My parents have a large asparagus patch on their farm. The patch is old—it was the first thing my father planted when they bought the place 52 years ago.
You only have to plant asparagus once, and then it gives and gives and gives, year after year, forever and ever.
Each spring, for one or two weeks in May, the patch produces hundreds of thick asparagus stalks, all the color of spring— a gentle but bright green, softened by hues of yellow.
My mother slices stalks right at the base, dozens of them, then steams them in water until they are pliable and floppy. She serves the stalks in a mound, with just a single pat of melting butter on top—just enough to make each bite taste creamy and soft—then tops it with pepper and a ridiculously delicious amount of kosher salt.
When I was little, my father came into the house one early May day and said, “That asparagus is shooting up so fast you can practically see it grow.”
That was a fascinating idea. I went outside and sat down and stared at one single stalk, watching it, my eyes locked.
I was probably six, maybe seven, so my attention span wasn’t all that great, but it felt like I stared for at least eighty million hours.
Nothing happened.
I gave up in frustration and skipped off to do something else. But when I came back in a few hours, sure enough, the stalk I’d watched had grown. A lot. A couple inches, maybe.
So I tried again. I stared and stared.
Nothing. So I gave up again.
The next morning, the stalk I’d been watching was a full seven or eight inches longer than it had been the morning before.
I was frustrated. I’d wanted the asparagus to change in front of my eyes, growing up, up, up to the sky, like a beanstalk, Jack’s beanstalk, a miracle of nature.
But then, there it was, indisputable— the growth happened right when I stopped staring so hard.
But it still happened, didn’t it? Asparagus can grow almost a foot a day. It’s a miracle, for sure. But it’s a miracle that refuses to be rushed or micro-managed by a watchful eye.
That’s quite a metaphor for the progress we see in classrooms, no?
In education, we all want to see progress. Watch it. Measure it. We want to go into our classrooms every day and have miracles occur.
We are obsessed with progress, actually. We use high-stakes testing, daily exit tickets, and rigid data tracking to try and catch growth in the exact moment it happens. But just like sitting in the dirt staring at that stalk, if you look too closely at a student from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, they often look exactly the same.
True learning doesn't happen in a linear, visible upward climb while we watch. It happens in the quiet spaces— during sleep, when the brain consolidates information; in the mistakes and frustrations of the previous day; when the student is away from the lesson, letting the roots settle.
An asparagus patch that has lasted fifty-plus years can only do so because it has an incredibly deep, established network beneath the surface. Even when dormant, it is building on that unseen foundation.
In the classroom, we often spend months building the root system—routines, psychological safety, basic decoding skills, or mathematical mindsets. To an outside observer (or a frustrated teacher), it looks like nothing is growing. But then, seemingly overnight, growth arrives. A breakthrough happens. Progress is evident.
There is a vital ingredient that educators forget when we panic about progress: time.
We cannot force the stalk to shoot up by staring at it, and we cannot force a child to master a complex concept by over-testing them. Growth is a slow, quiet, inevitable force if the environment is right.
It takes quite a bit longer than a minute, an hour, a day, even a year. It’s a slow thing, growth is, but it’s happening and it’s glorious when we look back and see it.
I know spring has arrived when my mother mentions the asparagus. “You should come up here next weekend,” she says on the phone. “The asparagus is up.”
And that’s how I know another year has passed. It’s how I know there will be a magnificent bounty, even though I haven’t been watching at all.
That’s all for this week. I hope you’re all enjoying the fruitfulness of spring!
Jen
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