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Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap: or, How to get a dozen kids to eat their vegetables, courtesy of the USDA and some of that mayo-vinegar-sugar dressing.

You guys!  Believe it or not, this sandwich wrap (in which broccoli slaw figures prominently) was just proclaimed unanimously a hit by three families' worth of homeschooling kids.   And also their moms. 

I adapted it from the USDA school lunch recipes by taking the 50-serving quantity and, approximately, quartering it.  The filling is gluten-free, so have a corn tortilla option for the GF kids.

Our kids, oddly enough, thought it was a little too sweet.  It does have a lot of sugar -- but I thought the sweetness was perfect.

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap  (12 generous servings)

Dressing:

• 1/2 cup       mayonnaise
• 6 Tbsp        white vinegar
• 1/2 cup        sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp    poppy seeds
• 1 Tbsp        garlic powder
• 1 Tbsp        chili powder
•                     Salt to taste

Also:

• 2.5 lb         frozen, boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and diced
• 12 oz          bagged "broccoli slaw"
• 6 oz            bagged julienned/matchstick carrots
• 5 oz            baby spinach leaves, chopped
• 20 oz        canned crushed pineapple, drained
• A mix of burrito-sized and taco-sized tortillas

Combine dressing ingredients with a whisk.  In a large bowl, combine broccoli slaw, carrots, spinach, and pineapple.  Fold in dressing.  Chill. 

At mealtime, serve about 2/3 cup of for a burrito-sized wrap, less for smaller taco-sized wraps.

It took me about ten minutes to throw the filling  together in the morning before school (with chicken I'd cooked ahead of time). I served these with peas and with string cheese on the side.  We all agreed that a bowl of honey roasted peanuts would have been a nice topping for added sweet-and-salty crunch.  Some of the kids requested a side of beans to make it more "taco-like."  

Definitely going in the permanent rotation...

 

Poetry for high school Brit Lit.

Our high schoolers are attacking British literature this year.  H. chose the novels and asked me to choose the poetry.  I knew all too well I had to choose a concise list, which meant being rather cliché about it -- or canonical, take your pick.  I ended up selecting about three dozen poems.  You decide if it's adequately represented or not -- and if you would put in something else, tell me what you'd take out!

The kids have already studied some pre-Elizabethan poetry in earlier grades.  They've read Beowulf, for instance, and parts of The Faerie Queene, and more.  (They've also read The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar.)  So I begin with...

 Elizabethan Courtly Poetry

• "The Passionate Shepherd toHis Love" -- Christopher Marlowe, pub. 1599, but written earlier.
• "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" -- Sir WalterRaleigh, 1596, a response to Marlowe. 

Hamlet, 1599--1602 and The Tempest, 1610--1611, this year's two Shakespeare plays, fit chronologically into this section.  

 

Post-Elizabethan poetry comes in three strands:

 -Metaphysical Poets: inventive conceits, speculative about love,religion

• "Song" (Go and catch a falling star);
• "Holy Sonnet X" (Death be not proud);
• "Holy Sonnet XIV" (Batter my heart, three-personed God) --all by John Donne, pub. 1633.
• "Easter Wings" -- George Herbert, included as a sample of a "concrete poem" aka "shape poem," 1633.
• "To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell, 1649-1660.

 - Cavalier Poets, mostly courtiers in a time when Charles I supported the arts; Herrick, not a courtier, matches them in style.

• "To Celia," Ben Jonson, 1616
• "On My First Sonne," Ben Jonson, 1603
• "To the Virgins, to MakeMuch of Time" -- Robert Herrick, 1648
• "Upon Julia's Clothes" -- Robert Herrick
• "Cherry-ripe" -- Robert Herrick

 - Admirers of Spenser (e.g. Milton).  I skipped these.  I think they might have encountered Milton before.

 Then we have ...

 Restoration poets (e.g. Samuel Johnson, Pope,Bunyan).  I skipped these too; I believe they have run into some of them before.  

(Personally, I'm rather fond of Pope, though, and had I more time I'd have included an excerpt from The Rape of the Lock.)

