Recent Lost Virginities: A P-M-I

Katherine here.  


Somewhere in my early married life there was a group of teachers at Green Mountain High School who lived and breathed school and we hung out together.  A lot.   We synergistically learned that teaching kids to think had nothing to do with content, but it had much to do with teaching kids jargon and systems of thought.  C. Fite taught science students a language beyond nouns--it wasn't about memorizing types and kinds of plants and critters.  C. Fite was a guide helping young thinkers find the right places to cut the biological world into parts.

In English classes, Jim and I were cutting things into parts of our own.  Sophomores learned to cut with  initiation knives for a year of their lives.  Juniors dealt with the knives of philosophy, sociology, and Zen Buddhism.  Seniors cut through tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.  Somehow, by teaching kids how to think, rather than actually teaching individual books, students learned both process and content. That was the plan anyway.

C. Fite also gave her blooming scientists a jargon to hang onto and to connect with the rest of the subject area world.  Students learned about hypotheses and theories and facts and inferences.  Though nouns, these are process words.  They describe types of scientific thinking.  All it took was a Friday afternoon at a local bar to figure out how these words lined up with our English jargon.  In English we taught subjective labels and objective details and subjects, assertions, and key terms in thesis statements. This jargon is a writer's and reader's language.  It is a set of nouns for describing a way to think about reading and writing.  All the science words and the Language Arts words were explaining different contents in very similar ways.  It was cool.

I meant for this introduction to be shorter (go figure).  I just wanted to say that I have no idea how successful I was, but Jim and I and Cindy and lots of others at that time tried to teach kids to think. And we all began with baby steps.

The first thinking strategy Jim and I taught kids was to P-M-I almost whatever content we were attacking.  To P-M-I something, you simply use your analytical knife and cut things into what you see as Positive (P), Minus (M), and Interesting (I).  I'll forever be grateful to Edward DeBono and his books about Lateral Thinking which led me to the concept.  I discovered that almost any freshman could master this thinking system and that should tell you worlds.

With all this in mind and with all the Salinger-esque interruptions and delays so far, I'm ready to roll.   I've managed to try a number of new things in the last year and I want to think about them and a P-M-I list seemed like the perfect filter.  Here's to a year of lost virginities of all kinds.  Thanks for listening.

 RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: PLUS

1.  I cooked my first pork belly.  I did it Asian style (Mizuna cookbook).  When it was all fried and crispy, I served it like lettuce wraps.  Yum.
2.  I went to The Santa Fe Opera.  I finally get it.
3.  I loved Sayulita, Mexico.
4.  I ate my first sweet potato pancake at Snooze.  I eat them a lot now.
5.  I ate grilled scallions sprinkled with cheese in tortillas at La Lancha in Guatemala.  We made them at home last summer.  Time to do that again.
6. I went to Boulder and was fit for shoes at Newton Running (named for Sir Isaac and featured in the Denver Post not too long ago).  My feet are very happy.  This is a very cool place if you're looking to be a barefoot runner, but the actual practice of going barefoot or wearing the finger shoes hasn't worked out for you.  My shoes (one pair for running and one pair for hiking) are turquoise.   Somehow that just seems appropriate.
7.  I learned to lean pieces of art up against mantles and walls and corners and things.  Our friend David taught me this when he was buying a small landscape oil in Jackson Wyoming to lean against some books in his library.  I'm leaning things all over the place now--mostly because I don't have a library.
8.  I now love Tory Burch flip flops.  That's really all I want to say about that.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: MINUS

1.  I crossed the borders between Belize and Guatemala twice.  The rates changed constantly.  The people in front of us were charged half of what we were.  People with large guns and uniforms reminiscent of Woody Allen's Bananas were standing close by.  We did not argue.  It's interesting that is always costs more to get out of a country than it does to get into a country.
2.  I hated the bus ride to Sayulita, Mexico.
3.  A bird pooped all over my dress while I walked down the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: INTERESTING

1.  I read my first Jane Austen book--Pride and Prejudice.  I struggled through the first half.  It's much ado with not much going on besides who likes who and it just reminded me far too much of love stories filtering through sophomore Big Chiefs (lots of words without much substance).  I really enjoyed the second half even though it kind of pissed me off.  I mean--the huge problem of a aristocratic-type person loving/marrying a mercantile-person is not the stuff Hardy was after with Tess.  I have Emma.  We'll see.
2.  I ate waffles and fried chicken for the first time.  I really liked it--salty and sweet together.  I couldn't do this regularly though--need to keep my girlish figure.  This might hit the PLUS category except for location.  Chris recommended Lo-Lo's in Scottsdale.  Turned out it was in a strip mall and filled with people who look like Scottsdale and it just didn't seem to feel very Southern.  The Kool-Aid (House Speciality) came in all sorts of bright colors and flavors.  Didn't have any.  I had plenty growing up.
3.  I walked up Granite Canyon in the Tetons instead of down.  We ran into an avalanche and lost the trail and then we ran into a giant bull moose and we had to bushwhack around him and find the trail yet again and we saw waterfalls and all sorts of nature stuff from a totally new viewpoint.  It was also a lot harder going up.  There's a lot to be said for taking the lift up Rendezvous Mountain and walking down the canyon.  We once saw a naked girl lounging in the river on that route.  Jim gave himself 20 points for that wildlife spotting that day too.  I didn't think she was worth more than 17 at best.
4.  I walked ALL the way around Emma Matilda and Two Ocean Lakes starting on the south side (Tetons again).  I loved this part--views of Ox-box Bend from high above and a new range of wild flowers.  The back side sucked.  Dark and woody ("Lions, and tigers, and bears--oh my!) and I've never had to wade through so many mosquitoes in my life.
5.  I'm learning to care for an orchid.  A gift from David who has them in his store.  It's gorgeous, but I fret over it.  I don't know what I'm doing and it's the thirstiest darn plant and David says they should be able to go 10 days or more without water.  This is not Alabama and my orchid nearly died last summer when a neighbor cared for it while we went to Wyoming.   It just lost all its blooms and Im hoping this is natural.  It's still green and pleasant looking otherwise.  My son-in-law will be relieved the blooms are gone now though.  He's shackled with taking care of it while we are out of town and I'm sure it'll be less pressure now that it's just a lot of greens and roots.

Enough.  It was good to think through some new experiences of late.  I'm tired though.  I don't want to think anymore.  It's time to settle down in front of ESPN and let pundits carve the world into NFL draft choices.