High School Environmental Literature: Laurie Colwin

Grade Level: High School

Objective: To begin thinking about how one's eating habits reflects one's environment

“When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove-top cook’s strongest ally.  I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold.  It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations.  If any was left over I ate it cold the next day on bread.

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures.  Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.  People life to you when you ask what they eat when they are alone.  A salad, they tell you.  But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam."-Laurie Colwin, "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant"

Writing prompt:

What do you eat when you are alone?  Why?

K's "Tuck Everlasting Paper"

Grade: 6

Objective: To spend time with a text, thoughtfully analyzing a central question

Why did Winnie Foster in the book “Tuck Everlasting” choose to die over live forever?

By K, Grade 6

Winnie lives a life of rules.  She can’t go beyond the radius of her own yard. She must sit up straight; she must not lick her fingers even when there smothered with syrup.   Then she meets the Tucks. They do not have any little rules like “sit up straight” or “no rolling around in the grass you’ll get your dress dirty.” They don’t care about little things like that--only the big picture. They had time to clean their house or other little chores whenever they wanted, they had more time than you could imagine—because they could live forever.  Toward the end of the book Winnie is confronted with a choice: she could choose to live forever and go with the Tucks.  All she would have to do is drink from the spring in the forest and it would be so.  In a conversation between Tuck and Winnie out boating in a pond, Tuck solemnly states: “Know what that is all around us Winnie?...Life. Moving, growing, changing, never the same two minutes together.” (Babbitt 61)  Winnie chooses not to drink the water and live forever because she did not want to be taken out of the circle of life, she wanted to cherish her life and not just have all the time in the world to do everything she wanted to do but fit them in and make them special. She wanted to live and die as a human being.

  Tuck Everlasting starts with a metaphor of a Ferris wheel turning slowly and then stops in its turning like the Tucks life whose Ferris wheel was turning but then suddenly it stopped.  Winnie started noticing the circle of life after that boat ride in the pond outside the Tucks little cottage—her life was still turning, slowly, but turning. The Tucks had stopped. Winnie decides not to drink the water because she does not want to stop in her turning.  She doesn't want to have to endure the pain of seeing the world go by without her. 

Calligraphy, story mapping, and "The View from Saturday"

Grade Level: 6

Taking their inspiration Noah, the story's first narrator, K. and A. chose to craft their The View from Saturday character map using calligraphy

We're about four chapters into E.L Konigsburg's novel The View from Saturday--and the 6th grade students have been really enjoying both the story and the activities we've been doing to engage with it.  Recently, they've made story maps using calligraphy pens (similar to the pen Noah learns how to use in the book's first chapter), had a reading tea party in the library loft, and responded to a writing prompt about a day they want to relive.

Blind contour drawings, charcoal sketches, and watercolor postcards

Grades: Elementary and Middle School

Objective: To practice line and paying attention to detail by experimenting with several different styles of still life drawings

M. takes her inspiration from the snow outside the library window

K sketches a Mason Jar full of oranges using charcoal

The Ancient Celts

Grade Level: 6

Objective: To learn about ancient civilizations through studying the Celts and sketching their living spaces

For our past two social studies classes, we've been working through Fiona Macdonald's wonderful book Step Into...The Celtic World,  a text I chose for its photographs, its illustrations, and its 15 step-by-step projects.  During our unit on Ancient India, K. and I enjoyed not only reading about India but also making timelines and charts, a paper mache Mughal-style helmet and a fabric prints, a set of prayer flags, chai, and naan.

This upcoming unit I hope to do some art and cooking, in addition to constructing a model of a Celtic-style round house.  Today, the sixth graders drew their own round-house diagrams in preparation for the project.

New students and winter walks

Physical Education: After the storm

Grade Level: Middle and High School
Objective: To exercise our bodies and observational skills by exploring the Ten Mile Trail after a windstorm.

