Light and Momentary

Saturday night miscellany

I peeked over at Facebook for the first time in two weeks and discovered that I had 87 notifications. It was enough to make me decide to stay away from social media for another week. (I miss you, Twitter pals! I wish I weren't so bad at moderation!)

I've been feeling weird about posting things from my ordinary safe boring privileged life, as if I shouldn't say anything unless I can say something important. I was also thinking about Make Our Garden Grow, from the end of the operetta Candide, and its message that even when the world is a hot mess you can tend your own little patch of it. So here are some updates from my little patch of the hot-mess world.

Tomorrow I am making the trek south to see my parents and (I hope) my siblings. I am only taking a subset of kids because of unforgiving work schedules, so this is not an internet announcement that I'm about to leave my house empty. It might be an internet announcement that some of our plants will need watering, since Elwood is not usually the plant-watering person. If you're in the neighborhood, and they look thirsty...

It's been so good to have Joe home after his year away. I am soaking it up this summer, because in the fall, when our 18yo leaves for college, we'll only have 2 kids at home. But I am not going to think about that right now. Today over lunch we had a long noisy conversation about movies which led to a heated discussion about movie brackets (e.g., Lion King or Little Mermaid?). "What else can we bracketize?" Joe wanted to know. "Epic poetry!" his older brother shouted, as he hastened to make us a bracket. "Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost?" he asked. 

Paradise Lost for sure, I told him, and pulled it off the shelf to illustrate with some Book IX. He countered by pulling out Paradiso. I stood on a chair and kept reading, because height confers authority. Then he stood on a chair to read too, and since he is 6'2" I was no longer the tallest voice in the room. Model of wisdom and maturity that I am, I climbed on the table to declaim:

The Tempter, all impassioned, thus began.
O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving Plant,
Mother of science! now I feel thy power
Within me clear; not only to discern
Things in their causes, but to trace the ways
Of highest agents, deemed however wise.
Queen of this universe! do not believe
Those rigid threats of death: ye shall not die:
How should you? by the fruit? it gives you life
To knowledge; by the threatener? look on me,
Me, who have touched and tasted; yet both live,
And life more perfect have attained than Fate
Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot.
Shall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast
Is open? or will God incense his ire
For such a petty trespass? and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of death denounced, whatever thing death be,
Deterred not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of good and evil

But since he had the pen and the bracket in his hand he overrode me, despite the combined authority of my height and my example.

I should probably remind the kids that there's no standing on the lunch table at my mother's house. Even if there are burning questions at stake.

Ambition Decisions

I bought The Ambition Decisions after reading Laura Vanderkam’s WSJ review. It’s by two Northwestern alumnae, a hair younger than me, who interviewed their sorority sisters about their career trajectories. So far I am finding it pretty navel-gaze-y. Anybody else reading it? I think I need a nice palate-cleansing chapter of Pickwick. 

Optimism Level: Sub-Basement

i am so bummed about Justice Kennedy’s retirement. I disagreed with him in all the places you might expect me to, but I appreciated his centrist-ish POV. 

Moderate is a valuable quality in a Supreme Court justice. I am trying not to go all Chicken Little on you here, but I doubt his successor will be any flavor of moderate.

I still can’t believe McConnell pulled off that Merrick Garland business.

CSA Year 7, Weeks 3-5

Stella has taken over the morning guinea pig feeding, with the result that the guinea pigs have had more CSA veggies for breakfast than I might have liked. They wound up eating one of our two heads of lettuce from week 3, along with the purslane and the funky Asian greens from week 4. Whoops! We'll try to feed the guinea pigs more frugally in week 5.

In week 3 we were supposed to get garlic scapes and rhubarb, but the boys swapped out the rhubarb for more garlic scapes at the trade table. I ate them ALL ALL ALL in my scrambled eggs. I do love garlic scapes. The mesclun and the other head of lettuce went into taco salad; the sauted radishes and spring onions flavored the taco meat. We've had sugar snaps every week, and every week we've eaten them straight out of the bowl on Tuesday night. I was going to sauté the radish greens, but I am afraid they deliquesced in the fridge instead.

