Hot Sauce

It began relatively innocent enough last spring: our last surviving working
Sister was retiring. Sister Veronica Marie not only devoted her life to her
God but also to her children. Part of the duties that sister took on for
herself was maintaining the gardens around our school. Which over the years
had become a great undertaking since at one time these gardens were used
to supply vegetables along with the flowers and plants for aesthetic purposes.
Franciscan beliefs stress the balance between nature, spirituality, community
as well as education. It was with great sadness that we accepted Sister's
departure, so in the spirit (or is that spirituality) of things we decided
to take over some of the older overgrown garden areas and plant our own
vegetables. The ecology aspect was rather intriguing as we tried to figure
out how to keep the local animals from eating our plants. The community aspect
had us trying to figure out what we would plant. For some odd reason everybody
this year was obsessed with peppers, it seemed the hotter the better. Thus
we had a large crop of jalapeno, habenero, and mild peppers as opposed to
a garden of varietal vegetables.

As we came closer to harvest time we decided that we would use the internet
to "sell" our peppers. But how? We delves into agricultural businesses, farmer's
markets, and the like. We ran into roadblocks because we could not sell the
"fresh" product and we had no means for smoking or drying them. Therefore
we did some problem solving and came up with an idea for preparing them somehow.
Perhaps because of my affinity for the condiment we started to look at how
we could "utilize" these peppers in a more resourceful and flavorful manner.
We then combed the internet once again looking for recipes for how to make
a "hot sauce", not recipes that "contained" hot sauce, but actually how to
make it. This proved fun, frustrating, and enterprising. The end result was
some 15 different recipes. We split the class into six teams randomly. We
created these hot sauces. Each team picked their recipes, bought the necessary
ingredients, adapted their recipes for their peppers and then converted the
recipes to make a specific amount. And then we bottled them with care.

To develop a greater sense of economy we decided delve into the fearsome
arena of marketing. We searched out advertising that fit propaganda and other
manipulatives; we analyzed these commercials and discussed how they worked,
why they worked, and why they did not. We then went into a campaign to advertise
our particular brands. All of this culminated in a "Food Show" a "Hot Sauce
Convention" where we were able to secure the assistance of our food service
specialists who cooked up some chicken wings, arranged vegetable platters
and refreshments. We then invited the entire school to parade through our
convention hall. They were our customers, purchasers of "Hot Sauce" condiments
and their job was to sample the wares and basically try to be convinced by
the different teams on which hot sauce that they would buy. (Of course some
of our boys seemed to be eating up the profits as it were.)

All in all it was fun, educational, and a little on the spicy side. And as
one person who was from outside of our agency noted "They're just regular
boys having fun and being goofy."

There is more importance to that last statement than first appears. Firstly,
our boys are all
Special
Education students. The majority of them are defined as having emotional
or behavior disorders and/or learning disabilities.. What this "technically"
means is that these boys do not work well in groups or individually, they
have difficulty staying on task, are always talking out, they have no or
improper social skills, they have difficulty learning and so on and so forth.
All of our boys have been kicked out of the "regular" schools. This means
that these are the "worst behaved" boys of the "worst behaved" boys in the
regular school. Often than not this means that the regular schools do not
want to deal with these boys and have decided that they are uneducable --
so they send them to us.

This then lends credence to my second point: at the "Hot Sauce Convention"
we saw teams of boys working together, assisting each other, explaining the
processes that went into their product and its development. They explained
how they grew the plants from seeds. The talked about how the chipmunks and
squirrels ate the peppers, they discussed their sorrow when some of the plants
were trampled by other youths. They talked about how they had to water, weed,
nurture their plants through the hot summer days. They discussed how they
put the recipes together, how they searched for information using the internet.
The displayed their brochures, slogans, advertising campaigns, they delighted
in serving their "customers", in sampling each others products and they were
able to agree that they may like someone else's product better than their
own -- but that did not mean that theirs was bad.

My second point is this: given the tools all kids can learn, we have
all kinds of minds
and all of these minds work in marvelously different manners. We can learn
intricate problem solving techniques and transfer this knowledge through
verbal and written communication. We only have to be given the environment
and nurturing to do so.

This cannot be done in a setting standardized to a percentage of the population.
We need to rethink
our schools.