People have been saying that for years

I don't like the logic. I really don't. No offense Intaki, I get where you're coming from. I've heard this saying for awhile, but you know what? It doesn't work.

For instance, people have been saying that the environment is going sour for years. Yes, because the process was gradual and accelarating. Now, we face a disaster of global proportion. The problem with people is that we think in terms of years, not decades, not centuries. So, if something doesn't go belly up a year from the time we hear the complaint we think that the complaint is unfounded. We don't get the idea that someone is seeing the early, early middle, middle, late middle, and late stage warning signs. Hell, they were telling us that we were running out of oil when I was in grade school more than two decades ago, but back then it was reactionary panic. Ahem...

People have been saying the government was corrupt for years. Maybe even since it began. Yeah, and now we have family dynasties of presidents, wire tapping on our home phone, legalized torture, and wars waged to promote a family's business. People have been saying it for years because it was bad and has been getting worse. Here's a better saying: people have been ignoring it for years.

Now, Intaki. Education. My teachers, the ones who are retiring, read Chaucer in High School. Math is now abysmal. I asked my class to figure out what 80% of 10 was and they couldn't do it. Only one person in the class (mostly made up of business and Education majors of course) could figure it out. Out of 16 papers of 3 pages in length that I was supposed to collect last class meeting, I received 11. Only 2 met the MINIMUM 3 page requirement. People have been saying for years that education in this country has been going downhill. Here's why: because it has.

Now, we have tests to determine whether these kids know enough to graduate high school and they're failing in numbers that baffle the mind. How bad was the education before someone started checking? This isn't arbitrary. It isn't a coincidence that the year they started checking just happened to be the year that all the idiots were trying to graduate.

What's more, they train these kids from first grade up to pass this test and they still can't pass. It's amazing. I can't even begin to fathom the depths to which our education system has sunk in order for that last statement to be true. Now I read essay after essay that says we expect too much when we expect kids in high school calculus to pass a test on rudimentary Algebra. Forget about English. They learn to write a five paragraph essay and they have no idea why it works or how to improve it.

Let's be frank about this. What people have been saying for years turns out to be true. All that crap that they've been saying about the corruption of the American way of life. True. Don't get me wrong, I love America, but eventually, these systems that people have claimed to be broken...eventually, they break. Turns out you shouldn't trust your health to a corporation. Turns out that a pharmaceutical company does not make your health its top priority. It turns out the the world is headed for an environmental crisis. It turns out that the housing market is overinflated. It turns out that starving countries do become more warlike. It turns out that a strong military isn't much of a replacement for a failing manufacturing economy. These are things that people have been saying for years; these are truths we are now seeing manifest.

Now, I don't want this to be negative. Here's the thing: you don't fix things when they're breaking; you fix them when they're broke. Well, now these things are broke and now they will be fixed. We aught to look at our time as an era of repair. But what will we need to do these repairs. Here's the upshot--we're going to need all those things that they've been saying for years have been on the decline: hope, kindness, decency to one another. We're going to have to think in the long term. We're going to have to learn to prize our success as a community, as a nation, and as a people as more important than the all mighty dollar. We're going to have to learn to see the value of things like art and the humanities, but also in things as simple as helping each other out. We're going to learn to think in terms of what we can do rather than what we can say.

I firmly believe this. I believe that the only way that we're going to get past the world's hardships is by embracing values that went out of style forty or fifty years ago. They'll have to be revamped no doubt, but simply WILL change, not must, not needs to, but will. I think that, too, is something that people have been saying for years. Hopefully now we're listening.

The lost art of Writing

"This summer College Summit will have 75 workshop nation-wide, 4 of which will be held in the Boston area at Amherst College. Volunteers play a critical role at the workshop because they help the students develop their personal statements. (We have a very specific method that guides volunteers and students through this process.) The workshops are incredibly moving and powerful experiences for both the students and the volunteers. Over the last 10 years, 79% of workshop participants enrolled in college and 80% retain."

I have bolded the important statement and italicized the statement that makes me cringe.

As a writing teacher at the college level in this country, I am consistently asked to defend myself for the rate of adult near-illiteracy in this country. That is people who can read and write at a seventh grade level. You learn where a comma goes in 7th grade by the way...if you were wondering.

I see it more in my literature classes. There are many people who simply cannot read a sentence and tell you what it means, much less an entire story or poem. Writing? Many people simply do not know how to write. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't know how to think. Which one should I think of as scarier? The person who thinks they're saying something new about the Death Penalty, or the person who doesn't know that a sentence needs a verb. Both? Good for you.

Now back to the job posting I received. This is for a job teaching inner city kids how to fill out the essay portion of their college application, and it says everything about why neither thinking nor writing are taught in this country.

Look at that bold faced line. They have a special way to teach essay writing. Good for them. I've now taught at four different institutions and all of them have a "special way." In fact, the "special way" is very hard to define. See, special aught to mean that it deviates from the "normal way" but as there isn't a "normal way" all we have is these special ways. What's today's special way? Outlining the essay in crayon? Writing programs around the country think that they're so f'ing special because of their "special ways" and yet, nobody who comes out of these programs knows how to write unless they knew how to write before the class. Perhaps someone should develop a kind of standard way of teaching writing like...oh I don't know...every other discipline has. Just a thought. Here's how I'd do it: figure out which teaching method actually works, and then DO THAT!

But of course, this misses the point, because the point of a writing class isn't to teach writing. No, of course not. It's there in the italicized portion of the job description. This will prove to be a moving experience. True. I know that when I read really really horrible essays five at a time, I cry. Perhaps the point here is to be able to summon up this pathos so that when someone asks you why you can't write a sentence, you can bring them to tears with your sad story of the writing class that never got its shit together. Meanwhile, your job goes over seas to where people know how to use a comma.