In week 4 I made a big batch of slaw with the new batch of radishes and the salad turnips. I cooked up the broccoli in olive oil with garlic and served it over pasta; Joe ate up the spring onions in his scrambled eggs one day at lunchtime. I should have eaten a little more salad, because there are a few leaves of week 4 lettuce left over as we start week 5. But it turns out that it's much easier to use up one's CSA allotment if the weird stuff disappears into the guinea pigs.

Heading into week 5: sugar snaps have already been devoured. I would like to roast the beets for soup, but I still have no oven. Would it work to roast beets in a toaster oven, do you figure? Perhaps I will try it and report back. Or bite the bullet and buy an oven. One of the two. Hm. It's 11:00 and I am feeling uninspired. This week's list of veggies that need destinies: cabbage, salad turnips, broccoli, beautiful little red onions, and basil. Pesto slaw might be just the thing.

The right amount of angry

It was an especially pleasant Sunday here: lauds and scripture over coffee, followed by conversations with Stella and Pete and a browse through the New York Times. I finished a few of the NYT puzzles and headed off to Mass with Joe and Pete. At doughnuts afterward I met a friend's husband for the first time.

I talked a bit about politics with my family. Pete had just come back from Boy Scout camp, where the Fox News influence was pervasive, and so we talked about the idea of a consistent life ethic and my (possibly wackadoo) theory that Russian dollars are flowing to some right-wing media influencers. But it was a lighthearted conversation, and after lunch I headed outside for some yardplay. (It doesn't really seem like yardwork when the weather is that lovely.)

I smote weeds with Pete, and finished two more KenKens, and bound off a sock while I watched a movie with Stella, and went out with Elwood in an effort to make some remodeling plans. Elwood grilled a delicious dinner, and after I read some Harry Potter to Stella I wrote a lightweight post about a favorite book. I went to bed early.

The New York Times headline this morning was the first I'd heard about Trump's immigration tweet, the one in which he opined that "we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came."

I imagined the way my Sunday would have gone if I hadn't been avoiding social media: the easy early-morning conversations filled with tension and perhaps a few surreptitious retweets of favorite zingers, the distracted thoughts about JUSTICE FOR ALL FOR CRYING OUT LOUD tugging at me during Mass, the burning desire to talk it through intruding on the social hall small talk.

It seems likely that the weeds would have gone unchallenged as I refreshed Twitter in search of useful commentary (and notifications). It is probable that I wouldn't have settled down to watch a movie if I'd been scouring Facebook for people defending Trump's position. It is certain that I wouldn't have written a fluffy and somewhat tone-deaf post about Sam Weller.

"What should I do with this information?" I asked myself this morning. "Not much," is probably the answer. Direct some of our June charitable giving to organizations that support immigrants' rights and family reunification -- but I was going to do that anyway. Vote like a vengeful Valkyrie* in November -- which has been on my to-do list since November 9, 2016.

*Probably Valkyries lack voting privileges, since their homeland is not a democracy, but I am sticking with it for the alliteration.

I have been so angry so often since Trump was elected, but I am not sure how much forward motion that anger has fueled. I have a responsibility to be an informed citizen, but how informed is informed enough? When the nation is governed by a man who thinks the norms of our democracy are superfluous contrivances, what's the optimal amount of angry?

FAMDRAL --> FAJDRAL

I sailed into Pickwick Papers right after the spring semester ended, but almost immediately I hit a long stretch of summer semester doldrums. I'm thinking about that pot of mental energy that equips me to do anything requiring perseverance and estimating that 80% of it was going toward my summer class. Then there was the 15% that has been in constant use since November 2016, attempting to cope with our new political reality, leaving only a dinky little sliver to get to grips with the meandering beginning of The Pickwick Papers.

But now! Sam Weller has arrived upon the scene, and Mr. Jingle is about to show his nature more plainly, and meanwhile Mr. Pickwick is in hot pursuit. Will the bamboozled spinster aunt escape unscathed?

When I first decided to reread Pickwick this year for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-Along, I thought I'd do a fun little series of posts about it. Instead I told you all to read it and then disappeared on you. If you started reading and bogged down, this is an invitation to get yourself unbogged. Hilarity awaits!

Notes from inside my closet

I'd been thinking for a while that I wanted to take a step back from social media. It was eating up too much space in my head and too many hours in my day. At the same time the idea of stepping away seemed daunting. What about all the stuff I would miss if I took a break??

