What We Plant Today: Spring Lessons from Correctional Classrooms

It’s planting season again. My little family and I have been cleaning out garden beds, composting, mulching, and watching seedlings we started a few months ago in the house carefully.

This is the time of year when hands go into soil, seeds are tucked into the earth, and the work begins—quiet, hopeful, and unseen. Gardeners trust that, in time, something will grow. They water, they weed, they wait.

It’s not unlike teaching in a correctional classroom.

We show up with lesson plans and flexible pencils instead of trowels and seed packets, but the intention is the same: to plant. We offer words, skills, strategies, encouragement, and every so often, a life-changing nudge. But just like gardeners, we often don’t get to witness the harvest.

Our students may leave before we see the fruit of their labor. They may transfer facilities or be released. Sometimes they fall back into old patterns before the roots take hold. And sometimes, we just don’t know what happened at all.

That’s a hard truth for correctional educators—this work demands faith in delayed outcomes.

But here’s the other truth: planting always matters.

Every lesson you teach, every time you stop and explain something again instead of losing your patience, every moment you look a student in the eye and let them know they’re capable—that’s a seed.

Even if the soil is tough. Even if the conditions aren’t ideal. Even if you’re not sure anything will take.

The incarcerated learner who hasn’t trusted an adult in decades but starts asking questions anyway? You tilled that ground.
The student who learns to write a resume and then shows someone else how to do it? That’s your harvest—whether you see it or not.
The man who finally reads at a sixth-grade level after years of hiding his illiteracy? Your hands are all over that soil.

And when our students do bloom—whether in the classroom, years later on the outside, or quietly in their own sense of worth—we may not always know. But the world feels it. Their families feel it. Sometimes, even they do.

Spring reminds us that growth is never instant. It’s a slow, steady push upward. A process. A promise.

So to all the correctional educators out there: Keep planting. Keep teaching. Keep believing.

You may not always see the garden, but it’s growing—one seed, one student at a time.

Until next Sunday…Cheers! ☕