Why I Need a 4.0 ...

... and why I can still do better.

I am going to preface this post with the following message:

This is not a dig for compliments. This is not a plea for people to reassure me. I don't want any of that. These are my actual feelings and the way my brain works. Throwing out compliments or reassuring me is a way to debase my feelings--an underhanded way to tell me that I am wrong and I shouldn't feel this way and I need to get over it.

So yeah, don't do that.

This is just an explanation, so people can understand me a little bit more.

I got a 4.0 this last semester. Finally. My first one in my masters degree. A big deal or so people assume, but to me, it is what I expect of myself. A 4.0 means I can't be any better. It is the top of the measuring stick when it comes to school.

I can't be any better. But then I think back to all the times that I procrastinated this paper or didn't read that article or should have been working on something but instead I was playing facebook games. And I can be better. I wasn't good enough. I did not do my best. It's really hard for me not to judge myself based on grades (that's a whole different blog post about how we're trained and taught toward the grade). But it isn't just grades. It's just that now that I am in school going toward this degree, that is what it is focused on.

Anything and everything I do is done with the idea that I could have and should have done better. These feelings come from always feeling mediocre when I was younger. Nothing I ever did was good enough, and I was never good enough at any one thing to be great. I could and still can do a lot of things, but I am always stuck in the potential phase. "You have great potential." I got really tired hearing that. I also got really tired of hearing "You could do better," or "Your best isn't good enough," or "Why can't you be more like your sister?" (which my mom doesn't ever remember saying to me, but she did, but not nearly as often as someone else).

My first semester of graduate school, I got a 3.455 - and people praised me. "You did so good for your first semester. That's really really good."

And I'm screaming in my head ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I GOT TWO Bs!!!

My second semester I got a 3.79. Much, much better. Just one stupid B+ in a class that I didn't want to take but had to take anyway. The worst part though is that it was the class I tried my hardest in. Just wasn't good enough.

This semester, yes, I got a 4.0. My overall average is now at a 3.739 (which lets me breathe a bit easier), but I had an easy semester. I only had 2 classes and a few hours of an internship that wasn't nearly as much work as I was expecting. So the work load was less, and my grades were higher, which makes me feel even worse.

Next semester, I have less school work and more real life work, work that won't give me a grade. I have one class (which I'm excited to take) and my Masters Project that I have to complete. I have a 10-hour-a-week internship with Utah Symphony and Opera, I have copy editing with SLUG magazine, I have 8-10 hours a week at Guadalupe School. I'm going to be busy and I am going to love being busy.

But the entire time, with every thing I have to do, I am going to be thinking that I can do it better. I can be better. But can I really? That is the worst part. The self-doubt. Because even when I do my best, I feel that it is not good enough. And without a grade to tell me how well I'm doing, without a grade to tell me that I can't do any better, then I am always going to think that I am not good enough. And that is why I need a 4.0.

So, I don't know if that worked. I don't know if I managed to explain myself, but if you give me a compliment, if you tell me "oh you're so smart" and I look away or mumble something about being better, try not to be offended. I'm working really hard on accepting compliments by just saying "thank you" and not contradicting the complimenter. But in my mind, I need to learn to accept them, too, and know that they are true. In my mind, the compliments are not true. I battle with this almost every day. I don't believe them. I am smart, but I can always be smarter. I do my work and meet my deadline, but I can always work harder. I am mediocre. I can always do better.

My New Year's resolution is to work on this. To be better.

But, but, but ... I TEACH YOU THINGS

I saw this picture on tumblr today.



It makes me sad because while I do my best to teach students how to write, this is the reality of writing in high school and college.

Crepes

I decided to be a bit adventurous.

Crepes!!!



2 eggs
3/4 cup flour (there is only 1/4 cup shown in the first picture, but you need more than that as I discovered AFTER I took this picture)
MIX THE EGGS AND FLOUR TOGETHER FIRST

Add 1/2 cup milk
1/2 TBSP sugar
1/8 tsp vanilla
A pinch of salt

THE BATTER WILL BE REALLY THIN! Most websites and recipes say to let the batter refrigerate for an hour, but I was hungry, so I didn’t.

