andrew plemmons pratt

Part of the TFA pre-institute work involves writing responses to required readings. I’m sharing them here as a way to shed some light on my first steps into teaching.

This first response involves reflecting on the teaching approaches of Aurora Lora, a corps member who taught in an elementary school in Huston—and considering what about her approach seems challenging, surprising, manageable. Ms. Lora’s Story is effectively a new journalism-style novella about her four years at Blair Elementary, wherein each chapter is organized around a central theme, but cycles several times through anecdotes and incidents involving one particular student from each of her four years.

Behavioral issues rob two of Ms. Lora’s students of significant amounts of learning time. For those students, and for others who are well-behaved, she crafts differentiated instructional materials that allow them to maximize the amount of time they have in the school year, address areas of need for each student, and generally capture their academic attention. While Ms. Lora employs a host of effective teaching strategies in the stories that describe her four years at Blair Elementary, I found both her responses to behavioral problems and her individualized instructional approaches particularly striking because they dovetailed nicely and represented techniques that I am sure will require substantial practice before I’m comfortable with either.

Ms. Lora’s two particularly challenging students during her years at Blair are Tanya and Douglas. Tanya learns quickly and is ahead of her classmates, but disrupts classes and after-school tutorials by announcing aloud the conclusion of lesson before their completion and by erupting in to occasional fits of anger wherein she accuses Ms. Lora of hating her. She is “a volatile amalgam of intelligence and impatience.”

Douglas, on the other hand, has been held back multiple times and doesn’t let his classmates forget that he is older and bigger than the rest of them. He struggles constantly with his class work, and his frustrations boil over into outbursts and occasional violence. The resulting suspensions and lost time in class only compound his learning difficulties. Read the rest of this entry »

Cattle grazing. flickr.com/yourdon

Generally speaking, meat production in the United States is produced in an environmentally unsustainable manner. An important personal rationale for sticking to a mostly vegetarian diet is that it reduces by some small amount demand for meat production processes that generate a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions and fertilizer runoff, and that demand pumping antibiotics into cows and pigs housed in feedlots. I do eat some meat occasionally; I don’t mind that other people eat lots of it; and I’m fully aware that my income and living situation allow me to make this choice. But a recent policy forum in Science presents some compelling research-based arguments for why there’s a lot of variation in the environmental impact of raising animals for slaughter:

However, the argument that all meat consumption is bad is overly simplistic. First, there is substantial variation in the production efficiency and environmental impact of the major classes of meat consumed by people (Table 2). Second, whilst a substantial fraction of livestock is fed on grain and other plant protein which could feed humans, there remains a very significant proportion which is grass-fed. Much of the grassland used to feed these animals could not be converted to arable, or could only be converted with significant adverse environmental outcomes. In addition, pigs and poultry are often fed on human food “waste.” Third, through better rearing or improved breeds it may be possible to increase the efficiency with which meat is produced. Finally, in developing countries meat represents the most concentrated source of some vitamins and minerals, which is important for individuals such as young children. Livestock also are used for ploughing and transport, provide a local supply of manure, can be a vital source of income and are of huge cultural significance for many poorer communities.

The whole piece is dense, but worth a read for foodies and anyone involved in a whole swath of disciplines from energy and environmental policy to human rights and foreign relations, as it takes a close look at the challenge of feeding everyone on the planet as the population increases, but more importantly, as populations grow wealthier and has more resources to buy pricier foods, including meat. So kudos to Science for archiving this outside the pay wall.

Homework.

…and not a minute too soon. I was about to use a Borders coupon to buy Teaching As Leadership, having been led to believe that the org wouldn’t spring for the 4000+ copies they’ll need for all the incoming corps members. Pleased they rustled up that money.

iGEM and David Appleyard (flickr.com/igemhq)

There’s lots to love and lots to chew on in this article by Jon Mooallem on synbio in the Sunday NYT mag. Mooallem captures science and spirit, covering the 2009 International Genetically Engineering Machine Competition by following an enthusiastic but under-resourced team of bioengineers at the City College of San Fransisco. That’s right: part-time students at a two-year community college compete with teams from the top research institutions on the planet.

Unfortunately, the CCSF folks can’t get their bacterial battery to work, but the enthusiasm on the razor’s edge of science is as contagious as some of the microbes they’re working with.

