Last week a friend asked me: Do you take advantage of the city you live in? The answer is an unequivocal YES! Living in the city means that art, music, and great food are just a stone's throw away. An added benefit? Folks who live in cities tend to have smaller environmental footprints than their suburban or rural peers.
The other day, my friend Katie and I took advantage of our city's offerings by attending a class at Pinot's Palette -- a fun BYOB where you can drink a glass of wine and create your own masterpiece painting. Artistic talent is unnecessary -- they walk you through step by step!
Katie and I at our easels. Most of the equipment was reusable, including the glasses they provided for our wine.
Concentrating.
My work-in-progress. We used acrylic paints. While they are a petroleum product, they are generally thought to be safer on the environment than oils because they don't require paint thinner for clean-up.
Yay! They recycle. In Houston, this is never something you can take for granted, and I often find myself hauling home empty bottles and cans. It's great to find businesses that care.
Katie and I both had long, frustrating days, but as we painted away we relaxed. It's opportunities like this that make city-living the best.
I know when I started this blog I promised to keep the tone light and fun. And I know that just recently I wrote about some heavy stuff. But we're at a critical time in American history, and I just had to address it. I will try to address it with a calm and even-handed demeanor. No gnashing of teeth. No throwing crockery.
Catfish, you may be wondering, what critical time in history? The critical bedbug situation in New York city, clearly the epicenter of the universe, considering the number of times bedbugs have been mentioned in the national media? The critical possibility that Delaware will elect a government official who dabbled in witchcraft?!? The season premier of Grey's Anatomy?
Yes, those are all important. But I'm talking about the critical opportunity we have to address education inequity.
Ed reform is hot right now. Oprah spent TWO shows this week talking about it. Waiting For Superman is poised to be the hottest documentary since An Inconvenient Truth made PowerPoint sexy. The Washington D.C. mayoral election was heavily-influenced by education issues (although anti-reform backlash seems to have won the day).
We have the chance to seize this opportunity and harness our outrage for good. Or we can make excuses and maintain the status quo.
I don't talk a lot about ed reform on this blog, because I spend about 80% of my time thinking about it, and this blog is meant to be an outlet from that. My daily work, my friendships, my thoughts when my head hits the pillow at night -- they all revolve around the central question of: How can we make good on the audacious promise our country has made, that every child will get an education that will enrich their lives and make democracy work?
School segregation, ca. 1953. In large part, segregation still exists although it is no longer the law. Just ask my seven-year-old students, who noticed it whenever we went somewhere with kids from other schools.
Because this is so important to me, this might be one of the most personal (and longest -- sorry about that, but I promise to try to be entertaining if you read it all!) posts I've written. That being said, I know that not all of you will agree with me. That's OK. If you don't agree, just know that this is definitely based on lots of thinking and research, and I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings or disparage the work of great teachers. I think that there is a systems problem that is much larger than the individuals involved, and that in many ways all of us who work with schools are caught in that system. Most of us agree that the system isn't great, we just don't agree on the solutions.
Almost every time a suggestion is made to change the status quo, excuses are made about why things just can't change. (In case you're wondering how bad the status quo really is, its creating huge gaps in achievement between students of different races, ethnicities, and social classes. I'm not going to go into the details here. If you want to know more, click here for an overview of the achievement gap and here for an eye-opening discussion of the economic impact of the achievement gap). Read any education article on the web that proposes that things aren't OK right now, scroll down to the comments, and you'll find comment after comment filled with excuses about why it would be nice to do better, but we just can't right now, and its offensive to suggest otherwise.
(I mean, let's just ignore the fact that it's offensive that fourth graders in low-income communities are 2-3 years behind their higher-income peers, which means they are basically learning a half-year's worth of material every year ... wait, I was going to try to remain calm).
A White school, ca. 1953. Looks a little more pleasant than the photo above, huh? You often see the same disparities in school resources today. The best teachers make a difference even without those resources.
