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"'When a lovely flame dies, Smoke gets in your eyes.' Song 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'"by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, performed by The Platters
Smoke is the essence of barbecue. It is what differentiates barbecue from other types of cooking.
Originally all barbecue and grilling was done with logs of dried hardwood as the sole fuel source. Heat cooked the meat, and smoke from the wood and from dripping juices imparted a distinctive seductive scent that is the essence of barbecue. But it is difficult to control the heat and flavor when cooking with logs, so today, only a few expert pitmasters outfitted with special rigs cook with logs only.
Today, most grills and smokers use charcoal or gas to produce the heat, although a few use wood pellets or electricity. They get flavor and aroma from the addition of wood in the form of wood chips, chunks, bisquettes, pellets, logs, or sawdust. When heated, they make smoke. Smoke can also come from meat drippings, which are laden with fat, protein, spices, and even sugars from sauces. Adventurous cooks can also get smoke from dried herbs, tea, and even hay. But not all smoke is created equal.
Smoke is a combination of tiny particles that we can see in an aerosol mixed with water vapor and a complex cocktail of gases. The exact mixture is crucial and it can add elegant vanilla and brown spice notes or coarse bitter ash tray taint.
Cookers that get heat from logs, charcoal, gas, pellets, and electricity each produce noticeably different flavors because each fuel produces a unique combination of combustion byproducts.
Combustion, as it applies to barbecue and grilling, is a sequence of chemical reactions between oxygen and another fuel that are ignited producing a change in the chemistry of both, creating heat, light, and smoke with its blend of particles, water vapor, and gases.
This video gives a good overview of this article.
Burning wood
Hardwoods, deciduous trees which include fruit and nut woods, have compact cell structures, and they are the best woods for cooking. Softwoods, like pine, fir, spruce, redwood, hemlock, and cypress, are all evergreen, coniferous trees, and they have more air, more pungent sap, and they burn fast. They are not recommended for cooking. We'll talk more about different wood types below.
Fresh cut hardwood has a lot of water in it, up to 50% by weight, it produces a lot of steam and off flavors during combustion, and it takes up to 45% more energy than charcoal or gas to dry it out, so most wood for cooking is hardwood that has been air dried.
Dried hardwood is rarely totally dry, perhaps 5% water. Of the remaining 95%, about 40% is cellulose, about 40% hemicelluloses, 19% lignin, and 1% minerals. Actual numbers will vary depending on the wood species, subspecies, age, soil, and climate.
Cellulose and hemicelluloses are large molecules made of carbohydrates and sugars. Lignin is another complex compound that gives wood strength, and it is found mostly in cell walls.Wood also contains oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen among many other molecules. The minerals in wood include, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and heavy metals. Although there are only trace amounts, these minerals can significantly impact the aroma and smoke flavor.
According to The Forest Encyclopedia, smoke flavor is influenced more by the climate and soil in which they are grown than the species of wood. This is very important to note, especially when you are caught up in the game of deciding which wood to use for flavor. This means that the differences between hickory grown in Arkansas and hickory grown in New York may be greater than the differences between hickory and pecan grown side by side. More on this below.
When burned thoroughly in a lab, wood produces about 8,600 BTUs of heat per pound, about half of the mass is converted to carbon dioxide and about half to water vapor. In the real world of a grill or smoker, wood is never burned thoroughly.
Wood has a lot of airspace in it and is a good insulator. That's why you can set one end of a stick on fire and hold the other end. It is also why wood burns unevenly with different parts at different temperatures.
Dr. Blonder explains that during combustion wood goes through four stages. When it is really going good, all four stages can be happening at once.
Stage 1 - Dehydration (up to about 500°F). In this stage wood must be heated from an external source like a match, kindling, rolled up newspaper, or (horrors) lighter fluid. The wood drys out the rest of the way, water steams and evaporates, and some gases like carbon dioxide are given off, but there is no flame or heat produced.
Stage 2 - Gassification and pyrolysis (500 to 700°F). Here's where combustion begins. The compounds in wood begin to change, and some come off as flamable gases, some form oily liquids and tars. The gases will burn if you give it an ignition source like a flame or spark, but they will not ignite on their own. Let's call the combustion point 575°F on average for the sake of discussion.
Stage 3 - Burning bush (700-1,000°F). An apt term coined by Dr. Blonder to describe the phase most important to cooks. Flame appears and more gases emerge, among them nitric oxide (NO) which is essential for formation of the smoke ring in meat. In the sweet spot of about 650 to 750°F, the best aromatic compounds for cooking come off, among them guaiacol and syringol, which are primarily responsible for the aromas we call smoke. Some are ethereal and dissipate, and that's why barbecue doesn't taste the same after it has been reheated. As the temp rises above 750°F, acrid, bitter, and possibly hazardous compounds are formed.
During the burning bush stage, heat creates gases that rise from the fuel creating something like a gas bubble, but the wood itself is not consumed. The bubble is surrounded by air that is about 20% oxygen. If there is any source the gas bursts into flame as the gases and oxygen combine. If all the gases are able to combine with the oxygen, a blue flame is visible. This never happens with wood or charcoal so the flame glows yellow or orange. If unburned gases escape, the bubble cools and creates smoke. Charcoal and wood fires are inefficient and so their flames are orange, yellow, and red.
Stage 4 - Charcoal formation (above 1,000°F). Most of the organic compounds have burned off leaving behind pure carbon, or char, which burns with little smoke.
Burning propane and natural gas
A gas grill has a venturi, a valve that blends the gas and oxygen like a carburetor. When there is too little oxygen some of the fuel is unburned and sooty. The soot glows yellow and orange, like an ember. When properly blended all the fuel is completely burned and the flame is nearly blue. Click here to read more about gas grills and smokers and how they work.
When propane or natural gas combine with oxygen and they are ignited, they produce water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and not much else. Wood and drippings are needed for flavor.
Burning charcoal
Charcoal is almost pure carbon made from wood that has been preburned in an oven with very little oxygen. When burned in a grill or smoker, charcoal, like wood, it burns hotter than wood and produces a lot of combustion byproducts, although fewer than does wood. For a detailed explanation of how it is made and how it works, read my article on the Science of Charcoal.
Electric cookers use a glowing metal coil for heat, so there is no flame, and no combustion gases. Even if you put wood chips on an electric coil, the flavor of the smoke is vastly different, and to many tasters, inferior for most foods because it lacks the complexity that the combustion gases from wood or charcoal produce. Even though propane or natural gas don't produce a lot of combustion gases, they burn at a hotter temperature producing better smoke.
What is smoke?
Smoke includes as many as 100 compounds in the form of microscopic solids including char, creosote, ash, and phenols, as well as combustion gases that include carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, syringol, and liquids such as water vapor and syringol, an oil.
Trace amounts syringol are responsible for much of the smoke aroma we love and trace amounts of guiacol are responsible for much of the taste of smoke. The composition of smoke depends a great deal on composition of the wood, the temperature of combustion, humidity, and the amount of oxygen available.
If the wood does not get enough oxygen it can still undergo pyrolysis and gassification, but not burning bush. It will not burst into flame, it will smolder, and smoldering wood produces lots of smoke and a different flavor than burning wood. Why would it not get enough oxygen? If the intake vents and chimney are not open wide enough. Click here to learn more about controlling vents and chimneys. Getting enough air can be a problem in kamado type smokers that are so well insulated and retain so much heat that we often have to choke off airflow to keep it from running too hot.
Wood also plays a role in the color of the meat and the formation of the crust on the meat, also called the bark. Below are two slabs of ribs with the same spice rub but no sauce. The one on the left was cooked on a charcoal smoker and the one on right was cooked on a gas smoker. You can see and taste the difference. They were both excellent, but different. The one on the right had a bit of a bacon or ham undertone, typical of gas smokers.
Blue smoke for long cooks
Smoke from wood or charcoal for cooking can range from bluish, to white, to gray, to yellow, brown, and even black. The most desirable smoke is almost invisible with a pale blue tint. You can see it below. Blue smoke is the holy grail of low and slow pitmasters, especially for long cooks.
Dr. Blonder explains that the color depends on the particle size and how it scatters and reflects light to our eyes. Pale blue smoke particles are the smallest, less than a micron in size, about the size of the wavelength of light. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. Pure white smoke consists of larger particles, a few microns in size, and they scatter all wavelengths in all directions. Gray and black smoke contains particles large enough to actually absorb some of the light and colors.
Black and gray smoke happen when the fire is starving for oxygen, and they can make bitter, sooty food tasting like an ash tray. Billowing white smoke is common when you just start the fire, and when the fuel needs lots of oxygen as it goes through stages 1 (dehydration) and 2 (gassification). If it doesn't get enough and if the fuel is not emitting gases for stage 3 (burning bush combustion), the fuel smolders and produces white smoke. For short cooks of thin meats, you might just want the heavier, more intense white smoke, and we'll discuss that below. Here are some tips on how to get blue smoke for long cooks.
Get your smoke from wood. Don't worry if your wood bursts into flame. A lot of beginners fret over their burning wood and want it to smolder and belch smoke. You'll use more wood if you let it burn, and you'll have to struggle a bit to maintain temperature control, but you'll get better flavor.
