Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Here’s a wonderful article I think everyone will enjoy!

Water or Coke?
I could not believe this….. Very interesting. It’s easy to re-hydrate yourself. When you get up drink a pint of water, do it again at 11:00, 3:00 and before you go to bed. That’s your eight glasses!

WATER

#1. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.
(Likely applies to half the world population)

#2. In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak
that it is mistaken for hunger.

#3. Even MILD dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as 3%.

#4. One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs
for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a University of
Washington study.

#5. Lack of water, the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

#6. Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of
water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain
for up to 80% of sufferers.

#7. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term
memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on
the computer screen or on a printed page.

#8.. Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of
colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast
cancer by 79%., and one is 50% less likely to develop
bladder cancer. Are you drinking the amount of water
you should drink every day?

COKE

#1. In many states the highway patrol carries
two gallons of Coke in the trunk to remove blood from
the highway after a car accident.

#2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of Coke
and it will be gone in two days.

#3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Coca-Cola into the
toilet bowl and let the ‘real thing’ sit for one hour,
then flush clean. The citric acid in Coke removes
stains from vitreous china.

#4. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers:
Rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of Reynolds
Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola.

#5. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour
a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble
away the corrosion.

#6. To loosen a rusted bolt: Apply a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola
to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

#7. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of Coca-Cola into
the baking pan, wrap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake.
Thirty minutes before ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix
with the Coke for a sumptuous brown gravy.

#8… To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of Coke
into the load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run
through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen
grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your
windshield.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

#1 the active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid.
It will dissolve a nail in about four days. Phosphoric
acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major
contributor to the rising increase of osteoporosis.

#2. To carry Coca-Cola syrup! (the concentrate) the
commercial trucks must use a hazardous Material place
cards reserved for highly corrosive materials.

#3. The distributors of Coke have been using it to clean
engines of the trucks for about 20 years! Now the question is, would you like a glass of water?

or Coke?

This week the concentration is on the play. The kids are doing a remarkable job and we are encouraging them to ham up their lines. It will be a fun week. We will do a little of the usual school work and play some group games and do some art, but the general focus is on the play.

If you do not have your summer field trip form in, please send it in. We are getting lots of calls from people who want places in our summer program, and in April, we will be enrolling them. There are only 40 spots, so please let us know if you want one.

Please send your child in a coat every day. It is too cold for a child to play outside for any length of time without a coat. We have had several children arrive to school in short sleeves. It is too cold for this. Also, snow boots should be left at home. Cowboy boots are fine until the weather is too warm for them to be comfortable.

If your child is having a birthday, and you would like to bring a cake or cookies or even something homemade your child would love it. Please remember him on his birthday. See the handbook!

If you need a new handbook, please let us know.

If you have a friend who you think would like the Garden School and has a child who is age- eligible, please pass on our name to him or her.

Spring break is March 25 and 26. We will be closed.

Have a great week!

Every once in a while I buy a whole cookbook devoted to something special or something I really love like cheesecake. Cheesecake is a many splendored thing! Recently, I found myself throwing a little cheesecake recipe book into my grocery cart and then leaving it on my desk until curiosity reared its head. Glancing at the book, I realized just how much I really like a good cheesecake, and I wondered just how you get a really good quality one.

I think the answer is the temperature of the cheese. Years ago, we left all kinds of things out – butter, eggs, cheese, and nobody thought twice about using these constantly room temperature foods. Today if it isn’t refrigerated within ten minutes of purchase, it’s heave ho! Not necessary.

Leave your cheese out several hours – won’t hurt it or you.

The crust is the first thing to be considered in cheesecake. The question is: what DO you want? The answer is an individual thing. The easiest crust is a ready made – plain graham cracker, chocolate, or vanilla or some of the new crusts.

The other alternative is to make a plain crust from graham crackers butter and sugar, and the third idea is something creative like ground ginger snaps or mint cookies, or even an herb cracker. Remember, it’s not an archetype, it’s a preference.

If using a homemade crust, the basic recipe is crumbs plus butter plus sugar. For a usual size spring form pan, use 1/2 stick of butter to 1/4 cup sugar to 1.5 cups flour or crumbs ( from graham crackers, or cookies).

Now for the filling:

If using a ready made crust, use two 8-oz blocks of cream cheese. If using a spring form pan, use four 8 oz blocks.

For every block of cream cheese, use 1/3 cup sugar and an egg.

When mixing cream cheese and sugar and eggs, you must beat it hard and for at least three minutes. The cheese must not be lumpy or your cake will be lumpy. Always add 1/4 cup of flour for a spring form and 2 tablespoons for a ready made crust

This is your BASIC recipe.

Now for flavoring –

Nearly anything can go into a cheesecake: Here are some ideas: eggnog, rum, Irish liquor, coffee, chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, pineapple, raspberry, strawberry, cranberry, pumpkin, pecan, mint, and just about any other concoction you can come up with. I even saw a coconut macaroon cheesecake listed.

