Food for Thought

Last Sunday, we saw the documentary Food, Inc. The movie examines America's industrialized food system and its impact on the environment, our health, the economy, workers' rights, and animal mistreatment. In our case, the producers were preaching to the choir; I can honestly say that there was nothing I didn't already know in the film, but I thought they did a great job providing an intro and overview to this important issue. We resolved to take our four nephews, aged 13-17 to see it also, not because we had any prescription for them to change their eating and food buying habits, but more because we wanted them to make informed choices as they become adults.

The boys were interested and a little bit horrified by what they saw (it's hard to come away from the movie without a little bit of shock and disgust: that's what they're shooting for), and each of them has brought it up again since seeing it, which is good-- it show's that they're thinking. Most notably, Treat posted to his blog about it, and Josh, who is staying with us, is full of questions about every meal we serve him. "Is this mayonnaise organic?" he asked yesterday. "Do you know where this chicken came from?"

Josh has spent 3-4 weeks with us every summer since he was 6. We don't have any children of our own, and his visit is our turn at parenting on a small scale. It's also his vacation, so we take him on a trip, sign him up for a camp or class, and plan a lot of fun stuff to do while he's here. One of our summer traditions is making every meal Josh-friendly. He can be kind of a picky eater, and that's not a battle we choose in the time we have with him, so this can involve a considerable change to our pantry and fridge-- chocolate milk, sugared cereals, frozen pizza, hot dogs, and instant mac and cheese all become staples for one month a year. (Don't worry-- he eats vegetables, too.)

This morning we went to the farmer's market, and Josh snacked on watermelon sorbet and browsed the stalls with great interest as we chose free-range pork chops, buffalo sausage, cherries, peaches, blueberries, cucumbers and summer squash. Looks like the summer menus might be changing a bit around here.

Been There

The other day I was talking with a friend about holiday plans, and she asked whether we were planning to attend the huge fireworks display downtown. "They're just not worth it to me," I complained. "It's so crowded and uncomfortable waiting, they last twenty minutes, and then when they're over you're stuck in traffic and it takes forever to get home. I don't think I'll ever go out of my way to see fireworks again."

Flash forward a few days. My best friend from high school flew in from Colorado today with her six-year-old daughter to visit her dad who lives here. When we were in boarding school in Switzerland, he was the commander of the US Air Force in Europe. He'd earned his fourth star shortly before I met him. These days he battles Alzheimer's. He looks good, but his short term memory is pretty shot. "I know what we should do," my friend told me on the phone a couple days before she arrived. "Let's take Dad to the fireworks!"

My friend and I are direct opposites in many ways. She is an extreme extrovert and I am... so not. Once when I was living at the beach, she came down to visit me for the weekend. She wanted to go out, but I was waiting tables and didn't get off until midnight. "I'll meet you at the club," I told her. This was way before cell phones, and it occurred to me later that it might not be so easy to find her. I shouldn't have worried. Starting with the bouncer and continuing until I found her, everyone I saw asked me if I were Tracey, because Karen was looking for me.

Tonight I packed a picnic supper, and we drove her dad to the Pentagon. Karen looked around for a police cruiser. She hopped out of the car and explained the situation, showing his ID, pointing out those four stars. It wasn't long before we had a prime parking spot and a space on the lawn right outside the river entrance. There were quite a few people there, but it wasn't crowded, and the light breeze and overcast sky combined to produce an unusually pleasant July evening. The Washington Monument stood tall in the East as children festooned with glow sticks chased each other around and about blankets and lawn chairs pausing only to ask their parents when the fireworks would ever start. We ate our dinner, and the general relaxed in his chair and waited for the show to begin, too.

At the first explosion, swallows darted over our heads, startled by the noise and light, and the concussion from each shell echoed back toward the river, bouncing off the wall of the Pentagon, even as the golden streamers and glittering colors were reflected in the windows there, too. Surrounded by light and dark and wind and roar, I was overcome by how wrong I had been.

A Well-deserved Holiday

Happy Independence Day weekend! I read today that Sylvia Brown, the famous psychic, says that Thomas Jefferson never reincarnated after his death on July 4, 1826. According to her, that was his last life, although he continues to offer spiritual and political guidance to the leadership of America. That came as a surprise to me.

