Brighter Flames Arrayed

Here’s the thing: I love brisket. It’s basically my favorite cut of cow. I also love geese. This is because the town I grew up in is sandwiched between a town that’s known for its brisket and a town that’s known for its roasted geese. And although it’s hard to get roasted geese around here the local co-op always has briskets for sale. It’s hard to make brisket the traditional Southern Chinese way properly lacking the proper spices, the secret recipes and the time to make really good soup stock. Usually that’s compensated for by adding MSG, but since I don’t ever use MSG (except in Japanese curry) that doesn’t quite work. So I’ve been experimenting and trying to figure out other interesting ways to make brisket.

After a year of learning and experimentation I think I’ve finally found the tastiest way to cook brisket in a crock pot and since I need to write it down before I forget what it is I think I should share this with you! The basic idea is that it takes a Jewish recipe (replacing ketchup with a real tomato and real sugar; none of that HFCS stuff goes near my kitchen) for sweet brisket and a collard green recipe from Louisiana, put them together and cook everything using a southern Chinese method. It’s in some ways exceptionally contrived but it works functionally because you get collards and brisket and soup in the same recipe! And it involves Southern food which is always a great idea. I don’t put in too many spices myself but more spices could definitely work with this. Also, the only reason this recipe is for 1/3 to 1/2 of a brisket is because my crock pot is too small for the whole thing. Scale and enjoy! (Note: You may get slightly less enjoyment out of this if you don’t use grass-fed beef, organic vegetables and free range chicken broth like I do because I clearly am raking in the money teaching math and have too much to spend on food.)

Wing’s Brisket and Collard Soup/Couscous

Serves 5 to 6, or 1 for five meals.

Ingredients:
1/3 to 1/2 flat cut brisket
1 large onion
1 tomato
1 bunch of collards
n pieces of bacon (where n is a non-negative real number)
6 cloves garlic
Siracha garlic hot sauce (however much you want)
apple cider vinegar (however much you want)
sugar, salt, ground black pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper
chicken/beef stock
couscous (lots)

Preparation Time: 16 hours, at least…

1 - Cut the garlic cloves into small, but not too small, pieces.

2 - Dice the tomato.

3 - Cut the onion and the collards into 1/2in pieces.

3.14 - If n > 0, fry up the bacon in a cast iron skillet as you’d normally make them. Don’t overcook the bacon! Chopped the bacon up into small pieces. Pour a small bit of the grease into the crock pot if you want to die an early but satisfying death.

4 - Add half the onion and all the tomato into the crock pot. Put some of the salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne powder, and about half the garlic on top of the onion/tomato mixture.

5 - Pour the (bacon and) collards in! Squish them in if there’s no room. Collard greens squish well.

6 - Put the rest of the salt, pepper, etc. and garlic on top of the collards. Add a small amount of Siracha and all the vinegar on top of the collards as well.

7 - Gently place the (part) brisket on top of the whole stack of veggies. Squirt some more Siracha over the brisket.

8 - Pour enough stock and water in (I use a 50/50 mix) to cover everything up.

9 - Turn the crock pot on high and cook for 6 hours.

10 - Add the rest of the onion into the crock pot and cook for at least 2 more hours.

11 - Take the brisket out and store the brisket and the soup in separate containers. Let them cool and then refrigerate overnight.

12 - Take the brisket out and slice it into small pieces.

You can serve the brisket and soup by tossing the brisket back into the soup and then bringing everything to a light boil. It goes well with noodles or rice. But that’s not the best way of serving this…

13 - Place the brisket back in the soup and bring everything to a slow boil. Scoop all the vegetables and brisket and a small amount of soup out. You may also want to save some extra soup because next you’re going to…

14 - Bring the soup to a full rolling boil and use it to cook couscous to go with your vegetables and brisket. You may not need all the soup to cook the amount of couscous you need, so that’s why you want to save what you don’t need. You can also only do steps 13 and 14 in small batches if you’re only cooking one or two servings at a time.

15 - Enjoy!

