Challenge 12... procrastination and summer reading...

OHMYWORD! I am JUST LIKE MY STUDENTS!!!

So I started and forgot and procrastinated and forgot and really-meant-to, and here we are, two days into Part 2 of Summer 2014 and I thought I'd be long-since done with my 20-blog challenge, but no. Bless.

So that's how it happens. I'd call this little experiment a success so far.

Normally I take the first two weeks of summer to recover... sleep, clean, organize, clear off the dining room table, and plot the rest of the summer. Then I go on vacation. This year we skipped vacation. I felt sad about that for Zane, since we went to Disney the summer after Kelsey graduated, but then I realized we sent Jimmy and Zane to Peru for a week when we sent Kelsey nowhere, so I suppose it evens out.

I've read too.

Last summer I read the Harry Potter series and some other books I can't remember. In Part 1 of Summer 2014, I read and reread random books: Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (CS Lewis); Wounded by God's People (Anne Graham Lotz); Disconnected Kids (Robert Melillo); How to Write Short (Roy Peter Clark); and On Writing (Stephen King). I'm currently reading by the pool Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and in the evenings Raney (Clyde Edgerton). Reading those two last fiction titles at the same time could conceivably make my head explode.

It feels like it's going slowly, but I actually annotated Clark and King and got LOTS of ideas about how to make both my writing and English classes better. "Less is more," I always say. Actually, I usually say "more is more," but I'm trying to write short{er}.

I guess that bring us to this, then: The End. Of Challenge 12. More to come. Later...

English major armadillo #2...

English major armadillo...

Homage to Vonage...

What Vonage sent as the text version:

"Hi Ms. William, it's Tim Schumer. In our city track field. Just wanna remind you about the beacon apple or if he might be at home. Really could use over the store like you over there doing out here. Really appreciate what you done force on that. Also, the cops and they is Friday and Saturday the 13th 14th and my we have got one rice or 200 on Friday evening. I would usually the airport good and also I don't a bus running events or most of the day on Saturday. I could usually there to know you're busy man but you think it helps appreciate it. There's a problem or any questions you give me a call ***-****. If you can't make the event please let me know if I don't hear from you I'll know you'll be there. Okay man. Appreciate it. I saw you up you're"

The message that was actually on our voice mail:

"Hey Mr. W******. It's Tim S*******,  ****  track and field. Just want to remind you about the meet coming up on Thursday, May 5th, at home.  Really could use your help as a starter like you've normally been doing all year. We really appreciate what you've done for us on that. Also, the conference meet is Friday and Saturday, the 13th and 14th of May. We have got one race, the 3200, on Friday evening. We could use you there, if we could. And also, I think most of the running events are most of the day on Saturday. We could use you there too. I know you're a busy man, but anything you could do to help us we'd appreciate it. If there's a problem or any questions, give me a call ***-****. If you can't make the event, please let me know. If I don't hear from you, I'll know you'll be there.  OK, man. Appreciate it, and thanks for all your help this year."

Best book...

Disclaimer: The bad thing about being a writing teacher is that you spend copious amounts of time editing other people's writing and very little time working on your own. I am excited to spend my upcoming breaks adding these tools to my writer toolbox and not just my editor toolbox.

I've been on a quest for the best writing handbooks. I teach two creative writing classes and one journalism class. I have to have a book that can handle any style of writing. It has to be lean and muscular enough to lift journalistic writing and flexible and swift enough to undergird imaginative writing. I figured I was in for a lengthy and somewhat painful search.

Not so. Very quickly I found a title popping up all over the place. That title: Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. It's been around for a few years, but this is the first year I've gotten my teaching feet underneath me enough to be out of survival mode and into growth mode.

Clark's book is a mini writing institute. In the Introduction, Clark hooked me with two ideas. First, we should be a nation of writers. Why should a select few be tagged to speak for everyone? Writing is a craft, an acquirable skill; anyone can do it and do it well, if given the right tools. And second, he collected the tools from the Poynter Institute, which is THE quintessential journalistic training forum.

Every writer should have Clark's book on his desk. I started to say on his shelf, but this book is desk-top material, not shelf material. It's one for daily use. As matter of fact, I have three book titles on my desk at school. The Bible, the AP Stylebook, and Writing Tools. I'll never teach without them again.

Word of caution: If you are thinking about using Writing Tools with a student, make sure the student is at least high school age. Many of the examples of good writing deal with sensitive topics (PG-13). It's not a book for teaching the younger kiddies how to write.

Some days I miss my...

... first period "Below Average" (DPS's term, not mine) English class from 16+ years ago. I wonder where they are now.

Grammar book...

I don't hate grammar. I really don't. I hate when grammar supersedes writing.

Grammar is a tool. It should help us be better writers. Studying grammar to the exclusion of actually writing is like studying a hammer without ever letting it hit a nail. What's the point?

But studying grammar as a tool allows writers to learn all the amazing things the language can do. Then they can venture into more ornate writing projects.

If you want to become a better writer... write! And read. Once you've conquered reading and writing, you can work on your "grammaring" skills so that you don't [metaphorically speaking] pound your thumb or bend the nail.

[Many thanks to Chandler for loaning me the picture.]

May I rant about language... just a little?

I guess by definition a rant isn't "just a little" anything. Oh well.

This is purely an English teacher rant and has NOTHING to do with my school. NOTHING.

It does have everything to do with a linguistic approach to grammar, though. At my beloved alma mater, I had THE linguistics professor as my grammar teacher for both undergrad grammar and grad school grammar. I loved her.

She made grammar come alive, and yes, we covered traditional grammar and diagrammed the socks out of a gazillion sentences. I have climbed Mt. Traditional Grammar and staked a flag in its peak. But it wasn't traditional grammar that made me go "Woo Ha." It was the underlying linguist's approach to teaching language.

You see, a linguist studies language as it is and not so much as it SHOULD be. Language is dynamic... growing and changing. When it stops growing and changing, it dies, like just about everything else in this world.

Latin is fixed because it is a dead language. There are no more living native speakers of the language. That's one reason it's such a great tool for teaching -- the rules don't change.

English is another story. A year ago "LOL" was cutting edge in slang. Today if you say "LOL," you're old. A month ago you said, "haha." Today, you say "LOLs" or "LOLz." A year ago "stalking" was the term you used if you visited someone else's profile on Facebook. Today you say, "creeping." If the forefront of language (slang) has changed that much in a year, imagine what the whole language has done in 400 years.

I just finished teaching Shakespeare. We read a modern translation of Merchant of Venice because my plans got a little off and we had only two weeks to read, analyze, and test on the play. Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. We speak Modern English. There's a gap. Are the students stupid because they can't read Early Modern English as well as they can Modern English? Not at all. Modern English is their native language. They get it.

But Shakespeare (and for that matter, the writers of our historical founding documents) was working with vocabulary and syntax that differs from what we use today. So what does that mean? Well, it means we have to do a little historical native language teaching and a little translating before we can get to the ideas they communicate.

I teach journalism. We are all about connecting with our audience. Today's writing is short. Sound bites. Sentence fragments. Conversational. It's that way because it's more accessible to more people, and believe it or not, the objective of being a journalist is to get ideas/events/news out there to the people. Getting read is a good thing.

Does that mean that thought-provoking, intellectually deep articles are a waste of time. Absolutely not. However, like everything else, there is a time and a place. Different types of writing are appropriate at different times.

It's all about connecting the message with the audience. To do that, sometimes we have to write the message in the audience's language, and other times, we have to teach a few language lessons before the audience "gets" the writer's point. And you know what? Either way, it's OK.