Mamacita says:  Many years ago, I was teaching Public Speaking in a small farmland high school in southern Indiana. My students’ assignment, one week, was to give an informal “how-to” presentation, a brief demonstration of something they personally knew how to do.

That week, we all learned how to crochet a chain stitch, how to do macrame, how to carve a simple wooden toy, how to change a tire, how to juggle, how to put a belt on a broken vaccuum cleaner, how to put a zipper in a skirt, how to make various color combinations of Easter egg dyes with food coloring and vinegar, and how to make homemade ice cream.

We also learned how to put a suppository up a cow’s butt, how to take a horse’s temperature with a rectal thermometer, and how to neuter a bull calf.

It was a really interesting week. I’ve never been able to look at a rubber band or a razor blade the same way since.

May we all have this same dream.

Careful, grammatically-correct language and an almost poetic speaking style will always get my attention. It’s an assumption on my part, of course, but I associate good grammar with people who actually know what they’re talking about. Martin Luther King, Jr. definitely knew what he was talking about, and he knew HOW to present it.

I worry about the future for different reasons than most people’s reasons.  I worry about the future because present generations aren’t learning about the past.

Seriously.  Our students don’t seem to have anything to make connections to, these days.  They believe ridiculous things on Facebook updates.  They don’t associate Lincoln with the Civil War.  They think the Disney versions of fairy tales are the original versions.  They don’t know that the Little Mermaid died.  They don’t know any nursery rhymes.  They can’t finish a line of poetry.  They don’t know why Paul Revere rode through the streets.  They don’t understand the difference between a comparison and a contrast.  They are uncertain about antonyms and synonyms.  Most of them have never used a thesaurus.  Some of them have never heard of a thesaurus, and when they hear the word, they think it’s a dinosaur.  Most students think a dictionary is good only for a definition, and if they don’t know how to spell a word, they can’t find it.

I worry about a future wherein the so-called “educated” population has nothing filed away in their heads, but rely on Google to find out the simplest things.  I worry about a future that has me picturing, in my head, surgeons googling the whereabouts of the spleen with the patient on the table.  Already, we have a population that doesn’t know how to do math without a calculator.

TV shows make stupid people seem like the norm, and ignorance seem like the ideal.  Our schools are emphasizing conformity and punishing creativity.  Physical ability is trophied even while much of the population’s physical ability is atrophied.  Academic success is pretty much ignored lest some kid’s self-esteem suffer because he/she can’t do “it” as well.

Excellent work that, a generation ago, would have been put up on the wall so all could see and benefit and honor it, is now hastily shunted away because not everybody can do that well.  Kids who can’t do that well now no longer have examples of what things could be like if they worked harder, etc.  Bright, fast kids are advised to slow down, and ignorant teachers “reward” them by giving them more of the same or, even worse, relegating them to the hallway where they spend the day tutoring slow kids.

I worry about the future because people know nothing about the past these days.  I worry about the future because people are spending the present letting other people think for them.

What kind of future is in store for our children if they are not taught about the past, and encouraged to do things more than one way, and encouraged to apply and connect this with that, and that with the other?

Education is about connections.  If our students have nothing in their heads, lives, or experiences, what sense can they make about anything?  How can things be relevant if there is no relativity?

I’ve had students who couldn’t follow the directions on a box of brownie mix.  Oh, they could read the directions, but they weren’t sure about teaspoons, tablespoons, and measuring cups.  Imagine.

Speaking of “imagine,”  I’ve had students who had a hard time imagining anything because imagination requires connections, too.  Image-ing is possible only with prior knowledge – schema.  How can we create the “magic” part of “i-mage-ing” unless we know as much as possible about as many things as possible?

The more schema we can bring to the table, the more connections we’re able to make.  The more connections we make, the more we can understand.  The more we understand, the more we learn.  The more we learn, the more we know.  The more we know, the better able we are to cope and improve the universe.  Not to even mention those  sofa Jeopardy wins.

As for those teachers who advocate “no memorizing, no studying, no homework, no proving knowledge or mastery, and almost total dependence on electronics,” I have only this to say.

