Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

homeschool

Making Kombucha is surprisingly minimalist

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Someone in my neighborhood posts regular SCOBY giveaways, and so one day I decided to pick one up out of curiosity. Never did this before, and I’m not even a big fan of kombucha (they give cans of them away at street festivals and events, but I don’t recall being impressed). But hey, with kids there are always projects you can add to the curriculum.

So the little girl and I went to pick it up and the gal handed it over in a plastic container with barely any liquid. Scoby is short for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast, by the way. It’s the living home for bacteria and yeast, which turns sweet tea into tangy, fizzy kombucha. The scoby grows to cover the liquid’s surface area, sealing the fermenting kombucha from the air. Kitchn.com says to think of the scoby as “the coral reef of the bacteria and yeast world. It’s a rubbery raft that floats on the surface of the kombucha.” (It’s a great lesson plan for young kids!)

I didn’t actually have time to see what entailed this whole kombucha-making operation before picking it up, and we didn’t have a glass jug to put it in. So I schlepped over to a thrift shop across the street and found this Bellco glass spinner flask. This piece of lab equipment sells for ~$279 and it was sitting under a pile of dust in that thrift shop with a $4 tag.

The SCOBY promptly sank to the bottom of the vessel.

There’s no shortage online of Kombucha-making advice, and the directions I followed are here. I threw black tea and sugar into a pot of boiling water (NYC tap). Then, since the first fermentation needs a cup or two of “starter” liquid I had to hunt down some unpasteurized, unflavored commercially sold Kombucha. Every bodega and grocery and cafe person I asked in El Barrio looked at me with a side eye (“kambu-whaaa?”), pointing to the guava juice instead. Thanks, dude, random “healthy” beverages won’t do. After 20 blocks I finally found an Upper East Side health food shop that carries not one but five different brands of it.

We placed the scoby in the flask (the little girl says it’s feels like a wet gummy), then mixed the tea with starter Kombucha and poured it in. We plugged up the arms with champagne corks, covered the top with a cotton square, and stuck the whole thing in a corner where it requires you leave it alone for 3-7 days. Totally forgot about it til we did laundry next and when I looked – voilà!, mama had a baby scoby! It’s quite exciting to make something grow, no?

After the 2nd fermentation the kombucha was taken out of the flask, mixed with sweetener, and put into fermentation bottles (I only had one) for 3-10 days. The whole process is surprisingly idiot-proof – though I will update this post after we test the end result in a few days. Reminds me of another fermented probiotic beverage we made last year, Finnish lemonade, which was a hit with the kids and was super simple to make.

If any of you happen to be nearby, I’m happy to send a bottle home with you. Hey, there might even be a scoby in your Christmas basket this year, or scoby dog treats, or….! (I hear scoby hotels grow out of control!)

After a few days mama scoby floated slowly to the top. After about seven days there was a baby scoby.
Here’s a better view of mama scoby and her baby.

Technology fun

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I love technology, and wish I had more of it in my background. Check out how this guy makes iridescent tempered chocolates with a 3D printer, in the first tweet below. He provided all instructions free on his twitter feed. And imagine how much less painful organic chemistry is, if learned this way, second tweet below. The learning possibilities are endless for homeschooling curriculums.

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to homeschool or not in nyc?

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Catching up on some long-overdue reading about homeschooling. Had no idea how big a movement it is, but I’m not surprised.

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From The Profound Ways that Schooling Harms Society, perfectly capturing why more parents are taking this route:

…interesting not only to look at what your children are required to learn in school, but at what they are not required to learn.  While your kids are very busy toiling over algebra and chemistry, international trade agreements are being forged and currencies are being manipulated by entities that most Americans don’t even know the names of, much less the inner workings of.  Kids are compelled to solve quadratic equations and write essays on Shakespeare, and they graduate without understanding how to calculate the interest on credit card debt or decode a mortgage agreement.  They learn an old fable called “How a Bill Becomes Law,” while corporate lobbyists draft legislation that will pollute their air and water, deny them health care and unemployment benefits, and put barely tested drugs on the market and genetically modified organisms in their food system.  And in the developing world, teenagers are struggling with — and more often than not, being defeated by — English Romantic poets and high school physics while the World Bank and IMF are negotiating incentives for foreign investment that will lead to their ancestral lands being sold out out from under them to foreign timber and mining companies and Wall Street speculators in agricultural land.

Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them. They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world. The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.

More intriguingly:

In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating globalstandards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.

Yikes.

That techies are homeschooling in droves is interesting, since it reflects the people we know personally. Here’s a piece from Feb 2015, with useful links: The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids.

…Problems arise, the thinking goes, when kids are pushed into an educational model that treats everyone the same—gives them the same lessons and homework, sets the same expectations, and covers the same subjects. The solution, then, is to come up with exercises and activities that will help each kid flesh out the themes and subjects to which they are naturally drawn.

Even back when we thought we’d stay in Asia, families have plenty of resources to draw on to homeschool. We’re fortunate to have moved to NYC where it’s one big learning environment. I was about to sign up for a book launch of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas at Queens Museum to hear a friend read one of his essays when I wandered over to its education programming. Most museums have curriculum and tour options that can be adapted to my 3 and 5yo and their friends. Here are some from prominent cultural institutions I googled in under 5 minutes:

There are readings and literary events for kids at indie bookstores (e.g. character visits at The Strand look cool if your kids know Elmo, Clifford and other widely-read characters), and high-quality curriculums on the web developed by people in varied disciplines. Check out #homeschool and #curriculum on your favorite social media. Every borough has homeschooling groups and co-ops, and the members often invite other groups to join their major events and activities.