The wetland classroom: he moved science class into the reed marsh

Lao Bai, the science teacher at the town middle school, kept one tradition that never moved: every migratory season, he took two class periods out into the reeds.

The marsh is three kilometers behind the school, a provincial wetland. Other teachers thought it was dangerous — water, slick boards — and a waste of syllabus time. Lao Bai saw it the other way. "The textbook gives one page to ecosystems. I can talk for three days in the classroom and it won't do what one look does. In that marsh there are producers, consumers, decomposers, migration, a food chain. You see the whole thing at once."

His wetland class is a shared memory for a whole generation of students in the town. There are rules, taught before anyone steps onto the boardwalk: walk softly, do not feed anything, carry your trash out. There is a worksheet: count the waterbird species in view, identify three aquatic plants, find evidence of the food chain — fish scales in bird droppings, for instance. The children creep along the boards with their worksheets, and the concentration is not something a classroom produces.

The finale is the birds. Lao Bai brings four spotting scopes and lets the children look in turn. The moment a swan comes into the eyepiece, the gasp goes up and puts half the marsh into the air. He has to restate the rules every year, and every year he understands why they break them. "The book calls it a spoonbill. In the scope it's alive. That shock is the first lesson nature education gives a child: the world is bigger than the book."

Nature education doesn't teach facts. It teaches the capacity to be moved — it lets a child know that three kilometers from the road he walks home on, tens of thousands of migratory birds are spending the winter. After that his world has depth in it.

The children have watched the marsh change. Years ago the edges were being plowed and used as a dump, and the waterbirds thinned out season by season. After the town cleaned it up, the birds came back, more each year. Lao Bai had his students do a comparison across time, digging out twenty years of school photographs and setting them against the current bird records. One student's report was blunt: "In the 2003 photographs there are more than three hundred black dots over the reeds. In the 2010 set there are almost none. We are in the recovery. We are watching a curve turn upward, and the whole town is pulling on it."

The wetland class also educated the adults. The children went home talking about swans and food chains, and their parents started paying attention. When a company wanted to discharge waste at the marsh edge, the students' bird records and photographs became the basis of a complaint. In the end the town drew the marsh edge into its protected red line. At a meeting, the mayor said: "We spent two weeks on a plan, and a stack of middle-school worksheets talked us out of it."

Lao Bai has retired now, and the class has not stopped. His former student Xiao Ma, now a young teacher, took it over. Every migratory season there is another group of children creeping along the boardwalk with worksheets in their hands. The old wooden sign at the entrance is the one Lao Bai nailed up himself; it has been repainted many times, and it still carries the sentence he wrote first:

"Step lightly. There are a lot of residents here."

Xiao Ma added a closing exercise: at the end of each term, every child does one concrete thing for the marsh — a bag of trash collected, a sign made, a poster of migratory birds drawn. Lao Bai heard about it and sent him a message. "Good addition. Loving nature isn't something you can do just by looking. You have to put their hands to work. A person who has work in their hands grows roots in their heart."