Teaching Attic

Good coffee with useful packaging

When I was asked to teach  Attic Greek to Catholic home-schoolers, my first thought
was to text a recent Classics grad from Edinburgh Uni to see if she would like the job. However, she had not done any Greek; her specialization began and ended with Latin. I cast about in my mind for someone else among my Edinburgh friends and acquaintances, but I could not think of anyone who had studied Ancient Greek within the past 25 years save my unworthy self.

As I passed Ancient Greek 101 and 102 only by the skin of my teeth, my conscience would have cut up rougher had I not sat down eight years later and worked through the bally stuff. That was the year I lived alone in a bachelor flat and spent my evenings reviewing Italian, French, Latin and Attic Greek. Eventually French and Greek fell by the wayside as I concentrated on Italian and Latin. My Italian was in super shape by 2000, and I actually used it at work----but let us return to Attic Greek.

Although I have little "natural talent" for foreign languages, I know a lot about learning them, thanks to a steady reading diet of popular works on language acquisition and years of grappling with Tym Pięknym Językiem.  I also know something about teaching, which I have been doing off-and-on since the year 2000. A three year stint under the Ignatian Pedagogical Method taught me some great teaching tricks, including repetition and getting students to really "ENGAGE" with the material. All that stuff about marking your "consolations" and "desolations" in the margins of photocopies and writing "questions for reflection" turn out to be key to memory work.

"Revel in your chagrin," I yell at my students when they perceive their errors. "Feel the pain of your errors! Or feel the joy of your successes! Joy or pain! Whichever! Feel it!"

I am all about pedagogical method. When my first Attic Greek pupils were sent away to be educated by a proper teaching order on the Continent, I asked them to discern the sisters' pedagogical method. They're still not sure what it is, but I hope it has lots of sneakily useful teaching tricks. Meanwhile, I have been engaged to continue teaching them Ancient Greek by correspondence as the girls their age are already reading Homer, Herodotus and the gang. Fortunately, we have a brilliant textbook.

My first and favourite Greek teaching trick is to make pupils cut out, bake and eat the Greek Alphabet. Subsequent testing has led me to believe that this step should never be skipped. Apparently Jews taught their children the Hebrew alphabet with cookies for centuries, and it makes complete sense. Children love cookies, so their love for cookies becomes linked to the alphabet being consumed. If the children are made to cut out the stencils and then the dough themselves, this engages their eyes, ears and hands. In fact, since they eventually bake and eat the alphabet cookies, all their senses work together.

My most recent Greek teaching trick was to make up Leitner boxes for my senior students. A Leitner Box is a classic Spaced Repetition System. In short, one has vocabulary cards which one reviews according to a fixed schedule, moving them closer to the back of the box as one's memory for them strengthens. As per the instructions in Fluent Forever, I left the backs of the cards blank so that my students could draw pictures or symbols denoting the Greek word (or word pair) on the front. English is not allowed.

The amusing thing about my Leitner Boxes is that the actual boxes are made from cardboard Union Coffee coffee bag supports, and as my favourite brew has this vigorous name, my students are returning to their consecrated preceptress from their Jesuit-trained, Easter-holidays tutor with boxes marked Liberacion. No pun was intended, and I rather wish I preferred "Bobolink", whose name is surely more in keeping with Traditional Catholicism, homeschooling and convent schools. But there it is.

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The Friendly Alien Eats Edinburgh

My search for a good croissant led us this morning to The Wee Boulangerie, and there I hit buttery gold. Yes,The Wee Boulangerie sells plain croissants that taste like croissants and not--as they do perhaps everywhere else in Edinburgh--like bread. And they are NOT £3 a pop, as someone claimed on TripAdvisor. I do not know how much they are exactly, however, as B.A. ordered a pain aux raisins. Together our pastries came to £3.75. We ate them happily while wandering down Nicholson Street in the direction of Brew Lab.

Brew Lab, that hipster mecca of coffee, was not overcrowded, and so we sat and enjoyed an espresso (B.A.) and a macchiato (I) made with Has Bean beans imported from Kenya. B.A. sat in one of the red leather armchairs in the window and read The Spectator while I sat on a bench beside two philosophical young Poles and wrote a letter in Polish. I hope the Polish youths did not think I was recording their conversation, averting to the Collins Polish-English English-Polish dictionary when I got stuck on the spelling.

