Only As Good as My Ingredients

I have all these cookbooks.  They're in a bookcase, and sort of just crammed in there because at some point one of my kids removed all of them from the shelf and scattered them about the floor for reasons beyond comprehension.  Well, my comprehension, anyway.  I'm sure there was a good reason at the time.  But now all of them are crammed back up there in such a way that if I even try to remove one, the rest cascade out, spewing bits of other papers all over the clean sticky floor.   Seriously.  My floors get sticky within seconds of being cleaned.  You could trap small mammals in the gunk on my floor.  But this is not the point.

The point is, I have all these cookbooks.  And I rarely use them.  When I do want to use one, like the really cool little bread one I got from mom that automatically falls open to the pizza crust recipe, I usually can't find it because it's hidden by all the little scraps of paper.  Recipes are written on those scraps, which I mean to organize into a binder or something, but I don't.  I just shove them onto the cookbook shelf.  And then I never find them again, or even remember that I have them.   Occasionally one will fall off and I'll read it as I pick it up (this does happen sometimes) and go "Oh!  Yeah, I liked that recipe.  I think."  But I won't be able to duplicate it because when I made it the last time, I used onions instead of scallions (which I never have) and tomato sauce instead of paste because I was out, white wine instead of red and omitted the capers altogether because who the hell stocks capers in their fridge?  Besides, I never remember that I like capers until I have them accidentally at a restaurant and ask my mom what they are.

So even with all these recipes readily available, some of them even in neatly indexed books, I'm always going to the internet to find ones specifically suited to what I want to eat.  Or, more precisely, suited to what I have on hand, or can reasonably substitute for.  Try asking "Joy of Cooking" for recipe that includes potatoes, half a stalk of celery, mini carrots and frozen chicken, but not wine because we're out.  "Joy of Cooking" will just sit there unhelpfully.  The interwebs, though, will hook you up.

Only it won't, really, because every damn recipe, even the ones rated "5 stars!" with comments like "this is the best thing ever!" will contain Onion Soup Mix, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom or both.  One even combined several "Cream of" whatevers and two types of powdered soup mix.  Seriously?  I think 90% of the recipes for crock pot chicken go something like this:    4 chicken breasts, 1 T dried minced onion, 1 bag Onion Soup Mix and a can of Cream of Chicken.  Put in crock pot all together and cook for 4 hours on high.  Serve over instant rice or noodles.  And all of them have 4 1/2 stars.

What?

I mean, sure, I've done the easy-chicken-over-rice-with-mushroom-soup thing many times, and yes, it's good and it's simple, but why the flying hell does someone put this on the internet like it's some brand new amazing thing?   And who are the morons gushing over it in the comment section like it's the Best New Thing since forever?  I guess it's new to somebody. It gets a little tiring, though, to wade through 6, 534 recipes like this to find the one that doesn't include insta-food.

I swear, I could probably find a recipe for "Best Hotdogs Ever" that instructed users to nuke a hotdog (remove from packaging first) for 30 seconds, place inside bun (remove from packaging first), add a strip of mustard and eat.  The only thing missing would be details on how to chew.

The real reason, possibly, that I find this all so annoying is that I would actually USE some of these "recipes" if I could eat the ingredients.  But anything made by Campbell's contains gluten, and most of the dried soup recipes do, too -- or something that makes me sick in any event.  And somehow, I find them less annoying than the recipes that call for things that I have to google to figure out what the hell they are, like "sucanat."  Or pancake recipes that call for five different types of flour (buckwheat, millet, sorghum, brown rice and barley), coconut oil, organic eggs and fair trade vanilla.  These are the kinds of recipes that I suspect are out there less to inform people about how to cook fantastic pancakes and more to inform people about how fantastic (read: better than you) the recipe-makers are.  Besides, I've had these pancakes, and they chew like soggy cardboard, and taste like grass clippings.

So it's back to "Joy of Cooking" or one of the 4000 scraps of paper.

But first I need to clean my floor.

