Workplace Problem and Solution

Explain the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the problem. Budget cuts. Cutting classes and bus service. Cutting the number of days of school. Drastically reducing the number of classes being offered.


Now offer a solution to the above. What are the causes and how can they be addressed?  Cutting district offices, selling the buildings, cutting the salaries of nonteachers by 50%. Addressing mismanagement.

Now consider what the unforeseen consequences to the so called solution.... cutting salaries, eliminating ineffective programs. Consequences?

Don't call me potato head

Van Gogh has a famous painting of the potato eaters. They are living in Amsterdam or some Northern city in Netherlands. They have African features. There is also a Celtic myth about the origin of the potato:  Ireland was formed from a huge potato and all the people there came from little potatoes. Whatever the story, the potato is the staple of my family as the bean or rice may be that of many other groups.

For Thanksgiving my children love the mashed potatoes most of all. They never care for turkey or the fixings just "smashed" potatoes with lots of butter and sour cream. This perfection of potatoes was not always perfect in my family. My mother when we were kids would save making the potatoes until last. The truth is she liked cleaning more than cooking and baking, since the days when she was a girl on the ranch when Grandma did the cooking and baking but none of the cleaning. That was reserved for my mother. Thus, my mother never really liked to cook. Then she would wait until the last minute and leave lumps in the mashed potatoes. I then took over making the mashed potatoes at every holdiay occasion--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc. The secret was to add more butter and less milk (same as when I made cookies from stratch: again mother did not like to bake and used to watch her weight) and to put in the time smashing the potatoes for a long time.

Rejection of cold sandwiches but not California rolls

While I won't eat cold sandwiches anymore and in fact never liked them even in high school, I will eat California rolls.  What do these rolls have that cold sandwiches do not? Where did the California roll come from? Certainly they are not from Asia.  These rolls wherever they are from have a great mix of ingredients and sauces that show the evolution of American food culture.

The Sloppy Joe

I remember in third grade at St. Thomas School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was introduced to the Sloppy Joe. I first ate lunch in a school cafeteria and discovered that I loved garlic bread but loathed Sloppy Joe.

I remember thinking that I sloppy joe was a hamburger with spaghetti sauce. I bit into it but it was terrible for a third grade boy like me who loved his cheeseburgers. When I was about to throw the sloppy joe away, a classmate of mine said, Wait. He wanted it and usually brought a sack lunch. He was AA but wanted the joe, so I let him have it.

I went back to the line to get more garlic bread. That was my staple food that year--far away from my mother's lunch cooking since I usually went home for lunch--now I was in Catholic school and too far away to go home for lunch. I felt the absence of my mother for the first of many years; my sole consolation was the garlic bread and the occasional view of my brothers.