now. cook.

I saw this while doing some research on my other entries – interesting. I can do 28 of them from memory, but I might question the Ratatouille and beef bourguignon being on the list of essentials. Listen kids, instead of this many recipes, what you need to know are more basic ideas that will get you to most of these. (For those who aren’t my wife, if you are a guy and you can cook even the most basic stuff…well, you know what that means with the ladies.) Soups/Stews: know mirepoix. Love mirepoix. Once you learn to go carrots, celery, onions (I add garlic), and have some stock, you are gold. If you want it creamy, roux it up after the mirepoix base cooks, and you are in then in open soup. Know the basics and you can do about a dozen soups with little help. Oh, buy a nice loaf to go with dinner; don’t be cheap – find a real bakery and get some solid bread. Don’t by crap at Food Lion or Safeway. Breakfast: know how to cook basic egg stuff (over easy, scrambled, omelette). If you add in learning to make a romesco sauce then you are gold. Waffles, pancakes, and French toast are all variants on the same theme. Keeping French toast in your hip pocket is the best option (milk, eggs, vanilla, bit of salt, nice sugar, flour, Challah!). Roasting: primarily vegetables. Don’t underdo them. 400 degrees for 40-ish minutes: olive oil, rosemary, ginger, salt and pepper. Don’t get fancy. Squash: easy money. Half, scrape, face down in bout 1/4 in of water. Oven. 400 degress, 40-ish minutes. Then you can stuff them with any combo of sautéed goodness and rice (hey, buy a rice maker…don’t kill yourself.) Chicken: full roasted bird with lemon and sage. Chicken tenders. X’s big platter of French-y chicken lusciousness. Yard bird. Mashed potatoes: Boil. Rice. Mash. Milk. Butter. Salt. If you can’t, or won’t do this, you aren’t worthy. Greek food: as a last item, focus on a basic area. Learn some basics from the cuisine and pull it out when you need to – spanakopita, tzatziki, gigantes, bread. Some day I’ll be 55 and teaching home-ec somewhere. Everyone will be able to cook and survive.

no shit

I remember being in the “talented-and-gifted” program, it was called TAG, at Rockbrook elementary school back in my day. I’m not sure how it happened, but it primarily involved being able to go on field trips throughout the year with the other TAG kids: ice cream plants and potato chip factories – nothing Earth-shattering or academic. I vaguely suspect it was like being on fire patrol (red belts) or safety patrol (white belts): if you raised your hand, you were in. As far as I know, there wasn’t any testing involved and it certainly couldn’t have been based on academic achievement. I think the grading rubric (how did that word become so popular?) at my elementary school involved Pass, Fail, Tried, Trouble. There’s your No Child Left Behind testing spectrum from the early to mid-1970s.

What brings this up is an Andrew Sullivan post on the T-and-G crowd which I suspect is much larger these days, but still based roughly on the same hand-raising or self-selecting process. Clearly, there was no improvement in my academic future because I got little gift bags of potato chips at the end of my tour at Lay’s. Of course, this whole talent-and-gifted idea is wholly separate from actual academic achievement (Honors, AP, and etc.) I’m pretty amazed that anything like this still even exists in elementary and middle school – did I need a survey to tell me that a year-and-a-half of exposure to mindless field trips doesn’t equate to a student being better off?

I don’t even want to consider Megan McCardle’s issue with talented-and-gifted programs – which she has somehow conflated into a public v. private v. voucher school discussion. I will tip my hand on that issue and say that I think vouchers are a horrible idea. Details? To come. (Full disclosure: my high schooler is in private school, but not via a voucher program.)

p.s. While digging for a picture, I came up an Amazon review for potato chips. Who writes a review for potato chips?

rearranging deck chairs

X pointed out this morning that we need more chairs for both Thanksgiving and general-use dining functions around the Hilltop’s massive table. Her exact words, while sipping coffee at the bar, were something like “finding solid, quality-made chairs for a reasonable price ain’t easy.” I decided then and there that I could include that tidbit within the grumpy fatherly advice given to children as they depart the nest (X added the last two):

1. Don’t get involved with crazy women.
2. Good quality dining table chairs are hard to find.
3. Don’t ever buy a piano.
4. Don’t ever buy a boat.

Of course, this led to me falling into my grumpy old father imitation (?):

“I don’t give a crap about your wife; I don’t have to talk to her. I don’t have to get in your damn boat or move your stupid piano. But, I do have to come over to your house for holidays because your mother will make me. I won’t sit in crappy chairs while eating overcooked turkey so get some goddamned good chairs. And, don’t ask me for any more money.”

On to other stuff.

