Grace in Small Things 192

• peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich
• a lunchbox
• a tankful of gas
• friends who share secret birding spots
• Horned Larks in fields where stubs of last year’s corn stalks poke up through the snow

Taloola Cafe, Windsor, ON

The first time I went into Taloola, which was shortly after moving to Windsor in 2007, I probably spent an hour just gazing around me…at the ruby red chairs, at the deep scarlet Victorian lampshade, at the Victorian chandelier with rainbow beaded fringe, at the bare-breasted ship’s figurehead mounted on the exposed interior brick wall, at the woven area rugs, at the inlaid tables. Oh, my, it’s a feast for the eyes.  Think Moulin Rouge meets Seattle smoothie bar.

Since that time, this Bohemian oasis has become my default stop when I feel like sitting and reading the paper after work while nursing a masala chai latte or pot of Earl Grey. It’s the kind of place where people meet for food or a relaxed game of chess while others sit by themselves reading. On the weekends there is live music.

The menu is no less dazzling than the decor. When you first come in, you can choose the soup, stew and/or sandwich of the day from the little blackboards hanging by the wicket. In the dessert case you will find many gluten-free choices as well as some vegan fare. Opening up the menu, you’ll find their selection includes such things as:

• raw juices (beet, spinach, celery, ginger, apple)
• exotic smoothies, such as the Masala (date syrup, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger) or the Figlioni (yogurt, milk, fig puree, pecans and pure vanilla extract)
• vegan salad dressings
• organic flavour syrups
• buckwheat crepes with mascarpone, basil pesto and/or savoury jelly

The quality and freshness of Taloola’s offerings are consistently excellent as is the service. I especially like the way the chef plates the sandwiches with a beautiful side of raw vegetables and a squirt of mystery dressing that makes me want to lick the plate. How much do I need to bribe someone to get the recipe?

The owner has recently made the cafe wheelchair accessible; call ahead and staff will put the ramp out.

For Taloola Cafe’s hours, address and more info, visit their website: http://www.taloolacafe.com/

Cheers!

Organized

I am no longer in need of medication.

Whereas I was once diagnosed with O.C.D., rituals and compulsions that met several of the DSM IV criteria for this disorder have long since mellowed into mild eccentricities and useful quirks.

I do love to organize!

Closet rainbow

My spices are in alpha order and my clothes are sorted by type and colour, as is my sock drawer. I even like to compartmentalize the icons on my computer desktop by type and frequency of use. (I created the coloured boxes using the Paint applications.)

Desktop Icons Organized

Though it’s been shown that a messy environment helps some people be more creative, I benefit from the sorts of changes a Feng Shui master would make to a home: no baskets of magazines on the floor, nothing stored under the bed, air and energy that can freely flow around things. Zen simple surroundings give me energy and make me feel like I can breathe.

Finishing Sarah’s Key

About a week ago I spotted a trade paperback in the book and magazine sharing area of my building. It was Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. Praise cited on the back cover included the words “it will haunt you, it will help to complete you” and “it’s a book that impresses itself upon one’s heart and soul forever.”

It was a page turner.

The author’s note preceding the first chapter reads: “The characters in this novel are entirely fictitious. But several of the events described are not, especially those that occurred in Occupied France during summer of 1942, and in particular the great Velodrome d’Hiver roundup, which took place on July 16, 1942, in the heart of Paris.”

The story was gripping and will stay with me long after I’ve passed it on to the next reader. What I wasn’t expecting was for a place name to jump out at me: Beaune-la-Rolande.

For three or four nights I was engrossed by the book, hardly able to put it down at bedtime and unable to resist squeezing in one more chapter before work each morning. In fact I would spring out of bed early just to make time for this.

The whole time I was captivated by the story of little Sarah, that name Beaune-la-Rolande kept teasing at the edges of my memory.

I knew where to look.