The letter having been written, B.A. and I went next to Central Library where I returned two books and took out five more. Then B.A. complained of the dizziness and double-vision that come upon him when he is hungry, so we went straight to Mother India's Café. There we ate a dhosa (lentil pancake) wrapped around spicy spinach and served with lentils; smoked chicken with peas; onion bhajis and pitta bread and drank a bottle of sparkling water. This tasty feast cost £19.75 + tip.

B.A. then proposed another coffee, so we decided to visit Baba Budan under the Waverley Arches after I picked up my new glasses from Specsavers. These are very special glasses that you can wear both to see the world in front of you and to read.  We took them to Baba Budan and ordered two filter coffees (£2 each) and sat on a bench. I read Ada i Adam na Wsi  aloud to B.A. using my new spectacles and was slightly nonplussed when I realized that the hipster girl crocheting in the armchair at my elbow was Polish.

Baba Budan is constructed on the usual hipster brick-and-board lines, only its ceiling is a bona fide stone archway and its walls are smooth and white. It advertises itself as a "donutterie", so I went back to the counter to buy a doughnut (a whopping £2.50 each) for BA and me to share. Baba Budan was down to passionfruit-mango and strawberry jam, so I picked the latter and it was TOO SWEET. Sugar is evil; I shall not do that again. Believe it or not, Goodfellow & Stevens offer a very decent chocolate-covered ring doughnut in supermarket bakery counters, so one need not search Edinburgh high and low for a good doughnut.

The coffee was served in round juice glasses, but we will not hold that against the café. It came from the Coffee Collective and was very good. The young ladies (Irish and Polish) beside us chatted amiably about taking each other on visits to Ireland and Poland and what their relations think of Lesbianism (e.g. fashionable, curable) and how, as these girls are Artists, their relations cut them some slack. I haven't seen these girls at Mass, but then perhaps they go to the Cathedral.

As B.A. and I were so close to Waverley Station, we took the train instead of the bus home, stopping at Co-op to purchase something for B.A. to eat later for supper. (I shall have a restorative mug of miso soup.) B.A. would have bought the boxed corned beef-with-mashed-potato dinner had he not noticed that it had something like 150% of his daily sodium requirements. He put it back with the haggis-and-mash and macaroni-and-mash (etc) boxes, and I reflected that the brand's motto could have been "Slowing killing Scots since 1904."

Skipping lightly over our supper prospects, we can reflect that we have had a very good foodie day. For croissants, we highly recommend  The Wee Boulangerie*. For a relaxed coffee, we vote for Brew Lab. For an excellent Indian lunch, we are all for Mother India's Café. For a quick coffee near Waverley Station, we give Baba Budan the nod although I didn't like the doughnut.

Update: B.A. made himself corned beef stovies according to his mother's recipe. It is composed of corned beef, mashed potatoes and a can of baked beans. Although B.A. refers to it as "Splodge", it is actually very tasty. Instead of having soup, I had a half-cup of Splodge and then began to make croissants according to Ruby Tandoh's recipe. If all goes well, B.A. and I will have homemade croissants for breakfast.

*Correction: Not La Petite Boulangerie but The Wee Boulangerie!

Arise, Sir Cake!

Sugar is stealthily creeping back into my life, and I will have to Take Steps. Seed-and-nut bars from the health food store appear to be a gateway drug: how sad.

Nevertheless, the big bag of caster sugar will remain on the shelf, for cake is an essential element of British hospitality, and making cake without sugar is an extremely fiddly business. Naturally, one can always cut the amount of sugar the recipe demands, which one should do for guests who hail from lower-sugar regions. This week I had four guests: a Scot and a Polish-American (dinner party)  and two Polish-Poles (coffee klatsch). I imagined the Scot and American were acclimatized to sugar, but I cut their dosage anyway.

The first cake (for the dinner party) was the plum cake or placek from the Applebaum-Crittenden Polish cookbook. It vastly diverges from the Standard British Cake (i.e. the Victora Sponge) in that it demands only half a cup of butter to the cup of flour, cup of sugar and 2 large eggs. Ann & Danielle were, let's face it, writing for Canucks and Yanks, not Poles, so I reduced the sugar to 3/4s of a cup. I didn't have two large eggs, so I used three medium eggs. Meanwhile, Americans and Canadians are not fans of "self-raising flour" and sure enough A&D asked for 1 tsp baking powder instead.

