Episode 73: How One Teacher Started an Urban Gardening Revolution

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 73 Transcript

Jennifer Gonzalez, host

This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 73 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to share with you the story of how a Bronx teacher became an accidental urban gardener and ultimately grew what is possibly the most outstanding, life-changing project-based learning model you’ve ever seen.

I’m going to be using a lot of superlatives in this episode—greatest, most amazing, most incredible—because I can’t figure out how to talk about this project without going a little nuts.

Let me start by telling you about my guest today. His name is Stephen Ritz. About 30 years ago, he started working as a teacher in the South Bronx. If you’re not familiar with the boroughs of New York City, just know that the South Bronx has been identified as the poorest congressional district in the country, where good jobs are hard to come by and many families live below the poverty line. Although this came as no big shock to Ritz—after all, he had grown up in the Bronx—he still struggled to reach his students with limited resources.

Something about Stephen Ritz was different, because he saw the talents that the students had right away and he saw the special gifts that they had. From an early time in his career, he started giving them real-world projects to do. He started having them help him, as a guy in his early 20’s, figure out the budget so he could move out of his parents’ house and get his own apartment. When he got older, he had them working on other projects.

After a couple of years of doing this, what he landed on was gardening, urban gardening, which happened by accident. I’m going to let him tell that story of how it happened by accident, but over the years, what he started to do was have these kids grow gardens. They grew gardens in neighborhoods nearby and on a rooftop. They eventually started learning how to grow edible plants right there in his classroom in the South Bronx. He moved from class to class. He ended up getting assigned to different schools, a lot of hurdles that a lot of us have dealt with, but kept going with this idea of how plants and the growing of them and then the sharing of them could tap into some of his students’ passions and qualities and help them find their strengths.

He found kids that really took to the gardening aspect, kids that took to the design aspect, others who were interested in the budgeting and sales-types of things. They ended up having their own farmers market, and now it has grown into this huge thing called the Green Bronx Machine. They have culinary classes for kids, they partner with local businesses, they bring food into that community, and it even has grown to where some of the kids who have graduated have jobs as contractors now. It’s so hard for me to put into words how amazing this thing is, and how it started with a guy who said, “We’ve got some seeds. Let’s go plant them.” He just kept taking advantage of the energy he saw in his students.

I’m not sure if my interview with him fully captures it, and I’m not sure if what I’m saying now fully captures it, but I guess the point that I’m trying to make with bringing him on and letting him share his story and urging you to please go and see the blog post that I have written to accompany this, because it has his TED talk in it. I think when you see the TED talk, then you really start to see the evolution of this. He’s found ways to work with his local community and their talents and have them grow a community and project right there within their own school, something that feeds the community, helps to educate the students, and ties right into the curriculum.

The thing that I think is so great is not just that he did this in an area that was underprivileged or in a deficit, but I can see people doing this anywhere. It’s obviously an amazing model for higher risk schools and kids, but it could be done anywhere. When I saw what he was doing and I read his book, “The Power of a Plant,” and I’m going to have a link to that too if you go to cultofpedagogy.com/pod and click on Episode 73, you’ll find all the resources. I’m going to have his TED talk in there, a link to his book, and a link to the Green Bronx Machine project, so that you can sort of experience it for yourself to see how he has worked this into the curriculum and how he has cut these amazing-looking tower gardens in this South Bronx school, they’re part of the classroom. This is a guy who has no background in farming or agriculture or anything like that. He says it all the time, “I am not a farmer,” but he accidentally happened upon this thing, which for anyone who is interested in project-based learning, this is such a cool model.

I’m going to get to the interview with him, but I’m going to urge you to please take a look at his TED talk too and look at some of the videos. This is such a great idea.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Kiddom for sponsoring this episode. Kiddom is a collaborative learning platform that enables teachers to plan, assess, and analyze learning all in one place. With Kiddom’s new student dashboard, teachers can empower students to take ownership of their learning. Students have the ability to track their own progress on skills, access and submit work, and communicate with teachers on assignments. Kiddom is 100% free for teachers and students. To learn more, visit cultofpedagogy.com/kiddom.

I also want to thank you if you’ve left a review for this podcast on iTunes. I absolutely love seeing these when they pop up, and you’re really helping to make this show more visible to new listeners. If you haven’t left a review yet, but you think I’m doing good work here and want more educators to listen, take a few minutes and leave an iTunes review today. Thanks so much.

