Elliot’s all-time favorite trick, and Abby’s all-time favorite Pointy Face.

Blue Steel vs. Head-Squisher.

I asked Billy to define “corkscrew curls.”

Elliot wanted me to get ALL angles of his face.

“Now, take Mary and Colleen.  THEY have lots of flare . . . don’t you want to express yourself?”

She’s doing this.  You probably won’t find it funny unless you’ve seen the episode multiple times.  Maybe not even then.

One normal one.  Look, we got some sun at the hotel pool yesterday!

Back to weirdness . . . here is Tristan singing along to a Motown favorite (anyone?  help!)

Relax, they’re not fighting.  Just singing, um, passionately.  I think Journey was the instigator.

Yes, there was actually a wedding amid all this craziness.  And here’s the beautiful bride, groovin’ to some sweet tunes on the dance floor.

Grandma’s making trouble again.  I don’t know how many times we must have told her to stop lighting things on fire.  Sigh . . .

Obviously, we had a wonderful trip, especially since Katie and Matt were gracious enough to spend lots of time with us, breaking the time-honored tradition in which the bridal party barely gets to see their guests.  We’re blessed with such a great extended family.  I wish we could get married again just to get them all to come back in Baltimore!

Two recent Times articles that have to do with parenting, education and food, but come from vastly different worldviews:

On the Best side is this excellent treatise involving a restauranteur who believes that “Children’s menus are the death of civilization.”  Hear, hear!   Based on my experience and observation, kids will eat what they’re expected to eat.  When there are no expectations, you can hardly blame them for eating only macaroni and cheese.  It’s somewhat endearing at four, but downright embarrassing at fourteen; I’ve heard more than one high school girl unabashedly admit that she doesn’t eat vegetables.  At all.  I’m so grateful to my parents for forcing, bribing and tricking me into eating all sorts of weird things — from pork rinds to artichokes and snails and tandoori — those experiences gave me the courage to discover new passions on my own.

In the Worst corner is this article that appears to be making a serious case for labeling foods as choking hazards.  They’re actually printing quotes like this:

“You have a SuperBall that by government regulation has to carry warnings telling people it’s a risk to young children and you can’t market it to them, yet you can have the same identical shape and size gumball and there are no restrictions or requirements.”

Well, maybe that’s because gumballs were INTENDED to be put in your mouth.  And because it’s generally expected that parents will use common sense in feeding and supervising their children.  Truly, can we say that it’s necessary to affix a warning label to a carrot?  People, it’s called common sense and supervision.  And while I can’t imagine the horror that parents who have lost a child to choking have experienced, the reality is that accidents happen, even shocking and fatal ones.  Heaping up onerous legislation can’t stop them from occurring.  We need to make peace with the unpredictability and fragility of life.

After my first year of classroom teaching, I wrote a piece for my school’s alumni magazine.  It was a half-rant, half-rhapsody about teenage girls and how wonderful and frustrating they were to teach.  At the time, I wasn’t at all sure I would ever teach again, so it was a sort of swan song, just in case.  A little like my friend Chris’ (sadly, his piece has now been archived and costs money to view, but you can take my word for it that it was compelling and true-to-life.)

That summer, I asked my dear friend Terry for some advice.  I wanted to write more, but I was lost about how to do it.  Getting into the business is a lot like getting into acting or fine art: you have to know someone, or preferably, know a lot of people.  What should I do?  I wondered.

Terry is nothing if not direct.  “I think you should write more about the Pink Girls.”

At first I didn’t know what he meant.  Then he started suggesting reading material: Reviving Ophelia, A Return to Modesty, I am Charlotte Simmons, unhooked.  I read them all, but I had more questions than answers.  Mainly: What on earth was going on in the minds and hearts of these women, who were barely younger than me but appeared unable to take part in a healthy, normal relationship of any sort?

Of the four, I think unhooked resonated most clearly with me.  I could sense the author’s concern, shock and bewilderment in every page, all emotions with which I could sympathize.  I wrote the author, Laura Sessions Stepp, and wound up in an extended e-mail and phone conversation that continued sporadically over a few years’ time.