Bullshit.  You’re all full of bullshit.

And this from Mamacita, who advocates tech so thoroughly and enthusiastically that my students who don’t use the social networking that they were told to use are left out of the announcement loop altogether.

P.S.  Dear Students:  Midterms are this week.  If you skived off class and didn’t check Twitter, Facebook, Google +, or email, you’ve got a big surprise coming.

And if you aren’t able to make connections, it won’t do you much good to show up, anyway.

“Whyyyyyyyy do I have to learn this? (Best said in a whiny, nasal tone.)

There are many answers to this question, all correct, although “Because it’s going to be on the test” is the poorest answer, even though it might be the only answer the student is capable of understanding AT THE MOMENT. Education is so full of wonders that it’s difficult to highlight just one, but I’ll give it a shot.

One of my favorite educational wonders is the simple fact that there are many things we learn for which we know no immediate reason. This not “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” although I love to know things just to know them. This is “life prep.”

Hasn’t it ever happened to you, that five, ten, thirty, sixty years later, something pops in your brain and suddenly you make a connection to that little poem your mean third grade teacher made you memorize much against your will, and you are able to comprehend something?

I thought so.

THAT’S why you “have to learn this stuff” now. Some of it is for today, and some of it is for tomorrow, and some of it is for when you’re seventy-two years old and struggling with questions far more difficult than school ever made you do. Each of your teachers is trying to prepare you not merely for the next grade up, but for all of the rest of your life. Everything you have ever learned is stored away in your head, somewhere, waiting to serve you “later.” Good teachers know this, and do their level best to encourage students to find and understand the connections and relationships between and among “things.”

That’s what I’ve always tried to do, anyway. I didn’t learn that in college. I learned it from some of my own teachers. Not all; just the good ones. I learned plenty from the bad teachers, too, and not just because bad examples are as useful – and sometimes more so – than good examples. The many good teachers in my life taught me much more than their job description required, and it was these “tangents” that taught me the most. I do this with my students, too, and often those tangents end up being more important than the actual lesson.

If our children learn nothing else in school, I hope they learn about the connections, which are, of course, also relationships. Connecting the dots between math and English and science and history, etc, will help us all want to learn more, and more, and more, and never stop learning more. I consider that to be my primary goal. Perhaps knowing these things about me will soften what I am about to say next, which is simply this:

It’s no surprise to me that a student doesn’t much like to sit still and pay attention when the instructor is boring, lackluster, monotonous, incompetent, and uninformed. (Or any one of those things.) Excellent lessons require much more than books, paper, and pencils; they require the skills of a savvy standup. You can’t teach Period 7 the same way you taught Period 2; it’s a different audience.

However, I still maintain that the majority of responsibility for learning lies with the student, not the teacher. A person who desires to learn will learn in spite of all of the obstacles our modern educational system puts in his/her path, and believe me, modern educational systems put all the obstacles in the path of our students that they possibly can.

It’s still – mostly – the student’s responsiblity.

Bring it on.

(Another re-run.  We’re moving this week.  I’m buried alive in stress, mess, & junk.  This house is a hoarder’s dream.)

The action or linking part of that sentence is the verb.

But just how important can a verb be? I mean, if it were so important to choose verbs carefully, why do most of them have a million synonyms, thank you very much Mr. Roget. Just find a verb that describes the action you need to describe and that’s it, right? One’s as good as another. They’re only verbs, after all. How could it be any kind of big deal which one you pick?

Well, kids, I’ll tell ya. And please remember that all words have a denotative meaning (dictionary definition) and a connotative meaning (what your mind does with the denotation, ie “fat” is somehow fatter than “plump,” etc.)

Let’s use a couple of common verbs for examples: STOP and BLOCK.

Denotatively speaking (see above) these two words are almost identical. In a thesaurus, their synonyms overlap.

