This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 73 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, I am going to share with you the story of how a Bronx teacher became an accidental urban gardener

and ultimately grew what is possibly the most outstanding life-changing project-based learning model you have ever seen.

Okay, I'm going to be using a lot of superlatives in this episode. Greatest, most amazing, most incredible, because I can't figure out how to talk about this project without going a little nuts.

I'm also going to be a little messy because I normally will write out the introductions to these podcasts and read them to you.

And I have been putting it off all day because I can't quite figure out how to write it. I just need to talk about it.

So my guest today's name is Stephen Ritz. About 30 years ago, he started teaching in the South Bronx.

And if you happen to be not familiar with the burrows of New York City, the South Bronx is sort of widely known as a very poor part of the city and of the country.

It's been identified as one of the poorest congressional districts in the country.

Good jobs are hard to come by. A lot of families live well below the poverty line. And none of this really came as a shock to Stephen Ritz because he grew up in the Bronx.

He moved away for a little while, but then he came back and started teaching. So he knew that this was going to be a challenge.

And something about Stephen Ritz was different because he saw the talents that the students had right away and he saw the special gifts that they had.

From a very early time in his career, he started giving them sort of real world projects to do.

He started having them help him as a guy in his young 20s figure out the budget so that he could actually move out of his parents' house and get his own apartment.

And then when he got older, he had them working on other projects. But after a couple of years of doing this, what he landed on was gardening.

It was urban gardening and it happened by accident. And I'm going to let him tell that story of how it happened by accident.

But over the years, what he started to do was have these kids grow gardens. They grew gardens sort of in neighborhoods nearby.

And then they grew one on a rooftop and eventually started learning how to grow edible plants right there in his classroom in the South Bronx.

And he kind of moved from class to class. He ended up getting assigned in different schools. And a lot of hurdles that a lot of us have dealt with, but sort of kept going with this idea of how plants and the growing of them and then the sharing of them could really just sort of tap into some of his students.

Passions and qualities and help them find their strengths. He found kids that really took to the gardening aspect. He found some that really took to the design aspect.

Others that were really interested in sort of the budgeting and sales types of things. And they ended up having their own farmers market.

And now it's spawned into this, I don't even know if spawn is the right word, but it's grown into this huge thing called the green Bronx machine.

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