Tag Archives: school

chocolate-chip banana muffins

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One of the first baking recipes I ever learned to make was my mom’s banana bread. To me, banana bread just tastes like home. And it’s a great recipe for someone like me who hates to waste food. I prefer to eat bananas when they are just ripening, still a little green at the tips. When they begin to get brown spots, I really don’t care for them. But thanks to Mom, I don’t have to worry about them going to waste — I just whip up a batch of banana bread…

…or banana muffins! In the past few years I’ve gotten really into making muffins instead of bread because I just find muffins so much more portable — easy to slip into a lunchbox or grab for breakfast on the way out the door. {That said, you could easily adapt this recipe for a loaf of bread if you’d prefer!}

I added chocolate chips to Mom’s recipe for a little extra treat to start the school year off right. 🙂 Hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

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chocolate-chip banana muffins

  • 1/3 cup butter or margarine
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 & 3/4 cup flour {I used whole-wheat flour}
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 cup ripe mashed bananas {I used two bananas}
  • 1 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line muffin tin with paper cups and set aside.

2. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well.

3. In a separate bowl, sift together dry ingredients.

4. Add a portion of the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, mixing well. Then add a portion of the mashed bananas. Continue alternating dry ingredients and mashed bananas until the entire mixture is combined. {Batter will be slightly lumpy due to the bananas.}

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5. Add chocolate chips.

6. Spoon batter into paper muffin cups, about 3/4 of the way full.

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7. Bake for 22-25 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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Enjoy! These are great for breakfast, a mid-afternoon snack, and also make a great healthy dessert!

Hope your week is going great,
-Dallas

saturday upsides: a cozy night in

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Monday is the beginning of a new semester at Purdue, and I’m gearing up to teach my two courses: First-Year Composition and Business Writing. Being back in Indiana means returning to below-freezing temps and snow on the ground, in addition to transitioning from festive vacation mode back to the everyday stresses and obligations of my normal life. Yesterday was filled with meetings and course prep, and {as often happens when I travel} I feel my body fighting off a little bug that I probably picked up on the airplane coming back from California. I’ve been downing green tea, Airborne, and plenty of water, which is seeming to help! Fingers crossed I fight it off and am feeling rested and energized come Monday.

My Saturday Upside is that I am reminded again and again that so much of happiness is based on not what happens to you, but what you make of it. {Or, as Coach Wooden so eloquently phrased it: “Things turn out for the best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.”}

Instead of feeling stressed or nervous for the start of the new semester, I’m choosing to feel excited and hopeful that it will be a great one!

Instead of dreading a long day of meetings, I chose to focus my mental energy on how great it would be to see my friends and colleagues again after a few weeks away. And it was!

Instead of feeling bummed about fighting off a cold, it’s been a great reminder at the start of this new year to slow down and spend time taking care of my body.

I had the perfect cozy night in last night: an easy homemade chicken-and-quinoa recipe I’m eager to share with you soon, M&M brownies for dessert, and snuggling up on the couch with a Redbox rental. I’m looking forward to a laid-back, restful weekend!

What are your plans for the weekend? I’d love to hear your Saturday Upsides!

🙂 Dallas

school paper organization

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Happy Wednesday! Hope you’re having a great week! It’s been sunny and gorgeous here. I have been eating lunch outside whenever possible. There’s a grassy quad outside of Heavilon Hall, the main academic building for the English department where I spend most of my time, and it’s so nice to sit under the trees, soaking up the warm sunshine. Hard to believe it will all be covered in snow in a few months! As a California transplant, that is one thing I still can’t get used to — the extreme change in seasons. When it’s summer, I can’t imagine it ever getting cold. When it’s winter, it seems like summer will never come again!

