Cautiously, emotional disabilities teacher Kristin Carter tends to her two potted plants in her classroom with hopes of more for her students. Parallels between gardening and the classroom, through one teacher’s efforts, are closer than they appear. 

Carter started her education career at The Kellar School, an educational institution catering to students with emotional and/or learning disabilities, teaching there for seven years. She developed teaching methods to support the demands of teaching which assist in creating new ideas in her current job.

“I like indoor plants and outdoor plants and I also like bringing gardening into the classroom,” Carter said. “I’m doing personal development this year and I’m going to ask if we can do something with growing our own plants in our lessons.”

According to Carter, gardening holds the same principles of learning and teaching in the classroom: patience, care and growth. The patience and care a teacher must have for a student’s growth parallels the patience and care needed for a plant’s growth. In addition, Carter envisions the potential effects gardening could have on her students. 

“[Gardening] is a good coping skill,” Carter said. “It’s a good activity to be outside and kind of calm down and decompress from the day, which is a lot of what we talk about–just being able to cope through situations.”

With her motivation stemming from personal difficulties she faced as a student, Carter has found a way to help students in similar situations throughout her career. As a result of her efforts, she has already seen some of her students bloom in their individual lives. 

“I actually just had a Zoom meeting with a previous student this weekend who came to me in middle school at Kellar,” Carter said. “He had not lived at home for years and had not been in a traditional public school. He started his senior year at a public school fully mainstream, is working as a vet tech and just has grown over the years.”

Combining past experiences for future hopes in her classroom, her plant pots grow silently in the corner of her classroom. However, as the gardener of many past and future greenhouses, she has felt changes within herself individually.

“I’ve personally grown with all these experiences,” Carter said. “It really helps me be a lot more reflective of myself.”