Charcoal belches flamboyant white smoke when it is igniting. You don't want to add meat until the coals are fully aflame and at their peak in heat, when it has a white coat of ash. Then add wood at the start of the cook. Remember, charcoal is for heat, not flavor. If the temp runs up a bit at the start of the cook, it's not a big problem. The meat is cold and it can take a little extra heat. Then, when the wood burns out, stabilize the temp.
Keep your cooker clean. Sticky grease on your cooking grates can create black smoke and drip on the food. Grease smoke is not good smoke. Click here for more on cleaning your cooking grates. The black stuff on the walls probably has a lot of condensed creosote in it. A thin layer of neutral carbon is harmless, but black sticky goo is not. Many competition pitmasters power wash after a cookoff. Click here for more on cooker cleaning and maintenance.
Control oxygen. Make sure coals have plenty of oxygen. If coals are choking for lack of oxygen, they burn incompletely and can coat your food with gray soot. If that happens, get the meat off, rinse it, adjust the fire and put it back on. Don't let your embers sit in ash which can smother them. Keep them on a grate above the bottom of the firebox. Knock ash off occasionally and if necessary, remove it.
Use dry wood. Wet wood makes bad smoke. It also cools the fire. Read my article on soaking wood. Some pitmasters will even put the wood on top of their smoker to drive off any remaining water.
Size matters. For long cooks, chunks of wood from golf ball to baseball size work best. For short cooks, like a steak, chicken, or fish, small chips and especially pellets work best because they produce more smoke in a short burst. Some remove the bark from their wood.
Build a small hot fire. You want to see flame. Fires burning in the 650 to 750°F range in the hot spots burn off the impurities that can becreated in an incomplete secondary combustion. That means that you need a lot of oxygen so you want your exhaust vent open all the way. The hot air rising through the chimney will draw in air through the intake vent. You will probably want it open wide or close to it. Low smoldering wood creates dirty smoke.
This is why high quality offset smokers, the ones that look like a big barrel on its side with a small barrel attached, are so popular with experienced pitmasters. But there is a big difference between the cheap offsets at the hardware stores and the serious pits made for competition teams and caterers. Cheapo Offset Smokers (COS) include Brinkmann Pitmaster, Brinkmann Smoke'N Pit Professional, Char-Broil Silver Smoker, Char-Broil American Gourmet, and especially the Char-Griller Smokin Pro. They are nothing but headaches. The doors don't fit properly so you can't control oxygen intake, the walls are thin so they don't retain heat, and they rust. Expensive Offset Pits (EOS) include Horizon, Jambo, Klose, Lang, Meadow Creek, Peoria, Pitmaker, and Yoder to name a few. They are superb cooking tools. The picture below is inside the firebox of Darren Warth's Jambo. His team, Iowa's Smokey D's, one of the winningest cooks on the circuit. Notice that most of it is glowing embers and a log almost burnt to embers, and there on top is a small block of hardwood for flavor. Go to our equipment reviews database for ratings and reviews.
This is also a problem with kamados and eggs. They are so well insulated and so efficient with the heat right below the meat that they typically burn small cool fires and smolder white smoke.
Start charcoal and logs on the side. Start your logs or charcoal on the side and add only hot embers. I use a chimney in a wheel barrow. Remember, when it is burning properly, charcoal doesn't produce much smoke.
Allow the fire to get rolling and allow the pit to warm up. Start the fire well before the food goes on. Warm the walls of the cooker.When a recipe says "preheat" your cooker, do it. Adjust your airflow and get the temp, fire, and smoke stabilized. Be aware of the weather. It is harder to get blue smoke in cold, rainy, or windy weather.
Cook indirect. If the meat drips on the fire, water can douse the embers and fat can burn and produce dirty smoke. These drippings can create flavor, especially for short fast cooks, but for long low and slow cooks, they can cause problems.
Use your senses. It's hard to see the color of the smoke at night, but the smell should be sweet, with meat and spice fragrances dominating. The smoke aromas should be faint and seductive, perhaps like vanilla, not like a bonfire smell.
Use good thermometers. Cooking is all about temperature control. You need good thermometers in your cooker and in your meat. Enter the digital age and get a digital thermometer.
Practice. Do dry runs without food until you can anticipate when more fuel is needed, how to adjust the airflow, and how to react when the smoke starts going bad.
White smoke for short cooks (and when you have a new Pope)
White smoke usually has a compounds from incomplete combustion and prolonged exposure to white smoke is not ideal, it can still make good food. If you are cooking hot and fast, white smoke is a good way to get some smoke flavor on the food in a hurry. White smoke is best for short cooks like burgers or steak.
The best way to create white smoke is to deliberately starve the wood of oxygen and make it smolder. Experiment with containers for the wood. Here you can see a foil packet with holes punched in it and a small aluminum loaf pan crimped to restrict airflow. For short cooks, like a steak, chicken, or fish, small chips and especially pellets work best because they produce more smoke in a short burst.
In recent years there have been a dozen new products brought on the market to hold wood and add white smoke to the cooker. I have played with a number of them, and the one that impresses me the most is this clever design, especially for use with gas grills. It is called Mo's Smoking Pouch.
It is a pouch of fine mesh stainless steel that holds wood chips or pellets. The airspaces in the mesh are small enough that they limit the amount of air that gets in so the wood smolders and never bursts into flame. It puts out plenty of white smoke, usually within a few minutes. Best of all, it smokes just by putting it on top of the cooking grate or you can stand it on edge and slip it between the grates and the back of your grill. You don't have to squeeze it in down by the burners although you can if you need to space on top of the grates. And it works. It holds enough wood for about 15 minutes for short cooks, but you need to refill it, or buy a second pouch, for long cooks like pork shoulder and brisket. Refilling can be tricky since the steel gets hot and stays hot for a while. If you have good gloves, no problem.
Creosote is among the compounds in smoke and it is the Jekyll and Hyde of smoke cooking. On the Dr. Jekyll side, creosote contributes positively to the flavor and color of smoked foods and acts as a preservative, among the reasons that smoking meat was used for preservation before refrigeration. Dr. Blonder says "Creosote is always present in charcoal or wood smoke, and a few components of creosote (guaiacol, syringol, and phenols) are the largest contributors to smoke flavor. No creosote, and the meat might as well have been boiled." On the Mr. Hyde side, "If the balance of the hundreds of chemicals in creosote shifts, it can taste bitter rather than smoky."
Commercial creosote is produced by distilling tars from primarily beechwood or bituminous coal (not charcoal). Careful control of the combustion temperature, oxygen flow, and pressure produce a wide range of aromatic oils and tars. Creosote from coal tar is the black stuff used to preserve telephone poles and railroad ties. Coal tar creosote is classified as a possible carcinogen. Anybody who has a wood burning fireplace knows that creosote from logs can cling to chimneys, clog them, and even ignite, burning down the house.
These industrial chemicals give the creosote found in barbecue smoke a bad name. I am unable to find any research that implicates the small amounts of creosote in barbecue with health risks.
According to Blonder, "When you smoke low and slow at temperatures like 225°F, many smokers require you to control the fire by damping the oxygen supply which moves it below the ideal combustion zone, creating black smoke, soot, and more creosote. Unfortunately, this is often the case with kamado and egg smokers. The best smokers combust at a high temp to create the ideal flavor profile and direct a small fraction of the smoke across the meat.
To control creosote, practice good fire management techniques and practice, practice, practice.
Smoke and food
In a smoker or grill, after combustion, the smoke rises and flows from the burn area into the cooking area. Most goes right up the chimney and very little contacts the food. Blonder explains why: "Around every object is a stagnant halo of air called the boundary layer. Depending on airflow, surface roughness, and so on, the stagnant layer of air around a piece of meat might be a millimeter or two in thickness. When smoke particles approach the meat's surface, they follow that boundary layer around the food. Very few ever touch down. We've all cursed a form of this piece of physics while driving: Gnats follow the airstream over the windshields, while larger insects leave green sticky splats at the point of impact."
So using a spice rub not only adds flavor, but it helps break up the boundary layer.
To show the way smoke sticks to food, we did some experiments.
Blonder suspended three cotton disks in a smoker at 225°F for 30 minutes. One disk was dry, one soaked in oil, one soaked in water. The results were pretty dramatic. The atmosphere inside a smoker is as dense as a London fog, yet no visible smoke stuck to the dry cotton pad. Some smoke adhered to the oiled surface, and far more stuck to the wet surface.
Why does the wet pad gather so much more smoke? Blonder explains that smoke impacting the dry pad simply bounces off because there is nothing to hold it. But the oily and wet pads are tackier. But why does the wet pad attract more smoke than the oily pad? The answer is thermophoresis, according to the physicist.
Thermophoresis is a force that moves particles from a warm to a cold surface. Look at the three beer cans here. First we painted them white. The one on the left was filled with ice water and put in the smoker. The one in the middle was left empty and put in the smoker with the ice water can. The one on the right was left empty and sat on my desk as a control. You can see how much more smoke the cold can attracted. In fact you can even see where condensation on the can ran down the sides.
