Academic literature on the topic 'Niche picking'

Too often as teachers, we worry about doing too much for our students, lest we contribute to their dependency and fail to convey our confidence that they are capable of solving their own problems. However, especially for students who enter our classrooms full of mistrust, it is more important to convey our good intentions and trustworthiness, for example, by being “nice” and providing help in the many small instances when a helpful gesture, while unnecessary, would ease a student’s situation. Picking up a student’s dropped pencil, providing missing lunch money, or spending time talking with st

On the Road to Volador were tree-lined, rocky hills, as well as a fútbol field where a few kids kicked around a ball. A boy on a wobbly-wheeled bicycle navigated the dirt path next to the road, spinning his legs as fast as he could to keep up with our truck. Just outside of town, a group of ten women and girls were picking chile piquín on a steep slope above the road. As Josh and I spoke in English to prepare our questions, the women chattered in rapid-fire Spanish to one another, clearly welcoming the work interruption. They had stopped plucking the tiny red and orange chiles, which they collected in two-liter Coke bottles with the tops cut off. Before we could introduce ourselves, an older woman said in Spanish, “It sounds nice, like what we’ve heard on soap operas.” They said they had seen gringos from time to time in Papantla, the municipal seat, and at the pyramids of nearby El Tajin, the spectacular pre-Colombian archeological site. But they claimed during our trip in 2007 that we were the first gringos to visit tiny Volador. The rugged but fertile land around Volador was planted with corn, beans, papaya, chiles, bananas, oranges, mangoes, and other crops. It was more difficult land to farm than that of Agua Dulce. Volador was also more isolated, and it had fewer people. The main difference, though, was that Don Beto Cruz, an absentee landlord from Papantla, owned nearly all of the land surrounding the village. There was no ejido here. Locals traded their labor with Cruz for little plots of land to farm. Wage work in the fields earned about $8 a day, but it was irregular, maybe one or two days a week. Several of the fieldworkers were high school–aged girls earning summer money. Despite the blazing heat, they dressed in jeans or sweatpants and had layers on top to protect against the scratchy fieldwork and the sun. One of the girls wore a white-and-blue shirt that read, “Telesecundaria Mariano Matamoros.” The shirt featured a television with a smiley face inside.

In the fall we had great fun picking our orchard apples and harvesting in the garden. There were two old apple trees, undoubtedly planted by the Baxter family in the late 1800s. One bore very large sweet apples, which probably was a Wolf River type, in Mother’s estimation, and the other bore just nice, tasty apples. The trunks of these two trees were ten to twelve inches in diameter, so they were really mature trees. Under and around these apple trees we usually had planted potatoes (our best crop!), corn, and huge beefsteak tomatoes. A slice from a beefsteak tomato warmed by the sun and just picked would cover a whole slab of bread. What fabulous sandwiches these made with mayonnaise. Makes me hungry to think about it. It was always such fun to visit our garden with Mother, as she would get very enthusiastic about our crops. Most fun was to dig potatoes. I might be at the shovel, and Mother with a bucket was collecting the potatoes, which were invariably healthy and robust. We would both get on our knees and feel around for the potatoes. Mother would get excited and ooh and ah about their size, their ruddiness, and their abundance. “Oh, Estella. Look at THAT one! Put your hands through that loose soil and make sure we did not leave any potatoes behind! Those little potatoes are hiding,” she would say, or words to that effect. Boiling these little potatoes up for supper was a special treat, as they were so tasty with butter when lightly cooked. Our corn occasionally bore enough cobs to give us a meal. We usually had good luck with onions, too. To weed this garden we had a one-wheeled cultivator with a hoe or blade attached behind the wheel, which was about one foot in diameter. The wooden handles formed a V sprouting from the axis of the wheel. With two hands one would push this wheeled implement between the rows of crops, and it would turn over the weeds, so one could keep the space between the rows pretty weed-free without too much work.