The Decline of Cooking

31. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Day 5: Baking breadImage by lorda via Flickr

Michael Pollan has a wonderful article in this week’s New York Times Magazine about the coincidental decline of cooking and rise of cooking shows. I have written about the pleasures of cooking a few times before. I really enjoy doing it and I love the results as well. Although I take Pollan’s point that most people don’t learn how to cook from shows like Paula Dean’s, I think people who have rudimentary cooking skills do learn something. I have learned things about ingredients, about what flavors might go well together, new preparation techniques, and more. I also take Pollan’s point that there’s a lot of focus on consumption rather than production of food, but I have also seen a strong relationship between those who cook and those who appreciate good food even in the consumption of food. And that seems to be a bidirectional relationship. People who consume a good meal are often inspired to create similar kinds of meals at home and those who create good food at home expect good food when they eat out. Although I’ve been known to eat at a fast food place on the road (almost only when traveling), when we eat out, we tend to choose restaurants that serve good food, often food I won’t prepare at home (Thai and Indian are common choices as is sushi). When my kids were younger, we would eat at places like Applebee’s and Chili’s, but I really don’t like these places now. People I know that don’t cook have no problem with places like these and consider them treats next to the canned and frozen products they prepare at home.

I credit some of my food snobbery, of course, to my parents. My mother had learned how to cook Southern food from her mother and added more sophisticated food to her repetoire as she began entertaining law partners and clients. She could cook butter beans, lady peas and fried chicken one day and oysters bienville and rock cornish game hens the next. The one restaurant in town was owned and operated by a couple who spent every other weekend in New York. They insisted on prime beef, fresh ingredients and were always trying new dishes. We frequented the place as it was good for my father’s career and because both he and my mother enjoyed a good meal. At the age of 13, my parents took me to the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia for a full 7-course meal. And though I’ve never had one since, I’ve never forgotten the elegance of it. Each dish was small and elegant, from the Vichyssoise to the nuts. I sometimes gave my mother a hard time for her fussiness over appearances, but I was always appreciative of her fussiness over food as I learned so much from it.

Although Pollan complains that many of the shows that are highlighted in the afternoon (when sahm’s are around to “learn” from them) focus on premade ingredients and shortcuts, many of the other shows, some of which are hugely popular, spend a lot of time talking about fresh ingredients. I watched a Good Eats episode the other day where Alton Brown insisted that we use fresh grated coconut in coconut cake rather than the stuff you could buy in plastic at the store. So maybe some of that will, or is, rubbing off on people. Maybe they will see the meals that the chefs prepare on Top Chef and want to make something close to that on their own. Those shows do provide many of the recipes on their web sites and the web more generally has a ton of available recipe sites. There’s no need to rifle through cookbooks (though I have many) to find the perfect chicken recipe. Some of my favorites are Cooking Light’s site and AllRecipes.com.

I hope it is rubbing off, because Pollan’s last point about the connection between not cooking and obesity is one that makes sense to me. Americans aren’t cooking as much as they used to, in large part because the food industry has given us foods that don’t need to be cooked and are laden with fat, sugar, and salt, which we are naturally disposed to crave. And not cooking is a key predictor of obesity rates:

The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.

There are a lot of reasons for the decline in cooking–from a food industry pushing convience food on us to an increase in work hours and commute time. But I hope that one thing that the cooking shows can convey besides the food itself, but the real joy that cooking can be.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Snarky Education

30. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
I really like Mark Bullen’s Net Gen Skeptic blog, because I, too, maintain a healthy skepticism about they hype surrounding the so-called Net Generation.  I don’t think they’re all disengaged, tech-savvy people.  When I teach and use something as simple as a blog, I have to teach about 80% of the class how to use it.  And often, I have to teach 100% of the class how to use it effectively.  Most of the students I’ve run into who have a blog use it as a diary or as a way to communicate only with friends.  So learning to blog in public is a difficult thing to do.  If you read the likes of Don Tapscott in Grown Up Digital, these students started a blog at birth and by the time they reach college, have gained a huge audience and are earning their college tuition through selling ad space.