OK, let’s learn about the Green Bronx Machine with Stephen Ritz.

GONZALEZ: OK. First of all, I would like to welcome you to the show.

RITZ: Thank you kindly.

GONZALEZ: We’ve got so much to talk about. I want to just start with your very earliest years. You grew up in the Bronx, you became a teacher without any formal training, and right away you were tasked with teaching kids who had very little success in school, they were surrounded by drugs and crime. But right away, you recognized their strengths and talents, and you helped them discover these by giving them authentic problems to solve. Can you talk a little bit about some of those early projects you did with them? This is before any of the gardening.

RITZ: Life in the Bronx was an interesting place back then, and no one tells these children that they are going to be both separate and unequal. But the world around us affords great opportunities, looking at work, looking at budgeting, looking at money, looking at the simple aspects that impacted these children’s lives daily and connected them daily was absolutely critical to what I think is at the heart of all successful teaching, and that is relationships. Motivating children from “can’t” and “won’t” to “must” and “done,” and that is the work that teachers do. Whether you are a sage on the stage or a guide on the side, that’s how this gets done, by inspiring those to look deep within themselves and be the greatest you can be on a day-to-day basis.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

RITZ: And have an impact on your life. The purpose of education is to move society and individuals forward, and when children get a sense of that and become empowered by that, that’s what happens. So that was very much the focus of my classroom at a very turbulent time in the South Bronx.

GONZALEZ: So what were some of the things you had them do before the gardening? You had them help you budget, help you figure out how to get an apartment, right?

RITZ: Right. So long before gardening, we were doing all kinds of hands-on activities. First it was theory. So some of them would be budgeting apartments. We were doing fishtanks, we were building bicycles, we were figuring out the angles of baseball diamonds, we were looking at local factories, at machining and sourcing and understanding what parts related to whole. We were also in a very turbulent time, socially and emotionally, in New York City, back in the broken windows days, post Bernhard Goetz, so we really looked at racial issues. One of the things that I was very inspired by doing was having children make connections. The joke was, in a world that was very much black and white to these children, and while I am a caucasian, for many of them, I did not come across as a caucasian. I just came across as one of them, because in some ways I was the oldest, I even had students who were older than me, but I certainly looked at them in some ways as a peer group. I was teaching 21-year-olds at the time, and I was 21 myself. We shared the same interests in music, in sports, in culture, bringing in Holocaust survivors and having children connect to other people who had been in pain, and hurt, and been discriminated again and came forth and forward through that, I felt was critical to what I call a human ecology, a planetary ecology, and a sense of empathy and compassion, which moves people to a greater global good.

GONZALEZ: So you knew right away how to connect to them. And it probably helped that you also grew up in the Bronx.

RITZ: Well, you know, I did grow up in the Bronx. I was a better athlete than most of them, if not all of them, and that was something that they neither expected or even could imagine. So having that little bit of leverage in my back pocket was kind of cool. The fact that I understood the language, and I was equally inspired by the turbulent times in music that was becoming, and art that was becoming part of the mainstream society of the South Bronx. Many people want to roll their windows up when they get in the South Bronx. I liked rolling them down. I loved hearing the music, I loved seeing the art, I loved connecting with people and a sense of spirit and resiliency that was the maker movement long before the maker movement even happened. Realize we had children putting together music and creating turntables and block parties and going off the grid in ways that have become celebrated and world-renowned today.

GONZALEZ: So you recognized those qualities and those talents right off the bat, it’s just that you hadn’t quite figured out the … I mean I can see it in your writing about those early years. You right away knew how to connect with them and how to recognize their talents. So if we fast forward a couple of years, you leave the state for a while, you get your teaching certification, and then you come back to the Bronx. So at what point did you start actually having students work with plants and gardens? Where did that start?

RITZ: So plants and gardens did not happen until after the millennium. I spent about 10 years prior doing middle school work and crisis intervention work and really developing relationships with a series of middle schools and communities across the South Bronx that were in turmoil due to just the proliferation of cocaine and crack and the first generation of crack babies. The post Ed Koch, Mayor Giuliani era where we really started looking at communities in a very different way, some very pro-police. I can’t say I was in favor of everything that happened, but these were turbulent times in New York City, particularly in communities like mine where the whole notion of highly policed communities really took over the notion of certain aspects of school, but the forcing of crime into certain areas really had an impact. Again, the first generation of crack babies and crack children, which nobody knew how to deal with, had a phenomenal impact on New York City school systems and in particular the community I was serving.

