Traffic report

So, I'm just stepping on to the crosswalk, when I noticed that I can't see the face of the guy who stopped at the stop line.  So I slowly approach, until I can see his face, and confirm that, yes, he is looking to his left, rather than to his right, where I am.  And he's fixated on his view to the left.  So, I figure that I better not get in front of this car.  And, sure enough, standing right beside his right fender, as soon as he sees a clear space in the traffic, he accelerates out onto the roadway, without even glancing to his right.

So, a little while later, at a traffic light, there's another person on foot, who notes, with approval, the reflectors on my clothing.  Since he's got a big safety reflector on his jacket, we are discussing how nobody is going to be able to miss us.  Just as the walk signal turns in our favour, somebody zorches into the crosswalk right in front of us ...

Exodus 2:22, 18:3

I have been a stranger in a strange land.

MGG - 2.1 - Teaching

Dad was a teacher, and later an administrator.  Mom was a teacher, for a brief time before I was born.  I did not want to be a teacher, when I was growing up.  I think this is possibly because, while both Mom and Dad were teachers, they weren't very good at it, and certainly didn't love it.  I remember my father giving me some career advice at one point, and suggesting that I become a teacher because you could put in your thirty years and then retire.  I found this rather questionable as career advice.

Eventually I became a teacher.  It was almost an accident.  However, once I became a teacher I discovered two things: the first was that I had been doing teaching for a significant number of years.  It just hadn't been called that.  The second was that I absolutely loved teaching.

I, having graduated with a bachelor of science, didn't take a bachelor of education, but took a one year "transfer" program, giving me the qualifications to apply for a teaching certificate without having a bachelor of education.

When, after all of that, and some other things, I did apply to the old Teacher's Qualification System, back when there was a TQS, I obtained a TQS 5+.  Getting a TQS 4 meant that you had a four year Bachelor of Education.  If you took a five-year Bachelor of education, or a bachelor's degree in something else, and then a one-year education program, you got a TQS 5.  A TQS 5+ meant that I had an awful lot more courses than any mere baccalaureate should have, and yet did not have a Masters, which would have been a TQS 6.

A couple of stories from my student teaching (possibly leaving out the back that driving to the school one day was the only time in my life that I have ever gotten a speeding ticket).

We had more than the normal allotment of time student teaching, in this particular program, since we had the usual three practicum sessions of three or four weeks, but we also had two days a week in the school while we were still taking other courses.  For much of the year I was in a grade five classroom, and, given my science background, I was asked to produce a science unit.  I did it on paper airplanes.  Not just folding them: setting up experiments to assess their performance, with regard to time aloft, distance, and aerobatics.  After we had finished the science unit, the results of the science unit became a kind of an art project, with the various models of paper airplanes hanging suspended from lines strung across the classroom.

But we did spend time in all of the grades available to us in that school.  Because of that, and a few other things, I have, in fact, taught every grade from kindergarten to grade 12.  And then up into college and university courses, post graduate courses, and, of course, commercial training in business and industry.

At any rate, this particular story takes place in a grade two classroom.  I also have to admit that, unlike the spelling test, this is possibly my least favorite experience of teaching, and I still feel terrible about it to this day.

I wasn't particularly doing much teaching in this grade two class, but one student had not yet finished the assignment when the bell rang for recess, so I was deputed to stay behind and monitor her completion.  As I was paying attention to what she was doing, I realized that the answers that she was providing were not the ones assumed, and expected, by the teacher in that class, but were, in fact, completely correct given the wording of the questions on the assignment.

I found this fascinating!  To my mind it was a really interesting example of the care that you had to take, teaching, when designing practice instruments.  If the students could answer something completely divergent from what you expected, and still be absolutely correct in regard to the question you had asked, it indicates that you weren't careful enough in wording the question in the first place.

I said, "Oh!  Look!  That's really interesting!  I know that the teacher was expecting a completely different answer, but the answer that you are giving is completely correct!"

(I should have kept my big mouth shut.)

The grade two student, all of 7 years old, looked at me with a pretty blank face.  Then she looked at the question again, and starting erasing all her answers.  And writing in the ones which the teacher probably expected.

I felt terrible.  I felt crushed.  Crushed that I had possibly crushed the spirit of inquiry and adventure in this seven year old girl.  I should have pointed it out to the teacher, not the student.  I should have expected that the student would only have been interested in pleasing the teacher.  The student was far too young to be interested in the labyrinthine twists of the nuances of language.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/08/mgg-20a-teaching-sailing-lightning-at.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/02/mgg-22-teaching.html

2 Samuel 11:1

In the spring, when kings go off to war ...

MGG - 1d.3 - Cooking

Back to churches, one time the church I was at decided that they wanted a Hawaiian luau.  I managed to get a seventy-five pound porker, and, in one of the enormous trays that they had in the kitchen, managed to cook the thing whole.

