It's What I Do

First day back from break and our weekly Tolerance Club meeting was on the calendar scheduled for 2:30. We sponsors had come up with a vague plan a few weeks ago ending with, let's meet before break to finalize the details. Well, that didn't happen, and since the club meets in my room, I often feel singly responsible for the hour.

Mondays are both easy and hard for me-- the routine of my class dictates reading log checking and word study quizzes (easy), but then there's the grading, recording, planning for the next day, and team meeting, which theoretically all happen between 1 and 2:30 (hard). Then there's Tolerance Club from 2:30-3:30.

Our tentative plan had been to show a clip from the documentary Girl Rising, which we had all seen in the theater last spring. The film tells the story of nine girls from developing nations all over the world and their struggle for agency in their mostly patriarchal societies. Each segment is written by an author from that region and narrated by a famous actress. It is a powerful movie with the thesis that educating girls will not only empower those individuals but also accelerate the economies of their families, communities, and nations.

So, we had the movie.

At 1 o'clock, I researched educational materials and found an outline for teachers and students. Using the questions on their worksheet, I designed a pre-view activity for small groups, found information on Nepal, and planned a one-on-one discussion for after the clip. I prepared all the materials and set up the movie, sign-in sheet, and snack. At 1:30 I went to my meeting.

The activity? It was a success. Everyone was engaged and seemed to really enjoy the discussion. One student, new to our club, told us how cool the experience had been. My fellow sponsors were also very complimentary. I appreciated their appreciation and thanked them, but finally I had to just shrug and remind them, "I do this for a living you know."

Good to Go

I'm more resigned than sad that spring break is virtually over. I had a nice week, and although my to-do list is always impossibly long (still that optimistic!), I feel like I accomplished quite a bit.

I'm ready for the last leg of this school year. I'm also ready to put my garden in, ready to celebrate my nephew's college graduation, ready for his brother's return from his freshman year away, and ready for our god son's graduation from high school. Look at all that potential!

And when summer comes? I'll be ready for that, too.

Inspector Gadget

It's Bill's birthday dinner!

So of course I had to use...
the Vitamix,
the juicer,
the Cuisinart,
the ice cream maker,
and the pizza oven for my grill.

Also,
the pastry bag,
the mandolin,
and the kitchen twine,
were very handy.

Not to mention all the
overnight soaking
and marinating,
and the toasting
and braising
I did.

I hope he likes it!

Greenhouse Effect

Sixty-nine little vegetable plants in pots under plastic bins take up our whole dining room table. But they're my babies, started from seeds. Where else can they go? Soon the air will be warm enough to place them outside on the deck, and in a week or so, the soil will be warm enough to transplant them into the garden, but for now? It's breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the living room so that later, in July, August, and September our table will be laden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash of many varieties, and perhaps even...

a pumpkin.

Oh Didi

Moving to Saudi Arabia when I was 13, my brother 11, and my sister 9, could have been one hell of a culture shock, except that it wasn't. Who knows why we were able to roll with what, to us, were the oddities of not just one, but several strange new cultures.

The oil booming Saudi Arabia of the late 70s was a crossroads of opportunity. Our dad was a white collar airline professional, and there were a few other Americans like him, but many of our fellow US citizens were oil hands and rough necks from Texas and Oklahoma. In addition, there were business men from all over Europe, and then there were the men from Pakistan, Yemen, Korea, and the Philippines who did much of the unskilled labor-- building roads, waiting tables, cleaning houses, driving taxis.

We went to an International School and so naturally our classmates reflected the same diversity. To say that it was different from our neighborhood school in the suburbs of South Jersey would be a truism, but the difference didn't seem any worse to me than moving anywhere far away from my friends. So what if some of the people spoke with funny accents?

To be honest? We used to mimic the ones that sounded funniest to us-- everyone from the Pakistani guard at the gate to the little girl from Kansas City was fair game for us. So it shouldn't have come as any surprise to me when one day my brother and sister starting chanting "Ohhhhh Didi!"  at me in a sing-songy exaggeration of an Indian accent. Still, I didn't know what they meant, and after a while it became a little maddening. With tears in my eyes, I begged them to stop.

They did, but they also laughed when they explained that "Didi" was an Indian term of respect for an older sister or cousin that they had learned from a girl at school. It's a "compliment" that they still pay me every now and then to this day, mostly because of my memorable over-reaction. Still, I giggled a little when I read what one of my students posted for her slice of life challenge today:

In India we call our big cousins didi and bhaiya. Didi is for girl and bhaiya is for boy. We say this to give respect to elders.

That's right, I thought, and posted it directly to my sister's Fb time line. She liked it, but it was my cousin Elaine who closed the loop:

Hello this is didi she wrote.

CGI Candy

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that there were many whole rooms of mysteries contained within the walls of our house. I always wished that I could find the way in to explore those magical places. Of course, as I grew older, I understood the spatial reality that made such a fantasy impossible.

Not so the producers of Captain America: Winter Soldier. We saw the inaugural movie of the Summer of '14 today, and it did not disappoint. In addition to an excellent part for Scarlet Johansson's Black Widow, there were all sorts of secrets from the past and present revealed. Plus, Chris Evans? Cobie Smulders? Anthony Mackie? And even Robert Redford? Pretty easy on the eyes.

I confess, though, that my favorite character was probably S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters, the Triskellion.

Most of the movie took place in Washington, D.C. and a lot of it was in that fictional building located, by the looks of it, between Rosslyn and Arlington Cemetery, maybe right on top of Roosevelt Island. At least 21 stories tall with its own private bridge into the district, I couldn't take my eyes off of that imaginary place, even before they revealed an hangar big enough to house three helicarriers and all their fighter planes under the Potomac.

Now that's a secret hiding place.

Still Half Full

Q: What do you call a rainy day during your vacation?

A: Vacation!

Also, a chance to pot all those seedlings I started and to run errands in a nearly deserted Target. Sure, the HVAC news was bad, and I do believe that is sleet I hear tapping against the window panes, but friends? The alarm is not set for tomorrow.

I'll take it.