The point to perfection is to make sure your cheesecake batter is smooth and has enough flour to bind it. If you add a liquid like rum, make sure you add a little more flour.

Cheesecakes can even be two layer. Bake one and then the next in the same pan.

The sky is the limit. It takes a little effort to be creative, but with the spring fruit on its way, it is fun to dream about lovely desserts that are easy to make. When you have made your cheesecake batter, it keeps a week without cooking. It’s a think you can do a day before you need it, and remember cheesecake ages with a spledored magic. It tastes better the second and third day.

Now imagine a chocolate crust and a crushed raspberry bottom with a light vanilla top to a two layer cheesecake.

Imagine a vanilla crust with a dark chocolate bottom and a caramel top. Melting caramels and stirring them into the cheesecake batter is a delight!

Imagine using mint chocolate chips to line the chocolate cookie crust and then using a few chips to decorate the top of the cake.

How about a caramelized nut liner to a chocolate cheesecake or an Irish cream cheesecake mmmm…

When baking, make sure your cake rises and seems puffed and slightly cracked on top. After you have removed it from the 350 degree oven, let it cool. It will sink slightly in the middle. You can build that up with sweetened sour cream, but it isn’t necessary.

Cool on a rack so your crust does not get soggy.

Happy cheesecaking!

Greetings from Yoga 101 ! At 2800 Lincoln Ave in Evansville.

March is here and Spring is just around the corner! Spring is a season of renewal and growth. Join us as we shake off the winter blues and welcome Spring with our first ever “Friends and Family Weekend” Saturday March 20th and Sunday March 21st. Encourage your friends and family to come and experience the wonderful benefits of hot yoga and enjoy special discounts off of purchases made that weekend. Hope to see you there!

Namaste
Friends and Family Weekend!

Join us for our Friends and Family Weekend Saturday March 20th and Sunday March 21st. All students new and old will be able to enjoy 20% off of purchases made that weekend! Encourage your friends and family members who have been wanting to try out our classes to come in and purchase a class package that weekend so that they can receive 20% off of their purchase. Merchandise is also included in the sale!

Jasmin and Isaac won the spelling bee today. They did a great job. So happy to hear that they tied because each one spelled as well as the next. That is enough to warm my heart. Isaac is reading on at least a second grade level if not better. So proud of him.

There was another medal party on Friday – I understand that fifteen people attended. I’m hoping for a medal party that includes all the kids. If a child loses his medal during the week because he either made another child cry on purpose, was chronically disobedient or chronically disruptive, he needs to understand that he is not behaving in a socially acceptable way. Change is the best policy there.

We practiced the play again on Friday. It’s at about 75%. That means seventy-five percent of the children know their lines and when to come in. We need that last twenty-five percent for a great play. We will get there. Costuming has been done, and the children all look darling. Next part is back drop and props.

I am working on the summer itinerary. As soon as fees start rolling in, I can be more definite about where we are going and when. The schedule will come out the first week in April no matter what, but many of the trips will be conditional unless fees are in. It’s very hard to plan on promises.

Spring Break is the week after the play. We will be in school Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and will take a field trip on Wednesday to the Zoo weather permitting. We will be out on Thursday and Friday.

Blessings on a great weekend! See you Monday!

From Teacher Magazine

The cover story in the current issue of Newsweek proclaims that, in order to improve schools, “we must fire bad teachers.” The story points to research showing that teacher quality is the most important factor in student success, and then argues that, for a variety of reasons – union obstructionism foremost among them – the teaching profession on the whole has languished in recent years, particularly in low-income schools. It cites the recently planned mass firings at Central Falls High in Rhode Island as “a notable breakthrough” in coming to terms with this issue, adding that “if more truly bad teachers were let go,” the good ones would get more respect and a “boost in status that comes with higher standards.”

What’s your view? Is firing bad teachers the key to improving schools? Would it ultimately bolster the teaching profession? Why shouldn’t ineffective teachers be fired – or why aren’t they more often?

To participate in this discussion go HERE.

Comment: What makes a poor teacher? Is it someone who can’t teach? Can’t relate? Someone who cheats the kids out of learning? Someone whose standards are too high, not high enough?

I believe a poor teacher is an ignorant one. A teacher who doesn’t know anything and who clings to the textbook without offering the extras is a poor teacher. An ignorant teacher is going to be ignorant about life in general.

I think administrators should always be on the lookout for good teachers and trade up. That’s the way it’s done everyplace else, so why should schools be the exception?

From Newsweek Magazine

George F. Will
The Basement Boys
The Making of Modern Immaturity.

Published Mar 8, 2010

Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a “disparate impact”: The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.

Increasingly, they are defecting from the meritocracy. Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates. The Pew Research Center reports that 28 percent of wives between ages 30 and 44 have more education than their husbands, whereas only 19 percent of husbands in the same age group have more education than their wives. Twenty-three percent of men with some college education earn less than their wives. In law, medical, and doctoral programs, women are majorities or, if trends continue, will be.

