matching tracksuits

fun in threes, sometimes fours

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

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"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.

She’s Growing On Us!

Wednesday 12 March 2014

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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.

Defending Babcia

Monday 10 March 2014

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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 09 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 08 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.