Another friend of Crescat, responding to my recent posts on the sublime and heart-moving beauty that is the Miles Davis Quintet, pointed out the Miles Davis 8-CD complete Prestige Recordings, available on Amazon. Unfortunately, these are about comparable in price to the set of 6 Spiegelau wine glasses and 6 Spiegelau whiskey glasses (with money leftover to replace my Knob Creek) that I had been eyeing. And while each of these purchases individually are slightly beyond my loan-based budget, together they are positively bank-breaking.

Witness the paradox of choice and menu-dependence.

I mentioned to Friend of Crescat Paul Goyette that I was stewing chili for dinner tonight, and he inquired about my recipe.

"Recipe" gives it too much credit. My girlfriend is a Texan, and therefore believes that beans in chili are a contradiction in terms. Nontheless, our talk of chili this weekend gave me a hankering for it, and so upon returning from the desolate New Haven grocery store, I put into a pot:

About 1 pound of ground meat-- I bought the mix of beef, veal and pork, both because I prefer mixed ground meats for nearly all purposes, nad because it was a trifle cheaper. (Since when does 80% lean ground beef cost more than $3.50 a pound?!!!!)

1 can of diced tomatoes-- Those who have cooked with me for long know that the can of diced tomatoes is ubiquitous around my kitchen.

1 onion, chopped as finely as I could until I started to cry-- when others are around to chop my onion, I like to mince it. When I have to do the dirty deed, it comes roughly chopped. I enjoy the variety.

3 tsp. Penzey's Ancho chili powder-- the real reason I made chili is because I wanted an excuse to use this temptingly purple spice.

Some salt, some pepper, some Penzey's dried Jalapenos, some Tabasco sauce, a glass of Finca Flichman Malbec-- add to taste.

During the downtime in Boston this past week, I saw a number of movies (my girlfriend is a Netlfix subscrber, as I might soon become):

The Maltese Falcon: A fabulous film. Bogart is young and brash, even though Lady Astor is an implausible love-at-first-sight. The highlight may be Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Those two plus Bogart turn the film into Casablanca-actors-on-parade. Watch this film together with Notorious (Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman, as well as the impossibly dashing Cary Grant) for the full roster.

Ghostbusters: "Ray, when someone asks you if you are a God, you say yes!" I watched this because I was promised it would fill an egregious gap in my pop culture knowledge, and indeed it did. I played with Ghostbusters toys with Michael Sikora in until 2nd grade, but I didn't understand their significance until now.

The Princess Bride: A relatively recent obsession with Casablanca has made me wonder if this is really the best movie of all time, or merely the second best.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: Hugh Grant is at his schmucky best. Andie MacDowell is a dubious love interest, but probably the best of a bad lot. It was decidedly worth my watching it, but nothing to write home about. Still, the funereal reading of Auden's Stop All the Clocks is fabulous.

I don’t like being asked what my father’s profession is because first, it seems to be a question of whether I come from a sufficiently good family, by whatever standards a parent’s profession is a judge of family quality; and second, because when I answer that he is a professor, the assumption is that my family must be rich, and this is a hard false impression to break (I have no sympathy when professors at elite private universities complain of their salaries). Professors in Kazakhstan are rich, not because of their salaries, but because students commonly offer large bribes for good marks. European universities have not been regarding Kazakhstani degrees as legitimate; now, even Russian universities are disregarding them as not worth the paper they’re printed on. Like the students’ university transcripts, students’ grades at secondary schools can’t be taken as vaguely objective proof that the students have studied their subjects well.

Secondary school students carry daily grade books in which teachers often, but not always, write in a participation grade for that day’s lesson. It’s praise to be taken home to the parents, or a warning that a student needs to shape up. As far as I can tell, whatever’s written in the daily grade book bears no calculated relation to the student’s final grade, though perhaps there was once a theory that connected them. The actual grades are recorded in a class’s grade book. Each class of students, 9A or 5B, has its own book in which all their subjects’ grades are recorded; each teacher does not have his own grade book for all the classes he teaches. Each teacher has his own section within that grade book, and in that section writes the topic of each day’s lesson. After each class, the teacher gives about a quarter of the students grades: 5 is high, and 1 is so low that a 2 is the lowest mark ever actually given. Over the course of a few weeks, all the students will have roughly the same number of graded observations, but they won’t all be for the same activities. Only for tests will all students receive grades for the same assignment. The tests don’t seem to be weighted any differently from the daily grades, for they receive the same series of 5s, 4s, and 3s.