Five and a half years ago I was dating a man whose father is a survivor of the Holocaust. The father and I became email pals, and he shared with me many documents about his wartime experience. He also shared what he had been able to dig up about the fate of his brother, who had not survived.  The surname was German, and I hadn’t remembered anything about France, to be honest. I think the reason I didn’t remember that part is due to the way the human mind works. To remember something, it helps to put it into a context that makes sense to you. Somehow the complicity of the French government in sending thousands of Jews to their deaths had never made it into my conscious awareness. Yes, I had seen movies in which this part of history was briefly highlighted, but because it hadn’t made sense to me, it hadn’t stuck.

I used control-F to search for the word “Beaune” in the documents. Sure enough, there it was. My friend’s brother was on Convoy 15 which departed for Auschwitz on 5 August of 1942, assembly point Beaune-la-Rolande. That’s the same convoy and same date on which the family in the novel is transported out of France and to the death camps.

After re-reading the documents and emails that had gone back and forth between me and my then-boyfriend’s father, I felt compelled to do an Internet search on the brother.  There is now a Shoa Memorial in Paris on which his name is etched in stone.

Even though reading books like Sarah’s Key or seeing movies about the Shoa/Holocaust is disturbing and hard, I think it is important to remember that humans are capable of such monstrous acts. We especially need to remain aware of how easy it was for so many to turn a blind eye to what was happening right in front of them. This is a part of human nature of which we have to be ever vigilant.

I also think we owe it to the survivors and to the dead not to forget what happened, nor push it from our minds.

Grace in Small Things 191

Bowls and the beaters from the electric hand-held mixer are stacked in the sink.

The entire hallway smells heavenly.

The only thing that can improve on spending an hour baking a buttermilk pie…

is sharing it.

BUTTERMILK PIE

1 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup Bisquick baking mix
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 x 1 1/4″ pie plate.

Mix all ingredients. Beat until smooth. Pour into pie plate. Bake until knife inserted in center comes out clean–approximately 30 minutes. Cool 5 minutes. This tastes great served with a variety of fruit such as kiwi, strawberries, blueberries, etc.

Buttermilk Pie

Fourteen Down,…

…eight to go.

• 50/50 ✔
• The Tree of Life ✔
• Midnight in Paris ✔
• The Help
• Beginners ✔
• Drive ✔
• A Separation ✔
• The Ides of March ✔
• The Muppets ✔
• J. Edgar
• The Artist
• My Week with Marilyn
• The Descendants ✔
• Moneyball
• Hugo
• Young Adult ✔
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ✔
• The Iron Lady ✔
• The Adventures of Tintin ✔
• A Dangerous Method ✔
• We Need to Talk about Kevin
• Albert Nobbs

We have not seen War Horse but do not plan to. Our soft little hearts can’t handle it, even if the horse doesn’t die.

Very Happy Here on the Sofa

Sylvain and I have some catching up to do if we are to see all the Oscar contenders before the big night.  We lost a number of opportunities while my school was closed for two weeks because Sylvain was sick.

Normally he balks at the idea of my seeing one without him since this is something we do together each year, but in the face of my wanting to see three movies this weekend, he chose to let me go ahead to The Iron Lady without him last night. Today we will see The Adventures of Tin Tin followed by A Dangerous Method. That should be an interesting one for someone who has been in and out of therapy much of her life, including over three years with a Jungian analyst. Whee!

As I sit here watching the tiny snow flurries swirl past the window, it occurs to me that there is enough time for a foray to the marina to check for new waterfowl. There’s time to do my laundry. I could buy a newspaper across the street, too.  At some point this weekend, groceries must be bought.

But no.   I’m pretty happy just sitting here in the warmth of my living room inching my way forward in Absolutely Nasty Sudoku, Level 3 book, sipping a cup of the Oolong tea a student gave me and responding to blog posts and emails.

I’m hoping Olivia’s imperfEct approach to 2012 will rub off on me. It’s okay, I tell myself, to let go for one day of this compulsive need to stay on track, on schedule, perfectly on top of my TO DO list.

