Bill's wife's favorite tree

Over my blog break, we got fresh snow on the hills around town, and fall color has started in earnest down here in the valley. This brings to mind...

Every year about this time I get a colorful reminder of one of the main things about a town you've lived in for a while that makes it different from a town you don't know, besides the people. It's the associations. The stories to go with things. For instance, if I stand out back and look across the vacant lot, I can see a certain tree, currently deep red on the fringes. Years and years ago now, I caught an old man looking at that tree in fall color, and Bill told me that it had been his wife's favorite tree, that she loved how it changed color, and how deep the colors were. He was a widower, and I hadn't known his wife. But every year in autumn I think of him - dead several years now himself - and her, and how he liked to look at that tree because it was her favorite tree. In a way it has made it one of my favorite trees in town, too.

I hadn't thought of Bill in a long time, but today I stood looking at that tree and let the memories wash over me. It was nice.

It's a little thing, I know. Like how in my old hometown you either knew which was Ritter's Hill and which was Ashby's Hill, etc., or you didn't, because you sure couldn't find them listed on a map. You could only know if someone told you, and for that you pretty much had to live there. And talk to people. And listen.

Such little things, and yet how connected they can make you feel to a place.

We get results: Thanksgiving Day poem

Some of you will remember that way back when I put up a notice that a gentleman we know was looking for a poem he remembered from years and years ago.

My husband found it this weekend, thanks to Google, which has posted The Indiana School Journal of 1896. Specifically, it's Recitation - The Thanksgiving Dinner, on page 787.

This rhyme is just one of several in the "Program for Thanksgiving Day" section which begins on page 785.

The journal was published by the Indiana State Teachers' Association. The original used for the digital image came from Harvard. No author was listed for this particular poem.

There are other editions of The Indiana School Journal online. I'm having a bit of trouble navigating the searches right now, but from what I could pull up, the earliest one I saw was from 1858, and the latest one I saw was from 1900. They look like they could be really good resources, from what I've seen so far. (They'd be even better if someone's fingers didn't block the view on some pages, but perhaps I'm being too picky?)

Blog break

This computer is heading for a much-needed major overhaul, and I'm going to take advantage of the situation by shamelessly ignoring email and the Internet for a few days. Maybe even a whole week.

It's fall! Have you looked outside recently? (For my southern hemisphere readers: It's spring! Have you looked outside recently?) It might be, you know, like, nice weather with interesting vegetation changes or something...

Back soon. Or, soonish, at any rate.

Reform run amok

Andrew Ferguson looks at education reform in America, and also at some books about education, in the Weekly Standard article No Child Left Alone. The subhead is "An education reform run amok."

An excerpt:

Reformers are busy people, tireless people, whose displeasure with the world as it is inspires them to improve the lives of their fellow human beings no matter what, and they get cranky when you bring up the law of unintended consequences. They dislike the implication that the benefits they confer in one field might lead to a shrinking of benefits in another. Yet the decline in attendance at Laurie Verge's wonderful little museum is, indeed, an unintended consequence of NCLB--just one of many, and a small one at that. Though no one thought of it in the long, sweaty hours while the bill was being written, or mentioned it in the self-congratulatory giddiness surrounding its final passage, NCLB's exclusive emphasis on reading and math has led a high percentage of schools (around 40 percent, according to one recent survey) to cut back on the teaching of history, civics, and government to the country's schoolchildren.

The irony here is hard to avoid: Republicans, who used to lament the rising tide of "historical illiteracy," have now reformed the nation's schools in such a way that can only swell the tide. But there are lots of ironies in Big Government Conservatism. Luckily for us, a handful of new books provides an opportunity to think about NCLB and its many consequences--and, by extension, to ask the question: So how's this Big Government Conservatism thing working out for us?

Meanwhile, over at Townhall.com, Dennis Prager looks at current problems in education from another angle, in his column Why the Left Has Changed Journalism, Education and the Courts.

As the title says, the column is about more than education. An excerpt:

The question, then, is not whether the left has had such an impact, but why.

I learned a major part of the answer years ago in Idaho where I was the moderator of a panel of judges -- including a past California Supreme Court justice -- and lawyers connected to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I asked the panel members to give their view of the role of judges. The response of the liberal former California Supreme Court justice opened my eyes to the left's view of virtually everything in society.

He said that the purpose of a California Supreme Court justice, and for that matter, every judge, is to fight economic inequality and racism in society. I responded that I thought the one purpose of a judge was to render justice in the courtroom.

I might as well have responded in biblical Hebrew (that's where I got the idea of a judge's role anyway): He and the other liberals on the panel reacted as if I had offered a new and original notion of judges' roles.

