A Little Bit of Texas Goes Everywhere

The local InterAmerican Academy held a fund raiser – Texas Days! There were Ecuadorian bands doing their best Country Rock, greased pig chases, petting zoos and a Texas Barbeque competition.

Normally, Saturday is a day for me – a time for writing, relaxing or whatever I want to let the stress of the week ease away. This Saturday was a different take – Texas Barbeque! Our school – Colegio Americano, cobbled a barbeque team together to compete. At the competition we gave out samples, and sold our homemade pulled pork and ribs along with hamburgers, all with a side of cole slaw. For competition we competed in one category of chicken and another for pork ribs. It made for a very long day. Aside from six weeks of meetings and several practice sessions, we sat up on Friday night, arrived at 7 a.m. to start Saturday morning and were working through 6 p.m. followed by cleanup. Tired puppies were we.

While we were cooking we thought we did well, and were especially confident in our chicken. We thought we had done a good job on the ribs, too, but we also knew there was going to be a lot of good competition in that category. Still, we thought another team would need to come up with some very good ribs to beat us.

In the end Miller’s Grillers (that’s us) took 1^st Place in Chicken and 2^nd Place in Ribs. We were delighted, but the one irksome fact was that the winners of the Rib competition were a team from the English Consulate. A squad of Limey’s won the Texas Barbeque Rib competition in Ecuador? Sacrilege on so many levels!

All had a good time, some important money was raised for InterAmerican Academy, and we managed to bring some trophies home. Of course, in typical Ecuadorian tradition, something had to be a fly in the ointment. Our 1^st Place trophy said we won the award in the “Chiken” category.

When Education Decisions are Made by Texas Politicians

The biggest problem with standards, whether they be by No Child Left Behind, or some state standard, is that these standards all too often are made by politicians, and not by people who know education. When politicians decide what your teacher will teach your child, no end to troubles follow.

the Texas Board of Education is the poster child for this damning reality. Check out this news report from Yahoo about their deliberations over state standards:

Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences

Texas has the longest set of standards in the world, so far as I know. One in which one of the few teachers involved, Fort Worth Republican Pat Hardy, said in the article "What we've done is we've taken a document that by nature is too long to begin with and then we've lengthened it some more," Hardy said, "I just think we failed to keep that in mind, it's hard for teachers to get through it all."

Amen, sister. Hard to expect teachers to teach when the standards to be taught are too lengthy even to be read by the teacher who is supposed to be teaching it.