Page 14 September 1981 Cassiar Courier —- Dining By Candlelight As the regular author of this column is on vacation, we shall take this opportunity to travel your taste to the South Caribbean. Lying off the northern coast of Venezuela is the Island of Trinidad, together with its ward, Tobago. Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1498 this small island some 100 miles long, 40 miles wide was subjected to Spanish rule for some 300 years. A British kxpedition from Martinique forced the Spanish garrison to capitulate in 1797. Trinidad was ceded to Great Britain in 1802 by the treaty of Amiens, Tobago followed in 1814. Trinidad was subjected to the economic lifestyle common to tropical plantation countries, exporting such crops as sugar cane, fine cocoa, coffee, citrus and tropical friits. The mainstay of the economy being asphalt from Pitch Lake at La Brea, later including crude oil and natural gas. In 1956 Trinidad was granted limited self goveniment and joined the West Indies Federation in 1958. On June 19, 1961 Trinidad was granted full internal self government. Following dissolution of the West Indies Federation on May. 31, 1962, Trinidad and Tobago became an independ- ent nation. On. August 31, 1962 Trinidad and Tobago became a member of the Commonwealth. August 31st is celebrated each year as the National Day and one can enjoy such local dishes as Trinidad Pepper Pot, Pudding and Souse, Shrimp Curry, Crab Pillau, Sancocho, while relaxing to the music of the world fa- mous Steel Drum Bands. Travel vour tastes. . . PEPPER POT (Chicken and Pork Stew) To Serve 6 or 8 A 5-5¥% pound stewing fowl trimmed of excess fat and cut into 8 - 12 serving pieces. 1 fresh pig’s foot (about ¥% pound) 2 quarts water 2 teaspoons salt 3 pounds boneless fresh pork shoulder or lean boneless beef, cut into 2” cubes ¥% cup cassareep 1 large onion, peeled and cut crosswise into 4” thick slices 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar The 198] - 82 Figure Skating season is scheduled to begin on October Ist. Registration will be held at the Sports Fun Day on September 12th at the Rec. Centre. Our Pro.- Lorraine Menzul has already been into town to set up the schedule. Before you register your child you must know what badges he or she has already as’ they are grouped — according to_ their level of skating and fees are set accord- ing to the instruction they receive. They will be grouped as follows:- Pre Juniors - Beginners, Stroking, Elementary. Juniors - Basic, Novice 1. Intermediates - Dance I, Dance 2, Novice 1, Jump, Freestyle 1 and Freestyle 2 Seniors - will have finished badges or at least be working on their last two. They will be working on their C.F.S.A. Figure tests. This year the club will be paying $25 per hour of ice time. The season will end March 31st making it.24 weeks long. Fees have been worked out at less than-a dollar per hour of ice time. Pre Juniors and Juniors will each receive three. ‘hours per week and the fee will be $60 per season for each child. Intermediates will receive 5 hours of ice time per week at a cost of $100 per season. Seniors will have seven hours per week and membership for that group will. be $140 per season. Various fund raising ventures will be organized to make 2 whole fresh hot chilies a2 inch piece of stick ciimaimom 4 whole cloves % teaspoon crumbled dried thyme 1 tablespoon malt vinegar Place the fowland the pig’s foot ina heavy 8 - 10 quart casserole and pour the water over them. The water should cover them hy about I inch; add more if necessary. Add the salt and bring to a boil over high heat, skimming off the foam and scum as they rise to the surface. Reduce the heat to low, cover partially, and simmer for about I hour or until the bird is almost tender and shows only the slightest resistance when pierced with ‘the point of a small, sharp knife. . With a large spoon, skim as much fat as possible from the surface of the soup. Stir in the pork cubes, cassareep, onion, brown sugar, chilies, cinnamon, cloves and thyme. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to moder- ate and, stirring vecasionally, cook partially covered for about 30 minutes longer, or until the fowl and pork are tender. Remove the chilies, cinnamon and cloves with a slotted spoon and discard them. Stir in the vinegar and taste for seasoning. Mound the pieces of pork, pig’s foot and fowl attract- ively on a deep heated platter and pour the sauce remain- ing in the casserole over them. Serve the pepper pot at once, accompanied, if you like, by boiled potatoes or yams. PUDDING AND SOUSE ’ (Blood Sausage with cold lime-marinated Pork Hocks) 4 pounds fresh pork hocks 1 large onion, peeled and quartered 4 tsp. salt 1 1/3 cups strained fresh-lime juice ] large cucumber ' ] tsp. finely chopped fresh hot chilies Watercress or whole fresh chilies for garnish 1 to 1% pounds commercially made blood sausage Wash the pork hocks thoroughly under cold~ running water, then place them in a 6 - 8 quart casserole or pot and pour in enough cold water to cover them by about 1 inch. Bring to boil over high heat, meanwhile skimming off the scum and foam that rise to the surface. Add the onion and 3tsp. of the salt and reduce heat to low. Sim- mer partially covered for about 2 hours adding more water when necessary to keep the hocks covered. When up the cost of the ice time which will not be entirely covered by the fees as the club is not yet large enough. We are fortunate that the Community Club has hired the Pro as if we had those costs as well then the fees would be quite high. The executive is really pleased to have Lor- raine back for this season. She did a tremendous job for the short time that she was here last year and we feel that the kids will benefit greatly from her experience. The schedule will be as follows:- “ Group patch intermediates & Seniors. Group freeskate Intermediates & seniors. Tuesday p.m. 3:30-4:30 /hr each patch & freeskate Seniors. 