GONZALEZ: Right, right. It’s so apparent that you have got such a love for this community. And I feel like that is one of the key differences in your approach, is that you are not somebody coming in from the outside to try to say to them, “Here’s how we do it in other places. Let me come in and save you.” You want to take this community and have them use their own resources and make their own community.

RITZ: Right. I’m a big believer that people don’t need a handout, well some people want a handout, but what people need is a hand up, and it’s about inclusivity. And we always talk about diversity, and diversity means there’s a lot of different tastes and a lot of different things going on, but inclusivity means you’re asking someone to dance with you to their music and celebrating them. People want a seat at that table. The table is sometimes so far removed that we’ve got to create our own table, because people don’t understand what our table is. So creating our table in a community where people can own it was absolutely tantamount, and that was the key to my success: Creating relationships and realizing and understanding what human potential is. No child rises to low expectations.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

RITZ: So we’ve got to set the bar as high as possible for all children at all times. I’d rather fail at a high end point level than succeed at a low one.

GONZALEZ: Right.

RITZ: And on my sleeve I wear this belief that people should not have to leave their community to live, learn, and earn in a better one, and neither skin color nor ZIP code should determine outcomes in life. Access to education should, and we need to do a better job. If nothing else, people knew from the minute I walked in that I was determined to do a better job, a more local job, and was absolutely driven by a love for the community and for the people that I serve.

GONZALEZ: That’s apparent on every page of your book. Take us to the point after the millennium when you started to really kind of drill down on the gardening.

RITZ: Well, I got to gardening by mistake, and I still say I got into gardening by mistake. I’m not a farmer. I’m a people farmer. I think things that don’t kill you will ultimately make you stronger. My wife and I, as we share in the book, suffered a series of tragedies. We went from twins to one to none, I also had some of my own students pass away, and that was catastrophic. And just simply to circle the wagons around my family, I opted out of the school. I just couldn’t return to the site of so much tragedy and so much personal pain, and I wanted to be closer to my own family, and I felt that the half-hour commute that if I had a walk-to-work situation, I could have a half-hour extra in the morning at home and a half-hour extra in the evening whenever I chose to leave, whenever I chose to come home, it would still save me an hour a day that was better spent, at that point, with my family just circling the wagons around some very critical needs for all of us. Only to take a job within walking distance to my home simply because it was available and walk into the work, one of the worst high schools in all of New York City at the time. And that’s how I got there, totally by mistake. A high school with a 17% graduation rate, 256 felonies a year, 18 deans of discipline, 48 school safety officers, 18 armed policemen.

GONZALEZ: Oh my gosh.

RITZ: It was insanity. And again, whether it’s design or default, when you have over 4,000 young people from very disparate and diverse unsuccessful backgrounds jammed into a building that was designed to hold no more than 1,800, knowing that that school is going to be closed, that’s not the recipe for success. So lo and behold, by accident, one day I’m teaching and I had 17 overage, under-credited youth, many of whom came to me by the criminal justice system, and literally got called to the principal’s office that someone sent me a gift, and that gift was a huge surprise for me, because I was so excited thinking, “Wow.” People knew I had done all of this Herculean work in other communities, maybe this was a lifeline.

And I go running down to the principal’s office like a boy on Christmas morning, get this big box, and the secretary, Mrs. D, says, “Mr. Ritz, look. You’ve got this great big box,” and no one could be more thrilled than me to see inside this box. In fact, I was so excited, I didn’t even take it back to my classroom. I ran outside of her office, said “Thank you very much,” and opened it in the hallway, and in the hallway, I open it, and I look inside and there are hundreds and hundreds of onions. And I’m like, “What are these little onion things? This is absurd. I have a bunch of 17-, and 18-, and 19-year-olds who are ready to kill each other. These things are projectiles, they’re baseballs at best, and they surely stink.” My high hopes were instantly cut at the knees, and I walk into class with this big box, don’t say boo to the children, take it, throw it behind this huge radiator that probably had three quarters of an inch of paint coating it in between the window, and just forget about it, or as we like to say in the Bronx, “Fuhgeddaboudit.” And I certainly forgot about it.