Last Saturday after choir practice I noticed that there was no line at the confessional. I slipped in and talked about my social media issues: the way I'd stayed up too late the night before, scrolling angrily through the Facebook page of the friend most likely to raise my blood pressure. The way I get all self-righteous and snarky. The ongoing low-level anger. The unwillingness to give any of that up, even in the presence of what felt like a nudge from the Holy Spirit. "So I am here seeking grace," I said, with low expectations. Afterward in the Adoration chapel I opened up my journal. In all caps I wrote "OKAY 7 DAYS NO FB NO TWITTER." 

I thought it would be painful. I kept waiting for it to get painful. But instead it has just been...delightful. I got up and ran in the cool of the morning. I read hundreds of pages of Harry Potter to Stella. I finished knitting another sweater. I made some headway on the email backlog, and got the van's oil changed (without thinking twelve separate times "I should get the van's oil changed"; I just went and did it), and planned/executed a half-birthday celebration, and texted the guy (finally) about the kitchen/bath remodel, and drove kids all over creation for summer activities, and played my violin for the first time in years, and made good progress on my research while also not spending too many hours in the office, and figured out a painless way to use all the CSA radishes*, and read Pickwick in the sunshine at the pool. I'll stop there but I could keep going.

*Blitz them in the food processor. Cook them down with the taco meat. Really, I promise.

Coincidentally (or not), I had an in-person dinner with local friends on the calendar for this week. I knew that one of them was struggling, but I only knew what was going on with the others from social media posts. I walked home from that dinner thinking about how poorly social media posts align with reality. I mean, it's not like any of them were making stuff up on social media. It's just that real life is three-dimensional, and social media posts squish that down so it will fit on a two-dimensional screen. And we need people to see the real us, our whole selves. Remember in A Wrinkle In Time, how the kids couldn't breathe freely on a two-dimensional planet? Maybe there's a Lesson there.

OH NO, that sounds super-sanctimonious. I am sorry for being preachy but I also can't bring myself to delete it.

I felt cautious about saying, "I am fasting from social media." When I wanted to tell Elwood last night about how lovely it had been I said, "Wait, I have to go in the closet." 

"Jamie," queried the ever-patient Elwood, "why are you in our closet?"

"Because Jesus! Prayer! Fasting! Closets!" But then I came out, because I am weird enough to shout from inside the closet but not quite weird enough to stay there and converse. 

So. It feels a little weird to trumpet my fast on the internet, but I am doing so as an invitation, not a boast. I am going to re-up for another week. Want to join me? 

Coming Soon: Vacancy

Soon, very soon, there will be some space in my head, you guys. Tomorrow is the LAST DAY of my summer class. Their final is all automagically graded, leaving me with twenty assignments and two discussions and also the grade appeal from one of last week's discussions (NOT THAT I'M BITTER ABOUT THAT ONE OR ANYTHING). I can do this.

Earlier in the day I was going to make The Big List, or maybe two. I always tend to start with the list of summer obligations, like "find a mason" and "get the pictures into albums," and then I have to think harder about the fun stuff. Kind of backward, I know.

But it's been a long day, my friends, and I'm having that thing where my judger is kind of broken because it has been judging ALL DANG DAY. Remember how I was all concerned about my students having to learn a month's worth of material in each week? Only belatedly did it dawn on me that I would also have to do a month's worth of grading every week. I am not sure I can exercise good judgment about summer Big Lists when my judger is plumb wore out, as they would say in the land of my childhood. Huh, you can tell I'm good and tired if I'm talking about things being plumb wore out. Making a Big List is kind of an art: too big and you get demoralized, but a mom's reach must exceed her grasp or what's a nine-month contract for?

So maybe I will just focus on getting the summer off to a good start. The plan for tomorrow: gentle run, brief yoga, a little catching up in 1 Kings, breakfast with lots of CSA veggies, and then check those exam settings. (Online exams, man-- there are so many details. If you're not careful you can make a total hash of things.) Put in a solid 90 minutes of undistracted grading, and then go to the pool with Stella and the sadly neglected Pickwick Papers. Oooh, maybe I'll make a salade Niçoise for dinner, and take a vote about whether to go to the new Incredibles movie or the fun thing at our church. I will enjoy the summer more if I am eating well and exercising regularly. Perhaps tomorrow I will post some firmer resolutions on that front, but tonight I am only going to plan for one day.

