The Trouble in Troubleshooting

I'm afraid I'm going to have re-think my future career as a remote technical assistant. One of my homeroom students has been having a lot of trouble with his iPad, and screen sharing on the conference call was one of the problems, which made it even more difficult to help him. After a little research yesterday, I was ready to solve that complication today with hope that we could fix the rest of his issues, too. 

Unfortunately, once he shared his screen, he lost his audio feed so that we could hear him, but he couldn't hear us. Let's just say there was a lot of heavy breathing and silly, sing-songy self-talk as he swiped and tapped and peered closely at the camera. I finally got his attention in the chat by holding up hand-written signs in the hopes that he would catch a glimpse of them when he cycled back around to the call. 

What followed was even more of a comedy of errors, as he squinted at my notes on the screen and in the chat, struggling to decode my handwriting and comprehend my suggestions, and I furiously googled what the problem could be and scribbled and typed some more. 

"Nope, nope, nope," he sang. "Hah? What! Nope."

At last I gave up and showed him the number of the help desk and told him to go to lunch. "When do they want me to call them?" he SHOUTED, because he couldn't hear me, so...

Right away! I advised him.

He gave me the thumbs up and left the call.

I wonder if he had his iPad on mute? I thought, as I ended the meeting myself, but it was too late to find out.

Finding Options

 Today was another day remotely resolving technical issues for my students as they took a beginning of the year pre-assessment. It was kind of exhausting, but I'm getting pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. In fact, depending on the election results, I might just move to another country and look for work in a call center trouble shooting tech for people back here in the States.

I'm only half kidding, because it occurs to me, the closer the election gets, that the one thing I really can do is to find a way to make peace with the results if things don't go the way I hope. As overly dramatic as it sounds, I have to be emotionally prepared and know what I am going to do in that situation.

So that's one idea.

Big Brother

 Finding a writing topic is a real challenge for some kids, but simply saying, "I don't have anything to write about" is also a common strategy that other kids use to avoid writing. Fortunately, it's usually easy to separate the two groups by engaging in conversation. 

Most kids with writer's block will open up after a few questions about their pets, their hobbies, their injuries, their victories, and find a story to tell about themselves. It's the kids who don't like any games or sports and don't know what they do in their spare time or don't really like or hate anything who are harder to help. The wrong approach will make them dig their heels in just to prove to you that they

really.

have.

nothing.

to.

say.

In the classroom, it's tough to crack their resistance, and I wasn't sure how I would approach it with distance learning. Today? I found out. I was using that good old workshop tool, the status of the class, checking in with every writer to see how they were progressing. As I asked about their writing topics, I was hoping that hearing from other students would help those kids who were struggling to find an idea.

Then I ran into J.

Oh my gosh! He was committed to having absolutely nothing to write about. He hated soccer, but couldn't tell you why. He won a participation award once, but couldn't tell you when or why. He had no pets, did nothing in his spare time, never watched TV, and never went on vacation. He just ate food because he needed it to stay alive. 

"Well is there any food you hate?" I asked him.

"Pineapple and onions," he answered, "because they're nasty."

"No one hates pineapple," I said. "Are you sure you still hate it?"

"Yeah," he nodded, "I had it last night on my pizza."

"Why did you eat it if you hate it?" I asked.

"My brother shoved it in my mouth and made me," he said.

"That sounds like a story to me," I noted, hopefully.

"Not really," he said.

I looked at his name on my roster, and something rang a bell. "Did your brother go to our school?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"Oh my gosh! I taught him 5 years ago! Is he there right now?" I asked.

"He's across the hall," he shrugged.

"Go tell him I said Hi, and ask him what you should write about!" I directed him.

For the first time in our conversation, he looked engaged. He left the frame and then came back a few minutes later.

"He said, and I quote, Write about how dumb you are!" he reported in a perfect deadpan.

I burst out laughing, and he laughed, too.

"Well," I told him, "I guess you can write about how mean big brothers are."

"Yes," he said, "yes I can."

Two Wrongs: Still Not Making a Right

I just got my new passport in the mail, and sadly, right now it won't really provide entry to very many other countries. Of the 195 nations in the world, only 29 admit US citizens these days, and several of those require a two-week quarantine. All of the others are either on the State Department's Level 3, Reconsider Travel, or Level 4, Do Not Travel lists.

I guess it's a good thing that I'm working 10 hours a day to make online school work-- I'd be too busy to travel, anyway.

Late to the Posole

 At first I considered my corn crop this year a bit of a fail. The sweet corn was misshapen, tiny kernels on short and too slender ears. I planted three varieties, all in three sisters mounds with beans and squash (which may be another blog post, or two, themselves.) Of the three, perhaps the most successful was the blue variety, a fiels corn meant to be dried and ground. 

I probably got 5 good ears of blue corn, and the good thing about was that it could either stay on the stalk and dry or dry in my kitchen, either way was fine, depending on humidity and critters. A month or so ago, I took 30 minutes to remove the dried kernels from their ears, resulting in perhaps half a pound of blue corn. What to do next was a puzzle, but not a pressing one, since the dried corn would last indefinitely. 

A week or so ago, it occurred to me that a pot of posole would be nice, and I wondered if any corn could become hominy. Turns out, it can, all it takes is nixtamalization, an ancient process where kernels are boiled with lime (not the fruit, but the calcium salt), to soften them and release more of their nutritional value. 

A few clicks of the mouse, and some food grade CaOH was headed my way, although my research indicated that most Latin markets would stock it as well. Yesterday I weighed and boiled my ingredients, and this morning I rinsed and finished the corn in the pressure cooker, and when it was done, miraculously, I had several cups of plump blue hominy.

Who knew!?

Um, just centuries of indigenous cooks. 

And now, me, too.

The Wardrobe Report

September weather is a crapshoot around here, with temperatures bouncing from the 60s to the 80s on any given day. 

It was in the low 60s this morning when I dressed to take the dog out before breakfast. As the two of us jogged down the parking lot in the cool morning air, a neighbor rolled to a stop and waved. "Shorts and long sleeves!" she noted, appraising my outfit. "The season has definitely changed!"

I shrugged and laughed. It was true that I had been wearing tank tops not too many days before.

"But you do have the sleeves pushed up," she noted. "I guess it's supposed to get warmer later, right?'

A Confederacy of Dunces

Like most Americans who were alive on the day, I'll never forget September 11. 2001. I have relived and recounted my experience teaching at a school less than 2 miles from the Pentagon on that day more times than I can remember. New York City bore the brunt of those attacks, for sure, but here in the DMV we were reeling, too. But so was the nation, I think. At least in my memory we were all collectively numb with grief. 

In retrospect, I guess life went on more or less as usual in parts of the country that weren't directly impacted by the attacks and their aftermath, but a lot changed for most of us in the United States that day. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enhanced security in airports and other high profile public places, a shared feeling of uneasiness, wasn't every American affected somehow? 

The general consensus was that we would do what it took to make sure everyone was safe, and since then, there haven't been any major attacks by foreign entities on US soil. And the event was so pivotal, that nineteen years later, even in the midst of an economy-crushing pandemic,  politicians, journalists, and citizens acknowledged the losses of that day with speeches, 90 second retrospectives and interviews, minutes of silence and shining beams of light to honor the dead.

Unquestionably, September 11, 2001 was a terrible day, but right now, more people than were killed in those attacks die every 3 days of Covid-19 in the US. Yesterday, Canada recorded a day without any deaths from the virus. Americans continue to be divided about what should and should not be properly required of us in order to defeat this latest attack, and we are on target to lose way more than 100 times the lives that were lost 19 years ago.

Why?