Saturday, December 21, 2013

Back to the Sublime: "Beauty and Atrocity" all the Time...

Lately, I've been telling my students to try to find a focus or theme for their blogs, and I've noticed that over the course of the last couple months, my focus has shifted a bit. In the beginning, I thought that I'd be writing a bit more about the concept of the Sublime, but other things quickly came to the fore, and I drifted away from that topic. Well, I shouldn't have worried about my inconsistency, because I'm coming back to the Sublime today.
This young tree might survive its trunk-bending
burden of heavy snow...
In my post on Snow Days, I recommended taking walks in wooded parks and along Duluth's many trails.  Today, on the Winter Solstice, I took a very brief walk along a part of the Tischer Creek Trail, between Second St and Fourth St. The trail hadn't been used much since the big snows, and I knew I wouldn't get far because of that, but I just wanted to pop into the woods for a bit, to see what the place looked like. I was expecting the quiet, peaceful beauty of a Robert Frost poem... 
June 21, 2012, Tischer Creek

I grew up walking along Tischer Creek--I know that trail like the back of my hand. I can walk it in my imagination, and sometimes I do that when I can't sleep. Of course, the trail I walk in my imagination is the pre-flood trail...

The Summer Solstice Flood of 2012 tore Tischer Creek to shreds, and it hasn't recovered or been repaired. Ever since the flood, I've avoided Tischer because it breaks my heart to see the damage. I've always thought Tischer was one of the city's most beautiful streams, but it'll never again look the way it used to... Yet, when the snow falls, it covers the wounds, softens the scars, and I can pretend the landscape matches my memory of it.


Tischer Creek, a year or two before the flood
One of the loveliest spots along the trail is a big rock outcropping just below one of the waterfalls. When you stand on those rocks, you can look up at the falls, and on the other side of the stream, growing right out of the rock-face, is a huge White Pine (and of course I can't find a photo of it!). Its roots grip the rocks, and it towers above you, leaning out over the stream. 

Every year I've been alive, the sharpness of that angle has increased. The stream is so narrow, the pine is so tall, and its angle so acute (I hope I'm using the language of geometry correctly here), that I used to think eventually the tree would lean over far enough for me to reach the branches...


Death of an old friend


I was able to touch the old pine's branches today, because it toppled over, probably during the big blizzard. The weight of all that snow was too much for it, and it snapped at the base, falling across the Creek and crushing the trees on the other side of the stream.  

While I was gleefully gloating over our three snow days, this was happening. My heart sank as I got close enough to see where the top of the pine had crashed through other trees, pulling them down with it. How could something so tall, and strong, and old, and beautiful be brought down by snowflakes?! 

I was immediately reminded of other sublimely sudden, severe, and awe-inspiring changes in our landscape over the last several years:  all the damage from the 2012 flood, of course, especially the damage to Jay Cooke State Park, and the collapse of the sea arch at Tettegouche State Park in 2010

Before the fall...

After the fall...
Change, of course, is the only constant, as the physicists say, and one cannot live long at all without experiencing all kinds of loss. Maybe that's one reason I take so many photos. It's a way of preserving things that might seem permanent, like rocks, but are always, in fact, changing.  

As I turned around to head back to my car, parked on Fourth St, I heard a crow cawing. It was quickly joined by several others, all squawking loudly. They were massing in a tree across the stream. The last time I heard a ruckus like that on this trail was back in February of 2010, when I happened upon a Great Horned Owl sitting calmly in a (different!) pine tree while a group of crows harrassed it. (Let's see who's paying attention:  1 extra credit point to the first member of the class of 2014 who knows what you call a group of crows--put your answer in a comment.)
Crows in the distance


I stood there, looking up at the owl for about twenty minutes, while the crows tried to make it move, but it just sat there, unconcerned, unflappable, calm in the midst of chaos. I admired the owl's ability to stand firm and ignore the craziness around it.  Perhaps these crows today were also mobbing an imperturbable owl, but they were too far away, and I couldn't identify the cause of their frenzy.  
So much heavy snow

In spite of all their noise and my sadness over the fallen pine, I was still able to appreciate how lovely the woods were, but I no longer felt like I was walking through a pretty little poem. Every branch of every tree was still dangerously weighed down with its beautiful but deadly burden, weeks after the big storm.  

