A read and 2 recipes

I wish the Tenured Radical could become the education czar with far reaching and unlimited powers. If you are academically oriented and haven't discovered her, she is a must read. This week's post hit particularly close to home. As one of the lucky few who actually experienced college classes with 4-15 people enrolled, I know first-hand the difference that small classes make in one's education. A transition to more, smaller classes may miss the University goal of standardizing courses, but is that such a bad thing? Smaller classes could employ more faculty and it might be possible to teach more smaller classes rather than just a few big ones. This would certainly help out those of us trembling on the pirate's plank of a job market, and would tremendously improve undergraduate education. Students might actually discover the love of exploratory learning - finding some little problem and figuring it out yourself - rather than churning out mediocre 6 page essays chosen from a myriad of prompts, non of which can be adequately answered in 6 pages and all of which reveal more the bias of the instructor (myself included) than actually get the students to think on their own. My undergrad institution was a writing intensive college. All of our classes required a 15-20 page research paper, in conjunction with 2 take home midterms, or 2 6-page papers, or weekly reading responses. I love being able to develop and explore my own historical interests - from the development of tap dancing in Ante-bellium US, to the life and controversy over Edith Stein, the self-proclaimed Jewish-nun and early 20th century German philosopher, to the worship of wells and St. Brigid in Ireland. I could go on forever but suffice to say that TR rocks and I wish she could take over the world.

An now the tasty end of the post. I finally tried 101 Cookbooks Black Bean Brownies. They are a sugar free, gluten free, low Glycemic response dessert and they are amazing. They taste like a mocha brownie cheese cake and were gone in 2 days. (I added extra chocolate b/c everything needs extra chocolate. the texture is the creamy, fudgy, cheesecake-like part). If you are baking-minded I highly recommend trying them.

The second recipe comes from Smitten Kitchen's attempt to create perfect oatmeal cookies. Remember, I like dense dougheir cookies, not the thin, butter, crispy ones. I made this recipe but added dark chocolate chips and added about 1.5 tsp of instant espresso powder. The espresso powder and cinnamon is a very tasty combination. The dough is chillin' like a vill'n in the fridge and I'll report back when they're cooked. So far I've had to come into my office in order to prevent myself from eating all of said dough, so suffice to say they're pretty damn good.

In other news, I have to get my cholesterol checked and I'm just hoping to live in blissful ignorance in which i can eat cookie dough for another couple of days....