On medium heat, melt a little bit of butter in a non-stick pan.

As you pour the batter into the pan, swirl the pan around. This takes talent that I do not have, but you want the crepe to be thin. If you use a smaller pan than I do then your crepes will probably end up round. :)

(ugh my stove is dirty ... don't look at that ... )

Let it cook (the top of the crepe will look dry) for only a couple minutes and then flip it over. There should be this lace-like pattern on the crepe. Again, cook for a couple minutes.



This recipe made about 4 crepes for me. I ate mine with jam. You can eat crepes with anything.

Strawberry Lemonade Muffins

I've made Lemon Blueberry and I've made Lemon Chocolate chip, but I wondered what Strawberry and lemon together would be like, and of course, the first thing I thought of was Strawberry Lemonade. I don't usually like lemonade because it's too sweet and not tart enough, but what a better place to be sweet than in a dessert. I looked up a few recipes and decided it'd just be easier to modify/create my own.

And if the pictures don't convince you how good these are, then get this. Eldon, who doesn't like ANYTHING I bake, actually likes these.

Besides what most people already have for muffins, you will need 1 lemons and some strawberries (I used about 15 strawberries, but they are different sizes).



Strawberry Lemonade Muffins

Preheat your oven to 375 and line a muffin tin BEFORE you do anything else. This recipe makes 12 muffins.

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Mix dry ingredients in a small bowl.


2 eggs
1 cup sugar
(mix those up until it's all nice and light and fluffy but still liquidy)
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp of vanilla
Mix all those wet ingredients together in a larger bowl.

Zest one lemon and add it to the wet ingredients.
Zest is the name of the peel of a fruit. You need a zester to do this, because the holes on a cheese grater are too big. There is so much flavor in the peel of a fruit. That is the reason why I added lemon zest instead of lemon juice. I didn't need extra liquid in the recipe, just the flavor.
I don't know how much lemon zest I added to this recipe, but a small lemon zested almost bare.



Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients slowly and stirring constantly. The lemon zest and the acids in the lemon will make the batter a little thick, but the moisture from the strawberries will balance it out.

Cut up about 12 - 15 strawberries, depending on their size. Again, I did not measure this, and just tossed them in. If you feel like you're going to run out of strawberries when you're spooning the batter into muffin cups, just cut up a few more.



Having the muffin tin pre-lined is a great idea because you do not want your batter to sit too long because of the acids in the lemon zest. Fill the muffin cups to the top. Usually I sprinkle the tops of the muffins with sugar to create a crackled surface, but since I am putting glaze on these, I did not do that this time.



Bake the muffins for about 20 - 23 minutes. Remove from the muffin tin and allow them to cool all the way. If you don't, the glaze will melt right off the muffins.



LEMON GLAZE

1 cup of powdered sugar
Juice from one lemon
Some lemon zest

Mix all of that together. Again, I didn't measure any of this, but you want the glaze to be pretty thick so it stays on the muffins. If it's not, add more powdered sugar.



If you're curious about how much flavor is in zest, mix the powdered sugar and the lemon juice together, taste it, add the zest and then try it again.

Once the muffins are cool, cover the tops with the glaze and add a slice of strawberry for looks and a bite of sweetness. I stabbed them with a toothpick because the strawberries were sliding down the side.





Enjoy!

Peach Cobbler Muffins

I decided to try something different. I hope you all enjoy.

This recipe takes a while because of the extra steps, so don't attempt it if you don't have time to kill. I've been procrastinating homework, so I have time to kill.

I didn't like any of the recipes for Peach Cobbler Muffins that I found online, so I adapted my muffin recipe to suit my needs. First, I made a crust, because a crunch topping is always awesome on Peach Cobbler.