Grace in Small Things 190

• cotton-candy sunrise in the rear-view mirror
• buttermilk sky to the left
• pale moon over Detroit
• five cars behind me cannot pressure me to go faster;
• there is miracle to inhale

Grace in Small Things 189

Thank you notes.

Duck Mystery Solved

This post has been updated as of Saturday morning, January 7.  Scroll to the very bottom to see the update.

Thanks to the great people who subscribe to ONTBIRDS, I got a lot of suggestions regarding what the mystery duck could be. Here are the suggestions with my answers.

A grebe? No, I know grebes. This duck didn’t have a grebe-like bill and didn’t swim like a grebe, but thank you for helping.

American Black Duck? No, this duck was too small to be an American Black Duck, plus it had a black not yellow bill and was pure glossy black.

Moorhen? No, again wrong bill shape, wrong posture when swimming. But thank you for helping.

Sarah Rupert suggested I look at Muscovies. No, I think Muscovies are bigger and almost always have the red wattles on the bill. This duck had a very pretty little all black bill. But thank you for helping!

A few people suggested a number of Scoters (juvenile, female, White-winged, Black), but I don’t think so. I think Scoters are large and stocky and have a diagnostic shape to the bill. This duck is small, has a dainty feel to it, and its bill is more concave like the bill of a Ring-Necked Duck.

Is this a coot with a black bill? I say no because coots have a distinctive way of swimming; their heads move back and forth. Also the bill has a shape almost like that of a chicken beak, whereas ducks bills are flatter. I got a really good look at the bill and know it wasn’t the shape of a coot’s bill. But thank you for helping! Also I got a look at the duck’s feet when it was on a beam under the docks. It didn’t have coot feet.

Transitional plumage Ruddy Duck or Bufflehead? I think with the transitional phases you still get some white or grey or a splotchy look. I don’t think you would get pure glossy black, however the size and shape are right.  Bufflehead’s call isn’t like what I heard. Ruddy Duck’s call is very different from this duck’s little quacking. Also Ruddy Duck’s bill is a bit different in shape. But thanks for helping!

Finally I got separate suggestions from three people that this is a domestic duck that is bred and kept by fanciers. One variety is the East Indies Black, the standard for which is glossy black plumage and feet “as black as possible.” It is smaller than your average Mallard but can quack like one.  I think this is what I had at the marina yesterday and today. Nothing I can count, unfortunately, but still rather interesting!

UPDATE: Helen Colvin sent me this ~

I don’t want to add to the confusion, but I have kept East Indies ducks and the ones that I had were equal in size to a Mallard if not slightly larger, and more elongated and slim. They tended to have quite a green-ish hue and never looked really black.

One of the posters, Paul Smith, I think, suggested a black “call” duck and from your photo that is what i would think. The Black Calls do have black feet and they are quite small; considerably smaller than a Mallard. They are rather cute, and the females quack a lot and loudly, hence the name “call”. They also have a tendency to fly off and leave their owner’s flock. (I lost one or two that way).

Yes, I apologize to Paul D. Smith, who had already written to say this was a Call Duck. I hadn’t realized that was a different answer from the answers I got about East Indies Black. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of domestic ducks bred by fanciers and all. I have now gone on a website and seen that Call Ducks are available in a pure black “with hints of iridescent green.”  The Call Duck was originally developed as a live decoy and this would explain why the little duck at the marina is so talkative!

For me there were two factors making me realize that Call Duck is the definitive solution to this mystery. One is the size and the other was one very unscientific word that jumped out at me from Helen’s email: “cute!”  This little duck had me thinking to myself, “What ARE you? You are so CUTE.”

Mystery Duck at Lakeview Park Marina

Today was my second day seeing a little duck I cannot identify.  The first time I saw it, my field guide was in the car. So I just studied it until it flew off with the three or four mallards it was associating with. I observed it from very close range and noted that it was black all over, including the bill and eyes. The black plumage was like that of a Grackle, very glossy so that it appeared almost green in the sunlight…except for the black of the chest, which has an iridescent effect showing almost a chestnut in the gloss. I am not saying the bird was any colour but inky black, just that the sun brought out some other colours in the gloss.