Bullen’s latest post about the Snark effect, an effect where policy or strategy is based on assertions rather than on a full evaluation of the situation, i.e. empirical research.  Bullen asserts that the call for technology in education is all snark and no bite:

The Snark Syndrome is clearly at play in the discussions around the Net
Generation and education. I have lost track of the number of times I
have heard educators repeat the stereotypes about the Net Generation:
short attention span, expert mutitaskers, technologically savvy etc
etc. Countless Michael Wesch-like You Tube videos are circulating
urging us to wake up and change our ways or else risk losing an entire
generation of learners who we are failing to engage. The answer, we are
told, is more digital technology

I think many people who encourage the effective use of technology in teaching and learning are not just saying it because we need to engage a crew of digital natives who would rather be Facebooking than sitting in class.  Instead, we see a future that’s digital, where we know our students need to understand and be critical of the information that is flowing past them every day at a very rapid pace.  They will be expected to use many of the Web 2.0 technologies in their jobs and will need to be able to learn how to use new ones and determine whether they are effective tools or not.  And many of us do look at the research.  Many of us are looking at research that is 40 years old and that still holds, that says that active learning is better, and we see that technology is one of many ways to achieve best practices in learning that are supported by decades of research.  My own dissertation investigated through empirical study whether blogs were an effective tool for teaching writing.  They are.

If people are blindly jumping into using technology for technology’s sake, then Bullen has a point.  As a consultant (one of the people he says educators are blindly following, though I do know a lot about education), I would never suggest that educators simply follow my advice without thinking about whether it would work for them.  It’s likely they’ll want to make small adjustments based on their own needs and experience.  I merely make suggestions, show things that have worked for me or for others, and talk about the research that backs up those suggestions.  In fact, the whole point for me of using technology in the classroom is so that we don’t create a generation of blind followers, that we have students who will be able to tackle the huge problems they will face: global warming, dwindling fossil fuels, global strife.  Blind following in any of those cases is a bad idea, and I believe that technology can be part (not all) of the solution to helping them become better informed and make better decisions.

Cross-posted at Emerging Technologies Consulting.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Personal Branding

29. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
I had the great pleasure today of leading a session on Personal Branding for Drexel University co-op students.  I’m not what one might call a “guru” on the topic, but I’ve essentially been creating a personal brand since 1998.  I also worked as a salesperson for a few years and have been through several job searches, so I have a good understanding of what it means to sell yourself.  Of course, now that everything is online, creating an image for yourself is easier than ever, but still takes a lot of work in terms of building relationships and showcasing your work.  A few years ago, when the fear hype about the web was at its peak (and it’s still pretty high!), I led a session for Bryn Mawr students about creating a positive profile online and this presentation was an extension of that.  There has been so much focus on people who put the wrong things online and on the extraordinarily rare occurrances of kidnapping and other similar crimes that few people stop to look at the positive side of putting yourself out there.  Yes, there are risks and yes, there’s sometimes a little filtering that needs to happen, but generally, good things accrue to those who take a risk and share information about themselves.  Potential employers can get a clearer picture of who they’re hiring and potentially someone might hire someone simply because they stand out from the crowd in some way.  Below are some of the points I covered in the presentation.  Feel free to add your own ideas–what’s worked for you?

Branding Yourself Online

Cross-posted at Emerging Technologies Consulting.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

RBOC: Incomplete thoughts edition

28. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:
  • Yesterday, I started a long post about race that I just couldn’t finish. Suffice it to say, my relationship to race is complex, influenced by being raised in the South, by my own desire to figure out how the South got to where it is, and by people I’ve known and other places I’ve lived. I have been in contexts where I’ve had what can only be called racist thoughts. And my response is to fight those thoughts, to understand where they come from. And I think I’m not unusual in having those thoughts, though I may be unusual in recognizing them and trying to do something about them.
  • Laura at 11D continues the conversation about parents and work schedules and also talks about managing her own time. Although I’ve made progress on some projects this summer, I’ve given up having a super productive summer. For one thing, I’ve realized that physically, I can’t handle all work all the time. Seriously. I end up with major migraines. So, I’m basically working about 4 hours a day. Yesterday, I worked in the morning, then took the kids to the pool. I usually read while I’m there, sometimes things I need to, sometimes not. But that’s been the typical schedule. Housework happens when I’m inspired, which isn’t that often. I recruit the kids for lots of things, and they’ve been good about that.
  • Still trying to balance eating healthy and local and the cost. Still difficult. Yesterday organic chicken was running at $5/lb. for a while chicken. Regular chicken, $1/lb. Sigh.
  • BlogHer was on last week. I went in 2006. I like the idea behind BlogHer. It’s certainly great to see a bunch of women bloggers all in one place, but the corporate nature of it rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I’m just squeamish that way. Maybe it’s because my blog doesn’t get enough traffic to attract coroporate sponsors. :)
  • Update to my Naked Teaching post, another good commentary on teaching with technology.
Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Relying on the childless

24. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Back to schoolImage by lorda via Flickr

Dr. Crazy had an interesting post the other day on how she’s finally decided to put her foot down and not take the crappy time slots just because she doesn’t have kids. I’ve been sitting on that post since I read it and then Wendy at Outside Providence responded and that prompted me to open it up again. My initial thoughts on reading Dr. Crazy’s post were about all the times that I never said anything about needing to make accommodations for my kids even when a meeting was scheduled inconveniently. Like someone in the comments said, I felt it was inappropriate to even mention my kids. I needed to fit the “ideal worker” mold, suck it up and just figure things out. Of course, I was in a 9-5 job where I was expected to be present during all regular work hours, unlike a faculty member. So when the kids were little, we put them in full-time daycare, and when they got to school, we signed them up for after-school programs. I eventually quit sucking it up so much and asked for a flexible schedule where a couple of days a week, I came home at 3:00. Of course that meant I showed up at 7 a.m. So, a different kind of sacrifice.

Daycare, full time or otherwise, is expensive. Faculty salaries are not so great. And I’m sure that what goes through a faculty member’s mind is somewhat about trying to save some money by doing part-time daycare or handling after school on their own. I’ve seen a lot of faculty do this, in fact, though I don’t know if the reasons are financial. So, one solution might be to help faculty financially or logistically with the daycare situation. Have a drop-off service or have a list of students available for babysitting.

In general, I like the idea that Wendy raises of creating a culture that’s more cooperative. One of the commenters at Dr. Crazy’s mentions the whole “you chose to have kids, so suck it up argument” which always bothers me. Yes, I chose to have kids, but no, I had no clue how much time and money would be required to deal with raising them. And many parents didn’t choose to have kids with disabilities or health problems or mental problems. And shit happens. Your kids get sick, get depressed, have accidents, etc. I agree that people who seem to be clueless about the fact that taking a kid to gymnastics is not really a good reason to be accommodated should be reined in. But shit’s going to happen to childless folks too. A friend or parent will get ill, will want you to help them move, will get depressed, will have an accident, etc. Or you might be the one that gets depressed or ill or has an accident. And you might need to adjust your schedule. Or, on the more positive side, you might choose to volunteer somewhere or take up a hobby that means you can’t make a 7 p.m. or 8 a.m. meeting. And, in my opinion, that should be accommodated just as much as needed to drop off a child somewhere.

Largely, I think it’s up to a department chair or dean to create a situation where accommodations are equal. Faculty parents can start by assuming their jobs are 9-5 and making arrangements for their kids during those times. Yes, I know one of the greatest benefits of a faculty job is the flexible schedule, but if your colleague is having to teach the 7 p.m. – 10 p.m. class every semester because you refuse to find a babysitter, you’re probably creating some resentment. If you don’t want to invest in full-time daycare, then at least make arrangements for scheduled meetings. And, to help out, chairs, deans and colleagues should provide plenty of notice for those meetings. Course schedules could generally be done through a combination of requests and random assignments. In many departments, these kinds of things are the norms.