But at least as I’ve seen it, grades are even less objective than randomly assessing students for different work. Now, I don’t want my experience to stand for an example of how all Kazakhstani schools are. I suspect my department is worse than average, but it is not abnormal. A grain of salt, please. Last week, I watched my co-teacher write down lesson titles for the previous two months, and scatter in number across the grid: only 5s for the best girl in the class, a mixture of 3s and 4s for a fairly average students, a few recorded absences, and so for all the class. And then she smiled at me. These grades are based on absolutely nothing more than her own subjective assumptions of how much a student knows, and perhaps how well she likes a kid (her son, whom she teaches, receives 5s).

Tests do nothing to balance out the system to some sort of quality. On Tuesday, I was told to write “control work” for the 8th and 9th grade classes, for tomorrow. Now, this was the first time this year we’d given control work, so I’d never seen an example of it before. I could not get an answer to the question how control work differed from a test, and I was not going to write this alone because my co-teacher could not find free time to collaborate on it because she had a party to go to. So I refused, citing the first reason, and alluding to the third. I can’t say that my co-teacher went home and wrote the control work herself, but she did chose it herself. The test 9A faced on Wednesday bore no relation to any subject we’d taught that year. It was a 10 question, multiple-choice exam that the co-teacher wrote on the chalkboard. It had come from a test file, and I corrected four errors in it as she wrote it out for the students to copy.

The students didn’t respect the test any more than I did, and they had no shame. They surely realized as well as I do that though I can tell them to quit speaking or quit looking at another’s paper, and I can have them move seats so they must cheat off of a different student, my powers to discipline them end there if the local co-teachers don’t back me up. This is one test I won’t be asked to grade, because at the end of the exam, I, speaking Kazakh, told the class they better pray I don’t check the exams, for I promised them all 1s if I graded it. However, even if I wrote that mark on their tests, I could not write it in the grade book, for only the teacher who is paid for a class may write in that book.

(Not all was as bad as the 9th grade. When I told my 8th graders not to look or talk during the test, some replied by standing textbooks on edge between them and their neighbors, using cover sheets, or visibly shading their eyes. A percentage did openly cheat. Relative to the 9th grade I’d just seen, I thought it respectfully low, though it was probably ridiculous by American standards. Yes, we do have cheating in America, but it’s shameful, so our students are at least sneakier about it.)

And the teachers, quite honestly, didn’t really care about their students’ behavior. It’s a pattern that’s been established for years between this class and these teachers that I wanted to stop. And why should the teachers support me, for I have just now walked in with my own opinions and attempted to enforce them, and with my actions implicitly declared that their own opinions and past methods have been wrong.

Five students pulled out dictionaries on top of their desks to look up words, though the local teachers would translate any word if asked. Students leaned across aisles and turned around in their desks to talk to their neighbors. Students, who all share two-person tables with attached benches, scooted shoulder to shoulder to see what the other had written, and to write on the other’s paper. Even when I stood next to, or between, a pair of talking students, they talked write through me, not even waiting for me to walk over to another pair. I tried again to stop the cheating when the 9th graders had “control work” again on Friday. Having the students place their school bags on the desks between them just meant they had to crane their necks a slight bit further to look. Students wrote draft answers to some of the questions on scrap sheets of paper—what is wrong with a clean scratch-out on an exam?—and passed these sheets to their neighbors. When I confiscated these sheets, the students who wrote them complained that I was taking their own written work away, and the other student had only been correcting or copying the answer. And again, they talked so much that when the local teacher translated three of the questions into Kazakh and gave the answer in English, some of the students were to busy to pay attention, and had to copy that answer, too (if only I could consistently get my students to work together so well when I assign them group work. Maybe I’ll create a project, lie that it’s a test, and leave the local teacher to administer it).

And all this time, the teacher who had been the fun American teacher with a few strange habits has undergone a transformation into an unreasonable witch who tries to force her own standards into a place where they do not fit; she does not understand that this is the way the classroom operates, and that the students are just being friends, for that is the term here for what we call cheating. And I wished for a moment I were a local teacher, for they’re permitted to slap students upside the head and haul them about by the ears, while my physical expression is limited to the furious clicking of my heels as I head to intercept some more friends. After class, my two co-teachers told other teachers about this in a tone of ‘oh, how cute, our little American was mad without reason.’

The teachers have little incentive to stop the cheating, for it does improve the students’ marks when they face tests for which the teachers have not prepared them and for which they have not prepared themselves. The teachers are responsible for their students’ success, and within Kazakhstan, there’s at least a pretense carried on that good marks mean students have learned. Now, given the fabrication of the rest of the process, I don’t see why curved tests wouldn’t work just as well, or even no tests at all. But that’s how the game is played. And the first national exams have only come to Kazakhstan within the last year or two. Students take these exams the summer after they graduate high school, so the teachers’ accountability for these marks is still far off.