The Topping

2 TBSP of melted butter
1 cup of crushed up cereal



I forgot to measure how much Life Cereal I crumbled up, but it made about a cup once it was all smooshed. You can use any kind of cereal for the crust, or Graham Cracker if you prefer. I just had Life at home today. The smaller the pieces and the more butter you use the more the crust will incorporate in the muffin mix. So I kept the butter amount low and kept the pieces of cereal larger than if I was doing this for some kind of cake crust.

Line a muffin tin and put about 1/2 TBSP of the crush mixture in each liner, just enough to cover the entire bottom. Keep the rest, because it will be sprinkled on the top of each muffin.




The Muffins

I used my basic muffin recipe for these, which I'm sure many of you are already aware of, and added some spices for that Peach Cobbler Fall Dessert Yummy Taste.

In a small bowl, mix together:

2 cups flour
2 tsp of baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg

In a large bowl, mix together:
2 eggs (whisk them before adding other stuff)
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

Add the dry stuff to the wet stuff.

1 large peach, diced (I don't ever peel mine, just toss the fuzzy stuff with the pieces. I also use large peach chunks, because it's SO good to just bite into a large piece of peach). Use a spatula to fold in the peach pieces so they don't break apart.



Fill the cups to the top, sprinkle with left over topping. Press the topping down a bit into the batter, so more of it sticks and it doesn’t come off after cooking. Bake for 25 minutes at 375. Makes about 12 muffins.





The Vanilla Glaze



1 cup powdered sugar
1 TBSP of milk
2 tsp of vanilla

This glaze is pretty thick. If you want it thinner, just add more milk.



I hope you Enjoy!!!

Traci Grant's Grammar Tutorial - Cohesion

(The images under google search of "writing cohesion" were really really boring, so I'm using this one because it's fun!)

COHESION

“It doesn’t flow. It’s just awkward. It doesn’t feel right. The words don’t go together. It’s confusing. I get what you’re saying but say it differently maybe?”

Okay, stop. How many of you have heard this before, either in high school or in college or at your job?

People (or readers in this case) know when something is off in a document. They know because, for some reason, people (or writers in this case) try to write in a different way than they talk. You don’t necessarily have to do that.

We talk more fluidly than we write which means that we will do things differently when we write. When we write, we stop to think of what to say and write something that sounds “better” than the way we speak. But you have to understand that when you’re having a conversation, everyone in the conversation gets it (or so you hope; there’s always that one guy that say, “Oh hey, you’re talking about chickens. I saw this cool bug once.”) and so you don’t need to use complete sentences or proper grammar (but omg please please speak with proper grammar!).

So as a writer, you have to do the same thing as when you write. But your writing sounds bad? That does not make you a bad writer because you can write. If you can speak, you can write.

The problems that come from writing aren’t because you are a bad writer or you aren’t using complete sentences or proper grammar. It's all based in the meaning of what you're writing. You have to make sure that your reader is following your meaning (and you can use sentence fragments and break grammar rules to help convey your meaning). You have to make the reader understand what you want them to understand. Just because what you are writing is clear in your own head doesn’t mean it’s automatically clear to your readers. The problem is that meaning is not immediate like it is in a conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to write differently than you speak, you just have to use different tools to help convey your meaning.

Cohesion is the most basic tool that will help you convey your meaning to your readers. Cohesion is how the words on the page work together to create meaning and keep confusion at bay. Cohesion is taught in high schools and in some college classes as “signposting” through the use of transitions. This is a great way to create cohesion on a full document level. But cohesion is useful at more than just the full document level. Your sentences and your paragraphs need to be cohesive too.

Here are some tips on how to create cohesion throughout your entire document.

Word Level
Pronouns

Using pronouns effectively is a great way to keep yourself from repeating the same thing and to shorten your word count. You can take a long subject and shove it into two letters. Look back at that sentence and see what I did. I could have said. “You can take a long subject and shove the long subject into two letters.” Instead, I used a pronoun.

