Chickpea Bowls and Teacher Roles

I brought my rubik’s cubes to school yesterday and during the after lunch recess I went to the gym and played with them. The kids were amazed, even though I messed up the first time I tried to solve one, so it definitely took me more than two minutes. I solved it again and took less time the second time. It was a bit amusing to me that I got so nervous and messed up even with just a few sixth graders watching me.

Cooking dinner ended up taking longer than I expected (as usual). The recipe is only supposed to take thirty minutes, but I knew I would be slower so I figured on an hour. It ended up taking an hour and a half, so I decided to call off my exercise (again!). The miso chickpea bowl with tofu was really tasty though, and I’m looking forward to having it again tonight. I didn’t dry the chickpeas as much as I should have, so I probably burned the miso marinade by roasting the chickpeas long enough that they weren’t mushy anymore. I’ll have to try again sometime and make sure to do enough preparation.

After dinner I played a little bit of Dwarf Fortress, maybe for half an hour or so, but then I worked on my second textbook reading. I had hoped to take the quiz yesterday, but the reading turned out to be longer than I expected—even taking only a page of notes, it took me an hour and a half to read this second chapter of the textbook. I quite enjoyed the first chapter, and I liked the idea of the second chapter—metaphors for teaching—but in general I found that the author had little of value to say about the topic. It was mostly common sense, I thought. The metaphor of teacher as storyteller was kind of a romantic notion to me and quite interesting. Oh, he also talked about the teacher as a prophet. I took notes about that not because what he said was insightful, but because I was interested in how my high school folly might be more appropriate than I could have imagined.

Getting up this morning, I found that my legs were a bit sore. Eventually I remembered that we did the song “One little two little three little pumpkins” yesterday, and at every mention of pumpkins we squatted to make a pumpkin shape. I think in all we squatted only twenty four times, but apparently that was enough to make me sore. Maybe I need to add squats to my workout. After googling the benefits of squats, it sounds like it’s a really good exercise and could help me if I ever start playing tennis again.