Thesaurus entry for “stop” and for “block:”

Main Entry: stop

Part of Speech: verb

Synonyms: arrest, avoid, bar, block, bottle up, break, can, check, choke, choke off, clog, close, congest, cut off, disrupt, fill, fix, forestall, frustrate, gag, hinder, hold back, hush hush, ice, impede, intercept, interrupt, muzzle, obstruct, occlude, plug, rein in, repress, restrain, seal, shut down, shut off, shut out, silence, stall, staunch, stay, stem, still, stopper, suspend, throw over, turn off, ward off

Main Entry: block

Part of Speech: verb

Synonyms: arrest, bar, barricade, block out, blockade, brake, bung up, catch, charge, check, choke, clog, close, close off, close out, congest, cut off, dam, deter, fill, halt, hang up*, hinder, hold up, impede, intercept, interfere, occlude, plug, prevent, shut off*, shut out, stall, stonewall, stop, stop up*, stopper, stymie, tackle, thwart

And these two fraternal twins differ. . . . how?

Like this:

Back in the day, when I wore shorts and began my descent from the car in a public place, I could stop traffic.

Now, that same action would block traffic.

Any questions?

Someone asked me what I really wanted to do in my classroom.

What do I really want to do in my classroom?  What have I ALWAYS wanted to do in my classroom?

I want to take each student, individually and collectively, by the shoulders and give them a shake and lift them up in the air and tell them to REACH.  I want to yell in their faces that life is short and the universe is amazing.  I want to point to the night sky and tell them that if they need perspective, it’s all up there.  I want to tell them that a book is a little universe full of awesome people doing cool things.  I want to tell them to play.  I want them to laugh at a lot of things that make dull people turn up their noses.  I want them to comprehend that each of them is blazingly beautiful, inside and out.  I want them to realize that each of them has a story to tell that nobody else in the world knows, and that we all want to hear it.  I want them to understand that mature adults aren’t really mature according to normal standards, and that we must be mature to realize that.  I want them to never, ever, lose their sense of “play.”  I want to tell them to turn off the TV and go outside; that’s where the cool stuff is.

I want them to hang out with people who don’t look like them.

I want them to try new things and go new places.  I want them to economize on necessities and splurge on creativity and imagination.

I want them to soar, higher and higher, in their heads if nowhere else.  I want them to not be afraid to venture forth and make fools of themselves.

I want them to sing in public and climb on the monkey bars no matter how old they might be.

I want to tell them not to let anyone tell them something can’t be done, because a lot of the time, it just needed a different perspective.

I want to help them comprehend that most awesome things are not comprehensible, just appreciable, and I want them to appreciate awesome things.

I want them to understand that, except for childbirth and insemination and peeing standing up, both sexes can do pretty much anything they want and should be able to do those things without any kind of put-down from others.

I want to show them that it is our differences that make us who we are, that nothing can be truly beautiful without a flaw, and that following the crowd didn’t work out all that well for lemmings.

I want them to stand up for what is right and to speak out when speaking out is needed.  I want them to understand that bad politicians are elected by people who choose not to vote.  I want them to volunteer, and share, and take good care of their own and other people’s possessions, and ask before touching.

I want them to understand that everything is connected to everything else, that nothing really stands alone, not even the cheese.

And, of course, learn the 8 parts of speech and the basic spelling rules, so they won’t look like tools when they express themselves in any and all ways.  :)

And world peace.

Now, how do I get all that on a departmental syllabus?

The students who don’t seem to do as well at this level are those fresh out of high school. Not all of them, of course, but of those who have and give the most problems, most are right out of high school.

This semester, every student who has asked for special privileges or exceptions, or who has excessive unexcused absences, or who has behaved poorly or inappropriately in any way, or who has plagiarized, or who has expected paper and pens handed out like Halloween candy, has been a younger student, a year or less out of high school.

I wonder sometimes if it would be better for us as a society to require at least a year of full-time employment before a student is allowed to go on to college. Would it help these young people develop a sense of pride in workmanship, in rules, in discipline, in a paycheck? If even one student learned – and probably the hard way – that a sense of entitlement and a fierce, protective mommy are actually detrimental to the personal advancement and growth of an adult student/citizen/worker, it would be worth it.

