I was over my limit at the check out, and I had already checked the hold shelf, and I didn’t find any books for me. I assessed the stack of books I had gathered up, trying to decide which four I wanted to check out, because that’s all the space I still had on my card.

“I checked just now. I didn’t see any book for me,” I replied. In my mind, I was already thinking of not taking it, because all the books I had reserved so far were historical fiction based in New Mexico for my high schooler’s New Mexico history. I had to pre-read them and I really wasn’t looking forward to reading them. These were not fiction I’d voluntarily pick off the shelves for leisure reading.

“I just put it there.”

I went over to the hold shelf and read the inside flap of the book jacket. I decided to take it.

And I started reading The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages last night. I was actually reading another book, The Glorietta Pass, but it’s just one of those books that you can put down. So I did what I have been doing so much of throughout the years; read multiple books concurrently.

The moment I started reading, I was introduced to Dewey Kerrigan, whom I thought was a man, and it turned out she was a woman, or so I thought. I had opened this book thinking it was an adult historical fiction, so I never expected the main character to be an 11 year old girl named Dewey Kerrigan. It didn’t register to me that it’s a YA fiction, and I did wonder for a while why the print was pretty spaced out compared to the other adult fiction I had been reading. It wasn’t until I flipped and read the back cover of the book that I realized it was a YA fiction and when I saw the Scott O Dell sticker on the front cover, I almost kicked myself for my oversight. I mean, how could I have missed that?!

Dewey Kerrigan is the daughter of a scientist who works with the government during the World War II years. So, if you think WWII and you think New Mexico, Los Alamos should be foremost in your mind. I learned about Los Alamos from hubs. He said that Los Alamos is filled with PhD holders in the nation, even today. Why? As I read this book, I thought about how great a historical fiction this is for learning about history, and as I googled it up just now, I even found a literature guide for it.

From St. Louis, Dewey was put on a train to Lamy, New Mexico, to next be transported to the ‘Hill’ where her father was. Working for the government, her father is one of the scientists involved in the top secret project that should win the war. What Dewey saw once she arrived in New Mexico, I can relate to. Dusty desert, adobe brick buildings, empty expanse of desert, tall majestic cliffs. One of my favorite descriptions of these cliffs was

The walls on the other side of the canyon look like a layer cake that some giant has cut cleanly with a knife.

because that describes exactly what I see each time we drive through New Mexico’s beautiful landscape. I think of my Chocolate Torte, two 9 inch cakes made with stiff peaked egg whites and ground almonds, assembled with whipped chocolate frosting in between the layers and glazed with a rich chocolate glaze and finally covered with chopped almonds on along the side. But of course, the layers existent in these canyons are way more beautiful than in any man-made cake.

Dewey is not a typical girl. What is a typical girl? A typical girl is stereotyped as a ‘girly’ girl. I think, the feminist movement has focused so much on the empowerment of women that it might have gone a little lopsided. Such that a feminine girl is mentioned with almost contempt, and has negative associations with it, while a tomboy, or atypical girl is favored. Even I find myself doing this at times. So do my daughters. Dewey, the daughter of a scientist, is a budding scientist herself. At that time, in the 40s, there were not that many women scientists, and thus Dewey finds adult companionship in Mrs. Gordon, a chemist living on ‘The Hill. Mrs. Gordon understands the importance of Dewey’s inventions in contrast to other adults who may think of them as junk.

Screwy Dewey is what the other girls call her. One of Dewey’s legs is shorter than the other, due to an incident in her infanthood. When she walks with her special shoe, she limps, and the girls view her as a weirdo. She’s practically an outcast to the girls. But to some of the boys, she’s a ‘good kid’ and they even share the secret of their tree house which is ‘not for girls’. I like Dewey. She’s neat, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s polite, she’s patient, and she’s wise.

What touched me the most about her is her relationship with her Papa, James Kerrigan. Her mother had left when she was a baby, so she only lives with her father. But ever since her father is hired by the White House, he has had to move all over the place, leaving her to live with other people and finally her Nana, who suffered a stroke. This is why Dewey had to finally live with her father on The Hill, because she has not other family members to live with. Her Papa is a loving and doting father, and talks to Dewey about math.

When he said to Dewey, “Dews? Remember the other night when we were talking about how much math and music are related?” ViHart came to my mind. I had found her accidentally and was captivated by her youtube videos. She calls herself a mathemusician.

Obviously, having such a close relationship with her Papa, Dewey is happy in ‘The Hill’, and according to him, “I’ve never seen her happier.” Part of it is being with her beloved Papa, and another part of it is her surrounding. She is literally surrounded by scientists and their ‘junk’ which they throw at the ‘Dump’. She would go to the ‘Dump’ with her wagon and rummage through it for nuts, bolts, springs, screws, metals, wires to add to her paraphernalia of invention materials. She has a knack for inventing mechanical contraptions, and is almost always engrossed in this.

This book is not just about Dewey though. It’s about a friendship between two unlikely girls. This is where Suze comes in, an almost typical girl, who strives to impress the popular girly girls so they would accept her in their midst. Both her parents are scientists, and her mother is Mrs. Gordon, the chemist. Suze on the other hand, is not a budding scientist like Dewey. You would think that if both her parents are hard core scientists, that she’d be inclined in science too, like Dewey is. Here is where I love what Klages has done. Klages made Suze a budding artist, and for me, this highlights the concept of multiple intelligence, and it brings somewhat of a balanced aspect to the subject of ‘smarts’ in this book. The story is set during the creation of the atomic bomb, so having an artistic aspect to it is to me, refreshing.

When Dewey’s Papa is called to Washington, Dewey is left alone, and Mrs. Gordon invites her to live with them, which means Dewey will be sharing a room with Suze. Suze loathes Dewey. She makes this clear too. Remember, Dewey is called Screwey Dewey by the girls, and Suze is one of those girls, even though she is not yet officially accepted in their midst, but she continues to strive hard to impress them.

I had said that this book is about friendship, and so the friendship of Dewey and Suze is the heart of this book. Where Dewey is called Screwy Dewey, Suze is called the ‘Truck’. If you want to know why, I highly recommend you read this book for yourself. Their friendship begins at the death of President Roosevelt. Coming from two different areas of intelligence, both girls learn about each other’s world and strengths and beautifully work together to pursue their individual interests.

Reading a story is to allow yourself to be transported into a world where you are in the driver’s seat, and so whatever transpires in the story will manipulate your emotions. I found myself in tears when tragedy befells Dewey. Her grief became my grief. After I was done reading the book, I even thought,

Why did Klages have to make that happen?

And I came to the conclusion,

She had to do it to move the story along and bring it to the next stage.