Many of my colleagues in ed reform use the phrase "no excuses" to spur kids to excellence. Well, if fifth graders can go about their business without making excuses, then I think we adults can. So I wanted to just lay out what some of the excuses are, and what the research, and my experience as a teacher in low-income communities, have taught me.
First, a quick outline of the pro-ed-reform stance, as represented on Oprah and by reformers like the divisive Michelle Rhee.
1. Quality teaching matters more than almost any other factor in whether students learn or not. Therefore, our current system, in which low-quality teaching is allowed to continue, is untenable. The quality of teaching must be improved.
2. Teachers’ unions are currently protecting a status quo in which bad teachers are allowed to retain their jobs for years, potentially harming generations of kids.
Ed reformers want one simple (ha ha ha) thing: a good teacher in every classroom. OK. This is a grindingly complex issue. It will be difficult no matter what. But there is a large group of folks, a lot of them teachers and politicians, who have a list of excuses why we can't do it -- even though in many places, in both traditional public and charter schools, we are doing it. The excuses are holding us back, and we don't need that because IT'S ALREADY GOING TO BE HARD.
So here are the excuses I've heard most often about why educational inequity just can't change right now. This list of excuses is based on my very unscientific reading of the responses that pop up in the media. There are lots more, but these seem to be the big kahunas -- the things that get repeated over and over.
The Excuses (and a few thoughts in response)
Excuse: I can’t teach these kids if their parents don’t care or take responsibility. Parents in this (insert: neighborhood, generation, school, ethnic group) just don't care.
Response: I always wonder if teachers and politicians who make this excuse talk to a lot of parents. I taught in a neighborhood in Houston that, if you didn't look below the surface, would probably fit a lot of your stereotypes of a low-income neighborhood. That's if you didn't look further. If you actually talked to the parents -- they all wanted their kids to do well, to go to college, to do their homework. Desperately, most of them wanted their kids to do well enough to go to the "unacceptable"-rated middle school other than the one down the street, and by the hard work of our fifth grade teachers, a lot of kids ended up going to magnets, charters, and private schools on scholarship. Without the effort of those teachers, many these parents who cared would have been stymied by a system that was byzantine for someone who might not be educated or speak English. But don't take my little anecdote as evidence: research shows that even more parents of African-American and Hispanic children view college as essential to their children's success than White parents do. As teachers, particularly if we work in low-income communities, we need to find ways to form relationships in partnership with parents to help kids achieve. Are there some parents who are really, really difficult to work with? Yes, of course. Just like there are some teachers who are. But that isn't the norm.
Excuse:I can’t teach these kids if they don’t care themselves.
Response: As someone who coaches teachers, I've probably walked into hundreds of classrooms by now, almost all of them in classes filled with low-income, minority students. I'm a White lady in high heels. I imagine, to most of the kids in these classes, I look like an outsider. And yet, I've never gone into a class and seen kids who didn't want to learn. I have walked into classes where kids weren't learning, either because the lesson was confusing or boring or too hard. In that case, kids sometimes act up (just like adults do when they are bored and frustrated). But most of the time, they are fighting to understand. Big high school boys who have never met me before will ask this outsider, "Can you explain this? I don't understand." That takes a lot of humility for a teenager (remember being a teenager? You don't want to ask an adult anything much less admit that you don't understand something). This shows me that these kids care enough to put their pride aside and grasp at their own learning. But often, when we're the teacher at the front of the room (I know because I've been there) we fail to see this because we know the kids so well and are so wrapped up in the lesson plans we've created or the things the administration is asking us to do, we miss the moments of grace that happen when kids are seeking their own learning. Again, you don't just have to believe my little anecdote. Check out the LA Times' controversial series on teacher quality (I'm pretty sure that it's controversial because people haven't actually read the well-reasoned and moderate articles) in which they found that teachers teaching down the hall from one another - kids in the same grade, from the same community -- had vastly different results. Teacher quality, not the kids, made the difference.
Let's hear it for teachers, like this one, who obviously care about their students. Just like most parents and kids care, most teachers do too -- but the system makes it hard for all parties to flourish.
Excuse: If my class was smaller, I would do better.