Sentimental, nature-themed poems of the later 18th century:

• "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" -- Thomas Gray, 1751
• "To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" -- Robert Burns, 1785 

 

Then come the

 ENGLISH ROMANTICS (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats)

• "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
• "The Lamb" (fromSongs of Innocence,1789)...
• ...and "The Tyger" (fromSongs of Experience,1794) -- both by William Blake.
• "The World is Too Much With Us"-- William Wordsworth, 1802
• "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"-- Wordsworth, 1804
• "Kubla Khan" -- Coleridge, 1816
• "Ozymandias"-- Shelley, 1818
• "On the Sonnet" -- Keats1819
• "Ode on a Grecian Urn" --Keats 1819

The novel selection Pride and Prejudice, 1813, fits in here. 

Victorians

• "My Last Duchess" --Robert Browning, 1842
• "Pied Beauty," ...
• "The Windhover," ...
• ...and "Spring and Fall" -- all by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877.
• Bab Ballads (e.g. "The Baron Klopfzetterheim") by W. S. Gilbert of "Gilbert and Sullivan" fame, 1864. 
• "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"-- Oscar Wilde, 1897.  

Here go three novel selections for this year:  Bleak House (1852--1853),  Silas Marner(1861), and The Moonstone (1868).

This brings us up to

The 20th century.

 The final novel selection is The Man Who Was Thursday (1908).  Following come these poems, beginning with the master Eliot:

• "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" T. S. Eliot, 1910

Three borrow their themes from WWI:

• "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" (with thelast line) -- W. E. S. Owen, 1918
• "The Second Coming"W. B. Yeats, 1920
• "The Glory of Women" Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

Another, prescient, has to do with the state and corporations peering into every aspect of the modern citizen's life:

• "The Unknown Citizen" W. H.Auden 1938

 I included this Auden poem too, purely because I am fond of it: 

• "Funeral Blues," Auden, 1938

 There is one WWII-themed poem:

• "The Naming of Parts" Henry Reed, 1942

And finally, 

• "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," Dylan Thomas, 1951

All these fall chronologically before our two twentieth-century plays:  A Man for All Seasons,Robert Bolt (1960), and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1966.

Handwriting and script.

A perennial lament about modern education:  kids don't write in script or learn cursive anymore.  Must be all that texting!  

Here's an article from The Atlantic that argues, indeed, new technology had something to do with the decline of cursive -- but it was technology of a couple of generations ago. It's entitled, "How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive:"

The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoint’s predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib—but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and you’ll end up with a leaky mess. Ink is where László Bíró, working with his chemist brother György, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn’t leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes.)

...

The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.

I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen....Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

My fountain pen is a modern one, and probably not a great representation of the typical pens of the 1940s—but it still has some of the troubles that plagued the fountain pens and quills of old. I have to be careful where I rest my hand on the paper, or risk smudging my last still-wet line into an illegible blur. And since the thin ink flows more quickly, I have to refill the pen frequently. The ballpoint solved these problems, giving writers a long-lasting pen and a smudge-free paper for the low cost of some extra hand pressure.

...[M]y own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college. Like most gradual changes of habit, I can’t recall exactly why this happened, although I remember the change occurred at a time when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes for mathematics and engineering lectures....[I]f joined handwriting is supposed to be faster, why would I switch away from it at a time when I most needed to write quickly? 

I loved this article, not least because it describes a wonderful example of how technology changes daily life right under our noses without our even noticing.  

Here, the argument is that the older technology -- low-viscosity ink --  caused our "traditional" script to develop ligatures between letters.  It was natural, the kind of thing that happened unless you were being especially careful, and so standard scripts, in which the joins proceeded from letter to letter in a repeated, predictable way, made it so we'd all still be able to tell one letter from another.  It was possible to print separate letters that did not have trails of ink joining them, but it took extra care and attention -- and took longer.

Viscous ink of the kind used in ball point pens does not make accidental ligatures, any more than it typically bleeds all over a paper -- yes, we've all known a pen to leak in our bag or pocket from time to time, but I'm willing to chalk that up to a defective pen -- do you notice all the pens that don't leak?  This state of affairs would be a miracle in the days of fountain pens only.  Since it doesn't make accidental ligatures, standardized ligatures are no longer, technically needed.

