Just a quick note to say that I've created and will be working on a new blog. This one is designed to help me track my feelings about leaving Japan. That is, both in terms of what I think I will and won't miss when I leave.
If you're interested, it is here. It's also linked to on the right under "The Flower's Features."
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Peach Oatmeal Bread
In what may be a vain attempt to eat better by incorporating more whole grains, I've been poking about for more recipes to try and came across a promising looking peach oatmeal bread recipe on a site called "Slow Like Honey". The recipe apparently originally came from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking recipe collection, so I had more confidence that it might not be a dud (as so many of my experiences with Internet recipes have been).
It turns out that those King Arthur people know how to use whole grains. In fact, after trying this recipe, I'm inclined to actually buy their recipe book. My only concern is that it might use ingredients that I can't get in Japan, but I'll almost certainly still get it anyway given the rave reviews of it on Amazon and the fact that this turned out really well for me.
I did change just a few things (Splenda, canned white peaches rather than fresh ones or yellow cling peaches) and made a small mistake. I should have baked it just a bit longer as you can see by the picture above were the center is a little dark. The center is slightly still "doughy". I think a full hour (rather than my stopping it around 53 minutes) as the original recipe stated would have done the trick.
My loaf looks more "rustic" than the one pictured on Slow Like Honey because she pureed her peaches and I just chopped mine up into small pieces of about half about the size you'd find in fruit cocktail. I also didn't use fresh peaches as they're too good to waste on baking and too expensive in Tokyo.
Peach Oatmeal Bread
(adapted from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking)
Dry Ingredients:
2 cups whole wheat flour
¾ cup unbleached bread flour
½ cup granulated Splenda (or you can use white sugar)
½ cup packed light or brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats
Fruit:
1 can white peaches, drained and diced into small pieces
Wet ingredients:
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ teaspoon almond extract
Directions:
Mix all of the dry ingredients together then toss the diced peaches in the dry mix. Whisk the eggs a bit then add the other liquid ingredients and blend thoroughly. Add the wet to the dry and mix until just moistened. Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) for an hour or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.
My husband, who generally does not care for whole grain foods, actually liked this but was unhappy with the texture inconsistency with the peaches. Next time, I'm going to puree the peaches to get a smoother texture. We ate ours with butter this first time out, but I think it'd be just as good plain despite not being incredibly sweet.
A Big Bully
In a previous post, I mentioned an issue with one of my students who is going to college on a military base. At the end, I said that I would work out what this teacher wanted and was going to be like with a little time. Well, I have, and it's not good.
There area few ways I can figure out what the teacher is like and wants. One is through their comments, syllabus, and what the student tells me. The other is by listening to recordings of the class. Obviously, the latter is the best way to know what is going on, but I can't listen to all of each class she takes. That being said, I can scan through what is going on at key points.
First of all, the teacher is a bully, but a crafty one. He's the sort who you could easily imagine beating his wife in his private time. In the classes and in written correspondence, he criticizes, berates, and pushes the students on the one hand and then offers to have lunch with them, take them on tours of the base, and is nice to them on the other. The "carrot" and the "stick" approach really smacks of the man who gives his wife a black eye and then brings her flowers the next day.
Second, he will brook no explanation or argument which can be (mis)construed in any way to be what he imagines to be a challenge to his authority. If you say anything, he'll go off on an attack. For instance, he said some things which made it sound like my student had been drawing her ideas and information from external sources rather than offering up her aggregate knowledge based on being 45 years old and having taken a lot of other classes and insisted that she reference her ideas. When she explained that the source of her ideas was not from somewhere else per se, but from a body of accumulated knowledge, he got pissed off and wrote back a highly defensive letter saying that even he (and he must be the authority, after all) references 90% of what he writes.
She went out of her way to say that she'd be happy to find references after the fact and do what he wanted, but he seemed to completely ignore that part. Rather than see what she said as an explanation that she was not plagiarizing or lifting ideas without giving proper credit, he read it as a challenge to his authority to dictate how papers were to be written. This is the behavior of a bully who is insecure with any opinion other than his own.
My student was quite upset by his reaction, of course, and is going to write an apology. One thing about the vast majority of Japanese people, particularly women, is that you don't have to bully them to get them to study or cooperate. This guy doesn't seem to know the difference between teaching children (which he did in the past) and adults who are studying of their own volition and don't need to be pushed hard to do the work.