Whatever Happened to the One-Kid-Per-Year Rule?

DS got an invite to a birthday party last week.  We'll go, of course, since it's one of his good buddies from pre-school, but I'm not terribly thrilled by the prospect.  Not because of this birthday party in particular, but because I know it's going to be another one of the dreaded rites of one-upmanship that is invading whatever class it is we're now living in: The. Perfect. Child's. Birthday. Party.

It will be held at either A) some massive child-oriented kid's venue, complete with pizza, a store-bought cake, punch and high-decible activity (tab: $350.00 for a party of 25) or B) an absolutely perfect McMansion, free of any dirt, and with upscale hors d'oeuvres and wine for all the parents who get to stand around uncomfortably, trying to make small talk, or nodding and smiling as the four mothers who do know each other talk loudly about every other fabulous person they know that the rest of us don't.

Either way there will be goodie bags filled with little trinkets for each child, each worth, oh, maybe $5, which isn't much until you figure out that there are 25 of them, all thematically coordinated with the cake, decorations and birthday-boy's outfit.

The message could not be more clear:  We have spent an ungodly amount of money on our 5-year-old's birthday.

And whoo boy, you better pony up come gift-givin' time.

Last year, I dug through the box of books and videos we'd bought at the school book-sale, and found copy of a lovely, if little-known children's movie, and, I think, a hardback children's book.  If I'd paid retail, it was probably a $15 gift.  I put it in a gift bag from our pile of gift bags in the basement, had DS make a "card" and off we went.  It was a nice gift, and one that I would have been happy to see my son receive.

I did not fail to notice for a second that nearly every other child had produced a gift that had to be worth at least $30, and all were elegantly wrapped, often in a bag or paper that matched the theme of the invitation.  Our gift couldn't have stood out more if we'd brought in a turd from the lawn, wrapped in used kleenex.

DS didn't care, and neither did the birthday kid, I suspect.  He was too busy tearing the paper of the next gift.  I suppose I could have imagined that momma's thanks seemed just a tad insincere and had the definite subtext of "cheap family" with it.  Our gift, it was obvious, did not cover our tab.  And I didn't even drink any wine.

I should explain that up to this point, all birthdays in our household have featured relatives only, should they have happened to be in town.  Once or twice we've invited the neighbors over for cake, which I made, with homemade frosting.  (Duncan Heinz cake, though.  Good stuff. Alton Brown says it's okay to use a box for cake, so I'm good with that, too.)   Gifts, I kid you not, are often produced from "shopping" in the basement where we have a ginormous stash of toys and games given to us by other families, or bought by J at Thrift Stores.  (We have enough K-Nex in our basement to create a life-size amusement park by now.)

So I am unsurprisingly appalled by this latest trend in trendy birthday parties.  I want nothing to do with it.  We've been saying that for his 5th birthday, Dash can have his first "real" party.  I was envisioning 4 friends, over for play and some cake.  I would figure out some way to get a quiet word to the parents that any gifts should be under $5, please.  But earlier this week DS had an absolute meltdown in which he proclaimed, wailing, that the only way he could ever be happy again was if he could go to the bouncy-mansion place he's been to once before.  I have no idea what brought on the hysterical sobbing, but in an effort to calm him, I suggested that maybe he could have his birthday party there.  (I sometimes go insane when confronted with non-stop hysteria.  When it's bad enough, I'll do nearly anything to make it cease.)  Sigh.

I can see now how some parents get roped into this, but I'm still hoping to quietly back-pedal this into a 5-kid show at the house.  But maybe not.  Still, no matter what, I'm making the cake myself.  'Cause I stand firm, and that's where I draw the line.  For now.

3 Minute Fiction for NPR

            Grace fidgeted in her seat, resisting the urge to play with the door’s silver buttons.  She knew a sharp “Would you quit fiddling, already!” would issue from her mother the moment her fingers strayed, so instead she reached up to twirl a lock of her hair.  She wriggled, watching the scenery go by.  A sign read "Greentown, 1 mi."  Grace squealed with excitement.  It had been so long that she’d gotten to go anywhere; she could hardly contain herself.

