05.30.07
Posted in Business, Places, Family
at 10:14 am
by Dave Badtke
Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)
For example, there’s a large fish tank in their dining room. 
I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.
I’m sure Zim could have talked on this and any number of other topics for as long as we were willing to listen, since he likes to get deeper and deeper into the details, philosophy, psychology and unintended consequences of whatever he’s thinking about, but then Katrina told us that Zim has a quota for such discussions. While I’m not sure how she measures Zim’s eclectic discursions, it seems that the threat of something like a warning bell urges him to move on to the next interesting idea.
Joel, who met Katrina and Zim when they were all undergraduates at Harvard and who was part of a rather large “family” of students with similar interests that brought them together when they were juniors and seniors, is like Zim in his ability to hold forth at length on subjects as diverse as the political history and future developments of Africa — he worked for the opposition party in South Africa before returning to Harvard — and legal issues. After my wife told him about a case pending before the State Supreme Court tomorrow, Joel was able to summarize its main points and highlight its importance with details, it seemed to me, that my wife hadn’t even told him about. Quite amazing.
So we had a great evening, made even better because Zim likes to cook, and he’s a good cook. After Zim’s grilled chicken and garlic bread and Joel’s salad, we had Bonny Doon Vinyard’s NV Bouteille Call dessert wine, which tastes like raspberries and blueberries and I don’t know what else. Into this sweet drink we dunked brownie edges. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, they’re a different kind of biscotti made by Sugardaddy’s Sumptuous Sweeties, famous for round brownies. 
You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!
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05.29.07
Posted in Places, Family
at 11:01 am
by Dave Badtke
We went down with the kids to Monterey and Carmel for a few days, with an excursion to Big Sur. When we’re thinking about going south, we seem to always end up here since over the years it has become such an 
interesting place. Of course the area has gorgeous geography, but now it also has a small theater that shows art movies, another that shows old movies, at least one good used-book store, BookBuyers, and the Monterey Bay Acquarium where you can see the most amazing sea 
jellies. But what I couldn’t find, and am now pursuing, is a good book that explains the life cycle and evolution of these amazing creatures that seem to blur the line between plants and animals. 
Which also brings to mind our cat, Prink, who’s about as fat and sedentary as a black-and-white squash, but that’s another story.
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05.24.07
Posted in Sailing, Family
at 9:20 pm
by Dave Badtke
Last Monday we took Dulcinea out on San Pablo Bay, heading towards China Camp. The winds started to pick up, so we heaved-to to put on our foul-weather gear, which of course meant that then the winds began to die. When we got far enough to see the Richmond bridge, we headed back on a broad reach and, because Joe and Mina were our extra crew, we tried out the asymmetrical spinnaker with Joe at the helm. As we approached the Carquinez Bridge, we even managed a couple gybes that weren’t half bad. All in all a slow sail, since we were more often going 5 to 6 knots rather than 10 to 12, but fun.
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05.20.07
Posted in People, Family
at 11:47 am
by Dave Badtke
Yesterday Mina and Joe arrived from Japan via Chicago and New York.
Oh Joy, Hooray!
Some of the children have arrived to stay
for a couple weeks
which is never long enough
to hear all their stories
and to give them enough hugs.
They’ll be with us for two weeks, which will be fantastic, so we decided to celebrate after picking them up at SFO at Mandalay Restaurant , which is near the corner of 4th & California, a Bermese restaurant that we like as much as Burma Superstar, which is usually more crowded and noisy, to be found just a few blocks away near 3rd and
Clement. Just across the street is Mia’s Vietnamese Restaurant, which is also terrific, but we were looking for pumpkin chicken and should have ordered more at Mandalay because it’s so, so good. Just writing about it now makes me hungry.
And then after we ate, we thought about going to Green Apple Books, which is always a treat, but not last night. After mango with sticky rice, Joe and Mina were tired — their New York time was three hours later for them — so we headed home.
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05.19.07
Posted in Education
at 12:17 pm
by Dave Badtke
The Composition Mastery Exam (CME) results for my two fundamental English classes were encouraging. For the most part, those who are ready to move on to English 1 passed the test, and those who aren’t, didn’t. This is a big change from a couple of semesters ago when even some of my best students didn’t pass or, which came next, some of my best students didn’t pass while others who weren’t strong writers, did. In other words, CME results seemed almost random. I interpreted that inconsistency as a problem with my teaching, which was easy to believe since I was new to teaching English.
I first worked at Solano in the Writing Lab to fulfill my practicum requirement when I was taking Ruth Saxton’s Theories and Strategies of Teaching Writing at Mills College. (Ruth was amazing and the course got me interested in teaching.) I continued on helping in the lab and sat in Sharyn Stever’s Creative Writing and Shari Pabst’s English 370 & English 2 classes. Bless Sharon and Shari for letting me not only sit in their classes but also for not getting too upset when I asked questions and generally was just as difficult and disruptive as their students. In Shari’s classes, if you can believe it, I was in class for the entire semester!
During my first semester teaching classes at Solano in 2006, I thought, even though I knew better, that I had some answers. I emphasized the creation of a writing arc, which I derived from the arc of a story, frequently called a checkmark story structure. With some modifications, the checkmark idea can be used effectively with a response, but I found that while my students could understand its elements, they had difficulty putting it into practice. Their confusion was exacerbated by my approach, which was overly theoretical. I talked of writing with particles and fields, which worked for me as a catchy idea because I’m a retired physicist, but which didn’t work at all for my students who didn’t necessarily find a structuralist’s approach helpful when trying to write a four- or five-paragraph compare-contrast essay.