A year of full-time employment might also help a student to decide if college is really the route he/she should follow. Hopefully, it would be, but maybe not right away.

Then again, for many students, a year in a factory, or in construction, or on a farm, or in retail or foods, might well be the deciding factor in a kid’s decision to go back to school and get the kind of education that would mean never having to do such work again.

Before all non-athletic field trips were prohibited here, our high school used to take all the juniors to the local General Motors plant. Back then, probably half of the kids would end up working there in a few years anyway, and of the remaining students, some recoiled in horror at the very thought (after seeing vats of molten metal and hearing the ’scared straight’ anecdotes of the workers) and applied themselves anew to preparing for college, while others listened, fascinated, and changed their track to a Rose Hulman/Purdue engineering mode.

But oh well, no more field trips except for the athletes. Those buses were needed to transport the teams a hundred miles to a game, anyway, which is of course more important than some life-changing field trip that might help a student make a decision that would put his life on a career track. Go, team, go.

One of the problems is, most of the big factories, those places where the non-college people were pretty much guaranteed a good job with benefits, are gone now, farmed out to other countries, outsourced, so the Mothership can pay the workers less and therefore make more money for themselves. But who do they think is going to buy all those cheaply-made cars and other merchandise? Their laid-off workers? This is not a very good way to promote brand loyalty, or any other kind of loyalty. People who have no job are not in the market to buy very many things, hello, CEO dimwads.

My student population is motivated in many different ways. It’s not like a high school classroom, where the goal is (sadly) to make a high score on a standardized test. That’s no motivation for a student. Or for anybody else except big government and clueless administration. No, my students’ motivations are important, and life-changing. If they had been allowed to tour the General Motors plant, some of the decisions they are making might have been made earlier, but that’s a moot point. My students are back in school and they want very much to do well. Most of them are. A few of them aren’t, but I haven’t given up hope yet. School takes some getting used to. As their instructor, I don’t have to worry about prepping my students to do well on one big stupid poorly-written standardized test. I just have to worry about helping them find success, and NOT the kind where I diddle about with the statistics so students who are doing poorly will think they’re doing well and have fake high self esteem. I mean, REAL success. Genuine self-esteem.  The earned kind. There is no other.  Anything not personally earned is a joke.

At this level, they get what they get, and they know that; therefore, what they get is a source of pride. Or shame, as the case may be. Both are earned results, and every kid in the universe knows the difference, and why some kids get one and some the other. The only people who don’t seem to understand are those fierce protective mothers, administrators, and the PC cops.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fierce protective mother. But a parent who consistently stands between his/her child and the results of that child’s actions, is doing the kid no favors. Let the consequences fall, and let the kid deal with them. He/she earned them, after all. And not all consequences are bad, remember. Let the kid reap the good stuff, too, IF it was earned. Not actually and truly and equally earned? It means less than nothing, and is worse than a bad joke.

Oh, and in case there’s a sentient person out there somewhere who didn’t know: those gift-grades, given so a slacker can “graduate” with his/her classmates, are BAD, BAD THINGS. A student who chooses to earn a zero should get that zero, not the 65% that another student might have worked hard for. Whoever thought up that 65% minimum should be dragged out into the streets and shot. We all get what we earn, and if we don’t earn it, we shouldn’t get it, whether it’s points or percentages or salaries or anything, in fact, in the world.  We do not deserve what we did not earn for ourselves.

I’m proud of my students. I will miss them, after this week. They did well.

Except for those few slackers, of course, but you know what? They had the same chances and choices as the others, and they chose poorly. Let the consequences of those poor choices fall on their heads, and let them deal with it themselves.

Those who worked hard? Congratulations. Those who did not? Well, there’s always the summer session, or the fall semester. Try again. And this time, do it right.

Cripes, I love my school and my students. I wouldn’t waste my meanness if I didn’t care. It takes too much effort.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charge with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

==

Mamacita says:  This is one of many poems Mrs. Chandler made us memorize in Junior English.  I am still amazed at the number of students who simply refused to do it and took a zero and didn’t give a tinker’s dam about it.

