It's not dirt

A delightful post in the North East Bylines from teacher and smallholder, Melody Bird.

As the digging went on, we made cross curricular links to the Battle of the Somme and sang ‘mud, mud glorious mud’. The clart was all encompassing. Accident prone Pupil H looked like the creature from the black lagoon by the end of the afternoon, but I think he was still smiling. The children keep referring to soil as dirt and so I keep correcting them. 6 inches of it and rain water means we can survive on earth. Yet it hardly gets a mention in the curriculum as I think I’ve mentioned before. For life on earth soil is more precious than gold… yet kids don’t see it as valuable as most of their food comes off a supermarket shelf. We really need to launch new campaign “Just Top Soil”.

Excerpts from the diary of a teacher on the verge of climate breakdown Week 9: Potatoes