Because the left views the purpose of judges as furthering a social agenda that transcends justice in the courtroom, the judicial process has been distorted for decades...

Hooray for Calvin & Hobbes, and E.T.'s Melissa Mathison

You just never know where kids will find inspiration.

You'll understand the first part of the above title when you get to the part about Hamlet's soliloquy and Calvin's yucky dinner. Heh. (Boys!)

The second part of the title comes from something that happened back in the 1980s.

One of my favorite assignments as a newspaper reporter was to interview grade school kids in a remedial reading class. They'd written to Melissa Mathison, the lady who wrote E.T. (a popular space alien movie), and she'd been kind enough to write back, answering their questions one by one. No form letter, this. I hope she'll forgive me for mentioning it, but the letter was obviously typed on a typewriter with some difficulty, with strike-outs and everything. Someone had sat down to answer a letter, and had backed up here and there to take a fresh go at the best answer or put slashes over a typo. Once I got over my surprise, I found the presentation strangely charming, and somehow friendly. Even back then, a typewritten letter (as opposed to printed) was becoming a rarity -- and one that wasn't sanitized into perfection was rarer still. It had personality, that letter. (Do not try this at home. You'll only look sloppy if you're insincere.)

I was sent to interview the kids, who had become schoolyard heroes overnight for having received a letter from a screenwriter of a very popular movie.

They had, before that, been taunted by classmates, who had designated them dummies, mostly by virtue of the fact that they'd been having trouble learning to read. Many of them were children of Mexican farm and factory workers, either migrant workers, or former migrant workers who had decided to settle down and become American citizens. Some of them, the teachers told me, regularly showed up at school in the firm clutches of a resolute grandmother, who had dragged the child to school kicking and screaming. Grandmother was determined the kid was going to learn to read English if it killed him, and otherwise get the best education ever attained by anyone in that family. The kid was tired of the humiliation. The grandmothers, fortunately for the kids, were stronger and didn't give up as easily.

I showed up with a plan to make sure every kid in the classroom got a chance to feel that the reporter had listened to him or her - I did this in all my classroom-related stories, by the way, but in this case I knew I was with kids who might not get another shot at being in the paper, so I was being extra careful not to leave anyone out.

As I was politely giving each child a chance to contribute something if he or she felt like it, one kid in the back exploded with "Can't you hurry?". The teacher tried to shush him with a reminder that it was nice of the newspaper to send the nice reporter lady to their school and it was rude to interrupt, but I was intrigued.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you had something else planned," I said, fishing.

"We have to get to the library and look up more on Einstein!" another kid exploded. To which sentiment there was much enthusiastic seconding, I might add.

More on Einstein? More on Einstein? Little kids in a class for slow learners thought they were going to die if they didn't get to go do research on a famous physicist? Right now, no less? When faced with choosing between the fame of being in the newspaper and with getting to the library, the potential honor and fame lost? Hands down?

I wrapped up in short order (who am I to argue with miracles?) and the teacher dismissed the kids to go to the library and I had to duck between desks to not get knocked down. Outside, their chaperone kept yelling "Don't run!" but it was a losing battle on her end. The kids would dutifully slow down for a step or two or three or five or six, then shoot off again. All because a patient and considerate writer took the time to explain to a bunch of kids she'd never met that something about E.T.'s looks was based on Alfred Einstein, and from there Einstein had captured their imagination.

I don't know who wound up with that letter. I hope it's framed somewhere, or, better yet, kept lovingly in someone's drawer and brought out now and then for a tender rereading. It set some kids on fire, and in a very good way.

There's something else, too, that's stuck with me all these years. It's a bit hard to explain. It's not just that the kids were suddenly, for perhaps the first time in their lives, excited about learning and passionate about reading. Something about how they held themselves, something about their expressions, made me think about little kids in a wedding party, wearing wonderful, new, stiff, special clothes they weren't used to -- but with these kids it wasn't the clothes.

I remember sitting in my car for a long time trying to pin down what it was about those kids that was so astonishing besides their love of Einstein. I finally decided that what I'd seen was a whole group of kids who were proud of themselves, and not used to it. They were wearing a self-respect that was alien to them. They liked it, but there was no question they weren't used to themselves like that.

You did good, Melissa Mathison. Thanks.

At the time, I thought I'd like to try to track the kids down a decade or two later and see if the fire had stayed lit. But, later, when the decade came around, I found I couldn't do it. Or didn't want to. It would have broken my heart, I decided, if the kids had slid back into thinking of themselves as dummies. I invoked the "don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answers to" rule, and hoped for the best. I still do.