What is more, this teacher's way of explaining himself is not very clear and his requirements for weekly papers is absurd. Every week, the students must write two essays, but he expects them to reference them like term papers, even when part of the content they're answering questions for contains opinion questions. It's ridiculous for someone to expect you to provide references for their opinions. You get the feeling this guy is more in love with the letter of the law rather than the spirit when it comes to education. He's more interested in students following form than showing they have learned and digested the material.
Finally, he follows in the footsteps of a long line of teachers my student has encountered at this particular school on the base who does not actually know how to lecture. He spent the class I listened to relating old war stories of when he worked as a cop, criticizing other students, bragging about himself, and offering up his opinions on anecdotal cases. A structured, informative academic lecture was nowhere in the room. While I would definitely say that discussion of prominent anecdotal cases can be very effective in teaching material, this is not what he was doing. This is mostly finding a way to bullshit one's way through the time.
I told my student that, if she is ever hassled by the school in any way, I am going to fight for her like nobody's business because she has forked over a lot of money to go to that college and has never had a proper face-to-face lesson or teacher. The teachers, when they are qualified, are only so on paper. None of them seems to know how to conduct a real lesson or prepare and present material. They just hang out and chatter about opinions one way or another and make the students learn from the book.
At any rate, I'm actually responsible for my student getting in Dutch with the bully teacher because I advised her to explain things to him and helped her write the letter. This was a mistake on my part because I should have seen the carrot and stick thing as a bullying tactic, but I was viewing it rather personally instead. That is, I thought he was being nice to try and get her on as a private student (that is, steal her from me) since he says he teaches Japanese people privately. The truth is that this was an egotistical way of looking at it. It had nothing to do with what I might lose and everything to do with this guy's personality.
There area few ways I can figure out what the teacher is like and wants. One is through their comments, syllabus, and what the student tells me. The other is by listening to recordings of the class. Obviously, the latter is the best way to know what is going on, but I can't listen to all of each class she takes. That being said, I can scan through what is going on at key points.
First of all, the teacher is a bully, but a crafty one. He's the sort who you could easily imagine beating his wife in his private time. In the classes and in written correspondence, he criticizes, berates, and pushes the students on the one hand and then offers to have lunch with them, take them on tours of the base, and is nice to them on the other. The "carrot" and the "stick" approach really smacks of the man who gives his wife a black eye and then brings her flowers the next day.
Second, he will brook no explanation or argument which can be (mis)construed in any way to be what he imagines to be a challenge to his authority. If you say anything, he'll go off on an attack. For instance, he said some things which made it sound like my student had been drawing her ideas and information from external sources rather than offering up her aggregate knowledge based on being 45 years old and having taken a lot of other classes and insisted that she reference her ideas. When she explained that the source of her ideas was not from somewhere else per se, but from a body of accumulated knowledge, he got pissed off and wrote back a highly defensive letter saying that even he (and he must be the authority, after all) references 90% of what he writes.
She went out of her way to say that she'd be happy to find references after the fact and do what he wanted, but he seemed to completely ignore that part. Rather than see what she said as an explanation that she was not plagiarizing or lifting ideas without giving proper credit, he read it as a challenge to his authority to dictate how papers were to be written. This is the behavior of a bully who is insecure with any opinion other than his own.
My student was quite upset by his reaction, of course, and is going to write an apology. One thing about the vast majority of Japanese people, particularly women, is that you don't have to bully them to get them to study or cooperate. This guy doesn't seem to know the difference between teaching children (which he did in the past) and adults who are studying of their own volition and don't need to be pushed hard to do the work.
What is more, this teacher's way of explaining himself is not very clear and his requirements for weekly papers is absurd. Every week, the students must write two essays, but he expects them to reference them like term papers, even when part of the content they're answering questions for contains opinion questions. It's ridiculous for someone to expect you to provide references for their opinions. You get the feeling this guy is more in love with the letter of the law rather than the spirit when it comes to education. He's more interested in students following form than showing they have learned and digested the material.
Finally, he follows in the footsteps of a long line of teachers my student has encountered at this particular school on the base who does not actually know how to lecture. He spent the class I listened to relating old war stories of when he worked as a cop, criticizing other students, bragging about himself, and offering up his opinions on anecdotal cases. A structured, informative academic lecture was nowhere in the room. While I would definitely say that discussion of prominent anecdotal cases can be very effective in teaching material, this is not what he was doing. This is mostly finding a way to bullshit one's way through the time.