Be careful though because while pronouns can create comprehension, they can also create confusion.

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

“his dad” creates a relationship that would not be there had I used a name. (ie: Tommy wasn’t sure what Charles was doing.) This use of a possessive pronoun creates meaning.

In the second sentence, even though we are using pronouns to cut down on redundancy and word count, “His” and “he” do not signify who they are referring to. Was the dad’s face scrunched up? Or Tommy’s? Is Tommy staring at the garage? Or is his dad?

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

If you don’t want to repeat his dad, rework the sentence:
Tommy wasn’t sure what was going on. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

That is much clearer on who is doing what in these sentences.

Sentence Level
Parallelism

Parallelism is where different parts of a sentence or a list are in the same grammatical form.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world and saw different people and learning about other cultures.

This is not parallel because the list of items are not in the same grammatical form. We get the meaning of this sentence, but it takes more time (maybe a few nanoseconds but really, who has time to spare?) to figure out because of the sentence structure.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world, see different people, and learn about other cultures.

Here is another example using a bulleted list.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fish
-to go on hikes
-boating
-ride your bike
-relax in large campsites
-ATVs

Because the items on the list are not in the same grammatical form, it looks messy. This is a professional document, Billy’s website or a flyer that he passes out in parking lots begging for business. He wants it to look professional and be easy to read, so he has to make the items on the list parallel.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fishing
-hiking
-boating
-biking
-riding ATVs
-relaxing in large campsites

The second one has everything in the list in the same grammatical form so it is easier to read.

Also, Billy changed the order of his list. For some reason that I’m sure a psychologist could explain to you, everything sounds better in a list when the longest one is at the end. Read these two sentences and you’ll see what I mean.

Grandma is good at baking, doing crossword puzzles, and knitting scarves.
Grandma is good at baking, knitting scarves, and doing crossword puzzles.

There’s nothing different in the meaning, but the way the mind reads, the second one is almost poetic. It’s just the way that English language users read a sentence. Again, I can’t explain it.

Practice Parallelism with these Examples
1. It makes me feel better and fortunately.
2. They are expensive in that they cost both money and you spend time on them.
3. Tickets cost $4 for adults and $3 for children's tickets.
4. Last Saturday, there was a riot when the band quit early and the cops will arrive.
5. I went to the store, shopping at the mall, and watched a movie with my friends.
6. Yesterday, angels were dancing on a pin, the oceans all had been changed to lemonade, and the skies turned purple.

End Emphasis

This is just as it implies: put the important stuff at the end of the sentence. Readers will remember what is at the end of a sentence more than the stuff at the beginning.

(Disclaimer: The following sentence in no way reflects this author’s economic viewpoint. She just copied and pasted it from some crazy person's blog.)

The US has created a grand total of $6.3 trillion in trade debt in just a short 10 year time span – money that can only come back to buy us out!

The last part of this sentence, from a doomsayer’s blog, wants you to understand that if other countries try to collect on this trade debt the US is going to DIE!

Yeah, that is end emphasis. You won’t remember that dollar amount or how many years it has been, but you will remember that we’re going to DIE!

End emphasis is also a good skill for document level cohesion. The last sentence of a document is not only what ties everything together, but it will also be the thing your reader remembers the most. So no pressure on that last sentence. None at all.

Paragraph Level
Given-new Contract

This contract relies on the fact that readers expect to know information that has already been given in a sentence or a paragraph. You give them information they know at the beginning of the sentence, and then give them new information at the end. Using pronouns is also a great way to use the given-new contract.

There are many ways that you can conserve energy. An obvious one is to turn off lights and electronics. One that isn’t as obvious is unplugging unused chargers. Even though nothing is charging, people don’t realize that there is energy flowing through the outlet.

In the second sentence, “one” refers to the “many ways” that was given in the first sentence. The new information in this sentence is the example. In the third sentence, “one” again refers to “many ways”, and “isn’t as obvious” goes back to the “obvious” in the second sentence. The new information is “unplugging chargers”.