Sometimes, though, I wish I'd followed up. I can't help but think at least a few of the kids from that class kept that fire alive. It would have been a good story.

More to the point, now that I'm older I can't help but wonder if, had there been some falling away, that perhaps I could have done some good by sticking in my own words of encouragement, my own reminder of that day when all that mattered was getting to the library as soon as possible.

See the test for yourself

Via Betsy's Page, here's where you can go to take that civics and history quiz that's behind the recent headlines bemoaning what college students know about America.

Betsy has some quibbles about the quiz, and so do I (on the whole my quibbles are different from hers, by the way), but I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how fair a job the quizmakers did when setting up this survey.

If you're wondering, I got 52 right out of 60, which put me well ahead of the average so far for September, but well behind what I was aiming for.

Knowing and teaching...

... aren't quite the same things:

She knows that there is a step-by-step pattern, and she is aware that the larger part of the equestrian world understands it and communicates with it, but she cannot.

She can accomplish the tasks, she spent six years of sweaty, grimy, painful work acclimating her body to a culture that was quite foreign to her in the beginning.

She has absorbed the culture. She can mount the horse and perform the tasks without even thinking about them.

But that's the trouble, she can't think about them. Her body has learned the language, but the brain has not. It sort of happened by osmosis.

A student can ask her "How do you such and such?" and The Equuschick's response is "I actually have no idea."

Hence the closed eyes, the muttering, and the careful step-by-step parade across the arena.

OK, be honest here. If you're over the age of, say, seven, haven't you been in a similar situation, where you have learned something so well it's second nature to you, and therefore, especially at first, it's almost impossible to teach it to someone else? Haven't you been reduced to saying, "I don't know, I just do it," or "You add enough flour until the dough just feels right," or something else along those lines that's truthful but of precious little use to the person listening to you, if they don't already know what you're talking about?

Been there.

On the other hand, a point Equuschick makes at the end of her post is a good one. Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach. My husband likes to have his seasoned employees train the new employees, at least for part of the job. Sometimes it's even money which one learns more, the rookie or the pro.

Read the whole post here.

A face to go with the blog

A couple weeks ago or so I met someone who knows me through business, and through this blog, but whom I'd never met in person. I found I'd somehow built up a radically wrong picture of him in my mind. He didn't say how much I matched or differed from his guesses about how I looked, but he did say it was nice to finally have a face to go with the blog.

I'm dragging my feet on sharing my mug with the whole world, but Phil at Brandywine Books has dropped the curtain, and mugs shamelessly for this post.

Assuming that's really Phil, I have to admit I blinked. Not at all what I had in my head. Not that I had a clear image in my head, but whatever I had, I was mistaken. For one thing, somehow I thought he was older...

On the other hand...

... sometimes an innovative bit of Christian theater can be respectful in its own way.

If I describe it as something along the lines of hand theater in black light, I hope that doesn't keep you from clicking through. The kids are pretty good, I think.

Solempne

C.S. Lewis - and others - on solemnity, or, more precisely, the older, richer, related solempne.

To which I say, amen.

"25 Skills Every Man Should Know: The List"

Via Peter Lawler, Popular Mechanics is discussing practical skills in this perhaps over-techno age. See 25 Skills Every Man Should Know: The List, Ready for Your Debate for more.

Feminists, you are invited to kindly stop gnashing your teeth. Nobody's saying we ladies can't learn these things. They're just noting that a lot of men these days haven't learned how to build or fix things or deal with emergency situations. And that can't be good, as far as I'm concerned.

Mrs. Judson's white-and-wheat pancakes

Since "whole wheat" breads, etc., taste bad to me, but at the same time I don't think using just white flour is all that healthy, I've had to adjust most cookbook recipes, or make up my own recipes altogether when it comes to breads and noodles and that sort of thing. (Somewhat-whole-wheat cooking hasn't been properly discovered yet, or something.)

After reading an aside in an old cookbook to the effect that it had been discovered decades before that sourdough starter wasn't needed for a foamy pancake batter - that plain old lemon juice would do in its stead - I dumped my sourdough starter (it was a bit too much like having a fussy pet, when it came right down to it - a pet that smelled, no less), and started in on devising my own faux sourdough, somewhat-whole-wheat pancakes. After a bit of experimenting, I came up with the following.

Right off the start I'd like to note that these do not have the tang associated with sourdough. They don't even have the tang I expected from the lemon juice. But they are airy and tasty, all the same.

Mix together: 3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup whole wheat all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons sugar.