4:30-5:30 Pre Juniors. 5:30 - 6:30 Juniors. 6:30 - 7:30° Intermediates. ‘Monday p.m. 3:15 - 4:15 4:15-5:15 Thursday p.m. 3:30-4:30 Pre Juniors. 4:30-5:30 Juniors. 5:30-6:30 Intermediates. 6:30-7,30 Intermediate and Senior Dance Saturday a.m. 8-9 Senior Patch 9-10 Senior Freeskate 10-11 Senior Dance T1-12 Pre Juniors and Juniors they are done they should show no resistance when piere- ed with a sharp knife. Transfer hocks to a plate, strain li- quid through a fine sieve and reserve. While the hocks are still warm, remove and discard the skin and bones. Cut the meat into half inch cubes, drop them into a bowl and add 1 cup of the lime juice and the remaining tsp. of salt. Turn the meat with a spoon to coat it evenly and marinate it in the fridge for at least 12 hours turning the meat occasionally to keep well moistened. Trim and peel the cucumber. Grate enough of the cucum- ber to fill one tablespoon and slice the rest into % inch thick rounds. Set aside. Combine the grated cucumber and 2 cup of the reserved liquid, the remaining 1/3 cup of lime juice and the chilies in a serving bowl. Stir together until well mixed. Taste the sauce and add salt and freshly ground pepper if desired. To serve drain the diced meat thoroughly and discard the marinade. Add the meat and the cucumber slices to the sauce and stir until evenly coated. Garnish with water- cress or whole fresh chilies. The blood sausage which is traditionally served with souse may be presented whole or peeled, sliced crosswise into 4% inch rounds. _ SHRIMP CURRY 2 pounds large raw shrimp 1¥% tsp cumin seeds 1¥4 tsp coriander seeds 144 tsp mustard seeds 14% tsp whole black peppercorns 1% tsp turmeric YS tsp crushed hot red pepper 3tblsp. vegetable vil I cup finely chopped onions ] tsp finely chopped garlic I thlsp scraped and finely chopped ginger root 6 medium firm tomatoes, peeled seeded and finely chopped. -— ~ or 2 cups chopped drained canned tom. 1 cup water ] tsp salt 2 thisp strained fresh lime juice : Shell the shrimp. Devein them. Combine the cumin cor- iander, mustard, peppercorns, turmeric, and red pepper in a blender at high speed until the spices are completely pul- verized, or grind with a mortar and pestle or in a small bowl with the back of a spoon. Cont'd on page 16 . Private lessons are booked seperately through the figure skating professional. One fifteen minute private lesson is $5.00. Times-are as follows:- Monday a.m. 6 - 7 Patch 7-8 Freeskate Tuesday, Thursday & Friday a.m. 6-6:45 Patch 6:45 - 7:30 Freeskate 7:30-8 Dance A list of club rules is being printed’and each person will receive one at registration. We hope that parents and stu- dents alike will read them as they are being made for the safety and benefit of all club members. BINGO The main fund raising venture of the Figure Skating Club will be the monthly bingos. This year the club will be en- tirely responsible for the Bingo and will not be holding them in conjunction withthe community Club as they did — last year. All profits wilt go to the F.S.C. and we hope that you will come out and support our children. The first bingo will be held on Wednesday September 2: 3rd at the Recreation Centre. Doors will open at 7:15p.m. and the bingo will begin at 8:00p.m. Hope to see you there. Me AK -Cassiar Courier September 1981 Page 15’ FIRST THINGS FIRST. . WHICH, FOR THE TEACHER, AFTER TWO TRENDY DECADES, IS TO KEEP TO THE PRIME RESPONSIBILITY — TEACHING. Education, that perennial whipping boy (or is it whipping person these days?) could be seen anxiously edging toward the front page of newspapers recently, getting ready for another season of lambasting. ; Nothing seems to cause taxpayers to crush newspapers more than to read of yet another walloping increase in school board budgets. And the anger turns to rage when it’s taxpaying time. The taxpayer thinks he’s caught educators brazenly un- latching the golden goose just to go on a spree. Educators ‘said, “Trust us — reducing class sizes, hiring more teachers, _those are the ingredients of the elixir that will make your children literate, perfect, and, all in all, adroit in things educational.” Through the late ‘60s and early ‘70s schools played with open-area classrooms, team teaching, modular timetables, differentiated staffing, and dozens of other jargon-laden approaches to teaching. Old math gave way to new math and left parents chewing pencil ends trying to help their kids with the