Wing :: Aug.18.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

1. One of my friends just started a cross-Mongolia journalism project. The goal is that she’ll visit every province in Mongolia on a horse with her camera and computer and it’ll be a crowd-sourced and funded project that is paid for by the Internet for the Internet. It’s pretty ambitious but sounds amazingly awesome.
2. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading Fables. It’s possibly the best comic series I’ve been reading recently. The downside is that since I’m on the West Coast temporarily every volume I buy right now will need to be transported across the country when I head back east in a few days. Also, I’m reading at a rate where I will run out of new Fables TPBs in a week or two. But that’s okay, because then I finally have time to catch up on Ex Machina before the final book comes out.
3. Today I wore a pair of girl jeans that I got for two dollars on sale the other day. They are exceptionally comfortable. My biggest complaint about boy jeans is that it’s too tight around the hips and too loose around the ankles. These pants have the exact opposite problem, which is both refreshing and more comfortable.
4. For the first time in over two years I’ve been invited to a wedding. This means that I need (semi-)formal wear as I don’t have much wedding-appropriate clothing and what I do have is not accessible before the wedding. I just realized how bad I am at picking out (dress) shirts and, worse, ties to go along with them. Sadly, this is not an occasion that I can go to with a work shirt over a patchwork/gypsy/cargo skirt and a pair of work/snow boots; this is what I pretty much always wear, by the way.
5. I’ve been getting into programming for Android phones lately, partially as an excuse to finally learn Java and to determine whether it is a good language for teaching programming. It isn’t; not where there are better alternatives around. But it’s fun to have time to program again and to remind myself of all the stuff that I’ve forgotten.
6. This is the first blog post I made about clothing and the first one in a while without a “teaching” tag. It’s only going to go downhill from here because every other post will be about new bags or something.

Wing :: Aug.03.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

I’ve been thinking about homework in general for a while now, and moreso ever since hearing Alfie Kohn speak a month ago. But I thought about it extra hard after seeing the reactions of a couple dozen teachers after they’ve been assigned homework for a professional development workshop. And it wasn’t just reading or busywork, it involved writing and thinking and spending time on things that get assessed promptly with carefully written feedback. It was the best case scenario of homework assignments; we should know because we’re teachers. But oh man were folks upset. It was a civilized reaction but I’ve not seen students react that strongly when they get told that they have homework. And if you are in any sort of academic administrative role you’ve probably seen it too: teachers (and unions) get real upset when you ask them to do extra work beyond what they have to do during the day, even if it’s something you think is really important and minor.

Okay, so teachers don’t like to do homework. Yet we insist on assigning it to students.

I’m not saying that homework is bad. Alfie Kohn is smarter than me and wrote an entire book about why he thinks homework is bad and you should probably read it if you’re interested in the topic. I’m more interested in homework-the-idea, which can be quantified. I don’t entirely agree with Kohn’s idea on homework-the-practice but what I do see is that assigning homework isn’t really fair or consistent behavior. In fact, I think that homework goes against our Good Old American Values.

In his talk, which I will link to when it is finally online, Kohn said that giving kids homework is essentially making them work a second shift. That maybe a little dramatic but the point that we expect students to work more than an eight hour day still stands. We have laws saying “hey you can’t make a grown-up work more than eight hours a day without giving her extra money to the tune of 50% more than usual” but none that say “hey you can’t make a kid work more than eight hours a day without making sure that the learning she’ll do beyond regular school time will be at least 50% more effective”. Sure, kids don’t actively learn during the entire school day but adults aren’t productive the entire day either. Oh, hello to you if you’re reading this at work.

More importantly, we’re asking students to take work home. Homework; that’s what the word means. In our culture an employer who never asks an employee to take work home is a good boss. Yet a teacher who does not ask a student to take work home is a bad teacher. In fact, in order to be a good teacher not only should you ask students to take work home but you need to take their work home with you the next day. This somehow doesn’t make very much sense and, given how students and teachers alike do not enjoy the process, seems to create a spiral of misery.