I told my student that, if she is ever hassled by the school in any way, I am going to fight for her like nobody's business because she has forked over a lot of money to go to that college and has never had a proper face-to-face lesson or teacher. The teachers, when they are qualified, are only so on paper. None of them seems to know how to conduct a real lesson or prepare and present material. They just hang out and chatter about opinions one way or another and make the students learn from the book.
At any rate, I'm actually responsible for my student getting in Dutch with the bully teacher because I advised her to explain things to him and helped her write the letter. This was a mistake on my part because I should have seen the carrot and stick thing as a bullying tactic, but I was viewing it rather personally instead. That is, I thought he was being nice to try and get her on as a private student (that is, steal her from me) since he says he teaches Japanese people privately. The truth is that this was an egotistical way of looking at it. It had nothing to do with what I might lose and everything to do with this guy's personality.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Now, It's Real
One of my former students recently returned from a year in America as a university exchange student. She told me that, now that she is back in Japan, she wishes she could go back to the U.S. because it was like it was "not real". I understand all too well what she is talking about.
When my husband and I first came to Japan, part of the appeal was that it wasn't "real". Everything you encounter carries an air of novelty and mystery. Even things like the Coke cans, which when we got here were small and short to the way in which your change is handed over to you in a special way when you make a purchase is a curiosity.
The "mystery" aspect is in all of the things you can't understand or have never seen before. You never know when you buy something which looks like a carton of peanut butter (because it has a peanut on the front and is next to the jam and Nutella) is going to be what you think it is or if you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Even something as mundane as traveling from place to place is pretty interesting when you see the train zipping past houses whose design is different from the ones you saw back home. When you see the huge apartments full of "rabbit hutch" apartments, rice paddies, and temples and temple gates, it all seems incredibly unreal. It's as if you've been transported to some ethereal land where the rules you grew up with don't seem to apply.
In fact, one of the things which makes the experience of living in a foreign country less real is that you lack an awareness of the rules. Back home, you're fully aware of all of the crap your parents have been putting up with all their lives like taxes, insurance, and home maintenance responsibilities. When I got here, I had no idea about the need to file an income tax return, pay city taxes, or health insurance and nobody at my work told me about it. I was completely unencumbered by these things. All of the reality of adult life is suddenly left behind as you go about your business in ignorance enjoying the exotic nature of your surroundings.
I'm not sure when it happened, and I'm sure it happened very slowly, but Japan became completely real for me. The novelty wore off of how cute the cans of Coke were. I started to understand what was in all the mystery packages I encountered. Watching the girl at the department store wrap my purchase like a gift was less of a cute idiosyncrasy of the merchants in Japan and more of an irksome waste of material. Cute little Japanese ditties that I heard again and again in shops or on T.V. became as annoying as the cute little English ditties in stores and T.V. back home. And, of course, all of those expenses and responsibilities which I was blissfully ignorant of became crystal clear to me and I started to understand what people were saying rather than experience it as background noise which meant nothing to me.
After awhile, the the way in which living in a foreign country feels unreal because you are disconnected from everything fades and it's all very real. I notice this very acutely when I read blogs written by people who haven't been here as long as me. They're delighted by all sorts of stuff which is now so mundane as to hold little appeal for me. Summer festivals are now the rage, but I've seen more than my share of them. Now, they're like the carnivals I grew up visiting as a kid. They don't change, and you can only ride the tilt-a-whirl so many times before it starts to feel boring or eat snow cones and think they're a special treat. In Japan, the kakigori (shaved ice with syrup) is no longer appealing. The opulent tanabata festival in my neighborhood is just incredibly annoying because it blocks access to shops and the train station.
The fact that Japan is now "real" is probably part of why the shine has gone off of it for me. That doesn't mean that my perspective isn't a valid one, but it does make it irritating to other foreigners who have no idea how it feels to be here long enough for the novelty to wear off. It's part of what motivates them to assert that Japan is "wasted" on me or that I should leave. To a lot of people, I don't belong here anymore, but that's only because they can't begin to imagine what it's like to live in the "real" Japan.
