Sometimes, You Get What You Need

Recently overheard chez Granola:

Curious Girl: "I don't want to go to school tomorrow because I'm sick, and New Classmate Who Doesn't Speak a Lot of English Yet will want to kiss me becuase she always kisses me, and I don't want to make her sick. Teacher will say "no, no" but New Classmate won't understand."

Politica: "Well, if you're sick, don't breathe on me because I don't want to get sick."

Curious Girl: "But Mama will take care of us!"

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Curious Girl, walking down the hall, singing: "You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you need. But if you try sometime you can't always get what you want. This is so catchy! It's catchy!"

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It's the end of the semester and the middle of Hanukkah. May all the latkes be yummy and the celebrations happy, for those who are celebrating. For all us academics, may the distance between now and final grades somehow be covered quickly.

Randomness

How to tell that you are teh fun middle-aged mama: when your daughter says, "mama, do you want to roll down the hill with me?" you say yes, and then you get motion sick. (In my defense, it was a very big hill. Dizzymaking for the 44 year old roller, not so much for the 4 year old roller.)

In case anyone out there has adopted Curious Girl's habit of using duper as an intensifier, here's how to express even more intensity. That is super duper cooper fun! Curious Girl was heard to say about some wondrous object in the car. Rhyming intensity.

More seriously--although there are few things more serious than my love of language--thank you all for those lovely comments on the previous post. It's an honor to share my stories with you. I'm glad you're reading.

Thanksgiving for Vegetarians, and a nerdy language observation

Here's what we'll be making for Thanksgiving:

• mushroom filo pastries (from Moosewood Celebrates--they are totally divine and I'll post the recipe if anyone's curious, and carnivores never notice the tofu in the filling, which turns kind of creamy. yum.)
• cranberry sauce
• salad with greens and other things, probably brought by Pseudonymless Friend and her husband, who are the very best salad makers I know
  
• quinoa vegetable pilaf
• bulghar wheat rolls (unless we buy brioche rolls at the bakery)
  
• roasted pears
• pumpkin bread or pie
• cupcakes (if Curious Girl still wants them for dessert)
• wine (interesting suggestions in the comments to one of APL's recent bullets)
  
• sparkling juice
  

Linking to APL's bullets reminded me that she recently posted an accent quiz, as did Scrivener. (both observed some of the limitations of the quiz.) I teach linguistics sometimes (I don't identify as a linguist, but I have some linguistic training and come at linguistics in the borders among philology, linguistics, and composition), and thus take a particularly nerdy delight in Curious Girl's language development. I did take the online quiz (which, surprise! pegged me as a northeasterner, and had some odd comments about New York in relation to northeast.) I'd rather tell you a dialect story than post the code to my result, so here's some phonological fun for Friday:

I had a little bag of Q-tips sitting on the banister in the upstairs hallway. CG brushed past them, and they fell down to the first floor. She dashed down, picked them up, and said, "Mama! The coupons! The coupons!" A confusion only made possible by the fact that she pronounces coupon with a [kju]/cyoopon. I've noticed myself alternating the two pronunciations of coupon, so I guess she's learning and I'm influenced by what's a little more prevalent here (although these maps show both pronunciations pretty well mixed).

So there you have it, a menu, some phonology, and two bullet lists in one night! We're having duper fun here on a Friday night.

Sunday Randomness

• Via Femiknit Mafia, a very smart and funny op-ed piece from today's Boston Globe about the gay agenda. Read it on her post and be prepared to laugh outloud while you discover just how it is that me and my people are taking over the country.
• I love language and language development. Curious Girl has started using duper as an intensifier because I sometimes use the phrase super duper. Today she told me that swimming was "very duper fun" and in the midst of that long crying jag she was wailing about her "duper favorite blankie" (which has since been found by Politica. Phew.) I think her language development is duper cool.
• Ianqui's relief about having somewhere to go for Thanksgiving makes me wonder what, besides turkey, people are planning to make for Thanksgiving. Our evolving tradition is to make mushroom-tofu stuffed phyllo triangles, a recipe I'm happy to share. Anyone up for a non-traditional holiday recipe swap? I started menu planning this weekend and am in search of a few side dishes. And sure, I could look in more cookbooks, but what I really love about recipes are the stories that go with them.
  
• Laura's post today on the centrality of teachers modeling learning got me browsing over at Alex Reid's blog, and I quite liked his post about lecturing, which reminded me a bit of the comments at Deb's recent post about audiocommenting. I have a lot of posts brewing about teaching, writing, and department chairing, so I'll push myself a bit in that direction with this little bullet point on the importance of considering what do students do when they are learning? It's easy to think about the content to be covered in any given course, but it's probably more important to think about what will students be doing in class. Practially, materially. So it's not enough to say "we'll be thinking critically about X." What are the activities, the steps, the moments of engagement that will produce, say, critical thinking, or flexibility, or whatever the more general goal is?
• The number of labels I just attached to this post seems ridiculously large. Oh well.