Greetings From the Desert

Saguaro cactus fill the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona.


We just returned from an eight-day trip to Arizona! 
Here are a few impressions of our adventure . . .

The palm trees and poolsides of Squaw Peak Resort in Phoenix.

The contrast of mountains and pine trees north in Flagstaff.

Getting our kicks on Rt. 66 in the little town of Williams.

Staying at the charming Canyon Country Inn, also in Williams.

An old-fashioned train robbery on the Grand Canyon Railway.

And, of course, the majesty of the Grand Canyon.

Varieties of cactus back at the Phoenix Botanical Gardens.

Indian blanket and purple lupine grow abundantly there.

Blooms spring from the tops of cactus, bringing splashes of color.

I caught this little dove perched way atop a might saguaro.

This variety of cactus is aptly named "golden barrel."

The saguaro is key to the desert's survival.


Cool things to know about saguaro cactus:

1. They grow to be 100-300 years old. Their age is often evident by the number of
arms they grow.
They can grow up to 50 feet tall.

2. Their roots reach horizontally to the length of their height,
near to the ground's surface
to absorb as much water as possible.

3. Their accordian-shaped surface expands and contracts as they collect and hold water.

4. Their flowers are pollinated by bats, and they produce fruit for birds and small animals.

5. They can hold literally tons of water.

6. They are only found in the Americas.


I hope you've enjoyed my little travelogue. 
It's back to the fields of Kansas for us!

For life is what you make it.  So make it good!

To Teach or to Entertain?

This eagle was recuperating at a raptor rescue center in Cheney, Kan.

That is the question.  

A newspaper article I recently came across reported the findings of a prize-winning physicist named Carl Wieman who has done research on different styles of classroom teaching. He has concluded that interactive learning is much more effective than traditional lecturing.  While I certainly believe in students participating in the classroom, I have a problem with the conclusion of his report. Right off, he asks the question: Who is more effective for student learning? The veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate student interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes?  The latter involves short, small-group discussions, in-class “clicker quizzes,” demonstrations, and question-answer sessions.  Weiman contends that real learning depends not so much on the teacher, but on the teacher’s methods.

“It’s really what’s going on in the students’ minds rather than who is instructing them,” Wieman says.  Another professor who is a proponent of this method agrees.  “It’s not the professor, it’s not even the technology, it’s the approach.”

My main problem with this is the disregard for the credentials of the person standing up front, as if all that a teacher is doing is disseminating information.  What if the students have questions that demand a source of in-depth knowledge?  What about the way in which an experienced professor models what it means to be an expert in a specific subject area?  All the technology and interactive exercises in the world cannot offer what a living, breathing scholar can while addressing a class.

I also take issue with the claim that the problem is with the teacher’s methods and not the students.  Again, I do recommend a varied approach to teaching (lecture, discussion, activities, multimedia,etc), but I think we need to stop giving in to the idea that students today have short attention spans and thus cannot concentrate on material that is presented in a traditional way. While this factor needs to be taken into consideration, perhaps it is the students that need to be trained to better focus and actively listen to a traditional lecture, especially at the college and graduate level.   

Teachers, let me know what you think about this topic.  And, of course, we’ve all been students. What has worked best for you?

For life is what you make it.  So make it good!

             

My Year As a Cashier



This peony flower looks tropical growing in front of my house!



             I just finished reading the book Malled by Caitlin Kelly, a memoir about how, due to the economic recession, her work as a professional journalist was no longer enough to support her or her fiance with a liveable income.  Even though she had been writing for papers like The New York Times, jobs became fewer and far between. She then turned, out of desperation, to the world of retail, and worked as a sales associate at The Northface, an upscale outdoor clothing store in a mall near the New York suburb where she was living.  This book, then, is an anecdotal telling of what that year was like working at a $9-an-hour job alongside other college grads who were just as desperate to make a living.
            As I read about her experiences, I couldn’t help but compare them to my own in 2000-2001 when I took a leave from teaching and worked as a deli cashier at Piccadilly Market, a restaurant, bakery and deli here in Wichita.  I saw, too, what is was like to return to earning a low hourly wage, standing on my feet for eight hours a day and doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again.  At the time, I was also reading the popular book, Nickel and Dimed, by columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer who had gone undercover for a year to see if she could make a living on low-wage jobs.  While I found that some of my experiences were similar to that of both of these authors, they were also markedly different.  Here are some thoughts I took away from “my year as a cashier”:

Many low-wage workers and their work are invisible to the rest of us.  Not only do I mean that customers may look through them and fail to think of them as human beings, but I also agree with Ehrenreich that many service jobs are done out of the sight of most people – early in the morning (newspaper carrier), late at night (a janitor cleaning offices) or the maids making our beds and cleaning our toilet in a hotel room before we arrive.  I had to show up at 6 am and count the cash in the registers, make the coffee, grab bread from the bakery and prepare everything else in time to greet customers at 7 am (and I am not a morning person!).  Now I make sure to leave a tip whenever I stay in a hotel room and send money to our paper carrier at Christmas.