Six weeks later, there’s an incident in class where a very big powerful strong tattooed girl finally has enough taunting from this very annoying skinny little kid, and chairs go flying. We had a protocol for situations like that in my school, it’s called “duck,” and in slow motion I see my career ending. Carol goes charging across the room. Gonzalo jumps up, this skinny little kid, and goes running over to the radiator, and I’m like, “This is it. It’s over for me.” He’s reaching under the radiator, there’s something there, and I didn’t know what he was doing, and all of a sudden, hundreds of flowers fell out, and he picks up this stem of a flower, I didn’t even know what they were, they turned out to be daffodils, this beautiful yellow gold flower on this long yellow stem and starts waving it at her.

And the whole class laughs, and I’m like, “What the heck?” In my mind I was probably thinking a little more graphically, but I won’t say it on radio. I’m just like, “Thank you, Jesus, that there’s no gun, there’s no weapon,” and the whole class is going crazy. Carol stops dead in her tracks to look at this flower. Gonzalo’s waving it at her, and that’s what we call in the South Bronx a teachable moment. How do you make magic out of that? But thank God no one got hurt, and all of a sudden the boys saw the box was wet and moist from this broken, decrepit radiator, so the whole thing started opening, it was just that critical moment. Flowers started falling out from under the radiator onto the floor. The boys went to pick them up and started giving them to the girls. The girls said we can take these and sell these and give them to their mothers. But the fight never happened.

And all of a sudden, out of chaos, came this incredibly opportunistic wonderful community moment. Right then and there I realized we were on to something. I didn’t know what it was, so we figured the next logical step would be to look inside the box and see more. And we found out that my students had been invited. People knew I had been doing all of this community work on a variety of levels and New Yorkers had sent me these hundreds and hundreds of these things called bulbs. They weren’t onions, they were in fact bulbs, and the heat and the steam and the sunlight that came in from behind the radiator in the window spot was enough to “force” these bulbs. So we had hundreds of flowers, and we figured we should show up where we were supposed to and plant them.

It turns out that my students and I had so much fun that we went on to plant 15,000 or 20,000 bulbs that year across New York City to commemorate 9/11, and the 17 kids who no one else wanted in this school who dubbed themselves the Ritz Fits went on to win an award from city council who somehow mistakenly took them as the gifted and talented program, which was absolutely awesome, because it demonstrated what the potential within these children could be.

GONZALEZ: Right.

RITZ: And that was the start, and we started with basically ornamental gardens. And back then, at the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of abandoned space, unproductive space, I like to say negative urban space, places where things were happening that no one really appreciated and didn’t serve a greater good. So my students and I became very adept at getting in there and transforming unproductive, underutilized spaces into highly productive, aspirational places. And those who are apart from success, somehow became a part of it, and regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, and oftentimes even gang affiliation, we went from being a 911 moment in the community to a place where everybody loved and adored us. And we started what I call falling up the ladder of success. And the rest was about making epic happen. But no, I didn’t know anything about vegetables until later, but the one thing that people in my community do know of across the board is hunger.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

RITZ: And that’s when it all started to come together, because there is tremendous food insecurity where I live. So my students, if they weren’t hungry at one point in their life had been hungry and on a day-to-day basis knew someone who is hungry. So when we learned about growing food, that was a game changer.

GONZALEZ: OK. And did the growing food start in your actual classroom or was that the bank note? I’m trying to remember.

RITZ: No. So growing food actually started at a community garden where we had this notion that we could, in addition to learning kind of landscaping skills and tree pruning skills, and realized post-Giuliani came Mayor Bloomberg, and I’m actually a huge fan of Mayor Bloomberg. I don’t agree with everything, but I think he has really helped transform this city to a better, more prosperous, more inclusive place with a great deal of vision, and this was a time where we was talking about green roofs, all kinds of things, a million tree initiative, New Yorkers should be five minutes from parks. And these represented living-wage jobs for my students, so these students started moving apart from the underground economy and oftentimes a negative economy into a living-wage economy, into a fair economy, and that was game-changing. And then when we learned about food, that we could grow food and we wanted to create a garden where we could grow food and give that food away to those in need, that became game-changing for us.

