Lessons in Baking

I am a baker. Bread making has been an activity I have done throughout most of my adult life; maybe it is in my blood as two of my great grandfathers were professional bakers.

I started making sweet doughs when I was still in high school. Back then, yeast came in small envelopes and the sweet dough that I would mix was one requiring overnight refrigeration. Now I buy yeast in bulk and, depending on the type of bread I’m working on, the finished product is out of the oven and on a cooling rack in about three hours, sometimes longer.

As a young married woman, my mother-in-law gifted me a bread mixing bucket, a tool she would use each week to bake her own bread for the family. Each Saturday, I would clamp the bucket onto a kitchen chair, add the flour, sugar, salt, yeast and water, and turn out 4 loves of bread. My go-to recipe came from Edward Espe Brown’s Tassajara Bread Book and consumed an entire day. But oh, when the loaves were finally out of the oven - usually around dinner time - the aroma was intoxicating. Usually we found some excuse to eat a significant portion of one of the warm loaves.

Our lives, however, got busy. Being an educator meant I had less time to spend pursuing baking; however, I did occasionally bake from scratch, and at one point used an electric bread maker. Once in a while I’d get myself together enough to start Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread Recipe. Mainly our lives were hectic, and we bought bread.

Flash forward to 2020 when COVID made in-person food shopping difficult and supplies of items chaotic. Isolation forced me to rethink how and what we were buying for groceries. Sometimes we could buy store bread; sometimes, we could not. I thought that if I could find flour and other basic elements, I could bake bread. I wasn’t alone in that idea, however. So many people were perfecting sourdough bread recipes that even flour was in short supply.

But a return to bread-baking is what I was able to do, and I continue to bake bread several times each week even now. The bread style, the type of bread may change slightly, but the basic ingredients - yeast, sugar, salt, butter and flour - are always constant. As is the time and patience needed.

Feeling dough beneath my palms is gratifying, and I have realized, often through experience, that there are no shortcuts when it comes to bread-making. The dough must be kneaded until it tells you it is the right elasticity. The dough needs to rise, twice, allowing yeast to do its magic. Shortchanging the time required for a decent rise only makes for a less-than-stellar loaf. The dough has to bake fully, reaching a good internal temperature, something I gauge by thumping the bottom of the loaf.

All the steps take the time they need; they cannot be hurried.

The lessons of breadmaking are also reflected in our precautions in avoiding COVID. We’ve had to exercise patience and caution while we waited, first for our own vaccinations, and then for vaccine protection to be offered to our young granddaughter. To me, there is an undeniable connection between the patience I’ve been practicing with bread-making and the slow and deliberate release of COVID precautions.

Likely there are those around me who may find this slow, cautious, approach strange and even off-putting. But the lesson of bread making has, over time, taught me that nothing is gained by rushing.

The Abyss We Live With

This pandemic year has been mentally exhausting. Given the number of reports and news articles about our mental wellness, I know I am not alone with my personal exhaustion. We are seeking finite and concrete assurances that we have escaped from this virus. There are no guarantees; just a reliance on our own collective good behavior.

We are exhausted.

As vaccines help us avoid death, hospitalizations and the more critical parts of COVID, we are being told it is possible to live with fewer health protocols . Those habits that had become a norm for living with a highly contagious, deadly virus are changing as scientists fine-tune transmission data and as those miraculous vaccines get into more arms. We are being trusted to monitor our own risks by becoming fully vaccinated and avoiding obvious situations that might allow the virus to rebound and surge again.

And once again, I - and most likely you, too - are hesitant to trust this situation.

The great scientist and author, Oliver Sacks, when faced with his own mortality, wrote about the very choice we have before us now. We must choose how we will live so that we can begin to resume those activities that give us enjoyment, that feed our souls, and keep us from harming our fellow travelers on this Earth.

“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.”

— Oliver Sacks

Will we choose to carefully, slowly, and purposefully begin to re-enter our pre-COVID lives? Will we take advantage of offered vaccines? Will we be patient about those things that may not yet be safe?

We have been looking into the abyss, and now it is time to step away from the edge. How we do that, is under our control.

Math Matters

Has this happened to you? Someone you work with brings a cake to the break room for sharing with work colleagues. Little by little, piece by piece, the cake disappears until only one piece is left. Of course, no one wants to be that person, the one who takes the last piece of cake, so that one remaining piece is subdivided over and over until a pathetic small sliver is left. The cake never is fully consumed, there’s always just bit left.

This is an example of what I’ve come to understand is exponential decay.

If you’ve never heard of exponential decay or its counterpart, exponential growth, you are not alone. However, it is these two terms that describe two very important ideas that have been in play throughout our last year dealing with the Coronavirus, and it is the phenomenon that will continue to impact all of us as we move toward regaining our life BC - Before Covid-19.

This morning’s New York Times carried a guest-authored Opinion piece written by University of Maryland, Baltimore County associate profession Dr. Zoe McLaren. Dr. McLaren explains how the concept of exponential growth can be used to explain the steep rise in COVID cases that impacted us a year ago. And she uses the countering concept of exponential decay to explain why - as COVID caseloads decline, things never really quite get to zero. We can continue to expect improvements in infection rates, especially as safety measures relax and vaccinations increase as long as the movement toward “normal” does not lift too many safety precautions too quickly. However, the road to herd immunity and to resuming our life as it was in the before times will probably not be a straight and steady one, and that is to be expected.

Having an understanding of the statistical risks that may be important for a return to normalcy is one way for me, and maybe for you, to comprehend the enormity of our efforts as we return to “normal”. From time to time, it may feel as if progress is stalling when what really is in play is exponential decay.