Can you find the given and new information in the last sentence?

Document Level
Stock transitions and signposting

There are so many ways that you can do this that I will not list them all here. But they have different functions: to add or show sequence, to compare, to contrast, to give examples, to intensify, to indicate place, to indicate time, to repeat, to summarize, to conclude, and to show cause and effect. A few examples are also, after all, immediately, altogether, as a result, because, however, before, first, finally and meanwhile.

But be cautious. Do not use “First, Second, Third, Finally” (or any other very similar stock transitions) as the first word in all your paragraphs. This creates redundancy which is not just a using-the-same-word-too-much issue. You can also create redundancy in your document arrangement.

A Entire Paragraph Example

In my classroom, I give my students the following paragraph and ask them to make it more cohesive.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating important points and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. Using some of these ideas will help. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging.

The meaning behind this paragraph is clear, but there are definitely some problems that will make it even easier for the reader to get the point. What would you do to this to make it more cohesive?

Many students say that they should just reorder the sentences. But when you only reorder the sentences, there is a lot of confusion and redundancy, and the sentence level problems have not been fixed.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating similar effects with parallelism and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Using some of these ideas will help.

Here are the following steps that you should use to make this into a more cohesive paragraph:
-Put similar information next to each other (reorder the sentences).
-Use the given-new contract and pronouns to get rid of redundancy.
-Use parallelism to create sentences that are easier to read.
-Delete any unnecessary information and rewrite sentences.

Here is a more cohesive paragraph (maybe not perfect, because the second sentence is pretty long, but it works for this example):

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging especially when you don’t even know what “cohesive” means. Many times, students come to a writing class without this knowledge, because their previous teachers don’t know either and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or their paragraphs don’t flow. There are a lot of different ways to help add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, parallelism and pronouns.

Can you see all the changes that were made?

I hope you found this brief tutorial helpful! I also hope that you automatically do a lot of this and just never knew there were actually tricks to writing well. If I continue to have time through the semester, I will put up more tutorials on how to use sentence patterns and sentence variety to your advantage, and how to create sentence clarity with word choice and punctuation.

Peanut Butter Brownie Cookie Cupcakes

I have no idea if that is what I would call these things or not, but oh my gosh they are deliciously peanut buttery chocolately.

The best part of this is that it is all store bought stuff which means Eldon will help me eat them.

Anyway.

I saw this picture on tumblr and I decided I wanted to change it.


These are the things I used. I strongly suggest you use and find Kroger's brownie mix. It's less than $1 (at least at my store) and makes the best brownies I have ever tasted.



So cookie in the bottom, candy, and brownie on the top.


Bake them for 18 minutes. You can't really test to see if they're "done" because of the candy in the middle. You might want to bake them for a bit longer. The ones that are a little full did not cook completely like the others. The spot in the middle is not "gooey"; it's just where the candy is.


I strongly suggest you use muffin cups with these because otherwise it ends up in an ooey gooey mess that still tastes delicious but it's hard to serve.


You will need a glass of milk afterwards. I also strongly suggest you do NOT eat more than one at a time. So rich and delicious!

Last Few Days of Relaxation

School hasn't even started yet and I'm already happier than I was all of last semester combined.

Everything that I wanted this semester is falling into place, and I don't have to fight with scheduling or administration to do the things I want to do.

I get to teach at the times I wanted to teach at. They usually shove newbies in the 7:30 and 8:30 classes, because no one wants to teach them. But I love being up early in the morning, and I don't mind. So Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I am teaching two classes. And the two classrooms are right across the hall from each other so I don't have to book it across campus to get somewhere.

The Writing Program has created a "class" that is really just a number that I get to sign up for. It's going to be my "internship" at SLUG magazine. The faculty have been listening to my complaints concerns about not wanting to be a professor and how the Master's program is set up only for those that want to go on to their phD and teach and do research. The director really wants to have options for those students like me that want to do more professional, technical and outside-of-academia work. It is nice, because I get to be the guinea pig, and I'm okay with that.