In the first experiment with cotton pads, in addition to the stickiness of water, the wet cotton pad was cooled by the evaporation of the moisture in the pad so it was well below the temp of the others. That's another reason why it was smokier.
The same thing happens to meat when you put it in the smoker. No matter what temperature your smoker's air is, the center of the meat, which is about 75% water, will never get hotter than 212°F, the boiling temp of water. It will start at about 38°F, refrigerator temp, and rise to perhaps 205°F. In theory the surface could dry out completely forming a very hard bark and it might get hotter than 212°F, but that is rarely the case. In fact, as the interior temp rises to about 200°F, it might even be hotter than the surface which is still being cooled by evaporation. So if you are cooking at 225°F or higher as I recommend, the meat will always be cooler than the air.
To see thermophoresis in action, do this experiment: Empty two beer cans the usual way. Fill one with ice cold water and leave the other empty. Put them in your smoker for 30 minutes. See which one is covered with smoke condensate.
Smoke flavor is almost all on the surface of the food
As we see, smoke particles and gases glom onto the surface of foods. There they may dissolve and penetrate a tiny bit below the surface but not very far. Rarely more than 1/8". This is the same phenomenon with marinades. Meats, especially, are hard to penetrate. Don't believe me? Here's how to prove it to yourself. Get a four pound section of pork loin (not tenderloin). Cut it in half. Do not use rub, and smoke the heck out of one half at 225°F until it is about 180°F internal temp. Use as much smoke as you want. Bake the other half, sans rub, in the indoor oven at 225°F until it is about 180°F internal temp. Let them cool a bit and cut a slice out of the middle of each. Now take a core sample of each as in the picture below. Make sure the center meat doesn't get to roll around on the cutting board in the juices from the surface if there are any juices left in this lean cut. Have a friend serve the centermost parts to you with your eyes closed. No smoke!
Also, building enough smoke to create flavor takes time. On a thin skirt steak for fajitas, there will be much less smoke flavor than on a 1 1/2" thick ribeye steak cooked to medium rare, about 130°F. A thick steak will have much less smoke flavor than a chicken breast the same thickness because the chicken needs to be cooked longer, to 165°F. And a turkey breast will have more smoke flavor than all of them because it is thicker still.
Does meat stop taking on smoke?
There is a popular myth that at some point the meat stops taking on smoke. Sorry, but meat does not have doors that it shuts at some time during a cook. There is a lot of smoke moving through the cooking chamber although sometimes it is not very visible. If the surface is cold or wet, more of it sticks. Usually, late in the cook, the bark gets pretty warm and dry, and by then the coals are not producing a lot of smoke. Smoke bounces off warm dry surfaces so we are fooled into thinking the meat is somehow saturated with smoke. Throw on a log and baste the meat and it will start taking on smoke again. Just don't baste so often that you wash off the smoke and rub.
Less is more and enough is enough
One of the biggest mistakes we make is using too much smoke. Too much smoke can make your meat bitter or taste like an ash tray. I cannot give you a precise amount because each cooker is different and the amount of wood to get the right flavor will depend on the volume of the cooking chamber, the airflow, leaks, how often you peek, the kind of wood you use, basting, humidity, the weather, and of course, your preferences. You will need to experiment, but a good rule of thumb is start experimenting with about two ounces of wood, regardless of the cut or weight. For dense, thick cuts of meat such as pork butts for pulled pork or beef brisket, you can double or triple the amount of smoke. If the results are not smoky enough, you can add more wood on your next cook.
In any case, it is best to weigh the amount of wood you use so you can increase or decrease it as you wish in future cooks. Kitchen scales are very useful tools especially for flour and salts for curing. My favorite is the OXO Good Grips Stainless Food Scale with Pull-Out Display. It can weight accurately up to 11 pounds as well as fractions of an ounce. Push a button and it converts to metric. Put the bowl on the scale and push a button and it zeros out so the bowl's weight is not included. The top comes off for easy cleaning.
Here's where to start your experiments: On charcoal, start with no more than 8 ounces of wood by weight for pork and beef. Use no more than 4 ounces for turkey and chicken. Add it in doses. Put on about two ounces when you put on the meat and add another two ounces when you can no longer see smoke. On gas grills, double the amount because they have a lot of ventilation. Take notes. If you want more smoke after tasting the meat, add it 2 to 4 ounces at a time on subsequent cooks. Keep records of your experiments on a cooking log.
Unless your cooker is designed for it and unless you have a lot of experience, do not try to cook with wood for both heat and flavor. It is too hard to control the temp and the amount of smoke. When you become an expert, you may be able to cook with wood only, but at the outset stick to charcoal or gas. If you are ready to try, read this article on smoking with wood first.
Putting wood to work
So here's how to take advantage of this info.
Use cold meat. As described above, smoke is attracted to cold meat. Do not let the meat come to room temp. Besides, it takes forever for meat to come to room temp. Yet another myth.
Use a spice rub. Rough up the surface with a spice rub. A layer of spices and herbs helps to reduce the boundary layer so more smoke will stick.
Keep the meat moist. You can do this by spritzing the meat with a spray bottle you can buy in a drug store. A mop or basting brush can wash off your spice rub. You can use apple juice if you wish, but it adds very little to the flavor in comparison to the rub and sauce. You can use cranberry or pomegranate for color. But really, all you need is water. And don't worry, opening the cooker every 30 minutes to spritz will not slow the cooking process measurably. Yet another myth.
Add humidity to the atmosphere with a water pan in the smoker. And don't bother putting juice or beer in there. Use water pans in your smoker. They add water to the atmosphere, but more importantly the water slows evaporation keeping the meat's surface moist.
Add wood early but only after the fire is hot. Meat soaks up more wood flavor at the start of the cook, and the colder the meat the more smoke it absorbs. But don't put meat into a cooker with charcoal that is not fully engaged and belching smoke.
Which wood?
Cured (dried) hardwoods with low sap are the best for barbecue, especially fruit and nut woods. They all have slightly different flavors, and it is impossible to describe them. The internet is full of guides attempting to describe the flavors of different woods. They remind me of the florid descriptions wine lovers use. Most of them are just copied and pasted from website to website. I don't find these descriptions very useful. Frankly, I think most of it is a bunch of hooey. More barbecue mythology.
First of all, there are different kinds of each wood. For example, there's shagbark hickory, scrub hickory, pignut hickory, red hickory, and more. There's post oak, white oak, black oak, live oak, pin oak, and more. The climate the tree is grown in can impact flavor. Hot climate drought-stressed Texas oak grown in sand tastes different than cool climate Michigan oak grown in river silt. Furthermore, the amount of bark and can significantly impact flavor. How long it has dried and the percent water left in the wood significantly impacts flavor and aroma. And most importantly, the temperature of the fire, humidity of the cooker, and fuel type have a massive impact on flavor. Then throw your spice rub and sauce into the taste profile. Oh, I almost forgot, then there's the meat. Yakima Valley Washington Apple might taste one way on pork, but will taste entirely different on beef or turkey. Can you taste a smoked rib with Meathead's Memphis Dust and Sweet Baby Ray's sauce and tell me what wood was used? Get real.
To make matters worse, there is no guarantee that the wood in the bag is the wood on the label. Coffee, olive oil, and fish markets are regularly rocked by scandals of fraudulent labeling. How do we know that the bag of cherry wood sold in the big box hardware store is really cherry? When the warehouse for Home Depot calls and orders 10,000 bags of oak and the rickyard only has enough for 7,000 do you think that maybe they might mix in a little hickory to complete the order? You know they don't say "gosh we don't have it, why don't you call somebody else." Then there are pellets. Almost all wood pellets are at least half oak, with apple, cherry, etc. comprising the remainder. They do this to make it feed and burn more easily. What if you bought a tub of butter and it was really half margarine?
Here's the best I can do based on the woods I have used. I compiled this table from my notes and notes of others, but it is crucial that you understand that there are many many variables such as how dry the wood is and the species (there are at least 100 species of genus querkus, aka oak). Remember, I have judged food and wine around the world, I have won wine tasting championships in contests where I had to identify wines blind, and I would love nothing more than to tell you that a particular wood has "nuances of spice with an undertone of mushrooms". I just can't do it. There are too many variables.
I avoid mesquite although it is very popular in Texas. It can be harsh, bitter, and pungent. Hickory is the tried and true mate for pork, but some people find it too aggressive and occasionally it can taste bitter. Fruit woods tend to impart a sweetness, but this may just be the power of suggestion because we know fruit to be sweet. Then there are the exotic woods: Citrus, dried citrus peels, pistachio wood, corn cobs, nut shells, coconut shells, mango, and even mahogany. Who knows?
The choice of wood is crucial when you are using logs for both fuel for heat and for flavor. It is not very important when you are throwing a few chips and chunks into a pile of charcoal or onto a gas grill or even in a pellet smoker.
Stop obsessing over which wood to use. Pick one and stick with it for a while. The quality of the meat, the spice rub, fire control and cooking temp, the meat temp, and the sauce impact the final taste profile far more than the name on a bag of wood. Once you have everything else under control, then you can experiment with different woods.