One commenter said that the key is to simply say what you want. I think honesty is a great thing here. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone understood where everyone is coming from?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Naked Teaching

24. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
Alex Reid and Tim Burke have both commented on this Chronicle article about SMU’s proposal to remove computers from the classroom.  Both Reid and Burke have pointed out that removing computers does not guarantee that teaching will automatically improve.  Burke notes that teachers who use PowerPoint as a crutch used to use notes or transparencies and will likely simply revert back to those pre-computer methods.  Burke outlines some suggestions for what makes lectures better.  But Reid raises the issue of what to do with a hundred or several hundred students when you’re not lecturing.  The article itself notes that “Lively interactions are what teaching is all about.”  I can tell you that in my spring class with 40 students, managing those lively interactions was quite challenging.  How, then, do you do that with hundreds?  There are no answers in the article itself, though it gives examples of interactive discussion occuring in several classes.  There is no mention of how large those classes are.  Reid suggests that the delivery of college courses will need to change.  The article mentions the pressure on colleges to do more within the classroom since lectures are now either freely available or available at a lower cost (for college credit) online.  Why would someone want to pay thousands of dollars for something they can get for free?  Lectures, then, and especially bad ones, are no longer always a cost-effective and certainly not a learning-effective way to deliver instruction.  Could a place like UC-Davis, where my colleague Leslie Madsen-Brooks works and where there are classes as large as 700 students, afford to break those large classes up?  Would it make sense to have such a large class watch the professor deliver her lecture via a video podcast and then be broken up into smaller chunks to meet with TAs to discuss the material, work on problem sets, or do some other activity?  There are costs involved in the production of the video and then there are the costs of the labor to handle the smaller sections.  Are there ways that this method saves money?  Lower facilities costs?  Better retention rates?  Justification for higher tuition?

This issue makes me think, too, of Dean Dad’s occasional suggestion that we should decouple class time from class credit.  What if a student can breeze through a first year biology class in half the time? What if another student needs a year to cover the same material?  Can colleges accommodate that and if they do, what are the costs?  While the technology that allows this kind of time compression creeps me out a little bit when applied to younger students, it seems perfectly logical at the college level, especially in courses where there’s already a huge distance between faculty and student.  Being able to check in with a tutor or a TA from time-to-time while working through the material on your own strikes me as better than the current lecture system.  There are actually many possibilities, facilitated in some cases by technology.  The problem is at least two-fold.  One, none of the options are likely to both improve instruction and reduce costs (many seem more expensive).  Two, change within the ivory tower is extraordinarily slow.  There are so many competing interests and in places where large lectures are the norm, the students’ best interests are often last on the list.  But I do think that students and parents are starting to ask, “What am I paying for?” when they see that they’re getting material that is easily accessible for free or at a much lower cost.  Hopefully that pressure for change will reach the podium of the lecture halls.

Cross-posted at Emerging Technologies Consulting.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Innovation or Nightmare

23. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
This New York Times article describes a summer program for middle schoolers where lesson plans are generated by computer algorithm. On the one hand, it sounds like many of the kids are enjoying the computer games that teach math.  On the other hand, this seems like a scary prospect of kids sitting in front of a computer all day.  Yes, the lessons are tailored to each student, which I think is a good thing and a good use of technology, but there seems to be little real interaction with the teachers or with other students.  Though the article mentions small group activity and lessons with the teacher, it’s unclear how much of that actually occurs.  There’s the suggestion, in fact, that fewer teachers are needed.

For now, the curriculum is focused on math, because there are materials–quizzes and games and whatnot–already available. There’s no mention of how they’d do language arts or social studies.  Would they just have online quizzes?  What about discussing a book? Blogging about it? I’m not opposed to using computer quizzes to test skills and basic facts, but those don’t necessarily indicate a full understanding of the material.  That’s one of the problems with state tests now; they test things that can be memorized not the understanding of the concepts behind those facts.  It may be that this curriculum is being supported through discussions and writing and other kinds of engagement, but that’s not the impression I got, and frankly, this scares even my technophile self.

Cross posted at Emerging Technologies Consulting

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Gaining or Losing Balance

22. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere about Jack Welch’s recent comment saying that there is no work-life balance. As Laura at 11D points out, evidence certainly suggests that the government and businesses are not interested in providing policies that help people achieve balance. She directs us to a great quote from Conor Friedersdorf, blogging at The Daily Dish. He suggests that maybe we should stop aiming for the top of the corporate ladder and count our blessings.

