The bicentennial year was one that I have several distinct memories of. It was the year I turned 13. There was the most horrible drought through the plains; I remember the crops mostly at the South Dakota farm, where the oats grew only about 3 inches tall. Everything, everywhere, seemed to be wrapped, draped, or painted in red, white, and blue. But the most powerful color I saw that year was pink: the pink of the dress my newborn sister Sheri came home in, one week after her birth on March 29th.
She was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on. She had the roundest blue eyes and the most transparent skin, and I worshipped her instantly. I don't remember Mom ever having to tell me to take care of her, although she must have. What I do recall is going to her first thing every day when I came home from school and seeing her eyes light up when I picked her up, giving me little bubbles of joy where I imagined my heart to be. Feeding, diapering, bathing her---none of these seemed like chores, because I could laugh and be easy with her in a way that I found impossible as a shy, painfully awkward teenager. It's not too much to say that she helped me grow a heart; I still feel those same bubbles there---tearing up a little, even now---when I picture her in her little infant rocker, sitting next to the piano as I practiced my lessons, cooing along to the music with her chin raised, her tiny lips forming a perfectly round O. No happiness for me this side of heaven could possibly be more pure than that picture, two sisters adoring each other and making music together for the sheer joy of it.
She grew so fast into one of the most distinctive characters in our family---and that's saying a lot. When she was still tiny, Dad christened her "Sharo" because when she would see that cheesy 70's performer Charro doing her shake-it-and-squeal routine on TV, Sheri would try to imitate her. (How I wish we had THAT on video to prove it to her.) By the time she was a toddler, she was infamous for hating to have clothes on. She would abide them in public because Mom wouldn't have her babies looking trashy by running around without clothing, but as soon as she came in the back door, she would start stripping everything off, right down to slipping out of her diaper when she could manage it. Sometimes I think she might have done it just for the reaction; because she was so much different from my brother and me, who had both been fairly tame, docile children, we were all just a little bit shocked by her exuberance. She was a wild child---loud, laughing, irrepressible, with limitless energy and no fear. Mom tells a story about working in the kitchen one afternoon while Sheri, two or three at the time, was playing in the back yard , and when Mom went over to the kitchen sink to clean up, she looked out to find Sheri standing in the pasture right in the middle of a herd of mama cows and, if I remember, a few calves. Anyone who has ever worked with cattle knows the most dangerous ones are mama cows, but they paid her almost no attention. Another time, when Sheri was around four, Mom caught her rolling a hay bale over and over, back and forth, in the yard---it had to be close to twice her weight. By that time, we all knew that no force on earth was going to keep her from doing what she thought she needed to do.
Still, we had our bond through those years. When she was still little enough for her bottle, I would sometimes take her to bed with me at night, laying out a row of pillows on the other side to protect her; when Mom went to bed, she'd put her in her crib for the night. I remember coming home from school one day when she was still a toddler, and for the first time, she didn't greet me at the door and jump into my arms. Mom said she had been sick all day; I found her lying on the love seat as limp as a wilted daisy. To see her so hurt me in a way I didn't know possible. It's the same look she still gets when she's sick---and it hurts me no less today. She would break my heart every Christmas, crying at "Rudolph" because the other reindeer kids wouldn't play with him....but it would drive me nuts that she would watch The Price is Right and scream with joy when people won, and cry when they lost. But never was she not fun to me. I can't count the number of articles of clothing I sewed for her in my four years of home-ec, including little halter dresses that were popular at the time that she now calls "hooker dresses." We didn't cut her hair until she was seven, and I was constantly toying with it, putting it up in "tails," as she called them. By the time I graduated from high school, Sheri was a rangy five-year-old who was ready to take on the world.
The years after I left home seemed to go by so fast, and after Sheri's third-grade year, when our brother graduated, she mostly grew up like an only child. I missed so much of what happened in those years, but she became exactly who she was destined to be. Before I knew what was happening, she was in high school. The gangly little girl became a gorgeous young woman; that translucent skin and those round blue eyes served her well. She was a handful, no doubt, but probably no more so than most teenagers---she was just bursting with so much more energy and emotion than Bo and I had at that age that I think Mom and Dad felt overwhelmed by it at times. Still, she was and is the child that has kept them young into their 70s. Through her college years and up until she was 30, she lived out in OKC in a world that was alien to all of us: producing television news, managing a restaurant, opening new stores in Texas and Oklahoma for a jewelry chain, selling Pampered Chef and Mary Kay, almost always working two or even three jobs at a time. We all knew hard work, but she was and is one of the hardest-working people I will ever know. I worried about her leaving behind her life there when, at 30, she honored Dad's request that she come back to the ranch and run the place because it was getting to be too much for him. Instead, she found her life there, meeting her future husband on a trip to Texas, marrying him in 2009, and at long last having the children she longed for, with a now 10-year-old sweet step-daughter and 19-month-old spitfire daughter who is every inch of her personality, carbon copied and magnified for effect.