Three points. First, undergrads are building these biomachines, crafting new BioBricks of DNA that enable microorganisms to, for instances, change color in the presence of specific environmental toxins. And they are not conducting pure basic research; they are organizing information about to synthesize the basic functions of small life forms—for fun and competition. Drew Endy, the master builder and noted seer of the field, puts it like this:

We have now, in a bottom-up, grass-roots fashion, de facto installed a genetic-engineering curriculum for the future of our field in 120 schools worldwide.

Second, top-flight high schools can’t be that far down the ladder.

Third, the folks at CCSF prove that anyone can get into this, and as other journalists have noted, synbio is coming into the realm of computer programming, a high-powered hobby in which nerdy enthusiasts can do significant work in their own living rooms.

From Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire—you can self-assess your reading proficiency at any grade level with the following simple test:

1. Have you ever secretly read under you desk in school because the teacher was boring and you were dying to finish the book you were reading?
2. Have you ever been scolded for reading at the dinner table?
3. Have you ever read secretly under the covers after being told to go to bed?

The point being that you can do a bang-up job of teaching students the technical skills necessary to absorb and comprehend what they’re asked to read, but real success means helping students cultivate a life-long hunger for knowledge and stories.

I think the current version of this test for myself would go something like this:

1. Have you ever been reading something on the bus, then kept reading as you went up the elevator into the office, and then kept reading after you turned on your computer and were supposed to be working, and then kept going to refill your coffee mug and taken your book along to the kitchen?
2. Have you ever been too engrossed in what you were reading to bother fixing yourself dinner and instead eaten vegetarian hot dogs wrapped in tortillas for the second time in a week?
3. Have you ever wished that you had a reason to read under the covers in secrecy and done it anyway, perhaps using one of those silly travel book lights that someone gave you for Christmas years ago and for which there really isn’t a proper use besides this?

Removed the croissant dough from the fridge and prepared for baking this afternoon.

Was not sure how much the Sur la Table recipe would make so I attacked the whole batch. Twenty-two in all, half of which I made as chocolate.

Working with the dough is not a fast process. With a whole batch, the second half had started rising on the counter by the time I had the first dozen prepped. Should probably try to chill or freeze the other half next time.

Baking is absurd. So much butter just spills out of the croissants. Good luck that I used two pans with lips on the edges.

Next fall I will be teaching secondary school English, and in order to be effective I’m going to need to brush up on my math. As I was starting the process of applying to Teach for America, one of the reasons I kept citing for why I wanted to go into education was that effective schools and programs (like TFA) measure whether they’re successful at what they’re doing. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in education, but we’re no where near to realizing the full the power of measuring what we do U.S. schools, seeing if it benefits students, and adjusting things accordingly. Fortunately there are a whole slew of districts, policy shops, and nonprofits working on figuring out what we’re not measuring, determining how to measure it, maintain that information, and act on it.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.

So one day at the farmer’s market over the summer I decided that it was time to learn how to cook with cabbage. I grabbed a tasty-looking specimen from one of the stalls and came home to find a recipe. The index in Bittman’s How to Cook Everything led me to “White Beans with Cabbage, Pasta, and Ham.” I took a chance on it and was genuinely surprised at how tasty it came out with minimal effort.

It’s now a staple go-to dinner dish because this is one of those recipes where you’ll tend to have most of the core ingredients on hand, but you can easily mix and adjust because it’s built on a core of mild ingredients seasoned with broth, onions, and thyme. As well, I make this as a vegetarian dish with small amounts of various fake meats—which I’ve found is a a great way to inject another jolt of flavor. The resulting portions are hefty and you can easily double or treble them, as cooking just involves two saucepans. I’ll run through the Bittman ingredient list and offer my substitutions:

• 3 cups chopped cabbage, preferably Savoy [Never used Savoy myself, which sounds pricey. Part of the point here is just to use a hunk of cabbage you might have left over from something else. One head goes a long way. I find that it only takes about one quarter of a normal size cabbage to get the 3 cups here.]
• 8 ounces small pasta, like cavatelli or orecchiette [Again, just use whatever you have open and want to finish off. You can also up the amount wildly without risk.]
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cups chopped leak or onion [Leeks are really good here. Obviously regular onion will do just fine.]
• 1 celery stalk, chopped [I find that getting celery just for this creates a problem because then you have the whole rest of the stalk and, eh, what else are you going to do with celery? I usually use carrots, which help break up the monotone color of the dish anyway.]
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme [The thyme, surprisingly, is really the heart of the dish. I tend to only have dry chopped on hand and gusstimate a substitution—2 teaspoons or so. Again, you can increase that to taste without throwing off the balance. Herb substitutions are 3 fresh units to 1 dried unit according to Google.]
• 1/4 cup chopped prosciutto or 1/2 cup chopped ham [I always make this vegetarian by using fake Italian sausage instead. Trader Joes sells a spectacular house brand imitation Italian sausage and you only need 1/2 of a link chopped small to get a lot of meaty flavor into this dish.]
• 1 cup chicken or other stock [I use 1 cube of vegetable bullion in 1 cup of boiling water—just toss it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup for a few minutes.]
• 3 cups cooked or canned cannellini or other white beans, dried but still moist [That's three cans, which I feel is a little excessive. I'll use as little as 1 can depending on what I have around. Just as good, you can use garbonzoes.]
• Black pepper
• Parmesan or Romano [A crucial garnish. Bear in mind the concentrated stock will be salty, so sometimes a less salty cheese is better.]

