Summertime Courses!

This summer I'm shaking it up. No more run of the mill summertimes for me - this is the 7th summer since I graduated from college, and my gosh! I haven't had a summer to myself since then. KSTF has had me flying around the country; the Governor's Institute of Vermont has been an institutionalized week of my life in the summer, and truth be told, I need a change.

So the plans are to take a slew of classes that I've been intending to take for some time now, so here's the list of courses:
May 1-2 Root Cellar Design at Yestermorrow
May 8-9 Earth Oven Building at Yestermorrow
May 15-16 Tracking and Awareness at the Root's School
June 19-July2 Hike the Long Trail with MHS Community Connections
July 18-24th Roots Core Skills 1 at the Root's School

Actually, the list looks shorter now for some reason. But I'm ok with that. Clearly May is packed, and I'll spend a lot of time in June hiking to prepare for the Long Trail trip.

I feel like the difference here is that ... I really want to do these things. No one is asking me to do them - I'm electing to do them, which feels really different. Gosh I'm pumped. :)

Hope or Triage or Both?

For whatever reason I've been battling a sense of impending doom lately. Put a different way, I haven't been feeling much hope lately, I'm using this space to talk through it.

Maybe it's because I just watched the trailer for the new movie The Road, which has pushed my visions of "worst case scenario" a little further down the awful scale. :( I'm sure I'll get over it by tomorrow, but it makes me wonder about the triage of solutions to the pending ecological problems. It makes me want to build a Living Machine in my garage and take a course from the Roots School about wilderness survival, or go to Doe Camp this summer and learn how to handle a gun or a bow & arrow.

I've been wanting to know how to do these things for a long time anyway. It makes me uncomfortable to think that I couldn't survive in the woods on my own.

It also makes me want to go test the water in the stream by my parents' place for contaminants. There's always some funky soapy foam build up in it, and not only do I not know where it comes from, but I don't know what it is, and I wonder if it would be fixed with a simple water filter (the kind that employes layers of sand, and charcoal). I mean, probably not, but if not, why not? And how do you fix it? I know UVM will test your soil for something like $15 and give you a full report on all the heavy metals and composition they find in it. I wonder if there's something similarly available for water. There must be. Sometimes I wish I had more of a biological or chemical background to know how to even begin to know who would do this work.

So my solution to this frustration is to plan action and to learn.

But I'm reminded too of the advice from Jesus (from Matthew 6:25) "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?" But how are we supposed to do that? I guess the reality is that all this planning for some imaginary worst case scenario does feel a little weird.

But that's not the point, abandoning well-advised plans for the sake of "not worrying" doesn't really help us. But instead, maybe it's like what my parents told me when I was nervous for finals: Do your best, and then leave the rest up to God. You can't do a thing about it past trying your best, so there's no point in worrying. It only steals joy from the present.

But then, are my plans well-advised?

Is this the cycle I could so easily get caught in. Is this the best I can do? Is there something more or different I should be doing? This is the part where I have to let go. This is the part where faith helps me live better; where trust in God would help me keep my head and my wits about me (which will ultimately help in any bad situations anyway). As I already know, people (like myself) who are panicked or afraid make poor decisions.

So I guess this post also comes with a prayer for deeper trust in God, for rest and deep breathing after all the planning has been done. The more connected I am to the Source, the better for everyone. :P :)

Bible verses on Ecology

So I had a somewhat discouraging conversation with a friend about Christian ecology (in that I responded in a way that could have used a much larger helping of love than I showed), but on the plus side a few folks chimed in the facebook post with some helpful references, which I thought would be worth sharing here. So here's hoping that this is useful! :)

2 Chronicles 7:13-14
When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 36:20-21
He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power. The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.

Genesis 6:19
You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.

Genesis 2:15
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

Leviticus 18:26-28
But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out, as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

Leviticus 25:2
'Speak to the Israelites and say to them: "When you enter the land I am going to give you, the land itself must observe a sabbath to the LORD."

Numbers 35:33-34
'Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.'

Isaiah 5:8-10
Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
til no space is left
and you live alone on the land.

The LORD Almighty has declared in my hearing:
"Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants.

A ten-acre vineyard will produce only a bath of wine,
a homer of seed only an ephah of grain."


Jeremiah 3:2-3
Look up to the barren heights and see.
Is there any place where you have not been ravished?
By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers,
sat like a nomad in the desert.
You have defiled the land
with your prostitution and wickedness.

Therefore the showers have been withheld,
and no spring rains have fallen.
Yet you have the brazen look of a prostitute;
you refuse to blush with shame.



Hope this is helpful!

Vshi installations in Montpelier!

So we had our first two pellet stove installations last week through the vt sustainable heating initiative- super exciting! It's great to see thos work come to fruition and hear the feedback from the recipients. Simply put, they're thrilled and eager to help give back to their community and vshi. Sweet.





And now for lessons learned:
Don't work with vt stove & flag works, they're not nice.
When doing a site visit make sure to check for grounded outlets and floor pitch - leveling takes a little while.
$2000 / installation is probably too low.

Church Garden Best Practices

So after a fairly successful summer, the church garden has now been sufficiently harvested that it would be difficult to get amounts of anything worthy of preservation. So last Sunday we opened the space to gleaning (there were some amounts of basil, dill, and stray tomatoes, fennel, and some bolting greens).