In our culture there’s a general “leave your work at your workplace” mentality that only gets broken for poor people and people who are passionate about their work; luckily teachers often fall into the second category. When you’re done with work you’re supposed to go home and play catch with Junior in your suburban yard. That’s the American Way. It applies all the way from corporate CEO to burger-flipper. It doesn’t always happen but that is what we expect. In the case of school, though, that is never the case. In fact, not having homework is a reward, which in itself is an issue; hey lets teach our kids that not doing work is a reward! Anyway, if we take this idea of homework and apply it to an adult in a job it starts offending our cultural values. Example: is it cool when a diner manager ask a line cook to take some potatoes home to peel and cut them because he should spend his time at work taking advantage of the facilities-I-mean-fry-o-lator?

Let’s take the most pessimistic views of education: that schools are daycare facilities that prepare students to become drones in society. Well, certainly our worker drones don’t like working more than eight hour everyday, and certainly not on weekends. So it makes no sense to assign work beyond regular school time as training for drone work. What about getting kids out of trouble before the family unit returns two hours after school ends because kids could cause trouble when they have nothing to do? First of all, the kids who get into trouble are usually the kids who don’t do their homework. Second, let’s examine a limiting scenario.

Imagine a boss saying “hey Mohammad, I heard through anecdotal evidence that some of you Muslims are troublemakers, so here are some reports for you to finish tonight so you don’t have time to blow up buses just in case you are one.”

Suppose that Mohammad is, in fact, a terrorist. Would a stack of reports stop him from blowing up a bus? Now, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more likely (as in with a probability of 1) Mohammad will just be extremely offended, as he should rightly be. If we’re saying we’re giving kids homework to stay our of trouble then we are just insulting a whole heck of a lot of them. Except unlike Mohammad the kids are required, by law, to not just walk out on their teachers and find another school.

I do think that homework isn’t fair. But, of course, life ain’t fair. In the best case scenario we should make sure whatever work students take home are in fact necessary and efficient. To go back to my imaginary law I think every hour of homework should carry 90 minutes’ worth of learning, or at least make it so that the learning done the next day will be 50% more effective. Unfortunately most homework assignments (and I’m sometimes guilty of this too, even though I actively avoid it) carry less “stuff” than regular class time. But at least, though, we can acknowledge that homework isn’t fair, even though it may be a meaningless gesture. Maybe if we repeat a meaningless gesture enough times we’ll discover meaning behind it; hey, that’s a metaphor for modern math education!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cayusa/2194119780/

Wing :: Jul.22.2010 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »

There are lots of reasons why I don’t use graphing calculators in my classroom. Most of them are pedagogical (e.g., yes you really should know how to sketch a parabola without a calculator). A lot of them are logistical (i.e., do I want my students to spend 20 minutes typing in a large data set so they can make a graph that is too crappy to read, or do I want them to spend those 20 minutes analyzing the graph?).

Personally, though, there’s also the vanity angle.

This is a comparison between a cell phone from the 1980s and a cell phone today.

Okay, lets do the same thing with graphing calculators.

It pretty much still looks the same, except there are rounded corners. That’s it. At least when we went from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 we got collaboration and pictures of cats in addition to rounded corners. Notice how the cell phone got, basically, a 100x increase in resolution on its screen? Not so for the graphing calculator. In fact, the $20 MP3 player I got for my mother has a better screen than the TI-84. And it’s in color.

Graphing calculators are really the only electronics items that don’t actually improve over the years—I think they even gave up on improving because my students are using the exact same calculators as I did when I was in high school. Even slide rules got better/prettier over time (hey guys look now we can shove 6 scales into the space of 4 with new plastic technology that is more durable and lighter). Graphing calculators? They not only don’t get better by much but they don’t even get shinier. XKCD has much more snark on this topic, which got posted as I was writing this so I may as well stop at this point and let them take over.

Wing :: Jul.19.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

I have a lot to write about, but I have no regular access on my computer to the Internet until mid-August. Oops! Perhaps I’ll write them locally and upload them whenever I have access. But, until then, I’m on vacation from the Internet and it’s actually a pretty wonderful thing to do sometimes.

Wing :: Jul.01.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »