Right outside of my house stands a green box. This box has four legs, and a spigot at the bottom, is split into several vertical tiers, and is filled with worms. More specifically it is filled with red wiggler worms, alternatively called Eisenia Foetida, worms excellent for composting. My relationship to these worms is very simple, I drop leftover food scraps, cardboard or other organic material into their box, they eat that material, convert it into nutrient rich fertilizer, and later I collect that fertilizer. This provides me with a resource, which I will hopefully use later to supplement a garden, or give to friends, and which also helps assuage my anxiety over my personal waste production.

In some salient ways, our classroom is like my worm box. I like this analogy, partly because I think it is funny, but also because it emphasizes this feeling that our classroom is more of a writhing and confused, collective unit, as opposed to a pyramid of top-down organization, or a kind of committee. While ostensibly it may appear that I am steering my students in on particular direction, the image of hundreds of entangled worms feels more apt.

One worm-like characteristic of my classroom is the spatial relationship of my students to each other and to the room itself. Red wiggler worms function well in tight knit environments. HU 101 is a very cramped room. My students consistently knock against each other in their chairs, or contort and twist their way through the narrow aisles of the desks. Somehow, no one seems to mind. I make extra room for the students, move the table around, encourage them to push their desks to wherever they want, but they choose instead to remain tight, and shuffle around in a wriggling mass.

This metaphor also works well with our origins. My worms were shipped from a business called Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm in Pennsylvania. My green box now makes up the entirety of their universe, excluding the few that squirm their way out of the top and dry out and die. My students were brought to Western from disparate places and states of mind, and for ninety minutes, three times a week, their worlds are encased by our small room in the humanities building.

Worms avoid exposure and isolation, squirming back into the wet layers in the box when they are pulled out. My students dislike standing up, speaking out, or generally being the object of many gazes. Personally, I feel more comfortable wheeling around in the roller chair, among clusters of small groups, than standing up front and lecturing.

The metaphor tracks along the content we consume and produce as well. Together, my students and I take a bunch of material, from our lives, from the course curriculum, grind it around in our gizzards, (our brains) and poop (write) it out in another form. I don’t know a lot about my worms but I imagine they digest their food multiple times until they finally deposit their beautiful, black, castings. I like to think that in a similar way, when we revise and translate meaning across different mediums, we are in a way, pulling the nutrients from a larger amalgam of banana peels, coffee grounds and paper towels, and move them across and into different forms. In this respect, I can work in alongside my students as one of their peers, as a fellow worm.

As individuals and as a group we are susceptible to external forces. As the temperature drops my worms also drop into a relative lethargy, consuming and producing more slowly. Other organisms inhabit the worm box, mold, flies, earwigs, unidentified beetles. Some of these other players help my worms by breaking down the larger food chunks, and some, I imagine, obstruct their wormy success, either through competition for resources or by predation. My warm-blooded students and I are still affected by seasonal change and other ambient changes. We are also all assisted or hindered by external individuals and interest groups, over which I have no control.

I would really like to think of myself as just another wriggling worm at all times some ways struggling through the compost with my students as my peers, but for better or worse, I cannot act as a worm all the time. Sometimes I have to act like as the human, lifting the lid and dropping food onto the worms. Sometimes this process feels very disconnected, I arrive, drop some onion skins or a workshop worksheet onto them, leave for a while, and come back to see what they have for me. Slowly, I identify what material they healthily and happily consume, and what they reject. Worms won’t munch on eggshells, students are wary of group work and need new technologies broken down for them.

Ultimately this metaphor becomes pretty goofy and a little weird. My worms are slimy, they emit a foul odor when aggravated, and I think they probably eat each other when they die. But one aspect of the metaphor of students and worms seems to ring especially true. My personal feelings on my worms and my students feel congruent. I like the worms in a removed sort of way. I think of them at once as a single unit and a collection of individuals. I appreciate the work that they do, even though it is sometimes a pain to extract the real nuggets of black gold from their pile of castings. I am curious about their interactions when I am away, but also find it pretty easy to forget about them. I worry that I am sometimes providing them with material that limit their growth and hurt them. Finally, I hope that the current worms in the box are part of a continuous cycle of success, that I can learn from them about their habits and preferences, that I can use what they produce as fertilizer for future growth, and finally that they will eventually become autonomous, that one day they will be able to reach into my kitchen to identify and grab the most delicious food scraps and garbage on which they can feast with abandon.