Response: Research on class size is mixed. One significant study in Tennessee showed that class size does make a difference in student achievement, but many others, including a study of Florida's class size reduction act, show that class size matters very little if a quality teacher is at the front of the room. From a teacher's perspective, it is certainly nicer to have a smaller class, but a good teacher makes more of a difference. And for those of you yearn for the good ol' days -- class size has actually decreased since the middle of the last century, while achievement stagnated or fell.
Not exactly a small class ... how did those kids even get into those desks?
Excuse: The outrageous behavior problems of a few students in my class make teaching impossible.
Response: I actually have a lot of sympathy with this argument, because I lived it. There were days when I rose above and days when I failed. I spent a lot of energy fighting to find help for students who had deeper issues than I knew how to deal with, that I knew were impacting their lives in negative ways, and making it hard for other children to learn. And I just couldn't manage to find the help these kids needed. I did my best, but I agree with the teacher's unions who say that education reform will work better when there is a better social safety net for kids. That's why I love the idea of the Harlem Children's Zone, which addresses the whole child and community. But do I think ed reform is impossible without that extended safety net? Definitely not. And research suggests that broader social reform, while having lots of benefits in a variety of ways, isn't necessary to improve achievement. (But that doesn't mean we shouldn't go for the gold ring and try to do both!)
Excuse:Standardized tests don't show what kids are really learning.
Response: Yep. Standardized tests are blunt instruments. Yep. Some teachers and schools get rewarded for cheating. Yep. Some teachers teach to the test. But before accountability measures were in place we had no idea how students were doing. I certainly don't think teachers should be responsible for a single year's worth of data on a single test, particularly if the students' starting point isn't taken into account. We have to remember, though, that state standardized tests are minimum standard tests. With a few exceptions, they are not of a high rigor. If our kids can't pass even these tests, we aren't doing our jobs as educators. The LA Times article found that the best teachers, as measured by standardized tests, weren't the ones who were teaching to the tests. They were doing the things that test foes argue for: teaching critical thinking and pushing kids to meet high expectations. When you do those things, passing a standardized test is a cakewalk.
Excuse: Unions might protect bad teachers, but we have to have the unions to fight for us, because we’re being targeted by parents and the media.
Response: I'm an old school liberal and I believe in unions. Teacher need protection, since they are at the whim of politicians and because kids and parents are media-savvy these days. However, I think that if teachers want to be treated like professionals, we need to act like it and have a professional association rather than a union. Professional associations, like the Bar Association and American Medical Association, both protect members and set the quality standard for their members (I know, I know, they do it to varying degrees of success, but that's the idea). I think that teachers would be better served by an organization that didn't make excuses, but upheld a quality standard that kept teachers from being such targets in the first place. I don't think firing teachers en masse is the answer. I do think that having real evaluations of teachers, combining observations, student work samples, and test data; and then helping teachers improve when they don't meet the bar of excellence (and letting those people go who don't improve over time); can improve the field as a whole and help take some of the heat off teachers.
So. That's my rant of the day. If you've read to this point, you are awesome. If you have thoughts, please share in a nice respectful way. I know some of you are international readers, and I'd love to know about your school system. And if you feel moved to act, you can visit the Waiting For Supermansite for ideas on how to make a change. Or, you know, find out how you can become a teacher, run for school board, or volunteer at a local school. Because after we stop making excuses, we're all going to have to get our hands dirty.
Movie trailer courtesy of Paramount Vantage/Participant Media.
Photos courtesy of Life/Google archive and licensed only for non-commercial use.
Sorry I've been AWOL for awhile -- I've been traveling for work and play and have been scheduled from morning till night. But here are a few pics of where I've been.
Birds over the Gulf. They're probably happy the oil leak has been capped.
If I was dark green I would make my own clothes out of recycled paper bags and cotton that I harvested with my own two hands.
But I'm light green, and so I work diligently to make the occasional apparel item and remind myself of the work that goes into a single garment.
Wow. I'm really happy about my new sweater.