It’s been simmering for several years now, boiling over every now and again when I hear another story of serial hookup followed by serious heartbreak.  So when I had the opportunity to write about an issue of social justice for my current class, Child & Adolescent Development, I jumped.  The paper is much too long to post here, but I’ll give you a teaser in preparation for the next few posts, which will contain controversy-laden excerpts (having done my research, I’m prepared to be attacked, as has everyone who’s written about this from a point of view I admire:)

It’s no secret that teenagers tend to be emotional, volatile and insecure, or that they take evident pleasure in flouting the rules set for them by parents, teachers and other authority figures.  The last decade, however, has revealed a disturbing trend among adolescents that persists well into young adulthood: the replacement of healthy short- and long-term relationships with episodes of unplanned, emotionally-detached physical contact called “hookups.”

Sex is easier than ever for teenagers; we live in one of the most permissive societies in history, in which sexual innuendo permeates even the children’s entertainment market.  As a result, teenage pregnancies are on the rise for the first time in over a decade. I believe this is because our sex-education programs (some of which begin in elementary school) are falling short in a crucial area: emotions and relationships.  We are failing our young women by denying them models of healthy relationships, experiences they can learn from and build on, and forums where they can define for themselves what they want out of a partnership.  In denying them the tools they need to negotiate in relationships, we as a society have essentially set them up for continual failure, and only through a focused effort to reverse these conditions can we hope to change the pattern for future generations.

How bad is it, really?  You have no idea.  Stay tuned.

1. Classroom Management. “Students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions,” says author Elizabeth Green, paraphrasing Doug Lemov, a charter-school principal and one of the main sources for the article. If only saying were doing!  All teachers wish their students would pay better attention.  The good students do; they’re interested in learning.  With the others, you have to convince them that it’s worth their time and effort to invest in what you have to say.

For this, I can recommend no better book than Fred Jones’ Tools for Teaching (as I have before.)  There are some very simple techniques in it, most of which require a teacher who is prepared, calm and focused.  The advice in the Times article is similar: for instance, it advocates giving directions only while standing still and looking at the student(s,) which implies that getting them to pay attention is your highest immediate priority.

2. Fixing Mistakes. “Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think,” says Deborah Loewenberg Ball, one of the teaching specialists quoted in the article.  In my limited teaching experience, I have noticed that students don’t need any help learning; they do that on their own, inconsistently and inefficiently but in the only way they can.  Your job, as a teacher, is to show them where and how their thinking is flawed, so they can learn more quickly.

For me, this second piece of advice is much more difficult than the first — so much so that I often wonder why I am a teacher at all.  I learn very quickly and easily, and I know what helps me learn; I have to constantly fend off frustration with my students, who lack my natural ability and / or self-awareness.  Working one-on-one, I can be as patient as the day is long, but in a group, when I sense control of the class sliding away from me as one student continues to look lost, it’s tempting to think, “Why can’t you just GET it?!”

So, that’s it.  “Do this and you will be saved.”  The article also discusses methods for training teachers to do these things and retaining the ones who already do them, which is interesting if you’re interested in the politics of education (I am, but am also increasingly disillusioned by it.)  Still, I am sure I will get the book mentioned in the article when it comes out in April, written by Lemov and based on his findings from a five-year study dubbed “Lemov’s Taxonomy.”  I figure it can’t hurt.

I blame parents.

Easy to say for one who is not a parent!  But I have heard too many caregivers lament that their child “will only eat” macaroni and cheese or hot dogs.  As one of my classmates points out, when given the choice, any child (or human, if allowed to act on his basest impulses) will gravitate toward the sweeter, more calorie-dense food.  It’s our instinct, derived from the days when such foods were very hard to come by — restricted to finding a patch of berries or a hive of honey.  Today, as others have already stated, such foods are actually cheaper (with externalized costs, of course) than nutritious foods, and they are certainly easier to serve.  But since when do we allow a child’s preference to govern his rules for living?  We don’t let him choose whether or not to brush his teeth, go to school, or say his prayers.  Why would we let him choose what’s on the dinner menu, beyond such reasonable choices as “green beans or broccoli?”