Joel Klein is following Michelle Rhee as “school chancellors out the door” in urban east coast cities (but for different reasons). I’m bothered by Rhee leaving even if I’m not a DC resident because I think letting her finish the job (five years) would have been the better option but politics intervened. Klein has been in NYC for eight years which is a pretty amazing run. I don’t have fully formed opinions and evidence for charter schools, something Klein fully supported and Rhee seemed to sort of support, but it seems as if both of them were quite willing to take on the unions and bust some heads – nice turn of “union and head-busting” phraseology, isn’t it. I’ve lost count of the number of philippics turned while talking about education out loud and in my crazy head. It’s easy to look at Fairfax county or the district of my youth and make assumptions about the quality of education. I think we’re usually wrong to even consider either of those as the underpinning of the system as a whole. Shouldn’t we always consider the weakest link as the issue at hand? Even if you take that weakest link’s issues and apply them to the stronger links you’ll still see the same problems. Those problems? Mediocre actual skills and results, middling test scores, and grading that is focused on pushing kids to the next level, not learning them to the next level. I’ll let it go for now…I’m pretty pessimistic. I have an analogy to make between education and offshore drilling, if you can believe that, but I’ll hold it for another day.

(Here’s a harsh review of Rhee’s tenure in D.C. Read at will. Here’s a look at Klein’s in NYC.)

I’ve started about book, The Tiger, that has me massively enthralled. I’m taking it bit-by-bit because I’m quite keen on the writing and the story. Here’s a review from the Seattle Times and here’s the piece from NPR that got me interested (you can listen to the audio portion). I’m looking at Lemon in a new light…

Finally, one last yarn. X was given control of taking any important calls at work for a colleague at work who’ll be out of the office for a few days. The real request is for her to simply ‘handle’ the calls and ease the minds of callers – don’t actually try to solve any issues; issues to be solved will be handled by the master upon his return. She’s to just be nice and make them feel as if their concerns and feelings are being stoked. I passed along to her that you can really learn a lot from Roadhouse. In fact, just about every life lesson might be encapsulated in this fine film.

Be nice. You don’t decide to do anything…I’ll let you know.

i walked to school uphill, both ways!

I’ve had some good, long discussions with people about education. Since I have a blog and have read some books, I’m an expert. That’s how it works. Of course, I have no training in education aside from my actual education through secondary school and my desire to enter a Chemistry teaching program at George Mason University in August. My primary concern has always been the primary and secondary public education system – I don’t even have the heart to delve into the insane college and university systems that run rampant all across the country.

I don’t think you need to be an expert to know that No Child Left Behind is a horrible program. It’s difficult to understand why any one believes that standardized testing is the way to measure the education of our children. There might be rumblings from behind the curtain that it’s the only way we know of to sort data, but that doesn’t mean it’s right or needed. Most of us have an understanding that SATs, ACTs, LSATs, GREs, and etc. are used as guides to measure the possibility of success in future endeavors, and somewhat as measures of the past, but they aren’t definers of a person’s actual ability to function in society. Here in Virginia there’s an annual test call the Standards of Learning (the SOLs…what a great acronym…) that I’ve watched both boys prepare for each year. Their classroom work ceases for weeks prior to the testing and the teachers simply teach to the test in order to pad the numbers and freak out. I’m pretty sure a good portion of the SOL results carry into the NCLB data pool. My question is this: If the kids are in school seven hours a day for an entire year, what are they learning? Why the need to for the “test teaching” for two weeks? Shouldn’t the basic math, reading, and writing skills have been covered already? Shouldn’t the test be an actual measure of how well the school – and its teachers – are performing? If you read David Brooks in today’s NYTimes you’ll see what brought about this crazy talk on the blog. I’ve been following the Mayor Fenty / Michelle Rhee doings since he won the mayoral election and I’m generally onboard with Rhee’s burn-and-rebuild ideas. (There are some personal vendettas and asides that bother me about her work, but I think the whole is much stronger than those issues.) Merit pay? Yes. If you do your job better than others; you get paid more. If you stink – you get fired. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think a complete educational overhaul is easy or cheap. Like anything else in this World worth fixing it’s going to take time, money, and a consolidated effort from the top. We should pay teachers way more than we do, we should finance the schools, we should either figure out how to better manage the money or we should redistribute revenues (or increase them) to make sure the educational system is truly functional. One more thing on NCLB, and something that made it even more laughable when it came into being: if there are fewer than x number of an ethnic or other NCLB grouping in your school, the program doesn’t even count either a baseline educational standard or any improvement year-to-year. Let’s say you have 12 Native Americans at your school – there’s a very good chance that any educational process under NCLB will be moot or ignored. It’s something I learned about while living in the mixed-bag community of Northern Nevada. I think that would qualify as left behind.

The second thing that triggered this all was X’s parent-kid-teacher conference at the New School today. What they’ve managed to do in their little corner of the educational process is get the kids to understand that there’s a program of learning and the program is owned by them. The teacher had the conference run by H. and he was fully able to discuss where he was having problems, where he wasn’t, and how he could improve – and it was dead-on with what the middle school head had learned from his teachers. Wow. What a concept – getting children to understand that their schooling is important and that they need to crackdown and learn. When you see, or hear, about the success of varying systems – about the parents, the schools, and the kids working together – it become clear why there’s so much failures: our inability as parents and adults to convince the kids that they are going to go school, they are going to learn and work hard, and that the work they do now will come back ten-fold as both young adults, professionals, and parents. That’s something that’s truly missing in society.

Fine. You can leave.