| The memiors of a young servant-caste girl growing up in a monsoon- and war-ridden India has been difficult to put down. The bags under my eyes are keepsakes from long nights enmeshed in the boarding schools, brothels and political rallies of Culcutta and the surrounding areas. The best (worst?) part of this book is that it is nearly 500 pages long; you don't have to part ways with the powerful protagonist for many, many nights! |
I have been awake looooong into the night lately, and it's not because I am fretting about living in a strange place, or staying up to surf the net. Nopes, my late nights have been consumed with Sujata Massey's The Sleeping Dictionary! That being said, I've finally come to the end, and several Kleenex-boxes later, I managed to write this short teaser. The Sleeping Dictionary is a great read; I highly reccommend it.
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It being Thanksgiving and all, the boys were keen for pumpkin pie. Without the typical Ontario fall colours here in a city that is in the midst of spring, it doesn't feel anything like Thanksgiving, and so we were going to just skip this Canadian holiday (my first time ever missing Thanksgiving!) But then news broke of our Munroe's big win, and I, for one, was feeling rather patriotic. And so we decided we'd attempt Thanksgiving after all. Such a goal is easier spoken than fulfilled, in a country where beef, pig and lamb rule the Parilla, and the few feeble-looking squashes at the local produce stands do not include the sacred Thanksgiving pumpkin! Cranberries, too, were a commodity not to be found, despite visits to several grocery stores of different chains. In the end, we settled for chicken, and Tats found a "pumpkinless pumpkin pie" recipe on an ex-pat blog, which she combined with a jar of pumpkin preserves we had happened upon at a farmers' market the previous week. She used her vivid imagination to concoct "cranberry sauce" from berry jam and lemon juice. All proclaimed the "turkey" to be yummy, and the pie to be "pretty good", considering the circumstances. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, everyone! After we cooked dinner together this evening (gnocchi, a multi-vegetable salad and home-made buns, with lime and mint water), the boys were excited to investigate the dessert section of one of their kids' cookbooks (THANKS, GRANDMA!!) They soon discovered "baked bananas", a 3-ingredient recipe that called for chocolate chips, sugar and, well, bananas! I decided we should start small, in case they didn't like the result (I didn't want to waste food). They wanted to make four bananas; we put two bananas in the oven for 20 minutes as called for in the recipe, then opened the skin, and sprinkled sugar and chocolate chips on the steaming innards. (I replaced the sugar with chopped walnuts in my own variation.)
One of the things I love about home schooling this year is that I finally have enough time with my kids to instill some sort of system for chores. It's something that's always been important to me, but it just seemed somehow seemed easier to do things myself than fight with them to take out the garbage or water the plants while simultaneously trying to get breakfast served or rushing out the door to work at 7 a.m.
Now that I am home with them every day, and school can start 15 minutes later some days if needed, and I can dole out immediate consquences where appropriate (rather than defer things, or let them slide, due to never having enough TIME to parent properly), it's easy to enforce routines! The boys each have a schedule of chores that they do, taking turns with watering the plants and taking out the garbage, most days without reminders. They also put away their laundry when clean, and sometimes help with getting a load into the machine. Lately, they have begun helping me with grocery shopping and preparing some meals, too, and are enjoying learning about how things work in the kitchen. I'm definitely finding home schooling and full time parenting to be a busy, often relentless job, but it's also a rewarding one. Moving to Buenos Aires? Here are a few sites we have found to be helpful:
BAIN - Buenos Aires International Newcomers offers friendship and support to those new to the city. Included are two chapters, a northern suburbs one and a downtown one. BA Expats - a number of forums like this one exist, where Gringos can post questions and suggestions, and hopefully find some answers. Discover BA - provides useful info for expats in BA, including historical and current information on life in BA, for expats, written from the perspective of a New Yorker who moved to the city, then married and had kids here. Gringo in BA - offers a more "authentic" focus, for those Gringos interested in living more likes Portenos! Also includes some great historical posts about Tango and more. The Buenos Aires Herald - Local News (including the blue rate for pesos/USD), online, in English! Mapa Buenos Aires - an interactive map that allows you to input your starting and ending points, and will tell you which bus(es) and subways to take.