I just finished a big knitting project, the "Wave and Dimple Kimono" from the Winter 2009 issue of Interweave Knits.I would love to say that I used organic yarn, or recycled yarn, or whatever, but honestly, those yarns are prohibitively expensive for big projects. I used Caron Country yarn, a merino blend.
Here it is, the Wave and Dimple Kimono. This was "deceptively hard" (as one of my yoga videos used to say) - i.e. people will think you're good at knitting if you do this pattern, but it's actually really easy.
Even thought it probably wasn't super-green, I loved this yarn. I'm wool-sensitive (that means I get the itchies if anyone says the word "sheep") but this yarn was soft, easy to knit up, and didn't require Zyrtec. That's all I could wish for.
The early stages of the project. Just to prove I actually made the damn sweater. That's my knee.
What time of year? you might ask, if you don't live in the Southwest. Back to school? Football season?
No, it's Hatch chili season!
Ta-da! The Hatch chilies in all their glossy, spicy glory.
Hatch chilies, like Vidalia sweet onions or Washington apples, are a local item that's hit the big time. Known to be "the best chilies" in the world, Hatch chilies come in red and green varieties and are filling the bins at fancy grocery stores all over the Southwest. Outside the Whole Foods, you can see the annual tradition -- a store employee standing outside, turning a chili roaster over a flame in the burning Southern sun.
Fresh Hatch chilies are only available for a short time in the late summer/early fall. Which means their season overlaps with fresh figs. Add goat cheese, and you've got a quesadilla that will make regular ol' quesadillas hide in shame. These babies combine salty, sweet, and spicy for a sublime mouthful. They are easy to make, but hard to forget.
If you can't get Hatch chilies, you could use another large, mild-to-medium chili like an Anaheim or poblano. The Hatch chilies have a real kick, however, so they are particularly good in combination with the figs.
Beautiful figs. Some say that these were the "forbidden fruit" in the Garden of Eden.
And really, who could resist?
Roasted Chili, Fig, and Goat Cheese Quesadillas
Ingredients**:
For every two quesadillas you will need:
1-2 large chilies
2-3 fresh figs
1 oz. goat cheese
2 small flour tortillas (you could make your own, or get some from a local taqueria or a grocery store with a tortilleria - but use the best quality you can get)
Step 1: Roast chilies.
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees (I used my toaster oven). Line a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan with foil and place the chilies on it. Stick it in the oven, and after about 15 minutes, turn the chilies a quarter turn and place them back in the oven. Be very careful when you handle them, as the insides are filled with steam. Keep turning a quarter turn every 15 minutes or so, until the skin is charred and the chili is mushy.
The chilies should look like this when they are ready to remove from the oven.
Take them out of the oven and let them cool until you can handle them. Then, gently slit the chili down the side. Remove the seeds. The skin should peel right off. (You can freeze the roasted chilies with the skin still on or save them in the fridge in an airtight container).
Step 2: Chop stuff.
Chop up the chilies. Then chop the figs (you can eat all the parts of the fig except the stem). Your pieces of both should be about a 1/2 to one centimeter.
Step 3: Mix stuff.
In a bowl, mix the chilies, figs, and goat cheese. Put a skillet on the stove over medium-high heat and add a little oil or non-stick spray.
Step 4: Make quesadillas.
Spoon filling (the stuff you just mixed) onto half of a tortilla. Fold tortilla and slap it on the skillet. When it's golden-brown on one side, flip it over.
The finished quesadilla. So goooood. Pardon - I think I got a little drool on you.
Once the chilies are roasted, these make a quick lunch that's better than anyone deserves. Cut them into triangles, and you've got a sweet little appetizer to impress your mother-in-law.
I have been at a conference all week, eating lots of things that are both bad for me and don't taste delicious (ah, hotel buffets ...). At least the place had great coffee. Whenever I'm in this situation, both me and my guts start to long for homemade food, so I thought I'd share with you my recent adventure in homemade tortilla-making.
Flour tortillas are probably my favorite food. Often, I eat them straight out of the package. I like them with peanut butter and banana, or with black beans, or just avocado. Homemade tortillas are one of the best things about living in Texas, and none can ever be better than those made my students' mothers when I taught first and second grades.