The dishwasher is running; the kids are all upstairs. Off to bed with me.

The Vulnerability Hangover

Back at the end of April Andrea left a comment about a vulnerability hangover. I had never heard of such a thing, but it made immediate sense to me-- an apt description of the regretful naked feeling that surfaces when you wonder if you've shared too much.

I'm feeling that way right this minute, actually.

Back in the spring a friend asked me if I would take on a leadership role for the fall women's retreat. Yes, I told her; yes, definitely. It felt like a clear call. Soon afterward I was in the shower when I was seized by an idea for our first meeting. I shut off the water and ran to the office in a towel so I could write it all down. We would reflect on Genesis 3, and on 2 Corinthians 4, and I had just the funny story to lead in with, and and and--

In the moment it seemed clear to me that the Holy Spirit was at work. As our first meeting drew nearer I was less convinced. Maybe it was a weird idea. Maybe it would be uncomfortable. Maybe I should buy one of those books with pink covers filled with Reflections for Busy Women or whatever and read one of those aloud. Let the professionals do the heavy lifting.

And then I went to Mass last weekend. First reading: Genesis 3. Second reading: 2 Corinthians 4. Gospel: perfect wrap-up for the central point I was making about the other readings.

How's that for freaky-deaky??? If you're not Catholic, you might not be aware: that trio of readings only appears once every three years. Here it was, the last set of Sunday readings our team would hear before we began our preparation. And here's something else freaky-deaky: I was telling myself back in the spring that I shouldn't fret about the challenges of creating new reflections each week. "God will provide at the right time," I told myself. In the wake of that Twilight Zone moment at Mass I realized I had a clear direction: I'll dive a little deeper into the Sunday readings at each of our meetings. We can mix it up -- individual reflections, small group conversations, some large-group sharing -- but that will be my framework. I won't have to come up with Eleven Saints You Should Know or Eleven Fruits of the Spirit Except Wait There Are Actually Only Nine.

And yet-- here I sit, feeling a little vulnerable. If you leave it to the professionals, it's less personal when people don't like the thing you've planned and prayed over. So. If you're a pray-er, I'd appreciate a quick one-- that I could stay out of my own way, and give these women what they need.

Homeowner hassles

Another item on my list of summer tasks is to hire a mason. The above-ground portion of our foundation is brick, and it needs a little TLC. At the base of the concrete steps up to our front porch we've had a bit of soil wash away, and I'd like to fill in that space as well.

I am not quite sure how I took on the role of "person who hires tradespeople" in this marriage, but somehow it landed in my lap. Here's the thing I am currently mulling over: you need a complicated mix of skills to be a good mason.

The most important part of the job, of course, is to be competent at grinding out the old mortar and putting in the new. But it's not the only part of the job. The electricians who installed boxes for new overhead lights for us were competent electricians, but we didn't get the bill for a year after they completed the work. The last guy to give us a bid for kitchen flooring could probably have installed a new floor competently, but he was so rude about my house that I would never hire him. I'm not going to put too much emphasis on people skills -- we once hired a painter who had fabulous people skills but incompetent slacker painting crews -- but you can't come into my house and be rude to me. I also get uncomfortable with effusive salespeople. Last summer I was playing the piano when someone came by to give me a bid on new basement windows. I was limping along through something difficult when he rang the doorbell, but he said, "Oh, wow, was that you? I thought it was a recording." I was like, "Come on, buddy, just give me the estimate and save the buttering up for your toast." But if you ever need a recording of Halting Un-lyrical Piano Interspersed With Unhappy Muttering, I'm on the case. 

Last summer I made a masonry decision, and then the guy I chose to do the work just never showed up. Does a scheduling fail predict a masonry fail? Did his phone eat my message? Do I try again with him or look elsewhere? Are those online reviews for real or are they sock-puppetry?

This feels like an important part of grownup-ness that I am perpetually just muddling through. You too? 

I need to blog about that.

Our house needs a little love. When you squish a big family into a small house for 13 years, things get shabby. I'd like to paint pretty much everything, and rip out the battered carpet, and OOOOHHHH the basement is kind of horrifying. But first things first: our downstairs bathroom and the kitchen need some attention. Back in the late winter or early spring, the guy who has done handyman work for us in the past came over to hear about what we wanted to do. And then...nothing. No estimate in the mail, no email follow-up. Just silence.