Such is it with writing fiction. You have to shake and rattle the reader with a a captivating plot which may include rendering the reader fraught with grief, laughter, or even anger. Klages’ writing is enjoyable to read. The fact that the book is pretty ‘clean’ also earns high ratings from me. There was a part where Charlie invites Dewey to his tree house because he had come upon a stack of magazines ‘with “lots” of pictures “somebody in the enlisted men’s barracks” had thrown away. I dreaded the revelation of these magazines, to tell the truth. After reading YA fiction that tries to be realistically true to culture, and how sad is it that the culture is so twisted with a lot of fawaa7hish, I have come to dread such things.

Alhamdulillah though, these children are geeks, and so, those magazines are LIFE magazines, and the pictures are of army and planes and soldiers and “no movie stars”. Inwardly, I sighed with relief.

Sometimes, tragedies in a story leave the readers with a sense of loss for the victim of that tragedy. That’s what I felt for Dewey, but of course, life goes on, and so life goes on for Dewey. Yet, I can’t help pining for her loss, even when I reached the end.

The atomic bomb, Trinity, and Alamogordo are all familiar words to me. We’ve even been to Alamogordo and to the Space Museum, where we looked at and scrutinized the artifacts from The Manhattan Project. I haven’t been to the Trinity site however and what I learned about it in this book, is quite interesting. The Green Glass Sea is aptly titled. I never knew about trinitite, though this only goes to show how immeticulous I was about ‘scrutinizing’ the artifacts at the Space museum in Alamogordo.

As I reached the end of this book, my interest in this incident in New Mexico grew. I was also piqued by the author’s experience in writing this book. It reminded me of the writing group I had joined back in Ohio, and how indeed working with a group of other writers progresses your own writing and ideas. It’s a support group. Writing is already a lonely profession, and while writing most times require solitude in order for it to work, it also needs companionship. That’s a noteworthy point for anyone who is interested in the field of writing.

When I closed this book last night, I told myself,

“I’m going to look for her sequel, White Sands, Red Menace.”

And that is my ultimate testimony for The Green Glass Sea. Thank you for Dewey, Ellen.

The extroverts are highly favored in this society, while the introverts are cast to the side, regardless of their strengths. Adults pay more attention to the outspoken and loud kids, associating intelligence to these visible verbal abilities, and automatically then attribute lack of intelligence or social skills to the quiet ones.

The silent, mostly hidden and unknown and unrealized strength is no longer sought for or valued, because just as we are so attracted to what we can see, touch, and hold in this materialistic concept we have embraced, we are then blind to the intangible aspects of strength and talents.

Unfortunately, we conduct ourselves based on this mindset, but fortunately, just  because we humans fail to notice these people who don’t usually stand out, it doesn’t mean they are forsaken and abandoned. For their Creator notices them, and compensates them, and in this talk, Shaykh Mohammed Faqih brings our attention to these very people, and motivates us to keep doing the little things we do, and not to undermine them, for Allah notices. And that’s the only thing that matters.

Short Bio of Shaykh Mohammed Faqih:

Shaykh Mohammed Faqih is the doctor of etiquettes and mannerisms. His style in fashion and stride in walk makes you say “that man’s fit to be president”. Living in California, he has much material for class jokes and light-hearted jabs to make his life-learning lessons hit home. Above all else, Shaykh Mohammed has melted the hearts with lessons in tazkiyyah, akhlaq, and even self-discovery and psychology. Hailing from a lineage of scholarship, Shaykh Mohammed traces his roots back to the ancient city og Harar in the Horn of Africa. originally from Yemen, his forefathers immigrated to East Africa and played a central role in the Islamic history of the region.

Description of the topic as in the Ilmfest schedule:

The black woman who cleaned the Prophet’s (saw) masjid, the Persian slave who planted trees to purchase his freedom, the Jewish boy on his deathbed who believed in the Messenger of Allah (saw), the bedouin who would sell his goods in the market of Madinah; these were not the nobles of society, but they were important parts of the mosaic of the community and were successful for the Prophet (saw) noticed them and Allah noticed them.

Before each speaker began his talk, a short bio of the speaker (transcript above) was presented to the audience with professional pomp and glory on the giant white screens that also served as a close up of the speaker during the talk to the whole ballroom. When his was done, Sh. Mohammed Faqih said,

“I asked them not to play that. Because there were many other people behind the scenes who did great work, and they are not mentioned.”

I had taken only one AlMaghrib class with him, ‘Usul Al Quran’ in Detroit, Michigan, and so this was the second time I heard him speak live. After the curt and humble dismissal of his strong points in the presentation, he asked the audience,

“Who among you know who Umm Mihjan is ?”

If I remember correctly, no one raised their hand. He asked this a couple more times, and still no one gave an affirmative answer. And thus began his talk.

Umm Mihjan was the black lady who used to clean the masjid of the prophet saw, during his time, on a daily basis. She noticed the little things that would clutter the masjid. She volunteered to undertake this task of picking up after others in order to keep the masjid clean, and she did this without expecting anything from anyone save from Allah. Some people thought she was mentally challenged. These are the kinds of people who are willing to do what other people are not willing to do. Those considered insignificant are most significant in the eyes of Allah.

These are the walking giants, unnnoticed.

But the One who made them, made them giants.

It could be YOU.

When Umm Mihjan dided, the sahabah buried her and did her funeral rather quietly, and they didn’t inform the prophet saw about it. When the prophet saw missed her, he specifically asked where she was buried, and offered a janazah prayer on her. In fact, he chastised the sahabah on not informing him of her death such that he missed her burial. Then the people realized how great Umm Mihjan truly was, such that the prophet saw even went to pray janazah for her even days after she was buried.

Allah notices what you do. Ibn Katheer said that Sa’ad Ibn Aqra’ came to Umar ibn al Khattab who was the Ameerul Mu’mineen, bringing back news of the Muslim army’s victory in the battle against the Persians. Umar r.a. asked the names of those Muslims who died. Sa’ad mentioned the ‘celebrities’ (those who were well known) first. Then he said,

“There were so many other people that Amirul Mumineen don’t recognize.”

Umar broke down weeping. And he said,

“Allah knows who they are. He honored them through martyrdom. And how is knowing Umar going to benefit them?” And he kept on weeping.

There is where the prophet saw told the sahabah sitting around him,said that the next man to walk in the masjid, he is a man of jannah. An Ansari man walked in. He was not of the ‘celebrity’. The next day, the prophet saw made the same statement, and the same Ansari man walked in. And the next day, the same thing happened.

How many of you all know that sahabi?

Abdullah Ibn Amr wanted to find out what this sahabi does that earned him Jannah, so he asked the sahabi if he could stay at his house. The sahabi didn’t do anything extraordinary in his daily routine. He didn’t do any extra ibadah than others, but the only thing he did that was of significance was that, every night, before he went to sleep, he would let go of any grudges against anyone in his heart and would cleanse his heart of any ill feelings, anger, hatred towards anyone. He doesn’t archive these feelings. He deletes them forever.

What do we do? We archive these feelings until they grow into quite a massive archive, that may very well lead to a massive ‘heart condition’.

“Don’t archive your grudges.”

