Allisence: How Deep Are Your Roots?

In the early 1990s, Brian Andreas, an American artist began collecting stories. He innovatively used the Internet of that time and collected thousands of stories from around the world. These stories eventually grew into colorful, hand-lettered prints—the foundation for StoryPeople.

One of Andreas’ prints is called Deep Roots. The story says this: When I die, she said, I’m coming back as a tree with deep roots and I’ll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school and whisper tree songs at night in their dreams. Trees with deep roots know about the things children need.

Last weekend, I went to Arizona State University’s 42nd Annual Language and Literacy Conference. I had reservations about going because while it sounded interesting, I wasn’t sure how applicable the ideas would be to my classroom, I had to pay for the conference out of pocket, and it was on a Friday night! Leaving the conference, I was blown away.

The theme for the conference was 21st Century Literacies: Honoring What We Know, Envisioning Where We Can Go. The visual they chose was a picture of an enormous tree with deep roots. The keynote speakers went on to explain how the roots represent what we know and our roots need to be deep. As schools, we need to be secure in our vision and mission. We need to have high standards and a deep understanding of our community and students.

The rest of the tree is all the places our students are headed. Yet, even if a tree has high branches and lofty goals, if it does not develop deep roots, a wind of new standards and a breeze of new research will topple it.

This got me thinking about my own beliefs about teaching. The keynote speakers talked about how a school should represent a healthy, deeply rooted tree, and I completely agree. However, I feel as educators, we also need to consider Andreas’ Deep Roots and think about the fact that each of us should also be a tree with deep roots, who knows about the things children need. This certainly doesn’t mean we’re so set in our ways that we can’t adapt, but it does mean we have a foundation to support where we and our students are headed.

While my students are only in elementary school, the decisions I make on a daily basis affect their lives in ways I can never imagine. And I wonder if sometimes I get so caught up in them learning dialogue conventions, multiplication facts, and certain phonograms that I’m missing the big picture. Where do I, where does the school, where do their parents, where do my students envision themselves going? How deep, in fact, are their roots?

As you can tell, this conference has got my brain going a hundred miles an hour and I hope you’ll take some time to consider these same questions and even share what you come up with!

Comments

[Mariah Woods]

As an undergraduate student, going to conferences such as those are encouraged by my professors. I have not yet attended one. After reading this post, I may change my mind. It really got me thinking of how I want my classroom to be, and how well I need to know each and every one of my students. Evaluating how deep my roots are may be my first step. I can only see myself being a special educator in the future. My passion is to help students with disabilities be successful in every aspect of life. Thanks for sharing this post, it gets many thinking!

[Jessica]

Hi Allisence, great post! I have those a-ha moments when I sit back and think "am I missing it all?" too. One of the things I do to sort of get out of teaching mode and show my students that I am still there for them is volunteer with Girl Scouts. I run a combo troop at my school, which gives me time to see them in a non-school setting, and we can even occasionally go out and do something. It has helped me see a different side of them and the other way around too -- they see that I'm there for them (at least I hope they do). I know at my school, where turnover was high for a number of years, my students are hesitant to trust new teachers -- we have to let our roots grow a little before they believe we'll stay.