In April we learned that at least one important piece of mail had gone astray on its way to us, which made me wonder if Handyman Bob's estimate had met a similar fate. Ever since then I've been thinking to myself "must text Handyman Bob to ask him to re-send estimate via email."

Two months is a long time to think that thought.

One piece of my procrastination is the worry that maybe he doesn't want to do the job. "Not you again, Jamie Gladly," I imagine him thinking. "You're too high-maintenance for me!" Even I recognize that this thought is more likely to be the tortured effluvium of Anxious Brain than it is to be a reflection of reality. The bigger issue is that getting an estimate means making decisions. Finding an energy-efficient fridge that fits in our little galley kitchen. Picking the replacement flooring. Discovering exactly how many cabinet pull options exist in the world. Ignorance on that last topic might actually be bliss, I'm thinking.

Oh, and also, can I get even less rational for just a moment here? I keep reading about people who remodeled their kitchens and then regretted the expenditure when they needed the money for, like, cancer treatment or an acrimonious divorce.

Huh, now that I have typed it all up the implausibility factor is at about 25 on a 1-10 scale. (It's a log scale, too.) I knew it would seem less overwhelming if I just wrote it all down. Last night at dinner one of the kids asked me about the plan for getting the oven working again. (It died last week.) I thought to myself, "I need to text Bob, and Decide All The Things, and then not get cancer." I pulled the brakes on that crazy train and said out loud, "I...need to blog about that."

The kids just looked at me, clearly puzzled. "Or," said the 18yo, "you could use your mouth to have a-- what's the word? it starts with a c-- OH YEAH, a CONVERSATION about it."

But sometimes a person needs to blog about it.

Nobody knows how cold my toes

Once upon a time we had one computer. We took turns.

And then the computers proliferated. Elwood found me a secondhand laptop so I could get out of the house to work on my dissertation. A boy bought himself a computer with his camp counselor earnings. The schools started requiring students to bring laptops. Maybe something similar happened at your house.

Although I posted enthusiastically about my laptop's return from the grave, it was not a lengthy return. It powered up, looked around, functioned briefly, and then flopped back into the grave -- disgusted, I assume, with the failure of the House Republicans to respond effectively to Trump's bananapants assertions about the rule of law. I am guessing that I could get a little more life out of it if I reseated the battery again, but opening up the case to reseat the battery every time I need to charge it is not a sustainable strategy.

I floated a wild and crazy idea. I said, "Elwood, what if we shared a computer again? What if we both used the dining room desktop? We could get a secondhand tablet for the times when one of us just wants to browse and the other one needs an actual computer."

We decided to give it a whirl, and it is going okay. Except. The dining room desktop sits on top of a vent. We do not crank the AC in our house. The thermostat is set at 84 during the day and 78 at night. Right now the compressor is working to bring down the temperature from 79 to 78. And I, my friends, am FREEZING. I backed up as far away from the keyboard as I could manage, and I still had to stop writing this post to get put warmer clothes on. I am bundled up in my robe, thinking about going back for warm socks. If this were a laptop I would get up and move to the couch, where the risk of hypothermia is negligible, but that's harder to manage with a desktop.

Maybe I could grow some extendable arms, like Mrs. Incredible.

Maybe I could go make myself some hot cocoa.

Maybe I could recruit a passenger pigeon to carry a handwritten version of this post to the good folks at Typepad.

Or maybe I could wrap up this post and go sit somewhere warmer.

In the winter at 10:15pm, the temperature in our house is coasting down from 68 to 62, the nighttime thermostat setting. Does it make sense that I am shivering? No. But I'm shivering anyway.

Year 7, Weeks 1 and 2

This is the seventh year that we've participated in a local Community Supported Agriculture program, and it's easier than it used to be to make use of the food we get. I thought I might blog about it this year, on the chance that it might be useful to someone googling "what do I do with this kohlrabi?" (Answer: make kohlrabi slaw; peel, shred, and mix with shredded carrots, mayo, squeeze of lemon, drizzle of maple syrup.)