(Yes -- an individual, today, still needs to be able to recognize them, because many people choose to write in joined script.  But now, it's a choice to write in joined script, whereas in the days of fountain pens, it was a necessity.)

Furthermore, modern pens (because they require at least some pressure to roll the ball and make the ink flow) strain your hand, especially if you're pushing instead of pulling the pen, as lefties do.  So -- more ligatures means more ink to force out, and that means more strain.

+ + +

There's a lesson here to learn (ha) about pedagogy, too.

My second-grade classroom had a big poster on the wall showing the proper way to sit while writing and the proper way to hold a pen, the barrel angled far back and cradled by the right hand -- much less upright than I held it.  I have a memory, too, of there being a picture showing how left-handers should write, with the pen-hand a mirror image of the normal writers' hand, and paper turned at an odd angle that wasn't even close to the angle I turned it.  I still suspect that no actual left-handed writers were consulted in the creation of the latter picture.

 I always thought the difference between how I hold a pen and how they told us to in school came from my being left-handed.   It never occurred to me it was because schools were still insisting in the 1980s on a grip that was developed to manage the quirks of fountain pens:

Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive. She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints.

However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper—a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold. Even before computer keyboards turned so many people into carpal-tunnel sufferers, the ballpoint pen was already straining hands and wrists. 

...I wonder how many other mundane skills, shaped to accommodate outmoded objects, persist beyond their utility. 

+ + +

I predict the Atlantic will get a LOT of letters about it, particularly angry handwritten ones.

I have never held a fountain pen -- the experience that gave the author the insight to suggest the real cause of the decline of ligatured handwriting -- but other than that  my experience with my own handwriting is similar.

Engineering school forever altered my script.  Today it is a mix of block capitals and sometimes-joined lowercase, with the "weird" cursive forms jettisoned in favor of r's that look like r's (and can't, for instance, be mistaken for the Greek letter mu).

Three representative samples of my handwriting.  Using a gel rollerball pen, my preferred tool, although I'm also fond of a super-sharp pencil.

 

Although I taught my kids to read script, I stopped bugging them to write in it when it occurred to me that the point of handwriting is to be legible, rapid, and non-injurious to the hand, in that order. My observation is that flowing script is none of these -- unless you use fountain pens, I guess!

I've moved my homeschool over to teaching Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting, a flexible print that can be joined, not-joined, or sometimes-joined however the student desires.

There's a lot less grumbling about this; it's legible; and we can move on to other things.

+ + +

I don't actually have any vitriol towards cursive, and I'm always charmed to receive a piece of real handwriting that's been written with great care.   It is a lovely art form that can bring grace to mundane occasions.  And I've experienced many times the fleeting sense of encounter that comes from picking up some scrap of household litter and discovering on it a slip of a loved one's writing.  If the loved one has been gone a long time, it is almost as if they live again, for the instant it takes your eye and mine to register it.

What I don't like is the suggestion that lack of cursive is Another Thing Wrong With Kids These Days. It would be like shaking your head that I buy bedding for my family instead of laboriously piecing together fabric scraps from their old clothes, because quilts are pretty.

Anyway, reading this essay is definitely going to help me move forward with a casual approach to handwriting -- without guilt.  Legible, rapid, and painless.  Those are my criteria.  If one of the kids wants to, we can study Palmer script or even calligraphy -- in art class.

Aylan Kurdi.

In the past few days, a particular Reuters photograph has gone viral, as they say:  a small boy in a red shirt and blue shorts, eyes closed, head turned to the side, knees tucked slightly under him, face down in the surf on the sand of a beach, dead, drowned, lost.  We are told now that his name is Aylan Kurdi, that his brother and mother also drowned.  That his father lives, distraught.  The family fled Syria for Turkey, and then attempted to reach Europe in a smuggler's boat, hoping to reach Aylan's aunt in Canada.  The boat foundered, and the father lost his children, and little Aylan in his blue velcro sneakers washed up on the beach.

I saw the photo, and I did not linger long over it, but I did not stop seeing it all that day.  Four times I have had little boys of my own.  I have pulled little red shirts over their heads and helped them into their little blue shoes to prepare for going out.  I have seen them curled up, still wearing their shoes, with their knees tucked under them and their bottoms in the air, tired out.  