The teachers are evaluated, though. Their evaluations come from the methodology inspectors at the regional department of education. The department wisely makes unannounced visits. This was Thursday, a day of great fear for the local teachers. The department reduces the salary for teachers it finds poor, and it spreads the damaging gossip that a teacher isn’t good. (I wonder, if any locals found this blog and spread the translated word around town, if I’d be asked to leave my site.) When my co-teacher found out the inspectors had come, she begged me for my lesson plan from a few weeks ago, when I’d ran an activity that particularly impressed her. The activity requires no more preparation than writing short texts of 2 to 3 sentences, and taping them to the wall at various places around the classroom. However, she did not want to write her own sentences or find appropriate ones in the textbook. I eventually gave it to her her—if they’re threatening her pay—but I wasn’t happy.

But it didn’t end up mattering, as she never got a chance to use that plan. The department observed an 11th grade class she and my other co-teacher share. The officials read the students a dictation in English. These students have had English since the 5th grade. Still, some did not now ‘dog’ and ‘daughter,’ and two wrote the whole dictation using Kazakh letters (was this a clever protest, an apathetic prank, or indifferent ignorance?). The teachers told me about their class’s performance as though it were a joke. Yeah, black humor. I preferred the one about the senseless inventor of toilet paper. These teachers don’t speak good English, but they speak it well enough that if they’d tried harder to teach these students over the past six years, the students wouldn’t have done so poorly on the department’s evaluation.

But again, it probably won’t come to matter. The teachers set off on a furious scattering to find who had significant sums of cash at school that day. By fortunate coincidence, a delayed paycheck had come only the day before. I think the collection originally stood at 2,000 tenge a head, but they may have reduced it down to 1,000 tenge as more teachers joined in the pool. “This is not a bribe,” I was explicitly told, “we do not give money to the inspectors.” But the head methodologist was formally a German teacher at my school and one of these teachers’ friends, though rumor says she has grown haughty with her new position of power and wealth from Mary Kay sales. Anyway, the collected money was explained: “we are friends.” And then a teacher asked me what I though of all this. The truth might set you free, but only if being set free means being fired. I said it was a different culture and the different culture had different customs; in my culture, I suspected that what I just saw would be grounds for a tenured teacher to lose her job, and certainly not the recommended path to keeping one.

I am not friends,. I am silent (if this is silence) and I will go no further. Sitting on my bookshelf is that play of Bolt’s, “A Man for All Seasons,” in which Sir Thomas More proclaims the legal truth that silence gives consent, but it doesn’t do him much good in a world of corrupt and perjuring men. That’s not fun conscience, but I’m not sure what the proper thing to do is, other than to avoid running through the streets shouting “It’s a sham! It’s all a sham!” and to complain of it to volunteer friends over beers.

And, in my humble opinion, the creepiest classic:

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;--
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee--
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me:--
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of a cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we--
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:--

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea--
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

A very happy Halloween to all.

A creepier classic:

I

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And an in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III

Hear the loud alarum bells-
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor,
Now- now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows:
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-
Of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people- ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells-
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-
Bells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

A classic:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost Lenore-
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door;-
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering,
fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"-
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore-
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;-
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and
flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed
he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no
craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore-
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door-
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered-
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown
before-
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore-
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never- nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and
door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore-
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he
hath sent thee
Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!- prophet still, if bird or
devil!-
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted-
On this home by horror haunted- tell me truly, I implore-
Is there- is there balm in Gilead?- tell me- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil- prophet still, if bird or
devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore-
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked,
upstarting-
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my
door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the
floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!

Having forgotten about daylight savings time, I woke up an hour earlier than necessary for my bus today. Spending some of that time reading up on the week's blogs, I finally got around to reading the transcript of the Bin Laden tape.

All I can say is that it's truly bizarre. The juxtaposition of Patriot Act and pet goat with grievances about Israel and prayers to Allah makes the whole thing sound like a strange campaign ad.

In my History of Western Civilization class, we once had to read a Declaration-of-Independence-style list of complaints from the peasants of Swabia. Between exhortations for due process of law, local control of religious matters, and an end to serfdom, I was most struck by a single line: "We also have a grievance about wood-cutting." The peasants then devoted 1/12th of their articles to a demand for access to firewood from the forest.

There's nothing wrong with that-- firewood is probably important if you're a freezing peasant-- but the combination of the grandiose and the mundane was similar.

It seems that Bin Laden watched Fahrenheit 911; this vaguely disturbs me for some reason.