Many of you have indicated causes of childhood obesity with which I can’t argue: working parents, busy schedules, child-centered advertising.  I think there is one more vastly important factor: the demise of home cooking.  Statistics show unilaterally that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves — even when “cooking” is widened to mean putting together a sandwich from purchased ingredients.  Children are not learning how to come home from school, cut up carrot sticks and peel an orange — and, at a later age, to saute onions and garlic for a sauce or set bread to rise in a warm place.  They certainly are not learning where the carrots and onions come from, when to plant them and how long to wait before pulling them up.  I was lucky enough to be raised by parents who did everything themselves, but I constantly meet people my age and older who say they can’t (or just don’t) cook, and that number seems to rise exponentially as age decreases.

At this point I’d like to surrender my point of view to two gentlemen who are far more convincing and knowledgeable than I.  One is Michael Pollan, who has already been referenced several times on this board.  Please do read all of his books; they are wonderful.  However, this article (it’s long, but worth it) from the New York Times Magazine last year reinforces my argument by illuminating one of the strangest dichotomies in modern times: the huge popularity of cooking shows on television and the dearth of skilled home cooks.  We spend untold amounts of time and money watching Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Emeril, but we are less and less likely to translate that enthusiasm into our own kitchens and dining rooms, mostly because we haven’t seen and modeled that behavior from a young age.

However, on that note, the second reference I want to make is to this excellent lecture (about 20 minutes) by Jamie Oliver.  Yes, Jamie Oliver, the English chef / television personality.  It turns out he’s also a compassionate, dedicated humanitarian who is shocked and pained by the current crisis in child obesity, and determined to do all he can to alleviate it.  For me, the most moving moment in the film is when he confronts an obese mother with a dining-room table covered with pizza, corn dogs and sodas — all the food she typically feeds her two (also obese) children in a week.  “You are killing your children,” Oliver says simply.  It cuts like a knife, but it’s absolutely true.  This mother, by failing to pass on the skill set she never learned herself — how to make nutritious, satisfying, diverse meals — is setting her children up for severe health problems and an early death.  Sobering, but verifiable fact.

But, as Oliver points out, this crisis is entirely preventable.  Children who couldn’t identify a beet or a tomato (watch the video, seriously) can be taught to.  Children who will only eat macaroni and cheese can be taught to love spinach (and not only, Mrs. Seinfeld, through trickery.)  They love to help in the garden or in the kitchen, and they are far more likely to try diverse foods (and thus to learn weight-management behavior) when they have participated in the entire process of harvesting and preparing food.  We can fix this, one household at a time.

Don’t feel bad if you can’t make it all the way to the end; I had to turn it off after the offensively didactic rap section (“someone to help you rebuild / after the rubble’s gone”.)

After you’re finished laughing, take a few minutes to watch the original, below:

We have American Idol to thank for this mess.  I’m proud to say I hardly recognized any of the faces in the new version, but I can name almost everyone in the original recording (here’s a cheat sheet,) which was made with about a hundred times more talent.

GRRRR!  Can we just pretend the remake never happened?!

Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”

They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.

. . .

But in general, people who share this kind of article seem to have loftier motives than trying to impress their friends. They’re seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said.

“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

On that note, here’s one of the most beautiful things to come out of the blizzard so far.  Be awed with me!

With a careful sequence of courses, including ninth-grade algebra, and attention to skills like note-taking, the early-college high schools accelerate students so that they arrive in college needing less of the remedial work that stalls so many low-income and first-generation students. “When we put kids on a college campus, we see them change totally, because they’re integrated with college students, and they don’t want to look immature,” said Michael Webb, associate vice president of Jobs for the Future.

The article considers it a given that the last year of high school is a waste — I guess because students have already made plans for college or a career or both, prime conditions for the ailment known as senioritis.  That was certainly not the case with me; I found my senior year very freeing.  I was finished with most of my course requirements, so I was able to choose courses I knew would bring success and enjoyment, like Yearbook and AP English.  I also experimented a bit, taking Anatomy and AP Civics, neither of which interested me beforehand, but both of which proved useful and fascinating studies.  And I finagled an independent study of classical piano, which basically meant I got to continue studying with my private teacher while practicing for a whole period on the school’s sadly neglected 9-foot concert grand.  Someday I’ll tell you all about that.  Besides, I got to play Liesl in The Sound of Music, I learned how to swing dance, and I had my first real boyfriend.

