scenes from xmas part 2

what xmas break looks like so far this year

we wish you a happy halogen

Guess who is not working for the next 11 business days? Awesome parts of Friday: huge work Christmas lunch party at fancy restaurant with three courses AND wine! It was like a wedding reception, with waiters and big long tables of guests. Also, it was the location of our secret santa reveal. I’ve never really done a secret santa exchange in my life, but this year’s burst of homemade presents and elaborate gift wrapping imbued me with a newfound interest in participating. After I carefully picked out and wrapped my presents, I wondered if I could list “exceptional secret santa” under the honors section on my resume. I gave: 1. small Oaxacan figurine, 2. funny kitchen magnets that said “My mood is” and then had pictures of food, 3. mulling spices, 4. crystal growing Christmas tree and 5. Starbucks gift card.

When I arrived at lunch, I sat down across from Sister Carol, who promptly revealed herself to be MY secret santa! Then, she handed me my last present--a wrapped log of brie cheese. Apparently, on the “interests” section of my secret santa questionnaire, I listed animals and cheese (!!!). What kind of person does that?! ANIMALS AND CHEESE! Truth be told—I can’t really think of anything better to list, but they are hard interests to shop for. Is she going to bring in a pet snake or something? She gave me animal themed things—penguin ornament and bird pencil holder. Sister Carol is obviously a great secret santa (much better than selfish me, who did not even attempt to read the “interests” section), and now I can cross off “have nun as secret santa” from my bucket list.

I took the lunch time as an opportunity to ask her about being a nun. I was shocked to learn several things—she became one at 18, right after college, to the disapproval of her mother. Nuns today can no longer join at the age of 18, they have to join in their mid-twenties. She’s the only nun in her family. Priests are generously provided for and taken care of by the church, nuns are not. Nuns can retire whenever they feel tired. They send their entire paycheck to their order.

This week, we made “Bohr model of the atom” felt ornaments in my chemistry class. After they finished, a groups of students decided that we needed a felt Christmas tree on which to hang them. They just did it—no input or guidance from me.


Then I made them stand in front of it and ordered them to “look cute”.

I guess I'm into this now

I was super inspired by an article in the latest edition of ReadyMade, in which the creator of these pipe cleaner tags mentions that the wrapping of the present is more important than the present itself. I've been trying to wrap with thought this year, though it's time consuming. But really, who wouldn't love their name in pipe cleaners?

I'm also into Andrei Rieu, PBS staple and crazy Austrian with a penchant for racist jokes in concert--he's European (and old)! What can you do?! We happened to get box seats to his recent SJ concert and it was amazing--there were fancy outfits, lots of waltzing and old people, a retrospective on Michael Jackson, a balloon fight and opening mockery of late comers to the concert (he put their faces on the large screens and made inappropriate Nazi jokes about the trains running on time). Another inappropriate comment came when he introduced the "black diamond" he found in South Africa. This black diamond was, of course, a black woman with a lovely singing voice. Couldn't he have just stopped at "diamond". Yes, but he's Andrei Rieu, earnest believer in the power of music! He also didn't get the memo that Michael Jackson did not die the beloved superstar he was in Europe. He was tarnished by sex abuse scandals and a morbid interest in his weirdness.

In summary, Andre Rieu needs a cross-cultural sensitivity editor (and possibly a haircut?)

Yes! Yes! Xmas tree time! This is my favorite time of year, when the house smells like trees and the living room is alight. What is adulthood if not the time to recreate everything we loved about our childhood and desperately attempt to redo or erase the parts that we hated? Obviously, I loved Christmas time when I was a child. Christmas eve was the only time in my life that I've consistently had insomnia. Tree! Presents! Grandmas! Sticky Buns for Breakfast! No School! Movies! Opening one present early! HOW COULD ANYONE SLEEP?

Bamboo and Kelp

Oh man, some stuff got made over the "break of the delicious family meal". Presents got wrapped, stickers got used, wooden Oaxacan figurines got repaired and two projects came to fruition.

