Matching Tracksuits

Month: March 2014

Spring Saturday

Saturday 15 March 2014

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About the only time I was indoors all day was for this shot, taken as I was finishing up my coffee and heading out to

  • finish the backyard leaf clean up, including
    • the mulching of multiple wheelbarrow-loads of leaves;
    • the hauling of countless loads of branches and twigs to the roadside; and,
    • the removal sand from the backyard deposited by last spring’s flood;
  • prepare the raspberry patch including
    • the removing of leaves and debris; and
    • the depositing of a twelve-inch layer of mulched leaves (see above) on the raspberry patch;
  • clean the front flower bed, including
    • the removing of numerous leaves; and,
    • the cutting back of last year’s jasmine;
  • apply various concoctions to the yard including
    • the applying fertilizer to isolated patches of the yard I missed two weeks ago; and,
    • the applying preemergent weed killer to the rest of the lawn;
  • sow grass seed in the entire backyard;
  • remove countless Sweet Gum seed balls from the front yard;
  • spray insecticide around the outer edges of the house;
  • and finally, fall into a heap to watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with my equally exhausted K, who
    • cleaned the house;
    • cared for the kids;
    • went shopping;
    • planted strawberries; and
    • prepared supper.

In short, a perfect spring Saturday.

 

Influence

Friday 14 March 2014

A hotel manager in Davos, Switzerland might be able to arrange a fine martini, a cab, or even some adult entertainment for you. He might speak four or more languages. He might be charming. But he’s not one you would likely put much stock in when it comes to questions of beginnings, metaphysical questions of origins and destinations. He’s not one you would expect to come up with earth-shattering theories about where humanity came from, about who might be listening in our most private thoughts, about who might be ultimately controlling more than we could imagine.

If a hotel manager form Davos, Switzerland proposed a theory that rewrites all history — religious, economic, political — you might suggest he put the drinks on your room tab and head upstairs to sleep it off. Especially if he suggests that the gods of all religion, ancient and modern, are aliens. That there’s proof in artifacts from around the world. That the evidence is painfully obvious.

Erich von Däniken is famous for his crackpot theories about extraterrestrial visitors’ influence on human culture and history. Thoroughly discredited, admittedly a fiction writer, Däniken’s books have still reached a wide audience.

Including my students.

In preparing for the PASS test, students have been planning and writing practice tests for the last several days. I give open-ended prompts and then we discuss, in one-on-one conferences, what went well and what could be improved. The other day, I put the following prompt on the board.

Many people influence us. Sometimes they introduce us to a new interest or hobby, or sometimes they affect our views on things. Write about someone who has had a significant influence on you.

And then I read a quirky eight-grader’s thesis: “Erich von Däniken has influence my view of history.”

I try to stay away from taking definitive stands about politics, religion, economics, or much of anything else in the classroom. I teach reading and writing — nothing else. But this, this I couldn’t resist.

“Have you read any critical analyses of von Däniken’s work?” I asked him. I suggested a few of the flaws in the theory, then encouraged him to read some critics’ view of von Däniken’s theories. Ideas like Carl Sagan’s:

That writing as careless as von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken.

Tolerance and acceptance of students’ views — that’s one thing. A student taking seriously ideas from an exposed fraud — quite another.

Teaching to the Test

Thursday 13 March 2014

1-Fullscreen capture 3132014 101053 PM“I’m so sick of the PASS test,” I said to our eighth grade administrator, “and we haven’t even taken it yet.” The test — technically now called the SCPASS, which stands for “South Carolina Palmetto Assessment of State Standards because just “PASS,” as it was called for years, infringed on some copyright or other — is the state assessment for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) compliance. It’s a silly hoop students have to jump through in an effort to provide data about effective teaching, effective schools, and effective students. In theory, anyway. It consists of math, reading, writing, science, and social studies assessments, and the first portion, the writing assessment, rolls around this coming Tuesday.

Regarding standardized tests, we teachers are always told we shouldn’t be “teaching to the test.” I’m not quite sure what this means, though, because it seems that, given the fact that we have state standards from which we form our curricula and from which test makers derive the tests, any time of standards-based teaching is, to some degree or another, teaching to the test.

