Rural kids rally: Nature nerding; 4-day school week; hikes instead of detention; farm safety; the 'Little White Duck'

Whether it's discovering a ginormous toad, finding the most gooseberries or uncovering troves of fossils, when kids venture into the great unknown of rural places, adventures unfold. A new graphic novel by cartoonist Tiffany Everett, Diary of a Nature Nerd, celebrates all the discoveries and learning nature nerding youth can make while tramping over hill and dale. "Everett encourages readers to explore new places, keep journals about what they encounter, and think like scientists," reports John R. Platt of The Revelator.

Rural school districts with teacher hiring and retention challenges turned to 4-day school weeks as an employment perk that also saves districts money. The 4-day school week schedule has been criticized as cutting too deeply into student learning time, and yet some rural schools are keeping the shortened schedule because it's a practical fix. "The schedule is especially popular with rural communities, where students and teachers often have to travel long distances to get to school," reports Anya Petrone Slepyan of The Daily Yonder. "But when it comes to assessing how the four-day school week affects students’ educational outcomes, the results are inconclusive."

At the end of the 3 1/2-mile hike, the students grab their 
backpacks and head home. (All Trails photo)

Instead of sitting in detention for breaking school rules, some high schoolers at Morse High School in Maine have opted to take mandatory hikes instead. Morse counselor Leslie Trundy was inspired to start the program after attending an outdoor conference, reports Madi Smith of NPR. Trundy told Smith, "I hoped that time in the woods, like, I could sort of take the skills that I have on the road with them, or on the trail, and be a listener for them and [while students] pay back the time to the school and sort of serve their consequence, [they] also receive more care and attention."

While growing up on a farm may sound wholesome and safe, farms can be dangerous places for children and young adults. The list of risks is long and can include everything from cows and barbed-wire fencing to big tractors and grain bins. To help farming families build safety awareness and habits, the National Farm Medicine Center and National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety support the "Cultivate Safety" website, which offers free resources in English and Spanish. For a quick safety check, Rural Mutual shares its "Top Tips" list for farmers and kids to review.

Often remembered as the voice of Sam the Snowman from the classic 1964 Christmas television special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," Burl Ives also acted and sang. For children who need to calm down after rowdy play or to get ready for bed, Ives' recording of "The Little White Duck and Other Children’s Favorites" is delightfully soothing. Ives’s collection of "traditional folk songs for children is as much fun for the kids as it is for the adults (I dare to say)," writes Jan Pytalski of The Daily Yonder. "Ives was central in promoting traditional folk tunes all the way back in 1940s and continued performing for many decades after."

2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest is taking submissions now through Sept. 15

It's time for authors to rev up their imaginations, seize their writing tools, and prepare to transport their readers to a story of rural making.

The Milk House and The Daily Yonder have opened submissions for their 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest and invite authors from anywhere to enter their short stories or essays.

Authors can submit fiction or nonfiction stories limited to 7,000 words for $10 each. 

Deadline is Sept. 15. Read all the details and submit here. 

The overall winner of the Best in Rural Writing Contest will receive $500, and the second-place author will receive $200. 

Some fine print: Contest submissions may be previously published (as long as it was not published before January 2024), and will also be read within 2 to 3 months of submitting with an eye toward publication on the site, as well as the forthcoming "2026 Best in Rural Writing" print anthology. 

Bit of guidance: Submissions should, in some way, be connected to "the rural.” The manner and extent to which this is done is open to the author and not necessarily limited to rural characters or rural topics.

Interested in rural reporting? Attend the live, virtual launch of the Rural Reporter's Notebook podcast and learn more.

For people curious about rural reporting or want to know more about how other news sources approach it, the Rural Journalism Collective is launching the Rural Reporter's Notebook podcast on Wednesday, May 14 at 2 p.m. (Eastern Time) with a live recording that includes a Q&A session with podcast hosts Claire Carlson and Julia Tilton from The Daily Yonder.

Anyone interested can attend this live, virtual event. Register here.

The podcast on May 14 will highlight how Carlson and Tilton interview their featured guest. The two will explain their processes during and after the interview. Then Caroline Carlson, senior digital editor of the Daily Yonder, will join the show and share details about launching and stewarding this bi-weekly podcast. The Q&A will follow.

The bi-weekly podcast will feature Claire Carlson and Tipton discussing news stories big and small and what they mean for rural communities. 

Opinion: AI doesn't make writing better. 'Letting a robot structure your argument. . .is dangerous.'

Photo by Robert Rieger, Connected Archives
via The New York Times

Nobody ever asks me about language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper.
-- From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Now ask yourself: Could artificial intelligence ever make that observation? What does a robot know about language? Very little, and yet, no matter who is writing, a robot is reworking words and removing human originality from the page. In her opinion essay for The New York Times, Margaret Renkl eschews AI as a better way to write. Edited portions of her essay are shared below.

"Letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It’s a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words — messy, imprecise, unexpected — to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The world which no one else sees in exactly that way.

"Sure, there’s a difference between writing a poem and cleaning up a garbled email, between writing a love letter and a Google ad. For some tasks, employing an A.I. assistant might save time without levying a commensurate cost in humanity. Maybe. . . .I’m still not sure."

Sometimes the need for a perfect word can send a writer on a deep dive for the exact word a phrase or verse needs. Renkl shares, "I was outside. . . sitting with my thesis director, the poet James Dickey. I remember that particular meeting because of one ill-chosen word. In a poem that was otherwise finished, a single adjective was clearly wrong. We batted alternatives back and forth across the desk, but none was right.

"Hours later, the right word came to me, popping up out of the depths while my mind was occupied with something else. It was so apt. . . I opened the phone book, and looked up Mr. Dickey’s number. When he answered, I said, ‘Pale.’ The word is ‘pale.’. . .Mr. Dickey was overjoyed about that word, every bit as jubilant as I was. If only for a moment, the world made a kind of sense it hadn’t made before."

''No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm' reads Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics. But what if the existence of robots itself is what robs us of our humanity? Is that not a way of bringing humans to harm?"