Normally I turn up my nose at such newfangled things as electric beaters, but as my butter wasn't very soft, I decided to do as they said and use one. This made for a much runnier batter than usual, which is what the ladies wanted, and after poking in the plum halves and drizzling the top with sugar and lemon juice, I popped the pan in the oven and prayed that it would rise.

The problem with Standard British Cake, with its 1:1:1 ratio of butter, sugar and so-called self-raising flour, is that the blessed thing doesn't rise very much. The Victoria Sponge would look really pathetic if one didn't pile one cake on top of another with a thick layer of whipped cream and/or jam in the middle. Even then it does not achieve the heights of the standard North American layer cake, especially my mother's.

My mother makes excellent cake. The first time I was engaged to someone, my grandmother was very sentimental about it, and as it was my birthday, my mother had baked a layer cake--light, fluffy, rich, covered with smooth butter icing, "Happy Birthday" written in delicate letters--delicious.

"Do you think you will ever make cake as good as your mother's?" asked my grandmother, inspiring me with murderous thoughts, as I was very embarrassed to be engaged and dreaded such domestic questions. However, I politely said that I didn't think that was possible, and my father heartily approved my answer, and peace reigned. Had I been a bit more cocky and cheerful about take particular engagement, I might have said, "Well, she's got 24 years on me, so check back in a couple of decades." Ha ha ha!

Still, though, after a happier engagement, I migrated to the Old Country, and had to cope with a fan-assisted over, British flour and no electric mixer. It was a good day when I did get an electric hand-mixer although by then I was so used to beating everything by hand, I used it only in meringue-making emergencies. Thanks to the climate, better recipes and sheer repetition, my (often meringue-topped) pastry now now rivals my mother's, but the perfection of her layer cakes eludes me.
 
An hour after I put my dinner party placek in the oven I had a look and, lo, it had risen beautifully. The plums had all but disappeared into the batter, so high did it rise. I looked at the electric hand mixer with new respect. Or was it the extra egg? Or the baking powder?  Regardless, the Polish-American had two pieces and spoke about his mother. The missing sugar was not remarked upon: baked plum halves are plenty sweet.

Today I decided to use the placek recipe to make a chocolate Victorian sponge for my morning kaffeeklatsch*, and was miffed to discover I had only two medium eggs. Nevertheless, I plunged ahead, making things up as I went along. This time I used about 3/4 of a cup of butter, no more than 2/3 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup Green and Black's cocoa and 1 teaspoon of baking powder. I employed the beater, and put in both eggs. The batter didn't look runny, so I put in two heaping spoonfuls of soured cream. That did the trick. I poured all into a paper-lined cake tin and spread the top with red currant jelly (made by my mother, 2015).

An hour later, I had another beautifully risen cake, and I waited impatiently for my Polish-Polish guests to arrive so I could try it. When they arrived I did. In terms of texture, the sour cream worked beautifully--resulting in a cake that was moist but not squidgey--and in terms of flavour, the red current jelly worked with, not against, the cocoa. What a relief.  It is a cake that needs neither cream nor ice-cream, neither of which are appropriate at 10 AM.

The British love to pour cream on their cake. My Polish guests (girls) and I commented on this as we compared Polish, British and American cake. It does seem a pity to drown a beautiful cake with cream--unless it is dry, and then the baker can only be relieved that cream covers a multitude of sins. We also agreed that British baking is insanely sweet--brownies, muffins, all the ghastly things at Caffée Nero--although a Brit would find this opinion rather ironic, coming from a North American.

I feel that I have had made some excellent progress in my journey towards cake perfection. Again, sugar is the enemy, but as it is culturally necessary, I must keep a bag of it. Instead I will toss the useless self-raising flour and stick to baking powder and sour cream.

*Suddenly I feel all nostalgically German-American. My German-American Great Aunt Tilly weighed more than 300 lbs. I love stories about Great Aunt Tilly. The Scots-Canadians were rather less interestingly from a food point of view--except for my mother, who is practically fluent in German. Wypadek? Nie sądzę.