Bittman recommends cooking the cabbage first then reserving that water for the pasta. Here are the steps, simplified:

1. Boil salted water for the cabbage. Cook until tender, about 3 minutes. Strain but save the water. Reboil the water and cook the pasta al dente—it’s going to cook some more when combined with the rest of the ingredients.
2. Heat the oil in a separate saucepan or large skillet that can hold all of the final volume of ingredients. Add the onions and celery/carrots. Soften, then add the thyme, imitation sausage, stock, beans, and cabbage. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss that for 5 minutes or so to blend flavors. Bittman reminds you to keep it moist but not soupy.
3. Toss the pasta in at the last and then move to your serving vessel. Serve with grated cheese.

Voila! A whole dish based around cabbage that’s not coleslaw. Hearty and just as good as leftovers the next day for lunch.

Every so often, I’m on a road trip, driving around the great southern states, and I’m overtaken with a very strong need for some public radio. Unfortunately, I don’t have one of the handy NPR Station Locator Maps. I also don’t have an iPhone, for which I could get the free NPR Station Locator app. What I have is a work-detail Blackberry and soft sport for dabbling in scripting languages. So I took the opportunity to learn some PHP and build a rudimentary station finder using the NPR API.

NPR of course offers a spiffy web-based station finder map for scoring your closest Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! or All Things Considered fix. But it’s a little too full-featured to work on a dinky mobile browser. But let’s also not kid ourselves about functionality here; this was an excuse to learn some super-basic PHP:

http://appratt.com/npr/

We’ll call this version 1.0 because it lacks anything resembling a design; it doesn’t verify that you’re feeding it ZIP codes or return appropriate error messages if nothing is in range; and it doesn’t indicate station strength (though station strength is something you can figure out pretty quickly with your tuner).

What is does do is query the NPR API and return a list of the closest stations with city and call number, ranked in order of proximity. Which is all you need when you know you’re missing Michelle Norris and all you can find is Delilah.

So the original draft of this spring’s mixtape was a solid start, and I’ve been listening to it a good bit this past week, and thinking about advice from friends who provided input. Here I present the final version—and all imperfections in it are solely the fault of the arranger.

Some recent additions: Ida Maria, which @lauraolin reminded me of, brings an additional dose of dancearoundwithyourarmsintheair power. As well, any proper spring mix needs something that makes you feel like you could be sitting on a sunny stoop on Sesame Street: hence the Cat Stevens.

I developed some serious qualms with Pete and the Pirates, mainly because they’re not very good musicians, and listening to them in concert with groups like the Violent Femmes, who can not only harmonize three strange male voices and create more melody with a tenth as many notes, really doesn’t do the former band any justice. But I’m giving Pete the benefit of the season and keeping the sprightly tune in.

Now on many occasions, I’ve tried to engineer mixes that take you up, ease you down, and then roar back to a crescendo. That end, the I’ve kicked in some more juice with a double shot of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and what seemed like a necessity for a spring mix: Le Tigre.

As much as some of these new tracks could have made great closers, I took Kristen’s advice seriously and stayed with the Avett Bros. at the caboose. The transition from “All This Time” into “Paper Planes” was too good to lose though, so I kept M.I.A. I would have worried about leaving a single hip-hop track floating alone, but I’ve ended up with a enough variety between rock, folk, punk, indie, and riot grrrl, that I’m not too worried. I attempted to fold in some funk and R&B, but it wasn’t working. There will be plenty of room for James Brown on the next mix.

Here’s the final, which I’ve decided to entitle “Sunglasses,” for obvious reasons:

http://www.appratt.com/mixtapes/sunglasses/