When I saw Allie in the hospital after Sheri gave birth, my first words were, "Oh, she looks so much like Katie!"---our brother's little girl, with the same round, blue Welker eyes and milky skin. I think I must have slipped sideways in time, for, after reflecting on it, I find....that little girl looked so much like her mother, the baby girl who taught me the meaning of "the light of my life." Watching her now, with her own family, I know that she, too, has felt that great gift, and I am so blessed to see it coming back around again, 37 years after she was gifted to us.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
What's Killing America
Ask any man or woman on the street what the most pressing problem in America is today, and you'll get a smattering of similar responses: the deficit---or, wait, the 2nd Amendment! No, there are all those continuing battles, large and small, of the Arab Spring, and we have to help them.....except we shouldn't help them. Yeah, and all the stuff we send over there! But we have this struggling, anemic economic recovery that should be most important. And all these entitlements that senior citizens are draining dry! On and on, the list revolves through time, with a different issue sliding into the rotation every few years and another dropping off. I couldn't pretend to know enough about any of them to say which is most likely to bring our country down, but I believe I know the answer anyway, and it's none of these. Nor is it McDonald's, leading the pack of fast food vendors making Americans more obese each day, or BP polluting our oceans, or coal polluting our skies, though all of these have surely done their part.
What's killing America is much more immediate and frightening to me, and should be to all of us, because if it isn't within arm's reach of you, you can surely look out your window and see it, and it comes closer every day. You might even instinctively deny it immediately, as I have always done until faced with some vivid and painful reminders of late. You might even continue to deny it long after you read this, but I hope you'll leave it resting in your mind as I try to keep it in mine, to make sure I haven't forgotten this terror of our culture for a single day.
What's killing America? I don't know if you'll believe it or not, but here it is: it's illiteracy----but not the kind we grew up hearing about in my generation, where the older generations or those in certain socio-economic areas hadn't had opportunities to learn. It's rampant, willful, PROUD illiteracy that rejects education, reading especially, on the bewildering principle that it's outmoded, pointless, and boring. It is more than a kid thing, as well; often this attitude has been instilled by parents.
Let me see if I can break this down in a way that makes sense to us both.
A little more than 30 years ago, when I graduated from high school, I don't remember anyone who went to our high school (yes, I knew them all----it was small enough that K-12 was all in one building) who couldn't read. Some were better than others, but we all could read, and several of us were willing readers who always had a book on hand, despite the slim pickings of our school library. Fast forward about five years to my first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant, and I remember a middle-aged woman who was in one of the first remedial grammar classes I taught. The poor woman could not seem to pass any of the work that we did, and it was very basic, clearly structured grammatical equations that the average 4th grader would be able to complete. The students thrived and excelled with the program, almost all of them able to pass the required exam to pass on to Freshman Comp I the next semester. But I just couldn't make any headway with this woman. I finally discovered the answer about halfway through the semester: she had made a 5 on her ACT. She couldn't read at all, and in fact, spoke only very broken English; Cherokee had been her first language. She had come into the university on a Voc Rehab program, I think, but had obviously not been getting all the services she needed. It was my first real experience with illiteracy, the kind that comes from rampant life-long poverty, and though I didn't know what to do to help her, I've never forgotten the woman's face. Only a mere accident of birth put her in her situation, and me in mine. This is the true, tragic illiteracy I think most of us associate with that word: not a pejorative but a simple description of awful fact. This is NOT the kind of illiteracy that is about to take us under if we don't fight it now.
Today's illiterates are supremely confident that books---reading, and the proper application of grammar, spelling, mechanics, usage, and punctuation---are so antiquated as to be laughable. Why? Well, because of media, of course! Who needs books when you can watch almost anything you want to see at any time, on some kind of device? Of course, text language is doing the most damage to grammar and her sisters; one only has to scroll through a Facebook newsfeed to see the disdain with which they are treated in half of the statuses and comments. But Twitter, beginning to outpace Facebook the way it once did to MySpace, forces even more of those "acceptable" misuses and abuses with its 140-character limit.
Adding to the "Reading is Outdated" argument is the constant bombardment of media on young people's attention. How can I expect students to read 10 pages one night when they must look up and watch at least 100 new YouTube videos they've heard about? No, not how---WHY would I expect that? I say this with all sincerity: My students are genuinely puzzled, some stunned (or even incensed), by any homework request of that sort. Over the years, despite my internal conflicts over it, I've determined that if I want my students to read something, I'm going to have to read it with them in class. I start out the year making them read novels on their own, and they do Accelerated Reader points all year, but if we can read and discuss it in two class periods, max, we do that. Otherwise, I'd just be standing up there lecturing to people when I want a discussion. For the longer at-home assignments, I've tried to head off the invariable "I just couldn't get into it" excuse by telling them from the start of the year that whenever they are doing homework for my class, they should turn off ALL of their devices and leave them at the other end of the house, preferably with a parent. Every breath, I know, is wasted; the look of horror on their faces at the mere suggestion that they go without their phones is akin to demanding, "Your money or your life!"