As I reached my car, I wondered how many other trees will fall under the weight of winter, which officially begins tonight? How many other ancient stones will come tumbling down before the year is out? How much of the beauty around me will soon exist only in memory, only in photographs? In the midst of future chaos, can I remain calm like the owl, untouched by the whirlwind of change?    



Thursday, December 19, 2013

Poetry Out Loud: An Exercise in Developing Grit

For the third year in a row, Marshall School is participating in the National Poetry Out Loud program. (Thanks to Mr Johnson for getting us involved!) All the Upper School English teachers conduct a classroom contest in which students perform their poems and earn a score based on guidelines set by The Poetry Foundation. The winners of each classroom contest (who may or may not be the top-scoring performers--more about that later) move on to the Upper School contest, and the winner of that contest goes to the Regional contest.  

The students must choose their poems from an approved list. They practice reciting from memory in front of friends and family members, and occasionally you can hear them reciting as they walk through the halls. Usually, we spend some time in class, practicing and working on these poems, but this year, because of our (awesome three-day stretch of) snow days, I sacrificed our practice sessions and left the kids to work on their poems on their own.  In years past, I've had seniors visit Middle School classes to practice performing their poems--I regret that I didn't have time for that this year (that might be my only regret about the snow days!).

It's not easy, getting up in front of your peers to recite a poem; after all, you might have to show some emotion! And it's scary because you might suddenly forget a poem you've been obsessively memorizing for weeks. You might even experience the supreme awkwardness of being stared at while you pause, panic, and wish desperately to plunge into an abyss! You can't just give up and quit--somehow, you have to get to the end of the poem. 

And no matter how you performed, no matter how painful the experience might have been, you're stronger for having gotten there. These days, lots of folks think that grit is the key to success.  I think they're probably right.  (Make sure you click on those two links:  one is a really long but really good article, and the other is a really good and shorter article that includes a video and a test you can take.)  There's even a poem about grit on the POL list.

That's why this experience is so good for our students! In the process, some of them find they have talents they didn't know they had. Others discover they can conquer their fears.  Perhaps a few even realize they actually like poetry. And, yes, I know some students dread POL and feel an enormous sense of relief when it's over. But I'm betting that someday they'll look back on this moment and feel a bit nostalgic about it...

This year, the contestants from my classes will be Meggan G, Jake K, Clara E, and Sunny W. You can watch their classroom performances in the video playlist below, along with some of the runners-up (except for Jake--we had technical difficulties!).  

Some of these folks had the highest score in their class; some of them didn't. When I decide who should go on to the US contest, I take a number of factors into consideration, and the score is just one of them. I also consider who competed last year, who could benefit the most from participating, and who might grow the most as a result of tackling this test of character... Sometimes, I take a chance on someone who might never expect to be chosen. Sometimes, I ask (or nudge, badger, push, bribe, beg, emotionally blackmail, plead with) kids to step out of their comfort zone.  Sometimes, they take me up on my offer; sometimes, they don't.

I hope everyone will attend the Upper School contest here at Marshall on the evening of January 8. A few local poets (one of them a former Marshall English teacher) will serve as the judges, and they will assess the performances they witness that evening according to the criteria provided by The Poetry Foundation. I'll be very excited to see who wins--but what I really care about, and what I'm most proud of, are the largely invisible, inner struggles that lead up to that moment.  


Sunday, December 15, 2013

No, Really, It's All About Lunch, I Mean, the Birds...

The reason I made the Lentil Salad yesterday is because two of my friends, former Marshall teacher Ms Hermes (Biology) and current Marshall teacher Ms Ball (English & Social Studies) invited me to accompany them as they participated in the National Audubon Society's 114th annual Christmas Bird Count.  

The CBC is an important exercise in what's called "citizen science." 
Ms Ball, looking for birds.
Ordinary folks help collect data and send it to scientists, who then analyze it.  About this time each year, "bird nerds," as Ms Hermes calls them, drive, walk, ski, etc, through a designated territory and count how many and what kind of birds they see.  They send this information to the person who coordinates the Count in their area, and in our part of the world, that person is former Marshall teacher Mr Larry Weber (Science).  He sends the information to the National Audubon Society.  