Avoid softwoods. Whatever you do, never use wood from conifers such as pine, fir, cyprus, spruce, redwood, or cedar. They contain too much sap and turpenes, and they can make the meat taste funny. Some have been known to make people sick. Yes, I know that cedar planks are popular for cooking salmon on, but I don't know anyone who burns cedar as a smoke wood. I have also heard that elm, eucalyptus, sassafras, and sycamore impart a bad flavor. Many woods are can be irritants or poisonous, among them oleander, mangrove, laburnun, sassafras, tambootie, yew, and poisonous walnut (but not other walnuts). A good source for general info about woods is the wood database.
Never use lumber scraps. Some lumber is treated with chemicals that are poisonous. Never use wood that has been painted. By the way, that's one of the reasons I don't use lump charcoal. You can see lumber scraps in there and it makes me wonder how careful they are to prevent treated lumber from getting in the bag.
Never use wood that is moldy. Some molds contain toxins.
Use dry wood. Freshly cut "green" woods have more sap, burn irregularly, and impart different flavors than dried wood. Air dried wood is usually slightly wetter than kiln dried. Kiln dried used to be rare but with more and more restaurants using wood for grilling, kiln dried has become more common as health departments demand it to kill insects, molds, and bacteria. The wood is placed in a room and heated to 200 to 240°F to drive off the moisture. If you buy kiln dried, ask for 15 to 22% moisture. The water provides steam that makes the droplets larger and stickier.
Bark or no bark? Some wood has more bark than others and that can impact the flavor. Some folks say you should remove the bark. Bark has more air in it and is less tightly bound so it will burn differently than heartwood. I don't remove it, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I know top cooks who remove it all. I know one cook who says hickory bark is the only one good enough to use.
What do I prefer? If I was on a dessert island I would want a bag of apple chunks and a bag of small apple chips or pellets. I would use the chunks for steady slow release smoke, and the chips or pellets for quick smoke. Apple is mild and rarely tries to take center stage.
Where to get it? There are a number of barbecue specialty stores opening around the country and there may be one near you. Most hardware stores carry only hickory or mesquite, but a few carry expanded barbecue supplies and a selection of woods. Watch the newspaper for ads from stores promoting a lot of grills. Then give them a call. Another option is to go to an orchard and ask if you can have some dead trees or limbs but be careful, they could be laden with pesticides or other sprays. Also there are a number of places to buy wood on the net. Click here for contact info for online wood suppliers.
Bottom line
Sterling Ball is a champion pitmaster whose trophies include the Kansas City Royal Invitational also owns a guitar string business. He describes the art of making tasty smoke as similar to tuning a guitar. "You need control of your instruments, the pit, fuel, oxygen, fire, and heat. And you need to practice."
Click here to see the original unedited data from Blonder's experiments.


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SkullMonster42 wrote:not reported: when i create an automation clip for mixer track volume and change from playing song to playing pattern the last value of the automation is used instead of the song init value.
I don't see anything wrong here. The song init value is not used when playing in pattern mode, as far as I know.
I'll double-check however.

subset: commoncrawl


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Category : Invoice.
Topic : Cool invoice template design. Author : Velma Cunningham.
Posted : Sat, Sep 07th 2019 15:02 PM.
Format : jpg/jpeg.
As a result, the costs related to generation and management of printed documents are drastically reduced. Also, the control and quality of an organizations billing and collection processes are considerably improved and simplified. Still, legislation compels companies to store their invoices and the related electronic data for a specific period of time.


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- Description
DetailsCreate a professional finish to your projects with the Rainbow Dust range of stunning edible matt powders covering the whole spectrum.
- Additional Information
Additional Information
Brand Rainbow Dust Colours Ingredients *E122, E171, E132.
* May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.
Manufacturer's Guidelines Store at ambient room temperature.
Suitable for Vegans & Vegetarians.
Certified Kosher.
Instructions Simply apply using a dry brush or mix with an alcohol solution to create an edible paint.


text:
Search Results: pasta
Avocado, Mozzarella and Bruschetta Chicken
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15 Minute Creamy Avocado Pasta
Creamy, thick, and rich with lots of garlic flavour and a hint of lemon. This is my newest favourite pasta dish. The avocado works wonderfully in this recipe to create a sauce so creamy and thick, you will think there is cream hiding in there.
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Baked Pasta
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Tonight, my friends, I achieved the "impossible." I made a completely vegan "cheese"-stuffed burger that Pea Daddy said was better than the original.
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Bacon Ranch Chicken Mac and Cheese
Loaded with cheese and bacon, you would never know this delicious pasta is actually healthy!
Bacon Mozzarella Pasta Salad
A delicious pasta salad that can be made in minutes and requires minimal ingredients.
Bacon Mac
This delicious pasta is a carb-loving dieter's dream - cheesy, bacony, pasta! 11 Weight Watcher's Points Plus per serving.
Bacon, Fresh Tomato & Basil Pasta
The big thick pappardelle noodles make this dish so fun to eat. You get hints of smoky bacon bites with sweet tomatoes and basil in every noodley-bite!
Bacon Chipotle Mac & Cheese
This Bacon Chipotle Mac & Cheese is a great way to get dinner on the table fast! Starting with a boxed mac and cheese, you can easily add a few other ingredients to make dinner delicious!
Baked Artichoke Chicken Pasta
Chicken, pasta, artichoke hearts and mozzarella come together with a creamy Parmesan sauce to make this rich and comforting casserole.


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Waterbabies 2
Charlie gives herself a three litre bag enema using her favourite SiliconeNozzles nozzle while continuing to use the glass syringe to pump more water into Chloe's already swollen belly.
Water and Power 浣腸罰
Charlie gives herself a three litre bag enema using her favourite SiliconeNozzles nozzle while continuing to use the glass syringe to pump more water into Chloe's already swollen belly.
Water and Power 浣腸罰 has sexually explicit content involving consenting adults.
I understand this site uses cookies and I am OK with that.
I am old enough to legally view adult content where I live.
I understand this is an adult site and I may not like what I see here.
I promise I won't pirate this site's content.
I understand that the techniques used on this site are risky and possibly dangerous and I promise I won't try them on myself or on others.
All models are 18 or older, records on file.
That you acknowledge that this is not an instructional, training or informational site. You acknowledge that the participants are not healthcare professionals and you agree and understand that you should not try any techniques or practices seen on this site or its affiliates.
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Hi all, I have just brought a new europa and have not set one up before so am a little lost. I have set up all I can but I would like to add some test sequences. For instance, it always fails washing machine for some reason and I have no test sequance for a surge protected lead.
Is there a list of all test sequances and if not can we put one together to help people like me?
I have had a look on line and through the forum but can not find one


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|Virginia Ward's yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High School, 1970.
Virginia Ward is not a small woman, but the fineness of her hands and the way her gray curls sweep around her ears make her seem so. She is missing her left front tooth and when she laughs, she leans backward and then forward again, as if in a rocking chair. She grew up in Mableton in Cobb County, Georgia, "over 'cross the [Chattahoochee] River" from Atlanta. In the fall of 1966, Ward desegregated Pebblebrook High School. In the first few frightening days, she remained sure other black students would arrive, but the months passed and "no one came."1 Ward endured two years as Pebblebrook's only black student. She was not written up in the local paper, nor feted by her community for her accomplishments. When she graduated in 1970, her friends and congregation were amazed: "Virginia," she remembers them saying after they watched her assemble in cap and gown with her white classmates, "you really was the only one!"
This story is about Virginia Ward's courageous desegregation of her local high school, but it is also about the implications of neglecting class and poverty in histories of school desegregation. The role of poverty in Ward's account acts as a reminder of the struggles of black integrators who were not upper-middle class or the chosen children of their communities, students who experienced their class as equally marginalizing as their race. As legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw suggests, socially constructed categories, i.e. "black" and "white," will always be with us; the problem is rather that "the descriptive content of those categories and the narratives on which they are based have privileged some experiences and excluded others."2 Crenshaw describes the importance of "intersectionality" to the experiences of black women, specifically, but her insights can be applied to class and race in narratives of school desegregation: when identity is configured "as an either/or proposition . . . the identity of a poor person [of color is relegated] to a location that resists telling." In many narratives of school desegregation, "poor black student" is a "position that resists telling;" in contrast, there has been careful attention to the class position of whites who resisted desegregation.3 Because there are, likely, thousands of "first children" yet to be heard,4 Ward's story is only one among many that deserve a hearing, but it is also true that Ward's "difference made a difference" that is not often acknowledged in the public memory of desegregation.5
|Map showing the location of Mableton, Georgia, 2012.
Virginia Ward's people were "Indians from Black Hawk Hill," and they had owned property in Mableton for many years. Ward, the third youngest of fourteen, was raised on her father's land. Her mother worked at the Wailea Cotton Mill and her father sold his homegrown produce and picked up odd jobs. "We had to be," she said laughing, "the poorest peoples in the world." But there was always milk and butter from the cow and eggs from the hens, and the bounty of a garden "just about as big as some people's homes." Fourteen children was a formidable labor force, and her father would brook no laziness. She recalled having a harder row to hoe, quite literally, than her friends: "We were taught . . . to work work work. . . . My daddy didn't believe in welfare." Although the demands at home were significant, Ward's parents insisted that she and her siblings earn their high school diplomas. She began at Washington Street Elementary, which all her friends attended. She remembered: "We all had to go to Washington Street. We had one bus driver—Lucius. He picked up everybody in Mableton and Austell. Cause we all went to one school. That's how we got to know all the blacks that's in Mableton cause all of us had to ride the same bus."