I'm not just an old-lady English teacher stomping her feet in the dust of her crumbling career here: it's well-known and documented that because of all these types of technology, our young people (not just students---anyone who is super-attuned to media) have become functionally illiterate in not just reading, but in social settings. Just a couple of weeks ago, at dinner with some friends on Brookside, we watched two women, possibly mother and daughter, at a table near us, where the young woman stared constantly at her I-phone, scrolling, typing, smiling at the screen, totally ignoring her dinner partner. We decided the older woman must have been Mom when she reached over and touched the girl on the wrist, and Girl kind of shook her off. What? How is that ever, EVER, socially acceptable? Yet, if you've read this far, I bet you've seen the same thing. God help you if you've DONE it. If parents, friends, family are less important than the devices, how much farther down the scale does reading fall? How much farther does informed citizenship fall?!
Second on my list of attitudes against reading is that so many find it pointless. I can't fathom that at all, but then I don't remember ever not being fascinated by books. They were there from my earliest memories of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother reading to me, curled up in their laps, the books so iconic in our lives that they rest on a shelf in my classroom, or on a high bookshelf behind me in my sister's office, where I'm writing tonight. I have hundreds---maybe 400, maybe a little more---of books in my home that date back to my childhood, up through the last purchases I made a couple of months ago. Stashed away until my two oldest nieces are old enough to read them, I have two copies of Little Women that I purchased at Louisa May Alcott's home in 2010, because I wanted to pass the joy I took in that old classic on to them. How, then, could I see sharp, incisive, rich books as pointless?
I can't see them that way because I'm a 49-year-old English teacher, of course; I'm not unaware of that. What I can't fathom is how any child of reasonably well-meaning parents could have an utter disdain for books....but I got a big eye-opener about that just a couple of weeks ago. I was discussing a poetic term, alliteration, which is a repeated consonant sound at the beginning of words, with my classes. I pointed out to them that our brains seem to respond to that repetition from infancy. To prove it, I asked them to remember back to the first books they heard, and possibly how they drove their parents crazy asking to have certain books read over and over again. What books were they? About half of the kids responded immediately with what I expected: Dr. Seuss, who was nothing if not alliterative and repetitive in his rhythm and syntax. These students understood the correlation immediately. The other half of the students said they didn't have books read to them at home. I'm NOT overstating that number, though the kids might have been---there are always a few who want to shock us to gain pity or at least attention. But the reality did strike me: Just as there is a correlation between our recognition of repeated sounds in children's and adult literature, there must be a corellation between those with no home reading experience and a disdain for reading that may come from a lack of exposure to it as an enjoyable activity, or even from a learned attitude from a parent. Either way, with such a high number of students having no exposure to books before school, there's really no surprise that they see them as pointless. I've always worked hard at making every piece of literature relevant to the lives of my students, and I've hit the mark maybe a little more often than not. But that's not good enough for these new people who will proudly, loudly, proclaim their opposition to reading as pointless (and a number of other adjectives somewhat more vicious, or even obscene, than this). I don't yet know what WILL be good enough for me to do on my own; whatever it is, we're all going to have to put in our time to change it.
Finally, today's illiterates see anything, ANYTHING, in print as "boring," "too hard," or just "too many words" to ever be dealt with. They're so tired of life, with a sense of ennui that I used to only associate with jaded yuppies, snooty Europeans, and literary characters suffering from TB or an over-blown sense of self. Not so anymore. Here's the quickest, freshest case in point I can give you on this one, and it was a shocker: several weeks ago, my juniors and I spent three days studying the Declaration of Independence, reading it through, discussing point by point, and then completing a notes page designed to help them remember some of the important infractions that Jefferson et. al. enumerated against King George III. This is one of my favorite pieces to study in the entire year, to see the kids come to the realization that everything they enjoy today comes as a direct result of this document. We were done with the group work and the students were working on their notes, when I got a question posed in such frustrated sincerity that it left me utterly speechless for a moment: "Ms. Welker, have they written a newer version of this? Like, has anyone remade it? Because these guys used a lot of words that we just don't have anymore." The Declaration.....is hard, and boring? No, it isn't, not at all, if you are willing to see the relevance in each point, how we would feel if we'd experienced what the colonists did: a standing army hostile to us, a judicial system functioning only on the king's whims, taxation without representation, trade with the rest of the world cut off, and every other point we went over in detail. It was not that they couldn't understand it; they didn't want to read to find answers to their notes, even though we'd read it through twice, because it was hard, and that made it boring.
I don't think we have to look very far to find what makes written words boring to many people of all ages today: it's the "damn box," as Laura and I always called it. Of course, they aren't made as boxes now; they're as thin and flat as possible, all of that money and technology that used to be so unwieldy now redistributed to the surface area, to provide screens of an unnatural clarity and brightness of color even Walt Disney himself could never have imagined. Why would anyone pick up a book when wall-sized characters of our choice will dance, sing, live their own "reality," or deliver our brand of news or sports at any time, day or night? I got my own sad reality check about this when I realized several months ago that I had virtually stopped reading, because I'd discovered so many new shows since I'd been recording things on my DVR to skip commercials. I didn't like the person that made me; I didn't know who she was. For most of my life, I'd been a limited TV viewer at best until after Laura died. I've had to watch my computer time, as well, because 3 hours can melt away in no time at all if I sit down with no schedule in mind. Not that I'm some paragon of literary virtue---I'm just as likely to read junky stuff as quality stuff---but if this lover of books could get so enamored of tech and TV, how much more likely would it be for someone who never loved the written word?
