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Whenever my wife and I travel, we search out the most celebrated vegan and vegetarian eateries to test the mettle of local chefs. Communities with proximity to farms, collectives, and other such agricultural outlets typically get "bonus points" for the farm-to-table quality of their produce. San Francisco has long been our vegetarian "mecca," while smaller communities like Ithaca, New York and Asheville, North Carolina have crept closer and closer to attaining benchmark status over the years. This evening, after a little Yelp-based sleuthing, I found a vegan eatery around two miles from my hotel. Julia's, it seemed, was a page out of our hippy-dippy Asheville adventures... I liked it so much I felt compelled to write a Yelp review:
Yelp Review of Julia's
Some pictures of dinner:
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| The Restaurant |
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| Vegan Chocolate Chip Cake! |
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| Yellow Coconut Curry with Basmati Rice! |
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| Roasted Red Pepper Hummus and Flatbread |
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| Fresh Greens! Radishes, Cantaloupe, and Heirloom Tomatoes! |
Dr. Karim introduced us to no less than twenty extra-curricular tie-ins to teaching Grapes of Wrath - from utilizing Grapes as a means to discuss the foreclosure and immigration crises to integrating the work of other seminal multicultural (many of them Californian authors as well!) authors. Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, Tillie Olsen's Yonnonido: From the Thirties, Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart, Louis Owen's The Sharpest Sight, and Helen Viramontes' The Cariboo Cafe were just a few of the more notable texts mentioned and explored in this lecture.
A large part of teaching a book as challenging as The Grapes of Wrath is generating what is called "student buy-in" early on... in order to accomplish this, teachers need to spend a good deal of time laying the brick-and-mortar contextual foundation prior to launching into the primary text itself. Dr. Karim gave us some additional ideas about integrating labor icon Cesar Chavez' struggles into the introductory materials of our units. Other names mentioned... Tomas Rivera, Sonia Nozario, and Juan Felipe Herrera... lots of good tie-ins waiting to happen!
Another cool idea Dr. Karim proposed was having ecology/biology/geology teachers "guest lecture" about the soil composition degradation issues that led up to the dust bowl... many English and Humanities teachers fail to really transmit the science behind soil erosion and students resultantly lose interest... as an environmental issue akin to how we feel about global warming in the 21st century, it seems important to get students to appreciate the gravity of this ecological disaster.
As far as making connections to the people/agricultural workers in Grapes, Dr. Karim mentioned how her CSA (community supported agriculture group) sends out dossiers about the workers (most of them migrant immigrants) who harvest their crops with the boxes of veggies each month. This could be an interesting way to take the kids out into their community / bring the farming community into the classroom... could this generate some "local ownership" of the agricultural struggle catalogued in Grapes? Her CSA: Full Belly Farm
The second lecture with Dr. Mary Adler focused on dialogic interpretation. She introduced the lecture with some interesting quotes from Mikhail Bakhtin:
"Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person... it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of dialogic interaction."
"We must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-layered world."
The driving idea behind Adler's lecture was to model ideas for showing students how to "unpack" the multiplicity of social voices within a passage taken from Grapes. As a close reading exercise, this will be extremely useful in the classroom...
I'm off tomorrow from lecture (will be going for a hike and possibly a kayak trip early) and we will resume on Sunday evening at 5:30 for a completion of our general discussion of Grapes.
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