Ward's memory of Lucius and the single school bus speaks to the nostalgia that is often intertwined with desegregation for students and parents of the pre-Brown era.6 Among the many legacies of Brown is the loss of black schools and their black leadership to the integration of existing white institutions which were reputedly better staffed and resourced. But some black community members, teachers and students remember that the interdependence and familial care fostered by these all-black institutions was, for them, far more valuable than the ineffable "good" of integrated schools. In her home community in Mableton, Ward's difference didn't register so starkly, her background was not isolating; her teachers knew her and her abilities. The sacrifices of students like Ward and the loss of all-black institutions are a critical part of understanding the contemporary politics of desegregation in black communities. As scholars such as Barbara Shircliffe have shown, black communities have undertaken their own reconstructions of desegregation history—in some cases quite literally.7 Shircliffe describes a Tampa, Florida, community that successfully petitioned for a new high school named after the local all-black school that desegregation had "taken." The restoring of their cherished school was a victory especially for the students who had been bused unwillingly to integrating white schools in the Tampa area. The new "old" high school stood not for segregation or its attendant evils but for a resistance to the erasure of the past and the resilience of community.
"Break[ing] That School In"
Virginia began high school at South Cobb High, a formerly all-white high school which was already desegregating.8 In her ninth-grade year, there were "four or five other blacks," as she remembered, attending South Cobb. But in 1966, Virginia enrolled at Pebblebrook High School, officially her district high school, which had not yet begun to desegregate. She imagined a similar ratio of white to black students as at South Cobb—not a happy thought, but a vaguely comforting one. "But when I got to Pebblebrook," she remembered, "I was like, okay, maybe the first day, no blacks, second day, no blacks." The days and weeks passed and "no one came." When it became clear she would be the sole black student for the remainder of that year, she resisted the urge to request that her parents transfer her because "it was mandatory. I had to go." Virginia's belief that she "had to go"—she could have legally gained admission elsewhere in the county—is suggestive of her parents' expectations and demands and perhaps, too, her own sense of duty. ("Someone had to do it!" she said later.) When Ward began her senior year at Pebblebrook, she was finally joined by another black student from her community, a girl who entered the eleventh grade.
Of the people at Pebblebrook, Ward offered with equanimity that "some were good" and "some were bad." She knew, whether by their actions or her own intuition, who was who. She remembered of one teacher, "I knew he was prejudiced . . . I heard him call me 'nigger.'" The evening of the day Virginia overheard the slur, her family gathered for dinner and her father asked her about school. "He was not a talker," she says with a smile, "but he was a good listener." Virginia told him and her siblings what her teacher had called her. She waited for her father's response—some word of wisdom or warning—but none came. The next day, however, he took her to school and left her in the lobby while he had a brief visit with the principal. Later that morning a fellow student taunted, "We're having a meeting because of you." The principal had called an all-school assembly to address the incident. Virginia remembered that he opened the "meeting" by asking her to stand. She recalled his words as she stood up alone in an otherwise quiet auditorium: "If anybody got a problem with integration, it's here. And Virginia is here. And no one is to make her uncomfortable. And if Virginia has a problem she can come to me." It was "so embarrassing" she remembered, her good-natured laughter softening the hard edge of the memory.
|Virginia Ward, center, in a Future Business Leaders of America yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High, 1970.
The scene she described must have been one of deeply-felt ambivalence: the principal's requesting that Virginia stand up (as if students did not know or recognize her sole black face among them) was extending an olive leaf with one hand and stoking the fire with the other. By being turned into a spectacle, and the embodiment of integration—"it's here now"—Virginia experienced the antagonisms and antinomies of her daily life writ large. Perhaps the principal had meant to protect Virginia with his gesture. Yet any seasoned principal or teacher ought to know that an edict from an authority figure invites abuse, not sympathy, from fellow students. Virginia's profoundest challenges from her peers came after the principal's injunction. Virginia's father's words to her at the beginning of the school year were prescient: "You're gonna have to break that school in."
"Every day," Ward remembered, "he'd sit behind me in class. Every day he call me nigger. Every day, every day." She was recalling the student who dedicated himself to taunting her—quietly and doggedly, repeating his incantation every time the two took their seats. She told her pastor and mentor, Reverend Aaron, who assured her that one can "change people with the Word." So for the weekly essay assignment in that class, Ward began selecting and writing about passages of scripture. She quoted her own determination: "I [will] find a scripture for that one boy who calls me a nigger, every day, every day. I will find one just for him." She laughed while claiming she had summoned "the worst peoples in the Bible" to her cause and read their exploits and cruelties aloud to her class—directing her pseudo-sermons toward the boy in the chair behind hers. After several Mondays, Ward's strategy and weaponry prevailed. Without any kind of disciplinary intervention from teacher or principal, the offender stopped his name-calling. Since her arrival, she said, "every day, all I heard is 'nigger, nigger nigger.' It was a song for them." But her triumph in the classroom spread, and "after a while," she remembered, "you didn't hear it . . . walking down the hall." Her peers were wary of her, muttering, as she approached, "There she come again, with the scripture, there she come."
Ward wove this story in and out of her narrative, referring back to the transformative power of her scripture essays and her pastor's assurances that "when they hear it, they'll know." Although she was without the resources or support to broadcast her battles and victories, and although she was a struggling student, neither popular nor high-achieving, she powerfully fashioned herself as a teacher of her peers. This role and her pedagogy reappear in later anecdotes about her relationships as an adult, when once again she challenged the racism and classism around her, and the narrowness of the known story.
At the Margins
When asked if she was ever scared during her years at Pebblebrook—of the bathroom or the locker rooms, the dangerous fiefdoms of adolescent girls—she countered that she was "not afraid of people." She offered that because her family was so poor, it was often the feeling of "not having anything" that isolated her. "It looked like the whole world rich," she recalled without rancor. "And going to the white school—you know you are really poor." She affectionately described a woman she called her "school mom." Mrs. Groover, the mother of a classmate who did not know of his mother's kindness to Ward, volunteered to take her to the dentist and doctor, for which her own mother had neither money nor time. "She was the first one who took me to get a hamburger," Ward remembered—a special treat because what could be gotten at home was never extravagantly purchased elsewhere. Mrs. Groover's unsolicited, and in a certain sense anonymous, generosity both mitigated and heightened the particularity of Ward's poverty at Pebblebrook. Yet it was not only being poor and adjusting to a wealthier, white "culture, clothing and language," but also being "slow," as Ward calls herself, that defined the character of her time there.
|Virginia Ward, back row right, in a Library Club yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High, 1970. Cynthia Beavers, who began at Pebblebrook in 1969, stands next to Ward.
Perhaps "slow," in Ward's parlance, was in fact dyslexia, or in education expert Ann Smith's terms, "a deficit in [her] education" in elementary and middle school.9 Whatever the case, Ward asserted that being black at Pebblebrook had nothing on being "slow." As she said: "that was hard[er] than even just being black and going to school and being called nigger . . . . [And] it's hard going to school when [there are] no programs for slow students . . . . It was a struggle to be in a white school. It's a struggle where you look around and everybody's smart." In an era without tracking and before the maturation of special education programs, Ward attended classes with students who excelled with ease—or so it seemed to her. After weeks of difficulty with her assigned reading, she found a friend in the librarian who ordered her required reading in books-on-tape, and her grades improved dramatically. Determined to endure her final two years and walk away with a diploma, harder-earned than anyone could imagine, Ward remarked of those books on tape, "It was a new world."
When it came time for graduation, no fairy godmothers intervened to purchase a class ring or a visit to the beauty parlor. Ward called the dark hair which framed her young smiling face in her graduation photograph, "a mess." Although Ms. Groover and the school librarian smoothed her path the best they could, Ward locates herself at the margins, socioeconomically, academically, and culturally. She related with some indignation that the members of her church who came to her graduation in 1970 were amazed to see her marching in the all-white procession. That her two years alone at Pebblebrook had gone unnoticed suggests that Ward's position outside the traditional desegregation narratives—her class, her academic troubles and her separation from her black peers—obscured her courageous struggle. Ward's story, in which being poor and being black inextricably reinforce her marginality, points to the way in which the "dream" of desegregation, especially in the South where the reality proceeded apace through the 1970s, would be foiled by other realities: white flight, evolving discourses of colorblindness and property rights, and structural poverty.10
A Shared Past
Through Job Corps, Ward got work almost immediately with the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. Although she was hired to be a "secretary," her supervisor encouraged her to become an organizer, to travel with other staff members and take on a greater role within the chapter. Ward liked the idea a great deal, but her mother "said no," and Ward knew—although her colleagues at the NAACP pressed hard for her to join them—that there would be no further negotiation. Instead, her mother encouraged Ward to leave the NAACP and apply for a job at the First National Bank (what would become Wachovia). She was hired as a maintenance person in the bank cafeteria. To this, her mother also "said no"—insisting that her daughter was better than that work and should say so. After a month, Ward summoned the courage to pursue a job in bookkeeping where her supervisors extracted hours of unpaid overtime and monitored her personal life and assessed her class status with questions about her mother's job and her friends from "the mill." After twenty-one years at the bank, Ward took Reverend Aaron's advice to start her own business painting and cleaning newly constructed homes and apartments. Although she possessed no relevant skills or capital, Ward set off, undaunted, toward entrepreneurship.