Back when I was in college, I had a job one summer selling chipwiches on the boardwalk. The zoning laws in this particular beach town were kind of picky at the time, and even though my cart was quite mobile, I had to stay put on the private property of the hotel that my boss had made a deal with. Even so, the chipwich cart and the blond girl in the straw pith helmet who sat beside it eight hours a day became a reliable boardwalk amenity, and I had both steady beach-goer business and some regular customers, too.

This particular seaside town is also well-known to a certain segment of the population as the home of Edgar Cayce, the "Sleeping Prophet." There has been an active new-age community there for well over 50 years. It is such a fixture, that most year-round residents of the oceanfront are surprisingly well-versed in such topics as reincarnation, dream interpretation and holistic health. Be careful, or they will startle you.

My chipwich gig was a one-woman operation, and as much as I liked the solitude and independence, I was also a captive audience for anyone who knew where to find me. There were a few people who stopped by regularly, not so much to buy some ice cream, as to spend a little time chatting. That's how I found out that Thomas Jefferson had indeed reincarnated-- one of my regulars told me. "See that bum down there?" he asked me one afternoon. "Everyone calls him TJ, because he used to be Thomas Jefferson."

I'm sure my eyebrows did a little dance, but I was right there with him. "Really?" I said, examining the lean, strawberry blond man with shaggy, chin-length hair and full goatee, as he picked carefully through a mesh litter basket. "It seems like kind of a big change of scene for him."

"Oh, that's exactly what he wanted," he answered. "After all that democracy stuff in his last life, he needed a break."

Look Forward

Today is the midpoint of the year, the fulcrum of 2009. So, is the year half over, or is there half a year to go?

I spent part of this day with the sixth grade counselor and the team leader of the other sixth grade team. We had 200 placement cards, one for each student we expect next year. They had been filled out by twenty or so fifth grade teachers from eleven elementary schools and on them there was information about math and language arts placement, study habits and social skills, native language and special education needs. In addition, there is room on each card for the teacher to write a comment. Every year, it is these we enjoy most.

It was our task to divide them fairly into two even, heterogeneous teams, and so we spent the afternoon sorting and resorting by elementary school, achievement level, gender and race, keeping count and keeping tallies. This is an annual event, and when we make the teams, the cards are just cards to us; we don't know the kids, yet, so at times the process takes on the feeling of a game or a backroom draft, with questions like, "Do you want the boy who uses his intelligence for the wrong reasons or the one who can be disrespectful at times?" or "I have a couple of smart girls here, why don't you take one each?"

Eventually, the cards ended up in two piles, and the teams were pretty well set for next year. I can't wait to see how we did.

Never the Same Place Twice

I spent the afternoon at Mt. Vernon yesterday. I was looking for something fun to do on my birthday, and it occurred to me that it's been several years since I've been there without having to supervise a group of students. One of the candidates that we interviewed on Monday asked about field trips. The other sixth grade teacher on the committee and I looked at each other and frowned. Neither team had taken many field trips last year. There were a couple of main reasons why: cross-teaming and cross-grading for math made the logistics of any trip challenging; it was also the first year that sixth graders took the state standardized test in social studies, and there was general hesitancy on the part of teachers to trade class time for field trips.

The teacher we were interviewing looked surprised. "But, this area has so much!" she exclaimed. We nodded, and then my colleague explained that because that's true, by the time they get to sixth grade, many kids have already taken a lot of the trips we might plan for them. I shrugged in agreement, because I've heard that excuse a lot over the years when we talk about taking field trips. The truth is that, as with any other learning opportunity, field trips are only as valuable as the meaning that students take from them, but they have much more potential than most classroom experiences.

My nephew went with me to Mt. Vernon yesterday. As it turned out, the last time that he had been there was when he was in sixth grade, and the adult in charge of his group was... me. "Did we see the sixteen-sided barn?" I asked him. He didn't think so. "Whaaat!?" I said. "Are you sure?" He was pretty sure. "Well," I said, "you can't miss it this time." And off we headed in a light drizzle to the lower fields of the estate. Past the cow pasture, and right before the trail entered the woods, we found a patch of wild raspberries. The fruit was dark red and fell from the vine with no more than a nudge. Birds had already gotten some of the warm, sweet berries, but we picked what we could reach and ate them out of hand.