{Or maybe I just need to stop being so dramatic…} 😉

At the beginning of a new school year, I always start off with such great organization intentions. I’ll buy a new binder or notebook. I’ll print out my schedule of where I need to be and when. I’ll redouble my efforts to keep a daily planner. {Something I tend to be good at for a while, and then forget to write things down for a few weeks and get off-routine. Does that happen to any of you guys?}

Organization is certainly important to being a successful student, and it has become extra-important for me since I’ve started teaching. I want to model good organization habits for my students. In previous years I’ve never been supremely disorganized — in fact, from the outside, it probably looks like I have everything together pretty well. {At least, I hope my students think so!} But it’s been something I’ve wanted to get an even better handle on. I hate carting around old papers I no longer need. I hate having to rifle through papers to find a handout for a student who was absent. I hate that sinking-stomach feeling when I realized I didn’t make copies of an assignment sheet I’d been planning to go over in class that day. Etc, etc, etc …

In previous semesters teaching, I tried to use a 3-ring binder to organize everything. It worked pretty well, but was a little bulky and cumbersome to carry around, and the cover started to fall off after about a year. It could also be a little tedious to have to 3-hole punch all my papers, and as the semester progressed I would always accumulate a pile of papers hanging out in the front pocket that I hadn’t gotten around to 3-hole punching and organizing into the proper divider.

This year, I decided to try a slightly new tactic and use an accordian file folder instead of a binder to organize my teaching papers:

I found this one in the $1 section of Target. Look familiar? Yep, it’s the same style I used to organize my stationary stash, only this one is clear instead of blue. I like that it’s made of a durable-feeling plastic, has an easy-to-use elastic clasp, and folds up pretty narrowly to easily slide into my bookbag.

I am teaching two classes this semester, Freshman Composition and Professional Writing. Most of the assignments and grading for Professional Writing are done online through a course website, so I only needed to use one section of the accordian folder for that course. I put that section in the back since I teach Professional Writing directly after I teach Freshman Composition. The rest of the file folder I used for my Freshman Composition course. I organized my papers as follows:

– First section: Attendance sheet, class calendar, and handouts for the day.

– Second section: Copies for the upcoming week.

– Third section: Papers to pass back.

– Fourth section: Papers to grade.

– Fifth section: Professional Writing.

This new system is working really well for me so far! It’s forced me to purge all my unnecessary & old papers, stay organized week-by-week, and keep everything in one place. And it’s easy to carry around with me, allowing me to get a lot of grading and responding to student work done in small snippets of time throughout the day. I find it a lot less overwhelming to grade in little-by-little chunks instead of in one big block of time on the weekend.

How are you getting organized this school year? What helps you stick with an organization system? I’d love to hear your tips for organizing the tons of papers that inevitably pile up during the school year!

Always,
Dallas

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-Time spent: 15 minutes
-Cost: $1

marvelous monday: back to school

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Hi everyone! Today is my first day of school for the new semester. I always get a little nervous on my first day meeting a new group of students. My dad always says that’s good because it means I care — and boy, do I care! I SO want my students to have a positive and productive semester and come away from my class feeling like they learned something {hopefully many things} that will help them now and in the future!

This semester, I am excited to be teaching two classes: a freshman composition course and a business writing course that is geared for upperclassmen. While I’ve taught freshman composition the past four semesters, this year is slightly different because I am teaching a themed “Learning Community” course; the students in my course are also taking an Introduction to Entrepreneurship course together this semester, and I am working with the professor of that course to coordinate our assignments. I’m really excited about it! In addition to writing I have a background in entrepreneurship, and some of my favorite courses in my undergrad days were in the entrepreneurship department. {I was lucky to have really amazing professors who continue to be my mentors and cheerleaders today!} I want my students to have the same positive, inspiring, energizing experience that I did. We’re going to be doing projects like marketing proposals, interviewing experts in their dream field, and elevator pitches — I can’t wait! It is my first semester ever teaching business writing, and I am planning to have an entrepreneurial bent to that course as well.

I can feel an electricity in the air on the first day of school. It’s like the entire campus is abuzz! Too soon, the energy fades as we all get swamped with due dates and schoolwork and grading and mile-long to-do lists. But this year, I am going to try to keep that electric enthusiasm going all semester long. I remember missing school dearly in my “gap year” after I graduated college and before I began my Master’s program. The next time I feel bogged down or overwhelmed with a huge stack of papers to grade, I promise to remind myself of how grateful I am to be here, teaching and learning and doing what I love.

You don’t need to be going back to school to bask in that back-to-school energy! Fall is in the air. It’s the season of getting organized, getting a jump on that project you’ve been putting off, and getting into your groove. There are so many resources and opportunites all around us, so many connections to be made and ideas to be shared. How will you make these last four months of 2012 a masterpiece?

Have a marvelous week!
-Dallas