110% Organic

The supply list in the bathroom at the Marriot Hotel in Seattle:   quince lotion; barley body wash; quinoa shampoo; amaranth conditioner.

I wasn't sure if I should bathe and moisturize or enjoy an all-natural organic snack.

Or both?

A Peculiar Brand of Fun

Our hotel retain its old stairwell and the boys seem to endlessly believe that walking up the stairs qualifies as "fun."

All Cousin, All the Time

The cousins arrived yesterday and that meant triple the fun.  We headed off for a baseball game at Safeco Field.  The day was beautiful even if the Mariners lost.

JT scored himself a foam finger.  He promptly used it to torture his cousins.  They endured his nonsense, though if they toss him to the wolves in Alaska it may be that he's earned that treatment.

We went to the Spaghetti Factory for supper (a fave from my own misspent youth) and then we visited the Space Needle. 

The view was really quite splendid.

We came back to the hotel at 9 and the announcement that some children were ready for sleep horrified JT.  Sleep?  When there are cousins to play with?  

A Day in Seattle

We're in Seattle for a few days before we board the boat to Alaska.  The city was amazingly glorious on our first day.  We arrived at noon Seattle time and after a crazy early morning at Newark Airport, it was like we gained a whole new day.  We got some lunch and then spent the afternoon wandering around Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market, enjoying the mild warmth and generally soaking up the atmosphere. 

The market was terrific, with fresh produce and flowers galore. 

 For supper, we ate some donuts for our appetizer.

And then we bought fresh cheese curds, homemade crackers, and Rainier cherries and retreated to our hotel to watch the College World Series and await the arrival of the cousins.

Tomorrow, we head to the ball park to watch the Mariners play the Cubs.  Reports as warranted.

Promiscuous Gardener

I can never say no to a plant and for this reason I am what you might call a promiscuous gardener.  Happily, I often end up with amazing plants as a result of this behavior.    But that just reinforces my easy ways.  If I had this problem with animals or children, some sort of state protective services would be called in and I would be gently separated from the beast in question, sternly warned to stop this nonsense, and then left to behave myself.

But there is no Plant Protective Services and I can't say no, which is how I ended up with over 150 canna bulbs this spring.  Cannas in bloom are lovely and I've long admired them.  So when the canna bulb offer was made by a fellow Little League parent I quickly said yes.  And when the bulbs arrived in greater number then I expected, I planted and planted and planted.  More than 50 of the bulbs made their way into my garden in various spots all over the yard.  The rest were distributed to fellow gardeners. 

These flowers will grow to be quite tall; the beds in which they were planted are already looking quite lovely.  I am eager for the spectacular display that will soon follow. 

The worst part, of course, is that my garden promiscuity is only furthered by experiences like this.  Plants in need of home, take note.  There is always a bit more space at Sassafras House.

The Road Ahead: Education Reform, part I

For the last three months, I've been reading about education reform.  And let me just say that plenty of ink has been spilled on this topic.  Thinking about education in the first place got me thinking about my own approach to teaching, and I wrote about that a few months back.  Today's posting isn't about me in the classroom, it's about classrooms and our kids.

President Obama's Race to the Top proposal interests me, not because I think it's brilliant, but because at this point in the game I'm intrigued by any serious proposal that aims to shake things up.  It's not that all American schools are in trouble; far from it.  Our problem is that the poor kids in at-risk schools are suffering.  We have a 75% high school graduation rate in the United States, much of it due to the abysmal completion rate in our poorest schools.  In a nation like ours, with an unacknowledged but powerful class system shaping so many of our children's lives,  a good education can still create better life opportunities.  Our most needy children are most in need of a real education if they are to have any chance of getting ahead.

I write from my perspective as a teacher, not a teacher in a large system or government-run school, but rather a teacher at an independent school, one with the ability to be innovative and with the luxury of well-cared for children.  My job can be demanding, but I would be the first to acknowledge that my challenge is not the same as the challenge present in places like Camden, Newark, Los Angeles or Washington D.C.  But it is those children to whom we owe a real commitment.  And frankly, we need to spend some money to give them what they deserve.

I'm not convinced that teacher salaries are where we need to spend the money, by the way. Teachers should be well-compensated, of course, and by and large the last 40 years have seen to it that teacher's salaries and benefits place them squarely in the middle class.  For example, the average public school teacher in New Jersey makes $65,000 a year, plus benefits and a pension plan.  Those folks may not be living the dream, but they are doing okay.

But we must spend money on some very important things.  Today, I'll outline a couple of the ideas on my list.  Later on this week, I'll finish up.

Nutrition and social services for children.  Hungry children from unstable family environments cannot learn.  What these children require is food, health services, stability, and security in the company of adults who care. Schools can provide breakfast and lunch, but that's just the beginning.  Schools need to open early and close late, providing after school enrichment, activities, and fun, and most of all the stability that children crave and deserve.  It will take more caring staff to make this happen.

Smaller classes.  The very best teachers I know are people who have a complete handle on their classrooms and their students.  They know how to challenge a child and move them forward; they teach with a focus on learning autonomy but with the sure knowledge that children benefit from guidance.  A teacher can do this most effectively with 15 - 18 students in her care.  Classrooms at that size allow for plenty of quality work to be assigned (and assessed to measure progress); they allow a teacher to develop assignments and activities that target the child's learning needs.  They ensure that a child has a meaningful relationship with his classroom teacher, a teacher who is neither over-worked nor under-valued.  The average class size in American schools today ranges from 22 to 30.  That's not good enough.