How Mum Keeps Sharp

I have been reading Training Your Brain for Dummies. It is very interesting. I am struck by how many of the recommended activities my mother has been doing all her life. They include

* drinking orange juice
*eating blueberries
* not drinking alcohol (we'll get to that)
*doing handcrafts (she is always doing handcrafts)
*reading constantly (she reads while doing such 'easier' handcrafts as knitting cable sweaters)
*learning languages (she reads German novels and looks up the 15 words she doesn't know)
*putting together jigsaw puzzles
*and doing other puzzles, like crosswords
*getting enough sleep
*exercising
*snacking on almonds

It would probably be better if my mother drank freshly squeezed orange juice from a blender instead of the from-frozen-concentrate she has been downing for as long as I've been alive. Meanwhile, when I say my mother doesn't drink alcohol, I mean that she has a glass of wine at Thanksgiving, a glass of wine at Christmas and then..... ahhhh....summer holidays in Europe happen. After summer holidays, life goes back to normal. My positively teetotalling grandmother also made exceptions for her summer holidays, too: when she went to a resort in the Muskokas, she would drink a Tom Collins cocktail in the afternoons. The women in my family are WILD, I tell you.

There are ways in which my mother could further improve her cognitional health, if she felt that the above was not enough.

First, she could eat more fish. Oily fish like salmon, mackerel and tuna are tremendously good for your brains.

Second, she could eat more walnuts Walnuts pack  as much omega-3 as you need in a day.

Third, she could drink green tea. (At this very moment, I am drinking green tea.)

Fourth, she could drink less coffee. Although initially caffeine improves your ability to memorize, this is only after 8 oz of coffee. More than 8 oz, and the benefits cease and the drawbacks kick in.

Fifth, she could cut out processed food, especially store-bought cookies. Processed food--BAD. Sugar--BAAAAAD!

Sixth, she could give herself a NEW mental challenge, like improving her Russian. Of course, it would be even newer, more challenging and nice company for me if she took up Polish instead.

That's as much as I have learned so far, but I hope to discover others. I really like these points because they don't seem all that much work--except for learning languages, that is, and perhaps the handicrafts, and the getting up and going out to exercise--which I will now do by walking through the woods to the bus stop to take a bus to Artisan Roast to buy some excellent coffee and read another Polish Muminki story.

Update: Here is a long list of brain-boosting foods.

Fraternal Love Expressed Through Music

My brother Nulli Secundus asked me if I would like a digital piano as a birthday present. I decided that I was not averse to a digital piano as a birthday present. Never look a gift piano in the strings or--if presented with a digital piano--the wires.

Moreover, Nulli must be the only person in my entire acquaintance who ever thought I deserved my own piano. I am moved.

It has been many years since I attempted to play for an audience, or to accompany a sing-song, let alone cried through acidic lessons and eternal half-hour practices. The crying stopped when I graduated from elementary school and was released from bondage to my quite probably abusive piano teacher. After a year or more of freedom, I asked my mother if I could take piano lessons in the local convent. She agreed--probably with surprise--and paid out her $15/lesson (or whatever it was by then) to a kind teacher who--it must be said--had never heard my brother play or even knew I had a brother until I apologized up front for not being as good as he.

I wish to underscore that I never blamed Nulli for being a child prodigy. For one thing, I have loved my brother in an uninterrupted fashion since the day he was born. For another, I always loved the music he made. One of the great joys of my childhood was waking up on a Sunday morning to the sounds of Nulli Secundus playing away. The old woman next door, a wealthy retired radio star, liked my brother's playing so much, she got her housekeeper to open the window facing our window, the better to hear it. She also sent a great sheaf of old music and a number of old song books for him to play from. This was a matter of pride for our whole family, and it only occurs to me now to wonder what she thought of my much more ordinary attempts.

Ordinary, not horrible. You will have noticed that I have broken my rule against the Nominative First Person Pronoun, but really there is no way to tell this story without it. In short, for I thought that because my brother played so well, I must be playing horribly. (Certainly I never heard anyone play worse.) No matter what my poor mother said to encourage me, my playing became nothing more than an occasion for blistering self-hatred. A very feminine little girl, I turned my anger on myself. Grown women often do this, and when our anger slops over onto our husbands and children, we hate ourselves even more.

That is why I am surprised, thinking about it, that I gave piano lessons another try in high school, and somehow limped along to complete the work for the Royal Conservatory of Music's Grade 8. My irrational self-dismissal was no longer corrosive but pleasantly ironic. I could play to amuse myself--never doubting for a moment that what I was turning out was utter rubbish--but never to an audience. My otherwise sympathetic teacher convinced me one day to sign up for a small recital, and on the day I froze solid at the keyboard.