Of that time, Ward testified that she learned "how to hold to business and how to work with people," how to win bids and demand fair pay, how to do a job so well that the customer requests you again. When Ward says, as she did many times, "life is a struggle," she means not that certain incidents were challenging, but rather that its arc is defined by struggle—getting very little, and always expecting even less. Despite her own "illiteracy" and her clients' "prejudice," Virginia ran a business—sometimes two—which supported her and her four adopted children. School, she believes, doesn't ready students for work; it is the world that does that—especially a world that exacts special penalties for "being black and a woman." Never, Ward intoned, "take a job for granted."
|Virginia Ward, in Pebblebrook High's BrookSpeak, 2009.
As the sole breadwinner for her family of four children, Ward augmented the income from her cleaning business by taking old and infirm clients into her home for full-time care. Ward was a demanding and yet deeply loving mother figure to even the patients who reminded her of her Pebblebrook peers. Some years ago, a young man brought his elderly aunt to Ward with the warning, "she's kinda prejudiced." Virginia assured him knowingly, "we'll deal with it," adding, "I didn't go into my background." The client had been a school teacher in Nebraska and repeatedly assured Ward that "they better not've put one of y'all in my classroom," vowing, "I wouldn't even live in a neighborhood with you all." Ward remembered thinking, with some relish, "I had her all day . . . [she] was gon' learn from me." After a short while, the two had become the "best of friends," and Virginia often brought her client to church with her, seating her in the pews "with the children." With the children? I had asked, not understanding. "I always made sure she sat with the kids," so that the older woman would come to realize, after so many years, that "children are children . . . they all do the same things . . . they all have to be taught." In telling this, Ward still marveled that her friend and client "got old to learn that," but under Ward's instruction, learn she did.
This tale is poignant not only for the image of an old white woman displaced from her former life, values and environment and deposited in a pew with a handful of unruly black children, although that image conveys well the creativity of Ward's pedagogy. Rather, what gives this story its power is the notion of an open and still-viable channel that connects the schoolteacher's generation of racist white folks to Ward's generation of integrating black students and then, finally, to the generation of young pupils in her church's congregation. Ward's maxim is that no lesson can come too late, and that no one gets too old to learn. For Ward, this gentle prodding of people into the unknown is what makes change possible, even in a deeply unjust society, and is what makes the progress that integration promised real. Lingering, enduring possibility surges through Ward's narrative—and it is this sense of a "revolution," not lost but rather deferred, that helps to re-narrate school desegregation, and encourages her listeners to be as resourceful and open-hearted as Ward in broadening narratives of a shared past.
A Familiar Narrative
Right around the corner from Pebblebrook High, and a few years earlier, a more familiar desegregation narrative unfolded. Daphne Delk was the Virginia Ward of her local high school's desegregation process. Unlike Ward, Delk chose her fate consciously, petitioning her parents and the school board for the opportunity to attend Marietta High School, which even then she felt was her "destiny."11 A stellar student, Delk sought what she saw as the greater academic resources and challenges of the all-white high school, and she excelled there, going on to college at Fisk University and into the medical technology field. Though she too ate many lunches alone, Delk's success in making a place for herself was understood to demonstrate Marietta's more progressive racial climate; the spring she graduated, she was voted Girl of the Year by her classmates. Her father, who spent two years at Stanford on the GI bill and her mother, who worked for a prominent white family, were active in and dedicated to their community, and Delk's preparation and support network for her integration of Marietta High were substantial.
These outlines of Delk's biography and experiences are familiar to desegregation history, even if hers is not a household name. Virginia Ward's very different story demonstrates the wide breadth of desegregation experience. Understanding the connection between Ward's story and the implications of class for the legacy of desegregation requires a sense of what "middle class" and "poor" have meant in the decades since Brown. In the wake of the Civil Rights era's major victories, the black middle class of Ward's youth had begun to enjoy the material benefits of higher education and white collar jobs, as "class position began to affect mobility for blacks as it always had for whites."12 Since the sixties, as Thomas Shapiro and others have demonstrated, the black middle class has grown substantially, and, as of the late 1990s, the number of black men in middle class jobs had grown dramatically, accompanied by the shrinking of the wage gap between black and white earners.13 Yet it's also true, and extensively documented, that due to de-industrialization, federal economic policy and entrenched residential segregation, the more fragile lower- middle class has become poorer as their upper-middle income peers prospered.14 So while middle-class black students and their upwardly-mobile parents are crucial to the story of school desegregation, so too are the poor families whose wagons were not firmly hitched to the star of post-Civil Rights mobility.
Raising their children in that moment of promise and peril for poor and working class black Americans, Ward's mother and father saw a potentially white-collar future for their daughter. Even if she didn't get a college degree, they hoped her material comfort and income would exceed their own.15 Ward's story of desegregating Pebblebrook High and her life after graduation speak to the economic precariousness of being lower-middle-class and black, a theme that popular narratives of desegregation have seldom expressed. Public education had, in the past, played a crucial role in creating opportunities for structurally marginalized students, but the increasing racial isolation of poor children of color in high-poverty schools today means that children like Ward face even greater odds than she did. According to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2009, only three percent of black public school students attended "low poverty" schools, and eighteen out of the nation's largest twenty districts were less than 50% white, a number that is sure to shrink, as desegregation scholar Gary Orfield has asserted, as Hispanic student populations increase over the next decade.16 The NCES estimates the dropout rate for students of color (specifically black and Hispanic students) at almost 40 percent nationally; the same data shows that more than one third of black children live in poverty. Race matters, as Cornel West would say, but so does class, and a full picture of school desegregation today and forty years ago will show both at work in the lives of students and their families. Evelyn Higginbotham's theorization of race as a meta-language speaks to how class and color cannot be decoupled for black communities then or now. She writes that race must be recognized for "its powerful, all-encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality."17 Although Higginbotham's insight is powerfully true, in the case of desegregation history, the "all-encompassing effect" of race on class has at times obscured the important difference class made for desegregators like Daphne Delk. Middle class backgrounds meant toe-holds for inclusion that Ward and generations of low-income black students after her have not had.
Over the decades since Brown, historians have interpreted the desegregation process across the US South and North through a variety of lenses, but the impact of class and poverty in the lives of desegregators have gone, for the most part, unaddressed. Barbara Shircliffe and Vanessa Siddle Walker have described the nostalgia with which some black communities remember their segregated schools and the dynamic of a large, tight-knit family that these all-black institutions cultivated and sustained.18 R. Scott Baker and Richard Kluger, among others, have traced school desegregation efforts back to court cases of the 1930s and '40s, revealing that many courageous children and families preceded those of Little Rock or New Orleans.19 The histories of these desegregation sagas and others—the Little Rock Nine, the children of New Orleans and the busing crisis in Boston—have been vividly told by Liva Baker, Karen Anderson and J. Anthony Lukas.20 Historians Pete Daniel and Elizabeth Jacoway have persuasively argued that the legacy of Little Rock's Central High is very much with us today, as its actors—black and white students—grapple with the mythology entwined around their adolescent actions.21 The fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision saw a deluge of literature about the "failure" of Brown and its lost dream of education equity, and a bounty of work about what integration does and should mean now.22 Although much of this work implicitly dismisses the importance of racially balanced schools and classrooms, researchers like Gary Orfield continue to crusade for the desegregation of increasingly homogenous urban and suburban schools. Clearly, the life of Brown is a much-examined one.
In the current era of school re-segregation, it is necessary to listen to the testimony of Brown's first children, to explore its rich diversity and to probe the silences in the known narratives. Without attention to the dimensions of class and structural poverty in desegregation history, the decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1—the landmark 2007 case which made student assignment on the basis of race unconstitutional—makes a kind of perverse sense. That is, if race is seen to be the only operative force in the lives of students and in their schools, then one might agree with the infamous declarations of Chief Justice John Roberts, "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," and Justice Clarence Thomas, "[Today's school desegregation plans] appear to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites."23 The words of Roberts and Thomas reinforce the importance of investigating both race and class in desegregation's history and its contemporary politics, rather than allowing the terms and their context to shadow and obscure each other in public discourse and public memory. As Richard Kahlenberg states, it is not the "black schools" that are inferior, it is the poor schools—very often composed of students of color whose parents do not and historically have not had the choices available to middle- and high-income white parents.24 While the school desegregation plans of the Brown era emphasized race-based desegregation to dismantle de jure segregation, contemporary desegregation plans must combat middle- and upper-class white flight spurred by southern desegregation efforts of the late sixties and early seventies and the residential segregation that has always been a feature of northern places like Chicago, Detroit and New York. The contemporary conversation about public education prismatically refracts these historical and cultural forces, and searching the stories of desegregators reveals new slants of light.
|John T. Bledsoe, Rally at State Capitol, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1959.