On another occasion, a church, in Eugene, Oregon, where I was taking my masters degree, wanted to do an Easter dinner, but they wanted to do it as close as possible to a Passover Seder dinner.  Americans are not great at "foreign" foods, particularly since they don't actually believe that there are any other countries in the world.  So, nobody in the church knew how to cook lamb.  In fact, it *wasn't* lamb that they had, but goat legs, that a farmer had donated.

I didn't know this at the time that I volunteered, I only knew that they were asking for volunteers to help out with the dinner.  When I volunteered, the woman in charge asked me if I knew how to cook lamb.  I said yes.  I had never actually cooked lamb in my life, up to that point.  (But, hey, it's meat, right?)  And then I learned about all the subtle oddities that they wanted for the dinner.  They were thinking of baking the lamb in the oven, and I said, well, if you really wanted to be as close as possible to a traditional seder, the lamb is supposed to be roasted, and the closest thing would be barbecuing.  The church didn't have a barbecue, so I dug up a hole in the backyard, and covered it with one of the grills from the commercial ovens.  I built a fire in the fire pit, and barbecued the goat legs.  At one point, as people were starting to show up to help with the meal preparation, somebody came up and said everyone in the neighborhood hates you.  Everyone, that is, except the burger place across the street, which is doing land office business.  Everyone else is frantically hungry because of the wonderful smells of the barbecuing meat for the past three hours.

As noted, Mom taught me portion cooking.  In this particular case, they had decided on rice, as the starch for the meal, and I had suggested baking it in the oven.  We had to very large pans of rice ready to go, and, standing at the head of the line plating the food, I just started dishing up with a scoop of rice per plate.  I finished the first pan and started into the second.  As the second pan was getting empty, I was realizing that nobody had given any indication that we were nearing capacity in terms of the number of plates.  I kept on going until somebody called out that was the last plate needed: everybody had food.  I looked in the pan.  There was one scoopful left.

As I say, I have helped out with dinners and receptions at a lot of churches.  Since I've spent an awful lot of time in an awful lot of different kitchens, I appear to have developed a kind of sense for where things are in a kitchen.  Where people will put the cutlery.  Where people will put the plates.  Where people will put the glasses.  Where people will store canned goods, and where they will store oil and spices.  Therefore, I can walk into a kitchen; any kitchen, even a church kitchen, which are somewhat different given that they are designed by a committee rather than an individual; and find where various things are that are needed for whatever project is underway.  So I help out with men's breakfasts.  I help out with church dinners.  I help out with funeral and memorial service receptions.  I know my way around a kitchen.  Within a week of being in Port Alberni, I was helping out at the memorial service of a woman whom I had never met, but who was very, very important to this particular congregation.  All the normal church kitchen ladies wanted to attend her service.  So, simply by being available to be in the kitchen, I allowed all of them to do that.  When everybody was upstairs, someone came in, and wanted a cup of coffee.  I pointed out that the large perk coffee urn had finished its cycle, so he was welcome to help himself to a cup.  That's when we discovered that the church ladies, in their upset over losing so important a one of their number, had, in fact, made one hundred cups of hot water.  Fortunately, having discovered this, we were able to find one of them in the service, get her to put actual coffee into the machine, and then I babysat it while she went back upstairs.  The minister went a bit overtime in his message to the congregation for that service, which was a good thing, because for my by the time he was finished, so was the coffee.

At one time, I had some sourdough culture, and kept it alive and useful for some years.  When I went to visit a friend, he wanted me to bring some, so that he could use it.  So I packed up a sample as securely as I could, and took it with me on the trip, which was several hours.  We knew that I would arrive at his place while he was still at work, so he had left a key for me.  When I got there, I figured that the culture had been through enough, and mixed it up with some flour and water to keep it going, and settle in to it's new environment.  In doing that, I spilled some flour, so I used the spilled four and some other ingredients to make an apple crumble.  When my friend got home, I explained why the dessert was ready: I had made a mistake, and fixed it by making apple crumble.  He sounded off: he loved apple crumble, and was annoyed that people only made it to fix cooking mistakes.

When Gloria and I married, we had both run our respective households, and so were competent in the basics of living.  As both of us were working, we divided up the chores.  Gloria always liked fabric, all aspects of fabric and textiles, so she took on the laundry.  I, somewhat naturally, took on cooking and shopping.

Gloria was no slouch as a cook, and certainly she had kept the girls alive.  She just didn't like cooking as much as she liked laundry.  Although I'm not sure that it would be fair to say that she liked laundry: she was good at it and knew pretty much everything about it.  (I did teach her about washing soda, when one family member got to the point of wearing clothes too long and they started to smell.)  Gloria did make the world's best potato salad.  Somebody once told her that potato salad was not so much a recipe, as an expression of love.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d2-cooking.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-20-scouts-beans-and-explosions.html

Exodus 23:1

Don't spread bad rumours,

or help a criminal by

false testimony.