This sahabi, even after knowing the prophet saw’s statement about him, did he stop doing good? No, he kept on doing good even though his place in Jannah was pretty much secured. What would we do if we know we’re going to Jannah for sure? The prophet saw said it, and it is from Allah’s knowledge that He has shared with him (saw) that he was able to say this. Wouldn’t we jump for joy, and forget about continuing to strive?

Behave like the people of Jannah until you make it to Jannah.

There was another man, who walks on a road and noticed branches blocking the path. He went and removed it, and for this, this man was forgiven all of his sins by Allah.

This was his moment of not success, but his moment of glory.

If you want anyone to notice, let it be Allah.

Allah appreciated and forgave ALL of this man’s sins.

It’s not about how many fans you have on Facebook or how many likes you get for your posts and statuses. It’s about the little deeds, and nothing is little in the eyes of Allah.

The next time you change a diaper, don’t think of this as something lowly, but think of it as something holy.

At this, I glanced over at my daughter and grinned, for they have their share of diaper changing too. The play of words ‘lowly’ turned into ‘holy’ tickled me.

This may be your moment of GLORY.

Take on those little tasks you never took on because you’re always thinking of the bigger things.

Focus on eternal salvation – doing deeds that Allah loves and doing it for Allah.

Ask Allah to make that easy for you.

Photo taken from http://www.dreamstime.com/small-blue-chicory-1-imagefree1006736

Part 4

Live Learning

“Just give me anything,” my oldest daughter said, when I kept asking her about how she wants to approach her high school curriculum. I was fishing for her interests and trying to customize her high school syllabus, but she seemed overwhelmed by the whole process. So I gave her the traditional curriculum. She started doing it and had no complaints whatsoever. But when I asked her what she learned, she replied,

“I don’t know.”

I was devastated. I believe this to be the result of our early years of homeschooling where due to the inflexibility of the virtual school system in which we were supposed to report to assigned teachers, we were more bent on completing the assigned syllabus, cramming in information, than enjoying the process.

Meanwhile, the Libyan brothers and sisters in our locality were undergoing emotional distress over what is happening in their country. One day, my son came home and said about his hifdh teacher,

“Ibrahim looks sad today.”

We also kept up with the news on the internet. Before long, my daughter began to take interest in the news, including the niqab ban in France. Suddenly, it occurred to me. “How would you like watching documentaries instead of going through the history syllabus?” So now, instead of her doing her history lesson textbook-style, she watches the documentaries online. At one point, she said to me, “I love history now.” With an eye roll, she added, “I can’t believe I just said that.” Apparently her interest in history grew through our discussion of world affairs especially since it was very much in context with our situation then.

In real life, literacy, writing, math, arts, science, history, geography occur together, often without clear distinction from one another. Living a life of learning requires us to be aware of learning opportunities around us and utilize them. But first of all, we have to be sincerely interested in looking at things as learning opportunities. Look for opportunities to tie the disparate subjects taught in schools together. Street names can spark a discussion on how the streets came to be named that way, or how the road system in your area has evolved throughout the years. Billboards can spark discussions on advertising techniques that can then be tied to the techniques Shaytaan uses to trick us into disobeying Allah. When reciting the Quran, you can go over the translation and start a session of reflection with your children. Go deeper into the story of companions of the cave. Ask them if they would do what the youth did if they faced a situation where they would be persecuted for their beliefs. It would make an interesting discussion. Expose them to different cultural experiences. Go beyond the obvious and ask them to observe for example, the similarities and differences in certain food items of different cultures. Pasties are the English version of the Malaysian Curry Puff and the Mexican Empanadas. Read historical fiction together and let this spark an interest to delving more into the historical setting of the story. The point is to keep the innate love of learning in your children alive by piqueing their natural curiosity through a lifestyle of active observation, discussion, and reflection. Learning is meaningful when it has a purpose in context. So enrich your child’s world by connecting him to the stimulus around him through your own verbal mulling, natural enthusiasm, and invitation to explore.

Individuality

However, while you may get all excited over a museum visit, your child may not. Respect this difference and tune in to his individual interests. Follow his lead and encourage him in this exploration, even if you are inept in it. In fact, take sincere interest in his interest and support him in it. You may see him browsing through programming books despite his young age. Try to hook him up with an adult or teen expert, or classes, even organizations to give him that opportunity to explore that particular interest. As an adult, you have the network and means to resources your child may not have access to. It’s your job to provide him with these opportunities in supporting his individual interest.

However, interests have their own life spans. Don’t be surprised if your child is engrossed in rocketry for only a week. While you may have gone through a lot of trouble finding resources for your child for his current interest, he may only wish to pursue it for a week. Don’t reprimand him. However, if it involves paying for a class, or any such commitments that involve other people, make it a point from the beginning to make this clear to your child. Tell him that he has to decide to make a commitment. Give him an option to bail out after a certain set period of commitment, so he won’t feel locked in from the very beginning. For example, instead of signing him up for ceramics class for a whole semester, agree to let him try it for the shortest time span allowed by the class, so he can decide whether to continue or not after that time period. This way, he will feel more at ease committing to something rather than avoiding commitment for fear of being locked in.

In terms of school performance, your child may be having trouble in some subjects. He may be a late bloomer. Assuming that you are already taking it easy with grades, assure him that he’s not behind or dumber than the other children. Expose him to the knowledge of different learning styles, individual strengths, multiple intelligence, and individual pace of learning. Make him understand that he is in control of his own learning by learning to know himself well. Hopefully, this will protect his love of learning, while also teaching him the reality of life in that sometimes, you have to do what you find hard to do. Not everything will be easy and 100% enjoyable.

We want our children to know how to think instead of just what to think. Let them know that sometimes, there is no one right answer. Encourage them to think big, and dream up something big, outside of the scope of what school covers. Don’t belittle any of their ideas. Spend time on these ideas even if it means they won’t be taking extra academic classes just so they could get great grades. It’s these seemingly insignificant ‘explorations’ that usually have the most impact in childhood that lead to specialized pursuit of an area in adulthood. Deprive them of this, and you have deprived them of nurturing their individual strengths. Show them the different models of successes that are not just limited to academics. Make them aware of their innate strengths and how they can be applied in the real world.

Living a learning lifestyle comes automatically when the love of learning is alive and kicking in the inner depths of our souls. When parents have this outlook, it naturally carries over to their interaction with their children and thus the learning lifestyle is passed to the next generation. So, embrace it and pass it on!

Published in SISTERS September 2011 issue.

Islam shouldn’t be restricted to rituals. It’s a way of life. Similarly, learning shouldn’t be restricted to the classroom. It should be a way of life. We are born with an innate love of learning that is usually crushed in the process of gaining an education because learning has been treated with such standardization that it has become something that is perceived to only happen in a certain setting. If your love of learning has been crushed, you have to go through a process of rediscovering it before you can immerse your children in a way of life that embraces learning.

