Pay the Cow, Man -- Substitute Education -- Insurgent Behavior

Scattered around the roadsides in the country hereabouts are signs posted on fences or stuck on front-yard posts or hung on unattended, homemade stalls advertising locally grown veg and, especially, free-range eggs. We get nearly all of our eggs this way and we buy most of our veg from a service that delivers a box of fresh, organic stuff every other Friday. The quality of both is a cut above what we find in the local groceries and at the commissary, and the price is right, too. Sometimes I have to research the odd-looking, dirt-encrusted tuber in order to discover what to make of it, but it usually pays off. Who knew celeriac made such a tasty mash? I chop it up with an equal amount of potatoes, then mash them up with some garlic and butter.

Egg stands are ubiquitous. A carton of six can be had for 1 pound, 20 pence. The cow sells its eggs for 1 pound (about $1.55). Payment is on the honor system. In this case, you deposit your money in the cow, which is really a bank. The Brits don't refrigerate their eggs, even in grocery stores. They just sit out there in the open until the stock is gone. We haven't encountered a bad egg, yet, though, knock on wood.

Ash Week, Epilogue

The Drover needed nearly a full week to decompress from his stint as substitute history teacher during the ordeal that became known as Ash Week. For those of you just joining us, ash from the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name spewed into the sky and floated at high altitudes into European air space around about Thursday of Spring Break (two weeks ago today). For six days, airports were closed across the continent, including those in the UK, stranding thousands of travelers from Bangkok to Birmingham. Among those were hundreds of students and teachers from the Defense Department schools for military dependents.

Battalions of substitutes stepped in to fill the breach until the stranded could return, which in some cases took an entire week. The biggest challenge for the Drover was fashioning a lesson plan from the directions left by the absent teacher. The chapter under discussion covered the 1950s post-war domestic economy and social and cultural changes in the US, things like the GI Bill, Levittown and Elvis Presley.

The next biggest challenge was adopting some kind of tactic to keep control in the classroom. This sounds like a no-brainer until you find yourself facing 25 students, among them a handful of the least motivated and least academically capable in the school. It takes only one to really screw things up. With so many teachers and administration absent (including the principal) that week, it didn't pay to fob your problems off on someone else, like sending the offender to the front office. Often times, nobody was manning the front office to fall back on. So you sucked it up, and did your best.

The lesson plans came together with some overnight research and the presentations in class were generally successful. The discipline problem was kept in check until the final hour of the final class on the final day of the week, when things promptly came loose like a stand of cannonballs kicked loose on a rolling deck.

On one hand, the look in a student's face who is hanging on your every word like it's money is a pretty inspiring sight. I have a fraction of understanding now what motivates teachers. The same face that's experiencing frustration and disgust at the antics of a classmate who's interfering with the experience is the flip side of that coin. It becomes a personal mission for the Drover to shield one from the other. Unfortunately, it's often a losing battle. Ardor for teaching, I think, sometimes runs up on the rocks. The underlying mission in classrooms is behavior modification. It doesn't pay to run a high school history class like a graduate seminar. They're just not there yet.

Not a Routine Day in Gardez
 
A convoy out of FOB Gardez was targeted yesterday by mortar and small arms fire. No casualties -- killed or wounded -- were suffered. The convoy returned fire and the insurgents were driven off. The wife was not involved in the operation; such events are not routine, she assures me.

This represented a minor incident in a war zone. No one beyond those involved took note of it. No press account was filed. The big story is elsewhere, in Kandahar or Marja or Kabul. Unless, of course, you know somebody who was there, or who might have been, but for the accident of scheduling. In that case, you say thanks, or feel relieved.