Because I get to sign up for three credits under this internship, I only have to take two other classes. The two classes I'll be taking are Discourse Analysis and Document Design & Usability. Both of my classes are on Tuesday and Thursday, evening out my school week.

I will still be working at Guadalupe School on Tuesday and Thursday night (if you live in SLC and you want to volunteer, please let me know!), and I expect I will still be rather busy with everything I need to do, but so far everything appears to be much less stressful than the last year.

So, yeah. Totally feeling the school-is-about-to-start excitement that I am sure will be ripped away and drowned spectacularly in a few weeks. But right now. Yeah.

Totally forgot I had to buy textbooks though ... yeah, don't know where my brain went on that one!

Mini Apple Pie Things

Preheat Oven to 375.
Makes six.


1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and diced. Peeling and dicing an apple is a pain in the ass.
Whenever you're baking with apples, it's always a good idea to use the tart ones. For some reason, they taste best when they are cooked.


Mix apples with 1 tsp lemon juice


Add and mix in 1/8 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ginger
1/8 tsp nutmeg


1 pack of Crescent Seamless Dough Sheet cut into six squares. It's kinda hard to use this bc it unrolls at different proportions. I'm just too lazy to make pastry dough, or bother to buy some and roll it out on my tiny non-existent counter space.


Evenly pile apple mixture onto the squares of dough. Take 1 TBPS butter and cut into 6 squares; put on each pile of apple mixture.


Squish them up and close the tops. I tried to make them into pretty square things, but yeah ... whatever.


Bake for 15 minutes at 375. Because of the uneven dough, some of these were a tiny bit undercooked, and I wish I had kept them in for about 2 or 3 minutes longer.


Anyway!
Eat them with ice cream! I'm sure it'll taste really good, but I don't have any ice cream, so I can't show a picture of that.

<3

Copy Editing is My Calling

I'm leaving sewing and art stuff to my talented sister.

Copy editing. It is my love. It is my darling. My little baby, my honey bunny, my lamey wamey ...

For those of you who don't know, I was offered a spot as a copy editor for SLUG magazine (SaltLakeUnderGround). It is an unpaid position (in dollar terms) but I will be able to get college credit, and it's going right on my resume. Here's the website in case you want to check it out www.slugmag.com

I'm typing this now while I'm still on this editing high.

I had a lot of fun on my first night. I was a little nervous at first since it was my first day, but everyone there was really nice and they answered my questions like it wasn't the most annoying thing ever to help the new girl. They have their own way to mark things and their own guidelines that I have to learn, but they assured me that it is something that you learn as you go.

I want to put all this stuff up here so I can remember how much fun I had in case I ever complain about it in the coming months or in case they all actually hated me and they won't let me come back.

Because as always, not being good enough is my biggest fear.

I know copy editing though. I know how to do this, and I'm good at it. But even saying all of this, it's still hard to have confidence in myself.

I wish it was more than once a week. I could do this every single day. But then again, if it was more than once a week, I probably would not have been able to do it. It's going to be another thing to juggle once school starts, but I think it will end up being something I do to keep myself sane.

Hopefully, I'll be able to count it as enough college credit that I only have to take two classes this fall instead of three. My advisor is working on it.

Anyway!

YAY for me!

Summer Semester is Done

The summer semester is finally over. Wednesday was the last day of class. My students' final portfolios are due tomorrow (Monday), but I will have them graded and done by Friday.

It's liberating to be out of this class. This is the first time I have ever had a student create so many problems for me. I thought about bitching about it and complaining and telling all the crap I went through, but I really don't want to deal with it, and most of you have already heard it. Instead, I leave you with things this semester has taught me.

The things I learned:

Lecturing is okay. My classes were an hour and a half instead of fifty minutes (like they are during the fall), which means I had to change the way that I control the flow of lessons and classes. I lectured way more than I had before. I'm not sure which method is better, but I'm going to try to lecture more this fall semester and see how it works.