Perhaps the most widely familiar stories of desegregators are the personal memoirs of middle-class and upper-middle class integrators. These memoirs demand attention because they are an accepted shorthand: for generations of TV watchers and news listeners outside the perimeters of the crises, the internationally known story of the Little Rock Nine and the post-graduation fame of Charlayne Hunter-Gault have served as a means to understand how the injustice and abuse that desegregators suffered paid off in individual success and the advancement of "the black community." Allowing just a few chronicles to stand in for a rich spectrum of desegregation experiences produces a form of closure that precludes a nuanced conversation about the merits and shortcomings of historical desegregation.25
In the memoirs of Little Rock and in Hunter-Gault's biography, the authors make the trauma of desegregation coherent so as to present a trajectory that begins with violence and disorder but resolves in triumph—legal or personal and sometimes both. The memoirs obscure the role of class by spending little time describing the crucial groundwork for the students' success laid by their families' class and social connections, their parents' jobs, and their education backgrounds. The Little Rock Nine, especially, emblematize desegregation broadly in public memory, but although the Nine are clearly middle class students, public memory of them and their own shaping of that legacy does not contemplate the difference their middle-class-ness made. By contrast, a history of desegregation that can perhaps better inform present struggles for educational justice will incorporate a diversity of experiences and memories which acknowledges that class powerfully mediated the hardships faced by integrating students.
Three of the Little Rock Nine have written full-length memoirs: Melba Pattillo Beals' Warriors Don't Cry, Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way and Terrence Roberts' Lessons from Little Rock chronicle the dramatic year (1957) of the integration of Central High. Beals' memoir, published first, has won the most attention and acclaim. She grew up in a comfortably middle-class home with her mother and grandmother, and in particular moments in her text the reader glimpses how Beals perceives her own class position—she calls the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard "hayseeds" and "tobacco-chewing . . . clods" and sees herself as equipped for higher education and a career in journalism.26 Similarly, Terrence Roberts' came from middle class parents; his mother was from an "upwardly mobile" Little Rock family and she ran a catering business, and her son was an eager, talented student, nick-named "the brain" and "the professor" by his peers.27 Raised by a college-educated store clerk and a brick-mason, Carlotta Walls LaNier came from a family of resources both cultural and material; like Beals she had travelled outside the Jim Crow South before high school, and like Beals and Roberts, she was academically prepared for Central High and was confident in the classroom. Although the accounts of LaNier, Roberts, and Beals must here stand in for the class position, social connections, and academic preparedness of the Nine, it is a testament to the group's upward mobility and academic preparation that all of the Nine attended and graduated from college.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a prominent news anchor and journalist, speaks of the 1961 integration of the University of Georgia much like her lesser-known peer, Daphne Delk does, in terms of "destiny." During her triumphant senior year at Turner High School in Atlanta—"the school for the Black crème de la crème"—Charlayne Hunter-Gault was editor of the school newspaper, president of the Senior Honor Society and Homecoming Queen.28 She was a gem of the "talented tenth," the phrase W.E.B. DuBois coined to describe the class of leaders, "an aristocracy of talent and character," in whose hands DuBois felt the fate of "the masses" lay.29 Hunter-Gault integrated UGA with Hamilton Holmes, a bright young man from a prominent family of black businessmen and doctors who would also go on to become Emory's first black medical student. Heckling mobs and social isolation on campus plagued both Hunter-Gault and Holmes, but Hunter-Gault enjoyed the celebrity her role attracted: she hobnobbed with Lena Horne and Robert F. Kennedy and won recognition in the form of prestigious scholarships and awards.30 Hunter-Gault went on to work as a correspondent and reporter for PBS, CNN, NPR, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her extraordinary accomplishments further complicate her role as a narrator of desegregation. Her memoir, like the others, highlights the challenge of commemorating desegregation in a way that at once honors the young integrators and yet imagines a diverse spectrum of experiences, inclusive of poor students, students who struggled academically, and students whose experiences testify to the enduring systematic problems posed by racism, classism and structural inequality.
Of her first days at Pebblebrook High, Virginia Ward maintained that not all her peers whispered "nigger" as she passed them in the halls. She remembered that some students and teachers "were ready for a change anyway. Some people were ready for a change." Ward's narrative—both a narrative of personal victory and a story of unabated struggle—and those of the many "first children" who have not yet been heard, can serve to deepen our understanding of historical desegregation. Rare is such a patient and ingenious steward of the "beloved community" as Ward, and hearing her voice and that of other desegregators is important to a desegregation history that speaks to our present. Reflecting critically on Brown means accepting that between its visionary promise and its distressing failures lie a host of testimonies and experiences of faith, family, gender and, as this story suggests, class, that must be accorded due attention in assessing Brown's legacy and its future.
|Article from Pebblebrook High's BrookSpeak, March 2009.
Scholars Robert Hayman and Leland Ware call the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Parents v Seattle "a betrayal of Brown" which "slam[med] shut" the door on racial diversity. Thankfully, the case was not to be the "final word on desegregation" that they feared.31 Long before the Seattle ruling, individual districts like those in Manchester, Connecticut; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and the Wake County schools of Raleigh, North Carolina, creatively and tenaciously pursued plans that did not rely on race or ethnicity-based student assignments. Rather, the plans placed emphasis on class, implementing busing plans to achieve socioeconomic integration. Memphis, Tennessee, recently saw the largest suburban-urban district merger to date when the Shelby County schools, a mostly white suburban district, and the Memphis city schools, a low-income "majority minority" district, consolidated. The previously impossible—a blending of two district's profoundly separate students—has become feasible. What Memphis and Shelby County officials and citizens will make of this opportunity is not yet clear, but the Seattle decision does not foreclose the possibility of class-based plans that have the potential to effect racial desegregation as well.
Although Brown-era desegregation finally allowed black students to demonstrate, in more than token numbers, how ably they could compete with their white peers when they received consummate preparation and resources, not all black students were poised to flourish in integrated schools. Some of the struggles Ward's narrative describes are all too familiar to students fifty years later.32 The challenges faced by contemporary students of color are not solely those of de jure racism to which Brown dealt such a blow, they are also the manifestations of structural poverty. Ward's experiences and those of students like her demonstrate the continuing importance of desegregation in the fight for educational equity but also point to the promise of class-based desegregation strategies for all low-income students. Sociologist Orlando Patterson has shown that the economic gap between rich and poor black Americans is even greater than that between rich and poor whites: class and race must together guide education policy, if high-poverty schools and low-income students are ever to get the justice they deserve. Despite the dramatic growth of the black middle class in the decades since Brown, black students are still more likely to attend high-poverty high schools and half as likely to graduate from college.33 Ward's story of individual courage enriches a memorializing tradition that too often forgets the role of class. It also must stand to remind those dedicated to educational justice, that students like Virginia Ward succeeded, in today's terms, "against the odds." With an ear to the stories of first children and the guidance they offer, we might take heart in the fact that although structural poverty appears entrenched beyond remedy, so once did the injustices of Jim Crow.
- 1. Interview with Virginia Ward, March 13, 2009. All quotations from Virginia Ward that follow are drawn from this interview, and will not be further noted.
- 2. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color," in Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), 376.
- 3. The class politics of white resistance have received thorough treatment in recent scholarship on desegregation. In her history of desegregation in New Orleans, Liva Baker describes the white mothers, called the "cheerleaders," as carrying signs that read "If your [sic] poor, mix. If your [sic] rich, forget it. Some law!" The first ward to desegregate was the "politically powerless, materially disadvantaged Ninth Ward." Liva Baker, Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 398. Similarly, in Atlanta, lower-income white parents protested that because they could not move away or choose private education like the "silk stocking crowd," they would be disproportionately affected by desegregation. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 139. In Charlotte, the CPA (Concerned Parents Association) was composed of "well-heeled whites;" these "upwardly mobile parents" mobilized to prevent their children from being bused away from their well-resourced neighborhood schools. Matthew Lassister, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics on the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 139-140.
- 4. When Brown was decided there were 4,000 segregated school districts in the south; three years later 712 of them were desegregating, sending 300,000 black students to integrate schools. This suggests that the numbers of "first children" across the South, who integrated schools alone or in small cohorts, is in the thousands. Robert L Hayman and Leland Ware, eds, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 4.
- 5. Crenshaw, 376.
- 6. "Brown era" refers to the years bookended by Brown I in 1954 and Milliken v Bradley in 1974, the case that prohibited the use of cross-district busing in instances of de facto segregation and marked the turn away from the dramatic (and largely effective) desegregation remedies of the previous decade.
- 7. Barbara Shircliffe, The Best of that World: Historically Black High Schools and the Crisis of Desegregation in a Southern Metropolis (New York: Hampton Press, 2006).
- 8. Until the county schools began to desegregate, black students had only one high school to attend, Lemon Street High, in downtown Marietta, the county seat. Cobb County adopted "Freedom of Choice" in 1965, but the county's high schools did not desegregate all at once. South Cobb High, for example, began provisionally desegregating before Pebblebrook High School, and as it was in neighboring Austell, Virginia spent her ninth grade year there before transferring to Pebblebrook, her district school.