I know that many people do not believe in memorizing poetry or anything else because we can always look something up if we want or need to know it.  I am sorry for these people.

I love memorizing things and can sit back in my airplane seat, close my eyes, and read entire books in my head.  When we memorize something, we have it with us always.  We can entertain ourselves from within.  We are never bored.  We don’t need batteries.

Even cooler than those things:  we have tons of “stuff” to make connections with.  Remember, education is all about the connections.  The more we know, the more connections we can make.

I pity the little kids whose parents don’t help them learn nursery rhymes, poems, stories, and cool trivia before they begin kindergarten.  I don’t think a child can ever make up for all that lost and wasted time, and parents who don’t do this are selfish dysfunctional assholes lazy know-nothings.

Then again, we can’t miss Days or Oprah or the big game; sheesh.

I still despise the father who refused to drive his spelling Bee winning son to the radio station to compete against the winners from the other schools because he was tired and didn’t want to miss the big game on TV.  Whenever I see this man, I think of this.  Whenever I picture this man in my mind, I see a fat dirty guy in a wifebeater shirt, belching, stinking, and demanding beer after beer to be brought to him because he’s too worthless to get up off his ugly ass to get it himself.  This man is a prominent citizen (hahahahahaha), but I know what he really is.

He’s a selfish jerk who puts himself and his own wishes before the welfare of his children.

I hate this man, to be quite honest.

And this was over ten years ago.  Yes, I tend to hold a grudge against people who don’t do right by a child.

I frankly don’t care WHAT this man says or does now.  He may have changed his ways and become a nice guy, a model citizen, but I will never believe it.  He put himself before his son, and that is all I will ever think of when I see him.

Don’t piss me off.

I fear that my personality type goes against the grain of the poems I love best.  Wishful thinking on my part, maybe.

So, in keeping with her poem’s theme, I chose another picture.

The Builders

I told them a thousand times if I told them once:
Stop fooling around, I said, with straw and sticks.
They won’t hold up; you’re taking an awful chance.
Brick is the stuff to build with, solid bricks.
You want to be impractical, go ahead.
But just remember, I told them, wait and see.
You’re making a big mistake. Alright, I said,
But when the wolf comes, don’t come running to me.

The funny thing is, they didn’t; there they sat,
One in his crummy yellow shack, and one
Under his room of twigs, and the wolf ate
Them, hair and hide. Well, what is done is done.
But I’d been willing to help them, all along,
If only they’d once admitted they were wrong.

===

As usual, we could discuss rhyme scheme and symbolism, a little hyperbole, some alliteration, and first person narration, but isn’t this poem really about giving unasked-for advice that would have made a positive difference, and wishing we could say “I told you so” when someone disregards us, thus screwing up royally?

Not that any of us would gloat or anything.  Other people, maybe, but not any of us.

Smirk.

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace;
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
and went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

====

Mamacita says:  Oh, such rhyme scheme perfection – such pristine and perfect ABAB, CDCD, etc.

Pay attention to that part if you wish; I appreciate a good rhyme scheme myself, but the technical part isn’t the only part of a poem.

Poor Richard Cory.  Filthy rich, expensive yet tasteful clothing, lovely manners, handsome, slim. . . . .  Anybody would be happy with all that.  He didn’t even have to work.  He could do anything he wanted, any time he wanted.  Compared to everybody else in town, Richard Cory had it made, and was the happiest man there.

Um, no.

Money isn’t everything, even if one has some, and Richard Cory, while he obviously had everything money could buy, apparently wanted something his money couldn’t buy, and that something money couldn’t buy was so much more important than wealth or looks or clothing or manners or education that Richard Cory, not having it, felt that life, even with everything else, wasn’t worth living so he stopped.

I first encountered this poem in junior high and it blew me away.  I’m not back yet, in fact.  It affected me greatly, and I’m still reeling from the effect.

Simon and Garfunkle liked this poem, too.  They liked it enough to turn it into a song, in fact.