Add: 2 tablespoons cooking oil, 1 beaten egg, 1/4 cup milk, and 1/4 cup water.

Mix until smooth, and then add water a little at a time until you have the batter as thin as you like. (As a rule of thumb: the thinner the batter the thinner the pancakes will be.)

Stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Let sit a minute or two to get foamy.

Pour by scant quarter cups - or whatever size you like - onto preheated fry pans or on a griddle. On my stove, a setting halfway between medium-low and medium works best. Cook until edges are dry and center is riddled with air holes, then turn over and cook the other side.

If you aren't used to cooking pancakes, don't worry if it takes a bit of practice to learn how to get them just the shade of brown you want. There's an old saying in cooking that the first pancakes of any batch are never as good as the ones that come after. It's all a matter of learning how the pan's heated up this time, and of course no two batters are exactly the same, and the weather might possibly be a factor, and...

Here, now, if you're a novice, don't let me scare you off. Making pretty good pancakes is relatively easy, with just a bit of experience. Making gorgeous pancakes, on the other hand, is where a bit of finesse comes into play, as well as a willingness to experiment a little. (Is that why so many men like to cook pancakes? I wonder... At any rate, it's the sort of cooking that rewards someone who develops a knack for it.)

I use nonstick frying pans, usually two at a time so I can keep the cakes coming. If you don't use nonstick, you might have to use more oil in the recipe, or else grease the pans. This last go-around I used olive oil, and we decided we liked it better than the veggie oil I'd used before. But we liked it with the veggie oil, too.

Added: Most cookbooks suggest cooking pancakes at high heat. My pans aren't supposed to be used at high heat, and I get fine results at the lower setting - but you might want to experiment with the higher heat, depending on your set-up.

The "Forgotten Man" in American politics

Pop quiz question #1: When Yale professor William Graham Sumner introduced the concept of "the forgotten man" decades before Roosevelt's New Deal, what did he mean by it?

Pop quiz question #2: When FDR first used it, what did he mean by it?

Pop quiz question #3: Why does it matter - enormously - that FDR twisted the meaning to his own advantage while he was in office?

Answers are in the text of "The Legacy of the 1936 Election," by Amity Shlaes, adapted from a lecture given in July, and printed in the September 2007 Imprimis. Shlaes is, among other things, the author of the bestselling history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man.

The unexpected in Ramadi

Via Bookworm, news from Michael J. Totten, reporting from Iraq, from what used to be called the worst city on Earth (for very good reasons).

The post is well worth a read. It's longish, but I urge you to read it all, or you won't get the balanced picture.

A devoted outdoorsman

I am not a "fishing widow," but I've known of a few. This about takes the cake in the stories I've heard, though:

"Likes" to fish is a gross understatement. "Lives" might be a more appropriate substitute. On their honeymoon, Grandpa Ed bought Grandma Ruby a bunch of peaches and went fishing with a friend, leaving her to can all of the peaches. Grandma always laughs a little when she tells the story. Grandpa doesn't like that story all too much. Maybe if he'd known he'd be hearing about it for the rest of his life he'd have stayed and helped can peaches.

In that case, Grandma Ruby would probably have never heard the end of it, at a guess. 'On our honeymoon I had to help the little lady can peaches. Can you beat that?' Heh.

Changing to a semi-new subject, this evening I heard that the family of an old man who died a few days ago is requesting that anyone who comes to the funeral show up in cammo clothes. That would be hunter's cammo, as I understand it. No, I've never heard of that sort of request being made before now. It's certainly got the grapevine hopping. Some of the grapevine has it that cammo is required at the funeral. I haven't heard the radio report yet (around here, you find out about funerals by listening to the radio news), so I can't tell you what the official line is.

I've long since given up trying to understand this sort of thing. Avid hunters and fishermen have different quirks than I do, that's all there is to it, I guess.

Update: I caught the radio news. The funeral is at the cemetery, and the family is asking that those attending wear cammo clothes if possible.

Book note: The World Made New, by Marc Aronson and John W. Glenn

I will admit to a certain fascination with The Age of Exploration. Suzanne Temple is recommending a new book on the subject, which looks at how the events that followed Columbus's voyage changed the entire world.

Closed circuit for the folks who work at our bookstore: If anybody trades one of these in, I have dibs. OK? Pretty please?

Book note: The Women Who Raised Me, by Victoria Rowell

Living the Life will be featuring actress Victoria Rowell on Thursday, discussing her memoirs, in which she pays tribute to women who helped her during a childhood spent entirely within the foster care system.

The publisher's page on the book is here. A website dedicated to the book is here. A press release about the book is here.