He liked the barn well enough, but much more interesting to me this time were the tiny pear tomatoes and red-skinned new potatoes almost ready in the kitchen garden at the slave cabin, and the mother duck with her three hatchlings on the bank of the Potomac. Back up the hill, we saw a little boy petting a young goat through the split rail fence, and I remembered a visit a few years back when a small group of students and I saw a lamb born here. We were just passing by the barnyard on our way to the mansion when out it dropped, wet and sticky, from the sheep to the frozen February ground. Astonished we stood rapt as the mother turned calmly around and nudged her newborn to a stand.

Next year, I want to take more field trips.

Help Wanted

A big chunk of of my day yesterday was spent in a conference room as part of a committee interviewing for a teaching vacancy on my team. There were several candidates, and I would have been happy to work with any of them, but obviously the whole idea was to pick the best one. With that in mind, we asked a series of questions about planning, assessment, differentiation, philosophy, discipline, technology, teaming, inter-disciplinary units, and what the students should take with them at the end of the course. After a while, it all ran together, and if you asked me to described the people we interviewed without referring to my notes, I might say:

energetic undisciplined creative inexperienced polished rambling well-versed uninspiring knowledgeable clueless thoughtful unprepared student-centered short intense-eye-contact tall young firm-handshake thirsty

All four of us on the committee were women, as were four of the six applicants for the job. Three of the people we spoke to were applying for their very first teaching job, two straight out of school, and one as a "career-switcher." The others had between 3-11 years of experience.

The interviews were informative, but the conversations we had in between were way more interesting. So often it seems that a person will have an advantage in teaching because he is male. This was true with at least one member of our interview team: "If we can get a qualified man, we should," she said. There was discussion about our professional responsibility to encourage and support new teachers, and the time it takes to do that. We talked about the programs that expedite certification for career-switchers and whether or not they properly prepare their participants for the classroom, and what made a new colleague a "project" versus somebody who might fit right in.

In the end, I think we made a sound choice, but only time will tell. I'm in no hurry to apply for a job, though, of that I am very certain.

Happy Birthday to Me

I spent my eighteenth birthday at Heathrow Airport. I was working as a counselor at a summer school outside of London, and it was my job that day to collect the students flying in from some forty different countries and direct them to the school van circling outside. We had names and flight numbers, of course, and there I was, that person holding that sign when you exit customs.

In between flights, I was on my own at the airport, which wasn't an unfamiliar place at all for an airline brat like me. I browsed the bookshops and kiosks, and made myself comfortable in hard orange plastic chairs nibbling chocolate and reading magazines. The weirdest thing about the day was that no one but me knew it was my birthday. I wasn't sure what to do with the information: I hadn't known anyone I was working with for longer than a couple of days, and it didn't seem like it was relevant, so as I wandered the airport shepherding nervous kids, every now and then I'd startle myself with the reminder that this day was my birthday-- I was 18. It was like wiggling a loose tooth-- I would forget all about it when I was occupied with something else, but once I remembered it, I couldn't leave it be. Alone, doing my job in the middle of thousands of strangers from all over the world, I wondered if this was what it was like to be an adult.

That night after all the new students were checked in with lights out, I sat in one of the other counselor's room playing cards and drinking warm ale that someone had fetched from the pub down the road and feeling pretty grown up having made it through my first solo bithday. There came a merry knock at the Tudor diamond glass window we had pushed open to the cool night air, and there was my mom and dad and brother and sister! They had re-routed their flight home from vacation in Portugal to stop overnight in London and surprise me. We spent a happy ninety minutes celebrating with my new colleagues-- "Why didn't you tell us it was your birthday?" they scolded me-- and then at midnight, my family left to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel before their flight, and I went off to bed, too, still feeling pretty grown up, but also really glad that I hadn't been alone on my birthday.