This is even more confusing when I consider myself as not just a reading teacher but a writing teacher as well. We teach kids that they should always taken into account their audience and purpose when writing, and so it seems to me we should be doing the same for this test. The purpose is simple: to pass at the very least, with a score of “Exemplary” as students’ ultimate goal. The audience, too, is straightforward: the only people who will read these particular essays are the exam graders. Therefore, as a teacher, I should help students figure out how to write for this purpose to this audience. “It’s jumping through hoops,” I tell them, “not real writing. You’re just trying to show them that you can do all the things on this rubric.”

So we’ve spent the better part of this week and last putting together a plan to write for this purpose to this audience. And I do so in full knowledge that this is not an accurate assessment of authentic writing; it’s an assessment of prescribed writing. Still, except for bloggers, professional writers, and diarists, almost everyone in the “real world” writes primarily prescribed writing: reports, minutes, emails, summaries, proposals, invoices, and the like, so maybe it’s an accurate assessment.

Nah — it’s just hoops.

Settling In

Tuesday 11 March 2014

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The skittishness is subsiding, and even E’s squealing can go unnoticed. She sleeps in the middle of the floor sometimes, and she’s seeking out company rather than desperately searching for a hiding place. The Girl is learning the old maxim, “If you love someone, set her free,” and Elsa is beginning to come back, showing it was meant to be.

In short, she seems to be happy to be part of our family.

Master of Kittens

Monday 10 March 2014

L says, “Daddy, you’re the master of playing with kittens. Elsa just adores you! When you play with her, it’s a joy to watch, even.”

Kuchnia Góralska

Sunday 9 March 2014

“Do you think she could make us kwaśnica before she leaves?” P once asked K some weeks ago.

“Of course!” And what’s not to love about kwaśnica, the tangy Highlander regional soup made of sauerkraut, stock, and magic.

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Kwaśnica

I fell in love with this soup the first time I tried it. It’s a little like any regional dish: every family makes it a little differently, and every family serves it a little differently. Babcia always served it with a heaping spoon of mashed potatoes pressed into the side of the bowl, liberally sprinkled with freshly fried bacon bits. The strands of kraut are crisp and sour; the bacon is smoky and crisp; the soup is bracing and warm; a bit of pork pulled from the sliced tenderloin that’s been boiling in the soup grounds everything; the potatoes keep it all together. It’s perfection in a every single spoonful.

And so P and his wife and two sons came over for dinner this afternoon, a long, warm afternoon promising spring but with bare trees as reminders of the actual date. Still winter, technically, but only a perfect day for kwaśnica in as much as friends have gathered together. A perfect day, perfect in every measure for kwaśnica, includes copious amounts of snow, gray skies, and below-freezing temperatures with a sun that sets just as a four-o’clock dinner is put on the table. Still, friendship is more important than snow, and besides, we have more than kwaśnica on the menu — a bit of a surprise. A meaty, meaty surprise.

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Chleb ze smalcem

The translation for chleb ze smalcem hardly does it justice. After all, who would find lard spread on bread all that appetizing? But as always, a literal translation makes a farce of the actual meaning of the original. Chleb ze smalcem is a little touch of meat-lovers’ heaven, another regional favorite from the mountains of southern Poland that calls for snow and reminds us once again how often “simple” is synonymous with “perfect” when it comes to food. The recipe only hints at the alchemistic perfection of the finished product:

  • finely sliced bacon fried, with the drippings remaining
  • sauteed onion
  • sauteed apple

Take those three simple ingredients, mix them together with the drippings (preferably in something small and ceramic), and then set it in a cool place to let the drippings solidify a bit. Smear on fresh bread — real bread that’s solid with chewy, thick crust — and then prepare yourself, because the number of neurons that will be firing that first bite will overwhelm.

It’s a dinner that I’d ask for if I were on death row…

Elsa

Saturday 8 March 2014

“Mr. S, do you like cats?” students ask.