When my husband and I first came to Japan, part of the appeal was that it wasn't "real". Everything you encounter carries an air of novelty and mystery. Even things like the Coke cans, which when we got here were small and short to the way in which your change is handed over to you in a special way when you make a purchase is a curiosity.
The "mystery" aspect is in all of the things you can't understand or have never seen before. You never know when you buy something which looks like a carton of peanut butter (because it has a peanut on the front and is next to the jam and Nutella) is going to be what you think it is or if you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Even something as mundane as traveling from place to place is pretty interesting when you see the train zipping past houses whose design is different from the ones you saw back home. When you see the huge apartments full of "rabbit hutch" apartments, rice paddies, and temples and temple gates, it all seems incredibly unreal. It's as if you've been transported to some ethereal land where the rules you grew up with don't seem to apply.
In fact, one of the things which makes the experience of living in a foreign country less real is that you lack an awareness of the rules. Back home, you're fully aware of all of the crap your parents have been putting up with all their lives like taxes, insurance, and home maintenance responsibilities. When I got here, I had no idea about the need to file an income tax return, pay city taxes, or health insurance and nobody at my work told me about it. I was completely unencumbered by these things. All of the reality of adult life is suddenly left behind as you go about your business in ignorance enjoying the exotic nature of your surroundings.
I'm not sure when it happened, and I'm sure it happened very slowly, but Japan became completely real for me. The novelty wore off of how cute the cans of Coke were. I started to understand what was in all the mystery packages I encountered. Watching the girl at the department store wrap my purchase like a gift was less of a cute idiosyncrasy of the merchants in Japan and more of an irksome waste of material. Cute little Japanese ditties that I heard again and again in shops or on T.V. became as annoying as the cute little English ditties in stores and T.V. back home. And, of course, all of those expenses and responsibilities which I was blissfully ignorant of became crystal clear to me and I started to understand what people were saying rather than experience it as background noise which meant nothing to me.
After awhile, the the way in which living in a foreign country feels unreal because you are disconnected from everything fades and it's all very real. I notice this very acutely when I read blogs written by people who haven't been here as long as me. They're delighted by all sorts of stuff which is now so mundane as to hold little appeal for me. Summer festivals are now the rage, but I've seen more than my share of them. Now, they're like the carnivals I grew up visiting as a kid. They don't change, and you can only ride the tilt-a-whirl so many times before it starts to feel boring or eat snow cones and think they're a special treat. In Japan, the kakigori (shaved ice with syrup) is no longer appealing. The opulent tanabata festival in my neighborhood is just incredibly annoying because it blocks access to shops and the train station.
The fact that Japan is now "real" is probably part of why the shine has gone off of it for me. That doesn't mean that my perspective isn't a valid one, but it does make it irritating to other foreigners who have no idea how it feels to be here long enough for the novelty to wear off. It's part of what motivates them to assert that Japan is "wasted" on me or that I should leave. To a lot of people, I don't belong here anymore, but that's only because they can't begin to imagine what it's like to live in the "real" Japan.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Long Time, No See
This evening my husband and I were walking along the huge, snaking shopping street about 6 minutes from our apartment. One thing I'm going to miss after we leave Japan is the proximity and variety of shops that we have at hand. This street is one of several reasons we have lived in the same neighborhood for our entire stay. It's not only that it is convenient, but also that we save so much money on food at the cheap markets located on it.
At any rate, as we were walking down the street, a Japanese woman pushing her bicycle shouted out my name. I looked over at her and I had no idea who she was. Fortunately for me, she said her name and then I remembered her. She was a student who I taught privately for about 3 years about with the last lesson ending about 10 years ago. We stopped having lessons together when she moved to a city in another part of Japan then moved to Germany due to her husband being transferred.
I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but it is possible that this student was the first private student I ever taught in Japan. I liked her a lot and even went to see the sumo with her at one point. It's nothing short of amazing to run into her after all of these years. It's not only that she's back in my area, but also that she was on that street at the same time as us in the same location along the street. For the record, walking the entire length of that street if you don't stop and check out any of the shops would likely take 10 minutes at a decent pace.
We chatted briefly and I gave her my e-mail address and phone number. My hope is that she'll contact me and we can at least catch up with one another. If she wants to start to study again with me, that'd be all the better, but I mainly would like to see what she's been up to. She was pretty shocked, incidentally, that I was still in the same place. Such is the life in Japan that no one expects you to remain in the same place for long. I think she was also surprised that we were still in Japan.
