Last Friday, seventh grade geography. We were going over the previous day's assignment (a fill-in-the-blank worksheet on China), and the question was "the Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep out . . . ?"

Ashley: Eye invaders.

Me: I beg your pardon?

Ashley: Eye invaders.

Me: ?? Let me see that.

So I check Ashley's paper and sure enough, she has "eih invaders."

Garrett: That's what I have too!

Alex: Me too.

So I check Garrett's paper; his reads "eign invaders." This was a partner activity and these kids were in the same group. The light begins to dawn.

I check the textbook and sure enough. This is how the text reads:
"The Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep out for-
eign invaders."

Oh. My. God.

Me: You all do understand the function of a hyphen, right?
(The class is breaking up.)

Me: Didn't anyone think that that answer didn't make any sense?

Garrett: I thought it was some weird Chinese word.

I had some pretty sheepish seventh graders, but we all had a really good laugh.

Clothes, suitcase, backpack, quart-size ziplock bag for toiletries, gifts for homestay family, passports for myself and eleven teenagers, etc. are all piled up in the living room, waiting for me to somehow get it all organized, packed, and under 40 pounds! Clearly I must not be too freaked about it since here I sit with glass of wine and plate of brie, but tomorrow will not be pretty. Then Tuesday it's off to Europe: first stop Switzerland, then Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and lastly, Great Britain. I did manage to learn the seven question words in German (who, what, when, where,why, how and how much!)- hopefully my homestay family will know more English than I do German. I'm still not fully versed in the operations of my new digital camera but I'm sure I will figure it out and with luck will have interesting stories and pictures to post when I return. Yikes!

All right Donna, look what you started. My sister made a peep diorama of Washington crossing the Delaware which I loved so much I decided that my students needed a peep diorama contest. To give the contest some educational value, their dioramas have to depict an event from US or world history or a scene from a favorite book, but honestly, the contest is mostly for fun. The contest deadline is next Wednesday and I have no idea what to expect. One teacher has already made one and some of the kids seemed really excited about it, but you never can tell with junior high kids. I decided to make one, ostensibly to generate a little more excitement and motivate those who had expressed interest in the contest (since junior high students are not always real good about follow-through) but the truth is that the kid in me wanted to make one, too!

So here it is – my version of a famous scene in revolutionary America: Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, rendered in Peeps. It’s particularly appropriate since the 232nd anniversary of Lexington and Concord will soon be on us. For those of you "from away," Patriots Day is a major holiday for our neighbors in Massachusetts.



Artistically speaking, my diorama is not in the same league as my sister’s. Revere's horse looks more like a camel or a large dog, but I am pretty pleased with the minuteman coming out of the door. I put the diorama together yesterday when I should have been grading papers because I wanted to bring in an example for the kiddies before the long Easter weekend. But Mother Nature intervened overnight in the form of a heavy spring snowstorm. No school today due to downed trees and power outages all over the place. But on Monday, I will tote "Peep Revere's Ride" to school. Hope it holds up that long!

We had last week off from school (it's a New England thing - February break) and I decided to take the opportunity to do a little hearth cooking. After all, we have the requisite cooking fireplace with a nice big hearth, the wood supply, and the necessary equipment. The menu: chicken roasted in the tin roaster, potato balls cooked in the spider, and for dessert, Marlborough pudding baked in the bake kettle.

The first step is to get a good fire going, since what is needed is a nice bed of hot coals.
That's the bake kettle "preheating" next to the fire, and the spider (the frying pan with little feet) just waiting patiently.



Now the chicken is trussed and threaded on the skewer in the tin roaster. The open side will face toward the fire and the curved back reflects heat around the chicken. (I like how daintily the chicken's legs are crossed at the ankle.) The roaster dates to the late 18th or early 19th century, and is actually very efficient. Assuming that you maintain a good hot fire, the chicken will roast in the same amount of time it would in a modern oven and tastes better - nicely roasted on the outside and juicy on the inside.

An old New England favorite, Marlborough pudding is a lemon-apple custard pie and was once more popular for Thanksgiving than pumpkin pie. A copy of the recipe is available at the Wentworth House site (www.paulwentworthhouse.org) in case anyone is interested - it is not complicated and is absolutely delish. Here it is in the bake kettle (also called a Dutch oven) which sits in a bed of hot coals.

Notice that the lid has a raised edge which allows the cook to pile coals on top, thus creating heat all around the pie (which is what baking is, after all). Again, assuming that you maintain a good supply of hot coals around the kettle, the pie will cook in the same amount of time it would in a modern oven.

Here are the potato balls cooking on the hearth in the spider which is also set in a bed of hot coals.



And finally, the dinner is ready.




I wouldn't want to do this every day - it's really hot work, it dries out your skin something awful, and it involves a lot of bending and lifting. It comes as no surprise that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, dinner was not served at night but between noon and 2 pm, and supper was usually leftovers or something light. There would be no way that a housewife could do this kind of cooking all day long and accomplish anything else. And note that I didn't use the beehive oven, which is an all day affair. But hearth cooking is fun from time to time, and gives me a real appreciation for the kind of work that women did for centuries.