Lost Love

I remember rushing home after I handed in my final exam papers in my final semester in college, thinking, “Now I can read whatever I want!” I didn’t realize it then, but that was the beginning of my journey to rediscovering my love of learning, which I believe was deeply buried under the pile of assigned readings, assignments, and tests throughout my school and university years.

Different people rediscover this lost love in different ways. However, the first step is to surprise yourself and try something new. Take the plunge and immerse yourself in it. A fresh university graduate who chose to stay home and focus on raising her children, I plunged into home-economics, a subject I never really enjoyed in my school years. Free from the watchful gaze of a perfectionist teacher, time limit, and restricted choices in exploration, I reveled in the art of cooking, baking, sewing, home management, gardening, and child-rearing, albeit with a slight academic slant. I wasn’t content with following recipes. I wanted to know the scientific process behind it. With cake decorating, I felt my creativity unleashed, especially since it has been forced to stay dormant throughout my school years because there were more important subjects to ‘cover’. There is just something about being able to explore on your own time, pace, and choice, especially in areas that involve creativity and intuition. This was my first step.

If you have trouble deciding where to start, start by listing your interests. Include interests you had the opportunity to indulge in and interests you would have loved to take up but had no opportunity to. Now think back to your school and university years. What are your favorite subjects? What did you enjoy about those subjects? Did you wish you could have done more with it? Maybe you can explore it in a novel way that you didn’t have time for back then.

Now list what you think you’re good at and enjoy doing. Are you in a vocation that employs your strengths and area of interest? If not, what would you like to be doing instead? Now think of subjects that you detested. Do you think that if those subjects were presented in a different way or explored in a way that appealed to your strengths, you might give them a second chance? For example, instead of thinking of mathematics in terms of solving word problems and mental calculations, explore it through art. Do you know that if we keep increasing the number of sides of a polygon we will eventually get a circle? Or that you can explore the concept of infinity by drawing circles upon circles inside a triangle?

When the first step has been taken, the journey will begin to get easier. Depending on your strengths, you might find yourself learning about other topics out of curiosity. I have always been an avid reader. My immersion in home-economics led me to other areas such as early childhood education, health and nutrition, and Islam. Thinking back, you could say that the topics that piqued my curiosity all came in context of my situation. I was a stay-at-home mother to three children under the age of four and I figured that I had spent most of my youth on secular subjects, and that if I were to raise my children with good Islamic values and knowledge, I’d have to learn and implement it first.

After this, it just gets easier and easier. That lost love has now come to the surface, being stirred to life with that first plunge. However, this is not to say that you will become this knowledge-absorbing machine. There is a limit, as we are all individuals with unique strengths. Despite it being one of my least favorite subjects in school, I surprisingly found myself looking forward to snuggling with a chemistry book in bed recently. However, there was a limit to my enthusiasm. I’m not a math person. Numbers, formulae, and diagrams interrupt the quick scan of my ‘reader’s eyes’. I stopped right where the chemical equations started.

I feel fortunate to have rediscovered this lost love. It has forced me to redefine education and look at it from a different pair of lenses, which in turn, makes it somewhat automatic for me to immerse my children in a lifestyle that hopefully keeps this love intact.

Rethinking School

It’s not easy to look at school from a different perspective when it has been an institution that has governed about twelve years of our childhood. It takes a paradigm shift to look at it in a new light. In Guerilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real education With or Without School, Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver offer some suggestions in how to go about doing this. Start with making a list of everything you know enough about to write a beginner’s guide or contribute fairly to a conversation. Then list everything you’re good at, academic and non academic, from making bread from scratch, to doing Calculus. Look at your list. Are they longer or shorter than you expected? You can also ask others with a different school background to make the same list and compare yours to theirs. Next, put a check mark by the skills and knowledge areas that you feel you gained from school and/or university. Now observe how much skills and knowledge you gained from school and outside school.

In order to rethink education, you also need to define success. Is someone who works a nine to five job and paid a handsome salary successful, even if he doesn’t enjoy what he does? Is there only one model of success? If not, what are they? List them.

Next, mull over what you think of education and its purpose in the larger context of life. Seek different opinions on it. Discuss it with your spouse and children. I tell my children that it’s not necessary to get a university degree, but that having tertiary education or being well versed in some areas gives them an edge when making dawah, which is our ultimate mission in this worldly life. Sometimes, we need to step out of the box and question systems that have been in place for so long that we accept them without thinking twice.

Once you have revived your own lost love of learning (if it was lost), and opened your mind to thinking about school in a different way, it will be easier to live a life of learning as a family. The ‘how’ will come in part four, inshaallah.

Suggested reading:

Guerilla Learning How to Give Your Kids A Real Education With Or Without School by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver

Vi Hart, the Recreational Mathemusician who explores math concepts through art and music

Over the years, Juli Herman has discovered how artfully bags can be stuffed and packed with library books before their seams rip or before their handles come off. Alhamdulillah for those self-check out machines at the library that can’t comment, “Wow! Your receipt is longer than a grocery list!”

Published in SISTERS August 2011 issue.

Photo taken from http://www.dreamstime.com/fish-imagefree2888385

Part 2

You will find very few parents who won’t ask their children, “So how did you do on your exam?” Attaining good grades has become the main focus of parents and students, because it has become the means through which perceived good education is achieved. Before there were grades, student evaluation was more individualized and subjective. Student evaluation was a form of feedback on particular tasks assigned by the teacher to a student.  The purpose was to help both teacher and student pinpoint what needed to be worked on and what the student had grasped well. With the Industrial revolution, these subjective and individualized student evaluations have morphed into a standardized version of student evaluation which is represented by letter or numerical grades. A single letter now conveys how much a student has learned and retained.

However, do grades really do this? Grades are not that all encompassing. They don’t tell us the whole story. What they do tell for sure, is how well the student did in that particular test, not necessarily how much the student has learned, retained long term, or even understood. A student may have studied hard for the exam and aced it, but that doesn’t tell us if the student has even understood what she studied or retained it after the exam. In fact, in this race towards good grades, schools have been teaching students test-taking skills. So what do good grades really convey?

Just as grades are slapped onto meat packets on assembly lines in factories, grades are being slapped onto projects, tests, and exams, thereby rendering students as products to be labeled and sorted. Today, grades are thought to play a huge role in determining one’s future where academics are seen as being superior to non academic areas. However, as Sir Ken Robinson, a world renowned education and creativity expert, puts it, the human community thrives on the diversity of strengths and abilities. A fireman is no less valuable than a doctor, nor is a carpenter less valuable than a university professor.

According to Sir Ken Robinson, we are suffering from an academic inflation. Before universities mushroomed, only a select few would be privileged enough to pursue tertiary education. Today however, even if you hold a degree or degrees, it doesn’t guarantee you a job. Similarly, there are so many A plusses in university application piles, that universities are now looking beyond grades. As seemingly efficient as it is in terms of producing student evaluations, grades has become so commonplace, that in actuality, it doesn’t carry much real value in what really matters; the love of learning.