So I’m a big proponent of senior year productivity, however it can be achieved, and although I still object to the idea that college is for everyone, I can’t take issue with an idea that expects a great deal of students out of whom  no one has ever expected much of anything.  I’ve never seen a study that didn’t prove the link between expectations and achievement, and this is no exception: dropouts plummeted from the 38% state average to zero, and one college president said this performance, from a group of completely average kids, was the most exciting development he’s seen “in 27 years.”  The kids are pumped, too:

“I didn’t want to do it, because my middle school friends weren’t applying,” Ms. Holt said. “I cried, but my mother made me do it.

“The first year, I didn’t like it, because my friends at the regular high school were having pep rallies and actual fun, while I had all this homework. But when I look back at my middle school friends, I see how many of them got pregnant or do drugs or dropped out. And now I’m excited, because I’m a year ahead.”

Good for her.  Good for her mother.  Good for the school, for trying something different.

In my mailbox at school today was a postcard promoting these vocabulary books.  Excerpt:

Can you resist the allure of Edward’s myriad charms—his ocher eyes and tousled hair, the cadence of his speech, his chiseled alabaster skin, and his gratuitous charm? Will you hunt surreptitiously and tolerate the ceaseless deluge in Forks to evade the sun and uphold the facade? Join Edward and Bella as you learn more than 600 vocabulary words to improve your score on the *SAT, ACT^®, GED^®, and SSAT^® exams!

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so I followed the advice I give to my own students and made a pros and cons list:

Laugh:

• Seriously?  Combining studying with pleasure reading?  We might as well try to slip butternut squash puree into their macaroni and cheese.
• I’ve read all four books, and I don’t remember once running into a word I didn’t know.  If someone needs a vocabulary primer to help them understand Meyer’s language, I shudder to think of what they’d do with Fitzgerald or Whitman.
• What makes charm gratuitous?  I think it’s more gratuitous to specify surreptitious hunting.  What would non-surreptitious hunting look like?  A trip to the grocery store?

Cry:

• How are any of those words considered vocabulary for high-school juniors?
• Most of my high school juniors probably couldn’t define those words without the accompanying crutch sentences.
• Will we ever expect students to read challenging works on their own, picking up vocabulary naturally along the way?

The jury’s still out, but I’m taking votes.  I’m eminently practical, so who knows — maybe it will work, and if so, kudos to the author for capitalizing on the latest pop-lit franchise.  But I’m also kind of a snob, and . . . Twilight?  In the classroom?!  The thought makes me shift uncomfortably in my chair.

I’m glad they didn’t, and I can forgive this display of mediocrity, but only because I know better.  Rob and I saw The Who live in 2002, a month after the original bassist died from a cocaine overdose.  (At 57.  These guys party hard.)  Daltrey’s voice was a little thinner than on their records, but the range was still there — he could perform most, if not all, of the vocal acrobatics for which he was known.  Townshend was as strong as ever, and both exuded an energy that sustained the crowd for a show that lasted more than two hours, with no breaks, and included every single hit we could remember.

The fun part: we brought my dad, who claims that at no time did “Who’s Next” ever cease to play on the record player in his college dormitory suite.  He knew all the songs by heart, of course, but was shocked that we did, too.  It was a little weird to be belting out power ballads (and occasionally smelling pot) with your dad, but my dad is comfortable with just about any crowd, so we all just enjoyed ourselves.  The memory of that concert is a lot bigger than the few pitiful minutes onscreen in Miami.

Unrelated rant about why else I hate football: at the end of the game, the Saints’ QB had his little baby on the field.  The child looked utterly bewildered and was wearing noise-canceling headphones, so undoubtedly missed this gem: one of the announcers said something like, “This is it.  This is THE most important and precious moment a father could possibly share with his son.”  Gales of laughter erupted from our living room at this, but I’m sure there were plenty of fans out there nodding in tearful agreement.  The same fans, I’m sure, who were touched by the earlier commercial in which the NFL thanked them for watching with open mouths and painted faces all season long.  People, please.  IT’S A GAME.