Pushing Back the Trees & Long-term Ecology

We made the decision to burn wood over two years ago. I work full-time as an educator and have summers "off". Most folks think teachers have it easy. The school day ends at 2:30 and we have summers off, right? Yes, there are some of us that work the clock but most of us are committed to our students, our curriculum and our school. This means that grading student work comes home with us and is scored after we eat with our family, that more than a few hours are spent on weekends doing what can't be completed during the week and that we spend some part of our summer thinking about what we will do differently and even creating material to use in the fall. Yup, that's me.

So, outside of my life as an educator, I have this passion for things outdoors. We have an organic garden that provides good veggies. We have a home garden and this year I've created a garden on our 50 acres (about 1 mile from where we reside). I'm experimenting with winter crops like potatoes, onions and squash. The soil is much richer than at our house and the plants show it! My 9 year old son is also very excited as his pumpkin plants there are HUGE! I'm hoping the critters don't find too much of what I've planted edible.

On our 50 acres, I'm slowly pushing back some of the fields that have been taken by trees over the last 100 years. The hardwood burns in our wood stove in winter. The soft woods are sold for pulp. I'm also dealing with poor logging practices.  Our acreage was logged a few times, about 12 years ago being the most recent. The memories of this are still there; deep ruts in softer soil and old oil cans strewn about. Some of the skidder trails are well placed and these I fix and turn into access trails for both walking, skiing and winter access for selective harvesting. This sounds like quite a bit of work (it is) but I take my strategy from Helen and Scott Nearing. It's a long-term plan with many interweaving components for successful land management. These components are designed to work together in one summer or over years of management.

Let me provide one example for areas where I am re-establishing open space.

Our forest is mid-stage succession. In this area of Maine, there are maple, oak, cherry, birch and beech but also pine and balsam fir. When I'm clearing, I have different things I do with the different parts of the trees. The hardwoods obviously are cut into burnable chunks, split and stacked to dry for winter fuel. The remainder is cut into "brush" and "poles". The brush is piled into a row on my access road and shredded with my field mower. Sometimes I leave this as it makes a nice base for a woods trail, sometimes I rake this up and use it elsewhere. The poles are stacked and can be either chipped or used as part of a "You Rot!" pile (read further).

Older softwoods are sustainably harvested for pulp. What little profit there is goes into tractor maintenance, chainsaw blades, diesel, gravel for the roads, etc. Branches from these are shredded and used as above. Sometimes the fir poles will be used for corduroy roads (another experiment). I leave wood standing until I am ready to use it. So, I may harvest the firewood one year and not harvest the fir until the next year.

When clearing, there is plenty of debris that is unusable. This includes half-rotten trees and wood too small to cut up for firewood. This material is stacked in rows into low spots on our property. When it reaches the level of contour I desire, I cover it with a layer of shredded brush (see above) that I have raked up. The idea is to create a moist environment for the organisms that feed on wood to thrive. I'm no soil biologist so my decay piles are each built differently to see what works best. I may eventually spread topsoil over the top and seed, but first I'll wait a year or two to see what nature brings.


We have a low area that will eventually make a nice pond. In this low spot, there is decent topsoil. In late August, early September when things are dry. I scoop out a good pile of soil and put it in a location where it can sit for a year. This way, the pile slowly dries and anything growing dies and decays. When I clear an area and the trees are gone,  I skim coat the surface with this top soil and seed with grass.

Stumps present their own issues.These are cut as low as possible

without running the saw blade into the dirt; then notched. Over a few years, the rainwater collects in the notches accelerating the decay process.  The freeze/thaw cycle over a few winters accelerates the process. The difference in longevity between notched and un-notched is remarkable; notched softwoods and hardwoods decay fairly rapidly.

In my "harvested soil", there are lots of rocks. These are raked out as the top soil is spread. The small rocks go into 5 gal buckets and the larger rocks are piled together. The small rocks are transported to a wet spot in a trail and used as fill, the larger rocks are moved to a pile that will be used to widen my main access road, build the next small bridge abutment or perhaps used in slipform construction to build a foundation for a cabin.

So, there is at least one option (usually more) for the output(s) of each process. Each output ties in with at least two ongoing projects. So, in theory anyway, as one process moves forward, the resources for another project become readily available. As new projects are completed, others are started. The most difficult part of the process is having a long-term vision and realizing that projects may take a few years to complete. In this way, what I am doing is more in line with what nature does when she "creates". It takes years for forest succession to take place so it makes sense (to me anyway) that small, human-engineered changes, should not be a rapid event either.

As I gain experience over the years and observe the outcome of my experiments, I gain understanding about how well certain ideas have worked. What and how I do things now is much different (and more efficient) than how I did things 5 years ago.

Reflections from my first full year of teaching in a Standards-based, Student Centered Environment

I teach Chemistry.