“No, not really,” I reply pausing before continuing my usual silly joke whenever someone asks me about my preferred pet. “They’re much to difficult to cook right, and they always end up too chewy for my preferences.”

“Oh, Mr. S! That’s horrible!” they respond on cue.

And I suppose it is horrible, but the truth is, I really have no preferences either way about animals, other than the fact that I’d prefer not own one at all. Still, it’s good for the kids, and if push comes to shove, I prefer cats: much more independent, much lower maintenance.

Our poor cat, though, is so old that she’s virtually toothless and prefers sleeping to anything else — more so than the average cat, that is. Try as she may, L can’t get our poor cat Bida (which literally means “poor little thing” in Polish — she was a rescue cat, and that was the only thing K could say about the poor cat) to play with her, and as she ages, Bida just wants to spend all her time in her little basement lair. So L has been pestering us for the last year or so for a kitten, a cat that she can raise from playful kitten to hopefully playful adult.

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Today, she got her wish, and we welcomed Elsa (L provided the name from her current favorite film, Frozen) to our family. She mostly trembles and meows now. “Imagine that same thing happened to you,” we explain to a confused little girl. “She’s been taken from her mother, and she’s around strangers in a strange house. She’s absolutely terrified, so you just have to give her time.”

Tonight, when it was bed time, we put Elsa in her little bed we’ve put in her temporary abode in the cleaned out floor of L’s closet, and then we kissed our little girl goodnight and waited. Sure enough, in a few minutes L appeared at the top of the stairs. “I can’t sleep. She just keeps crying.” In the end, L made a small bed on the floor and had Elsa come over and sleep with her because she just couldn’t handle Elsa’s sad crying.

Instant bond, and reassurance for us: she’ll be a good cat servant indeed.

 

Professional and Parental Thoughts on the Common Core

Saturday 8 March 2014

Conservatives around the country are expressing dismay at the implementation of the Common Core Standards, a set of educational standards that forty-five states have adopted. Some of the concerns are philosophical-political worries about excessive Federal control, about the perception that the Federal government is taking control of something that should be in the hands of the states. Ironically, one of the ideas conservatives have been pushing for years was a major impetus the adoption of the Common Core Standards (CCS). Conservatives have long wanted performance-based testing as a measure of teacher and school success, and many would love to implement merit-based pay. The logic is simple: the better you teach, the better your students’ test scores should be. There are a whole host of problems with this approach, but I’m not delving into those right now, tempting though it may be. Instead, look at the problem state standards have when used for measuring teacher success:

  • States have different standards. That means we’re trying to look at for the same “success” markers through a whole variety of different metrics.
  • States have different tests. South Carolina, for instance, is known for having a more difficult test than neighboring states. This means that according to these tests, South Carolina schools are doing worse than its neighbors when in reality it’s just a question of test bias.

The CCS implementation is an attempt to use a uniform measure for all states, simple as that.

More specifically, though, many conservatives have a problem with how they perceive some of the methodologies that the Common Core Standards encourage teachers to implement. For example, the CCS pushes teachers to get students to perform close readings of texts. Wikipedia gives as good a definition of close reading as I’ve ever found:

The careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the single particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.

In other words, students are learning how to pick apart texts word by word, to wrestle with the text on an almost molecular level. The problem? The model lesson included for teaching the Gettysburg Address encouraged teachers to avoid giving much background information.

“How can you teach the Gettysburg Address without background information?!” conservative commentators cried.

“What kind of education is this!?” conservative bloggers moaned.

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Doing math homework

Yet such an assignment is intended to get students to read to understand for themselves. Historically, teachers have been guilty of giving too much background information, and students can rely on this instead of the text itself. Taking some — and note that by no means did the model lesson say no context should be provided — of that away forces all students to look to the text itself for understanding, not what the teacher provided before reading.

When we turn to math, the situation is similar. Conservative critics bemoan the fact that elementary level math uses terms like “number sentences” and encourages “guess and check.” They eagerly post photos of their children in tears from the difficulty of the homework.