At any rate, this experience is one that I have occasionally mulled over in the back of my mind. I have taught and met a great many Japanese people in my time here. Some of them came to my home over a hundred times, but I'm not sure that I would easily recognize the ones who I haven't seen in the past three years. And, no, I'm not trying to say anything here about all Japanese people looking alike. :-p
The main problem is that I have seen so many of them and it all becomes a bit of a blur after awhile. I recognize their names, of course, but not their faces. It doesn't help that I endeavor not to make eye contact with anyone when I'm out and about because it is taken as an invitation for strangers to walk over and start talking to me while I'm just trying to go about my business and head back home.
This time, I was lucky that she told me her name. I don't know if my face was as blank as my mind and she saved me from myself or if she just figured out that it had been so long and I might not recall her. I still wonder if the day is going to come when a former student or coworker comes along and greets me and I'm just left looking like the middle-aged woman with the Swiss cheese memory that I am.
A small aside about people "recognizing" me on the street. I once had an experience where I was coming out of the subway and a tall, foreign man with very little hair and what sounded like a German accent said "hello" to me in a familiar way and then asked, "you don't remember me, do you?" I said that I did not and he started talking about having worked out with me at some gym that we supposedly went to together. Since I've never joined a gym of any sort in Japan, he'd clearly mistaken me for someone else. So, sometimes people walk up to me and think they know me when they don't. That's pretty surreal given how few foreigners are around who look like me.
At any rate, as we were walking down the street, a Japanese woman pushing her bicycle shouted out my name. I looked over at her and I had no idea who she was. Fortunately for me, she said her name and then I remembered her. She was a student who I taught privately for about 3 years about with the last lesson ending about 10 years ago. We stopped having lessons together when she moved to a city in another part of Japan then moved to Germany due to her husband being transferred.
I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but it is possible that this student was the first private student I ever taught in Japan. I liked her a lot and even went to see the sumo with her at one point. It's nothing short of amazing to run into her after all of these years. It's not only that she's back in my area, but also that she was on that street at the same time as us in the same location along the street. For the record, walking the entire length of that street if you don't stop and check out any of the shops would likely take 10 minutes at a decent pace.
We chatted briefly and I gave her my e-mail address and phone number. My hope is that she'll contact me and we can at least catch up with one another. If she wants to start to study again with me, that'd be all the better, but I mainly would like to see what she's been up to. She was pretty shocked, incidentally, that I was still in the same place. Such is the life in Japan that no one expects you to remain in the same place for long. I think she was also surprised that we were still in Japan.
At any rate, this experience is one that I have occasionally mulled over in the back of my mind. I have taught and met a great many Japanese people in my time here. Some of them came to my home over a hundred times, but I'm not sure that I would easily recognize the ones who I haven't seen in the past three years. And, no, I'm not trying to say anything here about all Japanese people looking alike. :-p
The main problem is that I have seen so many of them and it all becomes a bit of a blur after awhile. I recognize their names, of course, but not their faces. It doesn't help that I endeavor not to make eye contact with anyone when I'm out and about because it is taken as an invitation for strangers to walk over and start talking to me while I'm just trying to go about my business and head back home.
This time, I was lucky that she told me her name. I don't know if my face was as blank as my mind and she saved me from myself or if she just figured out that it had been so long and I might not recall her. I still wonder if the day is going to come when a former student or coworker comes along and greets me and I'm just left looking like the middle-aged woman with the Swiss cheese memory that I am.
A small aside about people "recognizing" me on the street. I once had an experience where I was coming out of the subway and a tall, foreign man with very little hair and what sounded like a German accent said "hello" to me in a familiar way and then asked, "you don't remember me, do you?" I said that I did not and he started talking about having worked out with me at some gym that we supposedly went to together. Since I've never joined a gym of any sort in Japan, he'd clearly mistaken me for someone else. So, sometimes people walk up to me and think they know me when they don't. That's pretty surreal given how few foreigners are around who look like me.
Whole Wheat Pancakes (that are actually good)
I'm guessing one of the hallmarks of a good pornographer is that they can hide all the flaws and grossness of the activities they are portraying and make it look like happy fun time with beautiful people. Well, maybe not actually "beautiful" so much as thin, copiously implanted, and shaven.
