Irene ZhangA coworker told me that she moved to Oregon in 4th grade and went to a magnet school in environmental conservation which mostly consisted of weekly field trips to remove invasive blackberry bushes and English ivy. This is the most PNW thing I’ve ever heard.
She said that 1) 11 year olds are really not big enough to take on a full blackberry bush so it would take 3 of them all day to get one out. And 2) she probably should have been learning science or literature but I guess learning to spot and remove invasive plants is a more useful life skill