The first step to keeping the love of learning intact in your children is to adopt a paradigm shift with regards to how you view education. Amy Silver and Grace Llewellyn, authors of Guerrilla Learning How to Give Your Kids A Real Education With or Without School, advise parents to view school as only one of the resources of learning in a larger world of attaining education. Don’t think of school as being the only and final authority on education. The whole world is a classroom if we treat it as such. If parents are able to adopt this mindset, it would make it easier for them to not take grades too seriously.

Don’t allow grades to define your child’s sense of success and failure. Treat them not as a determinant of your child’s present and future success but simply as one of the requirements your child has to fulfill to get through the system, that is, if your child is in the system. Instead of asking your child, “So how did you do in your math test?” ask, “So what was the most interesting thing you did in math today?” Ask questions like, “What did you learn in history today?” and “What do you think about the English-French wars?” There’s no one right answer to questions like these.

The objective is to emphasize the thought process in the various stages of learning instead of on the results of a performance. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care about how the child does in school (if this becomes a problems with the teachers), but it just shows that you care more about him engaging in learning. After all, learning is a life process. Any performance that is demanded of something that is still in progress will always be lacking. If it is not, then something has gone awry. This kind of thinking requires stepping out of the box, zooming out, and looking at the bigger picture.  It’s not going to be easy, because grades are such a dominant part of the school’s culture.

Thus it is even more important that the parents are truly able to change their mindsets about school and grades. Let’s say your child comes home with a C for his science project. On the forefront, you can muster up, “Well, we did have fun doing that project, didn’t we? Remember when your volcano spewed red bubbling lava? ” while your insides churn with pain. But this will manifest itself in your expression or body language. Your child will detect this, and he will continue with the belief that good grades are more important after all. However, this doesn’t mean that you’re content with letting your child have C’s and D’s in his report card. Because he still has to go through the system, you can make him understand that in the larger context of life, being engaged in what he’s learning is more important that being able to answer questions correctly all the time. Nevertheless, because grades do matter to a certain point, he still needs to get help and work on getting at least decent grades, at least for the sake of pursuing his area of academic interest. Since the disparate subjects in school do converge in real life, he will need fair knowledge of at least some of the subjects in order to master the dominant subjects of his area. My daughter loves psychology but she doesn’t really care for chemistry. I make her aware that at one point in time, chemistry and psychology will merge and so despite her indifference bordering on dislike of chemistry, she still needs to understand it well to truly master psychology. Learning becomes more meaningful with a purpose.

Along with taking grades less seriously, rewards and punishment for good and bad grades should disappear as well. Otherwise, we’re still sending the message that grades is the only key to success.  Taking it easy on grades is only one of the ways through which you can preserve the love of learning. If it’s the only thing you do in adopting this paradigm shift in viewing education, you won’t get very far. In fact, it can be a disaster. Since the whole world is a classroom, a lifestyle of learning has to take place for the whole family in order for the love of learning to thrive in everyone. How is this practically done? That is for part three to reveal.

Suggested reading:

Guerilla Learning How to Give Your Kids A Real Education With Or Without School by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver

Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out Materialistic, and Miseducated Students by Denise Clark Pope

 Published in SISTERS July 2011 issue.

Photo taken from http://www.dreamstime.com/teachers-marking-imagefree2410708

Almost all mothers will testify to being bombarded with never ending questions from their preschoolers and kindergarteners, to the point of aggravation. Children are born with a natural curiosity to learn about the world around them. Allah has given human beings the ability, capacity, and most importantly, desire to explore the blessings He has given us. In other words, you can’t stop a child from learning. He is like a ravenous caterpillar, chomping up all the juicy leaves he comes across.

This is an apt description of a child entering school for the first time. He comes home bursting with tales of new discoveries, and his eyes sparkle with an intrinsic joy that comes from learning. Fast forward a few weeks, months, years, and we may unfortunately find a completely different child. Tales of discoveries are replaced by complaints of heaping homework. The sparkle in his eyes is replaced by a dullness that bespeaks apathy, stress, and a yearning to get away from anything educational. When he comes home from school, all he wants to do is rest and not think about it, much like how an adult doesn’t want to think about work at the office once he gets home. Learning, which was such a joy before, has now become a job. What has contributed to this apathy to learning?

Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, blames it on our obsession with grades. According to Kohn, when  a child is pressured to achieve good grades and avoid bad grades, his focus shifts from learning, exploration, risk-taking, and discovery, to his performance. Instead of thinking of what he is doing, he is thinking of how well he’s doing. Thus, learning now takes a backseat to the pursuit of that A+. It no longer matters what it is he is learning. He’s so absorbed in cramming the information into his short term memory storage for future regurgitation that he doesn’t really connect with the subject matter in a way he would if he were learning it for the sake of learning. The point becomes not to acquire knowledge, and delight in the process, but to satisfy the teacher by giving her the correct answer, in the form that she accepts enough so as to give him full points for that question. If the child is not an achiever due to learning style or other reasons, the damage to his love of learning happens when he doesn’t attain what everyone is aiming for. He thus develops a negative assessment of his intellect and views learning as something that is not within his grasp.

The preoccupation with testing and grades led to the creation of study guides. Study guides were created to make possible the art of cramming information for temporary storage. Thrust in a system that requires them to perform, students rely on these study guides as if they are their salvation from bad grades. The system that necessitates students to use them is cheating these very students out of the joy of learning. Questions such as ‘Will this come out on the test?” or “Do we need to know this?” are signs that learning has depreciated in value. The student has come to a point where he will only study what will come out on the test. Anymore than that is extra and unnecessary. And as soon as the exams are done with, everything educational are retired to a dusty corner, never to be touched until the next school term starts.

When grades and rewards are dangled on a stick to bribe learning, learning is automatically degraded to a less appealing state. Daniel Pink, author of Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, presents the Sawyer effect, where play is turned into work and vice versa by certain practices, one of which is giving rewards. By this definition, a child who is offered a slice of pizza if he completes reading a book, will eventually view reading as a chore even if he takes to the challenge enthusiastically at first. The very fact that a reward is offered for the task renders the task unappealing. If applied to learning, it will eradicate the joy of learning in the long run.

With rewards and grades at stake, making mistakes and taking risks have no place in the race to A’s. No smart child will jeopardize his chance of attaining an A+ or reward by choosing to explore a subject in a way that will definitely incur mistakes. To explore a subject matter in such a way is to engage in learning in which making mistakes is a necessary component. Taking risks and making mistakes are part and parcel of effective learning. A child who is bent on getting an A for his artwork will abandon risk-taking in his brush strokes and stick to what he knows, so as not to make mistakes. As stated by Pink, rewards narrow our focus, and this in turn limits creativity in open ended activities. When red flowers receive higher appraisal than rainbow striped ones, the child will make his flowers red. When doing a math problem in which there are many ways to come to the solution, the child will stick with the method he is certain will get him the right answer, thus depriving him of a learning experience that may very well enrich his math experience in the long run.

