Blackberries

courtesy of whatscookingamerica.com

Still so much to write about, but here's something short and sweet until I have time to write about the other things:

We got a pint of blackberries in our CSA basket on Tuesday. I've seen blackberries in the stores and at the farmer's market for weeks now without a spark of a reaction. But Tuesday was different. Maybe it was the effect of seeing them there in the basket, freshly picked, or the fact that I had noticed a blackberry bramble earlier that day--but I was reminded suddenly of this poem by Galway Kinnell:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making, and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.



 Wrong month, I know, but it's a lovely poem all the same.

Pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease

Mom, can you get these?

Babe Ruth's eating habits

TZ: (eating a roast beef sandwich before a baseball game) Do you know who the greatest baseball player ever was? Babe Ruth.
Me: Uh-huh.
TZ: Did you know that he ate eight hot dogs before every game?
Me: That's a lot of hot dogs.
TZ: Just think--if only he had eaten sandwiches instead of hot dogs, he could have been even better!

Mommy 1, Fast food industry 0

photo courtesy of baberuthcentral.com

Testing, testing. And vegetables.

Yes, it's that time of year again. The CA Department of Ed is rolling out the CAHSEE (that's California High School Exit Exam, pronounced caysee) and teenagers across the state are sitting down with their number two pencils and their Scantron sheets and bubbling in their tickets out of high school. One of them, anyway.

The English/Language Arts is a big part of the exam, and I remember spending class time every year getting my sophomores ready to take the test. We'd go over sample questions, review test-taking strategies, respond to sample prompts. I hated it, and so did they.

Diane Ravitch, an education scholar who served both the Bush I and Clinton administrations, was once a vocal proponent of No Child Left Behind. The author of the recently published The Death and Life of the American School System: How Accountability and Choice are Undermining Education, Ravitch has since rejected NCLB’s testing-and-accountability model, saying that it “turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else.” I heartily agree.