Cricket, my stitching buddyNotice the nicely deconstructed wicker chair leg. One of these days I’ll sit down there and the whole bottom will fall out to the sound of the bunnies laughing at me.
My remedial reading students at the community college had their mid-term exam last week. I’ve been moaning and groaning since last Wednesday trying to get the exams graded. I’ve mentioned that the department changed the course; not so much the curriculum, but the method we are using to bring these students up to college-level reading skills. We’ve tweaked things some since the fall semester and made the mid-term more difficult. So far I’ve seen mostly low C’s, a few F’s, and one B. Not promising.
The course I’m teaching is the second in the series, yet these students are not reliably able to find the main idea of a paragraph or to make inferences about what they’ve read. Those very basic skills used to be covered in the first course and in the past I spent most of my time working on higher-level college reading skills and study strategies. It seems now that students are coming to me without those basic abilities which makes me wonder what in the world they’re doing for the first semester of the course.
Anyway, Lynne recently shared some funny student responses to math test questions. Most of them were very creative and showed that the student had a bright mind, but maybe just forgot to study for the test. It occurred to me that you might like a look at the work my students are doing. I’d like to think their answers are funny and show creative thinking, but I’m afraid not.
The mid-term was based on a short article about nutrition and students were expected to read the article and use particular strategies that they’d been taught to help them understand what they’d read. There were also questions to guide their reading that required them to find the main idea of certain paragraphs and to make inferences about the meaning of particular passages. Every single student got this question wrong:
The text reads: “Recent research shows that our food choices rival transportation as a human activity with the greatest impact on the environment. By 2020, people in developing countries will consume more than 39 kg of meat per person each year – twice as much as they did in the 1980’s. The people in industrial countries such as the United States will still consume the most meat – 100 kg a year – the equivalent of a side of beef, 50 chickens, and one pig each.”
Students were asked to explain in their own words what the italized sentence means. Some responses:
Can you hear me moaning and groaning? And screaming?!? I shouldn’t make fun, but they are clueless.
I don’t think this question, or the article as a whole, was very difficult. What do you think? Can you find any correct responses? Am I just being too tough?
I mentioned that I had gone on a bird walk in the Pine Barrens yesterday. While I’ve spent a fair amount of time wandering around there on my own or with a friend who knows the place well, this was the first time I went with a group of birders led by a naturalist from NJ Audubon. The weather was perfect and there were only 8 of us in the group – a plus as far as I’m concerned. I hate birding in big groups of chatty women and hardly ever bird that way anymore. I’m glad I went along though, as I learned a few new spots to visit again on my own.
I don’t ordinarily share trip lists here, but we had a few special sightings that make this list worth reading. Going to the Pine Barrens isn’t really about seeing huge numbers of birds; the habitat doesn’t lend itself to great variety, but I think that makes each new species worth the effort of walking through all that sugar sand!
Pied-billed Grebe
Tundra Swan*
Canada Goose
Wood Duck
Ring-necked Duck
Bufflehead
Hooded Merganser
Turkey Vulture
Bald Eagle
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
White-breasted Nuthatch
Brown Creeper (singing!)
Carolina Wren
Eastern Bluebird
Fox Sparrow
Song Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Junco
Not bad for a late winter day in the Pinelands! The singing Brown Creeper was a treat, as were the Bluebirds, and the Bald Eagle. I was most thrilled to find the Tundra Swans that I’ve been looking for since late November – there was a nice group of about 40 birds feeding in one of the cranberry bogs at the Franklin Parker Preserve. We also found a pair of Wood Ducks way back in the preserve in one of the dikes, but they flushed before I was able to really take in their beautiful colors. I don’t see Wood Ducks often at all, even though they’re a very common nester here in NJ. Anyway, it was a good day.
Spring officially arrived for me today because I had two firsts – the first eastern phoebe and the first woodcock.
I haven’t managed to see any woodcock in the last few years because I never got around to looking for them. There’s certain places locally that I know to find them, but I’ve been too lazy to get in the car and drive to then stand out in the near dark and cold on the chance that the night was warm enough and windless enough to suit them and their dizzying courtship display.
Well, guess what? I had woodcock almost in my backyard this morning! Our property backs up to a small park with athletic fields and a small market and farm bordered by wet woods. I was up before the sun today because of the time change and a bird trip to the Pine Barrens. After a shower I was here in the office with the window open a little so I could hear the cardinals and robins greeting the day when I heard the first “Peeent!” from the field behind the house. I thought for sure that I had imagined it, but putting my ear to the window confirmed what I’d heard. I stepped out the back door in my robe and saw a woodcock twittering over the house. It amazes me to find these birds so close to home when for years I’ve been driving out to Sandy Hook or the fields around the college to see them.