            Not far away, another little girl squirmed on a stone bench, alternately bouncing on her freckled hands, and kicking at pebbles in the dust.  “Stop it,” chided her guardian.  “You’ll scuff your shoes.”

            “Won’t.” she replied, glowering for a moment before brightening as she saw cars driving through distant gates.  She looked anxiously at her chaperone.

            “Yes, that’s her.” he said.  “Don’t worry. You’ll know what to do. “

            She nodded, red curls bobbing.   The cars drove up winding paths.  “When she gets here, I’ll really get to leave?  For good?” 

He nodded.  “Of course.  You’ll take her with you, as her guide. “ 

She bit her lip, nearly jumping with anticipation.

            Through the window, Grace stared at the manicured lawn, graceful statues and carved stone façades.  She had never seen such a beautiful town.  “Are we almost there?”  Her mother looked down at Grace's seat, her mouth set in a thin line that could have been angry, sad or just tired.  Grace never knew.  She looked away, folding her small hands back into her dress, and tried to be ladylike.

            When the car stopped, though, Grace forgot her mother’s silent admonition and scooted herself out the backseat the moment the door opened.  She ran full tilt towards a small pavilion, stopping halfway up to twirl and laugh in the sunlight until she heard a voice behind her.

            “Hey!  Over here!”  Away from the cars and people moving towards the pavilion was a pretty red-headed girl.  Grace glanced at her parents, but they were focused on each other, so she skipped down.

            “Hi!” she chirped.  “Who are you?  I just got here.”  The redhead just stared, and Grace suddenly felt shy, twirling her hair around her finger again.   The older man gave his charge a nudge.

            “Oh! Sorry!" she blushed.  "I’m Angela.  I know you’re new.  I’m… I’m your guide.”

            “My guide?” asked Grace.  She pulled harder on her hair, confusion mounting.

            “Stop that!” chided Angela, giggling.  “You’ll pull it all out!”

            “Pull it out?” echoed Grace, her brow furrowing.  She looked up the hill at her mother, who was seated now, clutching Grace's father.  Grace felt her hair, remembering now that it had all fallen out, and as she remembered her body flickered, a pale, balding image of herself replacing the peach-perfect of a moment ago. 

            “Stop it!” Angela gave her a little shake, really scolding.  “Enough of that.  That’s all done with.  You get to come with me now.”  Grace’s long hair and glowing skin returned.  She smiled nervously.

            “Won’t Momma be mad?  I didn’t ask…” Grace's voice trailed off as she looked up the hill to wave at her parents, but her mother's face was buried in her father’s coat.

            “It’s okay,” reassured Angela.  “She knows.  It’s time to leave.”  She reached out, taking Grace’s hand in hers.  “It’s okay. I know the way.”

            Together they stepped off the paths of Greentown and out into the wide, wide world.

When I Remember, I'll Tell You

     While cleaning the house today I had two or maybe even three possible threads going through my head that I wanted to post about.  I even started fleshing them out, deciding what tangents to follow and which ones to leave, what details to include and so on.  At the time, I remember thinking "I really need that Star Trek computer that allows me access my log from anywhere in the house so I can speak this out loud.  Otherwise, I'm going to forget this."  I was right.  I have forgotten everything except that thought about forgetting it.  It's like a dream I can *almost* remember, but can't.  Argh.  I think maybe it had something to do with gender identity and nail polish, but that doesn't seem quite right.

    I know I could have written down a few words on paper that would have reminded me, but I didn't.

     So, in lieu of whatever important and interesting topic I'd planned to write about, I'll just say that I had intense dreams last night, two involving getting back at bullies and one that involved time-travel and virtual keyboards that enabled me and my time-displaced companions to fly.  It was, in a word, cool.

