Confessions

I will admit that this past week I did not do awesome with my 30 Day Shred Challenge. I did Jillian's Banish Fat & Boost Metabolism on Monday and Shred level 1 on Wednesday, but that was it for the week. I rode 60 km on the recumbent bike between Tuesday, Friday, today and started to work some running into my routine as well. I am happy with my overall level of workouts, but my goal was to do the Shred at least every other day and I didn't.

I must have been distracted by the new kitchen and the cookie baking!

This week will be better.

Last week I rocked the no Diet Coke effort. This weekend, I slipped a little. So far this month, I have only had 4 which is much better than having it daily, so I figure I am still ahead.

The only goal I have made decent progress on this week is my school work. I finished my cultural autobiography yesterday and annotated 2 more of my sources for my annotated bibliography on multicultural education sources.

My goal for today is to create the annotated bibliography for my global literature course (10 books on the theme of perseverance) and to try to get some more of my research paper written. Despite my super organized strategy with the labels and folders, I am still having writer's block when it comes to piecing all the research together and writing the actual paper. It comes in waves and either I can do it very easily or I am totally stuck.

Right now, I am totally stuck.

For some reason I am usually most productive late at night when it comes to writing papers. I still have a few weeks before it's due, but I would prefer to get it done and turned in so I don't have to think about it anymore.

Sidebar: Don't you hate it when you are doing a research paper and the article or book you read refers to 80 other researchers and what they did or said, so you are constantly having to track down those sources as well if you like their quotes or ideas. Unfortunately, most of the great ideas I am finding are not from articles which I can usually find online and print, but from books that I have to purchase if I want to get the information from the original source because I don't have access to any libraries with books in English besides the school library which would not have the kind of books I need.

See why I end up spending a fortune from amazon.de???

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Excerpt

I am working on finishing up my cultural autobiography for my multicultural education course. This is the kind of paper I love writing because I get to use my own voice rather than a "professional/technical/graduate student voice." I have written 17 pages which speak to my life experiences and speak from my heart. The end of the paper relates my cultural understanding to the implications on my teaching.

Here is an excerpt:

Throughout my first three years of teaching, I was provided adopted curriculums for reading and math, which I used as Gospel. My understanding was that the adopted curriculum was what I needed to teach; therefore I taught it with fidelity. During my first year, especially, I found that blue scripted print in the teachers’ manual to be very helpful. I followed each lesson in succession, yet I often felt uninspired because the material I was teaching was not “mine” and I did not have a sense of true ownership of the words that I spoke. Each time I had the opportunity to invest more of myself into the lessons, adding my creativity, and drawing from my own experiences and connections, I became a better teacher. If the same notion is applied to students, it becomes vibrantly clear why some students fail to become invested in their learning. Given the use of streamlined curriculum packages that are designed to meet the needs of the standards, rather than the students, we can hardly expect students from diverse backgrounds to flourish in their role as learners when the content does not sufficiently pertain to who they are. Just as I sometimes felt like a shell of the teacher I had the potential to be if only I could put more of myself into my teaching, surely students could explode to reach a whole new potential given ideas, concepts, and lessons made meaningful to them. The consequences of such curriculum use are twofold. Firstly, if teachers are not reflecting true passion for the scripted curriculum, that lack of passion will be evident and transferred to students. Also, if the curriculum does not draw upon students’ own life experiences, cultures, languages, and backgrounds, surely they will not be as enthused and motivated as they would be if those aspects were incorporated. If teachers incorporate who the students are into the lessons, based on authentic knowledge and relationships with those students and their families, I believe students will rise to the occasion in their role just as I can in mine.

Ok, this part of the paper is a little more "professional voice-ish" than others, but as I was writing it, I thought that it was a piece I wanted to share with my blog readers.

I am always thinking about you guys!

I am really interested in what experiences other teachers have and whether or not my thoughts are consistent with those of other teachers or way off base.

As always, I will eagerly await your comments!

I heart Monsters

Monster cookies that is.....

I was a little nervous about my baking venture today (see previous post) given the different German ingredients and using an oven that measures degrees in Celsius instead of Farenheit, but they came out perfectly if I do say so myself. I only made 6 (they were ginormous) and bagged up the rest of the dough to send home with my girlfriends since I don't have a freezer. The recipe is supposed to make 24 jumbo cookies and unless you have a some teenage boys that frequent your house, I can't imagine making all the cookies at once. Six was plenty and having more of those puppies lying around the house would be dan-ger-ous!

Snaps for Ashlee's recipe! I would definitely make these again!

How fun to use seasonal/red & green/pink & white M&M's too!

This is an image of a "professional" cookie from the cookie shop I used to work at in college.

Hopes's Cookies are the best!

These is one of my cookies

slightly larger, but lookin' good!

I think I just need to work my M&M placement on the tops!

Adventures in Baking

Can you guess what I am doing today??

I haven't made any real food in my kitchen yet because I am gearing up for some major baking today because it has been TOO long since I have played Betty Crocker!

I went to the grocery store this morning to pick up all the ingredients and it was like a treasure hunt! The kinds of things that you easily locate and plop in the cart are hard to find when you are looking for the item names in German! I translated the ingredient names and both baking soda and baking powder translate to the same word, Backpulver, even though they are very different and cause different results when added to baked goods. Luckily, I made friends with another American woman who gave me the rundown on some of the differences between American ingredients and their German counterparts.