homework; prescriptive grammar that had earlier generations parsing sentences in their sleep gave way to the new “linguistic” descriptive grammar, which tragi- cally few English teachers bothered to master. Consequently we not only had children come through the school system no more understanding the nature ofa sent- ence than would an earnest newt, but we also bred a gen- eration of teachers little better off. (University staff, espe- cially university instructors of English, complain about the quality of English teaching in the schools, yet it is those same university instructors who train the high school teach- ers. Most teachers with degrees in English know all about the beauty of the language, except why.)") > >>> But rendering down the last quarter century, one finds little substance to support the notion that schools can be fairly _ blamed for society’s present rancidness. Twenty-five years ago schools went about their business with the perception that there were three kinds of children: “the ineducable child, the upwardly mobile child, and the status quo child. The ineducable showed little interest in school and fewer skills. Typically, that child’s parents had fared no better in school and quit — as did their child — at the first opportun- ity. = Such parents found communication with the school as in- timidating and as threatening as a weekly call from a col- lection agency. Rarely was the school pressed to explain its failure with. the child. The child’s father was painfully a- ware of his dirty fingernails and inarticulateness during an - interview with the school teacher or principal. The upwardly mobile were the children of parents who, al- - though they had little formal education, were competent \ in their trades or vocations and saw school as the vehicle by which their children would attain vocations and lives better than their own. If those children got the strap at school they also got a good dose of it at home. Disobedience to authority was not tolerated. The teacher’s behavior was questioned only if the children were not learning. The status quo children were of the ‘‘arrived” middle class. Not only did their parents have academic expectations of the school, they also had behavioral expectations of teach- ers. Schools were to teach manners and values consistent with the parents’ manners and values. Those parents dominated school boards and parent-teacher associations. They wrote the Public Schools Act and fash- toned the dogma and creed of the neighborhood school. Teachers paid the ultimate fealty to status quo parents by teaching in the “middle class, female language.” (Woe to teacher or student who dared to express himself in working class, male language.) In essence, until the late 1960s schools were in the bus- iness of confirming a child’s selection of parents. If a child was bright and came from an organized, disciplined home, he invariably breezed through school, collected the awards at the end of Grade 12, and moved on to a bright future. _ If he was bright, relatively disorganized and not very well disciplined, he usually made it with some struggle. If he . was not very bright and came from a home that was chaotic and inconsistent, he failed. “ The instrument those themes were played on is known in the trade as the bell curve. It goes like this: if one student . gets a mark of A, then four students shall receive’a B, 10 students receive C+, C, or C-, four students receive D and One student shall receive E. All D’s and E’s are failed. Until the mid-60s school were fairly lock-step. Everybody knew the rules and generally accepted them. That a quart- er of all students were dubbed failures was of concern only to them and their familes, and generally they were politically voiceless. Certainly the system had its critics, especially among teachers who saw the children lemming- ed off, year and year out. But then along came the late “60s and a new breed of child. He was unlike anything the schools had ever had to deal with before. He just refused to accept, period — rules were dumb, teachers were stupid, curriculum was irrelevant, and nobody over 30 was to be trusted. The school system was aghast, for not only did that child emerge overnight, but he emerged from the status quo group, the very group the school system was built on. He was the child who; in former years, would have been the obedient high achiever, the athlete, the one who got the citizenship award for his Grade 10 year. To say it happened overnight is hardly an exaggeration. It came upon us like Beatlemania. Let us call this child the refuser. He emerged out of the status quo group and gave rebellious eee to every oneofhispeers. His parents were the ones who looked the principal straight in the eye and demanded to know why they couldn‘t take their child out of school for a four-week holiday in mid-February. Or why the school. system Was so as to send a child home to get a haircut, or to put ona bra, or to bring a note for being absent. At first the principal and others in the school system, full of righteous indignation, fought back. But not for long. Staff meetings in schools became forums for soul-search- ing topics. Schools