The Dilemma of Labels

I’m still thinking about weeds.  Probably because we read Weeds Find a Way in class today.  Our students were so surprised when they realized the puff balls they love to blow from dandelions are really seeds!

We talked about the places weed grow…and I urged them to be on the lookout for weeds in unexpected places and to report back to us what they noticed.

The more I think about weeds, the more I realize that weeds are just plants that have managed to make pests of themselves.  One of my students pointed out that weeds are plants that we don’t try to grow–they plant themselves.  There’s a list of weeds in the back of Cindy’s book, most that I have never heard of (obviously I’m not well-versed in weeds beyond dandelions).

But then again, is labeling a plant a weed just a matter of opinion?  Is a weed a plant you don’t want?  I can remember as a kid my mom calling geraniums weeds.  They grew along the side of our garage and my mom was always trying to pull them out.  And now I see people trying to grow geraniums, buying them from the nursery, cultivating them for their beautiful colors and vibrance.

Yesterday I noticed this ivy coming through the fence to my backyard.

Sometimes I think ivy is pretty…but it can be insidious once it takes hold and is very hard to get rid of.  We had some ivy wrap itself around the trunk of a tree in our yard…and nearly kill the tree!  And it took a lot of work to free that tree from the ivy, and the tree is just beginning to come back to health.

So just when does a plant become a weed?  Is ivy a weed when it chokes a tree, but a plant when you cultivate its growth? And does the label matter? What about students?  When we label them…gifted, learning disabled, autistic, dyslexic…does it change the ways we view and treat them?  Do they become metaphoric weeds in our classrooms when they become a nuisance?  When they take too much work?  When they choke someone else’s growth?

Can we change our perceptions by changing the labels?  Or by removing the labels?  Would we like weeds better if we learned their names and noticed their unique qualities?

Hmmm…weeds and labels.  I need to do some more thinking about this!