After the very noisy bird (cackling or quacking with a quack much like that of a mallard only slightly more diminuitive and quicker) took off with its companions, I looked in the field guide and couldn’t find any duck fitting the traits.  American Black Duck doesn’t look anything like what I saw, and neither do the males or females of anything I could find under dabblers or divers, scoters and so on.

I convinced myself that it must have been the American Coot I’d seen earlier, even though this bird had a duck-like bill and not a coot-like one, and even though the Coot had markings on the bill, where this bird had a black bill. But I know memory and observation in the fallible human brain are strange phenomena, so I just shrugged it off as my mind playing tricks on me.

But today I saw this little duck again and had ample opportunity to study it at great length. It is definitely not the coot. First, it swims like a duck and doesn’t move it’s head like a coot. Next, the bill is most certainly that of a duck. Finally, the bird was kind enough to stand on a beam under the docks to preen, at which point I got to see its black, webbed feet.  I also got to watch it take off yesterday, and it takes off from the water just like the mallards and can keep perfect pace and angle with the mallards in flight formation.

Although I saw no white or grey of any kind when the bird took flight in front of me yesterday, I did see some barely visible white…just the narrowest sliver…in the area that is probably the secondary wing feathers.

The bird follows a group of five or six mallards and looks to be about 20% smaller than they are.  Is this some sort of domestic escape?

Please help if you can. If you are in the area and want to try to take a look, I think you will find the duck at Lakeview Park Marina in the water to the left of the parking area (the side facing Windsor Yacht Club).

Unfortunately I am not a photographer and only had a cell phone camera with me. Every time I tried to take a picture, the duck started swimming away from me, so all the shots are of a retreating duck. This was my best shot, which I cropped and blew up, resulting in very poor picture quality.

Happy New Year!

What are you saying goodbye to?

What are you saying hello to?

Only a Birder Would Stand There Like That

Long underwear.

I came back to the apartment to put on longjohns under my jeans, and to grab my aviator-style winter hat–the one with ear flaps that clasp under my chin. Feeling better prepared for the icy winds off the lake, I went back to the marina with my binoculars and spotting scope.

Every year between late December and late February we get a lot of interesting waterfowl on the waters between Peche Island and the marinas on the Windsor side.

I’m not very good at identifying all the little divers, but I managed to make out Mute Swan, Red-breasted Merganser, Common Merganser, Hooded Merganser, Bufflehead, Canvasback, Mallard, Greater (?) Scaup. While I was peering at the water in front of the rocky shore of Peche Island, a little red fox with a white-tipped tail came out of the woods to take a drink. He walked nimbly across the rocks on little black-stocking feet.

Ring-billed Gulls filled the air on the east side of Lakeview Park Marina, while a few Bonaparte’s preferred the quiet water on the west side. Last week I spied a lone Herring Gull walking around the parking lot trying to swallow an old dried piece of fish-jerky he found on the ground.

My morning visit to the marina was an attempt to shake of the sluggishness that has weighted me down ever since Christmas. I think the lethargy is from all the carbohydrates I’ve been eating.

Each morning I’ve been lazing in bed for too long with my Sudoku puzzle book. Normally I have a cup of tea and wait for a surge of energy before doing anything. This time I decided to do something in hopes it would give me energy. It did.

What Santa Brought Me

I made out pretty well considering I barely celebrate Christmas!

From my brother I got this witty e-card.

One of the students gave me a traditional Karen woven cross-body bags.

Sylvain and I had agreed to exchange one gift each as a compromise. He got me two ceramic frying pans. Since I refuse to use Teflon and couldn’t afford ceramic when I first furnished my kitchen, poor Sylvain has been putting up with broken yolks on his over-easy eggs on Saturday mornings. No more!