What a Mississippi river boat was doing on the Thames, I have no clue. Notice that it is even named "Dixie Queen." ??!??

A glass saucer in the living room holds a small collection of archaeological artifacts. There are other such collections elsewhere in the house: jars and boxes of artifacts pushed up in the garden in the spring or discovered in the barns and cellars. This particular collection, however, has pride of place because it represents the gleanings from a mudlarking expedition on the Thames in London. An ancient occupation, mudlarking essentially is scavenging for items washed up by the river’s tides. In the past, poor children would comb the riverside for any items which could be reused or sold. Today, the Thames continues to wash up the debris of centuries of occupation. A license is needed to dig on the bank and anything really rare or unusual needs to be reported to the Museum of London, but anyone can pick up items along the shingle and it’s a nifty way to find bits and pieces of London’s past – archaeological souvenirs, if you will.

Mudlarking was high on my personal list of things to do in London, but it was entirely dependent on being near access to the Thames when the tide was out. It happened that while we were visiting Tower Bridge, we spied a stairway leading from the embankment down to the river and we were in luck: the tide was out. We picked our way carefully down steps which were green and slippery with algae, and started exploring along the mud. In short order, we had collected an assortment of items tossed out by generations of Londoners: bits of broken pottery, a cup handle, pieces of bone, the base of a wine glass, fragments of clay pipe. None of it is valuable or exceptional but it is all part of the story of the city.

Perhaps it is because I will be returning much sooner than I had thought possible, but lately I’ve been thinking back to our trip to London last spring.

One London experience which has really stuck with me happened entirely by chance. Steve and Dan wanted to tour the HMS Belfast, which is docked on the south side of the Thames. Sally and I were not particularly interested, so we decided to find the Museum of Fashion which (according to our maps) was somewhere in the general vicinity. So we started off walking – it was a much longer walk than we had anticipated, through a part of London best described as commercial and industrial – only to find when we arrived that the museum was closed. For variety’s sake we chose to return to the Belfast by a different route and of course got turned around in the neighborhood near Tower Bridge. While trying to get back on track, we cut through a smallish walled-in park, with a few odd stones set in the entrances. http://flickr.com/photos/drewski/70124452/ The stones resembled large pieces of gravestones which, if put together, seemed to have a message about an older space still being useful (as best as I can remember them).

In the middle of the park was a modern building set upon what appeared to be a pedestal of some sort. We wandered around the building, and in the front was a World War I memorial, in rather bad shape (many of the metal letters forming the names were falling off or gone altogether). On the whole, it appeared to have been a churchyard, minus gravestones and of course, the church itself. We didn’t linger because we needed to meet the boys back at the Belfast, but my curiosity was piqued. What was this place? And what was with the modern building in what was clearly a much-older space?

Later, looking at our maps and guides, I figured out where we had been and that the park had indeed been a churchyard, that of St. John’s Church, Horsleydown. Even later, back home, I tried to find out more about the park, the church, and the modern building. I happened upon a picture (referenced above) of one of the odd stones, and through various leads, discovered that there had been a church there since the mid-18th century, but that it had been destroyed during the bombing of London in WWII. A new building was constructed in the 1970s on the foundation of the old church (thus the odd “pedestal”) – this is apparently Naismith House, part of the London City Mission serving the largely immigrant population of this part of Southwark.

It makes sense that the church was a victim of a wartime bomb – this neighborhood is fairly close to the London docks, and was hit pretty hard by the blitz and later by urban renewal. According to the London Metropolitan archives, the church was damaged/destroyed in WWII, probably in the fall of 1940 since after September 1940, weddings were solemnized in the vestry hall. After 1956, the parish was combined with Saint Olave into Saint Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey.

I can't explain my fascination with this place. Clearly there was a story behind the little park that I needed to figure out, or maybe it was just the unexpected nature of this encounter with a small piece of London's history.

(Note: I have a few pictures which I will try to post, if I can figure out how!)

Still feeling my way through this LJ stuff. Having explored the options available and reviewed them with my technical adviser (Dan), we settled on this color scheme and the cute little lemon smiley guys (who, as Dan pointed out, resemble the Boos on Super Mario). Easier than re-arranging furniture and a lot faster!

Not sure how this will work, or even if I want to deal with it.

Umm - things are pretty much the same as usual. School, home, back to school again, and so it goes. However, Steve and I will be heading off to Europe for three weeks this July. Not as romantic as it sounds - we will be part of a People to People delegation, and will be accompanied by 40-odd high school students (or "ambassadors," as we are supposed to call them). On the up-side, we will hit London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Lucerne, and Zurich, and will have a homestay in Germany. Dan and Sally get to stay home (no parties, no burning down the house) which will be a little worrisome, but we have plenty of good neighbors to keep an eye on them.

So - now to post this and see how it works. LJ for beginners.