I Wanted Larry, but Got Moe Instead

   I have had so much in my head lately that I haven't been writing.  It's like my thoughts are all jammed up in the doorway, Three Stooges style, so nothing can get through.  In addition, most of what comes out in my mental ravings to myself are rants about politics, or teaching, or society in general, and I need to keep these thoughts from running rampant in a public forum.
   So I think I will choose a safer topic, like using technology in the classroom.  You see,  I went to another teaching conference a few days ago.  This one was heavy on the ways we need to integrate technology into our classrooms if we are going to truly prepare kids for what lies ahead.  We have this old model, see?  The model where schools have all the information and we parcel it out it workable chunks and kids learn it and while they're doing that they learn how they are learning so that eventually they can do it on their own.
     Only we got bogged down somewhere along the way with really good sounding words like accountability and quality which are Good Things, because we do them in the real world.  We quality test in the real world.  We take the product and we use it and stress it and try to make it break.  That's how we know if we have a good product.  If the product fails, we go back and redesign it and try again.  This is a fine way to treat a product.  It's not so fine a way to treat a child, though, and we keep forgetting that.
     We have also fallen victim to "The Streetlight Effect."  The Streetlight Effect is from an old joke, about a drunken man, on his hands and knees, searching around a lamp post at midnight.  A cop comes along and asks what he's doing.  The man replies, "I'm looking for my wallet, ossifer."  "Oh," replies the cop, "where did you drop it?'  The drunk waves a hand, indicating a dark part of the street a ways off.  "If you dropped it there," says the cop, "why are you looking here?"  "Because this is where the light is good!" exclaims the man.
     This is where we are in our desperate quest to improve schools by making teachers and students accountable.  We are testing and collecting endless reams of data to demonstrate our progress.  Facts and figures and anything that can be answered by fill-in-the-bubble tests.  The lamp light is strong and bright here because it's easy to see if someone has learned what year the Gettysburg Address was given.  The vast majority of these assessments test only a little bit of knowledge and comprehension.  But it's really, really difficult to assess the ability of students to apply knowledge to new situations, or to test analytical reasoning, or synthesis or the ability that students have to evaluate what they are learning.  All of these higher levels of learning are nearly impossible to accurately judge based on a standardized paper-pencil test.  So we don't do that.  We look only where the light is good.
    What we really want schools to do is prepare our children to become productive members of society, able to work, have stable, meaningful personal lives and contribute positively to the community.  We want to hold teachers accountable for doing that.  But we only know how to test for whether they've taught kids how to memorize facts and figures, and how to effectively take tests.  As long as we keep insisting that everyone play this meaningless game, then we are not going to create successful schools any more than the drunk is going to find his wallet by that lamp post.
    The really idiotic part is that good teachers CAN and DO assess for all of the truly meaningful learning!  We just can't parse it down into standardized bubble-test numbers.  And so much time is spent worrying about the test, teaching to the test, working towards that lowest-common-denominator that there is little time left for actual learning.  We've become so convinced that teachers can't do a good job that we don't give them time or support to do it.  The system is working against itself--the very quest to hold teachers accountable and make them better at their jobs is actually making them worse.  Which makes me wonder what the real goal of all this testing is in the first place.
    I wonder this even more when the results of all this testing, which doesn't really test what we want it to test, is going to be used then to evaluate teachers.  Something stinks pretty badly here, and I'm fairly certain it isn't the drunk guy.  To quote Mark Twain, "There's lies, damn lies, and statistics."  And all this questionable data is ripe for some very funny number crunching, cherry picking and even some downright lying.

Hm.

Well.

I seem to have gotten off-topic.  This post was supposed to be about wanting to seriously use technology in the classroom, and not just as novelties or toys.  Me wanting to write a grant for iPads in my room.  Instead, this rant on education.

This is what happens -- I finally start to write and the wrong Stooge gets through the door.

Ah, well.

There's always tomorrow.

I don't think there is a better term than futility, really.