Project 1: All this thinking about Bohr put me in the mood to make a felt ornament of the Bohr model of the atom. I did a quick google image search to see if such a thing had been created and could therefore be referenced/copied. Alas, it had not. I made several failed prototypes until I finally found one that was acceptable (glitter, pompoms, stuffing):



Project 2: We are studying soil in APES. I ordered some soil corers (not sure why the school didn't have any) and they haven't come in. Instead, I made edible soil profiles to introduce them to soil horizons. Gummy worms and dyed green coconut are the O horizon. Butterscotch chips are the parent material.


Today we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I learned that kelp are the fastest growing producers on the planet, behind bamboo. They can grow 10-12 inches a day! Can you imagine? A foot/day of growth. The sun's energy being turned into sugar before our eyes (literally while you watch it for 1/2 an hour)? Nature is amazing.

dethroned

My in-laws are in town and we've been hitting the Clue board like it's going out of style. I lost by a hair tonight, after giving strategy tips to my opponents the last time I beat them. I've created a family of monsters. These are the notes from only one round of the game.

lights of the city

Thanksgiving break = maximizing our time to cram in several mini-vacations. We went into the big city, where I received my biannual fancy haircut at Vidal Sassoon. My partner saw the temporary post-Impressionist exhibit (on loan from the Musee de Orsey)on display at the De Young museum for the 3rd time in as many weeks (we became members for precisely this reason). I opted out and instead watched ice skaters in Union Square and reveled in my freshly cut hair (which left tiny hairs on my nose, causing temporary alarm (am I becoming a goblin?)).

We went to the iconic City Lights bookstore (Ginsburg!). As we crossed the street, we were honked at. Who does that--We're pedestrians!? Don't worry, I flipped him off, like a real woman.

I was browsing the fiction section when I saw this:

I am in love with the idea of Ulysses. My birthday is Bloomsday, and it makes me feel special. Joyce's dedication to this work is commendable (if not totally narcissistic). But this is downright off. It has been give prime shelf real estate and I am going to express doubt at its appeal for most (read: all) customers. It's not bedtime reading. It does up the intellectual ante for the store though, so kudos, City Lights!

The illuminated books across the street from the bookstore. They are beautiful and fluttery and make the street pretty.


Blurry bus and busy street.


There are many opportunities for high caliber entertainment. I freaking love bright, blinking signs more than just about anything.

tomorrow is free coffee morning at work

Tomorrow is my last day of work before our holiday vacation begins. It is also the day that our school hires a coffee cart for all of the staff in the morning. From 7:30-10:30, I get as many free coffee drinks as I please! I plan on getting at least two (early morning and mid-morning. Cafe mocha!). It's the little things like this that make my current employment reality more enjoyable than my last. I do, of course, realize that in what's commonly referred to (by me) as the "real" working world (like where my brother works), there is a virtual fountain of free food, drinks, time. But teaching is not like that world, and for this world, free coffee is rare and awesome. (Though I did once interview at a school that had a froyo machine.)

someone is a super planner

I'm more of a "read about it while on the plane and hope for the best" kind of vacation planner (see solo Norwegian vacation that started off with a $250/night hotel room, as I had no reservation and the pickings were slim in Oslo). Luckily, I married a planner, who will literally spend months pouring over travel books to construct the most perfect vacation that has ever been taken. These books are just the beginning of his madness (and hugely overdue).

Bucky Balls

Have you ever seen a child's set of building toys and thought, "I wish I could still play with those..."? Well, friends, I present to you Bucky Balls: The Perfectly Acceptable Adult Building Toy. Yes, they are pricey ($30), but satisfying to play with. Not quite as satisfying as building a Lincoln Log cabin or super awesome Lego toy--more like as satisfying as zoning out for thirty minutes while you try to figure out how to make a cube out of strong spherical magnets. It does lack the high frustration quotient of a Rubik's Cube, which is another plus.

wordless wednesday--let's try this thing.

tasmanian devils and mouth cancer

I assigned an endangered species brochure to my APES class. They were to research an animal and make a brochure advocating for that animal. Most students picked the polar bear. One brochure stood out--it was on the Tasmanian devil. I learned so much from that brochure. Did you know that they are currently experiencing an epidemic of mouth cancer? It's spread when they bite each other during fighting and it kills them within 3 years. They become unable to eat, and starve to death. 60% of the population has been destroyed by it. Mouth cancer is causing them to move towards extinction! They could all be gone within 35 years! What the hell is happening here? An adorable mini-bear looking animal is experiencing the grotesque and brutal side of nature? The lovable Tasmanian devil, cartoon mischief maker(!), extinct? Start the prayer chain NOW.

