Tag: cooking

Putting Play in Its Place

Posted on by Rachel Lonas

Inspired by our neighbor’s suggestion, last night my husband suggested we make pasta sauce for dinner. Our neighbor had an abundance of cherry tomatoes and sent us a picture of her one pan tomato roasting sauce ingredients — Olive oil, salt, pepper, onions, garlic, feta cheese, and tomatoes. Instructions: roast, pulverize, and voila — you have sauce. We piggybacked on her idea and made more of a puttanesca style.

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When my own children ask why I am so obsessed with gardening, I explain that it’s really just an excuse to play and experiment. I get to learn what grows and under what circumstances and environments. I get to eat what I grow which encourages more creativity and playing even if it’s a small dish or snack. So it makes sense that I want to instill (or perhaps invoke) that spirit of curiosity in the girls who come to Maple Key no matter what “skill level” they come in with. That’s the joy of being imaginative — there is an endless supply of creativity available!

Perhaps because right now my children don’t have bills to pay or places to drive or multiple schedules to organize, they don’t see what the big deal is for an adult to make space for play even if it’s for 5 minutes of checking on and watering your okra and bush beans. It often just looks like a chore or a huge investment of time to them. But I assure them that for most adults play is, sadly, the first thing to go when you prioritize all the daily things you must juggle.

My college roommate (who is a new tutor for Maple Key this year!) doesn’t garden, but finds her play in singing and being in actual plays. She has spent her summer in community theater. An incredible ensemble of professional players!

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Fiddler on the Roof!

There are so many places we can find our play.

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Legos at the local library!

So I say, here’s to bringing back play as a part of a healthy balance in life. Now back to more pickling 🙂

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Taking ChatGPT For a Spin

Posted on by Rachel Lonas

I did it. I caved. I read too may articles not to. Whether people in my profession like it or not, chatbots are changing the writing landscape and teachers and professors are adapting to the new technology seemingly overnight.

My husband’s cousin says its great for generating content for his IT newsletter. It has saved him time and energy and he can tweak it by asking it to do more specific things. My husband (whose co-workers generally have grad degrees or more) said that they have used it to generate blog post titles and the suggestions have actually been pretty solid. I have seen articles interviewing realtors who say it saving them a ton of time on content creation. I have seen it suggested that ChatGPT is also a fantastic “study buddy” who can help generate questions on a topic you’re going to be tested on. It does seem to have many uses in field of writing, so I tried to see if it could title a blog post I had been thinking about composing.

They all sounded like clickbait. So I gave it some feedback and its responses were way better!

I settled on #5 and then asked it to write a blog post based on the title. That’s where it got interesting.

Its first attempt read like a Wikipedia article — factual and logical but devoid of any voice. I suggested it give me more sophisticated syntax and poetic style. Its next attempt was markedly better in style, but still too broad. I said I needed more specific stories or narratives to incorporate into the ideas of the piece. It gave an example of “cooking grandmother’s lasagna” but that’s about as close as it got to being relatable. I asked it to write more like the New Yorker. It just shuffled sentences and paragraphs around. I asked it to write like The Atlantic and it did the same thing. In frustration I finally said “this needs to be more literary” and it just couldn’t do it.

What are my conclusions? Nothing definitive because my understanding is that these bots are only going to evolve and get smarter the more we use them and tinker. It seems to have the 5-paragraph-essay (blech!) down to a science, but it could not create a unique voice. I wonder how long that will last? Let’s just say, for now I am going to keep writing my own blog posts!