The Value of Rotting Pumpkins

When I made the move from teaching first grade to teaching second grade, it was a profound experience for me. Second grade children could read independently. They could understand and follow written directions, and could express themselves in writing. They could work independently for more than twenty minutes at a time, and they were able to demonstrate their mastery of many social skills they had practiced in their earlier school years.

No matter what grade I taught, though, I felt my students should be exposed to real-life problems and situations in their learning experiences, and it was to serve this end that we watched a pumpkin rot. I had always used our Halloween pumpkin to teach and reinforce several academic lessons. We voted and tallied the score on how we wanted each part of the pumpkin’s face to look: eyes, nose, and mouth. We carved the pieces out and handled and examined and commented upon them together. We all enjoyed the sensation of sticking our hands into the pumpkin’s gooey insides, although some more than others. We collected, cleaned, and counted all the seeds and, of course, we roasted and ate the seeds together.

One year, it dawned on me that it might be very interesting to see what happened when a pumpkin was left to rot. To facilitate our experiment, I put a nice layer of soil in a large terrarium and brought it to school. After Halloween, we placed the pumpkin into the terrarium, and I sealed the top tightly with plastic wrap. We discussed what might happen next, and I had each student illustrate how the pumpkin looked at that moment and write a speculation in a writing journal about what might occur as the pumpkin rotted. Nobody, including me, really knew what was going to happen, other than we said it would rot. So we watched.

After about a week the pumpkin began to sag in on itself. We continued to illustrate what we saw, revisiting and recording our observations every couple of weeks. The transition was fascinating, from sagging, to a growth of white fuzzy mold, to a change to black mold - all accompanied by a slow drooping of the pumpkin onto the surface of the soil. Some people might have felt it was gross but my students all seemed to find it interesting. The entire process took several months and, at the end, the only visible sign that something had been in the terrarium was the pumpkin’s stem. Every other part of it had decomposed into the earth.

What an excellent opportunity for discussing where the pumpkin went and what purpose it might serve now. It led me to wonder aloud to my class about what would happen if we were to bury other things in the dirt of the terrarium and watch to see what would happen to them too. Would any item decompose and turn back into soil? The idea was met with much enthusiasm, and we talked about what we might want to bury. In the end, we buried a Styrofoam cup, a page from a newspaper, a banana peel, a plastic water bottle, and a rock. And then we left it all for time and the earth to do whatever they were going to do.

We knew the process would take time, and we resisted digging into the dirt to see what was happening. That wasn’t easy. After a period of two months, we took a trowel and dug in, and this was what we found: the banana peel was gone except for a tiny bit of the stem; the newspaper page had disintegrated into an unreadable, soggy mass; and the rock looked just as it had when we buried it in the earth. As for the plastic water bottle and the Styrofoam cup? Other than being dirty, they appeared exactly as they had at the beginning of the experiment and, with a wash, could have gone on doing the function for which they were first invented. An interesting discussion ensued. I can only hope that my students have kept the lesson of the items in our world that are not biodegradable with them to this day, and that it affected their future behavior as consumers and disposers of unwanted items.