     I started unpacking my school things into my new room today.  I'll actually be setting up two classrooms, which I've never had to do before.  I've been a traveling teacher, going to 4 or 5 different schools and carrying my "classroom" with me in my car, though.  If I was lucky, I had part of a bookshelf to store some essentials in each building.  In this case, I need two full rooms, all set up for 10 - 20 kids.  So it's a new experience.
     In a strange sort of way, I enjoy unpacking, and seeing what treasures lie in each box.  I did label the boxes, but often in cryptic "Random books!" sorts of labels, so it's less helpful than one might hope.  And despite all the labeling, I did not find the box with the scissors (handy for opening lots of well-taped boxes) until I had gotten to the bottom of the massive pile.
     This time the unpacking is laden with all sorts of mixed emotions.  I wasn't supposed to be doing this job this year, and while I'm happy to be doing it, I don't want to do it alone.  I've always had at least one team member with me, and now I don't.  Furthermore, as a teacher split between two buildings, and only teaching a small fraction of the students within each one, I won't truly be a team member of those buildings, either.  Through no fault of anyone there, I'm bound to be viewed as an outsider, and not really part of their staff.  It's just the way it is.  If I'm lucky, I'll see one of my gifted team mates once a month.  So I feel a bit adrift, and already missing my friends.  The other feeling is one of, for lack of a better term, futility.  This particular teaching position was saved by some last minute maneuvering of the district's administration, and they just revealed that gifted ed is on the chopping block again should the next levy fail.  A new levy is on the November ballot.  There is already a lot of negativity swirling about it, and I think it's going to be a rough sell.  So I hesitate to unpack for just a year.
     A lot of my "teacher books" are staying in their boxes entirely, and others are going into opened boxes, lids placed onto their bottoms, tipped onto their sides on the shelf.  I have access to them during the year, but when the time comes to move again, I need only put the lids back on top, and we're ready to go.
     A few days ago I went to a teachers' conference with a keynote speaker who was adamant about how school needs to be, and needs to change to teach effectively for this century.  So many of the things he talked about were things that we do with our gifted students in our non-traditional classroom.  I know that this is so good for my students, and I also know that there is a very, very good chance I will not be doing it next year.  I'll be prepping kids to answer bubble-in-the-answer questions on standardized tests.
     And it makes me sad.  And that's no way to start a year, so I'm trying to work myself out of it.  But I haven't quite gotten there yet.

things to be thankful for today

    I have about 3 weeks of vacation left, and a lot of my friends are bemoaning the end of summer, but I figure that 3 weeks, all together, is a luxury very few other Americans have.  So I will not gripe.  I will soak them up and be thankful.
     The vacation-y thing I did today was an excursion to a point midway between our house and my parents' house, to meet up with my mom and an Aunt I haven't seen in four years, but dearly love.  I was supposed to go up on Sunday, after a weekend helping run something called a regional gathering (food, games, speakers for about 100 people at a hotel.  Fun, but exhausting.)   I called off the trip.  I was just too wiped out to drive all the way to the Lake.  My mother suggested a meet-up someplace between here and there, and my Aunt, after driving a reeeally long way to get to Ohio, was gracious enough to drive some more to see us today.  We spent the day at an indoor pool which was not nearly large or exotic enough to merit the cost, but it was plenty big for my little ones.  Also not crowded at all.  And it was indoors where it was not 95 degrees and scorching.  So, good times.
    This Aunt is not one by blood--she married into the family -- and made a real effort when I was little to be special to me.  I can remember her taking me out to see "Annie," and another time to buy shoes--something that would have been an errand for my mother but became somehow a special outing with my Aunt.  She worked at it, and I appreciate and love her for it.   It makes me want to be a better Aunt to my own nieces, and try to do some special things for them, too.
    So, I'm grateful that there was something reasonably fun and entertaining to do with the kids halfway between here and the Lake, and I'm grateful that my Mom and Aunt were willing to make the trip, and that I have a pretty enjoyable family in general.  How many people can say that?