That first semester as the CME approached, I felt my students sinking with me at the helm until I introduced a rather straight-forward outline approach to writing a response. That class was memorable because many students finally seemed to understand the they could always find something to write about with a structure that would work even if they were confused by the topic. All was well, I thought, with this prescriptive approach until I got the results back that first semester: Even some of my best students had failed to pass the CME.
The spring 2006 semester was followed by a summer 370 class that was way too fast for the majority of my students. We met for 2 1/2 hours four days each week for six weeks, and the students also were in the Writing Lab for a couple hours each day. For students who need to significantly change their reading habits and reasoning and writing skills, such a fast pace only works for the most dedicated. Many tried hard, but again the CME results were too random. I was so upset after getting the scores that I sat in the kitchen as my wife was cooking and read each essay aloud to her to get her opinion. I ended up overriding too many of those students, which is my prerogative as the teacher if I think the student can handle English 1, but I certainly didn’t feel good about doing it. I felt so bad, in fact, that I made copies of my students’ CMEs so that I could discuss them with other faculty to get a sense of what I was doing wrong.
If one has been properly prepared by failure to seek and listen to advice as I was, a few minutes can make a world of difference. One evening when I was working in the Writing Lab with Sharyn Stever, there were no students waiting, and I asked Sharyn if she would read some of those summer CMEs that I thought should have passed but didn’t.
“Analysis,” Sharyn said. “They’re not analyzing enough.”
Which made immediate sense to me, that my students weren’t relating ideas to each other with appropriate inferences, because in class I hadn’t stressed how cause and effect are used to create closure when responding to an author’s writing.
During the fall 2006 semester I began to spend a lot more time on analysis of readings and my students’ writings though I continued to emphasize the sentence-combining skills so many of the students need as well since they have difficulty constructing grammatically correct sentences that properly express logical relations such a compare and contrast and cause and effect. I also modified the repsonse template, but most of the corrective effort occurred in classroom discussions. The result that semester was most encouraging. Like this semester, those who were ready tended to pass the test, and those who weren’t, didn’t.
Since I’m now a convert to using templates to help students, an approach which is also stressed in the Writing Lab, I discovered, when rooting about the faculty text lists, a template-based book, They Say / I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, that may be exactly what my English 1 & 4 students will need to take them to the next level in their writing.
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05.17.07
Posted in Education
at 8:58 am
by Dave Badtke
Today the faculty at Solano College gets together at 1:00 to grade Composition Mastery Exams, CMEs. It’s a painful, stressful process not only because we’ll all be working together to read through some 800 essays but also because we’ll find out how our students have done, which, of course, is a reflection on them and us.
But even though it’s painful and stressful and gut wrenching, it’s a good process that should be extended beyond our fundamental English students to all those in beginning composition classes. It would be a good test for our students and a good process for the faculty since we’d better figure out what the goals for English 1, 2 and 4 really are in terms of a paper written in English 1 that would demonstrate the ability to research and sythesize multiple references, in English 2 that would show the ability to analyze a poem, story or play, and in English 4 that would demonstrate the ability to research and make an argument incorporating multiple viewpoints. Most of all, though, the faculty would get together, as we’re doing today, to discuss the papers the students were writing and what they should be doing better.
Regardless, today it’s our fundamental English students whose writing will be placed under a faculty microscope. And I’m wondering right now — feeling my gut tighten just a little as I write this – how my students, and I, will do.
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05.15.07
Posted in Education, Column Ideas
at 10:43 am
by Dave Badtke
There’s only one class left in the semester, my 370 students have taken their Composition Mastery Exam — which the entire faculty will grade on Thursday — and the Spring 2007 semester marathon is almost over. And while I submitted my text requests for the fall semester, I’m still looking for new texts and stories for my English 1 & 4 students. But the problem in doing this is always the same: the vast majority of my students do not read for pleasure. And they also struggle to read their assignments, which for them are decidedly not pleasurable.
The cause for this non-reading state would seem to be that they have too much else they can do. More than that, there seems to be so little silence in their lives, required to have a conversation with an author, which seems like a good topic for this week’s column: Reading and silence.
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05.13.07
Posted in People, Places, Society
at 8:47 am
by Dave Badtke
As reported by NPR, there are more than 10,000 mothers in the U.S. military who are celebrating this day in Iraq. Not that long ago, Liz Vazquez, about whom I wrote today in The Benicia Herald and who is pictured here when she was in Iraq, was one of them. (See also my earlier blog post.) On this special day, all the best to those who have served, who are serving as I write this, and who are preparing to serve in the U.S. military.
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05.12.07
Posted in Philosophy
at 9:04 am
by Dave Badtke
This is the title of a book by Jonathan Lear that I began reading again after I wrote about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. I first read Happiness, which evolved from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an award Lear received in 1999, when it was published, but I remember little from that time perhaps because Lear’s style isn’t transparent — but well worth the effort — and also because I’m getting older and older.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of
From Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”
While I’ve only just begun to reread Happiness, my sense is that it’s a dialectical investigation in which Lear examines Aristotle’s thesis that what we do for “the good” brings us happiness and Freud’s antithesis that we’re subconsciously influenced by “the death drive.” Finally, Lear arrives at a synthesis, I think, that relates to including what Lear feels has been a previously excluded middle, which is what we do with the “remainder of life.”
The idea certainly seems interesting, but I may have this all wrong, so more with updates and corrections as I read.
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05.08.07
Posted in Business, People, Places, Sailing
at 9:32 am
by Dave Badtke
One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.
Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.
Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.
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Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)
I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.
You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!
