The Demo Site

Picture yourself in middle school, but instead of seeing few connections between reality and your curriculum, you see almost no distinction. Just north of Santa Fe at Camino de Paz School and Farm, students experience this. They learn physics by designing solar-heated henhouses, chemistry by making goat cheese, biology by turning a compost pile, and history by means of a foot-powered loom, a horse-drawn plow, or by opening the flood gates of an age-old acequia. Sure, they have an indoor classroom complete with desks, chairs, books, and Google, but it’s also got photovoltaic panels on the roof powering their lights and a woodstove that the kids keep an eye on lest they freeze during a spelling bee. Perhaps the best thing about the curriculum is that the students take turns working the booth at the farmers’ market on Saturday morning. This gets them out in the community helping people, educating people, and learning techniques of effective marketing, and since the school trip they take each year literally depends on chicken-egg sales, they really DO care about effective marketing!

If you would like to tour Camino de Paz and you are the spontaneous type of person, please come to the open house tomorrow, Sunday, February 21, from 1pm to 4pm. If you need to schedule events further in advance, please join us at the school’s annual Food for Thought brunch on Saturday, April 21, from 11am to 1pm. I will be the keynote speaker, and I’ll be talking about water, food, community, and my concept of gradual greening.