Worms Make for a Fertile Earth Science Class

In teacher Michael Taylor’s perfect world, every home in Glendale has worms.

Purplish-brown worms that eat trash and wiggle in order to breathe through their skin and have five hearts, dual sex organs, and love to mate in your sprinkler puddles at night.

“They also like to mate in wet cardboard,” Taylor said, before a listener pleaded too much information.

But there is far more than this to a worm’s life, as Taylor proved to his geoscience students this year at Glendale High School. Worms are not just fish bait. They work the land. They recycle rubbish by consuming and then expelling it, producing richly fertilized dirt from which food grows.

“Worms are nature’s soil engineers,” Taylor told his teenage gardeners recently as they watered burger wrappers, cereal boxes and other household castoffs that they feed to the Glendale High worm colony.

“Don’t pour too much on there,” one budding farmer cautions another.

The students built a wooden box to house their worms and grew from seed the flourishing vegetable and herb garden outside their portable classroom.

“My first thought was, ‘This is gonna be messy,’ ” recalled Jarred Sanchez, 16. “And those worms? Nasty.”

Getting out of the classroom “was still the best part,” he said with a grin, classmates around him nodding in agreement.

Ordinarily, Taylor’s geoscience course deals in abstractions. It starts with the universe and narrows down to the planet Earth and its environment and then to subjects such as biogeochemical cycles and vermicular composting.

“Boring,” said Jarred.

Taylor knew he needed to “make the subjects more real” for his students than “things they can’t see, like methane gas.” But how?

When a construction project outside the school’s chain-link fence yielded a heap of scrap lumber, dirt and assorted junk, Taylor saw an opportunity. Most of the elements of a garden, he said, were waiting across the street from his classroom bungalow and free for the taking.

His students hauled materials to an asphalt strip outside their bungalow. Fifteen-gallon nursery pots were donated. Seeds were bought. Then came the lesson in nature’s soil engineers.

The students yanked nails out of the scrap lumber and hammered new ones to build worm housing--a 4-foot-square box with legs, a lid and bottom drainage. A glass window was installed on one side of the box so students could observe the worms at work. A refrigerator drawer on the ground beneath the box caught runoff water, which was used on the plants.

Then, Taylor sent away for five pounds of worms. Arriving by next-day mail, the $13 purchase launched his 18 students on a course of study as new to most of them as the soil itself. Many had never gardened or pulled a weed.

“Only one in six of them has a yard,” Taylor said, “so I wanted to show them that they could still grow things at home by using a five-gallon can, some dirt and seeds.”

By early June, the students had produced protein-rich fertilizer, which fostered 6-foot-tall high tomato plants, dangling green beans, leafy Swiss chard, bell pepper, zucchini, cucumber, beets and aloe, which can be used to treat burns.

“Tomatoes were important,” Taylor explained. “They are relatively easy to grow, and the taste difference between store tomatoes and vine-ripened tomatoes is very obvious.”

The students were so enthusiastic they gardened before and after school and showed off their crops to other kids.

“I will never forget the morning I came in and said, ‘Hey, you guys, some of your seeds have started to emerge from the soil,’ ” Taylor said. “They were standing up, they were so excited, saying, ‘Can’t we go see now?’ ”

As Taylor had hoped, the worm colony flourished. Other students talked of starting their own potted gardens at home. The head of the science department, Nancy Astor, wanted her own worm box.

“Michael got us started, and me and my neighbor built it,” Astor said. “Now I’m making one for the 7-year-old down the street. Every time I see her, she says, ‘Where’s my worm box?’ The word is spreading.”

Overall, the students say, they understand more about photosynthesis, life cycles and the food chain because they set those processes in motion and learned from their mistakes.

“You don’t want to feed weeds to the worms,” said Danny Hernandez, 16, “because they won’t eat the seeds,” leaving them to sprout into more weeds.

As the school year ended, Jarred Sanchez emerged as a worm believer.

“I’m gonna build my own worm box at home this summer,” he said, showing off his first tomato, a pearl-sized green one that had been fertilized with worm castings.

This teenager, who had tanked academically the previous year after relocating from West Covina, found something to recharge his interest in school, his father said. And the hands-on learning, Don Sanchez added, has “absolutely” helped Jarred, who, said his father, struggles with attention deficit disorder.

“This was one of the few classes where Jarred would come home and say, ‘Hey, Dad, we planted this today,’ or ‘Hey, Dad, this plant is growing bigger,’ ” Sanchez said. “This was the only class where he did that.”

Having failed almost all of his classes last year, Jarred earned enough A’s, even in core subjects such as English and math, to land him on the honor roll this time around, his father said.

“It’s a tremendous turnaround. I wrote a letter to ... the administration on how [Taylor] was instrumental in getting Jarred to participate.”

Taylor said each student was given a variety of plants, including jasmine, jade, Rosetta and aloe, to take home. Now that they have learned that a garden can be grown in a mere bucket’s worth of real estate, Taylor said, he hopes his students will put their green thumbs to work.

“Everything we grew can be done by container or balcony gardening, and for these city kids to get their hands in the soil and feel a part of the planet is important,” Taylor said.

“There is a connection as they cultivate a plant. They can see how the planet gives back, and it cultivates an environmental ethic for the first time,” Taylor said.

“It is so important for these guys to see that there is a big planet, a big world beyond their balconies.”