I have questions, I have answers.

What would I do without the internet? It's such an integral part of my life. I have so many questions. It has so many answers. Like this morning, in the midst of my preparations for a 3-week cleanse and my course planning for my tutoring job (one of the 4 jobs I've got now), my curiosity and work bring me these directions:

How do I make Turkish coffee? Why, by boiling water in an ibrik and following these simple directions, naturally. (Coffee with cardamom and a little brown sugar is so much nicer than plain when you're drinking it without any cream or milk, and I prefer to keep the spices out of my Moka [where I usually make my coffee] to avoid always having to drink flavored coffee.)*

What are The Chronicles of Prydain about, and would it be appropriate reading for my challenging literature & ESL class of 11-year-old Korean girls, once we've finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

How can I teach that same class about the Vietnam War in a way they'll understand and get something out of it? They had many questions about it as I tried to explain "hippies" and the context for The Bridge to Terabithia. I'm sure Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried would be too sexually sophisticated, Michael Herr's Dispatches too full of vulgarities for this group, who titter at the word "damn" or the word "sex," even in the sense of the distinction between male and female. Yet they're SO BORED by almost everything I bring in, except Harry Potter. I came upon this wonderful article by Peter Filene from 1999 about teaching Vietnam to children of Vietnam war vets & protestors (unfortunately, available in full only through institutional access through JSTOR). But for 11-year-old girls raised with a foot in Korea and a foot in the United States, Filene's observation that for his students, "the war has very different meanings: it is both further away and closer" is true in rather a different sense. Maybe I can take a look at Wanda Miller's book, Teaching U.S. History Through Children's Literature: Post-World War II (Through Children's Literature) to find some more ideas. And maybe the book Teaching U.S. history as mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin may help, too, since it sounds good and sounds like it's got a case-study on Vietnam. Of course, since I'm not paid for prep and this is far from being my primary job, the question remains too exactly how much I can put into this . . .

Could I teach Hesse's The Journey to the East to my group of soon-to-be 6th graders? Am I reaching too far in wanting to teach them Hesse and Thoreau in my anthropologically driven English literature course on nature and survival narratives? (So far we've read Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", and Athabaskan (Alaska native) writer Velma Wallis's Two Old Women, and next up is Jon Krakauer's article "Death of an Innocent" [a shorter version of the story on which his book, and the recently released film "Into the Wild" is based] Maori writer Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider.)

Would a nectarine tree grow in my yard? Hmm, probably not to be hardy or fruiting from a stone of fruit from COSTCO grown who-knows-where. If I spent a bit on a tree, a special cultivar called "Flamin' Fury", probably so.

What should I do with my cabbage from the Howell farmer's market? Why, make raw sauerkraut and linguine with sauteed bacon, onion, cabbage, coarse sea salt, fresh-ground pepper and nutmeg, and garden-fresh tarragon and thyme, inspired by Katrina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking, of course. This is cheating a bit, because I actually found these recipes in the past and have been meaning to make them for some time. Now if only I had a 50-gallon barrel for sauerkraut, instead of the modest brown ceramic crock I found at a garage sale and bought for this purpose (but instead have been using for a year to hold my alliums and potatoes)!

Just when am I going to stop playing and start working on my archaeology paper? Oops, that's one the internet can't answer for me. Perhaps I should go explore the question off-line.

*By the way, though, that recipe above doesn't call for NEARLY enough coffee. Very weak for a Turkish coffee, and I don't think there was even a full cup of water in my pot, since my ibrik is very small, like this one. I think THIS RECIPE looks better; I'm going to try it now, since the food coma is setting in since I ate all the pasta. Mmmm. What a lovely lazy day at home.

Mapping Genetic Variation for Insight into Humanity's History

It's an interesting learning experience, teaching undergraduates about race. Some of them have a really hard time letting go of essentialized thinking about groups, and understanding the quite basic notion that race is a social construction with material consequences, but no biological basis.

The fabulous PBS film Race: The Power of an Illusion helps quite a bit for fueling the discussion, so we showed the third part, The House We Live In, to the sections this time around. Somehow roughly a third of the class still missed the question on the exam asking about the biological basis of race, answering that it's "skin color, hair texture, and nose breadth".

As I continue striving to find a way to communicate these ideas to young people, I get increasingly excited about research that may help to clarify the issues. So the image above caught my eye when I saw it on the U of M homepage today. It's a schematic of human genetic variation, with colors representing different genetic types. If you click on it, you'll get to the article on the research the team has been doing. Pretty amazing, I say.

Little Joys of Teaching

But I didn't tell you the best part about today . . .

I gave my students the end-of-semester evaluations, and thanked them for a lovely semester, and there was that awkward moment of my collecting my things to leave the room. And what did they do? . . . They applauded. :)

About the image above: My mother has been a wonderful elementary school teacher since I was in grade school. Although the level of writing and analysis of our students is obviously different, sometimes I think there isn't actually much difference between our work as educators! Mom has always brought home lots of gifts from her students at the end of every school year, and a Sandra Boynton mug with this picture is one I have drunk coffee out of many times in her kitchen. :) It seems apt for my circumstances now, although to update it for the modern classroom, we'd need to put a cell phone in the paws of the dancing ADHD kitten on the desk, and an iPod earbud in the turkey's ear and a laptop with YouTube showing the latest viral videos on the desktop in front of the lamb.