Teaching like a gardener?

In the musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton decides with his dying breath that legacy - the concept with which he is obsessed - is planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. 
As I've only been teaching for 8 years I often feel that teaching middle school social studies is planting seeds in a garden I'll never get to see.

Don't get me wrong. There are those students every year whose sprouting civic engagement, curiosity and activism I can see early in the year. They keep me going on the sunless winter days. Most of the lessons I teach, however, are not easily cultivated so I take the long-term approach. I plant the seeds that require roots. 

With current events I've decided to play the long game this year. I started the year with current events quizzes but soon recognized that the current events stories and the rising anxiety levels of my students seem clearly correlated.  
I reflected and I changed course. I'm teaching my students a strategy I use when I get overwhelmed by sad stories, tragic stories and angering stories in the news. I look to history. I look backwards not so I can predict the future but so I can be reminded that the human spirit always survives.

Today's lesson was on visual storytelling. We looked at this 21st century skill of telling a complex story in a simple way using powerful visual elements. Three goals for their history day projects this year: 
1. Appeal to your audience's senses - Use REAL primary source material to help your audience IMAGINE what it was like to experience the past.
2. Be clear so your complex story is relatable and has a simple and clear connection to today. This should be easy when every story is about breaking barriers! Everyone loves to hear about people overcoming great odds.
3. Make it relevant - Think about what we want our audience to walk away with. We want them to walk away wanting to not discriminate, to not build walls that divide. We want them to walk away understanding other people and the ways we overcame challenges in the past.  
If we can do that, we've succeeded.

After repeating that message throughout the day I realized it's my teaching mantra.  If my students can walk away with those lessons and if those seeds I've planted can have an impact on the world, I will have succeeded.