Category Archives: Educational

These post have something at least obliquely to do with how we educate our young people.

The day I looked up from baseball to find my teacher’s hospital room

This would have happened in the late 1950s, just after my fifth grade year at Andrew Carnegie Elementary School, in Tulsa, Oklahoma .  I loved it there–the school, my friends, the town, the ranches surrounding our suburban subdivision–it was just the ideal place for a boy to grow up.

Carnegie was a “pilot school,” one set up to try out new educational initiatives, and most of them really worked for the students there.  For example, from the second grade on, we changed classes.  The classes of children stayed together throughout the day, but we moved from room to room and from teacher to teacher.  The advantage to us was that when we were in, say, Science class, we had a Science teacher, not some nice lady who really wished she understood Science a little better.  The Art teacher, for example, was actually able to get me to produce some attractive works–something that never happened before or since–just by providing the materials and environment that put success within the students’ grasp.  It still is a great school, apparently–all these years later.

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I’m Sorry: 21st Century Style

The translation here, 21st century style, is, “I know I did something to inconvenience you, but I don’t really want to have an unpleasant exchange with you, and I certainly don’t want to change my behavior in any way, either, so I am saying this meaningless thing I learned in elementary school so you’ll go away and not say anything unpleasant to me to try to get me to actually take responsibility for my actions.”

Do I sound grumpy? Maybe I am.

But the translation is almost Hemingway-esque, in a way, isn’t it? I mean in terms of sentence structure.  Content and meaning be damned. Hemingway nor his characters would have said anything so insincere.  Imagine one of Papa’s characters making a false apology.  I mean, really.  They were more likely to leave a righteous apology unsaid than to make one insincerely.  But the compound sentences, Man! Look at the sentence structure!

But back to the issue, I am “apologized” to almost daily in this way.  I have occasion to run and ride my bike on a series of paved trails just miles from my house.  The trails are marked with a center stripe designed, I suppose, to keep everybody in line.  Still, I am constantly coming up behind pairs and groups of pedestrians and cyclists who have arranged themselves across the entire width of the trail, blocking it rather quite completely with their wide, wide, butts, their canine companions, their double-wide strollers, their colorful magnesium bicycles and associated festive costumery.  There is a plenitude of what-all out there, believe me. Continue reading

Limits? Boundaries? Me?

pic of barbed wireBoundaries and limits. Limits and boundaries. Life is full of these. Why would anyone try to raise a child without a proper grounding in these necessities? We can guess at some of the possible reasons, but people try to do it all the time. Really. All the time.

Sometimes we needn’t guess why certain individuals try to accomplish this trick. Obviously, people exist for whom something went slightly awry in their childhoods, something that made limits and boundaries seem as negative things when they are, rather, quite positive things—when executed properly, that is. It definitely can happen.

My own life provides evidence for how these social constructs can get a bad name. My parents are, as they say, no longer with us, but let’s just say they were no model for how to teach the value and benefit of boundaries and limits. They were inconsistent; they were needlessly harsh from time to time, and often hypocritical, sometimes transgressing the reasonable limits society had placed upon them, and doing so within sight of the kids. To their credit, perhaps, they did so with a certain admirable élan at times, but still, the fact of the violation, in the face of the strictures they applied to the children at home—well, it just didn’t take a juvenile genius to see through it all and come to one’s own conclusions on the matter. One began to see that boundaries and limits could be a pretty fungible commodity, and that is not the most comfortable discovery for a child to make.

And then life went on and put me in a place where, in 25 years as a teacher and coach in various institutions of public instruction, I learned the value of limits and boundaries while dealing with some 3000 young people—other people’s kids, in fact—many of whom had never heard of such a thing as a boundary before and perhaps not even since.

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OK, I Give!

St. SebastianYeah, that’s the way it is with me. Not one to be a martyr in a lost cause, I give up, already.

See, you don’t know me, but I am one of those people–one of those really disgusting people, apparently–who knows all the words and all the grammar and usage rules, but what’s the use, really? I mean, none of it seems to do anyone any good anymore, does it? It’s certainly nothing to boast about in today’s cultural milieu. One should, rather, hang one’s head in shame for knowing all those words and all those rules. Sign of a misspent youth and all that, what?

“Hey, wait,” you say. “You cocky jerk, isn’t it ‘all of the words’ and ‘all of the rules'”? Not really. Nope. And what about knows? Surely, people know things, don’t they? Well, they do, but one person knows things. This one confuses M$ Word’s grammar checker, too, so give yourself a pass. Score one for you if you marked the cliche near the end there, however.

The fact is, though, I’m tired. Having fought the good fight in an English classroom for a quarter century, I can say rather authoritatively that the fight already is over and the other side has won. The barbarians are at the gates, and we’re trapped inside the walls living in our own filth. We’re obviously correct in everything we say or write, but that doesn’t make the air smell any better in here, does it?

But, as my in-laws from Long Island say, “wadda-ya gonna do?” The forces acting to change language are just too strong. Resistance is futile, or perhaps I should say, feudal. I am going to go ahead and be ass-immolated.
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“Shooting Spree”

Whitman.jpgThis is one “convention” of journalists that could use some some serious reflection. Whenever someone shoots more than one or two victims, members of the chattering class will refer to the incident as a “shooting spree.” The phrase, ringing so close to the more common “shopping spree,” makes it sound as if someone were having just a whole lot of fun killing people.

The phrase is problematic on so many levels. It has become a particularly obnoxious cliché in the vast majority of cases, it is anything but accurate; furthermore, and more to the point, the phrase could encourage impressionable fringe characters by making the actions of a crazy person sound attractive and fun.

I don’t know which is a worse offense, frankly. I hate cliché s, I hate fuzzy, inaccurate prose, but the idea of making a destructive act of utter desperation sound like fun does not strike me as all that useful, either.
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Why do they act that way?

I mentioned “hand-wringing and indignation” in my previous post about a stripper’s allegations of rape against members of the recently disbanded Duke lacrosse team. These two reactions have been among the most common to the still-evolving mess–I say “still-evolving” because the DA seems determined to bolster his “street cred” with Black voters by sending the case to the grand jury despite the absence of DNA or other evidence that an assault actually occurred.

Oddly enough, the stripper apparently can’t identify anyone as an assailant, so without DNA or eye witness evidence, this rape allegation begins to look more and more spurious. I mean, some “unpleasantness” probably occurred, probably characterized by some racism and angry words, but this is starting to appear like an attempt to bend the legal system to the designs of a few interested parties–the DA and the stripper, most likely.

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PC Minefield at Duke

MinefieldThose of us who live in Durham, NC, seldom experience the glow of the national spotlight. We have become accustomed to seeing references to the Research Triangle area in the sports pages, but apparently not much else happens here that is worthy of notice by the rest of the country. Maybe that is what has led to the disequilibrium around here, especially among the usually confident voices of the university set who now find a bit of difficulty in hitting their marks and saying their lines in the case of the recent rape accusations against members of the Duke University lacrosse team.

Perhaps people have also been put off balance by the complex convergence of factors required to put Durham in the news. Attracting national attention has required a story combining the popular theme of sports and something else newsworthy–or prurient–enough to attract the notice of the national press. In this case it was that a young African American woman is the accuser and the accused are generally privileged white college athletes who have become rather notorious in the area for their rowdiness and run-ins with the law.

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