Although his breaking the “one gift” rule didn’t surprise me, the Kobo Touch e-reader did. It’s so CUTE! I like the fact that the pages look like real pages with real ink, though for that you sacrifice being able to read in the dark. That’s okay. I love the way I can turn the page by swiping my finger in the same place and direction as I would to turn a page in a real book.

For dinner we were invited to his sister’s house, and she is the most amazing cook, so that was a fantastic treat in itself. (I’m not just saying that because she reads my blog, either.)

Equally exciting was what Sylvain did for me today. He drove me and his sister out to Kingsville to see a Great Grey Owl that had been reported there this week. This boreal species is rarely seen around here, but this seems to be an invasion year…certainly it is for the Snowy Owl.  I knew I might never get another chance in my lifetime to add this species to my life list, and I was becoming whinier with each passing day that we did not set out to try to view it (due to the busy-ness of the holiday).

We found the crowd of photographers and birders easily. What a handsome owl!

Great Grey Owl - Kingsville, ON - December 2011

Once Sylvain and his sister had taken enough photographs of this bird that the Peterson’s guide describes as “very tame,” we set off to try to see Snowy Owls in or around the farmers fields near Point Pelee National Park.

From the narrow dirt roads we did manage to see the white lumps among the dead stalks and remnants from this year’s harvest, but even with the scope we could barely make out the faces of the two snowies.  We have read and agreed to abide by the birder’s code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things: littering, trespassing or harassing stressed birds. And so we did not tramp across the farmer’s land to get a closer look–as some photographers chose to do.

After a washroom stop at the park, Sylvain decided to make one more loop around the fields that had the snowies. A woman approached with a small girl in the car. Had we seen an owl? We pointed out the two white blurs in the distance, one to our left and one to our right. Her shoulders drooped with disappointment.  We drove on up the road to head home. Suddenly Sylvain asked, “What’s that up there?”  He was pointing to the television antenna on the roof of the house we were passing.

“Is it real?” his sister asked.

“It has to be real, it’s moving!”

We jumped out of the car before it was even brought to a halt and turned our binoculars on the gorgeous white owl perched on the wire, haloed by sunshine and blue sky.  I waved to the vehicles back at the fields and soon the mom was pointing out the Snowy Owl to her small daughter. This was actually the most heavily barred of the three Snowy Owls we saw today. The others appeared whiter, at least from a distance.

Snowy Owl - Onion Fields - December 2011

What a great Boxing Day gift!

Word Salad

December marked the end of a term, which means I was busy assessing my students’ levels in all four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. It was quite an undertaking considering that mine is the only multi-level class spanning all the levels. Most classes are limited to a single level, though two of them span two levels and the advanced class lumps the 5, 6 and 7s together in one room.

So I spent an entire weekend creating rubrics for all four skills for seven levels. It nearly killed me. Other teachers are fortunate because in a class full of level four students, it’s easy to spot the slower ones who need to repeat, the ones who are almost ready for the next teacher, and the ones who finish all the assignments early and are bored.  Some of those teachers do not even bother to test (though they are supposed to). Or they use the portfolio method, which I must look into immediately, as it will probably  save me a lot of grief.

In any case, when my results came back, one thing was glaringly clear. In my particular class (though this would not hold true for a class full of Chinese or Russians, as they are usually very strong writers of ESL), listening is the skill that is most likely to be higher than the other three skills. This is followed closely by speaking skills.  Everyone in my class has poorer reading ability than their listening and speaking. But writing? It’s at the very bottom all around. Nobody in my class can write well.

The compositions they wrote for their tests are what I heard one teacher at a recent conference call “word salad.”

Here is a charming example (note that many of them also misunderstood the instructions. Instead of picking ONE of three topic choices, they thought they were supposed to cram all three topics into one composition. The three topics of choice were: 1. the story behind a scar; 2. an emergency involving medical care; 3. the Canadian health care system compared to the one in your first country.