Oh, good. When was the last time you heard anything positive about the foster care system?

(And, no, I don't know why the book is all about the women who helped her, instead of the men and women who helped her. But I doubt that Living the Life would have her on if the book wasn't inspiring, so I'm cutting some slack on that account, with apologies to the men who are kind enough to read this blog. If you've read this blog long, you know I'm huge on the value of daddies.)

Narrowing the idea of healthy

When kindergarten teachers forget who the Mom is, you get... The Food Police Go to Kindergarten.

Admittedly, some mothers are smarter about nutrition than others. But whatever happened to discreetly working one on one with a mother who is flunking in the food department, and leaving everyone else alone? Isn't diversity supposed to be good?

Besides, has swapping and sharing been abolished? (I suppose it might be. The Food Police seem to like to oversee everything...) I seem to remember that as kids we sometimes helped out kids who didn't have enough. As in, "Oh, look, here's an extra apple in my lunch bag. How did that happen? Do you want it? Otherwise I'll just have to lug it home again..." You know, stuff like that. Teachers used to approve of behavior like that, or, at the least, turn a blind eye to it. Why have they become so fussy and prissy and nosy?

OK. OK. Not all of them have. But it sure seems to be a trend... (And, OK, my fifth grade teacher was a rabid spoilsport on playground patrol. She freaked out easily, and seemed to be obsessed with the idea that a girl might get hurt on her watch - something which must be prevented at all costs, apparently, by the implementing of drastic preventive measures, such as a blanket prohibition of boys playing with girls. We thumbed our noses at that rule. Regularly. With malice aforethought. We despised her, the only teacher I remember despising, but I digress...)

Do you ever get the feeling that somehow most of the people who would have been bothersome old maids making life miserable for their immediate neighbors in eras past, have somehow drifted into positions of authority in our day and age, thereby expanding the reach of their humorless tyranny as far as possible? Sometimes I wonder.

Not that I mean that the kindergarten teachers in this case necessarily fall into that category. I'm just saying that so much of what passes for "liberal" causes these days sure seems like busybody old women who can't get along with anybody and blame it on other people not being as good as they should (by their definitions, of course). To be fair, a lot of Republicans in positions of authority seem to be doing good imitations of snippy old maids, too. Sigh. Does having power do that to people, or do people like that set their sights on those positions? Am I asking a chicken or the egg question here? Oh, never mind. I'm not sure I'm up to this sort of discussion today.

On a side note, this talk about food and school makes me think of the Japanese book Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window (available in English translation). Totto-chan's headmaster solved the problem of getting mothers to pack nutritious meals by asking them to try to remember to arrange for their child to have "something from the ocean and something from the hills" in addition to their rice. This made sure the children always had a combination of things to eat, and it also let him turn mealtime into educational time, because he'd quiz children about where their food came from. His wife would go around serving fish out of an "ocean" saucepan and potatoes out of a "hills" saucepan to anyone who had come up short that day. It was a simple system and they had fun with it.

Totto-chan broke sales records in Japan, has been translated into several language, and is still in print here in the United States. I suspect it - along with other work by the author, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi - has had more influence than some people would guess. Wikipedia has an article on the book here.

Another silly study taken too seriously

So, have you been hearing that a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience somehow proves that 'liberals' are smarter and more adaptable than 'conservatives'?

You might want to read Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine to see what the study actually tested and how it was carried out.

How people expect non-scientists to take science seriously when junk like this gets traction in the press is beyond me.

By the by, I put 'liberals' and 'conservatives' in single quotes in part because these days it seems to me that more 'liberals' are big on punishing people who don't march in lockstep as per their assigned group identity, and more 'conservatives' are in the freedom-loving, countercultural role. At any rate, the current use of the words doesn't match the traditional meanings of the words at all. (If you feel up to a lengthy, scholarly explanation, you might want to check out What Is Classical Liberalism?, by John C. Goodman, December 20, 2005, NCPA website, for starters.)

Finally, this might be related to the issue discussed in the Saletan article: Most science studies appear to be tainted by sloppy analysis, Daily Policy Digest, NCPA Idea House, Sept. 18, 2007.

A tribute to JR Salzman

Gateway Pundit has a tribute to JR Salzman, a former ESPN Outdoor Sportsman of the Year who is coming back strong after losing part of an arm in Iraq. These days, Salzman is a college student majoring in technology education.

See also: ESPN article on Salzman right after he was injured. (World champion logroller, ESPY winner Salzman loses arm in combat, Sam Eifling, ESPNOutdoors.com — Dec. 27, 2006)