In order for learning to be effective and meaningful, it needs to happen in context. A child who is taught the anatomy of a real live ladybug because he came across it while playing outdoors learns differently than a child who is taught the anatomy of a ladybug from a book just because it happens to be the topic of the day. In the real world, disparate subjects such as biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, literature, art, and economics interweave to form what we experience as life. However, our education system separates these subjects and sterilizes them out of context. When a child is fed disparate bits of data over the course of twelve years of schooling, the logical and human thing to do is to forget them. It’s easy to forget them because they don’t carry much meaning out of context.

Fortunately, Allah has created the human brain to be resilient. Some of us who suffered damages incurred by grades, rewards, and de-contextualized teaching have fortunately managed to rediscover our inborn love of learning. The even luckier ones have managed to keep that love of learning intact. Unfortunately, there are those who have lost it forever. The question is, are we willing to take this risk with our children? How do we keep this love of learning intact in a system that threatens to extinguish it? Part two will shed some light.

Suggested reading:

Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Juli Herman remembers thinking, ‘Now I can read whatever I want!’ the moment she rushed home to her two babies after being done with final exams in her final semester in college. From that moment on, she has embarked on a journey of rediscovering her love of learning, and by Allah’s mercy, she believes she has found it.

Published in SISTERS magazine June 2011 issue.

Photo taken from http://www.dreamstime.com/childs-play-imagefree1656032

I thought Sheikh Waleed wasn’t going to make it, because earlier, Sheikh Muhammad Faqih mentioned that Sheikh Waleed was at the hospital, tending to Yousef. Later on, as the evening progressed however, Ammar announced that Sheikh Waleed was on the way, and so he gave his scheduled talk. His topic was truly appropriate to his personal situation and he was probably the best person to give a talk on this topic seeing as how he himself had to tend to his ailing son during Ilmfest.

I took notes during his talk, and below, I will try my best to put it together as presentably as I can, so others may also benefit inshaallah.

The talk was titled as above: Houston, We Have a Problem: Success In Crisis

Short Bio of Sheikh Waleed:

Shaykh Waleed Basyouni, PhD, is the Vice President of AlMaghrib Institute and the Head of our ‘Aqidah and Adab Departments. Students know him well for his sincere care for their well-being and progress in studying. His smile is always heart-felt and his unique methods for keeping them engaged are always greeted with appreciation. If you pass by him in the hall, expect to be asked, “How are you finding the class so far?”

He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Islamic Sciences from Al Imam Muhammad University, KSA; did his Masters in Islamic Theology, World Religions and Modern Religious Sects from Al Imam Muhammad University; and acquired a Doctorate in Theology. Shaykh Waleed has Ijaazahs in reciting the Holy Quran and in several books of Hadeeth, awarded by vairous scholars. He studied under great scholars of our time such as Shaykh Ibn Baz, Abdul-Razaaq Afify and others.

Description of the topic as in the Ilmfest schedule:

This world was never meant to be perfect. Allah made this world an abode of tests in ease and difficulties that we learn lessons from our mistakes and are humbled by our successes. How should we react when crisis inevitably knocks on our door? Shaykh Waleed Basyouni will discuss some of the most important success strategies in how to not only survive crisis but to allow for it to make you stronger.

Tests and trials have been attached to the son of Adam.

Sahih International

O my sons, go and find out about Joseph and his brother and despair not of relief from Allah . Indeed, no one despairs of relief from Allah except the disbelieving people.” [Yusuf 12:87]

Sahih International

Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease. [As-Sharh 94:6]

 Go Outside!

For competitive outdoor sports, you can team up with one child while your husband teams up with the other child and play double tennis. If you have younger children, the whole family can take turns minding them. Parks usually have playgrounds, sometimes tennis and basketball courts, and jogging trails. While a family member watches the younger children at the swings, the rest of the family can shoot hoops at the basketball court.

If your children are enrolled in youth sports programmes, the whole family can get involved and cheer on the child’s team if the games fall on the weekends.

For non competitive sports, your family can try hiking, cycling, or fishing. Even a family with young children can spend the morning cycling or hiking on a designated trail. The younger children can be placed in a child seat while cycling, or strapped on a child carrier while hiking. If your family wants more adventure, there are activities such as kayaking, river rafting and rock climbing.

If these are too much, but you still want to be outdoors, a day in the park flying kites or tossing a frisbee, capped with a homemade picnic is more than enough for a enjoyable family weekend. Whatever activities you choose, make sure everyone is having fun, and don’t forget to point out and reflect together on Allah’s creations as you enjoy the outdoors.

Scout Your Area

Depending on what’s available in your area, you may find businesses and organizations offering weekend workshops/programmes for children, and some of them may even be free.

Some home improvement businesses offer free carpentry-based workshops as part of their marketing. Even pre-schoolers can participate in building items such as pencil boxes, cars, or birdfeeders by assembling pre-measured parts.

Public libraries or organizations may host a variety of workshops for children of all ages.  Don’t forget to check out the science museums, bookstores, arts and crafts businesses, organizations, and community recreation centers. Be sure to take an active role in whatever your child is delving into, be it writing, carpentry, sewing, baking, cake decorating, or arts and crafts. Make it a family affair even if you are not directly participating.

Strengthen Silaturrahim

If you live in the same city as your parents and extended family, the weekends can be a means of enjoining what Allah has ordered to be joined.  Spending the weekends visiting them is a great way to teach your children the importance of keeping relations and doing ihsan to relatives. It thereby becomes an act of worship for the whole family, and inshaallah cements a strong bond of family ties. If your parents live in a different city but within driving distance, some weekends can serve as a road trip. Just make sure not to overstay.

Seek Ilm

Particularly in the west, opportunities to attend Islamic classes and conferences are increasing. Spending your family weekend seeking Islamic knowledge together has multiple benefits in this world and the hereafter. By attending these classes, you are emphasizing the importance of seeking Islamic knowledge by modeling it, and you are teaching your children how to use the weekends in the way of Allah. However, seeking knowledge comes with its own difficulties, so on the outset, this may not seem to be an enjoyable way to spend the weekend. If you have small children, you may need to arrange for babysitting or take turns among family members, and you might spend the whole weekend attending classes. Either way, with the correct intention and execution, the difficulty is worth it.

Give Back

If there is a need for volunteers in your community, make it a family affair by including your children when you volunteer. You and your children can volunteer at your local masajid and non profit organizations such as the soup kitchens, animal shelter, Red Cross, etc. You can do it as a family or support your children as volunteers. Let them help with set up, run little errands such as relaying messages to other volunteers, help make signs and posters, hand out leaflets, man booths, and make sure to commend them on their effort. Inshaallah this will serve as a continuous deed for you and your children and teach them to give back to the ummah.

