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The Poetry Periodical

About Tending Roses

This blog is about my experience teaching literature to 2nd-6th grade. While the title may give you a different impression, I assure you that in order to find tips on how to grow anything, you will want to look elsewhere. Every green thing I’ve ever touched has withered and died.

Why “Tending Roses” for a title, then?

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, she talks about the importance of, and the bravery in, consciously replacing a bad thought with a beautiful one. Since two things cannot exist in the same place, a great service is done by creating beauty wherever possible. This is explained in gardening terms by a man who has so completely filled himself with thoughts of his own inadequacy that he has physically crippled himself. But one day, as if in a dream, he hears a voice say, “Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle may not grow.” Gradually, he recovers from his maladies by putting aside his morbid thoughts, and instead focusing on the beauty of the world.

This phrase is meaningful to me in my classroom. I think of my job as being much like that of a gardener—I tend to my students’ minds so thistles may not grow there. Instead, I try to instill something beautiful—an appreciation for the things that literature can give to us.

With this blog, I attempt to discuss the various aspects of tending roses through literature.

About Grace

Grace is a literature teacher at a small private school in Orange County, California. She has been teaching for nearly a decade. Her husband, Kyle, works at the same school, and they have three young children. In her spare time, Grace loves to spend time with her family, but also enjoys reading, crocheting, sewing, embroidery, and watching Korean dramas.

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