A good food pornographer similarly takes a subject which can look like slop and make it look appetizing. What is more, they can take utter failures and make them look like successes. One of my major pet peeves (which I've mentioned before) is that a lot of the recipes I find on the Internet look fabulous or are steeped in superlatives, but when I try the recipe, I get something inedible or lame.
Invariably, a lot of the best looking pictures with bad recipes have a bunch of comments under them saying, "it looks fabulous! I can't wait to try it!" They never have comments from people who have actually tried it. This irked me as the comments are relatively useless to those of us wanting to actually try the food rather than just treat it like a statue to admire, but I have finally figured out why there are no comments from people who make the featured item. I have posted comments on some of these failures and said in a polite way that the recipe didn't work out for me. Sometimes I've even asked for advice about where I may have gone wrong. Unsurprisingly, these comments are never posted. This goes a long way toward supporting my suspicion that people who post their glorious food porn pictures know that the recipes suck, but they post them anyway and hide the consequences.
I've made whole wheat pancakes on many occasions, but the results have been somewhat disappointing. Mainly, they're denser than I'd like, too flat, or too eggy. On the whole, they simply weren't fluffy enough to satisfy compared to the glory of cakes made with white flour. The truth is that whole wheat can't hold up to the decadence of white flour cakes. It never will because it has a different taste and texture due to the extra protein in them. The best you can hope for is something which is as good as it can be, but not so different from beautiful white pancakes as to disappoint.
I was poking around for a recipe for whole wheat pancakes and you'd be surprised how many included white flour. How can it be whole wheat if there's white flour in it? It sort of takes away the "whole" part. At any rate, I found an abysmal recipe which was just 4 ingredients - whole wheat flour, baking soda, brown sugar and milk. I was going to try it anyway because I though a radically different approach might work better. The next morning I had second thoughts and decided to heavily modify the recipe to include things I think should be in any pancake recipe. The results were surprisingly good.
Whole Wheat Pancakes:
Dry ingredients:
1 cup (regular) whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 semi-heaping tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
Wet ingredients:
3/4 cup milk with 1/2 tbsp. distilled vinegar added (or buttermilk)
1 medium egg
1 tbsp. Canola oil
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Sift the flour, baking soda, and baking powder into a bowl. Scoop most of it up and sift a second time. Add the sugar and salt and mix up the rest of the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients until well-blended. Add the wet into the dry and stir until all of the dry ingredients are moistened. Don't overmix it or smooth out lumps. Mainly, you're just looking to make sure there's nothing dry in your pancakes.
Heat a skillet or griddle at medium-high heat. The pan should be good and hot, but not smoking hot. Add just enough Canola oil to coat the pan and let it heat for about a minute. There shouldn't be any pools of oil. You just want to add enough to make sure they don't stick.
Add the batter by the tablespoon. I used about two tablespoons per cake and they were not huge, but not small. It's very important to follow this next part when cooking if you want to have good, fluffy pancakes. You need to watch them carefully and flip them when the edges look dry and/or the very first bubble starts to form on the top. If you have the heat set properly, they will brown quickly as well. Only flip them once or you will have tough pancakes. You can test for doneness once they're flipped by pressing gently on the center of one of the cakes. It should feel firm, but be springy.
If you wait too long to flip them, they won't rise enough. You should also be able to tell if they're ready by the fact that they don't break apart when you attempt to flip them (and by the edges looking dry near the bottom). Essentially, the bottom should be cooked and the top still quite wet. If you look at the stack of cakes at the top of the post, you can see that they are uneven because they were flipped when top was still very moist and it splayed out a bit (bottom is smaller than the top). This is what you want.
These are very hearty tasting and undeniably "wheaty" in taste, but they have the right texture and look and feel like an real, fluffy pancake. They're actually better with things like jam and honey than the average white flour pancake, but good with syrup as well. When you add the syrup, the pancakes will be more "crumbly" than usual pancakes because those made with whole wheat flour isn't as gluey as those made with white, but they don't disintegrate.
