well, i have not been bloggin' much lately. got rather busy with the students at winterstein this summer, and am now gearing up for the school year. excited to report that i will be working with the little ones: elementary schoolers. this will be a new experience for me, and am looking forward to it. also, super excited to be teaching watercolor through arden creek parks and recreation district this fall. also a new opportunity for me.

...after this school year, i will have taught art to all ages, from 5 to 85 (seriously).

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so, one of my favorite "back to school" rituals is the TEACHER MOVIE MARATHON. i don't actually stay in and watch all these movies, but i do try to watch one or two. here is a list of great teacher movies:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (love love love this movie!)

To Sir With Love  (dear handsome Sidney Poitier...i love you. yes, i cry when lulu sings)

Stand and Deliver (saw this in 4th grade and was moved to tears)

Blackboard Jungle   (makes me want to rumble. and cry a little)

Dangerous Minds  (cheesy? absolutely. a little offensive? yup. did i cry? you bet i did)

Dead Poet's Society (um, who *doesn't* cry when they watch this?)

Lean on Me  (not much crying, but get fired up a bit watching morgan freeman with that baseball bat!)

Up the Down Staircase  (honestly, have not seen it yet. is first on my list this year. i do, however, anticipate some crying)

Chalk   (absolutely no crying. some pretty good chuckles. why? because this is the most realistic film about teaching i have ever seen. crying happens with the great story arc. this is a fairly honest picture of teaching and teachers and the daily grind of it all...no arc, just the last day of school)

Class Act  (haven't seen it yet, is in my netflix queue. is about ART EDUCATION. you should watch it too)

I Am A Promise: Stanton Elementary  (also on my queue. i sang a song called "i am a promise" when i was in third grade, and it made my mom cry, so i imagine that this will be a pretty good teacher movie)

To Be and To Have (Être et avoir) (FANTASTIC documentary about education in france.  the tenderness of this teacher, and the gentle community created in a one room school house will make you cry. in french.)

The Future We Will Create  (check out the link on my favorites page to Sir Ken Robinson's talk about creativity, children, and the future. if what he says resonates with you, watch this documentary)

happy labor day ya'll.

when i was a kid, you could sign up for summer school and take special "extras," like art for instance, that were not offered during the regular school with much consistency. the summer after third grade (or there abouts), my mom cut a check and i got to color, cut, and paste to my hearts content.

summer school was at dunlap elementary school (i went to may grisham. go gators!), and i remember two things about dunlap that my school lacked, much to my fourth grade chagrin: mr. brancato. and the garden.

mr. tony brancato was the principal of dunlap. he looked like an italian woody allen: small, lots of nervous energy...but he had charisma in spades, he glowed with enthusiam , and i loved him. he  would say hello to all of us, every morning as he walked down the hallways. mr. brown, my principal at grisham, was okay. he wore brown slacks. but honestly, mr. brancato was just...cool.

mr. brancato planted a vegetable garden at dunlap. it was amazing. i'd never seen anything like it before. i mean, i'd never really seen vegetables growing, and certainly not in the middle of an elementary school. mr. brancato put the garden in the middle of a corridor that sat between two long hallways flanked by classroom doors and windows (anyone who attended a school built during the cold war in california should know what kind of layout i am describing). i mean, you couldn't even run in the hallways. and here was mr. brancato, creating a tiny eden in the middle of a bureaucracy. planted it. just turned. it. out.

it's not like i was really into gardening (most of us were pretty much just focused on coloring, painting, smurfs, and candy), but i did intuit something special about that garden and dunlap's principal. he took the time to make something on campus; he liked us and he liked the school...and that just felt good. that was my first romance with gardens, 25 (!!!!) years ago. fast forward to the present, and i am still just totally fascinated by gardens, and the people who make gardens...

even though mr. brancato did something pretty unorthadox at the time, it was a fantastic idea. folks like alice waters and her edible schoolyard project make a connection between growing food for growing people! gardens on campus, healthy organic high quality produce in the cafeterias...it makes me want to skip!

because really? shouldn't we be feeding our kids the very best? ...and hey! one more thought: did you know that the free/reduced fee breakfast and lunch programs used in schools were instituted during world war ii when the military started to note that many men coming through the draft were malnourished (the depression)...the government decided that nourishing the youngsters was a matter of national security! i think our current government needs to revisit this idea. pronto.

check out farm to school for some interesting reading... 

well, yesterday's sac bee had two very interesting stories on the front page which has me chattering on about victory gardens. again.