MGG - 1d.2 - Cooking

In another case, I was taking an outdoor education course, and, as a graduation exercise, we ran an outdoor school for a particular school elementary school.  We did all the planning, taught all the activities, and but had the teaching staff of the elementary school, whose students we were running through the program, attend, partly for legal responsibility, and for their oversight, and also a bit of a break for them.  The instructor for our outdoor education course felt that it would be a great thing if we could do absolutely everything ourselves, including the cooking.  So, having demonstrated some cooking prowess in other events that we did during the year, I was kind of volunteered for the job.

This type of cooking, of course, involves not just cooking but meal planning, inventory planning, and shopping.  There's a bit of budgeting involved there as well.  In this particular case, students in the outdoor education course, and the instructor, felt that it would be a good idea to have cooking be one of the activities.  I warned them that having such an extensive program centered around the kitchen would require a lot of work on their part.  Everyone assured me that they would be helping out in the kitchen when they weren't doing their own activities.

On the first day of this outdoor school, none of my fellow students did show up at the kitchen to help out.  The teachers, whose students we were teaching, did come to the kitchen.  The first day of setting up in a kitchen is pretty hectic, so I didn't have an awful lot of time to school them in the niceties of cooking in preparation for eighty people, but I got out the large baking sheets, cut up appropriate portions of bread dough, and instructed them to roll or flatten the dough out so that it completely covered the baking sheets.  This was, of course, in preparation for pizza.  While I was working on the other side of the kitchen I could hear mutterings from the side where the teachers were working about how impossible a task this was.  Bread dough is elastic stuff, and you have to stretch it further than you need, so that it will snap back to the right size.  In addition, of course, bread dough is not the toughest construction material in the universe, and, if you pull it too much, it will tear.  So the teachers were muttering away to each other about how the lumps of dough were too small, and this was impossible, and various other things.  I had an awful lot of work to do, but finally I had enough, walked over to their side of the kitchen, took one of the baking sheets, took the smallest lump of bread dough that I had given them, rolled it out so that it more than filled the pan that I was working on, took a knife and cut off the excess around the edges of the pan, and then used the excess pieces to patch the holes in the bread dough in their pans.  And then walked back to my side of the kitchen where I was working on salads, without saying a word.  There was a short pause in the muttering, and then the comment, "Oh.  I guess it is possible."  They continued work without further comment.

Pizza is a great meal, but it does require a little dietary balance, and so I had planned for a quantity of salad to be the adjunct to this meal.  At the appointed time, one of my fellow students showed up with the group of elementary students who were to have the cooking lesson for this particular activity.  Again, I still had a ton of work to do to get ready for dinner, but the group was there and they needed the activity.  There were about a dozen of them and I had a dozen heads of iceberg lettuce, for the salad.  I got the students around a work table in the kitchen, and rolled a head of lettuce to each of them around the table.  Then I showed them how to identify where the core of the lettuce was, and demonstrated holding the lettuce up above your head (making sure that the stem was on the bottom), and then bringing the head of lettuce down sharply on the table surface.  This breaks the attachment of the core to all the leaves in the head of lettuce, and you can then turn the head of lettuce over, and simply pull out the core.  It's a lot easier this way, particularly when you're doing a lot of salad and need a lot of lettuce, than slicing up the heads and individually cutting out the pieces of core.

Again, I know that none of my fellow students showed up to help in the kitchen that day.  Every evening after the kids were bunked into their cabins, we had a debriefing meeting.  At that evening's debriefing meeting I noted that I had had no help in the kitchen that day, and that I felt that, while I could possibly continue to provide the meals, that I wasn't sure that I would also be able to do cooking activities for the elementary students attending the outdoor school.  All of my fellow students objected.  One told me, "We have been teaching them canoeing, first aid, nature walks, and a bunch of other things, and do you know what everyone, in every cabin, is talking about tonight?  How to take the core out of a head of lettuce.  You've got to keep on doing the cooking lessons."  So we continued with the cooking lessons.

Of course, I didn't get any more help in the kitchen.  I struggled through, but, by about Wednesday night, I figured that I needed to speak up again.  I again reiterated that they had promised to help in the kitchen, and weren't helping in the kitchen.  One of my fellow outdoor education students agreed that they had fallen down on the job.  But she said she had a solution.  She would take over as the lead cook, my fellow students would help in the kitchen, and I would have the day off.  Completely.  I thought about it for about 15 seconds and figured that the resulting disaster probably wouldn't actually kill anybody.  So I agreed.  The menu was planned and noted, and all the recipes were available.  The provisions were stocked in the kitchen.  I knew there would be problems, but I figured that it wouldn't be problems that anybody was not going to survive.  I figured that I would just stay completely away from the kitchen, not interfere, not assist, and that people might learn a valuable lesson.

I was right.  Breakfast, the next morning, was a half an hour late.  Lunch, despite the fact that yes, my fellow students did rally around their new head cook, was 45 minutes late.  Dinner was an hour and a quarter late.  I stayed out of the kitchen.  Although after dinner I did go up to one of the serving hatches where the new head cook was resting, and looking very tired.  I asked her how her feet were.  She looked up, rather woebegone, and said, "I think that's what hurts the most."  I nodded.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d1-cooking.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d3-cooking.html