Week 1: sunchokes, sweet potato, beets and beet greens, rhubarb, sorrel, green garlic, green onions, 

One of the keys to using things up is batch processing. Last week I roasted the overwintered sunchokes at the same time as the overwintered sweet potato and the new season's beets. I also slid the chopped rhubarb into a corner of the oven with a little water and bunch of sugar; there they cooked down into soft stalks basted with cerise syrup. I didn't plan to use the beets or the rhubarb that night, but they were one step closer to being edible.

Rachel-who-needs-a-blog told me a few years ago to try cooking sorrel in cream and using the resulting sauce on fish. It is a dreadful drab color but just close your eyes: it tastes amazing. I also put some of the sorrel into scrambled eggs, where it was tart enough to be pretty penitential.

Over the weekend I took my rhubarb syrup and turned it into a gelatin dessert with a little coconut milk. It was not a hit. The kids don't really like the taste of rhubarb. I like the way it tastes, but you need so much sugar to make it edible that I prefer not to eat it. When I first unmolded the jelly it lay on its plate like a pale pink flower. The kids ate about two-thirds of it, after which it warmed up into a flabby mess the color and consistency of an uncooked chicken breast, left out on the dining room table for any peckish children. I pitched the last third of it.

Some of the green garlic went into scrambled eggs along with the beet greens, but I finished up the week with green garlic and green onions left over.

Week 2: more green garlic and green onions, basil, arugula, mesclun, carrots with tops, sugar snaps, and a big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens

The sugar snaps vanished over dinner, as they always do, straight out of the bag of CSA goodies.

I am going to use the green onions and most of the green garlic in this recipe from the NYT. I probably don't want the baby garlic bulbs in there, since overbrowned garlic gets unpleasantly acrid, and I am going to save out the scapes for my scrambled eggs. But I figure it should work to add in the greens. I'll report back.

The mesclun and some of the arugula will turn into lunch salads, which I will enjoy more if I make myself a batch of carrot-miso dressing. And hey, I have just the carrots for that. Our farmer encouraged us to use our carrot tops in pesto, but probably we will feed ours to the guinea pigs instead. The big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens will go into green potato soup, where they will be joined by the remaining arugula. That leaves only the basil. Caprese salad tomorrow, I suppose, to accompany the...whatever I decide to serve under the garlic-onion sauce, and pesto on Thursday with the remainder.

Top tips for CSA newbies overwhelmed by greens: cook 'em down (spinach soup for one meal rather than spinach salads for six meals), blend 'em up. That bunch of herbs is less likely to turn black and squishy in the fridge if you turn it into pesto than if you dole it out a few leaves at a time.

If you can't say anything nice

I try to post mostly good things about my job here, or to be vague if I feel the need to grumble. BUT YOU GUYS my job is making me a little hyperventilate-y just now. I am teaching an online summer class and it is not going well.

I think before you take a summer class it's easy to think of summer classes as laid-back. Mellow. It's summertime; ergo, the living is easy. Students also tend to think that online classes are easier than the face-to-face versions. So a summer online class should be approximately as onerous as taking a nap, right?

Except I am the person trying to squish a semester's worth of material into a month, and there is no way for that to be anything but onerous. This is stuff they will need to know, and many of them are just not learning it. A few of them don't even seem to be attempting to learn it. I can view the user stats on the back end of my course management software, and I still have students who have viewed a single-digit number of files here in week 3 of the term.

My chair and I had a helpful conversation about the class last week. I also sat down with our campus coordinator of online education, and implemented a couple of her suggestions. But here is a true fact: I can spend a lot of hours captioning my lecture videos to spell out the hard words for my students, but it's going to be easier for them if they watch the videos than if they don't. I have several students who are taking this class while working full-time. One is taking two online classes and also working full-time. As far as I know the Ministry has not issued her a Time Turner.

Right now the very last student is taking the second exam. It's tricky to write an exam for an online class. I don't want them to be able to google their way through it, and so I'm asking them to think and synthesize. I've been watching the scores trickle in today and the conclusion is unmistakable: thinking and synthesizing are hard.

One-way enthusiasm is also hard. I am doing my best to give them engaging and thought-provoking lecture videos. I am trying to set up online discussions in which they can learn from each other while contemplating interesting questions.

It doesn't seem to be working.