Even if I've convinced you of the types of disdain for literacy that abound today, you may not see this as what's bringing our country to the brink of disaster. I submit the simple corollary that to be a free republic, we must be an informed republic, and an informed republic cannot be made up of illiterates. Further, those who find no sustenance in being able to read, write, and comprehend our native language will most certainly be unwilling to work with those of other languages and cultures, yet we all know that this is the world that our young people will have to function in, the one they will have to compete in for their survival. Can we possibly sit by and be passive about their arrogance, however unwitting it may be? Of course we can't, any more than one of us can change the culture. It will take an enormously concerted, conscious effort.
We must read to and with our children, starting even before birth.
We must model good reading habits for people of all ages.
We must make rules about media having only a certain amount of influence in our lives and our children's lives.
We must talk with our families, over meals or in cars, at bedtime or any other quiet time, about what we read and think and know.
We must be diligent in supporting groups that encourage reading and free and open thought.
We must believe always in the sanctity of the written word, properly used.
We must never forget that as the minds of our people go, so will our country go. Put another way: trash in, trash out. That's where we're headed if we keep to the current path. But I have faith in the ability to create change. We can do much better than we have today.
We can pick up a book and not only save the life of our country, but of everyone we love.
What's killing America is much more immediate and frightening to me, and should be to all of us, because if it isn't within arm's reach of you, you can surely look out your window and see it, and it comes closer every day. You might even instinctively deny it immediately, as I have always done until faced with some vivid and painful reminders of late. You might even continue to deny it long after you read this, but I hope you'll leave it resting in your mind as I try to keep it in mine, to make sure I haven't forgotten this terror of our culture for a single day.
What's killing America? I don't know if you'll believe it or not, but here it is: it's illiteracy----but not the kind we grew up hearing about in my generation, where the older generations or those in certain socio-economic areas hadn't had opportunities to learn. It's rampant, willful, PROUD illiteracy that rejects education, reading especially, on the bewildering principle that it's outmoded, pointless, and boring. It is more than a kid thing, as well; often this attitude has been instilled by parents.
Let me see if I can break this down in a way that makes sense to us both.
A little more than 30 years ago, when I graduated from high school, I don't remember anyone who went to our high school (yes, I knew them all----it was small enough that K-12 was all in one building) who couldn't read. Some were better than others, but we all could read, and several of us were willing readers who always had a book on hand, despite the slim pickings of our school library. Fast forward about five years to my first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant, and I remember a middle-aged woman who was in one of the first remedial grammar classes I taught. The poor woman could not seem to pass any of the work that we did, and it was very basic, clearly structured grammatical equations that the average 4th grader would be able to complete. The students thrived and excelled with the program, almost all of them able to pass the required exam to pass on to Freshman Comp I the next semester. But I just couldn't make any headway with this woman. I finally discovered the answer about halfway through the semester: she had made a 5 on her ACT. She couldn't read at all, and in fact, spoke only very broken English; Cherokee had been her first language. She had come into the university on a Voc Rehab program, I think, but had obviously not been getting all the services she needed. It was my first real experience with illiteracy, the kind that comes from rampant life-long poverty, and though I didn't know what to do to help her, I've never forgotten the woman's face. Only a mere accident of birth put her in her situation, and me in mine. This is the true, tragic illiteracy I think most of us associate with that word: not a pejorative but a simple description of awful fact. This is NOT the kind of illiteracy that is about to take us under if we don't fight it now.
Today's illiterates are supremely confident that books---reading, and the proper application of grammar, spelling, mechanics, usage, and punctuation---are so antiquated as to be laughable. Why? Well, because of media, of course! Who needs books when you can watch almost anything you want to see at any time, on some kind of device? Of course, text language is doing the most damage to grammar and her sisters; one only has to scroll through a Facebook newsfeed to see the disdain with which they are treated in half of the statuses and comments. But Twitter, beginning to outpace Facebook the way it once did to MySpace, forces even more of those "acceptable" misuses and abuses with its 140-character limit.
Adding to the "Reading is Outdated" argument is the constant bombardment of media on young people's attention. How can I expect students to read 10 pages one night when they must look up and watch at least 100 new YouTube videos they've heard about? No, not how---WHY would I expect that? I say this with all sincerity: My students are genuinely puzzled, some stunned (or even incensed), by any homework request of that sort. Over the years, despite my internal conflicts over it, I've determined that if I want my students to read something, I'm going to have to read it with them in class. I start out the year making them read novels on their own, and they do Accelerated Reader points all year, but if we can read and discuss it in two class periods, max, we do that. Otherwise, I'd just be standing up there lecturing to people when I want a discussion. For the longer at-home assignments, I've tried to head off the invariable "I just couldn't get into it" excuse by telling them from the start of the year that whenever they are doing homework for my class, they should turn off ALL of their devices and leave them at the other end of the house, preferably with a parent. Every breath, I know, is wasted; the look of horror on their faces at the mere suggestion that they go without their phones is akin to demanding, "Your money or your life!"