Photos by Alex Meacham

 

Lichen observations and watercolor painting

Grade Level: Elementary

Objectives: To learn the difference between vascular and non-vascular plants, to learn what makes lichens unique, to observe lichens closely and thoughtfully

Today we:
-Carefully observed lichens from our new "lichen" table
-Discussed the difference between vascular and non-vascular plants
-Compared lichens to farmers (fungi team up with a photosynthesizer to make food more easily)
-Painted and identified lichen samples

Environmental Literature: The Pleasures of Eating

Grade Level: High School

Objective: To be read aloud and discussed in Tuesday's environmental literature class

"Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, 'What can city people do?'

"'Eat responsibly,' I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.' If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want — or what they have been persuaded to want — within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or "processed" or "precooked," how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?"-"The Pleasures of Eating" by Wendell Berry, 1989

End-of-Unit India party

Grade Level: 6

Objective: To explore some of the culture and costumes of contemporary India after almost a month of learning about Ancient India

K. finishing up his paper mache Mughal helmet

M. demonstrates the kind of Bindi a young girl might wear for a special occasion

Henna

projects, projects, projects

Grades: Elementary and Middle School

K works on his Harappan style fabric prints

K is working on a constructing a climbing wall for math, he has a to-scale model completed in cardboard

Potato-prints

Desk name tags

Ancient India timeline

Religions of Ancient India comparison chart

Environmental Literature--"Consider the Lobster"

Thursday reading homework: Read (and print) "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace from Gourmet Magazine (2004)

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”-David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster"

"Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with convictions or rationales and who regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?"-David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster"

Food poetry

Grade Level: High School
Objective: To begin thinking of "food" as an "environmental" concept, to pay close attention to language, to practice finding the thesis of a poem.

Green Chile

By Jimmy Santiago Baca

I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historic grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.

                          But grandmother loves green chile.

When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery
collar, fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth-watering fulfillment,
fondling its curves with gentle fingers.
Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
and cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
bandana round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
as she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice - her sacrifice
to her little prince.
I slurp from my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.

All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Veguita, Willard, Estancia,
San Antonia y Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.

Harappan Seals and Mughal Block Prints

Objective: To make our studies of ancient India more tangible and tactile through hands-on activities and crafts

Comparing (Several Prominent) Religions of India

Grade Level: 6

Objective: To begin to understand the cultural context and development of some of the most prominent Indian religions

Source: Hands-On Ancient India by Daud Ali

K. and I have been working our way through several texts about Ancient India.  One of our favorite texts has been Hands-On India, which includes lots of drawings and photographs and a number of hands-on activities.  Today K. worked on a textile-print art project and a comparison chart of several Indian religions.  Here's what he came up with:

Buddhism  (500 BC)       

 -Siddhartha Gautama created Buddhism and later became known as the Buddha (enlightened one)

-Siddhartha (a Brahmin), was born into the warrior caste and left his family at age 30 to look for enlightenment

-He gained many followers and taught a “middle way” between pleasure and suffering

-His middle way became popular with Indians who didn't benefit from the caste system

-Siddhartha found his enlightenment at the Bodhi tree, which became an important symbol for Buddhists

-After Buddha died his followers built Stupas and statues

-Buddhism was spread by many, most famously King Ashoka who was said to have built 80,000 stupas

Back after a winter break hiatus--looking for archaeological clues

Grade Level: Elementary/Middle School

Objective: To learn more about archaeology through searching the woods around our own community for "ruins" and "artifacts," then making deductions based on our observations of them.

K. and I have been studying ancient India using a National Geographic book on the archaeology of India.  We've created "seals" out of clay, after learning about the seals used by ancient Harappans and began drawing a timeline of ancient Indian civilizations and the art and architecture they created.  We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of oral vs. written traditions. 

Our most recent project has been a place-based analysis of the archaeology of our own community.  Monday, we walked the woods just beyond the borders of our community looking for clues about the people who lived there before us.  K hopes to curate a display of images with his own speculative captions about Holden Village's past.