My feeling is that the baking soda made a huge difference with the whole wheat flour because it acts much more rapidly than baking powder. I think it gave these extra lift, but it also means you can't make too many at once or save the batter for the next day if you won't want to use it all. My recipe made 7 medium-sized pancakes. I ate two and put the rest in the refrigerator for the next few days. I recommend cooking them all up at once rather than saving the batter because I think they'll lose all of their capacity to rise by the next day.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Of Teachers and Idiosyncracies
For the last two and a half years, I've been tutoring a student who is studying criminal justice at a college on one of the American military bases. This is one of the reasons that I have insight into both the American and Japanese justice systems and wrote the "This is not America" posts. I'm not speaking from anecdotal experiences. I'm speaking as someone who has taken courses side-by-side with my student as she's mainly taken distance courses and my job has been to read her texts and provide a lecture for her to base her papers on. I'm just as much a student as she is, but I have the added benefit of her research into the Japanese justice system (in Japanese) as a part of my learning process. It's how I learned things like there are no rights provided in line with habeas corpus in Japan (or that they are ignored).
At any rate, one of the things about helping someone get through college is that you are taken back to the time when you were going through the process yourself. All of the issues that I experienced with some of my teachers back then are in play for my student as well, and I find myself frustrated on her behalf.
One of the biggest problems that students complain about is the amount of work that teachers give them. Each teacher tends to expect not only attendance at lectures and reading the textbook, but regular personal research into related topics and articles. Some teachers assign work as if their class were the only one the students are taking, or at least as if their class is the most important and therefore worthy of a disproportionate amount of the students' study time.
My student is currently studying with one of these types of teachers. She has a gigantic text chock full of more information than anyone could possibly retain on the first pass, but he also expects her to research for articles and information on discussion topics. This is on top of writing essays every week for homework. It appears to be a daunting task for even the students who speak English as a native language as my student has forwarded messages from the teacher where he complains that they are just writing their opinions too much and not doing enough volitional work to augment their essays content. Never mind that at least some of the questions that the teacher is telling them to answer are opinion-based questions...
The other point that I recognize as being akin to my college experiences is that some teachers don't actually teach. I considered myself fortunate that the vast majority of my teachers at university lectured on the content they wanted you to learn. A few of them, however, mainly told stories or anecdotes and did not actually teach so much as fill the time in a way which was easy and entertaining for them. My feeling is that teachers are supposed to aid the digestion of the material they want you to learn. They're supposed to take some of the hairier elements of the topic and make things much clearer than a book could. Teachers who just have chat sessions or tell stories tend to expect the students to regurgitate the book on tests and in papers while not actually helping you succeed at either of these tasks with their lectures. I will note that I only got a "B" in one of my psychology classes after choosing my major (the rest were all A's) and it was in a class with a teacher who did this sort of story telling and time-wasting class while testing us on the textbook material.
Another point I recognize through my student's work is that every teacher has different idiosyncrasies about how written work is done. Some of them take off points for sentences that are too long. Some of them take off points for paragraphs with too few sentences in them. Others have strict style guidelines which differ from those of other professors. Some of the really lazy ones insist that the students type out or copy and paste every question they are answering as part of a test or essay so that the teacher does not have to reference the questions while reading the answers. Others get miffed if you waste their time and word counts on putting the questions in your work.
The bottom line with the idiosyncratic choices for each teacher is that I have to help my student work out what they want each time and help her tailor her work to fit in with what a particular teacher's wishes are. Usually, it takes a few assignments and analysis of comments and corrections to work out what they want to get it right. This illustrates how subjective the academic evaluation process is as each teacher applies a different standard.
Finally, the one constant is that teachers grade you higher if you concur with their viewpoints on topics which require an opinion or conclusion. The teacher of my student's current class is a former police officer who identifies more strongly with victims. If my student expresses less punitive views of the perpetrator of a crime (such as mental illness factoring into punishment and charges), he's less likely to see what she writes or says favorably.
This is one of the stickier idiosyncrasies because there's a choice to be made in terms of either pandering to the teacher's bias to get a better grade or to simply be honest. Some teachers are open-minded enough to grade objectively if an opinion is backed up with research or evidence. Some are not. I haven't sussed this one out yet in that regard, but I'll know soon enough based on how she is graded on particular assignments.