- 9. Interview with Ann Smith by the author, March 10, 2009.
- 10. In 1980, as a result of desegregation, only 37% of black students attended mostly black schools, by the year 2000, that number had grown to 69%, quickly approaching the 1968 numbers for Southern black students. Robert L. Hayman and Leland Ware, eds, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 319.
- 11. Interview with Daphne Delk by Jessica Drysdale and Jay Lutz, November 7, 2009, Kennesaw State University Oral History Project, Cobb NAACP/Civil Rights Series No. 7.
- 12. Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 44.
- 13. Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Costs of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6.
- 14. Pattillo-McCoy comments that since the 1970s examinations of the black "underclass" have constituted a "research industry" stoked in large part by William Julius Wilson's two seminal works on class and race,The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, the latter of which documented the plummeting employment opportunities for black Americans and the widening gap between poor black families and middle class black families. Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20.
- 15. Pattillo-McCoy points out that obtaining a college degree is a "strict" standard for middle-class membership; a more widely applied rule is that a family earns "two times a poverty-level income," 15.
- 16. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, "Historical Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies," A Report of the Civil Rights Project, UCLA, August 2007.
- 17. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol.17, No. 2, Winter 1992, 252.
- 18. Barbara Shircliffe, The Best of That World: Historically Black Schools and the Crisis of Desegregation in a Southern Metropolis (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006) and Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1996).
- 19. R. Scott Baker, The Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston South Carolina, 1927-1972 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006) and Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Random House, 1975).
- 20. Liva Baker, The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009), J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, 1985).
- 21. Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000).
- 22. For example, Peter Irons, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision& (London: Penguin, 2002); Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Jennifer Hochschild and Terry M. Moe, though at different ends of the political spectrum, both demonstrate the marginality of desegregation in the scholarship of education reform and educational equity.
- 23. Roberts's words are drawn from the plurality opinion in Parents v Seattle in 2007. Thomas' comments date back to his concurring opinion in the 1995 case Missouri v Jenkins.
- 24. Richard D. Kahlenberg, All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public Choice (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001).
- 25. Although the issue of re-segregation is a pressing one in both the South and the West and has historically been a persistent problem in the urban North, the context for this paper is the de jure school segregation of the South.
- 26. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 168, 171.
- 27. Terrence Roberts, Lessons from Little Rock (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2009), 30.
- 28. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, In My Place (New York: FSG, 1992), 87.
- 29. W.E.B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-Day, (New York, 1903).
- 30. Hunter-Gault, 205, 211.
- 31. Hayman and Ware, 313.
- 32. Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy elaborate on previous findings that "socioeconomic segregation matters" in student achievement; they find that in South particularly "the effects of socioeconomic segregation can only be addressed through policies that attempt to redistribute students among schools or improve the quality of [low-SES] schools." "Does Resegregation Matter?: The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in Southern High Schools," in School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005), 145.
- 33. "The Economic Stagnation of the Black Middle Class," A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, July 15, 2005. Accessed at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/122805_BlackAmericaStagnation.pdf on December 9, 2011.


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Stock up on a variety of breakfast items, beverages, snacks, frozen entrées and more, any time—all on the honor system.
Candlewood Suites Houston Medical Center
Candlewood Suites Houston Medical Center
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Whether you're in town for business, leisure or for a visit to Houston's Texas Medical Center, our hotel's location is ideal for your needs. We're right off I-610 and just minutes from NRG Stadium Rice University and the world's largest medical center.
Our hotel's location in Houston is ideal if you are in Houston visiting the Texas Medical Center. We offer shuttle service to major medical institutions such as MD Anderson, Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor Clinic.
For relaxation and family fun, enjoy a picnic or visit the zoo in nearby Hermann Park, or take part in a yearly tradition at the Livestock Show and Rodeo at NRG Stadium. Love to learn? The Museum District a few miles away can keep you busy for days. The convenient access to the Stella Link Shopping Center and the opulent Galleria makes it easy to enjoy the best shopping in Houston.
You'll find it easy to stay on top of your exercise routine in the 24-hour fitness center. You can rest without a care at the Gazebo Grill. With the Candlewood Suites® Houston Medical Center hotel's free guest laundry facilities, affordable Candlewood Cupboard store and free coffee bar, you'll feel right at home. Come enjoy one of the most convenient hotels in Houston as our guest!NRG will be hosting Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo,Off Shore Techology Conference andMonster Jam in the upcoming months. Please come out and enjoy the fun.
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text: Christopher Farr trained at the Slade School of art in London. Influenced by the artists Ryman, Albers and Agnes Martin, his medium was no longer oil on canvas, but wool and dye, spun and woven by hand into objects that were more than mere floor coverings. They were themselves works of art. Farr's art training and passion for contemporary design and architecture are exquisitely expressed in the Cloth collection. From the choice of materials of the highest quality to the bold geometric patterns, oversized motifs and textured weaves. He has been the creative director of Christopher Farr rugs during this time and has completed many commissions for private clients and institutions worldwide.


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Story highlights
- Pope denounces chemical weapons use
- He calls for day of prayer and fasting for Syria
- He invites "all men of good will" to join
- The pontiff appeals for peaceful efforts to end conflict
To robust applause from the gathered faithful, Pope Francis called Sunday for a day of prayer and fasting over the violence in Syria.
Devoting the totality of his weekly remarks in St. Peter's Square to the civil war in Syria, Francis invited "all men of good will" to join with Catholics on September 7 to take part in the prayer and fast.
He condemned in strong and personal terms the recent use of of chemical weapons.
"I tell you that those terrible images from recent days are burned into my mind and heart," Francis said. "There is a judgment of God and of history upon our actions which is inescapable!"
The pontiff urged a peaceful ending to the conflict. "Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake." the pope said, his voice rising. "War begets war, violence begets violence."
In recent days the United States, Britain and France have had high profile debates about the merits of military intervention in Syria.
Britain's parliament dealt a blow to Prime Minister David Cameron's desire for military action.
In the United States, President Barack Obama announced his intention to get congressional approval for any military involvement.
The French government is expected to discuss the matter early next week.
While Francis did not mention any of those efforts specifically, he called on the "international community to make every effort to promote clear proposals for peace in that country without further delay, a peace based on dialogue and negotiation."
On September 7, he said, people will gather at St. Peter's Square from 7 p.m. to midnight, while other churches hold similar community events.
"Humanity needs to see these gestures of peace" he said.


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Academic Programs
Nashoba Valley Technical High School operates on an alternate week schedule. One week is spent in academic classes followed by a week of training in technical programs. This rotation continues throughout the school year. It is the school's philosophy that well-rounded individuals who are ready to become responsible and contributing members of society must be prepared in academic, as well as technical areas. To this end, the courses offered at Nashoba Valley Technical High School have been designed to assist every student to meet this goal.
Nashoba Valley Technical High School's academic program consists of a core curriculum for all grades in all subjects. The level or degree of difficulty of the assigned course will be determined by the student's aptitude, standardized test scores and past academic performance and recommendations. All academic courses are aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and are designed for utmost success on standardized exams including the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), Advanced Placement, SAT and the Stanford exams. Nashoba Valley Technical High School offers a college preparatory and honors program in all grade levels. Advanced placement courses are available during the junior and senior year.
Career and Technical Programs
Nashoba Valley Technical High School provides technical training for young men and women who desire skills required for successful employment with a curriculum that combines safety, theory and practical application in a state of the art facility. All technical programs align with the Career and Technical Education Frameworks and are structured so that students acquire knowledge and skills in occupational safety and health, program specific technical standards, embedded academics, employ-ability, management and entrepreneurship, and technology.
Annual Curriculum Review Procedures
Nashoba Valley Technical School conducts an Annual Curriculum Review based on a four-year timeline. The intent of the Curriculum Review Procedure is to provide step-by-step instructions for ensuring compliance with Federal and State laws and regulations, as well as, district policy regarding the selection and review of textbooks, instructional materials, and counseling materials. Teachers review curriculum materials for bias, intellectual merit, simplistic and demeaning generalizations based on race, color, gender, gender identity, religion, national origin and sexual orientation. The results of their review are brought to the Curriculum Sub-Committee of the School Committee and the full School Committee body for review.


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Chevron Deluxe Address Labels
The ancient heraldic V-shaped stripe is again at the forefront of style! With light, fun lines of color that guide your eyes and thoughts upward, this label is a joy to glimpse on any letter or package. Great for identifying books and sports equipment to prevent mix-ups, too, personalized address labels come on sheets and measure 1-1/8 inches x 2-1/4 inches each.
- Set of 144
Specify line 1 up to 35 characters and line 2 up to 50 characters.
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Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
At the beginning of the year, kindergarten student Thalia expresses excitement about learning to read, but remains unclear about the specific skills needed to read. When asked what reading entails, she responds, "You look at the pictures, maybe you'll know what the words say." This video follows Thalia's progress over the year as she engages in a variety of reading and writing activities that develop her awareness of letters, sounds, and words -- the details of reading and writing. Her English-language teacher, Jim St. Clair, uses poems, songs, predictable books, reports on classroom activities, and student journals to build on her emergent literacy skills and to promote a love of reading and writing.
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