Like a Room without a Roof

Fantastic word today that Josh was accepted into the Corcoran School of Art with a pretty nice scholarship.

He and his parents will work out a separate financial aid package, but it looks like this prestigious, private school will probably end up being a better deal for his college education than the state school just down the road.

Everyone who cares about Josh is pretty tickled by the news; the congratulatory texts and emails and facebook posts have been flying all day.

I have to confess, though, that when I read his text this morning, it was definitely a bit of a paradigm shift:

accepted into the Corcoran with a $32k scholarship looks like im living with you guys!

But I quickly recovered and texted him back:

Yay! Congratulations!

Mm Mm Mm

It was impossible to recover my right-before-lunch class for the last ten minutes after one student made a very lewd gesture. Although I asked him to step out into the hall to discuss that particular choice, and despite the fact that they had a pretty engaging activity (if I do say so myself), all anyone wanted to talk about was what did he do!? and what did it mean!?

Some students tried to shrug it off and play it cool. "What?" said one boy. "There's nothing bad about that. It just means one girl likes another girl." Although I appreciated his open mind, I informed him that he was misinformed, and tried again to move on.

I was still a little grumpy a few minutes later when three of my female colleagues joined me for lunch, but at least I had a good story. We rolled our eyes and giggled as I told the entire tale, ending with that other student's remark. "I guess he was sort of on the right track," I shrugged.

"Hey now!" said one of the other teachers, "No need to be so limited! No need at all."

Oh my! My jaw dropped, and I can not remember the last time I blushed so hot and so red, but the four of us almost fell out of our chairs laughing.

Which is probably why we are middle school teachers.

Common

One of the first things I learned when I started teaching is that fair and equal are not synonyms. Perhaps Dr. Richard Curwin, co-author of Discipline with Dignity and contributor to EduTopia, can explain:

Students are not the same. They have different motivations for their choices, different needs, different causes for misbehavior and different goals.

No one would go to a doctor who treats all headaches the same, since the cause for one may be allergies and the other a tumor. Identical treatment for two students who don't do homework for different reasons -- one who has to help at the family business after school, and one who watches too much television -- is no different than that crazy doctor with the single cure for all headaches.

These days, though, there is a hard push toward standardization of everything school-related. Not only are teachers and administrators encouraged, or even required, to treat every student the same in regard to discipline and achievement, but we are also being herded into systems that require considerable homogenization of our teaching practice.

Today a presentation on the merits of common formative assessment was made to our staff by some of our colleagues as part of a school-wide book study. It was a well-intentioned overview of chapter 2, and one of the powerpoint slides offered a couple of definitions of the word "common."

One was, collective, communal, and the other was familiar, popular, general.

All very warm and fuzzy, but as an English teacher I know that's only part of the story. I was struck by the definitions they left out:

ordinary, average, unexceptional

not to mention

uncouth, vulgar, coarse, unrefined, unsophisticated

March Madness

Perhaps you've heard? Warren Buffet is offering a billion dollars to anyone who picks a perfect bracket for this year's NCAA tournament. (Don't worry-- those two 16th seed play-in spots are not included.) Even so, the odds, they say, are 1 in 128 billion.

If you are so inclined, you can do a little research to find out just how slim your chances are (the same as flipping heads 37 times in a row, for example), but I have another question. What would you do with a billion bucks? Or, if you take it in a lump sum, 500 million bucks, minus 39.6%? That seems practically unspendable to me, but perhaps my tastes are too simple?

I confess that I did enter the contest... fingers crossed I'll be able to answer that last question myself.

Anything is possible

until Thursday.

Popcorn

My dad was neither a good eater nor an accomplished cook, but he did have a few culinary specialties. On Saturday morning he would fry bacon and cut up oranges into eighths for us to eat while we watched cartoons. Later, when he took us grocery shopping for the week, store brand sodas were 10 for a dollar so each of us got to choose three and he picked the tenth. (It was always cream soda or root beer.)

We drank the sodas on nights when my mom was out at one of her meetings or another. Then, my dad would make popcorn on the stove and serve it with plenty of salt and butter in the biggest bowl we had. He set it in the middle of the three of us on the floor in front of the TV, and we would crunch and munch and wash it down with ice cold soda straight from the can. When the popcorn was gone, the unpopped kernels languished in a little puddle of butter and salt at the bottom of the bowl until it was wiped away one little fingerful at a time.

I took advantage of that one more unexpected snow day we had today to pop some corn over the fire. When it was done, I poured it in my big bowl, a twin to the one my dad used, and sat down on the floor in front of the fire to crunch and munch and enjoy the warmth, both of the fire and of the memory of those long ago evenings.

Silver Palate

Finding a table for a party of six at 7:30 on a Saturday night can be tricky in these parts. Most of the places we checked had at least a 90 minute wait, but then for some reason I recalled a review I had read a few years back about a Burmese restaurant in the area. The description of the menu, 200+ dishes that would take you on a gastronomic tour of Myanmar, had stuck with me, and I'd been meaning to try it for some time.

When I called, I could hear the clamor and clank of a busy Saturday service over the phone, but they told me that they could probably seat us in 30 minutes, so off we went. A few minutes later we found ourselves in front of a storefront in a strip mall. The sign either didn't work, or was turned off, but we pushed in through the standard plate glass door and waited for a six top to open.

I'm lucky to live in such a diverse area with so many ethnic restaurants to choose from. As kind of a foody, though, it's been a while since I have experienced anything completely unfamiliar as far as cuisine is concerned. That all changed when I took a look at the menu as I waited.

Myanmar is bordered by Thailand and Malaysia to the south, Laos and China to the East, and India and Bangladesh to the North. Consider, for a moment, the intersection of all those cuisines. Can't do it? Neither could I. Add to that my lack of experience with anything Burmese (except the python and Aung San Suu Kyi) and you might have an idea of how clueless I felt approaching the menu.

The six of us blundered through, though, and we had food that ranged from the sublime to something my brother politely spit into his napkin. It was both interesting and frustrating, and on the way home, Heidi asked me if I'd ever eat there again. "No way!" I told her and went on to explain my disappointment.

Later, though, I took a second look at the review I'd read so long ago. They had said that some dishes were uneven, and they had also provided a primer for the inexperienced. Two of the dishes we liked, ginger salad and chicken coconut soup, were on that list, but there were several others that we had not tried.

Oh all right! I'll go back.

What kind of a foodie would I be anyway to dismiss an entire cuisine after one try?

The Spice of Life

I can honestly say that I don't mind 60 degree weather one day and a possible snowstorm the next.

Bring it!