it gets warmer and better; banana pancakes

SPRING IS HERE. (sort of.) there is a daffodil that came up in the garden behind the apartment - yesterday it was standing tall and today the bloom has fallen off, killed by the freezing cold we had last night. but it came out, so that's progress - new york city is WAKING UP AGAIN and i realize again that this is my absolute favorite time here.

AND school is going better, too. i'm beginning to get the hang of getting them hooked on the books themselves and doing a lot of the things that i did when i was student teaching with sean desilva but forgot in the daily crush. (probably because i feel like i have to spend so much time just getting them to acknowledge that they're in a classroom. but i'm beginning to think the best way to do that is just to charge ahead and keep "heeling" them back to the material. and when i do a good job of hooking them from the beginning, it's easier to heel them and some of the behavioral problems kind of take care of themselves. it also helps that we're doing "the outsiders" and "night.") a sample lesson title: "A MORAL QUESTION: Would You Kill Baby Hitler?" wherein we talked about whether we would have killed infant Hitler if given the chance to go back in time, complete with a picture of Baby Hitler. most of the kids actually said that they wouldn't. i'm going to ask them again how they feel when we get to the end of the book, or maybe right after the part when they talk about throwing the babies into the incinerators.

other things are good, too. i had much more of a balance last week between doing school shit and doing my own shit - i'm getting in yoga and have been doing some good cooking and reading. i just read this cool book mom sent me called "the wild within" which is all about stalking the self & the need to be able to see things for what they are outside of our thoughts. it makes me come back to looking at what i really want to teach & the kinds of change i'd like to affect in my own life, i.e., being able to connect with the natural world on a regular basis and helping others connect with it as well. now i'm reading a book that sibylle gave me a long time ago called "nonviolent communication" which intersects with the book mom gave me because it's all about being able to phrase yourself in a way that acknowledges that our thoughts are just reactions. i'll be interested to see if i can make it work in my classroom.

i wanted to share this awesome banana pancake recipe i made this morning. it was kind of a triumph because i made it without eggs - pete's little bro mike, a vegan, is visiting - but it came out better than when i do it with eggs. it's easy as hell, too:

blend 2 bananas with 2 cups of soymilk and 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil. mix 3 cups of flour with some salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, a dash of cinnamon, a 1/2 cup of oatmeal and 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts. add the blended ingredients to the dry ingedients by mixing with as few strokes as possible. COOK 'EM & EAT' EM w/ maply syrup! (serves 3)