Tortillas (even those made at most grocery stores) are usually filled with a lot of unpronounceable ingredients. I try to processed foods that only contain recognizable ingredients, preferably organically-produced, but I just can't give up tortillas. And here's the ingredient list of the most popular brand:
Blech! Mama Earth says: Double blech! It's pretty amazing that a food that has only five ingredients when homemade has 13 (not even counting the ingredients in the ingredients) when processed, including conventional wheat and soybeans most-likely produced on factory farms.
So I decided to make my own tortillas. I chose a simple recipe from the internet (Click here to find it). It contains only five ingredients, one of which is water, and I can use my own flour and oil, produced organically.
First I had to knead the dough and let it rest, then form it into balls and let it rest again.
I was worried that rolling and cooking the tortillas would be hard to coordinate, but it worked perfectly. While one cooked, I rolled the next one.
And they turned out to have the uneven shape and grilled spots that the best homemade tortillas have.
These tortillas were delicious, but low in fat. Most of the moms of my students used lard or vegetable shortening. That would defeat the purpose of making my own tortillas, but I think next time I will add a bit more oil. We can't be too healthy!
In my last post, I wrote about my eco party preparations, and promised that cocktail recipes would follow. And because I'm a girl of her word, this post contains said cocktail recipes.
Cocktail ingredients.
Classic cocktails are hip these days. Whether its the influence of Mad Men, or the greening of our culture, every major city seems to have its own micro-distilleries making small-batch bourbon, and bartenders dredging up old-school recipes for the perfect martini or old-fashioned. In Houston, Bobby and Kevin, proprietors of Anvil Bar and Refuge, keep cocktail culture alive and well. Happily, the classic cocktail culture eschews ungreen ingredients like high-fructose corn-syrup and artificially-flavored mixers.
I can honestly say (and not in a I'm-hipper-than-thou way, but in a I-drank-my-first-gin-martini-with-my-parents way) that cocktails are sorta my thing. And I love the classics. They are easy to concoct, yet elusive to master; they taste elemental; and you sound cool ordering them. Nevertheless, as a hostess, I know that not all of my friends dig the classics. Hence, I've developed the 3,2,1 system.
The 3,2,1 system is a nearly foolproof method for devising cocktails which satisfy your friends who like a fruity drink, yet remain sophisticated enough that Don Draper would still recognize them. When creating a recipe, if you stick to a formula like this one, you won't go (too) wrong:
3 parts spirits
2 parts fresh-squeezed lemon or lime juice (or other fruit if you want to get crazy)
1 part simple syrup (could be infused if you planned ahead)
This formula can easily be adjusted slightly. Don't like sweet? Dial down the simple syrup. Amp the lime. Want to keep the sweet but add astringency? Dial up the spirits. Soon you'll be able use this system flexibly to create drinks like the ones I served at my happy hour.
Mad Women Cocktails
I decided to dedicate these to the women of Mad Men, characters who might chafe at the restrictions placed upon their sex, but look great doing it.
Betty Draper's Mint Gimlet
On Mad Men, the gimlet is Betty Draper's drink of choice. The gimlet is a drink that perfectly reflects Betty -- the frozen shock of gin mixed with the tart sting of lime, softened by a hint of sugar. This season, however, Betty has truly lost the life she once craved ... and what better to represent the fading of summer than fresh mint? The green leaves wave to Betty like her lost youth.
3 parts gin (or vodka)
2 parts fresh-squeezed lime juice
1 part mint-infused simple syrup (Click here for the recipe)
Mint
Put a couple of mint leaves and ice in a shaker. Bash with the handle of a wooden spoon. Imagine that it's your father and then cry for betraying him. Put all liquid ingredients in the shaker and, you know ... shake. Strain. Garnish with mint leaves. Drink while appearing to have absolutely no feelings, yet with every sip feeling the stabbing loss of the life you once had.
