Can We Have Some Real Plants, Please?

It was that day in August—the day before school begins. It wasn’t my school, because I’m only a supply teacher, but I went there for the morning to learn about the new Reading & Writing framework. There is always a new Reading & Writing framework, for educational leaders are always either throwing out what works best or berating teachers for not doing what works best.

I had sat on a chair and listened to the woman and I’d “got into groups” and talked with the people and I’d done something on big paper and scribbled in my notebook and I’d checked off my PRD target and now I was headed for the door. The permanent-contract teachers would stay and use the afternoon to arrange their classrooms.
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Ever nosy, I peeked into one classroom after another as I walked down the corridor. 

Classrooms are so tidy before the tidal wave of children sweeps in. Display-boards, covered in clean bright paper, ready for artwork or writing prompts. Tables, geometrically arranged for the easiest fit of 32 children into one room. Pencil-pots bristling with brand-new pointy pencils, all the same length and all colours present and correct.

At one classroom door I paused in surprise. On every table stood a potted succulent, fresh and green and somehow changing the feel of the whole room.

“That’s really nice,” I said to the teacher.

She explained to me, briefly and rather tensely, that the plants would be Useful as a Learning Project because the children could Go Online and Research how to maintain aloe vera on their School iPads.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I couldn’t help wondering why she apparently felt there had to be a tech-oriented justification for venturing to put living plants in her room. Wasn’t it enough that they made the classroom a pleasanter place? Walled inside a tight rectangular space for five and a half hours, would it be so very wrong for 10-year-olds to just enjoy and maybe help to nurture some houseplants? Do children have to relate to other living things solely through the window of their iPads now?

But at least, in a school heavily oriented towards technology-based learning, she had dared to break the barrenness and put living plants inside her classroom. Since that day, I do it too, as often as I have spare greenery. I bring little spider plants or aloes into the schools where I’m booked, and I ask the children if they’d like to keep them and look after them.
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I’ve had a few negative responses: Plastic plants are nicer or I want to kill it. But most groups of children welcome the addition, and eagerly promise they’ll water their plant every week. 

“This isn’t an extra job for your teacher,” I insist. “This is about you taking care of a plant that is helping to take care of you—cleaning the air and giving out oxygen. It’s not a hard responsibility, and it’s good to learn to look after living things.”

No other school staff have challenged me (yet), but if and when they do, I can explain. It isn’t just my own unreasoning obsession. Real scientists have done proper studies on adding plantlife into classrooms. They’ve discovered that children’s mood and learning abilities improve when their immediate environment includes living plants.

As a teacher, like most teachers, I inwardly groan when I hear the words “new initiative”. A “new initiative” often means more paperwork of dubious value, a heavier load to juggle, an extra responsibility to answer for, another box to check. And I know that throwing out the plastic greenery and replacing it with living plants will mean a little extra mess, one more little thing to remember. But I’d like to see schools deciding to support a greener indoor space—supplying classrooms with windowsill planters or stable table-top arrangements, for instance. Or even just validating the teacher who does guiltily slip into the classroom something that isn’t tech-heavy.
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Notice I said “supporting” and “supplying”, not enforcing. There are classrooms where it’s more urgent to maintain a hard-to-break, easy-to-tidy environment, for it only takes one child with serious anger issues to render indoor gardening impracticable for a whole class. You don’t want the children who get fond of their pet classroom plant to get traumatised by its violent demise. 

​But, where it can be done, I’m trying to initiate the keeping of real plants in the classrooms I visit. My rationale is that the benefits will (usually) outweigh that little extra item to remember, that little loss of windowsill or table space. Because, if it’s true that green living plants in the classroom improve children’s wellbeing, then the small cumulative effect on attitudes and attention-spans should compensate. I hope.