started running T-groups for teachers. Across the land principals sat alone in their offices study- ing their fingers and contemplating early- retirement. Teachers who tried to maintain their old posturing found little support from that new principal selected for the job by a committee of citizens. “ Trying to stop it was as futile as standing on a beach and barking to try to hold back the incoming tide. The wise Ones in the schools backed up to high eyelets and just waited for the tide to change. And it changed in the mid-’70s. Once again it became fashionable to talk about standards and accountability. Grammar and spelling became the innovations of the day; year-end exams were reintroduced; “‘back to basics’’ re- placed “‘if it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.’’ Virtually everything but the strap was brought back. What caused the change was yet another new child: the post-Pill baby. Typically, his parents ‘chose’ to have him, and they want- ed the best of schooling for him. They have supported teachers in their campaign for smatler classes and’ more support systems to heip with learning-disabled children. So for teachers it apparently all ends with a happy chapter about concerned parents with selected children supporting a system they believe in. Right? Evidently not. More parents than ever before are sending their children to private schools. More parent lobby groups are expressing their discontent with tne schools, and more teachers are burning out each year. We are left with a multitude of ironies. * Teachers have never had it so good, but claim it’s never been so bad. * The parents of today’s children refuse to have them judged on a bell curve, but the school system seems de- termined to so judge them. (The ministry of education’s grading system has not changed in 50 years.) * Today’s child is more informed than any before him, yet is more difficult to teach. He is egalitarian — that is, he believes he has equal rights and Privileges with all others: teachers, principals, and even parents. In most cases he believes those privileges are God-given, not oli te ; * The school system has never had so many options for a child’s education, yet parents complain about the lack of options. (Today a student can waltz into any institute of higher learning except a trades school. But where are the i job Opportunities? In the trades, of course.) *Canada spends more of its gross national product on ed- ucation than is spent by any other country — about $18 billion in 1980 — but the school system keeps groaning for more. So what's the solution? More money? More resources? Obviously not. The solution is this: educators must stop gumbooting: into every social swamp, searching for an- other frog to kiss. : For 20 years the school system has taken on every chal- lenge society has nudged into its path. And it has failed to make a prince out of any of them. Schools have tried alternative education, family educat- ‘ion, sex education, outdoor education, consumer educat- ion, adult education, legal education, values education, bilingualism, multiculturalism. They have programs for the gifted, special education’ programs, work-study pro- grams. They're now going into mainstreaming, career education, computer education, and lifestyles educat- ion. Somewhere in that line-up of boisterous attention-getters underfoot and hardly recognized any more, is poor old reading, writing and arithmetic. How can one eRe the wntce R‘s to survive in such a line-up? What teachers need to do is pull their teaching certif- icates out of their back pockets and read them. Nowhere does it say that teachers are social engineers or off-duty policemen or psychologists or family coun- sellors or politicians. It merely says they have been train- ed to teach the three R’s and should be accountable for that. But if one is a teacher, or is married to a teacher, or has a Parent who is a teacher, one can better understand the de- limma. How can one teach the three R’s and ignore the rest of the needs of those children whom you aaa hours with, 200 days a year? I’m not suggesting teachers should ignore all but the three R’s, but that teachers must say | will do that for what | am trained and | will take the prime responsibility to see that it is well done. But the rest of the child is someone else’s prime responsibility. | will support that primary agent for the rest of the child, but I will not let my prime time be frittered away doing what | am not trained to do or am responsible for. Schools must give back to parents that part of the child that belongs to parents and give to: children those things that the school is there for: cognitive skills that equip a child to think. The school system must reassess its man- date and make some. hard-nosed choices. As the optimist said, “If 1 have to leave my fate some- where, | suppose it would be in the hands of the phil- osphers.’” And the realist retorted, “Me too, but. not during mealtime.” . by Edgar M. Carlin . . . superintendent of schools for West Vancouver, president of the Association of B.C. School Super- intendents, and teacher and administrator in the B.C. school system for the last 25 years.