I took a walk back to the farm this evening just at dusk and was treated to a show by half a dozen or so woodcock. What a treat! They’re fun to watch because no two birds fly alike. Some go straight up and hover at tree-top level, some corkscrew off low to the ground, and many zig and zag through the brush making it very hard to follow them with binoculars in the dying light. Sometimes one will take off or land almost at your feet.
I have to wonder how long I’ve been missing out on this! Now that I know they’re back there, I’ll be sure to listen for them at dusk.
Image from Google Images
There’s this sort of game I play with myself so that I can get things done that I don’t really want to do. Most weekends it’s cleaning the house and doing the grocery shopping. Today it was a visit to the dentist and grading mid-term exams that were on the *don’t really want to do* list. So in an attempt to balance out the negative emotions involved in those two activities, I spent a few hours after the dentist wandering around a state park that I don’t often visit.
It’s a very urban park, but with a nice mix of habitats – a sample of the more southern pine barrens forest with lots of pitch pine and a dense stand of Atlantic white cedar, plus the upland hardwood forest with beech, black birch, red and white oak and old growth white pine. There’s also a fairly large bit of salt marsh and a freshwater marsh that I can admire from the Garden State Parkway at 70 mph as it passes through the park.
The trails were very wet; that was the only tangible sign of spring that I found today. No spring azures, no fiddleheads, no skunk cabbage or hint of buds on the mountain laurel or swamp azalea. It’s supposed to be very easy to find pink lady’s slippers here and trailing arbutus, but I’ll have to go back later to find those beauties when spring isn’t just in my imagination.
I came home to the stack of mid-terms happy to have had a few hours out, but disappointed that I hadn’t found more to put me in mind of the coming season. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t catch spring fever quite so soon. There’s still six more weeks of students and papers for me to contend with.
A late reminder that the now biweekly *Good Planets* will be hosted this Saturday by Bev at Burning Silo. Hopefully it isn’t too late to submit a photo for this weekend’s edition. The theme this month is *home* – whatever that may mean to you. More specific info is available in Bev’s post on the subject. I would love to find a bird’s nest to photograph for inclusion, but this lonely bluebird box was all I found when I went out looking for nests and woodcock late last Saturday afternoon.
Our friend Jayne at Journey Through Grace is hosting the upcoming edition of I and the Bird on 3/22 so send a link to your best bird-related post to her at blessingsabound AT mac DOT com by 3/20. Lots of us have been blogging about birds lately, so it would be wonderful to see your serious or comical (Mary!) bird blogs read by a wider audience.
The weather here in NJ has been temperamental (like most of us come March), but I’ve been pleased to note the arrival of a small flock of bluebirds at Allaire State Park and Red-wing blackbirds in the wet fields by my office. I’ve also spotted a killdeer or two, so Spring is marching northward. The Osprey should appear at Sandy Hook within the next two weeks and I’m trying to decide on a day to take off from work to greet them on their return. The Sandy Hook Migration Watch starts a week from today – if you’re in the area why not stop by and check it out!
Peeper lives in the spare bedroom behind a gate. She chews and tugs at the gate incessantly so once in a while I let her roam around the house. I’d be happier without a gate to climb over, but I worry about a fight between her and the Flemmies who live on the porch.
Dora, who passed away, used to live here in the spare bedroom, but we never needed a gate because she wouldn’t set foot outside of *her* room. The Flemmies don’t need a gate either because they hardly ever venture off the sunporch. But Peeper is a roamer. It’s strange to me how rabbits can be so much the same in some ways, yet so different in others.
On this particular day, Buddy had been sound asleep on his bed in the middle of the living room when Peeper came bounding across it and stopped to check him out. He woke up and ambled off to the kitchen window. Buddy gets nervous around the bunnies, probably because he’s afraid of doing the wrong thing and getting yelled at. Really, I don’t know why they make him nervous; he’s always been gentle and only gets yelled at for running full-steam onto the porch to bark at the mailman. That sends the bunnies to scattering in all directions and somebunny usually knocks something over in the process which just startles them worse and then Buddy gets yelled at for setting all the chaos in motion.
I snapped the photo just as Buddy had finished yawning and turned to look balefully back at Peeper and I pursuing him.
If we’re lucky enough(?) to live in a place that has four seasons to the year, then I think it must be inevitable to be anxious for each seasonal change. I’d guess the anticipation of spring is most common; however I find myself anticipating the end of summer and heat more than I do the return to that type of weather. Yet, as much as I love the cold of fall and winter, I do get to missing the garden. March is a funny month; with the equinox we think of it as the first month of spring, but here in NJ at least, the weather is anything but spring-like most days, and the garden has to wait.
Whatever else it may be, I think of March as a month of anticipation. There are good things to come, but also much to appreciate at this in-between time of year. Maybe just to convince myself to be happy at this week’s return to below freezing temps, I made a list of some of the things that, as a gardener, I enjoy about late winter. Maybe you’d like to add to it?
“Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle… a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dreams.” –Barbara Winkler