Summer in a glass

It's still not quite local strawberry season in Overcast, but when the first strawberries of the season showed up a few weeks ago in the grocery store, I had to get some for eating and some for booze.  This is probably my favorite of the liqueurs we've done so far, both because it was easiest and because it's retained the flavor of the fruit best.  (We've done blueberry, orange, banana, and fig besides this).  I didn't really measure, just putting enough hulled and halfed strawberries to loosely fill a quart mason jar, with enough vodka to cover.  They sat for about two weeks, turning into the horrible pale alien fruit things you see above.

With just draining, the yield was only about 2 cups/12 ounces, but squeezing the strawberries in a cheesecloth bag brought the yield up by half again to about 3 cups.  Since it was still at this point basically pink vodka, we added a little more than a cup of 1-1 simple syrup and a little lemon to round out the taste and dilute it a little. Verdict:  It's basically a perfect little sip of summer.  I'm thinking there might be strawberry mint spritzer in my future.

What to do?

So after maligning my students again yesterday, they were pretty good in section today.  It might have been my expectations were modified; it might have been the reading was complicated enough to work through without being so complicated they couldn't get through it all; it could have been that Dr. Comrade (the prof in charge of the course) emailed the class last night to ask if it was worth continuing to hold sections if only 6-8 people are making use of it.  I mean, I would love to have my Fridays clear, but I got a lot of panicked questions today about whether sections were going to be cancelled because I had something more important to be doing, and please don't cancel section, because it's really helpful.

What?  This was from students who text all during class, and in fact were texting as they asked me not to cancel section.  That's supposed to mean they're bored and not engaged.  I don't know how to gauge interest.

The students who have been to every section said it's made the readings much clearer; the students who come occasionally said it was good to have a resource when a particular reading made less sense than usual.  And then we had really good discussions about the intersection of religion, race, and politics in American history.  (Which is another one of those areas I have to fake my way through--I bet no one enrolling in a 20th century course thought they would learn so much about 17th century theology, but that's what I know).  So I don't know what to do.  If five people out of forty are getting good use out of section, does that make it worth it?  The prep time is the same for me.

It just feels odd to try to lead discussion when there's only two people, and the scattershot attendance means that if something comes up from a previous discussion, anyone who wasn't there doesn't know what's going on.  Regular attendance at least means that even if they haven't done the reading, they got the jist of the important parts of the readings and the ideas to keep in mind for next time.  I try to pick up key themes to carry through the semester and throw discussion back to previous weeks to help students make connections between the readings, but that doesn't work so well if not everyone in the room was there.

In the mean time, though, J and I have been productive.  The blueberries are out of their vodka, tasting ok.  There's not much blueberry taste.  3 cups of blueberry vodka took 1 cup of 2:1 sugar syrup and 2 tsp of lime juice to bring out what blueberry there is.  It's more of a grassy taste, like in a blueberry ale, with a lot of alcohol burn to finish.  I think it'll be more pronounced over ice with some seltzer water or something.  J's shirt project is coming along, although he's monopolizing my sewing machine, and his carpenter brain could not get around the idea of easing a sleeve to match an armscye.  That's a whole nother mess of teaching problems.

Teaching the willing

The homemade orange liqueur in action

So, after my maligning of my over-worked seniors, I went to give a talk to a class of 6th graders about archaeology.  And it was pure, unadulterated awesome.  The wife of a friend in the history department I'm in teaches social studies and science at the middle school one town over, and they're doing a unit on Egypt.  I don't work on Egypt, but I do a lot of my research with archaeological collections, so it's not that big of a jump.

They were interested, excited, and asked a lot of good questions.  I used to work at a museum doing school group presentations and workshop days, and I love working with middle school groups.  They're at just the right age to know a little about everything without being so old that they can't be excited in front of everyone.  I decided to go to grad school rather than get a teaching certificate in part because I felt like I found that excitement again in college, after hating high school, and in part because I didn't want to teach to the test or have my curriculum dictated by evolution denialists.  And college students are excited.  Sometimes.  It's just a lot harder to get them excited about the rhetorical differences between socialism and marxism than it is to get sixth graders excited about gold rings and mummies and playing detective.

It was also odd to have such a large age difference: I came into grad school straight out of college, so especially when I'm teaching seniors, I'm sometimes less than three years older than the students I'm teaching. Really, age shouldn't have much to do with it, and I try to present myself older than I am, but even the women in my department who are much older than me or the undergraduates are treated as if we were much younger than our male peers by the students.  Academic drag helps, but there's only so far some severe glasses and a blazer can take you.

Once, when I was TAing a US history course and we were getting ready to study the French and Indian War, the professor told the other TA and I: "Really emphasize to the students how young George Washingon was when he started the war."  (At age 20, Washington unintentionally triggered a global war by letting some French soldiers he was negotiating with in the backwoods get killed under his command).  "Really emphasize to them how young and stupid he was, only their ages and in command of all those people!"  I think I was 22 at the time, and in charge of a room of 18-20 year olds.  It didn't help much that the prof I was TAing for obviously didn't think much of twenty-somethings.

I'm sure I wouldn't be romanticizing sixth graders this way if I taught them every day, but it was just so nice to go into a class room where they were excited to talk about something, where they were so excited that we ran out of time, and where I didn't have to position myself defensively.  I felt like I had so much energy when I was talking to them that I could just keep going for hours.  When I get in a bad section, I can't wait for it to get over either and I look at the time as much as my students do.  If I could figure out how to bottle that energy and excitement and take it with me, I'd be set.

What I do have in bottles is the orange liqueur, which we made sidecars with tonight.  1oz orange liqueur, 1oz brandy, and a half oz of lemon juice per person shaken over ice and it's just heaven.  Super simple, and the taste of the clementines really comes through.