GONZALEZ: People listening, what I want to make sure they understand is that what you’re talking about right now is almost like two decades’ worth of stuff. Well, maybe not two decades, but close to it …

RITZ: No, about a decade …

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

RITZ: … about a decade. And then I learned about growing food indoors, which was unbelievable. So literally, my students and i, we converted six acres of cement into a beautiful farm, into a community garden, and that was great, but what happened is the farm was most productive during the summer, and that was awesome, because I got my kids jobs and my students started working, but as I became more involved in what I call systemic change, because I saw the potential for systemic change … You know, a lot of people can’t take 17 kids across this city to garden. A lot of teachers don’t have the time, energy, and wherewithal to have access to a bank note building.

GONZALEZ: Right.

RITZ: To have access to someone. Half of my life has been the relationships I’ve built and leveraging them. But for people who come to work dedicated to teach and do the job that they’re paid to do with passion, purpose, and hope, they don’t have the connections I have, so I started looking at what was systemic, what was scalable, and the notion of bringing gardens indoors, into classrooms, and growing tremendous amounts of food indoors seemed incredible. It also seemed that there would be no loss of instructional time, bell to bell instruction, and the ability to grow something greater where it needed to happen most, in school, because so many people were excited to give me the students they didn’t want in school as long as I took them somewhere else, I felt the need to have these kids in school was critical for everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to show them that they can and that they will succeed and that no child rises to low expectations.

GONZALEZ: Right.

RITZ: It’s about creating meaningful opportunities day-to-day in a classroom. So I gave birth to the first edible classroom in all the country, and then I continued to iterate it, and I’m at a very different place now using scalable, replicable technology, and no longer am I the school garden guy. I am the guy that wraps a whole school around an indoor academic garden. The art and science of growing vegetables align to Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards and Content Area Instruction, really can transform the lens of public health, personal performance and school systems, and we’re seeing that happen here in the South Bronx and across America and literally around the world. In 2014, I started iterating the technology that was in no classrooms in the United States. Today, we are in over 5,000 classrooms in the United States alone. I was in Chicago yesterday, Pittsburg the day before. We are scaling schools across Canada and even in the Middle East. I’m in Dubai, I’ve been to Mexico, Colombia. So people are really responding to this notion of growing food aligning to growing students in academics.

GONZALEZ: Right.

RITZ: Particularly in communities where people have food issues, and quite frankly, everyone has a food issue, because food is a non-negotiable. So growing obesity, growing diabetes, water resource issues, all of this and realize I grow indoors, four stories up, using 90% less water and 90% less space, but the most important thing that I’ve grown, beyond 50,000 pounds of vegetables and happy, healthy children, is a better-performing school.

GONZALEZ: Right, right. And what I’m going to do whenever I publish this, is I’m going to provide people with links to where they can … because you now have a whole curriculum that they can use. You’ve got lesson plans, right?

RITZ: That is absolutely correct.

GONZALEZ: OK. I want to sort of re-emphasize something that you were just saying, because you really have put this together … I mean it was very catch-as-catch-can. You pulled in a lot of community resources, you took donations where you could, and you keep using this word “iterate,” which is really what it was, you just kept figuring this out, and now you’ve got it to where any teacher could do this. They wouldn’t have to pull together the resources. You’ve made it so that they can just take it and go.

RITZ: I’ve made it so that principals want it. Listen, we always have champion teachers, and for any champion teacher listening, I salute you. Thank you for the work that you do daily. But what I really want to do is create the next generation of champion teachers, people who need help, people who need resources, and people who have their principal’s approval.

So when I set out to create this curriculum and the work that I do, it took me about two years of volunteer time, and I quit my job, I don’t get a paycheck, and I sat down and put on the hero teacher’s lens, but set out to do it through the principal’s eyes. So we created a program, and an integrated curriculum and the word is “integrated,” that actually aligns to how plants grow in real time. It’s not random lesson plans. It is scoped and sequenced and developmentally appropriate, in line with what’s happening with growth in a classroom, and it’s aligned to subject areas, content areas. And when a principal walks in and says, “Where’s your lesson plans?” No, this is what the principal wants you to be doing in the first place, so odds are the principal’s going to give it to you, and that’s what I spend time doing, working with teachers, working with principals to create systemic change.

