakeup in the normal pattern. Some schools flip schedules completely mid-year (6th period become 1st, 5th becomes 2nd, and so on), and most teachers recognize the need for a break in routines at times. There are students who need to have predictable routines to function well (e.g., autistic students anywhere on the spectrum, from moderate to profound), but others might benefit from looking at a task in a different order, or approaching the day outside of the usual routine.

Food for thought.

Would You Hire Your Own Kid?

So let's move beyond the conversation about testing, standards, curriculum maps and cut to the chase:

If you owned a business, would you hire your own kid?

If not, why not? What is missing?

Tony Wagner suggests there are seven skills that school should be teaching (with the implication, of course, that schools are not currently teaching all, if any, of them).

1. Critical thinking and problem solving

Critical thinking and problem solving are examples of divergent thinking, a practice that is generally frowned upon in school these days. Instead of getting the one, right answer, students should be encouraged to examine the problem or idea from multiple perspectives. This is teaching HOW to think, not WHAT to think.

2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence

Mike Summers, who is Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell Computers, said that his greatest concern was young people's lack of leadership skills. "Kids just out of school have an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and collaborative skills," he explained, "They lack the ability to influence versus direct and command."We should be teaching kids to work together as a group instead of blindly competing against one another. Doesn't mean everyone gets a medal, but it does mean that we more fully explore the idea that kids should be learning to collaborate locally in person and globally through webtools.

3. Agility and adaptability

Adapt or die - basic Darwin. The only thing constant is change - basic business speak. If we are raising kids who cannot be flexible and utilize new tools and ideas if they are the new norm, we will have kids who will not be able to keep pace with the speed of innovation in the world. This is not to say abandon all tradition or simply speed up; this means being more agile and less rigid in thinking and skillsets.

4. Initiative and entrepreneurialism

Mark Chandler, the Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Cisco was one of the strongest proponents of these traits. "Leadership is the capacity to take initiative and trust yourself to be creative," he told me. "I say to my employees if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try ten things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. If you set stretch goals, you'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying.

Risk-taking: not taught in school because risk = bad. Not so. There is stupid risk (drinking and driving) and calculated risk (think experiments with alternate road materials, like solar panels, to solve the energy crisis). What employer would not want a confident employee who takes initiative?

5. Effective written and oral communication

Schools like to think they do this well, but identifying a noun in a sentence is not "effective written and oral communication." Writing and public speaking are taught less and less in general, and writing and speaking for a purpose even less than that.

6. Accessing and analyzing information

Kids have the world at their fingertips, and in their purses and in their backpockets, in the form of iPads, iPods, tablets, etc. They are inundated with information, but so what? Plagiarism is rampant, so kids are not transforming the information they find, simply copying or parroting it. Do they know how to vet a website, or do they believe what they see because it is written down, and are we teaching this skill? Not so well.

"There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the information effectively it almost freezes them in their steps."

7. Curiosity and imagination

Daniel Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind, writes that "Even in our best schools, we are teaching kids to memorize much more than to think. And in the 21st century, mere memorization won't get you very far." This goes back to #1 and is closely tied to divergent thinking. There is more than one answer, but if students only have four to choose from their motivation to go further deteriorates rapidly. To put it in global business terms, China is thrilled with the test focus in the US; conversely, they are developing more programs to teach creative thinking and are banking on the fact that they will move from simply manufacturing American ideas to manufacturing their own, cheaper and more quickly than the US. Best quote from this article? The Chinese professors laughed [and] said, ‘You're racing toward our old model. But we're racing toward your model, as fast as we can.'"

So where does your kid fall? Do they have any of these skills, and, if not, how will you help them?

Would you hire them as they are?

21st Century Enlightenment

Shedding a little light on the subject of enlightenment and change in the 21st century.

Comments are also quite enlightening!

100 Teaching Tools You Should Know About

This is not just for classroom teachers and homeschoolers; this list encompasses technology and learning tools that can impact both work and personal life out side of the classroom. A great Slideshare presentation!

Happy Friday!

Growing a Community Through Food - Food Revolution Blog!

Here is the student blog published on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution site:

Feb 2012
Story by Sicily

We are a non-profit private school just starting out, a one-room school house on five acres. My mother is our teacher; she started HoneyFern in 2010 when she saw that kids need experiences and a voice in what they learn.




As we started the second half of our first year, we started to look around for community service opportunities, eventually finding Pastor Leonard and Hollydale United Methodist Church right down the street. Recognizing our common desire to help our community, even though HoneyFern is a secular school, we started running Hollydale's food pantry a year ago, helping families with a no-questions-asked food donation twice a month, relying solely on pantry items donated by church members and other people in the area.

Hollydale's congregation is a very low-income one; 90% of students at the local elementary school are on free or reduced-price lunch, and the church assists them as well with a brown paper sack of food every Friday, too (so they will definitely have some food over the weekend).

Many food pantries have two problems today: they are a never-ending supply of food, and they are a never-ending supply of (often) low-quality food. Every week we see the same people, if people know that they will have a constant food source for free, they may not try to supply the food for themselves. But sometimes the food they are being supplied with is extremely unhealthy. If we want to try and help people eat healthy at home, why are we giving people horrible food? Pastor Leonard also realized that all food given out is usually boxed, and filled with preservatives, additives, and all kinds of sugars. In the long-term, this didn't seem like we were helping our community at all.

At the end of 2011, HoneyFern met with Pastor Leonard and talked about the idea of helping without hurting; what could we do in our partnership that would take the people of the community out of their 'crisis mode', which is ultimately self-destructive and limiting, into a self-sustaining place of helping themselves?

We realized that opening the food pantry was a good idea if we just want to put a Band-Aid on the wound, but it was not great if you wanted to heal the wound. In this conversation we discussed the idea of starting a community garden; in this way we can either educate people how to grow a garden at home if they have space, or they can come to the garden and have a plot of their own, with support and education to start providing for themselves. We have decided to try to get fresh herbs and vegetables on the plates of the people who come to our food pantry.

Planting (and eating from!) a garden relaxes your mind and body. Eating healthier benefits your body because it builds strong bones and gives you less of a chance for blood clots, and it just makes you feel more alive. You have more energy to do things, and personally it makes me feel happier. Growing a garden is healthy for your mind, too. While you are weeding weeds you are also clearing your mind of weeds and focusing on one thing. You forget about car payments and mortgages and focus on the garden, the plants getting stronger in the sunshine and the good you are doing for yourself and your environment.

We hope to educate people on healthy eating so they can take that home and make healthy meals for the entire family; although we do not live in a food desert, the people in our community have limited incomes and many have fallen into the pattern of dollar menus and cheap meals in boxes, some of which we have provided through the food pantry. Although we will not give up the food pantry, as it does provide immediate food aid and relief to people who are truly in crisis, we feel that the community garden is the direction that will sustain and grow our community, long term.

This is our Food Revolution: helping bring healthy eating to those who are less fortunate than us. We hope that our gardening 'plot' (no pun intended) will help our community get back on its feet and gain independence in the world.

This is our first spring, and we are ready to break ground on a new beginning for our community; won't you come with us on our journey?

About the author: Sicily is a 6th grade student at Honey Fern School.

Wordless Wednesday - Making Mardi Gras Masks