Jeremiah Learns to Read makes a nice companion book to Eve Bunting's more classic adult illiteracy tale, The Wednesday Surprise. The three-part lesson below is intended to be taught over a number of days, and is best suited for grades 4-6 (though it could easily be adapted for younger or older grades, too). BEFORE - Anticipation Guide Before reading the book aloud for the first time, have students respond to the following statements, indicating whether they agree or disagree (they will revisit these statements after reading and discussing the text):
DURING - First Read Aloud As you read the book aloud for the first time, stop periodically to model think-alouds, focusing on "Check for Understanding" and/or "Asking Questions", two comprehension strategies in the Literacy CAFE menu. A few suggested stopping points are below:
AFTER - Second Read Aloud (a few days later)
This blog post is not specifically about Argentina, but since I am not currently blogging at verateschow.ca I figured I’d share my thoughts here, in my current online journal. If you’re here because you are following my Argentina adventures, and aren’t interested in any deviation from that topic, then you may wish to skip this particular post. While out with the kids this afternoon, I overheard a group of local teenagers bantering in a large-ish cluster, as teenagers are wont to do. One of them used the word “Maricon”, a derogatory term roughly equivalent to the North American “fag”. The others laughed and a few of the teens shoved each other. I wondered how any actual “fags” in the group must have felt. How sad, I mused, that even in a cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires, sometimes referred to as the "gay capital of the world", young people continue to use homophobic slurs freely with their peers. Apparently Argentina’s progressive marriage equality laws and transgender policies have not deterred the country’s youth from propagating the same painful, homophobic bullying that young people everywhere still have to put up with. I reflected on my own school experience, and it occurs to me that the gay and LGBTQ-positive teachers in my past don’t even know what a beneficial impact they have had on me and countless others like me. So, I thought I’d write a short note of thanks to you now, three decades after you began to make a memorable statement in my life. In particular, I recall three teachers in my elementary and high school upbringing: First there was the apparently single, short-haired, female band teacher about whom the word “dyke” was bandied around fairly regularly (I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I joined my peers in using the intentionally derogatory descriptor, lest I be labelled one myself!) Then there was the high school art teacher, whose class I took as an "easy" credit, and from whom I learned that there was far, far more to art than "crafts". This soft-spoken though sometimes harsh man was accused by students of having pierced nipples ("you can SEE them when he wears a white shirt!"), and therefore, being (horrified gasp) GAY!!! Another high school teacher was sent away for an unpaid leave after sexual allegations from a disgruntled male student who did not get as high a mark in the man's class as he had been hoping for. He returned amid a sea of rumours a year later to resume his post. I found myself in one of his classes mid-semester my third year of high school. Dear teachers above, you may not know that while you were probably suffering in silence in a work environment that was not set up to support “safe spaces” like the one I am lucky enough to teach in today, and while you were taunted mercilessly by the very students you taught (and perhaps even your co-workers and administrators), you were laying a foundation of critical recollections for me to refer to in times of need some thirty years later. I remember the female band teacher now as a quiet but powerfully firm woman, and I think with a smile of the incredibly talented Art teacher who showed me such beautiful things in high school, and of that third high school teacher, who never lost his sense of humour, and modeled for me how to maintain work-life balance (he had a busy social life and small but successful private law business on the side) while taking a geniune interest in his students' success both during and after our years under his tutelage. Unensconced by a publically supportive sea of pink t-shirts and trendy queer-positive social media campaigns, you fought your battles more privately. But in being who you were, you made silent yet powerful impressions on my psyche. Decades later, I have left the pressure cooker of a straight marriage and ventured out into the frightening but fulfilling world of being who I truly am. And on some of my gloomier days, I remember you, and inhale with gratitude the thought that others walked before me, down much narrower, more tangled paths. I am not alone. Tats found a brilliant resource for learning Spanish. It's free, and very effective!
http://www.memrise.com/course/737/first-5000-words-of-spanish-2/ One of the advantages (and temptations) of home shooling is that there is no one breathing down your neck with a schedule and a recess bell. And although in general we've been pretty good about sticking to a timetable, today things ran away with us a bit... After the boys posted their photo/caption blogs here and here, I sent them off for recess, and worked on my own blog for a few minutes. Just as I was about to call them back for a math lesson, I heard the joyful sounds of laughter eminating from the far bedroom. I wandered back there to see what they were up to, and found both boys deeply engaged in some sort of imaginative play with a few of the toys they had brought with them to Argentina interspersed with their growing "local" collection! Elsewhere in the apartment where stashes of "guys" (like the one in the above photo, which I discovered posed on the kitchen table when I later when to get a snack), set up for a grand play adventure. I decided to give them another 45 minutes of play time before we came together again for "school". As Simon noted before we got started on mental addition of three-digit numbers, "Mom, that was the longest recess ever!" :-D
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About Vera...Canadian, vegetarian, PPL, certified teacher and mother of twins, home schooling for the year, in Argentina!
Visit me online at www.verateschow.ca Archives
May 2014
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