I will not put a picture of a mouth-cancer ridden Tasmanian devil on my blog, but google it and you can see the horror.

whole paycheck strikes again

It’s no coincidence that every time I get paid, I do my weekly shopping at Whole Foods. I feel flush with money and not constrained by a weekly budget that might require me to shop at Safeway. If I were to suddenly start making a million dollars a year, I would probably not be able to save any more money. All of my extra income seems to go to fancy/delicious food/kitchen accessories. Today, while at my local Whole Foods, I almost bought $12.00 worth of egg salad and a $12.99 BPA-free water container for my car (I came to the sudden realization that if I am in need of emergency water, then I have bigger problems than BPA on my hands). I did happen to spy a crunchy kale snack ($7.99) that I could not resist (freeze dried kale with nutritional yeast! What will they come up with next?). I wonder what Oprah’s shopping list/impulse buys look like.

unified understanding of science

I never quite made it to what was going to be my main point in that last post (due to agonizing over the modern state of affairs, as it were), which is thus: I love science, specifically chemistry. If there ever was a branch of science at which I have never been skilled, it would be chemistry. Chemistry--bane of both my high school and college experiences. Chemistry--the science that made me feel bad about myself. Chemistry--my cognitive tormentor. Chemistry--a lifetime struggle with its patterns and symmetry.

This year, I threw myself into the teaching of chemistry and it has created new synaptic pathways! My understanding of how it fits together with nature has grown tremendously. Years of study and work in science (specifically applied chemistry!) did not impart the level of understanding that I feel like I have now. It quite literally feels like a block has been lifted—a breakthrough! I get it now! I know I get it now because of a question I received recently--a student wanted to use sodium iodide for a Halloween trick she found on the web. We didn’t have sodium iodide, but we did have potassium iodide, and though I know nothing about those chemicals (OK, my bad), I did know that potassium would probably react more violently than the sodium, being in the same group, but further down on the periodic table. I knew this! I don’t feel like I knew anything about chemistry before, other than there were periodic trends that I didn’t really know, but someone else might (!).

Teaching is insanely hard on many levels, but look at the rewards—you get smarter, you learn how to deal with the wide range of irrational human emotions and you learn time management like no one’s business! I sort of feel like anyone who gets a PhD should be required to complete one year of teaching their subject in a high school. You learn so much fundamentally about the subject, and also how to present material to students, two things that are sorely lacking in academia. How many crappy, yet brilliant, professors does one have at any given college? I certainly had many, and without fail I always felt as if I had a learning problem. I remember asking an environmental studies professor (who was in the biology department) why logs float down a river (they are so big, shouldn’t they sink!(?)). He told me he didn’t know. If he taught high school science, he would have been able to answer that question (density). So fundamental, yet so far from the brains of smart people who narrow their focus and never really had to explain basic concepts in their life, or on the other hand, just sort of skipped to the specialized PhD level without really getting a grasp on a fundamental understanding of science (totally happens, I know of people like this, but rest assured, no one who reads this blog!).

Questions I have had to answer this year (and it's only November):
Why is the sky blue?
What is gravity?
Why is there wind?
Is emotion matter? (it’s a chemical process in the brain, which is matter. It wouldn’t exist without the brain, but it’s not matter?)
Why do we have an atmosphere?
When are tectonic plates going to stop moving?
What is an alpha particle?
Why are some isotopes of an element so much more abundant than others?
How can you tell, or calculate, whether an isotope of an atom is going to be stable or radioactive?

