"Student Led Conferences" - Better than they have been in the past

I went to Storm's high school last week to attend the so-called "Student-Led Conferences." These were terribly disappointing when she was in middle-school: mumbly events where the kid led the parent from classroom to classroom, showed you one folder after another of incomprehensible and often disorganized materials, and then directed you to the next. If you engaged the teacher at all, they were usually pleasant but disengaged: this was a "student-led conference," and it was up to the student to communicate with her parent about the quality of the work.

Ridiculous. Either you already know what the kid is up to, or you're hopelessly out of touch with what the kid is doing.

This conference was decidedly better. It was not "student led"; it was a fifteen-minute conference with each teacher the student had, discussing their progress.

I found most of the teachers to be delightful. Even more to the point, every teacher was confronted with a parent who gave a damn. As a ferocious diletantte from a family of the same, I was able to engage every teacher at some level, which gave me some insight into their caring. The science teacher was discussing electron shells with the kids; I was able to discuss the difference between covalent and ionic bonds, so he knew that Storm's parents weren't being left behind on that topic. The same was true in language arts: "Both of the adults in Storm's house are published authors. Much of the Writer's Digest collection on writing genre fiction and reportage nonfiction is on our shelves." And in social studies: "Storm sits at a dinner table where the phrase 'the marginal utility of wealth' is not unknown." French: "Je parle un peu l'Francaise."

The only teacher who let me down a bit was for mathematics. I think she was honestly surprised by, and completely unprepared for, a parent who could still do the kid's math homework. She started in a droning voice, "I keep every kid's progress report on-line. Here's how you get to it..." Blahbitty blahbitty blah. When I started engaging her directly in the material on simple linear and quadratic equations, you could see the gears in her head shifting as she changed over from the routine she had built to actually discussing her topic. She seemed pleased with my inquiry, but more than a little unready to actually discuss material. I frankly doubt such inquiry happens often.

Storm continues to be a pretty good student. She's sliding a bit, but we're pushing her hard to succeed. I don't think she quite gets the importance of it all, but she's figuring it out.

I have Iron Chef'd out!

Last night, I got it into my head to go a little crazy with the#cooking. At first, I was just going to make ground buffalo sliders (basically, mini-hamburgers) with home-made biscuits, half of them cheddar & bacon, the other half with home-made tatziki sauce and cucumber topping. Tatziki sauce is that dill-and-yogurt sauce most people only encounter when ordering a lamb dish at nominally greek restaurants.

And I did exactly that. I made the biscuits first, and while they were cooking I made the patties and the tatziki sauce.

But as I was looking through the refrigerator, I realized that I had a problem: there were root vegetables that had been in there a long time and were in danger of going bad. I had to cure that immediately. So I made steak fries but with rutabaga and turnips instead of potato. To soften them, I steamed them for six minutes in the microwave first, then tossed them with olive oil and smoked paprika before putting them into the oven at 450°F for 20 minutes. That wasn't long enough; they still came out soggy. I'll have to work on the time/temperature thing some more.

Also, around all this cooking, I made cardamom ice cream, seeding the pods by hand, which took a while. I also used a fresh vanilla bean, superfine sugar, heavy cream for the infusion and whole milk for the chill. I was afraid that I'd ruined it by having the temperature up too high and might have scalded the cream, but no, when it was fully chilled two hours later, oh my gods was it good. Omaha was ecstatic.

I'm half-tempted to try something completely weird, like basil ice cream next. Never know. It might be good. And while it's pricy (a pint costs about eight bucks to make, between the fresh herbs and heavy cream, much more than the $4 pints of Häagen Dazs, but it is so much better), it's cheap enough I can afford the experiment.

Backups are available...

Livejournal has done a resolute job in staying up in the face of a serious of brutal attacks by, well, name your poison. I applaud LJ for all the hard work that they've done.

That said, interruptions of service are annoying and inevitable parts of life. To that extent, I'm going to try and maintain a copy of all my posts over at posterous.com on Elf Sternberg's Remote Outpost. We'll see how this works.