Amen! I’ve come to feel that this work-life balance thing could be about making good policies, but it’s more about cultural expectations. While I think it’s unlikely that people at the top of the corporate ladder are going to spend significant time with family, I don’t think that means the rest of us need to work like CEO’s, putting in 60-80 hours (or more!) a week. But that’s what the culture dictates. In the tech industry, this culture is pervasive. Programming, system administration, etc. can all take place any time of the day and the work is never finished. The people who have the time and want to take the time often put in ungodly amounts of work, creating a culture where everyone else feels the need to do so as well. This has been especially hard on women, as they are often primary caregivers, and can’t put in those hours.

I feel as though this concept of success=number of hours worked per week is pervasive, not limited to certain fields. Neighbors tout about how many hours they work no matter what their field. Now, does more work actually get accomplished? I’m sure in some cases, that’s true. But in some cases, I suspect there’s a law of diminishing returns, that after a certain number of hours in a day, productivity levels off or declines. So I wish, as a society, we could quit judging people for whether they work, how much they work, etc., and think of them as whole people.

The other day in the car, I had a moment where I realized that my past self would be very unhappy with my current self. I used to judge and criticize women who stepped off the career track. In my mind, success was about working full time, with or without family obligations. And maybe it’s true that from a purely financial standpoint, women who step out of careers are giving up a bit of success. But there’s more to life than financial and career success. That’s what I’m coming to now. That moment in the car made me first, have some doubts about what I’m currently doing, and then second, laugh at my past self. Perfect balance may indeed be elusive, but I think no one should dismiss those that are trying to find it.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Frustrated by food

21. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Let’s talk about food. For the last couple of years, I’ve been doing my best to buy food responsibly, meaning buying plenty of local food, organic food, basically food that is good for me and good for the environment. That goal has been supported by the opening of a farmer’s market near me. And the food there is reasonably priced as well as locally and organically grown. But the market is only open on Wednesday afternoons and I’m a meat eater. Those two things are making my life difficult. I can get meat at the market. One farmer provides chicken and pork. Another has buffalo. But, it is pricey. Though less pricey than the grocery store. On my last trip to the grocery store, I wandered through the meat section looking for farm-raised, free-range, organically fed meat products. No beef or pork fit this category. Only chicken and duck. Purdue chicken and the store brand both cost between 1 and 2 dollars a pound, depending on the cut. The organic poultry? 3-4 dollars a pound. Now, I could potentially swallow that cost, but people on a serious budget? No way. And I see people in the store all the time with coupons and with the weekly circular only buying stuff that’s on sale. Smart financially, but not necessarily healthier.

Organic fruits and vegetables have a similar markup. Luckily, I can get most of them at the market. But I had a debate with myself about buying avocados. I love them, but they are in no way local. I overheard someone at the store complaining about how she couldn’t tell where the vegetables had come from or how they were grown. You don’t hear that much around here.

One of the proposed items in the health care reform bill is a tax on soda, which even Democrats oppose. The problem is soda is not that cheap already. And healthier options such as juice are even pricier. I don’t think the government can figure out a way to force people to eat better. I think most people shop based on what they like and what they can afford. And healthy options (not to mention sustainable ones) are usually out of their price range. Not everyone has access to a farmer’s market and not all grocery stores even carry organically grown products. The time it takes to prepare a healthy meal is fodder for another post, but for many people, time constraints really drive their food purchases.

I’m going to keep trying to be mindful of my food purchases, but I’m frustrated by how difficult it is to make good choices.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure

Worthwhile blog reading

20. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:
  • ianqui writes about her mother’s problem with boundaries
  • Cathy Davidson on this article quantifying the costs of humanities and social science publishing. I need to think about this more. One key figure for me: 47% of the cost is in the editorial process. In light of some things I’ve read, mainly Shirky, it seems the filter first-publish second method is not only slow, but not cost effective.
  • Historiann asks “How do you define good teaching?” Thoughtful questions. Of course, there’s tons of research out there on what creates an effective learning environment (good teaching is usually mostly about having students who learn the material). Sadly, most faculty aren’t given the time to read this research, although at many institutions, there are teaching resource centers or teaching and learning centers where faculty can learn more. There’s more to her post than that, so go read.
  • Leslie Madsen-Brooks on the UC situation and the call by faculty at the “more prestigious” UC schools for the regeants to abandon the schools that serve a more diverse population of students (diverse in many ways).
  • Speaking of white privilege, Eric Stoller links to a Colbert Report clip on the topic.
Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure
« Older articles