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!

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/

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.

That was… 2006. Or maybe 2007? It wasn’t actually until 2008 that I had an LCD projector in every room I taught in. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve only actually been (able to be) using tablet PCs for two years and it feels like forever since I picked up a transparency marker.

There is actually a stack of transparencies sitting in the department office supply closet and several transparency pens and I have no idea what to do with them. Don’t say “make ’stained glass’ art”, though, because we have a real stained glass studio like 200 ft away from that same closet.

It costs more for me to buy in-season vegetable grown at Local Farm at Local Farm itself sold by its own workers than to buy the same in-season vegetable grown halfway across the state at Fancy Supermarket. In turn, it costs even less for me to buy the same thing grown halfway across the country at Generic Grocery-co. This includes the amount of extra gas I would need to use to get to the large markets.

The same thing applies to out of season vegetables. The Local Co-op stocks, say, lettuce from greenhouses an hour or so away during the winter. But that is much more expensive than lettuce grown in California and shipped across the entire continent to Generic Grocery-co.

Now, of course, I haven’t been to Generic Grocery-co in years. I do 98% of my shopping at the Local Farm, the Local Co-op and the Co-op That Is Slightly Further Away (but still not as far away as Generic Grocery-co). But even though I live in rural Vermont and am literally surrounded by farms I am still paying significantly more for the food grown down the road than food grown in California; that’s a little silly. Considering that I’m really living in one of the best possible places to eat local and this is a best case scenario, that’s a little sad. And the price margin—especially on meat—is significant enough that if I wasn’t living alone and had to shop for a family of 4.2 or whatever the average is while paying a mortgage I wouldn’t be able to do this on a teacher’s salary.

What’s even sadder and more baffling is that Generic Grocery-co has a ton of business because it’s situated nicely next to the Industrial Area and the Sub-par Housing and the Poor People. So basically we’ve got a bunch of people who literally cannot afford to buy food grown ten miles away and so they have to import cheaper food grown across the country. They have to call up some dude in a suit in the Midwest and ask him to torture some cows and feed them hormones because they can’t afford to buy the happy healthy cow standing right next to them.

That’s more than a little crazy.

This is my first real project (though not the first I ever finished) and it’s Kirby and his three friends using Super Game Boy default colors for each of the animals. I started it in March, did the outline work while on vacation and during weekends and the filling during meetings because what are meetings for besides time to cross stitch or knit or crochet?

Once I took the picture I realized that I really should clean off a little spot under the fish (whose name I forgot because I don’t like him nearly as much as Coo and Rick) and reframe the whole thing… I need to figure out what I’m doing next before my next craft-friendly long meeting in a week and a half. I think I’m probably going to do something Cave Story related…

Okay, that was a lie.

When I say we don’t give final exams I mean that we don’t use a final exam as a make-or-break assessment tool. Some of my coworkers and I do give final exams in the literal sense: they are exams and they are at the end of the year/semester, and they catch everything important that the course covered.

Today I was talking to a colleague who teaches history about final exams and he told me about his final “exam”: a short essay that answers a question, written in half an hour. The thing here though is that the students come up with their own question in advance; the only requirement is that the question has to capture the entirety of the course or at least most of it. This means that students think about broad concepts of pivotal moments in what they studied; more importantly the students get to think about and decide what was important in the course. If a student’s topic is about the Romans instead of the Greeks she has to first be able to defend why the Romans were more worthy to be placed on her exam.

We as teachers have ideas on what the most important skills in algebra or geometry or calculus are. It’s not hard (but also not easy) to make a list of things that a student who studies high school algebra should know. In fact a ton of people have done it. Some of those people publish those lists and say “this is the official list of stuff kids in this state should know because they are important”. And then we create summative assessment based on the lists. And we tell the kids that these ideas on the list are important. Some of us try to convince the kids that these ideas are important through motivations and discoveries and projects. But we never really ask the kids, at the end, what the list is. Instead of saying “the final covers this this that and this” when students ask “what would the final cover?”, why not ask them what would be fair on the final? Even if there is in fact a set list (and hence, right answers) it’d be a nice discussion and assessment on whether what the students think are the important topics matches up with what we decide are important.

Here’s the experiment I’m running for the next ten days:

I have three students who have completed all the material in a standard college level calculus course doing an independent project with me for the next week and a half. Their goal is to recall calculus and try to solve harder problems than the problems they have done in class. They have a pile of calculus textbooks and they have to choose what problems to do (and come up with their own problems) given that those problems require using all the skills that they believe are the most essential in calculus, be of reasonable difficulty and be interesting. I have my own ideas of what that list should be but I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with.

In fact, Keith Devlin wrote a column about my failure.

Whenever I teach combinations and permutations (say, last Monday) my class inevitably gets into an argument about whether one problem should be solved using combinations or permutations. Although the textbook tries to be clear beyond reasonable doubt whether order matters in every problem there is always one problem that can be open to interpretation—unless you know the keywords and templates that textbooks and standardized tests use, then it’s crystal clear. The kids, especially the younger ones, love to argue about the problem and I’d do them a disservice if I didn’t assign said problem.

But.

Ultimately, I have to say “yes, you’re right in that the problem can be interpreted that way, but if you use that answer on, say, the SATs or in college you’ll be marked wrong” because while they are indeed being reasonable and the discussion that arose from an ambiguous problem is usually a great one part of my job is in fact to make sure that my students won’t be judged as idiots by people whose standards my employer, my students, their parents and myself do not agree with. I am fine with the answer; straight As for the kid who can think for herself and defend her answers reasonably even though she interprets the problem differently than those guys with PhDs on the inside front cover of the textbook. But I also have to tell them that those guys with PhDs represent an establishment that will say they are wrong because I owe it to them and their families to let them know that this is how the world we live in works.

This is the precise moment when they feel the first ACME brand iron weight slowly crushing their spirit. Soon they will become jaded, weary eighteen-year-olds ready to accept other soul-crushing responsibilities of adulthood like bills and children and (lack of) jobs and the cold comfort that, perhaps, if they make enough money, they can buy a motorcycle and feel some glimpse of happiness they once felt in their childhood before their math teacher told them that if they wrote down what they believed in they would be marked wrong by The Establishment.

We want our students to be special and not necessarily conventional. We want them to think for themselves make their own healthy choices even if others may not like those choices. But in math education, wrong means wrong. It’s not a you-are-playing-with-gender-stereotypes-and-we’ll-look-at-you-weirdly-while-judging-you or you-are-playing-in-a-band-even-though-you’re-thirty-you-should-have-a-real-job kind of wrong. It’s a stamp that says you are scientifically proven to be worse than the kid who follows all the steps in the cookbook. Sadly, you’re not going to find a support group for people who don’t interpret word problems as they are “meant” to be interpreted as much as support groups for people who fail to interpret word problems.

My personal goal is that my students would be able to think for themselves but be able to be on their “best behavior” and restraint themselves while applying their best analytical skills when it comes to things like standardized tests and passing that required college stats class (where there are actually right answers to all the questions, unlike statistics in real life) when they need to. And the first step is to let them know that I don’t actually have an answer and it’s up to them to find one on their own and convince me that it’s true. I’ve been doing that a lot in the past years but I’ve slowly slipped over the last year. It’s a good thing that I just watched the Dan Meyer TED talk and he reminded me to be less helpful. I’m part of the problem, but let’s hope that I can be part of the solution as well.