Ms Hermes and Ms Ball have been doing this for many years (not quite 114, but probably pretty close), and I've heard them talk about it many times, but this year, they asked if I wanted to come with, and I said yes.  I also offered to drive, and as we knew it would be cold and snowy and as I have an all-wheel-drive vehicle (with heated seats), they took me up on my offer.  Ms Ball also told me to "start thinking about what you'll bring for lunch." Apparently, a VERY important part of the day's meandering journey through Carlton County involves stopping in Jay Cooke State Park for lunch, with everyone bringing something to share.  I guess each year somebody brings garlic-stuffed olives.  I thought the Lentil Salad would go well with the olives.  

Anyway, we left Duluth around 9 am and headed for Jay Cooke, stopping off here and there at various places where birds are known to congregate.  
Ms Hermes uses her spotting scope to check for
waterfowl in the distance.
We paid special attention to feed stores, areas near open water, and houses with large collections of bird feeders.  Often, we would park somewhere and just wait and watch.  Ms Hermes and Ms Ball were both well-supplied with binoculars and bird identification books, though they seemed not to need the books.  They're both very familiar with the kinds of birds one sees around here, and they can identify them sometimes simply by their flight patterns.  I don't know the names of very many birds, so I was rather impressed.  


We saw lots of Chickadees, Crows, and Pigeons (which are technically known as "Rock Doves," or so I am informed).  House Sparrows and Red-Breasted Nuthatches also made an appearance.  The sight of two Mourning Doves (one of my favorite birds) was the highlight of the day, as they're not often seen at this time of year.  (As far as other wildlife goes, we saw lots of red squirrels and a couple of deer.)

As we got closer to the State Park, I drove very, very slowly through the residential areas nearby, and I wondered what we must have looked like--three middle-aged women driving slowly through the neighborhoods of Carlton, two of them peering through binoculars, the car stopping now and then, unexpectedly for no easily-discernible reason.  I joked at one point that we might be mistaken for house-breakers, casing our next job, or private investigators, spying on the cheating spouses of our clients.  

When we entered the Park, it was very nearly empty.  Ms Ball and Ms Hermes spent a little time in the Park Headquarters buying Christmas gifts for assorted relatives of the juvenile variety, and then we walked over to the River Inn Interpretive Center for lunch.  We found another couple of bird nerds in the Center.  Emily and Drew were also out bird-counting, and they were both acquainted with Mr Weber.  
Focaccia bread, made by Ms Ball, garlic-stuffed green olives, black olives, pickled roasted red peppers,
hummus, Mozzarella, apple-lemon-ginger jelly, Nutella, chocolate-covered dried cherries, my Lentil
Salad, and three kinds of cookies (Mexican, German, and Italian).
They ended up sharing our lunch, for we had an awful lot of food with us.  (Emily asked me if the salad was a variation on tabbouleh, which made me very happy, and while everybody liked the mint, some of us thought the salad needed a bit more zip, some chili peppers, perhaps.)
Ms Ball, playing with her food.


After lunch, we drove into the Campground, parked, and walked around for a bit, looking and listening for birds.  Ms Ball and Ms Hermes started making an odd noise, which they wanted me to make, too, as they claimed it was a call for Chickadees.  It sounded like they were saying "Pish, pish, pish." And, indeed, it worked, because in just a few seconds there were a half dozen Chickadees gathering in the branches of nearby trees.  Apparently, pishing is a real thing.  
Ms Hermes, playing with her food.
Ms Hermes told me to look it up, and I did.  


I tried to take some photos of the Chickadees, but it was very cold, and very bright, and the birds didn't show up well in any of the photos I managed to take. The Park was very beautiful, though, with all the snow, and it was a lovely day (despite the fact that it only got a couple degrees above zero).  I think now that I've gone bird-counting with them, they will have to come orchid-hunting with me in the Spring...  
Birdfeeders at Jay Cooke State Park.
Note:  If I've made any mistakes, or misrepresented the events of the day, I hope Ms Ball and/or Ms Hermes will correct me with a comment.


Saturday, December 14, 2013

How to Make a Lentil Salad (& an Infographic About Salads, Too)

The seed pod of the Showy Slipper on
Munger Trail, taken two weeks ago
Cold winter weekends are my favorite time for cooking.  Spring's a long way off, and I can hardly remember what it feels like to be on the Munger Trail early in the morning, hoping to take a few good shots before the strong midday light bleaches the color from the wildflowers... So, when the temperature dips below zero, one must find other sources of beauty and other occupations.  Cooking is a good one.  (See what I did there, children?  --I'm using my main topic as a transition into other topics I love... You can do that, too.)  


1 cup of French green lentils, simmering with Bay leaf,
cinnamon, turmeric, and cayenne
Today, I'm making a lentil salad that I'll be sharing with friends tomorrow.  If there's any left over, it will be my lunch next week.  Lentils are a tasty, quick-cooking, and fairly cheap source of protein, iron, and fiber; I cook with them quite a bit.  They're great in soups but also good in salads.  

I'm a good cook, but not a good baker.  Cooking and baking and two very different enterprises.  (It's not a coincidence that my famous chocolate pie is a no-bake pie.) Baking is a science, and it requires that one stick to a formula recipe; a spontaneous substitution might result in an imbalanced equation a flat cake.  Cooking, however, is an art, a bit like interpretive dance, and it usually rewards intuition and creativity.  In fact, I never follow any recipe exactly, down to the letter, and I rarely measure anything.  I think of recipes the way I think of literature--as an excuse for concocting an interesting interpretation...


1 cup of Wild Rice, soaked
and drained, ready to be
cooked
The kind of salad I'm making is meant to be a full meal all by itself.  Along with the lentils, I'm adding wild rice from the Co-op.  I'm pretty sure they get it from the Leech Lake Reservation, and it's harvested and processed in the traditional way.  It's beautiful, with its long grains and its smoky fragrance, and it's also very nutritious.  (It's also very expensive, so I don't buy it often, but I much prefer it over the cheaper, commercially-grown and industrially-processed tame "wild" rice that comes from California.)   
1 head of cauliflower, roasted at 400 degrees

The other main component of the salad is roasted cauliflower. Cauliflower is bland and boring, until you break it up into little florets, drizzle it with olive oil, sprinkle it with sea salt, and roast it in the oven until it's beautifully browned and crispy. Roasting intensifies and sweetens the flavor because the sugars in the vegetable carmelize.  Try it sometime!  

Now, for the interesting bits!  While the white cauliflower provides some contrast for the brown and gray colors of the lentils and rice, a good salad needs color!  
1 bunch of fresh mint
It also needs some zippy flavors.  For color and bright sweetness, I add chopped red bell pepper, shredded carrots, and chopped mint leaves.  If you've never used mint in a salad, you should try it--it's fantastic!  I could have added any number of other herbs (like dill or parsley) and vegetables (like radish or cucumber), or even fruits (like grapes or pineapple).  The possibilities are endless.  The key is to add different colors, flavors, and textures.  (I thought about adding some chopped pecans or sliced almonds, but if you add too many ingredients to a salad like this, the flavors get lost in the crowd.)  


I like to make my own dressings, and this one is just a bit more complicated than the typical oil-and-vinegar mix.  
Half a red onion and a handful of golden raisins
in Meyer lemon juice
First, I chop up half a red onion and soak the bits in the juice of three Meyer lemons.  Meyer lemons are a cross between ordinary lemons and Mandarin oranges, so they're a good bit sweeter than plain lemons.  I add the zest of the lemons and some golden raisins, and then let the mixture sit while I cook the lentils and rice.  As the onions soak in the lemon juice, they lose some of their bite, and of course the raisins soften and plump up as they absorb some of the juice.  Next, I melt some butter (yep, I'm a bad vegan these days--I've been using a little butter now and then), and add some freshly ground cardamom seeds, black mustard seeds, and cumin seeds to it.  I let the spices simmer in the butter for a while to release their flavors, and then I add the spice/butter mix to the onion/lemon mix.  Then, I pour that over the salad and mix it up well. 

Finished salad!

