Non-Farm Friday! September 16th, 2022
I was nowhere near the farm this week!
Um, yeah.
I’ve been on a fifteen-day road trip with 56 junior high students. So, no, I don’t have any photos from the farm to share. I’m also four days late. The trip was all-consuming and I slept in a tent most nights.
I’m sure I’ll write about the trip at some point, but for now, here are some photos and a few words to describe.
We went to Galena, IL and toured Grant’s house. This first part of the trip was all about Civil War and Civil Rights.
We visited Hannibal, MO and toured the Mark Twain Museum. It was kitschy but fun for me.
We went to the Trail of Tears state park and camped by the Mississippi River. Saw barges and had a train go right next to our campground at 4 am blasting the horn. In the morning we toured the museum and learned about genocide. It was a lot for the young adolescents, but I appreciate that we take them to this place, which was a river crossing on the trail.
This is a photo of a Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges from 1964.
The trip brought us to Memphis and the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Junior was killed. This museum is jam packed and powerful. I could spend a day and not see all it has to offer. It was overwhelming and we needed so time afterwards to process. I sat in the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks did her civil disobedience (or a re-creation).
The next day we went to Vicksburg and saw the battlefield and a wreck of a Union gunboat. It is interesting to me that although it is one of the key battles of the war and certified turning point, except for two early assaults, there was no big army versus army action. It was a chess match where Grant slowly tightened the board until the Confederates surrendered to save the carnage from happening.
The next day we arrived at Ocean Springs, MS for a week of Marine Biology lessons. We kayaked on a bayou, dissected sharks, learned about the marine life of the Gulf, and had a bunch of free time to enjoy being next to the Mississippi Sound.
Our program was hosted by Southern Mississippi University, and they had the Katrina waterline on our dorm. Whoa! Their campus took a direct hit and parts needed to be rebuilt after Katrina. The new teaching campus is amazing!
They have this cool teaching tool which is a globe with four projectors synced up to show weather patterns and any number of other geographic features. Wow!
We learned how to do scientific sampling using tools like the seine net. Caught more fish in the sound than out on the island.
On the island trip we found lots of interesting items washed up on the beach, including a shell from a horseshoe crab. We saw crabs and pelicans and osprey and more. We also picked up a lot of trash.
We had side trips to New Orleans, to an art museum, and to a plantation that had a two-part tour (first focus on the house and the white people and second focus on the enslaved people). Our guide was amazing — she had been a high school history teacher and she is a member of a local Native American nation. It is an tough topic to teach well and she did it the best I’ve seen. As a side note, this was a sugar plantation and it was about the same size as the plantation from the Marlon James book we wrote about last month.
The way home was more driving and less touring. But a key moment was in Birmingham, AL when we had a question and answer with Paulette Roby, a civil rights activist and one of the participants in the Children’s March which forced Birmingham to integrate. Wow.
This was quite a trip and I need to process more before I write anything more.
