November 16, 2011
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1 I love my classes.
2 I was absent Monday for personal reasons, and they all missed me, or so they said.
3 I have become somewhat addicted to teaching this year. It isn’t out of personal need, it’s out of necessity.
4 Not a bad thing, mind you.
5 It’s just that I have powerfully high-performers this year. They need not only challenges, but engaging lessons each day.
6 That means more homework, but more homework for me as well.
7 I really didn’t want to be out on Monday, but had to. I know people think it’s easy to teach. And that it must be easy to be absent.
8 <basketball buzzer>
9 When you’re absent, you first have to come up with a lesson that will work in your absence. It usually involves some sort of writing. Writing usually means still more papers to grade, and that’s if the substitute kept all your classes moving along.
10 If I lose even one day, it gets tough to get things back on an even keel, and to keep everything moving as though nothing happened.
11 I was ridiculously nervous going in yesterday because I just didn’t feel that I was on top of my stuff for the first time this year.
12 Fortunately, I knew that getting in there and being fresh and alive was the best counter punch I could offer.
13 The second the bell rang, I felt alert and completely on my game. I’d love to say it was luck, but it was the result of worry and stress. In this profession, you can’t afford to let up for even a second, or the results can become bewildering.
14 Turned out fine; my papers are around a week behind, but my classes went steady to good yesterday.
15 And I’m back in the rhythm, which as I said, can get rocked within a millisecond.
16 I think that one of the toughest parts of teaching is not letting on that you are constanty scared to death. Don’t tell anyone I said that.
17 Oops. Too late. This is a public forum.
18 Moving on, Part the First: At the risk of being boring, I have to follow up on my meatloaf story from yesterday, just so people know I’m not a hack.
19 Remember my riveting story about making meatballs, and then trying to make a meatloaf? And how I mistrusted the meatloaf so much that I wound up having some cole slaw for dinner?
20 Last night I got home, opened the fridge, and lo! The meatloaf had solidified!
21 Not only had it held together, it was absolutely delicious! Impressive! I always love a dinner that tastes better the next day.
22 My fave in that department is when I make cioppino. I can almost match my Mom on that one. It’s another all-day ordeal.
23 Interestingly, my Mom always called it cioppino, even though that’s not really an Italian name. That’s what Californians called it way back when. If I’m not mistaken, I believe it’s originally a SoCal term, which is funny, because I always associated it with Italy and San Francisco.
24 In Italy, by the way, they used to call it simply “seafood stew”. Not as enchanting, but that’s a reality.
25 My Mom also used to absolutely hate the word “pasta”. She said that real Italians refer to noodles by the noodle. Linguini is linguini, spaghetti is spaghetti, and on and on.
26 I used to be a Julia Child fanatic. I still love watching her old shows, because she poured her heart into her recipes. I’m not sure if it was Julia Child who told me, or some other cook, but I remember my own personal prejudice against the word “gravy”.
27 It may have been my favorite cook, James Beard, who also loved butter every bit as much as Julia.
28 Someone, in any case, told me at a young age that real cooks don’t call it gravy. They call it “sauce”.
29 I guess gravy just sounds like something you pour over mashed potatoes.
30 ”Sauce” sounds like a recipe of itself.
31 It’s all semantics, but for a brief time I was a bit of a snob about that one.Gravy sounds like some slop you might see in a soup kitchen; “sauce” was something you would enjoy in a fancy French restaurant.
32 Words, words, words.
33 Nowadays I really don’t care about what it is called, as long it’s good.
34 Moving on, Part 2: For all my talk, you’d think I cook all the time. If anything, because of all the extra time I’ve spent planning lessons this year, I actually miss cooking. I haven’t the time for it, really. I’m coming home and simply can’t afford to mess up the kitchen, eat, and then find time to clean up AND grade things.
35 You’d think I would lose weight, but a lot of dinners become a ton of fresh veggies made into a dip, and then some snack to dip into the dip.
36 I really try hard to get as many fresh vegetables in as possible, but I’m pretty sure the Fritos aren’t doing my body any good.
37 I drink non-fat milk all the time also. But it’s sort of like I eat each night of the week standing up, roaming around, watching sports, and hoping the “meal” will be over soon so that I could worry about school.
38 And then I’m asleep by eight or nine. Seems healthy but I’m sure it isn’t.
39 The nice part is that when I arrive at school in the morning, I’m pretty well-rested and ready to go, each day. That’s reasonably healthy.
40 Anyway, I think I’ll put this DN to bed. Two days in a row of no news is pretty good news.
41 Stay safe.
42 Catch you on the reebz.
43 Peace.
~H~