GONZALEZ: Awesome. I’m so excited to send people to your resources and have them read your story. I think one of the most inspiring things about it is just it’s your desire to grow the community that kids are in and grow new opportunities for them right there in that community. Sadly, it is an unusual model, but I hope it gets replicated by a lot more people.

RITZ: Well, I believe that we are the ones that we are waiting for. After years and years of failed public policy, and listen, there’s been a lot of successful policy too, so I’m not here to play the blame game. But Superman isn’t coming. There is no man on the white horse. We are the ones that we’re waiting for, and teachers in classrooms are doing the Herculean lifting daily. But if you can engage parents, engage students and create a culture of health, wellness, mindfulness, and real scientific inquiry. You know, the notion of planting seeds is just awesome. You put a seed in a child’s hand, you’re making a promise, you’re making a promise to that young person that that seed is going to grow into something great. The fact that I’m doing it in a classroom, and I have just walls and walls and towers full of food is awesomesauce. Plus you get to eat it every 30 days or sell it. How cool is that? We’re connecting people around this thing called agri-culture. The most important thing about agri-culture, I believe, is the culture, school culture, respect, inclusion. At the end of the day without farmers and food, we’d all be naked and hungry, and that’s not a concept I’d like to embrace.

GONZALEZ: There’s one more point, before I let you go, that I wanted to make sure that we emphasize, because this is something that I notice so often. You brought up this phrase early in the book, “I know a guy,” which is sort of your way of growing up in the Bronx of you make use of the relationships that you have in the community to get what you need, to accomplish what you need. I’m thinking now about the teachers who are listening how they may be thinking, “Oh I could never pull this off. I don’t have the time. We don’t have the resources.” And so I just want to know: How would “I know a guy” come into play for somebody like that?

RITZ: Listen, I believe that everybody is surrounded by tremendous resources. And while we all have heroes, the heroes that I know and love the most are the heroes right up the block—the grandmothers and grandfathers, sometimes raising children, my neighbor, my next door neighbor, the parent who has three, four jobs, the grandmother who helps the children across the street to school, the crossing guard. And that’s what this is about—leveraging what’s right in our backyard to grow something greater. Listen: No one can do everything, but everyone can do something, and it usually starts with a phone call or someone right next door with an aligned greater good. And that’s local ownership, and that’s what this is about, local ownership.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. I can hear that you’ve got kids coming in the classroom, so I need to let you go. I’m going to be putting links to all of your stuff in the blog post, but is there anything else that you would like to add before we finish?

RITZ: No. I mean my story is the story of passion, purpose, and hope, and I believe that passion, purpose, and hope will get you far as long as you are endlessly resourceful and eternally optimistic. And I remain the CEO — Chief Eternal Optimist — of Bronx County. And sometimes you’ve just got to take that blind leap of faith. You know, if I can, you can, we all can, we are Ameri-cans, Puerto Ri-cans, Domini-cans, African Ameri-cans, and this is our moment. No one should and no one could hold us back. And for all the teachers who are listening, listen: We are teachers. We are the people who go from “can’t” and “won’t” to “must” and “done” daily, so get out there and make epic happen. Celebrate your successes. Congratulate your children. Set the bar high and be relentlessly unafraid to fail, because failure is what’s going to get us all to a better place as long as we accept it and learn from it and move forward. I jokingly say I keep falling up the ladder of success, I’m having the time of my life doing it, and along the way I keep saying, “Sí se puede,” “Yes we can,” and “Make epic happen.” So that’s my purpose, that’s my point. I hope you read the book, I hope you buy the book, I hope you share the book. It’s called “The Power of a Plant,” and 100% of the proceeds are being donated to public schools and public programming just like mine so that together we can grow something greater.

GONZALEZ: Awesome. Thank you so much, Stephen. This has been really just such an honor to talk to you.

RITZ: No, thank you. Jenn, I’ll get you a bunch of stuff. Give me about a half hour. I’ll get you some links and stuff, and we’ll figure it all out, and if you need more, if you want some pictures, I’ve got amazing pictures that would just blow people out of the water, just happy, healthy children doing amazing things in a place no one expected them to do it.

GONZALEZ: I would love that, I would love that. We’ll be in touch.

RITZ: All right. Thanks kindly, and remember, “Sí se puede,” “You can do it,” “Make epic happen,” thanks for your time today.

GONZALEZ: Thank you.

For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and click on Episode 73. To get weekly updates on all my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.

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