One thing this has reminded me of is that we grow up seeing teachers as being authorities and being scholarly. In many cases, we see them as knowing much more than us and being in control in a manner which we are not. From a certain viewpoint, that is true. They are in control of the class and speak with confidence and authority. Of course, this is easier to do when you've presented the same material over and over and over again. The idiosyncrasies I've noted illustrate, however, that (at least some) teachers are just as human as anyone else and as likely as your boss at your office to apply arbitrary standards or unrealistic expectations as anyone else.
At any rate, one of the things about helping someone get through college is that you are taken back to the time when you were going through the process yourself. All of the issues that I experienced with some of my teachers back then are in play for my student as well, and I find myself frustrated on her behalf.
One of the biggest problems that students complain about is the amount of work that teachers give them. Each teacher tends to expect not only attendance at lectures and reading the textbook, but regular personal research into related topics and articles. Some teachers assign work as if their class were the only one the students are taking, or at least as if their class is the most important and therefore worthy of a disproportionate amount of the students' study time.
My student is currently studying with one of these types of teachers. She has a gigantic text chock full of more information than anyone could possibly retain on the first pass, but he also expects her to research for articles and information on discussion topics. This is on top of writing essays every week for homework. It appears to be a daunting task for even the students who speak English as a native language as my student has forwarded messages from the teacher where he complains that they are just writing their opinions too much and not doing enough volitional work to augment their essays content. Never mind that at least some of the questions that the teacher is telling them to answer are opinion-based questions...
The other point that I recognize as being akin to my college experiences is that some teachers don't actually teach. I considered myself fortunate that the vast majority of my teachers at university lectured on the content they wanted you to learn. A few of them, however, mainly told stories or anecdotes and did not actually teach so much as fill the time in a way which was easy and entertaining for them. My feeling is that teachers are supposed to aid the digestion of the material they want you to learn. They're supposed to take some of the hairier elements of the topic and make things much clearer than a book could. Teachers who just have chat sessions or tell stories tend to expect the students to regurgitate the book on tests and in papers while not actually helping you succeed at either of these tasks with their lectures. I will note that I only got a "B" in one of my psychology classes after choosing my major (the rest were all A's) and it was in a class with a teacher who did this sort of story telling and time-wasting class while testing us on the textbook material.
Another point I recognize through my student's work is that every teacher has different idiosyncrasies about how written work is done. Some of them take off points for sentences that are too long. Some of them take off points for paragraphs with too few sentences in them. Others have strict style guidelines which differ from those of other professors. Some of the really lazy ones insist that the students type out or copy and paste every question they are answering as part of a test or essay so that the teacher does not have to reference the questions while reading the answers. Others get miffed if you waste their time and word counts on putting the questions in your work.
The bottom line with the idiosyncratic choices for each teacher is that I have to help my student work out what they want each time and help her tailor her work to fit in with what a particular teacher's wishes are. Usually, it takes a few assignments and analysis of comments and corrections to work out what they want to get it right. This illustrates how subjective the academic evaluation process is as each teacher applies a different standard.
Finally, the one constant is that teachers grade you higher if you concur with their viewpoints on topics which require an opinion or conclusion. The teacher of my student's current class is a former police officer who identifies more strongly with victims. If my student expresses less punitive views of the perpetrator of a crime (such as mental illness factoring into punishment and charges), he's less likely to see what she writes or says favorably.
This is one of the stickier idiosyncrasies because there's a choice to be made in terms of either pandering to the teacher's bias to get a better grade or to simply be honest. Some teachers are open-minded enough to grade objectively if an opinion is backed up with research or evidence. Some are not. I haven't sussed this one out yet in that regard, but I'll know soon enough based on how she is graded on particular assignments.
One thing this has reminded me of is that we grow up seeing teachers as being authorities and being scholarly. In many cases, we see them as knowing much more than us and being in control in a manner which we are not. From a certain viewpoint, that is true. They are in control of the class and speak with confidence and authority. Of course, this is easier to do when you've presented the same material over and over and over again. The idiosyncrasies I've noted illustrate, however, that (at least some) teachers are just as human as anyone else and as likely as your boss at your office to apply arbitrary standards or unrealistic expectations as anyone else.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
A Brief Note About Straw Man Arguments
Just a quick note for any readers who come over from Japan Soc and decide to quibble with me. I will ignore any straw men that are put up. I realize this means I will have to ignore most of what anyone says, since 99% of the arguments I encounter are based on straw men.
If you don't know what a straw man is, here you go.
If you don't know what a straw man is, here you go.
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