Stay Home

Sometimes, weekends can be the only time to sit back and relax at home, though chores would probably still await you. No matter. Just turn it into a family affair! Many hands make work light and fun. In the end, the whole family gets to enjoy a cleaner home.

This would also be a great time to gather your husband and children in the kitchen and prepare lunch or dinner together. Or, if you have accomplishments to celebrate, however insignificant they may be, bake a cake and decorate it together. Who says you can’t spend a memorable weekend at home?

Plan, Save, and Enjoy!

Some of these events and programmes could be free or available at a minimum cost. They could be advertised in newspapers, TV, or radio. It might be a good idea to join different clubs, mailing lists, masajid, and e-social network such as Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds to get this information. Be on the lookout for coupons and deals. With proper planning, your family weekends can be truly enjoyable emotionally and financially. You might even get free or greatly discounted meals for the family and no dishes to do.

Whatever way you choose to spend your family weekend, make sure everyone’s enjoying it, so your children have those memories to look back to.

Written for publication in SISTERS January 2011 issue. Collaborated with a co-author to produce the final published article titled ‘Something for the Weekend’.

I started reading this book during our drive through New Mexico and Texas, part of my read-ahead for my high schooler’s modified New Mexico history learning approach. She couldn’t bring herself to plow through the textbooks, and I didn’t have the heart to force her to, so I suggested she approach learning it through historical fiction. She readily agreed. However, upon searching for Young Adult historical fiction set in New Mexico, I came up disappointed. I then turned to adult historical fiction. There are many. I slumped in exhaustion. If I pre-read even the Young Adult novels, that means I have to pre-read the adult fiction even more! I didn’t look forward to reading historical fiction set in New Mexico. New Mexico, despite its beautiful and breathtaking landscape, didn’t really capture my fancy, as I feel it to be too mired in historical confusion for me personally. So when I picked up this book, it was with a sense of responsibility, not leisure.

Written in the format of letters, which I don’t really like in a novel, I had to plow through it for the first few chapters. Abigail Cronkin, from Virginia, travels to New Mexico with her husband and children in a wagon, after the civil war, because her husband, Clayton, wants to try out the mines in New Mexico. The other wagons with easterners are headed for California, and you could sense how she actually prefers to follow them than remain in New Mexico. But Clayton remains adamant in trying out his luck in the New Mexico mines. Abigail loses her son Josh during the journey, among other tragedies in her life. By now I was caught up in the book, letter format or not.

Abigail’s letters are written to her sister Maggie in Virginia, and apparently, her mother is truly not pleased with her decision to go traipsing off to the wild west when she could have lived a civil life back in the east. This conflict between Abigail and her mother emerges again and again in her letters. There were times where I agreed with her mother as Abigail unfolds the happenings in her life that are filled with hardships and difficulties. At some point in time, even Maggie, her own sister whom she is close to, judges her decision and ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilized’ ways where the structure of the society obviously lacks a lot of eastern and white society’s decorum. One would think that Abigail would take offense, and she did, but eventually, she resumes her letter writing, and apologizes to her sister. Several times this happens, and the worst conflict to me seems to occur when their daughters spend some time in New Mexico and Irene, Maggie’s grown daughter, spends a lot of unchaperoned time with a ranch boy, resulting in her being sent back east immediately.

The problems and conflicts in this book made me cringe at times, and many times I found myself wishing Abigail was back in the east. I could also sense the arrogance of the whites in Abigail’s letters. I also understood better now why New Mexico’s literacy level is as it is. I’m reminded of this middle school boy we talked to at one of the farms we went to. He’s into Rodeos and his father told us how his son is more interested in entering Rodeos and is not interested at all in pursuing academics. When I asked the boy, he showed his disdain and disinterest in school. In this book, Osborn articulately depicts how even civilized whites from the east during those times could turn ‘wild’ from living in such an untamed land. The mountains, canyons, mesas, rivers, blooming desert flowers and cacti could bewitch and lure you to their depths. Such was what happened to Abigail’s daughter, Margaret, who grew up practically attached to her older brother George who was always out in the desert on his horse. As societal customs then frowned upon girls handling cattle, Margaret grows up with a constant and bridled longing to be out there with her brother, and gives Abigail a hard time. Eventually, the yearning and longing won out and Abigail is left with two children who left her to be out there in the wild. Amy, her oldest daughter, turns out to be the only one who she can count on, and it is her granddaughter who reads her letters long after she has passed.

What I love about this book is not the plot however. The characters, well, I didn’t really bond with them as much either. But what captured me about this book was Abigail’s artistic skill. The New Mexico landscape, which to me, is rather depressing, is depicted with such beauty and flourish in this book, through Abigail’s artistic eyes. She paints the sunset, the Indians, the Mexicans, the landscape, the desert, the mountains. The description of the colors of the sky in her letters bewitched me. I have seen those scenic phenomenon throughout my years here so far in New Mexico and they truly are paintings in my mind, just as they are in Abigail’s mind when her sight deteriorated in her old age. As I progressed through this book, I realized how beautiful New Mexico truly is, and I found myself appreciating New Mexico and its beauty, its history, and its people. The Spanish words and terms have always baffled me, making me feel like I’m in a place I don’t want to be in. I’ve come to cuddle up with the names of desert plants like pinon, mesquite, and juniper, especially when I look through the homemade salves and balms sold at the Co-op and farmer’s market, and have even experienced their Allah-given healing properties. No wonder the Native Americans held their medicine man or woman in high esteem. The herbs and medicine they utilized truly have the healing properties from Allah. Subhanallah.

They call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment. I can understand why. The mystical aspects from the Indians incorporated into the seemingly magical landscape spread out before them create the Land of Enchantment. The colors of the sky, very visibly apparent day in day out add more to the magical experience. The sudden storms that create flash floods and revive the barren desert give the desert a dangerous reputation, and of course the rattlesnakes are no stranger to the list of dangers of the desert as well. I can’t help but tie this to tauheed, and it’s so easy to see how all these signs, the creations of the one and only Creator, can lead one to come to a conclusion of ‘Land of Enchantment’. This is itself is proof to the power of that Creator. A desert dweller, if guided by the rightly guided, can learn to appreciate these signs of Allah and come to a conclusion that there is a Creator, and that all these signs all eventually bring one to Him. The beauty, the danger, the colors, the death and life, all are proof of Allah. The signs of tauheed are everywhere, and in the desert, where everything is open and visible, it is even more so. And maybe that is part of the wisdom of me being here, that I appreciate these creations, reflect upon them, and bring myself to the concrete conclusion of the majesty and power of the Almighty. These creations are not just beautiful, they point to a greater being that is All More Powerful. The beauty is not just to be appreciated as is, the beauty is for us to reflect upon, and we have to pierce beyond the display of colors and mountain peaks and perfectly flat mesas to arrive to a deeper understanding of what Allah intended us to have.