In 1956, the median age of men marrying was 22.5. But between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5. A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents’ homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women.

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society’s belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker’s home. What are today’s “basement boys” doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

Gary Cross, a Penn State University historian, wonders, “Where have all the men gone?” His book, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, argues that “the culture of the boy-men today is less a life stage than a lifestyle.” If you wonder what has become of manliness, he says, note the differences between Cary Grant and Hugh Grant, the former, dapper and debonair, the latter, a perpetually befuddled boy.

Permissive parenting, Cross says, made children less submissive, and the decline of deference coincided with the rise of consumer and media cultures celebrating the indefinite retention of the tastes and habits of childhood. The opening of careers to talented women has coincided with the attenuation of male role models in popular culture: In 1959, there were 27 Westerns on prime-time television glamorizing male responsibility.

Cross says the large-scale entry of women into the workforce made many men feel marginalized, especially when men were simultaneously bombarded by new parenting theories, which cast fathers as their children’s pals, or worse: In 1945, Parents magazine said a father should “keep yourself huggable” but show a son the “respect” owed a “business associate.”

All this led to “ambiguity and confusion about what fathers were to do in the postwar home and, even more, about what it meant to grow up male.” Playboy magazine, a harbinger of perpetual adolescence, sold trinkets for would-be social dropouts: “Join the beat generation! Buy a beat generation tieclasp.” Think about that.

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became “a retreat into childish tantrums” symptomatic “of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation.” And the boomers’ children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster’s, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese’s for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang “Satisfaction,” a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year’s game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to baby boomers’ limitless appetite for nostalgia. “My generation’s obsession with youth and its memories,” Cross writes, “stands out in the history of human vanity.”

Last November, when Tiger Woods’s misadventures became public, his agent said: “Let’s please give the kid a break.” The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: “Forever young.”

This morning Miss Judy, Mrs. St. Louis and Mr. Terry will be in Indianapolis. We will return on Tuesday. If there is anything you must have ASAP please see Miss Amy.

This week we are adamant that your child knows his lines. This is a group activity and important to every child.

We will fit your child with a costume this week.

We will have as many classes as we can fit in with play practice. It will rain this week, so rain boots and rain coats are a good idea for kids.

Please remind your child that he needs to take special care to keep his medal. There might be another party this week!

Please return your summer enrollment this week. We are taking outside the school reservations. This is a really good deal for summer: class days on Monday and Thursday, and swimming all day on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a huge huge huge field trip on Fridays. Parents welcome every Friday. There is no other school in Evansville that does so much for so little. Please remember that your child needs to explore in the summer. Every child has the right to be able to say, “I had a great summer, we went here, and here, and here and we did this and this and this, and I learned to swim and go off the diving board.

If there are any problem with the cost, please see Miss Judy on Tuesday.

We made a new treat this week. It was delicious!

We started at 5:45 a.m. with a clean kitchen! So important that all the dishes are done and put away, the counters are cleaned and the sink has been drawn with hot soapy water for the next job – cheesecake bars!

These are simple and fun and they are sooooo good. Here’s what you do after you preheat your oven to 350 degrees:

Step one: in food processor put 1 stick of butter, 1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour and 1/2 cup brown sugar and blend until you have what looks like cracker crumbs. Put your canisters away!

Step two: press crumbs into the bottom of a 9×13 baking pan that has been pan coated and bake for 15 minutes.

Step three: in the empty food processor bowl, place 1 egg, 1/3 cup sugar and 1 8oz block of cream cheese and 1 tablespoon lemon juice and blend until creamy.

Step four: pour the egg mix onto the cooked crumb mix.

Step five: put your empty food processor bowl, blade and any cooking utensils into the sink.

Step six: Bake pan of crumbs and cheese mix again for fifteen minutes.

Step seven: wash your processor bowl, your utensils, and wipe down your counter and put all garbage in the trash.

Step eight: pour 1/2 package of chocolate toffee crumbles onto the cooked cheese bars. Cool.

Cut into reasonable squares and devour.

Soooooooooo good.

Friday was a wonderful day. We had a late breakfast of pancakes and juice and milk, and then we played outside.

During play practice, I was so pleased with the children who have learned their lines. This is so important to do this quickly, because we can then ham up or do some body language with our lines. When the children don’t know their lines until the last minute, it’s stressful to the other children.

Sam and Jake have been wonderful about their lines. Jasmine learned her lines, Javeon is doing a fine job with his dialogue, and Austin knows his lines, but needs to speak louder! Emily is a pro, and Kylie is not far behind. Jill knows every word and Colby is very very strong.

In the afternoon, Miss Leigh and Miss Dayna had a party for all the children who kept their medals all week. There were seventeen children who kept their medals all week. The names are posted in the front hall of the school. They had an ice cream sandwich and MacDonalds fun party.

Lots going on at school. It’s hard to keep up sometimes…