I'm not just an old-lady English teacher stomping her feet in the dust of her crumbling career here: it's well-known and documented that because of all these types of technology, our young people (not just students---anyone who is super-attuned to media) have become functionally illiterate in not just reading, but in social settings. Just a couple of weeks ago, at dinner with some friends on Brookside, we watched two women, possibly mother and daughter, at a table near us, where the young woman stared constantly at her I-phone, scrolling, typing, smiling at the screen, totally ignoring her dinner partner. We decided the older woman must have been Mom when she reached over and touched the girl on the wrist, and Girl kind of shook her off. What? How is that ever, EVER, socially acceptable? Yet, if you've read this far, I bet you've seen the same thing. God help you if you've DONE it. If parents, friends, family are less important than the devices, how much farther down the scale does reading fall? How much farther does informed citizenship fall?!
Second on my list of attitudes against reading is that so many find it pointless. I can't fathom that at all, but then I don't remember ever not being fascinated by books. They were there from my earliest memories of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother reading to me, curled up in their laps, the books so iconic in our lives that they rest on a shelf in my classroom, or on a high bookshelf behind me in my sister's office, where I'm writing tonight. I have hundreds---maybe 400, maybe a little more---of books in my home that date back to my childhood, up through the last purchases I made a couple of months ago. Stashed away until my two oldest nieces are old enough to read them, I have two copies of Little Women that I purchased at Louisa May Alcott's home in 2010, because I wanted to pass the joy I took in that old classic on to them. How, then, could I see sharp, incisive, rich books as pointless?
I can't see them that way because I'm a 49-year-old English teacher, of course; I'm not unaware of that. What I can't fathom is how any child of reasonably well-meaning parents could have an utter disdain for books....but I got a big eye-opener about that just a couple of weeks ago. I was discussing a poetic term, alliteration, which is a repeated consonant sound at the beginning of words, with my classes. I pointed out to them that our brains seem to respond to that repetition from infancy. To prove it, I asked them to remember back to the first books they heard, and possibly how they drove their parents crazy asking to have certain books read over and over again. What books were they? About half of the kids responded immediately with what I expected: Dr. Seuss, who was nothing if not alliterative and repetitive in his rhythm and syntax. These students understood the correlation immediately. The other half of the students said they didn't have books read to them at home. I'm NOT overstating that number, though the kids might have been---there are always a few who want to shock us to gain pity or at least attention. But the reality did strike me: Just as there is a correlation between our recognition of repeated sounds in children's and adult literature, there must be a corellation between those with no home reading experience and a disdain for reading that may come from a lack of exposure to it as an enjoyable activity, or even from a learned attitude from a parent. Either way, with such a high number of students having no exposure to books before school, there's really no surprise that they see them as pointless. I've always worked hard at making every piece of literature relevant to the lives of my students, and I've hit the mark maybe a little more often than not. But that's not good enough for these new people who will proudly, loudly, proclaim their opposition to reading as pointless (and a number of other adjectives somewhat more vicious, or even obscene, than this). I don't yet know what WILL be good enough for me to do on my own; whatever it is, we're all going to have to put in our time to change it.
Finally, today's illiterates see anything, ANYTHING, in print as "boring," "too hard," or just "too many words" to ever be dealt with. They're so tired of life, with a sense of ennui that I used to only associate with jaded yuppies, snooty Europeans, and literary characters suffering from TB or an over-blown sense of self. Not so anymore. Here's the quickest, freshest case in point I can give you on this one, and it was a shocker: several weeks ago, my juniors and I spent three days studying the Declaration of Independence, reading it through, discussing point by point, and then completing a notes page designed to help them remember some of the important infractions that Jefferson et. al. enumerated against King George III. This is one of my favorite pieces to study in the entire year, to see the kids come to the realization that everything they enjoy today comes as a direct result of this document. We were done with the group work and the students were working on their notes, when I got a question posed in such frustrated sincerity that it left me utterly speechless for a moment: "Ms. Welker, have they written a newer version of this? Like, has anyone remade it? Because these guys used a lot of words that we just don't have anymore." The Declaration.....is hard, and boring? No, it isn't, not at all, if you are willing to see the relevance in each point, how we would feel if we'd experienced what the colonists did: a standing army hostile to us, a judicial system functioning only on the king's whims, taxation without representation, trade with the rest of the world cut off, and every other point we went over in detail. It was not that they couldn't understand it; they didn't want to read to find answers to their notes, even though we'd read it through twice, because it was hard, and that made it boring.