To read Dr. McLaren’s article, link to The Math That Explains the End of the Pandemic here.

Closing a Year-Long Project

Back on September 29, 2019, I had an idea for photographing my view from a window wherever I was physically located each morning when I woke.

At the time, I envisioned our excursions into the world as we knew it then. Short trips to New England towns, a stay a cabin in the woods, a trip overseas. A year of documenting seemed like a fun way to pass a year.

For most of the Fall and early Winter months of 2019, we were both busy with work-related responsibilities, so our trips became a trip to Boothbay at the end of leaf-peeping.

And then, 2020 happened.

Our last trip away from our condo in Lowell, MA turned out to be an overnight to a concert held at the Museum of Fine Arts at the beginning of March. We took the train into the City, had a wonderful time going to the Museum, stayed at the edge of the South End and returned the next day. It was the in-between time when the virus was just getting started in this country - or so we have been lead to believe.

We haven’t had a leisure trip since.

The visions of travel and waking up in different locations in the world - the way I envisioned this little project - is not the reality of 2020. Certainly we don’t feel as if a trip is in our immediate or long-range future. It is entirely possible that our return to a sense of normalcy will be altered in ways I cannot begin to imagine when we finally feel as if travel outside of our bubble is safe.

This all seems very strange.

I did keep on with my project though, even with the change in scope. As I cull through the 365 photos I did take every morning, mostly through the two giant banks of windows in our renovated mill building, the photographs will document changes over time throughout the seasons of 2019-2020. I believe the subtle changes and uniqueness of this year of years will be evident even though the vantage point does not change.

For now, however, I offer two photos: one at the project start (September 29, 2019) and one at the end (September 29, 2020).

Back-to-School? You Go First.

To me, reopening schools and deciding on the best course of action to do so is a matter of trust.

I’ve been out of my classrooms for 5 years now and my granddaughter is not old enough that her parents need to make a decision about this Fall over the next weeks. So I admittedly do not have any skin in this fight, but I do know limburger cheese when I smell it. And the insistence by some in leadership positions that school buildings reopen for the Fall academic year is pretty ripe.

The New York Times editorial staff posted a piece today (“Reopening Schools Will Be a Huge Undertaking”) outlining many reasons why children need to be back in schools: socialization, food insecurity, social emotional health, and academics. I don’t think there is an educator that I know who would disagree that the overnight switch from face-to-face learning to distance learning has been “less than”. The sudden shutdown of school buildings and the resulting switch to distance learning will have impact on students - and educators - for many years.

The plans for returning to school buildings in the Fall that I have been reading and the advisories coming from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) appear to me to be just trying to accommodate a face-to-face return to school buildings happen without any significant guarantees of funding. We’ve all experienced the impact that those advisories can have. Theoretical plans and mandates coming from state and federal Departments of Education often come without any consideration of the realities in terms of costs.

Here’s an example from our very own Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). In the past weeks, DESE published guidance on classroom configuration which has been thoroughly analyzed by Blogger and Worcester School Committee Member Tracy Novick. I have to ask this: Was this entire document some undergraduate education major’s project? There are so many things wrong with this DESE “guidance”: 3 feet distance chair to chair in place of CDC recommended 6 feet; teacher in the front, removing all other classroom furniture but the student and teacher desks and chairs.

Loading 24 to 30+ students into building spaces where air quality has been an issue will also make safely reopening school buildings difficult if not impossible. For many school districts, including Lowell, carving out the suggested additional space needed to accommodate social distancing and student/faculty safety will be a very big factor. Where will the space be found and how will it be paid for? Nearly every nook and cranny in Lowell’s school buildings (K-8) is being used as learning space already. There is no more space available to socially-distance the nearly 15,000 students in Lowell Public Schools, no new school buildings, and even if there were, there is no money to pay for more space.

While the Times editorial suggests decision-makers think “outside the box” and consider instructional spaces created under tents in outdoor settings, that idea will only go so far if the virus lingers through the colder, winter months, as one might expect it will. However, more importantly, funding necessary for all of these out-of-the-box ideas will still need to materialize and the very same Federal government insisting that schools reopen buildings in the Fall is seemingly unwilling to back that up. At this writing, the Heroes Act, an act that might just provide some desperately needed monetary help is languishing in the US Senate.

Schools in Massachusetts have long been underfunded, and that is particularly true in the Gateway cities like Lowell. At the time the Student Opportunity Act was signed and passed last November, Lowell Public Schools was operating with $50 Million less as the Commonwealth has not kept the promise of funding public schools for more than 25 years. Schools systems like Lowell have cut and cut and cut until there really is no more to cut. If the Commonwealth cannot adequately fund schools under “normal” circumstances, what makes anyone trust that the extraordinary measures needed to keep students and faculty safe for a building reopening in Fall 2020 will end well?

From where I observe, this really does all boil down to trust, which has historically been tested and unearned. Locally, educators and parents see plans being made that put student and staff lives in danger. State and federal leaders are insisting that school buildings reopen as usual and yet there appears to be an unwillingness to dedicate adequate and appropriate funding and resources to do so safely. And that feels a lot like business as usual in the field of education.

In other words:

Many teachers, and parents, are wary of reopening schools. They fear policymakers will cut corners and safety measures will prove inadequate. These fears have been reinforced by the president and by Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom have publicly encouraged corner-cutting. Such a strategy is willfully shortsighted. It might succeed in reopening schools for a time, but it is not likely to allow schools to remain open.

As my grandfather used to tell me, “you reap what you sow.” That certainly seems applicable now - because of the history of underfunding schools and the history of unfunded mandates, parents and educators do not trust that buildings can reopen safely. They are pushing back on this idea and rightly so. Corner cutting will yield deadly results.