L, of course, is encountering CCS math now, so we’re getting a first-hand view of the supposed horrors, and I have to say so far, I’m impressed. Far from being convoluted and confusing, it seems to me that CCS math concepts teach a fluent understanding of basic mathematical concepts rather than rote memorization of math facts.

One problem that L recently encountered had the following instructions:

Choose three numbers to make related math facts. Choose numbers between 0 and 18. Write your numbers. Write your related facts.

“Math facts” is CCS-speak for equation, but it goes beyond that: it teaches students to see the relationships between the three numbers as a matrix of facts rather than a bunch of randomly memorized equations.

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The problem under discussion

It gets them thinking that if 6 + 11 = 17, then similarly 11 + 6 = 17. It teaches them that they can reverse the numbers and change a sign for another group of facts: 17 – 6 = 11 and 17 – 11 = 6. By drilling students in this kind of thinking, CCS-based math seems to encourage students to think of clumps of math facts and see them as interrelated.

As to the vocabulary, using “number sentence” or “math facts” as opposed to “equation” seems to be merely semantic. They’re all valid descriptors of the same thing.

Here is a recent example of uninformed criticism of “guess and check.”

L has yet to start “guess and check,” but I can already guess about the thinking behind that: it’s an effort to teach children from an early age how to estimate, something that I find with my own students is a skill that is sorely lacking. Granted, I don’t teach math, but I use math in the classroom from time to time. For instance, as we’re nearing the end of the third quarter, we begin informing parents and students who might fail that repeating the eighth grade is an impending danger. To help students who might be facing such a situation calculate how much they need to improve for the fourth quarter, I present them with the following scenario:

In order to pass, you must have an average of 70 for the year, which would also work out to an average of 70 for each quarter. Therefore, you can add those four quarters up to determine how many points you need to pass: 280. Take your first semester grade, multiply it by two, add your third quarter grade, and subtract all that from 280. You’ll come up with your necessary fourth quarter grade.

They look at me like I’m speaking Greek, so we break it down. 280 – (first semester grade * 2 + third quarter grade) – what you need to pass. Then we plug in some hypothetical numbers: 280 – (68 * 2 + 63) =  x. “So what’s 68 times 2?” I ask. Blank looks. No one has ever taught them the multiple ways you could estimate this in your head. Indeed, not even estimate: it’s easily calculated. 60 * 2 + 8 * 2, or 120 + 16, or 136. You could also do it with 70 * 2 and then subtract. Either way, you end up with the answer in a matter of moments. Or you just estimate with 70 * 2. Yet for so many students, this is completely foreign thinking. (In the above example, in case you’re curious and not inclined to finish the calculation, the hypothetical student would have to score an 81 for the fourth quarter to pass.)

Common Core math, it seems, is trying to teach students these skills from an early age by getting them to do it all the time. It’s not meant to be a replacement for actually working the problem. Indeed, it’s called “guess and check,” not just “guess.”

For me, as a right-leaning moderate, I find it embarrassing that so many who share some of my other political views can be so very ridiculously uninformed and, quite frankly, can show such a frightening lack of critical thinking. Maybe it would be a good idea for these critics to add “and check” to their own guessing.

Aldi Quarter

Friday 7 March 2014

“Daddy, can I have my quarter back?”

“Just a second,” I say, reaching into my pocket as I come to the stoplight. To find my pocket is empty. The irony brings a smile: “Honey, I think I left it in the buggy.”

Aldi saves money in many ways, but one method is based on the simple principle that we like physical things, that the slightest bit of actual money has more value than the minute or two we might save in leaving a shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. The theory was, I’m assuming, that if people have to put down a monetary deposit, they’ll want it back, no matter how insignificant. And so we all dutifully roll our carts back to the long outdoor line of carts, snap the metal tab back into place, and retrieve our quarter. (Actually, since we leave our cart at the checkout for the next customer, it’s the quarter belonging to the guy who beat us to the checkout lane.) In doing so, we save work for the employees, because no one has to go out and round up all the carts, thus reducing overhead, which leads, in part, to Aldi’s famously low prices.