I don't think we have to look very far to find what makes written words boring to many people of all ages today: it's the "damn box," as Laura and I always called it. Of course, they aren't made as boxes now; they're as thin and flat as possible, all of that money and technology that used to be so unwieldy now redistributed to the surface area, to provide screens of an unnatural clarity and brightness of color even Walt Disney himself could never have imagined. Why would anyone pick up a book when wall-sized characters of our choice will dance, sing, live their own "reality," or deliver our brand of news or sports at any time, day or night? I got my own sad reality check about this when I realized several months ago that I had virtually stopped reading, because I'd discovered so many new shows since I'd been recording things on my DVR to skip commercials. I didn't like the person that made me; I didn't know who she was. For most of my life, I'd been a limited TV viewer at best until after Laura died. I've had to watch my computer time, as well, because 3 hours can melt away in no time at all if I sit down with no schedule in mind. Not that I'm some paragon of literary virtue---I'm just as likely to read junky stuff as quality stuff---but if this lover of books could get so enamored of tech and TV, how much more likely would it be for someone who never loved the written word?
Even if I've convinced you of the types of disdain for literacy that abound today, you may not see this as what's bringing our country to the brink of disaster. I submit the simple corollary that to be a free republic, we must be an informed republic, and an informed republic cannot be made up of illiterates. Further, those who find no sustenance in being able to read, write, and comprehend our native language will most certainly be unwilling to work with those of other languages and cultures, yet we all know that this is the world that our young people will have to function in, the one they will have to compete in for their survival. Can we possibly sit by and be passive about their arrogance, however unwitting it may be? Of course we can't, any more than one of us can change the culture. It will take an enormously concerted, conscious effort.
We must read to and with our children, starting even before birth.
We must model good reading habits for people of all ages.
We must make rules about media having only a certain amount of influence in our lives and our children's lives.
We must talk with our families, over meals or in cars, at bedtime or any other quiet time, about what we read and think and know.
We must be diligent in supporting groups that encourage reading and free and open thought.
We must believe always in the sanctity of the written word, properly used.
We must never forget that as the minds of our people go, so will our country go. Put another way: trash in, trash out. That's where we're headed if we keep to the current path. But I have faith in the ability to create change. We can do much better than we have today.
We can pick up a book and not only save the life of our country, but of everyone we love.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Nyquil Blues
Am I the only person who remembers----or maybe has ever heard----that awesome ditty of the cold and flu season?
"Give me a bottle of Nyquil,
That restful sleep my body needs.
Oh-h-h, give me a bottle of Nyquil,
That restful sleep my-y-y body needs.
Analgesic decongestant,
With an antihistamine."
I've known that odd tune for something like 30 years. I don't think I ever took the stuff, though, since I rarely ever got sick. My sharpest memory of it was when we discovered that my brother, around eight or nine at the time, had taken almost a whole bottle in a week's time; he'd been dosing himself up every night, having somehow discovered that it knocked him out. Thankfully, we found out early enough that we didn't need to stage an intervention or send him off to rehab.
This week, I actually bought a pill version of the generic Nyquil to try to keep me from coughing and thrashing all night. Results are mixed. Maybe I should have taken the stuff sooner; this is going on the third week of recurring respiratory crap. But with blood pressure meds, one can't be too careful; lots of things don't mix, so I usually try to tough it out or go to the doctor for meds.
But there's nothing to be done about it tonight, except take the last of the pills and hope for the best. My head is roaring, but as long as I don't talk, breathe, or exert myself, it's all good. Oh, and it's the beginning of spring break: having the respiratory ick is JUST how I wanted to spend my week!
Hope yours is full of delight, and that you can toddle off to sleep without a stiff swig of
alcohol. Just sing a chorus of the "Nyquil Blues" for me.
"Give me a bottle of Nyquil,
That restful sleep my body needs.
Oh-h-h, give me a bottle of Nyquil,
That restful sleep my-y-y body needs.
Analgesic decongestant,
With an antihistamine."
I've known that odd tune for something like 30 years. I don't think I ever took the stuff, though, since I rarely ever got sick. My sharpest memory of it was when we discovered that my brother, around eight or nine at the time, had taken almost a whole bottle in a week's time; he'd been dosing himself up every night, having somehow discovered that it knocked him out. Thankfully, we found out early enough that we didn't need to stage an intervention or send him off to rehab.
This week, I actually bought a pill version of the generic Nyquil to try to keep me from coughing and thrashing all night. Results are mixed. Maybe I should have taken the stuff sooner; this is going on the third week of recurring respiratory crap. But with blood pressure meds, one can't be too careful; lots of things don't mix, so I usually try to tough it out or go to the doctor for meds.
But there's nothing to be done about it tonight, except take the last of the pills and hope for the best. My head is roaring, but as long as I don't talk, breathe, or exert myself, it's all good. Oh, and it's the beginning of spring break: having the respiratory ick is JUST how I wanted to spend my week!