I never would have looked for this, but vanilla comes in little vials like perfume samples.

Apparently it is very potent, so you can just add a very little bit.

The Backpulver, which is baking powder, comes in little packets like yeast. Baking Soda is called Natron and comes in a box, but it still looks very different than it does in the U.S.

I was really happy to find M&M's because I want to make this recipe for Monster Cookies from Ashlee's A Year in the Kitchen blog. She is awesome and the desserts she makes always look amazing! These cookies use peanut butter, M&M's, chocolate chips, raisins, and oatmeal in the dough in addition to all the other typical stuff.

A little bit of everything for a delicious bundle of cookie joy! Mmmmm. Can't wait!

I am also thinking of making a batch of oldie but goodie chocolate chip cookies too. Surprisingly chocolate chips are actually quite hard to come by when you live in Germany unless you have access to a military base or you hunt down a store that sells American products (which are really expensive...and I have heard about stores like that, but have yet to actually see one). My friend went to England over fall break so she picked up these babies for me...

dark chocolate bits of gloriousness

I absolutely love baking and if I weren't a teacher, I think I would want to have a little shop or business that would allow me to bake all day and make adorable, fun little treats. How fun would that be?

What is your favorite thing to bake?

It's finally here!

After being in Germany for three months, and living in our apartment for over a month with a "temporary" kitchen consisting of a mini fridge and two hot plates, I am proud to introduce my new

kitchen!

I had absolutely nothing to do with the selection of this kitchen. Our landlord picked everything out prior to our renting the apartment, so I am really happy that it came out looking as nice as it does! For some reason my husband thought it was going to be blue, and given some of the crazy kitchen colors at Ikea, and Germany's obsession with Ikea, I was a bit nervous. The kitchen actually did not come from Ikea, which is good because they came and went in one day and spent about 8 hours on the installation which would have been longer had it been from Ikea.

The one thing I am nervous about is that there is no backsplash and with me being the messy cook that I am, I guarantee there will be some tomato sauce splashage on the walls before I know it. We also don't have a freezer. The fridge is pretty small, but at least there are drawers underneath so it is elevated a bit higher. Crouching down to access the fridge for the past month was not fun. I am debating if we really need a freezer because we haven't used one for the past three months, but we have room for a free standing one if we decide we can't live without.

We still have to figure out what we doing with the other side of the kitchen because our table is in the other room. I would like to get another piece for storage because right now all those cabinets are full of dishes and bakeware and I need somewhere to put food! We had just put a nice new walk in pantry in our house in Portland and we also had a big cabinet in the kitchen with pull out drawers. It was fantastic. I need something like that again!

Hubby and I will probably hit up Ikea tonight to look into some storage solutions. I have gotten almost everything put away, but my tupperware still needs a home and so do all our bottles of wine and alcohol.

I can't wait to cook in this new bad boy, but I am too tired from a hard day of watching men install the kitchen, so I am thinking I will wait tomorrow and have my first baking debut in the kitchen with some of my girlfriends.

for the love of dorkiness

Today I worked on my research for one of my doctoral papers and I got immense enjoyment out of the organizational scheme I came up with. So if you can handle the dorkiness that is about to ensue, please read on.

You might find this helpful or you might find this sickening...

I started with a huge stack of book and articles on multicultural education.

Disclaimer: I have a serious problem/obsession ordering books from amazon.de with my amazon prime shipping.

It's getting ugly.

As I read, (I have been working on getting through these texts for quite some time now), I used this handidandy highlighter, which doubles as a sticky flag dispenser.

Whoever invented that was a super smartypants!

Today, I went through the documents and typed up the important quotes/ideas that I highlighted which I think will be good to include in my paper. I typed them into a word document formatted with 2" X 4" labels and then printed them out. For each quote, I included the author's name at the bottom and/or the other researcher(s) that were being quoted and the page number from the original source. I will have to go and locate primary sources, so it's important to write down all that good stuff.

how do you like that quote teacher friends??

Once they were printed out, I cut them apart and sorted them by theme, which will become the different sub sections of my paper. You might be thinking that labels are expensive, which they are, and that using labels is a waste, which is probably is. I wanted to use index cards, but I didn't have any. I suppose I could have run on down to the grocery store, but I had to be home to receive my package from amazon.de. ( I know...it's a problem....but if I am not home, then I have to walk all the way to the post office the next day to get my book and that definitely puts a damper on the awesomeness of the overnight delivery) I also figured it would be easier, and faster, to type the quotes rather than write them out by hand. I also liked the fact that I could stick the labels onto something rather than having loose cards.

Once I got the labels cut and sorted, I stuck them onto file folders and labeled the folders with the appropriate theme or idea that corresponded with the quotes and will correspond with the sections of the paper.

Now I have 4 colorful folders that each contain information for a different section of the paper. When I being the actual writing process, I will not need to keep flipping through various articles hunting for the information and quotes that I need because it's all nice

and organized in my folders.

Ta-Da!

So if you made it to the end of this post without gagging, then hopefully you are like me in that you appreciate a good organizational, timesaving system.

Thoughts?