My pretty city

This is my favourite time of year in Christchurch..well right now it is my favourite time of year though I may well change my mind in the lazy summer, or when the leaves are faded velvet or when the mountains are first covered in snow next winter. It is my favourite time because though it is not officially Spring, the air is soft and smells of damp earth and new leaves and just opening buds.

It is the perfect time to park the car in Cranford Square and be amazed again at an inner city park so open and green, encircled by old trees and empty benches and no other person in sight apart from the occasional cyclist just passing through. I promise myself that I will soon come here again and sit on the grass with my thermos of coffee and serious book but that must wait till the soil is warmer and the trees are weighed down with summer leaves.

On this first day of  spring (though not officially The First Day of Spring) the air is soft and earthy and even humans can feel the change that has pushed the crocuses through the bare earth and opened the magnolia buds closest to the sun.   Pale sunseekers stretch across the new grass between the sharp shadows of naked trees.

Soon there will be noisy children discarding ice-cream wrappers and tourists with clumsy feet crowding the rose garden with cameras and water bottles expecting more and ready to move on but not yet. Soon there will be hordes of families and dogs pissing on the daffodils, letting their toddlers maul and trample  but it is early for that yet. The rose garden is silent and bare so I respect its privacy and follow the river past the oblilgatory ducks and canoes, pausing to admire the blossom tree on the far bank. This  postard perfect Christchurch we sell to tourists so I keep walking and look instead for little treasures in the undergrowth, azaleas and irises.

(Only a little more today, I know but…better than nothing! I still want to learn how I can link this to the matchingphotos on flickr)

More food

There were more pictures, so there is more food (descriptions of food, that is).

I have probably mentioned Rare Fare but it deserves much more than a passing reference. It is the source of all things good and natural and nutricious (apart from fruit and vegetables) and definitely makes meat shopping easier and ethically satisfying.

Rare Fare has Akaroa Salmon, soft buttery fresh fillets and whole sides. This can be marinated in soy, mirin, garlic, ginger and brown sugar and baked in foil. On Monday night this was served with rice and spinach steamed with garlic. Last week it was crusted with pecan and brazil nuts. Rare Fare also has hot smoked and cold smoked salmon. Perfect as snack meat (if you know Mikey you are already familiar with the concept of snack meat) or as a croissant filling with dill mayo.

Next is Highland cattle beef. We usually go for the ribeye because it has more fat and fat is good. Last night it was marinaded in crushed garlic, fresh rosemary, salt (of course) and olive oil, grilled, and served with baked potato and stir-fried orange and green capsicum and onion. Mikey topped his steak with Hollandaise sauce and loaded the potato with sour cream and grated cheese.

Pork is the reason I made the effort to make my first visit to Rare Fare. I love pigs only a little less than I do pork so I desperately needed to find a reliable source of ethical pork from happy pigs. Havoc Pork makes me happy anyway. It truly does taste better as well. I can choose from Rolled pork roasts (to be stuffed with apple and sage ), butterflied chops and loin fillets.

Food (light reading but not light eating)

It has been such a good morning for visual treats that I shall repay the travellers by describing some home comforts.

These days I have to do almost all the cooking myself so I have had to lift my game. Living with a lapsed gourmet cook is definitely a challenge but I think that I am starting to cope with it.

Last night I made Chicken Kiev…free-range cornfed chicken breasts, gluten-free crumbed, with lemon and garlic butter; Dauphinois potatoes… baked in cream and parmesan cheese; salad; apricot pie with a golden flaky pastry lattice top served with… more cream. This morning I am off to the gym and pool for two hours to work off come of the cream that I have already stored as fat while Mikey sleeps and hopefully converts some of the cream to fat.

The last few weeks’ highlights have included: Akaroa salmon crusted with brazil and pecan nuts; risotto (yes, I have finally learned to to cook it for myself) with grilled peri-peri chicken thighs; chicken pot pie (chicken, potatoes, bacon and wine and cream under a flaky pastry crust); free-range pork roasted with apple and sage; Heck’s Nurnberger sausages with fried onions; and Highland beef ribeye with fried potatoes (parboiled, sliced and cooked with bacon, rosemary and pinenuts).

Hmm, for some reason my stomach is feeling a little heavy so I shall take it to the gym now but if you give me more pictures of far away places I will give you more words.