My escar

Was I wark ing it is my fumar/when I cuting. Tree it was tree felt on my leg. injred. aftathat  it bleeding a lot out my leg. becuuse not houseptall my vellge. is to far To town. but I sating HOMe. My self. becaus I cant walking. My conslusion is Canada besste country to my country.

Now comes the question: how can I help them?

I have already told them that in 2012 we are going to focus a lot more on writing since it is their weakest skill.  I just have to figure out how to be effective in this new campaign to turn them into writers.

First off, I can see very clearly that we need to return to the sentence level. Also, I want to start a practice of using a SIMPLE set of proofreading marks so they can correct their own errors. We need to start a habit of checking and revising our writing so that no paragraph is done until we have completed three drafts. I probably won’t torture them with more than that unless I can make the process exciting and fun, which I might be able to do.

For example, maybe I could encourage each student to put in one interesting detail. for the student above who said he was farming one day back in his country when a stick hit him in the leg: what crop was he about to sow? For the student who wrote of falling out of a tree as a boy: what kind of tree was it?

I haven’t found a text book yet that is geared to their level (and at the same time aimed at adults), but one website suggests guiding the compositions with questions. When did it happen? Where were you? What was the weather like that day? What season was it?  I wish I could remember how I learned to write. What tricks did my teachers use?

I think what I’ll do first is hand back these compositions because they have a huge amount of potential to be great stories. I’ll review what makes a solid sentence (subject + transitive verb + object OR subject + BE + subject complement, and so on), give them strips of paper and ask them to pull out as many simple sentences as they can find. We will work each of those sentences: Does it start with a capital letter? Did you put a period at the end? Is the verb in the correct tense? Is there subject-verb agreement?

When they have doctored up their sentences, we can add a few more good ones. I say this because their speaking tests were around the same thing: the story behind a scar. Their verbal reports were detailed, funny and well-structured. The written versions were a mere shadow of that. Where did all the detail go when the medium was the written word? Let’s put it back.

Once we have all the sentences down, we’ll arrange them into beginning, middle, end. We’ll then add a topic sentence, concluding sentence and a title.

I wonder if this will work. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Makes It All Worth While

my dear teachar kelly  i wish you happholiday/season thankyou my best teachar for having A good heart thankyou very much for teashing me fourm your student ali

Update – Eggnog, Snowflakes and Sudoku

There is a carton of eggnog in my refrigerator.

This year I vow not to forget to stock the apartment with enough staples to last me until the stores re-open.

My classroom door won third place in the decorating contest. I can’t share a picture because I printed up life-sized photos of my students’ faces and taped them in the window of the door so that they seemed to be peering out. They were wearing elf hats, some of them.  I covered the rest of the door in blue paper and on top of that taped my famous snowflakes.  These snowflakes are much prettier, I think, than the ones I used to make before I learned how to make six-pointed flakes. The old four-pointed ones looked more like valentines. Oh, I also made a speech bubble saying “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” using a delicate font.

At the end of the week we have a big lesson about the more secular of the Canadian Christmas traditions. All classes will come together in one big room for that. Each class has to teach one part of the lesson. My class is going to explain what elves are. Well, it will be a short skit by two students that goes something like this:

H: Hey, W, why are you wearing that funny hat?

W: I’m an elf!

H: What’s an elf?

W: We are Santa’s little helpers. We live with him at the North Pole and help him make all the toys. We wear green suits with pointy shoes and we have pointy ears, too!

H: I don’t understand.

W: Well, why don’t I just show you. Would you like to see a video of some elves?

H: Oh, yes, I would!

W: Okay then…

At that point we will show the ElfYourself video that we made in computer lab using students’ faces. It’s a pretty funny video since some of my students use canes or scooters, but in the video they are break dancing.  I think it will get everyone in a cheery mood.  If you have never made a video using ElfYourself, I highly recommend it. It’s free and you can send the link to friends and relatives to watch (before it expires on January 15). It costs $5 if you want to download your video to keep for posterity.