It's not that I was a coward--I became a teenage pro-life activist after all--it's that I thought I couldn't do it, so of course I couldn't. The last time I had forced myself to do something everyone but I thought I could do, I began to drown--literally drown, I mean, in the municipal swimming pool. (I was rescued by a nice older boy who, wide-eyed and white-faced, suggested I stay out of the deep end from then on.)

The sad irony in all this is that I very much love piano music. This is probably why I love my brother's playing, if you see what I mean. On the other hand, maybe I love piano music because I love my brother's playing. Perhaps it all reminds me of waking up late on a Sunday morning in a sunbeam while Nulli plays piano and the smells of pancakes and coffee mingle in the air.  I hope Chopin--he probably made it into Purgatory on the prayers of Poles--doesn't mind that he reminds me of pancakes and sunshine and the coffee grinder whizzing.

Nulli did not become a professional pianist--which is just as well as it's a chancy profession--but he continued to play in adult life and even came up with a bump against the nastiness of geniuses who give lessons to very gifted who are never gifted enough. I think it was a shock to him, and when I heard about it, I was aggrieved on his behalf. Of course, now that I think about it, it may have given him an insight into what I suffered for however many years. This may have been valuable; I notice that his wife and children's teacher seems to be a pleasant, competent woman.

During our visit to the House of Music, my mother offered to treat me to a piano lesson with this excellent teacher after she had finished the other family lessons, but I demurred. Nevertheless, I had been pleased to discover that I could still read music and that I could play simple arrangements of classics with relative ease. I could also play a few old assignments, if awkwardly, and mirabile dictu,  a Chopin Prelude. The Prelude hurt my fingers and, to my mingled amusement and pride, I found myself holding my hands under a tap of cold running, as my brother often has to do--albeit after five or six of them. My fingers never hurt when I played as a child--no doubt because of all those scales, chords, and other secretly finger-strengthening exercises. And I realized that my mother's money and my time and tears had not been wasted. My brother can play Chopin because he's wonderfully talented and has always loved the piano. I can play Chopin (just) because from the ages of 7 to 14, I was not allowed to quit. 

One of the revelations of adult life--too bad I didn't realize this years ago--is that although there's no substitute for the spark of genius, hard work  can give innate talent a run for its money. When I began to read Bernard Lonergan's swinishly difficult--and yet intellectually honest--Insight, I had no great love for philosophical texts. When I finished my Insight course, I was no longer afraid of philosophical texts. When I began to study Polish, I had listening comprehension skills so terrible, I could barely make out the lyrics of recorded English-language pop songs.  Almost five years later, I could make out the Canadian French broadcast over my sister's car radio. When I was twelve, my self-hatred was so fierce, I sat on the piano bench weeping. Over thirty years later, I am convinced all I need to do to improve my playing is work at it until I do.

One last thought. Although I was not prepared to let even a nice, professional, kindly woman sit beside me and judge my playing (let's not go crazy here), I was happy to receive the first lesson of our lives from my brother. It was very simple--just an explanation of how one can master Chopin's chords without straining one's hands--but it was incredibly useful and beautifully explained. Thirty-five years ago, I would have cast myself into a bit of humiliation afterwards, but now I am eager to try out Nulli's advice on the piano he has given me. So thank you very much, dear Nulli! Apparently it should arrive by Friday noon (see picture).

Update: Julia notes (below) that Chopin made his deathbed confession. I have gone about the internet, and the Abbé Lizst himself is the source of this story, that is, he passed it on from Chopin's confessor Abbé Jelowicki. I wonder why I have not read this story before; perhaps, as with Adam Mickiewicz, all kinds of interested parties having been writing duelling biographies of their hero, and until now I hadn't come across "Catholic Chopin".

Edinburgh Sunday Cool

The McLeans ducked into Edinburgh's new West End café "Noir" this Sunday before Mass. (Hitherto, the beautiful Palmerston Place building housed a typical Starbucks -- ugh.)

We knew from previous visits that Noir's treatment of the heritage interior is superb and the coffee delicious. However, today the music, too, was fantastic. In place of the rap and heavy metal clichés that had marred our first visits was brilliant, swinging, old school jazz.

"Django Reinhardt," said Benedict Ambrose at once, seriously impressing his wife. She knew, of course, that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, but jazz, too?

The friendly barista likewise approved.

If you have to be in the West End once a week and can't always get your hit of caffeine goodness at hipster "Brew Lab" on South College Street, Noir provides an excellent café experience--at least when they break out the classic jazz.  Well done, them.