           Most customers were decent and friendly.  I do think this has a lot do with how I approached them as a worker, but by far, I found most people to be polite.  We had a lot of “regulars” at the deli, and I enjoyed the fact that I came to know about forty of them by name.  One man even gave me a five dollar bill every Wednesday morning, just for being there early to greet him!  As news of my pregnancy got out toward the end of the year, some of my retired people who came for coffee every morning showed up with baby gifts, and one couple even stopped by my house to see my newborn after I had quit the job!  Of course there were always the ones like the woman who, well-known in Wichita as an upstanding person, got disgusted with me when I asked for her driver’s license after she had written a check.  Then there was the man who always stood with a clenched jaw, looking above my forehead, and refused to tell me what kind of sandwich he had ordered, so out of fear I would just charge him for the cheapest one!
          It wasn’t the managers that were difficult; it was the other workers.  Unlike Ehrenreich, who made managers out to be heartless bosses that mistreated their employees, my experience was the opposite.  I can’t begin to name all of the workers that I saw come and go at that place within a year.  Our managers, who were generally kind and supportive, had a tough job on their hands.  They were dealing with a population who generally couldn’t be counted on to show up to work on any given day, who might call in from the county jail because they had spent the night in a holding cell, or, when they were at work, did as little as possible.  I remember the many times a new face appeared and energy was exhausted putting them through training, only to have them quit after a few weeks. Of course, I worked with some great people, but between the tedious scheduling and keeping the positions filled, the managers had a responsibility that I knew I never wanted.
         The work was hard, not only physically, but mentally!  When I was being trained, I knew that I would find it much easier to lecture to college students on the logical fallacies in argumentative writing than keep track of all of the ever-changing costs for hot deli foods or even up my cash drawer at the end of each day using a tricky computer program!  I am not good at procedures, and jobs like this are full of them. 
         Anyway, it was good to have that experience after working in the professional world.  I now know what it’s like to be behind the counter!
 
         For life is what you make it.  So make it good!

Louise Erdrich: A Wonderful Poet

           Louise Erdrich is a poet and writer whose mother is Chippewa Indian and father is German.  She grew up in South Dakota on a reservation where her parents both taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Now in her early 50s, she was one of the first women to graduate from Dartmouth College where she focused on Native American Studies.  It’s not surprising, then, that she writes about Native American culture, specifically regarding contemporary issues.  I have had the privilege of teaching her short story “The Red Convertible,” one of the pieces included in her book Love Medicine.  Other notable books of hers include The Beet Queen and The Plague of Doves, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
          I had the opportunity to visit her bookstore in Minneapolis (Birchbark Books), which happens to be in my sister’s neighborhood!  It was charming and has a wonderful collection, with a café attached.  In one corner of her store sat an old, ornate wooden confessional booth, paying homage (she says) to her Catholic upbringing.  I guess it’s to be used how customers see fit!  On another wall I saw this poem written by her.  I liked it so much that I wrote the title down and looked it up as soon as I got home.  Here it is:

           Sweet Apples

Life will break you.

Nobody can protect you from that,

and living alone won’t either,

for solitude will also break you

with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.

You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken,

or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near,

let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples

falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.         

                                                    

                                             - Louise Erdrich

To see a short interview of Erdrich with Bill Moyers where she reads another great poem, check out this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaedpQmh8Go

For life is what you make it.  So make it good!

Americans Like Livin’ Large



This is Domino, a beloved member of our family.  At 12 years old, he can still chase a rabbit!

            Our national creed as Americans, at least in the past several decades, seems to be that “bigger is better.”  In Sarah Wexler’s new book, Living Large: From SUVs to Double Ds: Why Going Bigger Isn’t Going Better, she looks at a number of phenomena that are popular in our society: big box stores, Hummers, McMansions, mega-churches, The Mall of America, etc.  In her research, she asks the question: Where does this hunger come from?  What need does all this “bigness” fulfill? How are our lives different than from years ago when most people had only one TV and one car, and we all shopped at mom and pop stores?  Now I’ll admit that a jaunt to Wal-Mart is a convenient way to get everything I need in one stop.  And, the Mall of America is actually kind of a cool place, albeit overwhelming.  So, I do appreciate the author’s approach, in that she simply does not write off all of this as entirely negative.  Still, she recognizes that America’s insatiable desire for “more” has landed us into a heap of trouble debt-wise, and she challenges us to re-examine our priorities as we decide what truly adds value to our lives and what doesn’t.

            Another author I’ve been reading is Mireille Guiliano, who wrote the popular book, French Women Don’t Get Fat.  In this book, she observes the extreme nature of the American lifestyle.  Either we’re downing “biggie” Cokes and fries, she observes, or we’re going on crash diets and sweating to death at the gym.  She compares this with the French lifestyle, where people integrate walking, biking, and climbing stairs into their day. They LOVE to eat, but eat modest portions and save pastries for special occasions.

            An article I’ve enjoyed is one I found in Woman’s Day by Lori Erickson, entitled “The Little House That Could.” (check out her blog at Spiritual Travels).  She writes about her family’s decision to stay in their small home instead of move to a larger one. “In our not-so-big house,” she says, “it’s harder for us to ignore each other by retreating to our own spaces.  As my sons have grown, I’ve been able to look over their shoulders as they were doing homework at the dining room table, and overhear their conversations with friends in the basement.  I know when they’re playing video games on the computer instead of doing research for a school project, and what kind of music they’re listening to. And I’ve noticed something funny over the years: Our house is the smallest of any of their circle of friends, but it’s still the favorite gathering place (proving that a well-stocked refrigerator trumps extra rooms any day).”

            What do you think?  Is bigger always better?

            For life is what you make it.  So make it good!