See also the first symposium we did on this topic , back in I want you to visit the home of each of your children. You need stay only ten minutes in each home. I just want you to understand your students. I had never wanted to teach little kids but the only opening was a class of forty-seven third graders, my husband was a graduate student, and I needed the job.
Every home was a shack with a dirt floor. The children slept on the floor or on a car seat from the junkyard. The mothers spoke poorly and seemed frightened to have me visit. I returned to school, amazed that my students could learn as well as they did and recognizing the fine teaching that had occurred earlier so that now each one of these children could read at least at a mid-second grade level. Those teachers had been the most important adult in the lives of the children.
Gloria Stronks was a classroom teacher and reading specialist in state and Christian schools for fifteen years. She later taught at Dordt College and then at Calvin College for a total of twenty-two years, and is the author or co-author of ten books. For two summers in college I worked as a wilderness canoe guide. I led folks across vast, mysterious lakes and through ancient, hidden portages. But creation is also singing on farms across rural Iowa.
And I have heard it there. Few have. And of those who have, fewer yet comprehend. On farms the song gets easily confused with other noises. James K. And the elements of this liturgy that are daily practiced across my farm are profoundly articulate in their song.
The world needs me to farm because the world needs places where this song can be heartily sung by an expanding chorus of voices. Phillip Jensen and his family grow several acres of vegetables for the CSA on a farm that they started in rural Iowa, and have a herd of Red Wattle hogs, a flock of hens, and a milk cow.