Tomorrow, I'll find out if my friends like it! If you know much about classic salad recipes, you might recognize this as a variation on tabbouleh, (pronounced ta-BOO-lee) a Middle Eastern salad that became a staple of American vegetarian cooking back in the 1960's.  The very first vegetarian dish I ever made was tabbouleh.  I've been making it, and variations of it, ever since.  It's simple, easy, nutritious, and if you don't include too much liquid, it keeps for a full week. 

I've put my thoughts about designing variations on tabbouleh into
I made this with venngage.com
an infographic (which is just a new-fangled word for diagram, graph, or chart).  I used venngage.com to make mine, but there are lots of free web-tools out there for making infographics.  Almost all the seniors will be making infographics in the coming weeks as the semester winds down.  Perhaps some of those infographics will show up on their blogs...






Wednesday, December 4, 2013

One Thing Leads to Another, Part Four

Blogging is a great way to share what you love with the world.  Some of you are beginning, just beginning, to do that with your independent posts.  And some of you aren't quite there yet...  I want you to really OWN these blogs and make them truly yours.  I've certainly done that with mine.  
My 'chids live inside a small pop-up greenhouse in the winter
when the indoor humidity is low.  A couple grow-bulbs in a
floor lamp provide light during these dark winter days, & a
seedling germination heating pad underneath provides some
warmth.  Queen Vic has a bud (her 4th) beginning to open. 
You can tell within a couple seconds of scanning my blog that I love orchids, Lady Slippers in particular.  What do you love?  I want to be able to tell, immediately.  


Ok, so everybody loves a lot of things.  I do, too.  But think deeply about your life and all that you love...what could you focus on, here in your blog, that would serve as a lens through which you could write about the other things that are important to you?

Notice how, in so many of my posts, I've used the topic of orchids to write about lots of other things.  I've made lots of connections, and that's the kind of thinking I want you to strive for! 

I really enjoy sharing with others what I know and like about orchids. Photography is one way I can do that. I've always liked taking photos, maybe because I grew up watching my dad take lots of pictures.  

He was an English teacher for many, many years at Central High School, and for a time, he was their yearbook advisor, so he took lots of photos at school events.  He got so interested in photography that he built a darkroom in our basement so he could develop his own photos.  I used to watch him as he moved the photos from one chemical bath to another.  
Only this Moth Orchid, or Phalaenopsis, is blooming right now.
It's the first orchid I bought, & this is its 2nd set of flowers.
I love the contrast of its color against the snow outside.

I've never owned a really good camera.  I do still have a little digital point-and-shoot camera, but I don't use it anymore. And I don't really want to carry around a big, complicated camera, like Mrs Kosmatka and Mr Anderson do (though I admire the really great shots they get with theirs!).  

Getting my first smartphone (an iPhone 5) last year really made taking good photos easier for me.  It especially made it easier for me to take better photos of Lady Slippers when I go out hunting for them.   


Showy Lady Slippers on the Lady Slipper Scenic Byway, July 2013
I post my Lady Slipper pictures on Facebook, and Flickr, and here on my blog, because I want everyone to see how beautiful these flowers are--isn't it amazing that such exotic plants grow right around where we live?  Some months ago, I submitted one of my photos (the one above) to the "photo of the week" feature on the American Orchid Society website.  Soon after, I joined the AOS and subscribed to their magazine, Orchids. About a month ago, I received word that my photo would be featured in the Orchids magazine annual end-of-the-year article that includes a "selection of the best" orchid "photos of the week."  

I was asked to write a brief description of the photo/orchid, which I did, and just the other day, the digital edition of the magazine was released (see screenshot below).  I expect I'll get the hard copy soon; I'm eager to see if an iPhone photo really looks good on the page next to photos that were obviously taken with much more sophisticated cameras. [Update:  On 12/19/13, I received the hard copy, and the photo looks great!] 
AOS Publication Committee. "Orchid Photograph of the Week:  A
Selection of the Best."  Orchids December 2013:  733.
Web.  4 December 2013.


This experience has been a lot of fun, and I plan to submit other photos in the future.  

So, your assignment is to find a focus for your blog, and start writing about it because you love it, not because I tell you to!