Isn’t it amazing that in the desert, so much life is present? The colors you see in the desert of New Mexico belies one’s understanding of a ‘desert’. The colors you see in the sky, not obstucted by any man-made construction, but rather, made more intense by the regal presence of the mountains and mesas, cool your sight while also revitalizing your spirit. I thought about the psychology of colors, and how the desert is dull yellow. I have always been depressed by the dull yellow of the desert. Even its plants have that dull green shade, at least in the part of New Mexico I’m living in. But I also found some vibrant stimulating warm colors such as red, purple and bright yellow in the desert that come from the desert flowers. Then you have the azure blue of the sky as the backdrop, and believe me, the shade of blue of the sky you see is the most pleasing blue there is. Imagine if Allah had made the sky gray, or red, or orange, or even white. Why blue? Blue is calming. You can just look up to the blue sky and all your worries can flutter away, even if just for a while. In the desert, the dull yet sometimes golden yellow contrasts with the calming blue, and it brings balance into perspective. At two ends of the day, displays of greeting and farewell fill the never-ending expanse of the sky as a spectrum of colors fill every inch of it. And even when complete blackness covers it, sparkling beauties twinkle at you. I can’t help staring at the night sky here in the desert. I can  better understand and appreciate why Allah made the stars as adornment. They are like those sequins you find on your black abaya and hijabs.

This book truly brings out the beauty of the New Mexico desert. The plot is gripping. The characters are well developed. But it’s the artistic depiction of New Mexico that did it for me in this book. I believe I am slowly falling in love with this ‘Land of Enchantment’ even as I seek to leave it.

Chemistry was not one of my favorite subjects, even though I love my high school chemistry teacher. Now, if high school chemistry was taught via baking, I might have more love for it. I love baking. It’s chemistry and optional art afterwards, after all the chemical reactions have simmered down. You don’t realize how much of chemistry baking is until you engage in gluten free or allergen free baking. Trust me. I appreciate baking more than cooking because I didn’t grow up learning the art of cooking. But baking appealed to me because it requires following precise instructions, and that’s somewhat ‘academic’, which was what I was engrossed in growing up.

For years I have been indulging in baking, trying out new recipes, letting of some creative steam afterwards with some assembling and decorating. At one point in my life, I even believed I might make a living doing it. All that came to a halt when my youngest child was diagnosed with multiple food allergies. All of a sudden, I lost my desire for baking.

After listening to this,

I reflected upon my life and sought to figure out what Allah wants to make manifest with this trial of food allergies. Thinking back, I realize that this is one of those tests in my life I am not reacting to with grace. I find it a burden. And at times, I’d grumble about it. But after looking deep within myself, I think I can kind of figure out some of the reason why this test befell me.

Maybe I went overboard with my baking. Maybe I was taking things for granted. Maybe I was becoming too lax, and maybe, my focus in life was getting to be far away from where it should be. Allah was redirecting me. Knowing myself as well as I do now, I also realize that this test is tailored to my personality. I am a stickler for details. Allah knows I can handle this test, and while I may have lamented over the hardships it imposed on me, He knows I will eventually find it in myself to live with it.

My son’s allergies have changed our lifestyle. As of now, it seems to be for the better, but I’m sensing that even in this, we may be overlooking some things that we should rectify in this new lifestyle. It’s amazing how tests steer us in different directions, and may those directions we take, be good for us in this world and in the hereafter.

And so, now I spend maybe 90% of my time in geek world; homeschooling and learning Quran. The remaining 10% are my breaks, which, as I type, are happening right now. It is during these brief breaks that I find myself rushing to my creative pursuits. In the previous break, I spent 3 days sewing, which came out of this nagging guilt from looking at the stacks of fabric that have been part of my family for years. For this break, I am finding myself baking up a frenzy, not for our culinary pleasure mind you, but for my allergic son’s deprived palate.

First off, baking for him, is not the same as baking for us. His allergic reaction is anaphylaxis. So I’m very particular on avoiding cross contamination when preparing his food. This basically means, that when I bake for him, the countertops, tables, measuring cups, measuring spoons, bowls, etc have to be very clean, with no traces of dairy, eggs, peanut, wheat, or fish. This then translates into rewashing these clean utensils just to be sure. It also means there can’t be any traces of flour, eggs, dairy around, which means, I can’t have my canister of all purpose flour sitting on the counter, opened and used, while I’m making these allergen free baked goods. It can get pretty stressful, because any cross contamination could render the baked goods inedible to my son.

Then of course, there is the chemistry. Because he’s allergic to wheat, I can’t use normal flour. This sent me into the world of flours, and oh boy, did I learn a lot about flours and grains. All these other flours I have to use, do not have gluten. Gluten is what helps binds things together in normal all purpose flour, and is also what helps give texture to the finished baked goods. Without it, your baking can result in a lot of flops. I’ve had some flops in my normal baking years, but, these are affordable flops. All purpose flour is not that expensive. But when you have flops in gluten free baking, you’re talking money in that sink hole. These other flours are expensive!

Berry Millet Muffins

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time nor patience to do my own experiments in allergen free baking, except for one success story; allergen-free banana cake. So, I rely heavily on others’ experiments. For a while, because of the unfamiliarity, cost, and lack of time and energy, I even stopped looking for allergen free recipes. I get intimidated and discouraged when I see unfamiliar ingredients such as agave nectar or flax seed meal. It took me years to become familiar enough with these items to finally step out of my comfort baking zone and try them out. Try them out I did. Thanks also to Cybele Pascal’s The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook which I checked out from the library. I tried out some of her recipes and they work wonderfully well, and they taste swell too! I finally bought agave nectar, and learned a bit about glycemic index, something I’ve been evading for a long time. I told you, chemistry was not one of my favorite subjects. I can’t believe I actually went to the Food Science department after  graduated in Computer Science to ask how long it would take for me to complete a bachelor’s in Food Science. They said, with a lot of cramming, it would take three years. Forget it. That’s what I said to myself.

chest freezer is filling up with my son’s allergen-free baked goods. I’m making him some for the road trips we are to take in a few weeks, and hopefully they will also last and keep for his breakfast and snacks and occasions where we attend potlucks and invitations. So, this break, it is becoming apparent that I am to spend it filling up my freezer with my son’s baked goods. I rather enjoy it though, despite that one mishap that occurred with Karina’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. I have successfully used this recipe before, but recently, I think I may have messed up in the mixing process, such that the end result had me in a foul mood. I ended up with globs of thick sugary flops. Other than that though, I’ve been baking up a storm these past few days, and enjoying it immensely. It’s no secret that I also have a love of food blogging and food photography, and so, it is in these rare occasions now, that I manage to have the time and energy to bake and take photos. I can’t say I have the patience to do the set up for the photography sessions, but I’ve resigned to taking simple shots, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve accomplished thus far, alhamdulillah.

So, till my next break. I wonder what I’d be scheduling to do for that one.