Teaching without my own coursework is awesome. I really enjoyed having time to go through students' assignments (even the small ones) and give them feedback. I loved having time to actually critique writing instead of just grading it. And I especially loved not having the pressure of my own classes overshadow the learning of my students. We are told as graduate students that we are grad students first and teachers second. I think this is counterproductive. To our students, we are teachers first and grad students second. It isn't fair to the ones that we are teaching to do less than our best for them.

And finally:
One student shouldn't ruin everything, but one student can if you allow it. Be firm. Be strong. Be yourself. And when all else fails, go to your supervisor. If it wasn't for my supervisor, I would not have survived this semester.

I am really excited for next semester! Luckily, I'm well prepared, so that means I can do what I want, and right now, I just want to color and play around all day and get over this mess of a semester, which, like this sentence, felt really long, but wasn't too bad compared to others.

Cinnamon French Toast Rolls

Hey all!

It's been a bit since I posted this and I'm still recovering from summer semester and frustrating students (I'll discuss it in a later post). I had this idea and decided I would take pictures just in case it worked out okay. I like them. Eldon didn't. But no one should be surprised at that.

Things you need:
Some kind of roll things. I was lazy and used Crescent Rounds.
Cinnamon and Butter. I love this Sweet Balance All Vegan/Gluten free stuff. It's yummy.
Egg and Milk for French Toast Mixture.



The packaging instructions specifically say to not unroll the dough, but I have yet to buy a pack of Crescent Rounds that aren't all screwed up on the inside and I have to re-roll them anyway. So unroll the rolls, spread butter/cinnamon mixture on the inside and re-roll them.



Bake according to packaging/recipe instructions.



LET THEM COOL!!!!!!! It is really hard to slice these rolls in half if they are not cool. If you can manage not to eat them before then, good for you! But trust me, let them cool.

And then slice them.



Dip JUST THE BOTTOMS in egg mixture and put them on a skillet/pan of whatever sort. Only put egg on the bottom. If you put it on the top too, it drips into the crevices and doesn't evenly cook. And the tops can burn very quickly!!



So yeah, DON'T DO THIS! I just wanted to take a picture to show you the bottoms of them



And finally! All done!
Enjoy with syrup (though they are sweet enough that it doesn't really need it), whipped cream, strawberries, etc.



ENJOY!

Blueberry Muffins

I was thinking about what else I could put on my blog besides the woes of being a teacher and graduate student, and I decided that I can put up the recipes and stuff that I use to bake and cook. I love baking and cooking, so I will share the love.

The only person who doesn't devour these muffins is my husband, so I'm going to assume they are good enough to share.

Preheat oven to 375.



2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Mix all of those into one bowl. For a different flavor add a teaspoon of cinnamon.



2 eggs
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

In a separate bowl from the flour, mix the two eggs slightly. Add the sugar and mix really really well.


Add the milk and the oil and then finally the vanilla. You do not need to use an electric mixer for this. Just use a wire whisk.


Add the flour mixture and mix until creamy. With a rubber spatula, stir in a carton of blueberries (I usually use a 6oz or 8oz carton).


Spoon the mixture into muffin cups. With a regular spoon, sprinkle sugar on top of the wet batter (this creates the cracked effect on the top of the muffins).


Bake for 18 - 22 minutes. This recipe makes 12 muffins.



Let cool at least a little bit. Those blueberries are hot enough to burn your tongue and your fingers when they first come out of the oven.

If you don't have blueberries, you can add chocolate chips. I also like raspberries. And I have discovered that you can make any kind of fruit muffin with this basic recipe. I've also added 1 TBSP of cinnamon and added raisins for Cinnamon Raisin muffins. Nuts also work really well in this recipe. When I make strawberry muffins, I put sliced almonds on the top instead of the sugar.

I hope you enjoy!!