Yesterday I drove to a doctor's office, to a pharmacy.  I listened to Aylan's aunt giving an interview to the press, telling her brother's story.  I wept behind the steering wheel.  I stopped at traffic lights, I stood in line at the pharmacy.  Everywhere I saw small boys, holding the hands of their mothers, begging their fathers for candy in the aisles.  I closed my eyes and I saw the same small boys, this one in his yellow shirt and cartoon sneakers, that one in his plaid shorts with his shock of blond hair, face down on the beach.  I can still hear Aylan's aunt speaking to the English-language broadcasters, how Aylan's father would bring home a banana for his sons to divide between them, how he says now he wants only to sit by his sons' grave, and to buy a whole banana every day to bring there, to place on the earth.  

+ + +

Some people have asked why the photo matters.  Why did people like me not really pay any attention, or not much attention, to the Syrian refugees (to any refugees in particular), and then all of a sudden this one child has the fortune to be snapped by a Reuters photographer and everyone is talking about them?  If Aylan matters then don't they all matter?

Why are we upset by the sight of this one boy?  We should be more upset by the thousands upon thousands who die every day of hunger, of trauma, of violence, no?  

Some of the voices are angry.  It shouldn't be this way.  It shouldn't matter that there is a photo.  You should have cared without having to see the photo.  The facts are all there in the newspapers.

+ + +  

There's no point in being angry at human nature.  "It is what it is," a cliché if there ever was one, but well suited for the situation.  We are creatures who evolved in close societies, not global ones.  We evolved to come forth out of still tinier societies, that is to say families; to form new ones, and to raise up our young ones within them.  We are designed to respond to the sight of a lost child before us -- because (being members of a species born in families and of close societies) if we find ourselves in close proximity to a child in desperate need of help, the long experience of the generations is that the child is probably one of our own.  The sight of a lost child triggers a sense of "one of us," of belonging, and a desire to reach out and draw the child out of danger.  Stories, too, like Aylan's aunt speaking to the English-language press in her own broken voice with no translator in the way, telling about the half-banana Aylan begged daily from his daddy, do this.  For stories have also been with us from the beginning; if your voice tells me a story in my language, then the chances are good that we belong to each other, somehow.

No newspaper report can reproduce this kind of primal trigger.  The numbers can get larger and larger.  The adjectives, more and more florid.  We can learn to understand the numbers, but we aren't wired to have a physical response.  We can't make ourselves be wired that way, unless we devote time to carefully meditating upon the numbers, upon the sobering facts, to turn them into imagined individuals.

(And notice that the facts and numbers are "sobering" -- rather the opposite effect of Aylan's half-submerged face -- the photograph raises passions we sometimes forget we have; the numbers suppress them.)

+ + + 

In the photograph, Aylan is beyond our help, and we know it, if not from the position of his body, then from the caption.  In the next photo, if we can go on to the next photo, a uniformed man tenderly cradles the boy.  And then, maybe we stop looking, or wish we had, later, when we pick up our own sleeping child.

No, there's no point in being angry at people for caring when they see one lost boy.   You might as well be angry that we salivate at the sight of food or recoil at the sight of a scorpion.  It's a reflex for the survival of our species, and we've never developed the reflex to weep at the sight of newsprint.  We might be able to muster the will, but it is not a reflex.

+ + +

What the governments involved decide to do about the Syrian refugees -- this is a question of the newsprint sort.   I'm not saying it isn't important.  I'm not saying that the governments involved, which are after all made up of human beings, can't make their decisions from a place that is affected by photographs of lost children as well as by lists of numbers, facts, quotes.  It's possible that ordinary people (people responding to photographs of lost children) can nudge these decisions -- there are ways of sending messages to the decision-makers, after all, in all but the most repressive regimes.