At first when we would get a harvest of lettuces that really couldn't be preserved I conceded that we ought to give them away a little begrudgingly, but after I gave away summer squash, cabbage, lettuce, and tomatoes at church, I was hooked. I suppose I liked giving food away to the food shelf well enough, which desperately needs fresh produce, but I LOVED giving food away at church. It was so satisfying to go up to the fringe folks who were sticking around and say "hey, would you like some potatoes?" Then they would take them, and leave happy, and if the few data points I have are indicative a trend (and I'll have a few more data points after this coming Sunday), then the folks who have received food as a gift from the garden have a 100% return rate. Hm. :)

As I think about what we would plant for next year, I'm drawn towards thinking about the things which preserved well, were relatively easy to harvest, or which lent themselves to recipes that people knew (e.g. Who knows what the heck to do with fennel bulb?).

The veggies which excelled against these criteria were:
potatoes - they keep so well
carrots - keep well, and we made an awesome soup and made for awesome church-time snacks
plum tomatoes - SO much sauce!
basil - who doesn't love pesto? (only i might make it with some other nut besides pine nuts, cause, well, you can and pine nuts are like THE most expensive nut at the coop).
onions - again keep well, easy to harvest
squash - wow, so prolific, easy to give away, easy to shred and freeze
kale - blanch & freeze in bags
green beans - good thing my mom has a pressure cooker, so we canned a whole bunch of beans
celery - good in the carrot soup

Veggies which I would probably not do next year:
cherry tomatoes - so labor intensive
dill - I don't think we ever harvested this
fennel - what do you do with fennel?
parsley - unless i grew it specifically for companion planting, we didn't harvest it like at all


Somewhere in the middle:
big tomatoes - sure they're big, but I don't think they produced the volume of the plums/juliets


Other things I would do differently:
trellises - basically our trellises sucked. They almost all fell over
string - I think we tied up the tomatoes with like some throw-away string from the ReStore, and it got all stretched out and ineffectual. Next year I'll invest in some twine.
logging the harvest - We were pretty good about recording what went in, but not so good about recording how much was taken out, so we have no real sense of the value added from this project.

Running a church garden has been really good, I'm glad we had people sign up for particular weeks to take care of it so the burden was more spread out. *whew*
Even so I'm not entirely sure if I'll be doing it again next year. We'll see.

Honesty and Humility

So it's 4:30pm on a Friday and I've decided that grading papers is still my priority to lighten my load for next week. You would think that would be a gritty, unsatisfying decision, but among the stack there came one paper which caught me completely by surprise, and made my extra time entirely worthwhile.

For obvious reasons I can't disclose anything about the student, but I can describe the assignment. It was a graphing practice. It provided several sets of data with the task of determining the function that best described it based on a handful of functions I set out earlier in class. One of the six data sets was a little sneaky: it didn't completely conform to any of the functions I had described. I planned to give full credit for a "quadratic" solution, as that was the closest match that I had provided. But this student came up with the actual solution: that it was y=kx^(1.5). And then he wrote a paragraph about this problem as follows (I don't think it's illegal to share this - besides I was delighted to have read it):

"The graph of data set ____ looks like a parabola or a straight line. I also though that I might have made a mistake drawing it and that it was a square-root. None of these worked, so I asked my father for help. We determined that it followed the equation y=kx^(1.5). Although I worked hard on this problem, the solution is not mine."

Here's what I wrote on his paper:
"Indeed it is also Kepler's solution to the relationship between the orbital radius and period of the planets, more commonly seen as radius^3=period^2, which gives period=radius^(3/2). Your honesty and humility are truly remarkable. Thank you :) "

I will probably be glowing about this kid all weekend.

Soooo... now what? Transitioning into the curriculum

This the part of the year where I pause a little bit and wonder how the heck do I start the real stuff? I'm perpetually tempted to solicit from students even the most mundane of details, just to prove to myself that they are thinking. But the kinds of questions I'm prone to asking during lecture could be most accurately described as "fill in the blank" for which the context makes it painfully clear what the answer should be: This is not critical thinking.

Today I had a brainwave and since I didn't have a class until half way through the day I had time to make it happen, much to my relief. After setting up the concept chart and supplying them with details about position, displacement, and time, it was time to start thinking about velocity... since there's really not a whole lot you can do with those fundamental measurements (besides perhaps discussing their origins, the nature of the smallest increment, and personal applications, e.g. the length of one's stride or the time it takes to start & stop a timer).

So on to velocity we plowed, and here were the questions I posed in a ppt slide with instructions to work on the questions in groups:
1) What is speed in terms of the items on your concept chart?
2) In what units do we measure speed, and what do those units tell us about what speed is composed of?
3) Write an equation for speed based on your answer to the above.
4) Is this equation always true? When is it not? What are its limitations?

As far as I can tell all the groups came to the correct conclusions, but now I'd like to know which question was most helpful for the creation of the equation which they created?

I'm inspired to ask such a question because of my recent reading of The Teaching Gap, which describes (among other very interesting things) the value Japanese school place on multiple methods. They don't require that all students use the same method to solve a problem, but observe, rather, that statistically speaking certain percentages of students will be prone to solving a problem through a handful of methods. So, of course, I'm very curious to see the distribution of methods the students used to come up with the equation... or perhaps since they worked in groups, I'll have to frame it more like, "Which question helped you personally understand what the equation ought to be?"

Update on the Women in Engineering: We're about to start our first project, so I'll see if I can put together a post-survey regarding their enthusiasm. I'll let you know what I find. :)