Observations

Teaching is hard. I just went through some practice SAT answers with my daughter, looking at answers to interpretations of essays, and for about two thirds, we agreed; for those where we did not, about half the time it was obvious to me what they were looking for, and the other half it wasn't. For the ones where it was obvious, I tried to explain why I thought a certain thing was right, and I was a little dismayed to realize how much of it was based on my own feelings. Some answers were not clearly right or wrong, but different. How can you judge someone on interpretation? Yet that's exactly what they'll be doing when she takes this test for real. I told her not to feel dumb, because a lot of this will be based on writing styles that she hasn't experienced yet, but even as I said that I wondered how the heck an experienced teacher makes these points. How do you get a kid to think about something thats so flexible?

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I see where a guy who's going to be sworn in as a Congressman wants to take his oath using the Koran rather than the bible. I see nothing wrong with that. The idea of using the bible is that you're using something with meaning for you. If I swore something on the Koran, it wouldn't have meaning for me, and I could swear to anything. He wants to use a book that symbolizes his own beliefs. If he swore on the bible, he'd be swearing on the equivilent of me and the Koran. I think what the people who are arguing against it are really saying is that they mourn the loss of tradition, not realizing that the tradition is not the use of the bible but the agreement to be bound by belief (which happens to be based in the bible for most people). They might also, a little, be saying that they don't want a Muslim in office, though I hope thats not the case.

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A guy who was elected to the Senate had what I'd call a testy exchange with the president (though others called it civil): the president asked how the guy's son, who is in Iraq, is, and the guy said he wanted them out of Iraq. The president said that wasn't what he asked, and the guy replied that that issue was between him and his son. I'm not a defender of Bush, and I think both men acted badly here, but in this case, the senator-elect started it. You can be civil without being friendly, and he chose to be combative instead. I don't agree with some comments afterward that they all have to get along, insofar as that implies that they all have to mute their opinions, but there's a time and place for open discourse, and this wasn't it.

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Low blood sugar makes me punchy and disoriented. I had a very low number just before dinner (the result of swings induced by two nights (in a row, yet) of eating out), and I actually had trouble reading -- both in focusing on what I was reading and in understanding it . A most disconcerting experience. Don't do that.
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That Ricotta cheesecake is awesome. Only thing is, it doesn't taste like cheesecake -- its almost like a flan. Which is not a bad thing! And the almond cookies are good, too. I had some time left tonight, so I thought I'd make that pudding. Put in a little more cocoa (to use a box up) and about 1 7/8 cups cream (which apparently is all there is in a pint; I thought it was equivilent to two cups; where's metric when I need it?), so the pudding is very thick, almost a mousse. Not bad. Is it even possible to have bad pudding?