Hope yours is full of delight, and that you can toddle off to sleep without a stiff swig of
alcohol. Just sing a chorus of the "Nyquil Blues" for me.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
My Side of the Door
DISCLAIMER: I am eyeball-deep in grading; though my mind is teeming with topics, I'm a little pressed for time this week. As a result, for this week's post I'm giving you an updated version of one of my essays from my 2000 project to write an essay a week. In the 13 years since I wrote the original, I'm proud that my core beliefs are still intact, although I am a little more tired and ragged around the edges these days. I hope you'll still recognize some of me here. Thanks for reading, and I promise I'll have something fresh next week. cjw
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, to “teach”
means “to impart knowledge, especially as an occupation.” That seems reasonable at first glance,
especially to someone who has never worked in the profession. But from my side of the classroom door, I
have to wonder: How could they have
missed the mark so completely?
Saturday, March 2, 2013
The Devil Loves Chocolate
Oh, no.....it's happening again. Never is it invited. It comes back around unexpectedly and stays for lengths of time no one can predict. It's colorful and dramatic and often gives me a good talking point to start the day at school. It's a torment and a comedy and a puzzle. It's....it's......oh, be brave enough to state it!.....it's my dream machine.
It rests somewhere deep in some brain structure----hippocampus? parietal lobe?----that has some cramped-up wiring, making it switch on every once in a while and go into overdrive. When those synapses fire up, the most bizarre and vivid scenarios go traipsing across the screen of my barely-subconscious mind in the moments before I wake, and then I am forced to go about my day so discombobulated that I hardly know who I am, because I often remember these dreams in the most irritating detail.
Case in point: Thursday morning I drove to school spittin' mad at my first hour. (There is no need to alert the authorities; I was not a threat since I have not been forced to carry a sidearm by the OK legislature....yet.) Why was I mad? That morning's show had featured an interaction in first hour, not really my real room or students, but that was the meaning. I was trying to give them directions near the end of class (my alarm was probably already ringing), and they were not very focused. I noticed some noises outside, from what sounded like all over the building: shouts, not of the good-natured kind we sometimes hear, but louder and angrier, and then a bit of chanting. My kids started to get up and mill around. I told them to sit----they started to push toward the door. Oh, that did not go over well; I jumped over in front of the door as quickly as I could and told them, nearly roaring, to park their backsides back in their desks. I could feel myself drawing up, the instinctive move I think is bred into most teachers, to become ten feet tall and bulletproof when events call for it. And, uh....I think that might be what did it: I pissed off the natives, and they.....CHARGED me like a herd of elephants, completely bowling me over and trampling me. A bit deflated but mad as any old woman you ever saw, I picked up and took off through what seemed the whole student body in a swirl of protests and chants. I somehow ducked through the crowd and found the door to Lori Helton's office, our assistant principal. Whether I went there for information, protection, or to rat the whole bunch out, I can't remember, and that's when I woke up. Unfortunately, I was unwise enough to tell this tale to my first hour class, who jumped on the detail that if all the students decided to rise up, the teachers wouldn't be able to do much about it. Thank you, Mister Sandman, for that waking nightmare.
The story I always tell to prove the colorful intricacies of my dreams happened when I was about 9 or 10. We had lived in our new split-level only a short time, and the big finished basement was my special torment. I was a nervous little kid, prone not only to nightmares, but to being afraid of every waking night terror there was: monsters of many varieties under the bed, in the closets, down the hall. General darkness was the very worst, which is why I hated the basement at night, even just going down the seven steps into the rec room---anything could be under or behind the pool table. I was also more than a little paralyzed with fear that the devil was out to get me, although I had no exposure to hellfire-and-brimstone theology that I can remember, and that the floor vents in the basement gave him easy access to our house. Put this all together, and you have a perfect storm for nightmares deluxe.
On this particular night, I had come across a feast of a dessert before bed. We had chocolate cake in the house, an unusual thing, and the ice cream we all have a tiny little obsession with. Oh, and wonder of wonders: Hershey's syrup. Mom said, "You'll regret eating that." I assured her that she was dead wrong; I savored every bite. Damn the consequences!
Yes, well, consequences arrived right on schedule on the dream train express from hell. I dreamed that the rec room in the basement was my bedroom, and Mom and Dad had allowed me to decorate it how I liked. (This had been a bone of contention from building the house, when Mom said I could choose the colors for my room, and I requested red carpet. Denied. That was the end of my input---thankfully, since the carpet that was actually chosen stayed for more than 30 years.) My tastes had changed by dream time; the most spectacularly elegant thing I could imagine was.......purple satin. This was a bedroom to rival any bordello, I tell you. Purple satin hangings from a four-poster canopy bed tented in purple satin, accented with white lace and satin ruffles. Purple satin sheets. Purple bedspread, purple carpet. I knew, in this dream, that I had created a masterpiece of elegance, refinement, and luxury. It was both beautiful and comfortable, and I couldn't wait to climb in that big bed to sleep. But before I could, lo! That old devil had come up through those floor vents, got himself a heaping helping of Hershey's syrup, and poured it all over that purple satin, ruining it forever. He must have used about 4 or 5 squirt bottles, because he hit every piece of material in that room.