the first story is about migrant labor issues-- a couple of months ago, maria isabel vasquez jimenez, a 17 year old girl and farmworker, passed out in the high pickin' heat, and died; it was discovered that she was two months pregnant...just to give you a sense of how tragic maria's death is to her family (and the potential pr/labor crisis that could result in squashing california's ag economy...in the midst of already rising food and transportation-of-food costs) the governator even went to her funeral. maria's death, and the realities unearthed by the resulting labor inspections have me thinking that a labor strike would not be far off the money.

the other story is about the attack of the killer tomatoes. the central valley of california makes alot of produce, ya'll, including tomatoes. like, i heard somewhere that most of the tomatoes eaten, in one form or another, in  the united states come the central valley of california. anyhow, seems there is cause to fear that them tomaters is poopy and can make ya sick.

problems: labor and immigration issues. unsustatinable farming practices. poopy killer tomatoes.

solution: subvert the lawn! plant an edible estate! transform vacant lots into beautiful community gardens! secure your own food source!

seriously.

i am super excited about edible estates by artist/designer/totally awesome dude fritz haeg and victory gardens 2.0 by amy franceschini...graham and i have been discussing issues and ideas like this for months, trying to figure out a way to merge our professional interests (art and education, sustainability, and community) and personal passions (good real food, gardens, art, localism, new urbanism, etc).

i even had the wild thought of victory gardens for the 21st century-- but franceschini beat me to the punch. however, i do think the idea could be embraced by our government and really promoted on that whole national campiagn level, with psa's, posters, maybe even incentive$ of some kind... as was the case during world war II, these victory gardens would protect and increase our national security. only now, crops culled from one's yard would decrease a carbon foot print and encourage gentle community based action that tastes good!

muriel strand, a local lady with a lot of pluck, recently ran for mayor of sacramento on the "goats and chickens platform" and she said something that really struck me: "YOU CAN'T EAT MONEY". muriel worked with the city to change ordinances that made it illegal to plant edible crops in one's front yard (so, like, it was illegal to have a tomato plant between your rose bushes. how did such an ordinance even get passed in the first place?). thanks to muriel, folks like fritz haeg and his edible landscape garden lab groupies (i love you fritz!) can transform their front yards into a culinary paradise! you can't eat money!

the social justice issues inherent to having some control of one's food supply are profound, especially in this age of genetically modified and de-nurtitionized produce grown with harsh chemicals that hurt our bodies and the earth...if a local hero like muriel hadn't helped the city change it's silly and over reaching ways, artists like fritz haeg become like renegade-protest gardeners...

i would love love love to turn out our front yard, but the heavy tree canopy in mid-town worries me...not sure if our little patch (really, it is the most ridiculous patch of lawn ever. it's like 6 x 6', and sits on the west side of the house) would produce much...thoughts?

back to muriel strand....the following is from muriel's blog. it's basically the detailed list of a "goats and chickens platform" (by the way, this is not a term muriel uses, but it is the phrase bandied about in our house over dinner because graham and i think it is hilarious-- and truly dead on, in terms of really being honest about sustainability) 

• Develop and support (more) classes in traditional crafts & skills such as spinning, weaving, smithing, woodworking, etc.
• Recalibrate city utility billing to effectively reward and motivate conservation and waste reduction.
• Ban nonrecyclable plastic take-out food containers.
• Match people wishing to trade houses and reduce their commutes.
• Develop a low-cost community garden design option.
• Actively support planting & use of tree crops such as pecans.
• Tax lawns & plastic bags.
• Develop a permitting process for composting toilets.
• Develop a few standard designs & streamlined permitting process for passive solar construction & renovation.
• Tax parking spaces.
• Convert parking lots to urban farms.
• Require traffic calming devices to be bicycle-friendly too.
• Revise the vehicle code to give the right of way to bicycles
• Require pedestrian walkways to be adjacent to buildings or residential gardens rather than adjacent to parking or streets.
• Truly visible street addresses to reduce confusion & needless driving.
• Ban leafblowers and other uncivilized machines.
• Revise zoning codes to include inoffensive ways to keep chickens, rabbits & goats in residential neighborhoods.
• Loans for graywater systems in residential & commercial buildings.
• Redesign water treatment processes to compete with bottled water.
• Convert parking pavement to water-permeable surfaces.
• Invest in children - nursing, nutrition, skills - for elders' pensions.
• Design & build a prototype manually-operated clothes washer.
• Protect clotheslines, natural landscapes, and affordable housing from the "blight" label.
• Recognize that when mothers are caring for their kids they ARE working.
• Light-rail to the airport won't be needed when we can't afford to fly.
• Delete oil subsidies.
• Reduce the workweek to 24 hours so the same amount of work will yield more jobs.