Bohr and the technicolor atoms

Today the girls burned metal compounds in fire. Lest you think that only teenage boys enjoy burning things, I am here to report that teenage girls are equally excited about the prospect. Any lab involving fire is automatically classified into “good lab, fun class”. Graphing and calculating weighted averages for isotopes are classified as “busy work, boring class”. The key is to mix up the necessary, but boring work, with the fun and exciting labs in just the right proportion. I’d say there has to be one fun thing a week to make a kid feel positively towards a subject.



The flame test lab is one that I, for sure, never did in high school (I don’t remember many fun lab experiences. Conversely, the only experiences I remember are labs.) It’s fun, and it illustrates a really important concept in chemistry—quantized energy. It’s the idea that electrons live at different distances from the nucleus of the atom, rather than randomly around the atom--important discovery in atomic history made by Niels Bohr about 100 years ago (not that long ago, all told). The color of the light given off when you burn a metal is proportional to how far the electron has to move from one orbital to the next. If you burn a copper penny, it will look green. If you burn a copper wire, it will also look green. Copper gives off green light! All elements give off a different color of light. It’s insane to think that kids today literally do high school lab experiments that won Nobel prizes less than 100 years ago. We should be raising the smartest children ever to inhabit the earth!

They can literally see gamma particles emitted from a rock with just dry ice (at Safeway for $10/bag and another Nobel prize winning experiment). Our modern world is so magical! Why can we not yet travel closer to the speed of light? Imagine what Wilson, Bohr or Einstein would have done with all of the knowledge we have now. Instead, children text, play video games and dawdle on Facebook. They dream of being business women, having lots of money and visiting Cancun for their anniversaries. The beauty and magic of nature is lost to other pursuits, and that saddens me. We have but a few good hours in the day and not nearly enough time to ponder everything that we want. So we pick and prioritize, and the internet and Facebook help to winnow our choices down even more. In the end, it’s too much work to keep up the effort of learning and growing, so people stop. They look to Fox News and stop. Learning and understanding are hard pursuits! They take time and dedication! Who has time for that when Facebook beacons and Glee is on and the kids need to be fed? I’m really not judging (OK, maybe the Facebook and Fox News, but not the challenges of life in general).

poop heaven

This summer, I went to an AP workshop to learn how to teach an advanced class. It was great because I learned a lot of stuff about the environment that I did not know, and was exposed to the kinds of labs and activities these kids need to be able to do in order to pass the AP Exam. I’ve never taught an AP class, only remedial classes, and so my teaching barometer needed to be re-calibrated. I do find it ironic and limiting that “teaching to the test” (which some might argue is what is wrong in education today), is exactly what one is supposed to do for an AP class. I am literally supposed to have them practice essays and problems similar to those designed by the College Board. Is anything in life ever simple? Can’t there, just once, be a clear right and wrong? Oh, how I am tormented!

At the workshop, we took a field trip to the LA waste water treatment facility, an event that changed my life for the better. I had never been to such a facility before, and it is AMAZING. I highly recommend that you go, right now, to see what happens to your pee and poop after it leaves your house. It gets filtered, pressed, decontaminated, mixed with bacteria that make it safe again, dehydrated and placed on a truck, where it is shipped to cotton farms as fertilizer, or buried in huge piles to further its decomposition. Along the way, lots of gas is released that is then harnessed for power. What an operation!

Sewage pipes: old concrete ones were being replaced with new plastic ones.


Filtration step 1: this is where all of the “solids” get filtered out from the rest of the water. This is where tampons go (for the record, they should not be flushed down the toilet). One time they found parts of a horse in there.


That was just one of many banks doing the same thing...


I forget what happens here, but it was so well named...


This is water that is not clean enough to drink, but at least doesn’t have poop in it. (I imagine this is the stage where all water in Mexico stops. It looks clean, but absolutely is not, as I, unfortunately, found out this summer)


This is clean and desiccated poop (looks like charcoal)! It’s on a conveyor belt making its way to a truck that will take it far, far away (only to come back into our lives after it has been incorporated into whatever crop they’re using it on. Can’t wait to see you again, old poop molecules!).