There is nothing, though, that I can do for Aylan Kurdi, and not just because he is already lost, in the photograph.  It is, of course, true that the uniformed man has already tended to his body and delivered him into the hands of his grieving, remaining family; they will do for him everything else that it is fitting to do.  There is nothing I can do, and I know it at the instant that I behold the lost little body, and yet I cannot stop the leaping of the heart that would power my arms to reach out to him.  If I look at the photograph again, I feel it again.  It is physical.  I can't believe the strength of it.  And it is entirely impotent.  Not just because the little boy is dead and beyond help; it arouses me to a physical drive to rescue, and there is no object of rescue, primarily because the little lost boy I can see is not really here with me.  The photograph has tricked my deep brain.  

It has presented me with an illusion that here is a child, that we are together, that the child is in need, and because I am the one who is near and who sees him lost and alone, I must reach him before it is too late.

The physical response to the nearby child, the child who must be (reflexively) held dearly, remains and the higher mind cannot entirely overrule it.  Even though the higher mind has to know it's an illusion.

+ + +

It isn't bad or wrong that we should have such a reaction to a photograph when we haven't had a reaction to mere news articles -- and it shouldn't surprise us, either.   It is what it is, human nature.   Some are arguing that the lesson here (now that we've finally been touched by the previously-ignored Syrian refugee problem) is that we should channel our reaction into communications with the relevant governments, in some way that will help other little boys and girls and their parents, keep them from washing up on the beach.  And perhaps that is true.  At least the people who are closest to the refugees and can reach them, those who can make a difference -- maybe they too will be moved to act, one at a time, and help.

As for me, an ocean away:  I'm left wondering what it is that holds back the reflex, every day of my life, as I walk among the wounded who are still breathing and within my reach.

Changing room, II.

I wanted to highlight this beautiful comment on my post Changing room, about the mixed feelings I had on putting away the diaper-changing table.

Monica wrote:

Wow, I'm having the same issues now that my fifth is walking.

I nearly died after he was born, so we're thinking no more, although we always acknowledge the fact that God is in charge and may have an alternate plan.

I read somewhere else that all the work we do to be open to life really does make us open to life (by the grace of God, of course), which means that it's hard to get to the end of the child bearing, no matter what the reason is.

Maybe the solution is to focus our openness-to-life skills in other areas?

There are so many ways, like being open to the life God is unfolding for my older kids, for a simple and practical start...

This is really, really smart, and beautiful, and the last bit is exactly what I needed to hear right now.

"Open to life" has a specific meaning when we Catholics are talking about marriage, one that we can't gloss away or substitute.  It means, rather bluntly, that we do not attempt to render our sexual intercourse sterile.  It can't mean less than that.  But it also can mean more than that, and (in my experience) it usually does.  Something different for everyone.

Being "open to life" in the specific, ordinary way is sometimes, well, terrifying.  A few elite souls may get off lucky, and traipse through the fertile years exulting about the joy of just letting things happen as they will.

 For most of us, though, I'll bet -- sooner or later comes an encounter where -- forget "lie back and think of England" -- you'll be lucky not to be thinking (as your newborn sleeps not far away) of that one friend you have who has two babies eleven months apart.  Or of the tone in the doctor's voice when, as you swelled near the end of your last pregnancy, she described the stress that another one could put on your circulatory system.  Or of that last, terrible grief that you don't think you can face again.

We have our own version of morning-after regrets, too.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but probably we should have waited another day.  I'll try not to think about it for, er, ten days or so.  

+ + + 

And what is it all?  Acts, and consequences, sometimes sad, sometimes joyful.  Something that we cannot control -- no, that's not quite right -- something we deliberately choose not to pretend we can control.  

Life, in other words.  All of it.

(This doesn't mean we can say "we are open to life" and still leave room for the sterilizing, you understand, in the guise of being generally open to the different things life can throw at us.  It just means that Monica is right, we can apply what we've learned.)

We can be properly terrified about everything!  Not just getting pregnant.

OK, I didn't mean that.

No, actually, I did.  I did mean that.  

We can have the healthy fear -- the awe -- that inhabits the knowledge that our lives have meaning -- all the time -- whether we want them to or not.

But we can also acknowledge that our control of the situation is limited.  And that the people under our care and surrounding us are individuals with their own right to be regarded as full human beings, independent of their utility or of their demands.  And we can choose every day to treat them as such, and to be thankful for what they bring us.

Love.  It's risky.  It's terrifying.  It's ... what we do.

 

(edited to fix missing "do not")