I'm not really sure how I ended up teaching Chemistry. I began as a professional scientist and spent 20 years in that career. Somewhere along the line, I obtained a Masters in Environmental Education. When I first went into teaching, Chemistry is one of the classes I ended up with. Surprisingly, it has been the one I most enjoy. I think it's because I like what it does to kids brains.

At the high school level, we tend to forget that there are cognitive levels. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chemistry. Because there is a certain amount of abstract thinking involved in this subject area, there are some students who are just not able to grasp, perhaps visualize, some of the ideas in the course. While I enjoy watching my students brains expand with the information they learn, I also enjoy the challenge of developing different ways of delivering information that helps them approach learning.

I am fortunate to finally be in a school district that has embraced an evolving model of learning. When I was a scientist, I always felt that I worked with others in a community where we all had the same goal; the discovery and advancement of knowledge. I've been in 3 school districts in my tenure as an educator and I have never felt like a professional. I learned early on in my first career that progress can only be made when you are in an environment where you work "with" people and not "for" people.

So, to truly change the learning environment, your administrators must re-establish their role(s) and discover how to work "with" the professionals they have hired. This often involves creating a model of "shared-decision making" which allows anyone in the building an opportunity to participate in this process if they desire.

Educators must also be willing to embrace change. Lecturing to the masses is dead. The global economy has undergone a massive shift over the last 7 years. Technology is in every students pocket; they are part of a digital generation. So, education must also change to both embrace the technology we have that is constantly developing and to provide our students with the ability to think and adapt. We don't know where the jobs of the future are or will be so we need to help our students become independent learners.

When both administration and educators connect, there is an amazing cultural shift that takes place. What I have observed in my whole 1.3 years of being a part of this environment is that a new dialog begins. The focus is on education and on students. Hasn't the focus always been on education and students you think? In my 10 years of being an educator in three different school districts, I had yet to experience a place where there was universal, constant dialog with all the stakeholders involved, about how to improve education.

So, I'm still a newbie to all of this schtuff. To give an idea of what is possible, let me just list the changes I have observed in the 1.3 years I have been a part of our district.

With no experience, I was dropped into a standards-based, student-centered learning model 2/3 of the way through the school year (3rd trimester 2012). Trial by fire? Definitely!

2011-2012
Specific Targets (standards) had just been written and adopted at the beginning of the school year. Teachers were working to figure out how to adapt their material for each target, figuring out to move through the targets to complete them by the end of the year and how to create assessments that demonstrated student learning for each target. They struggled with what it means to "meet standard"on each individual target assigned to their classes. Targets often begin with statements like "Students understand and can demonstrate..." so you often think and re-think about what proficiency means.

Students were learning that, if they couldn't demonstrate "proficiency" on an "assessment", that they needed to re-visit the material and re-take an assessment. No longer was failure an option. Pacing became an issue as it became difficult to keep moving forward as there were students that were unsuccessful at completing assessments. The concept of multi-tasking and organization were redefined as some students worked to meet standard on past Targets, many students were keeping up with class pace and some were ready to move faster through the material. Learning to groups students moving at the same pace together was a developing skill. Learning to keep track of everything and document was a developing skill.

2012-2013
The second year of working with established Targets allowed us to appreciate what worked and identify what did not. We were allowed to fix what didn't work well. We were allowed to re-write what was not well defined. Working with the two other Chemistry teachers in our district has been an amazing experience. Together, we reconfigured our Targets into three trimester mini-courses that might be seen as stand alone courses. With so much focus on course content over the past two years, lab activities had been compromised. We're now working to re-integrate laboratory skills that mesh with and reinforce the Targets we teach. And, we are in the process of redefining what advanced courses will look like. Instead of being it's own year-long course, Honors Chemistry will be an additional trimester course that coincides with the third trimester of Chemistry. This will be an introduction to a year-long Advanced Chemistry course.

In addition, in our particular High School, we voted to completely recreate our daily schedule. Science classes have the option of having a second laboratory period much like colleges do. Intervention and study halls no longer exist in favor of Labs where students will go to work on things they are challenged by.

Parting thoughts.
These changes were brought about in just two years from within by a faculty committed to creating an environment that works for our students. For those just beginning their journey, the changes may seem overwhelming and even a bit insane. Your journey will be different from ours. The hardest part for many will be to let go of what we feel has been working well for us. You have to constantly remind yourself that we are not in education "for us" and that we are working to create an environment that will help our students, all of our students, be successful in their future.  It is not an easy road to take as there are generations of adults that do not understand why we are changing. Many are not willing to embrace a proficiency-based system of education.

As a scientist, I enjoy experiments. The goals of this experiment are to improve what we do. If we don't explore learning how to learn, then we can't get better. How do I know what we are doing now is better that what we did "before"? Simply, by the quality of the interactions I have with my students. They are more engaged on a day to day basis , the questions they ask are richer, the connections they make are deeper. Ask me again in a few more years. I can't wait to see where we go from here!