Learning difficulties (2)

Whenever I think about teaching, I always eventually end up hearing Carl Rogers’ wonderfully sensible voice. Maybe I am going bonkers, because of course I have never actually heard his voice. Another more recent realisation about teaching, is that normal people are not teachers so perhaps being bonkers is part of the package.
The latest Rogerian moment of insight is related to thinking about working with students with learning difficulties. I don’t know how they think or how they got to the place of learning difficulties, or in fact anything important about them at all. They don’t know how I think, or why learning is easy for me or how I can help them or why I might be able to help them or anything important about me at all. If we were a Venn diagram our minds would be circles floating in random isolation.

What we need to do is create an intersection. A common space where we can work on the learning difficulty together. I am not psychic and neither are my students, so we have to put the relevant bits of our experience and skills and understanding into the common space where we can work on them together. I need my students to teach me how to teach them. That concept of a common space is what brings Rogers back to me and improves both my teaching practice and my mood. I am most effective as a teacher when I am part of a learning community and my students feel that they are members of that same learning community.

I have been a much nicer and better teacher this week. Carl Rogers would have been pleased.

Learning difficulties

I have intended to write on this topic for some time but….. Anyway, I have decided that I shall just start writing, and post whatever I have written, whether it is to my satisfaction or not, and then go back and edit it later. Those of you already in the know, will know that I have just demonstrated metacognitive knowledge of myself, the nature of the task and the special advantages conferred on blog owners. Lucky me.

The current focus of my interest in learning difficulties is….. dyspraxia. (note: ask susan how to do one of those clever little in-text hyperlinks to a definition). Basically, dyspraxia describes a whole range of difficulties that arise when the brain does not co-ordinate planning with movement in the most efficient way. So, it includes the clumsiness some people exhibit when they reach out to catch a ball, or the inability of a child to write ON a line, or the lack of spatial awareness of someone who accidentally sits on your lap instead of on the seat beside you. Of course, it also includes many other things that range from inconvenient to disabling and life-threatening.

Why am I so interested in dyspraxia? In part, because it is so common in its milder forms. Also, we tend to blame dyspraxia on the sufferer as if they choose to be clumsy, or messy, or forgetful, or disorganised. This is so unfair because who chooses to have a disability? Of course another reason for my interest is that because since it is a LEARNING difficulty, it can be remediated by teaching and I am a teacher.

Primary and Kindergarten teachers do lots of things to help children learn to co-ordinate their brain with their movement. If this was always enough, I probably would not be interested in dyspraxia. The fact that it is not enough for some children. That Secondary teachers do little, and know less, about dyspraxia is rather shocking because we see its effects everyday and spend a whole lot of time nagging and punishing students for things they just can’t do much about themselves.

We don’t penalise students or yell at them for not being able to read, or do Maths (well we are not supposed to!). We know that if they can’t read, it’s not their fault and it’s our job to teach them those skills or refer them to someone else who will. What about students who can’t estimate time, so don’t know how long it will take them to get to their next class and are therefore often late?

How about students who are given a multi-step task and can’t sequence and so don’t know which instruction to start with and then what to do next? At this point you may be saying, “Well, surely they know to start at the top and work their way down the list?” Your first wrong assumption might have been that the teacher wrote down the instructions. The second was that the student knew there was a top. The third was that it is automatic to work down a list systematically. The fourth was that the student realised that the items on the list were connected in any way. The fifth might have been that the student had a clue that he was actually supposed to do something related to those written or spoken words.

Of course, most students in an average ability high school class can indeed follow multi-step written instructions. They don’t interest me, except in regard to what they do need, i.e clear instructions that are accessible to them as they work through the task. This is called “good practice”. I am interested in the students for whom “good practice” is not enough because they need more practise…duh…lame Englsh teacher pun.. in the micro-skills needed to develop the big skill of following written instructions.

A divergence here, sorry this is not good practice but…this is how my mind works when I am not teaching.

At my SPELD course recently, I asked why it was that even though kindergarten and primary teachers are drilled in the Vygotskian vocabulary of scaffolding and apprentice ship, they let children write stories full of spelling and grammar mistakes? My tutor’s answer was that the teachers are misunderstanding the concept of “first steps”. In other words, they see the end product , for example a magazine article, and think that the first step for the children is to write sentences. I fact the first steps are to form letters, to spell common words, to use punctuation etc. A master would not ask an apprentice to make a complex finished article, unaided, until he was sure that all the steps had been mastered. So, why do we ask students to write “authentic” pieces unaided when they can’t spell, or punctuate?