The other thing I’ve been busy with is addictively doing one Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 3 puzzle after the other. Although I am a big fan of SudokuSlam for allowing me to turn cells different colours,  I turn to SudokuSolver by Andrew Stuart when I am stuck. Unlike SudokuSlam, it doesn’t stop giving tips at the diabolical level.  I can load any puzzle into his software. Then, with his “take step” feature, I can pinpoint the exact juncture in the flow of logic where I failed to recognize a strategy that I could have employed. I then study up on that strategy so I recognize when to use it next time. So far I am great with hidden singles, naked pairs/triples/quadruples, hidden pairs and triples, pointing pairs, box-line reduction, x-wing, swordfish, Gordonian rectangles and y-wing. I am just now learning how to do xy-chains and haven’t yet figured out Gordonian polygons.

What are YOU doing these days?

P.S. I had an odd dream the other night of a Hanukkah advent calendar. Actually it was a cross between a menorah and an advent calendar.

Peanuts in My Pocket

The mornings are mild for December. I have to be careful as I take the shortcut, though, not to slip on the frosty grass.

One squirrel has figured it out. I’ve been dropping one peanut in the same two spots every morning and afternoon five days per week since August–one by the dumpster and one under the mulberry tree.  One squirrel now waits for me in the mulberry tree. “Hey buddy!” I say, and she or he comes bounding toward me expectantly. I call all squirrels “buddy.”

Two days ago all the squirrels in the area were sitting up high chattering angrily and wouldn’t come down. As I crossed through the alley by the dumpster, I spotted the reason for their agitation: a tabby with its big tomcat head and twitchy tail.

This morning my buddy with the red tufts on his ears wasn’t in the mulberry tree nor by the dumpster; the cat was there instead.

The sparrows are envious. The peanuts are too big for them, though they fly down to investigate each time I toss one out. I don’t always have time to stop, shell a peanut and break it into wee sparrow-beak-sized bits.

Perhaps I will buy some birdseed for the other pocket.

My Floor is Covered in Construction Paper Bits

Although I have not been in this blogging hiatus for very long, already some new projects are receiving more of my time, energy and attention.  Here are some things I’m doing:

• reading How Fiction Works by James Wood
• making a life-sized poster of the human form complete with construction paper internal organs
• contributing to three committees at work: the green committee, the newsletter committee and the “teach teachers how to blog” committee

Differentiating lessons for a multi-level class is time-consuming, but I love doing it. I know I spend three, four, maybe five times longer on lesson planning than do my coworkers, but I choose to.  I am building an arsenal of materials and aids that I can keep forever. Lamination will help preserve them.

Here is a picture of my male body poster. I call him Sam. He will get laminated this weekend.

And here are some students using the little labels to drill each other on the human body vocabulary. I made three colours of body part labels: blue for my literacy student, yellow for the intermediate students and green for the advanced students.  They broke off into homogeneous groups to quiz each other while a T.A. took Carl out for one-on-one work.  Next week I will bring in Sam and Samantha so we can divide into two teams (an equal number of advanced and intermediate students on each team) to stick the labels in the correct places on the posters. I hope it will be a fun game.

The Samantha poster will show the pancreas, kidneys and a few other things not showing on the Sam poster.

We Wish to Interrupt this Regularly Scheduled Program

I wish to interrupt this scheduled break to announce that Sylvain has, after a year and a half, landed a job.  He got the call for an interview just one week after his employment insurance ran out.

I am so proud of him for being willing to enter a new field with all the learning and starting over that entails.  The coolest part is that he and I now both earn our livings at not-for-profit organizations/companies and also both volunteer for non profits.

I am also proud of him for the equanimity he displayed while unemployed. No, he was not immune to the beating one’s self-esteem begins to take as the result of weeks looking and not finding, resume’s sent without calls for interviews and interviews that are not followed by the good news call. Nevertheless, he never stopped saying, “I am not worried. Everything is going to work out in the end.”

He has been offered a job by the one employer he most wanted to work for.

Thank you for all your good thoughts over the past many months.