Category: archive

select pieces from my ex-blog, All That Tea (Not Really, Sorry)

Untitled #5

I could watch cats groom each other all day long.
Sandpaper tongues,
Small, pink,
Appearing fast
And disappearing faster.
With utmost care and precision,
From tiny toe beans to full, warm bellies,
Licked clean.

And then suddenly,
Friendly rivalry;
They go for the throat.
A nip of fur,
A quick paw,
And just as suddenly,
Back to grooming.

Licked clean,
And then, sleep.

“Is this graded?”

Reading the syllabus for each of your classes is one of those first day of school items that you do and then forget for the rest of the year. This year, however, the syllabus, and more specifically the new grading system, had everyone talking.

My school recently made a quiet but impactful change in how students were assessed- homework would no longer count towards our final grades, and if it did, it would be only a small fraction of them. Our grades would depend in majority on quizzes, tests, and final exams. This new, apparently more equitable way to assess students bought about many opinions. So far, after two weeks of in-person school and talking to many different people, I’ve heard both extremes of those opinions and also found some similar to my own. I don’t know what to expect, and I don’t know if it’s going to benefit me. But I do trust my school and teachers to take the right decisions, and even if they don’t mean something to me directly, they might to others and I respect that.

I wanted to analyze my own thoughts about the grading system. How can schools get a proper understanding of what a student knows? Every child is unique and growing during these crucial years of school, and everyone learns in different ways. Personally, I think that my school’s new plan is a step in the right direction because it allows students to learn however they want and only show it to their teachers on tests. Another, bigger reason for my support is that tests assess students on one crucial feature: accuracy. While completion-based grading is an incentive to do whatever is assigned, accuracy-based grading adds an aspect of reality (“real life” as we’ve been told so often) to school and the learning experience. In the actual world, if you do something wrong there are consequences. Tests represent that in a much lighter way- if you do something wrong, you only get a bad grade.

Some people that I’ve talked to do think that tests put extra pressure on students due to their time constraint, grading, and the individual student’s desire (and sometimes necessity) to do well, and I agree with that. Without homework, a cushion for most students’ final grades, academics are going to be harder. And although homework is essentially optional now, many teachers still do assign it and expect it to be done.

Could smart grading soon follow smart whiteboards into classrooms? Hopefully.

Cereal

“What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?” my teacher asks through the screen with a wide smile, clearly proud of herself for the out-of-the-box attendance question. It’s a nice effort, to be fair, to try to engage everyone in the “classroom”, but the seemingly simple issue hits too many memories in my mind and somehow I’m no longer trying to find an answer for it.

~ ~ ~

When my parents immigrated to a completely foreign land, which later became my birthplace, over 20 years ago the only cereal they knew was light, popped grains of rice, sorghum, or millet, made in huge brick ovens and sold in kilograms back in their home country. It was far from the aisles of colorful cereal boxes that they were seeing then, miles away in every way from everything they had ever known.

~ ~ ~

“Are you going to finish it?” my parents ask me carefully, eyeing the cereal box in my hand (differently colored than what they usually buy) with suspicion as we stand in the grocery store. Somewhere inside of me it’s like a switch turned off; I examine the box myself, my eyes skimming over the list of ingredients, the colors, the “artificial flavorings added”; the grinning, predatory mascot that seems to scream to me, “DON’T LISTEN TO THEM.”

“No,” I say, putting the box back in its place among other boxes.

~ ~ ~

The teacher calls on me. “What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?” she asks again.

“We don’t really eat breakfast cereal,” I reply, thinking of huge brick ovens and the popped rice they make.

Red Line

Under my name, a red line. I stop typing, take my hands off my laptop entirely. In the background my teacher continues to explain what microaggressions are.

Suddenly I want to close the document I’m working on. ‘X’ out of all the tabs I have open, even out of the one where the teacher that can’t pronounce my name teaches what I want to learn about.

But I don’t. I right-click on my red-underlined name-

‘Add to dictionary.’

Fake Plants

My mother loves plants of all sorts- flowering plants, berry bushes, fruit trees, indoor palms and succulents… but perhaps the most surprising of all is that she loves (equally) fake plants.

Personally, I’ve always had something against fake plants. Compared to the real thing that provides oxygen and food, the limp plastic one seems like a total rip-off and waste of money. I understand that there are some times and places where growing an actual plant is just not possible, but can a fake plant really fill up that little space in your heart (or the ground)?

Let’s think about what a fake plant is made of- plastic. Oof. Plants, that usually symbolize a healthy environment and are depicted as a solution to all environmental problems, are now made of plastic. What would happen if a fake plant ended up in the ocean? It wouldn’t matter if it looked like a plant; in essence and in that moment, it is just yet another piece of plastic in an ocean already harmed because of it.

Today it’s fake plants. Tomorrow it could be something else, bigger and worse.

And to even think of keeping these innocent-looking sources of toxicity in our homes is scary. What could we ever gain from mostly useless pieces of plastic that make up only a sliver of aesthetic decor? What all could we lose?

Banana Appreciation + Inspiration

“Don’t compare apples to oranges!” people tell me, but deep down inside I’m actually just comparing apples to bananas.

Fruits can be categorized in many ways, one of them being like this: the ones that taste different every time you eat them, and the others that are bananas. We’ve all eaten sour apples and sweet apples, but have you ever eaten a banana that did not taste like every other banana that you’ve eaten? Bananas are special in the sense that they are the same no matter where you go. I think we can take that fact a bit further to make it something we can learn from.

In today’s world we are exposed to so many different ideas and opinions, and even the everyday news has food for our thoughts. We are changing, in our beliefs and own opinions, continuously. During this change, it’s important to have a sense of who you are so that you aren’t just changing but bettering yourself so that you are an asset to society with your uniqueness. I feel like bananas portray this perfectly. They change with time, showing through the brown-black spots on their yellow peels that they are taking the effort to change themselves to be better individuals. Their taste becomes sweeter and their texture becomes mushy, but does that change who they, as excellent sources of energy, are?

“We should be more like bananas” may sound questionable out of context, but with reference to the text above, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Be the change you want to see in the world, but be yourself too.

Raspberries

There’s a raspberry bush in my backyard.
Its fruit is small and overripe.
And little spiders crawl along the branches,
Stomachs full of that type

Of raspberries, and leaves,
Green but decayed.
So I head back with empty hands;
I never liked raspberries, anyway.