Saturday, May 28, 2016

Closer and Closer

Over the course of the last three days I have finished two corners of the current project. There is echo/contour quilting in the narrow yellow border so lots of stitches but they go straight without turning back on themselves so the work is fairly quick. I also had time to take a walk with a friend and our four dogs, her two and my two, and meet one of my major success stories for lunch today. She is going into her senior year at Harvard, working at a hospital lab doing cell manipulation work for her senior thesis. Because she is quite poor, she is also working as a proctor for the high school kids who come to Harvard for summer school for her room and board. Even her vacation time is hard work.

Next week I am meeting with another one of my "kids". He just graduated from Yale and I don't know yet what his plans are. I am also meeting my most current tutee although I have no idea what we will even talk about. Perhaps she just wants to visit but she is so emotionally needy that I am afraid she sees me as some sort of earth mother--definitely not what I want anyone to think of me.




Tuesday, May 24, 2016

A Reminder

Yesterday I finished quilting the last bunch of wisteria on my new quilt. Now that doesn't mean that I am done or that I am even close to being done but I am closer to being done. Here is the top pre-layering to show where the wisteria bunches are. The quilt has progressed since this photo was taken.
Finishing that part of the quilting reminded me of what I like best about hand quilting. I don't know about your life but most of mine seems never to accomplish much. The kitchen floor gets washed and the dogs come in with muddy feet. There are always windows to clean, and dinner to make, etc. But quilting changes the quilt right in front of my eyes, and once it's done, that part is done. I am the least patient person I know with very little tolerance for waiting in lines but hand quilting satisfies my need to get stuff done. That's probably why I only work on one quilt at a time since I loathe having projects simply waiting around.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Bee In My Bonnet

I like to have something in the background when I quilt, sometimes it's music sometimes it's TV. Today I was watching Rick Steves in Turkey and then Rudy Maxa in the Veneto travel shows. I pretty much threw everything on the ground and ran downstairs to make Italian bread to go with dinner--Frank Sinatra's mother's Italian sausage and peppers.  The sausage and peppers recipe came from the Sacramento Bee, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times decades ago and the bread recipe came from one of the first cookbooks I bought in 1970, the year my husband and I were married. Dinner will be a little later than originally planned.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Head Meet Hammer

Yesterday a new teacher brought three classes worth of essays over. She is new to the school and new to my services although she does not seem too much younger than I. These students are sophomores, reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and theoretically learning how to write an essay of literary criticism. That's the theory but not the reality. What's most frustrating to me is there doesn't seem to be a purpose, or if there is a purpose it must be to provoke failure in the students.

I have read one full class worth of essays so far and so far not one student has a thesis statement. Not only are there no thesis statements but they don't even seem to understand the prompt (what one student called a "promped"). Simply giving students the prompt and then letting them go is akin to throwing a kid in the deep water to teach that kid how to swim. What purpose is served if all of these students fail?

Wouldn't it be more worthwhile to begin by discussing what an essay is? Wouldn't students learn more by talking in class about how to read the prompt so that they can then understand what is expected? This isn't even "AP" English yet, simply 10th grade English, so the basics are what they need.  And even if many of the students don't speak English at home or have limited proficiency in English no matter what language they speak at home, that does not mean they cannot learn the structure and form. Fifty years ago I didn't speak Spanish but I learned to read Spanish well enough to read "El Cid" and Don Quixote in Spanish and write essays about them in Spanish.  But I wasn't thrown off the high dive into the deep water.

This exercise is a waste of everyone's time so far.

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Long and Hard Two Days

I spent the last two days scoring high school essays. Two classes worth were from students actually in AP English Literature and four classes worth of sophomores going in to AP English Literature next year. It is near the end of the school year so they weren't as dismal as in the fall, but anyone who thinks that this in any way mimics a college level class is woefully misguided. Now that everyone and his brother want American students to focus on STEM classes, literature and writing are the redheaded step-children. Gone are the very basics such as understanding nouns and pronouns, or using verbs well, let alone any ideas of forming and supporting arguments. Instead there is personal opinion masquerading as wisdom and hideous adverbs scattered like grains of salt. If I read another "truly" this weekend I may scream.

The most laughable notion is that these students, every one of whom is 17 or younger, have all grown up during the time in education when teachers were encouraged to make reading relevant and fun in order to encourage students to read and to write. Well they still loathe reading and writing but they probably make smashing dioramas. One student is even choreographing a dance to interpret Hamlet's "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy. I wish him well but I also wish he could write a clean paragraph with no elementary errors. 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Odd Times

Ted Cruz and John Kasich just dropped out of the presidential race leaving Donald Trump alone on the Republican side. I certainly understand the dissatisfaction of most voters with both major parties and with politics generally. But having Trump as POTUS would mean that I could no longer look at Italy's multiple votes for Berlusconi with amusement. The only positive attribute I can think of is that his many children seem to be more or less normal and intelligent.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Quilting Moves Forward

As you know if you have been reading this blog, I am a hand quilter with no interest in changing. Don't get me wrong, there are some machine quilted works that are impressive, but I don't want to make them. I have finished the center section and I am moving to the area around and including the applique section. Surprise, surprise--the applique section will take longer. Each separate applique element whether it is the parrots, the flowers, or the leaves needs separate quilting within the shape plus separate quilting around the element.

I hope to post some photographs tomorrow but I have to take one of my cats to the veterinarian tomorrow to have some sutures removed. He had a lump removed ten days ago along with having some teeth pulled and a biopsy done on the lump. He has a mast cell cancer but the veterinarian thought he would be all right. He is already about twelve--we don't know for sure since he was abandoned at the barn where my daughter-in-law keeps her horses. He is a good cat and I sure don't want him to suffer.

Update: We had to wait for our son to bring parsley stems and carrot peelings from the restaurant for my friend who keeps hens so my husband went ahead and took a picture tonight. It wasn't until I finished the spirals in the corner motif that I remembered that the oldest quilt fragment known that from the Siberian/Mongolian border shows a stylized spiral design in quilting. It is described as a rug rather than a bed covering and dates from 100 to 200 BCE. When my husband and I go to Europe we spend a great deal of time in churches and cathedrals where spiral mosaics and "mazes" are quite common.

In this quilt, the corner motif is larger than the central motif but they both feature spirals as the primary design element so they work well together.You can also see the difference between the quilted parrot, right side of photo, and unquilted parrot. The background grid is half inch squares so that gives an idea of the scale.