Why do we return the shopping carts? After all, it’s just a quarter, and we could easily just tack that on as a shopping expense like gas. But we don’t. Not a single one of us: I’ve never seen a single buggy left in the parking lot at Aldi. Not one. Yet in the parking lots of grocery stores that have buggy corrals and regularly send out young employees to rustle them up, we see shopping carts left here, there, everywhere. Customers must feel that, since someone is already coming out to release the carts from their little prisons that they could just as easily walk a few more steps and pick up the buggy left a few yards away. It’s rare that you see a good Samaritan pushing back someone else’s cart, but therein lies the beauty of the Aldi system: it relies not on motivating customers to return their own carts but in motivating other customers to round up abandoned carts, because, hey, free quarter. So the rest of us must internalize that thought and tack on a little sense of competition: “Someone’s going to get that quarter — it might as well be me.”

At least that’s my idea. Any others?

Photo by JeepersMedia

Refill

Tuesday 4 March 2014

The Boy has learned how dispense water from the refrigerator. He makes a circuit of it: fill up a glass, take a drink, toddle over to the sink, pour out the remainder. Repeat.

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Sorting

Monday 3 March 2014

Evening play with the Boy: we put the cards out on the steps, one at a time, sorting. We place Emily on Emily, Thomas on Thomas, and it’s all going quite well for the first few cards. E takes a card, looks at it, and places it on the right stack. Soon there are three stacks, and the accuracy decreases. Soon, with five, six stacks, he loses interest in place them on the right stack and simply begins tossing cards on the stairs.

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Later, as L is working on her homework, the Boy begins rifling through a pack of bandages. One variety: no sorting, but still there’s the question of manipulation, of getting them all in a stack, all in a row, so to speak.

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It’s captivating to watch, whether cards or Band-Aids, because we never really know what he’s trying to do, and I’m not sure he does, either. Patterns emerge that seem to be purposeful then disappear into new chaos.

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Home Again

Sunday 2 March 2014

When I was a kid, my father went on business trips once or twice a year — South Africa, England, and various states in the US. For me, it was a highlight, because we often got to take him to the airport. Watching planes take off and land from the observation deck was sheer heaven for a small boy. Of course the real highlight came on his return, for he always brought something back for us from wherever he sent. It was a bit like Santa in September.

An acquaintance at church mentioned at the post-Christmas-concert pot-luck that in 2013, he’d been in something like fifty countries on business. That’s a lot of time in a plane, a lot of time away from one’s family, a lot of nights in hotels. I both envy him and pity him. Seeing that much of the world would certainly be a blessing, and it would certainly help one appreciate what’s here in the States and likely produce a sense of the possibilities based on what’s in other countries. Travel changes the traveler forever. Still, so much time away from home, from family, makes it a bad trade.

As a teacher, I don’t get many opportunities to go on business trips. Conferences are about the extent of it. So when I do go for a conference somewhere, I realize anew how much of an aggravation ten countries a year — let alone fifty countries a year — would be. But I also smile at the thought of seeing L’s smile when I say, “Come here, sweetie, I brought something back for you.”

Hurt

Saturday 1 March 2014

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Reznor

I’ve never been a fan of Trent Reznor’s band Nine Inch Nails. Industrial just doesn’t really get it for me, and their seeming sense of self-importance was always a turn-off. Their song “Hurt” seems to me a perfect example of this. A whinny voice that belies the lyrics: any pain this guy’s felt is first-world pain, that strange phenomenon that often manifests itself in teens as cutting. Of course, a close listening shows that it’s about heroin addiction.

Still — first world issues with that voice.

Then I heard that Johnny Cash had done a version.

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The Man in Black

Nothing new or all that surprising: Cash has covered bands as non-country as Danzig and Soundgarden. He’s musically adventurous. But it was more than the novelty of it that excited me as I began listening: it was his voice, that deep bass-baritone that, unlike Reznor’s nasally voice, didn’t belie the text.

“He’s a man who’s felt pain, and whose voice won’t sound like a whinny kid.”

The real musical test of a song, though, is to remove the vocals, to strip it down to the the music alone. If it stands that way, it’s a good song. Enter: 2cellos.