It's been 40 years since I had that dream, and it's still just as vivid today as it was then, and a teeny tiny corner of my heart even breaks at the thought that I didn't get to keep that gorgeous satin pouf of a bedroom, dreamed up by my child's mind. I think that was the turning point in my devil-gets-me dreams. He knows I've been on his tail all these years, and he doesn't show up anymore. These days, when another lively round of dreams starts---sometimes lasting days, sometimes weeks---I know I can never know what to expect....but I know it'll be entertaining.
It rests somewhere deep in some brain structure----hippocampus? parietal lobe?----that has some cramped-up wiring, making it switch on every once in a while and go into overdrive. When those synapses fire up, the most bizarre and vivid scenarios go traipsing across the screen of my barely-subconscious mind in the moments before I wake, and then I am forced to go about my day so discombobulated that I hardly know who I am, because I often remember these dreams in the most irritating detail.
Case in point: Thursday morning I drove to school spittin' mad at my first hour. (There is no need to alert the authorities; I was not a threat since I have not been forced to carry a sidearm by the OK legislature....yet.) Why was I mad? That morning's show had featured an interaction in first hour, not really my real room or students, but that was the meaning. I was trying to give them directions near the end of class (my alarm was probably already ringing), and they were not very focused. I noticed some noises outside, from what sounded like all over the building: shouts, not of the good-natured kind we sometimes hear, but louder and angrier, and then a bit of chanting. My kids started to get up and mill around. I told them to sit----they started to push toward the door. Oh, that did not go over well; I jumped over in front of the door as quickly as I could and told them, nearly roaring, to park their backsides back in their desks. I could feel myself drawing up, the instinctive move I think is bred into most teachers, to become ten feet tall and bulletproof when events call for it. And, uh....I think that might be what did it: I pissed off the natives, and they.....CHARGED me like a herd of elephants, completely bowling me over and trampling me. A bit deflated but mad as any old woman you ever saw, I picked up and took off through what seemed the whole student body in a swirl of protests and chants. I somehow ducked through the crowd and found the door to Lori Helton's office, our assistant principal. Whether I went there for information, protection, or to rat the whole bunch out, I can't remember, and that's when I woke up. Unfortunately, I was unwise enough to tell this tale to my first hour class, who jumped on the detail that if all the students decided to rise up, the teachers wouldn't be able to do much about it. Thank you, Mister Sandman, for that waking nightmare.
The story I always tell to prove the colorful intricacies of my dreams happened when I was about 9 or 10. We had lived in our new split-level only a short time, and the big finished basement was my special torment. I was a nervous little kid, prone not only to nightmares, but to being afraid of every waking night terror there was: monsters of many varieties under the bed, in the closets, down the hall. General darkness was the very worst, which is why I hated the basement at night, even just going down the seven steps into the rec room---anything could be under or behind the pool table. I was also more than a little paralyzed with fear that the devil was out to get me, although I had no exposure to hellfire-and-brimstone theology that I can remember, and that the floor vents in the basement gave him easy access to our house. Put this all together, and you have a perfect storm for nightmares deluxe.
On this particular night, I had come across a feast of a dessert before bed. We had chocolate cake in the house, an unusual thing, and the ice cream we all have a tiny little obsession with. Oh, and wonder of wonders: Hershey's syrup. Mom said, "You'll regret eating that." I assured her that she was dead wrong; I savored every bite. Damn the consequences!
Yes, well, consequences arrived right on schedule on the dream train express from hell. I dreamed that the rec room in the basement was my bedroom, and Mom and Dad had allowed me to decorate it how I liked. (This had been a bone of contention from building the house, when Mom said I could choose the colors for my room, and I requested red carpet. Denied. That was the end of my input---thankfully, since the carpet that was actually chosen stayed for more than 30 years.) My tastes had changed by dream time; the most spectacularly elegant thing I could imagine was.......purple satin. This was a bedroom to rival any bordello, I tell you. Purple satin hangings from a four-poster canopy bed tented in purple satin, accented with white lace and satin ruffles. Purple satin sheets. Purple bedspread, purple carpet. I knew, in this dream, that I had created a masterpiece of elegance, refinement, and luxury. It was both beautiful and comfortable, and I couldn't wait to climb in that big bed to sleep. But before I could, lo! That old devil had come up through those floor vents, got himself a heaping helping of Hershey's syrup, and poured it all over that purple satin, ruining it forever. He must have used about 4 or 5 squirt bottles, because he hit every piece of material in that room.
It's been 40 years since I had that dream, and it's still just as vivid today as it was then, and a teeny tiny corner of my heart even breaks at the thought that I didn't get to keep that gorgeous satin pouf of a bedroom, dreamed up by my child's mind. I think that was the turning point in my devil-gets-me dreams. He knows I've been on his tail all these years, and he doesn't show up anymore. These days, when another lively round of dreams starts---sometimes lasting days, sometimes weeks---I know I can never know what to expect....but I know it'll be entertaining.
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