Joan Holloway's Lavender Lemondrop
Joan is no shrinking violet. Hence, lavender might be her flower of choice. It's softly lovely, yet if you get too close to a stand of lavender, you'll no doubt find it bursts with bees. This lemondrop takes a step up in sophistication from the lemondrop you've no doubt had at a hotel bar.
3 parts vodka
2 parts fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 part lavender simple syrup (I used the Sonoma Syrup Co. brand, which has can sugar instead of high-fructose-corn syrup)
Lemon twist
Mix liquid ingredients in a shaker. Strain. Garnish with lemon twist. Drink while looking askance at the immature little boys who run the firm where you work.
Peggy Olson's Whiskey on the Rocks
Peggy's not fancy. She's in new territory for a woman at her firm as she rises through the advertising ranks from secretary to copywriter. To succeed, Peggy's become incredibly adaptable, drinking what her boss drinks -- and that's whiskey.
2 oz. whiskey
Rocks (but if you don't have any, because you're drinking in your office at noon like the Mad Men just imagine them)
A dash bitters, if you're feeling sassy
Pour the whiskey in a glass. Drink standing up in your boss's office while he berates you.
Perhaps it was because I recently discovered Starz Network's brilliant-yet-canceled series Party Down, but I realized that it had been a long time since I'd had a party. And I like parties. I like to host parties, and I try to take a very Zen view toward hosting: don't concentrate too hard on the party, and it will happen.
I decided to hold a "Back to School" Happy Hour, even though I no longer go to or work at a school. And because I have this little green project, I wanted to make it as green as possible without getting all unZen about the whole thing.
Invites
Remember, back in the day (well, most of us don't really remember) when people used to send their manservant (Giles or Rupert) over to friends' houses with a hand-lettered cardstock invitation to their country dances or dinner parties? Yeah, neither do I. But of course, no trees need die for invitations anymore (actually, some paper used to be made from rags. Cool, huh?). For this party, I used evite.com. I like it because the invites are cute, although I have to say that they have a new beta version that I didn't love.
Food Regular readers of this blog have probably realized that I'm a little obsessed with food stuffs and their origins. Luckily, there are lots of yummy party foods these days made from organic ingredients. I particularly love Cheesy Girl products, made right nearby in Sealy, TX. They make vegetarian goat cheeses (no animal rennet) and their Hottie style spread, with jalapeno, is deee-licious.
I included lots of fruit and veg with the party food, and guess what? It all got eaten up as well as the bad-for-you nosh.
Drink
For the beverage menu, I planned Betty Draper's Mint Gimlets and Joan's Lovely Lavender Lemondrops (recipes to follow in the next post!). It meant a little preparation two days in advance. The gimlets required mint simple syrup. Regular simple syrup is made with high-fructose corn syrup, but it's so easy to make there's really no reason to buy it at the store. Just take a cup of organic sugar and mix with a cup of water. Then boil. Let it cool and stick it in the fridge. To make mint- or ginger-infused simple syrup, chop up a good handful of mint or ginger, and put it in the simple syrup. Keep it in the fridge for a couple of days, then strain (or don't).
Homemade simple syrup is often a light golden color, instead of clear like the fakey-fakey-fakester store-bought stuff -- just to warn you.
Here's the mint simple syrup, infusing away in the fridge.
Bathroom Break
So ... awhile ago I stopped buying paper towels. In general, this has made no difference in my life once I adapted to using rags for cleaning. Since I was being so Zen about my party planning, I didn't realize that my guests would have nothing upon which to wipe their hands. My friend Kelly uses washcloths as hand towels, so I decided to do so as well. I created a little sign telling guests where to discard their towels, and voila! The restroom was ready for guests.
Don't Give Up the Zen
Listen, it would have been more eco to use my china plates and cups. But honestly, I didn't want to wash them, and I had a whole bunch of paper plates and napkins left over from prior parties. So I decided to use those. Who cares if they didn't match. At least they weren't going to waste.
Yep. Those are Christmas plates. So what?
What are your favorite party planning secrets?
Next: 3, 2, 1 ... Cocktails! Get the recipes for sweet Mad Men-style cocktails.