Don't scrimp on the "extras."  There is a growing amount of scholarship that demonstrates what good teachers already know: Learning across diverse disciplines is connected.  Children with regular gym class have better math scores.  Children who receive regular art instruction are better thinkers and writers.  Children in regular music classes learn to be adept problem-solvers.  Math and reading are essential, of course, but these skills don't develop without a full serving of learning in fields as diverse as science, history, foreign language, and so much more.  This learning must be in the hands of professionals who are committed to their subjects.  Among other things, that means that students are working with many caring adults who are teaching subjects they love.  It's a recipe for lifelong learning.

Subject Training.  My exposure to schools of education has convinced me that pedagogy is not nearly as useful as content.  There is simply no substitute for content and more is always better.  'Nuf said.

These ideas are a start, but they aren't the whole story.  Later this week, I'll outline the rest of my reform agenda.

Father's Day

Usually, Mother's Day has served as an opportunity for me to think about being a mama.  I originally sat down to write this post on Mother's Day.  But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that these thoughts are a better fit for Father's Day. 

Families like mine are lost in the shuffle of days like this (and don't get me started on the meaning of Mother's Day when one is a single mom). Sometimes, I resent these manufactured events.  But a day like this reminds me that JT is a child with a unique view of the world of families.  He knows families of all sorts: families with a mom and a dad, families with two moms, and at least one family with two dads.  But the family he knows best is his own: a family of one boy and his struggling mama. 

Someday, when he becomes a father, JT's role model for being a parent in a family will be this household of mine.  Neither parenting nor household chores have a gender at our house and there is much to be valued by that arrangement.  For one thing, I'm the only adult here and so I wield both the hammer and the frying pan.  I'm raising a son who expects to clean the toilets and look after the trash bins.  He'll nurture the baby and wash the laundry.  I'm proud of that.

I've come to understand that the child of a single parent assumes responsibilities in a very different way from a child with two parents at home.  In my weaker moments, I worry about the losses in his life.  He won't grow up with an innate knowledge of how to make a partnership succeed.  I consider that a loss.  On the other hand, he has gained an expectation of self-sufficiency and an independence that is awfully valuable.  As he grows up, I am confident that my boy has what it takes to be resilient in the face of adversity.  These lessons will grow more meaningful over time, as he becomes an adult with familial responsibilities of his own.

In the meantime, this boy and I have all sorts of conversations I could never have imagined when I daydreamed about being a mama.  We talk about bodies and their parts.  We discuss weaponry and books.  We talk about the intricacies of baseball.  We laugh (and let's face it, bicker).  We do it all together, as a family should.  And I hope that my boy understands that love has neither a gender nor a boundary.  It simply is.

Garden Therapy

Like a poorly trained toddler, I often find transitions unpleasant.  I'm happy to be free of work obligations for the summer (especially the alarm clock), but also at a bit of cross-purposes with all this time suddenly on my hands.  I know that the remedy for the funk is to organize a bit of a schedule for my days.  Yesterday, I partook of the cure by taking to my garden.

 Planting happened around the 1st of May and I've already weeded the patch a half dozen times.  But as the summer heat grows nearer, it's time for my favorite method of weed control and moisture management: newspapers and mulch.  It took about three hours of weeding and mulch-spreading to finish half of the garden.  That half looks nice and tidy now.

 The rest of the job will wait until Monday morning, when I will have read the weekend's newspapers and can put them to work on the ground.  It's always satisfying to consign the week's news to the dirt.  I'm hopeful that I can find at least a few Joe Barton pictures for the next go-round.

Aspirational Reading

My friend Nichole, who lives in Nebraska and is doing her level-best to singlehandedly increase the population of Democrats in the state (no small chore, that), has decided that my household water problems are the result of my reading habits.

Her particular concern at the moment is the condition of my roof.  As she put it in a recent comment, "What's this I see in your profile about how you just finished a book about so-and-so living under a leaky roof?? Really?? Do you need to tempt the fates?? Maybe you should switch to those cheesy romance novels that don't involve any mention of a leaky roof."

Though I can't see picking up a cheesy romance novel habit at this late date in my life, I feel she may have a point.  Thanks to her concerns, I've set aside that book about the Dust Bowl that I was planning to read this summer.  I've decided instead to take up books that offer hopeful aspirations.  I'm re-reading a bunch of Miss Read's Fairacre novels, because they always make me happy and I could do worse than being a well-adjusted spinster prone to caustic asides.

I am on the look out for a book about a single mama who raised an amazingly well-adjusted kid who went on to a long, lucrative, injury-free major league career as a catcher.  While I'm at it, I'll look for some books about people who won the lottery.  That would be handy on a number of fronts (most notably when the roof goes).  I feel that I can safely continue to read my gardening and cooking books, but I'd like to get a social life and maybe - gasp - a date.  I'd figured that I might have to summon my courage and try to meet people.  But with Nichole's theory as my guiding principle,  I'll just be on the look-out for the appropriate book on that front. 

This might work out quite well, really.  Internet, I'll keep you posted.

Relaxation

It's been a bit warm of late, though not quite hot enough to warrant air conditioning.  So I brought out a fan to circulate the air in the living room.

Tiger promptly moved the ottoman in range of the fan, lay down on his back, and proceeded to enjoy the breeze.