This is, of course, the goal, right? Because if our complete inability to communicate in written form forces us into a deep economic recession from which we cannot recover, then the inner city will grow, and more people will need this course. It makes perfect sense to me.

Has anyone thought that maybe reading and writing go hand in hand with thinking. That the inability to do either of those first two is a sure sign of a deficit in the latter. If you can't get your thoughts together on paper, maybe it's because you don't have any. Again, just a thought.

So, what are we left with? Numerous touchy feelie programs around the country that are trying their best to get the students to talk about their emotions, rather than getting their thoughts into some logical form, so that we can all congratulate the program itself on its novelty (though a written letter of our joys will be beyond us). As a writing teacher, I imagine some other, easier way: a writing class that concentrates on writing not tears, that thinks about what successful writing does rather than pedantic tricks, that looks at this process as having an end result of forging a reader and not a person self actualized enough to cry about their not being able to write.

Finally, when its all said and done, is it not disturbing that 80% of these kids stay in college. They're armed only with this special method designed to create moving stories. Shouldn't they have to know more than that to be successful in college.

Dirty Books

So, okay. I teach literature. I teach it to college students who range from ages 18-65. I'm not peddling my ideas to children. I'm not trying to corrupt young minds. In fact, everything I teach qualifies as literature. True, Lolita is literature, but see...that's my point. I'm not making ten year olds read Lolita.

Okay, so I'm making adults read books. Some of them have scenes that are a bit racey. I'll admit to that, but here's the thing. Most of the stuff I assign isn't worse than an episode of Scrubs. Most television is far worse than anything I've ever asked anyone to contemplate. Have you seen the Meet Bob commercials? That's about a guy who can't get a hard-on.

And so, one would think anything less than Bob would probably not meet with much resistence, but you'd be wrong. I don't know if it's because it's written down, or because it's taught in a classroom, but suddenly the majority of my students start acting like they've got buckled hats. One of my students felt appalled that in a story we read a man went to a concert only to pick a woman up. My goodness!

What seems worse, please don't take this the wrong way, but the deep deep chauvenism that is produced by my female students is absolutely appalling. I say, "well, the woman doesn't have to go to a hotel with the guy," because I have this opinion that woman might be in charge of their sexuality, and I am replied to in such a way that let's me know that the man in the story is no better than a rapist, that the poor woman in the story aught to consider herself the ultimate victim, and that I aught to be ashamed of myself for so much as suggesting that what the man has done isn't really all that morally reprehensible and for assigning the story in the first place. A guy goes to a concert, sees a girl there, picks her up, whereupon they both go back to a hotel room and have sex. Is that really so deviant that it demands complete moral outrage?

I ask people to analyze these stories and I get page long diatribes about how offended the students are. When did this happen? I can't watch primetime television without at least one reference to sodomy, meanwhile if two people are so much as a bit randy in a book marked literature, I have to read pages upon pages of complaints.

That mysterious noise I heard

The other night, I was awoken to the sound of my larger cat (17 pounds) vomiting...and I mean vomiting. It sounded like she might be dying.

But when I woke up to see where the mess was for me to clean up, I could not find it. This is really the joy of cats as far as I'm concerned: the little eccentricities that surround their various bodily effusions. Like when my little cat decided that the bathtub was a pretty good catbox. Not on a regular basis, mind you, but once every other month. The bathroom would just reak like death and then you'd pull back the sliding shower door, and there would be Jasmine's leavings.

Okay, so back to the vomit. I'm sitting here, grading papers, minding my own, and I look over and there, behind the cat box, nearly hidden from view, is the vomit. I then get up to clean up the vomit. This is not the point of my story.

The point of my story is that I was reading this woman's paper. I asked the class to write about why they have come back to school and this woman wrote about how the world is unfair, and blah, blah, blah...and in any case, there's this job that she knows she could do, but they won't let her do because she doesn't have a college education...and of course, the implication is that this education that she needs to get, according to the powers that be, is completely useless and she's really only doing it because she has to....you get the drift.

Now, how bad is this essay? Well, I could point out that the grammar is atrocious and that the job this woman wants requires a strong ability with writing. She misspells, writes in incomplete sentences, rambles belligerently, etc..

However, I think that the most telling thing about this essay is that I stopped, mid-reading, to clean up cat vomit. I can't think of no more accurate way to describe its quality.

Dishonerable Conduct

Recently I reread (or finally read) a document circulated to me at the beginning of every semester on how to handle academic dishonesty. According to this document, I can flunk students for acting dishonerably. The people who wrote the document were trying very hard to cover all the possible bases they could concerning cheaters, as well as people who want to beat their teachers up. With these areas in mind, they included this catch all about dishonerable action.

I can flunk people for dishonerable conduct...

Now, definitions here might be a bit subjective. Sure. I'll say that. One person's dishonerable conduct is different than another's, yes? Let's see...grade grubbing and not spell checking seem fairly dishonerable. I'd say, anyway. How about a cell phone ringing. Or...I know...not having read the f'ing material.

This document, if I'm not mistaken, may give me the power to turn the American collegiate system back around. "I'm sorry this essay just isn't very good...it dishoners this hallowed institution. You flunk."

Now, of course, they'd fire me. There's no himming or hawing over that, but then...couldn't I just point to this document which they give to me every semester and think of it as grounds for a lawsuit. After all, they say themselves that I can flunk people for dishonerable conduct...I'm just following the suggestion really. Perhaps they keep giving it out as a kind of hint.

State of Depression

I want the dope that the economists are smoking.

I know nothing about economics. Nothing at all. Most boring classes I ever took were micro and macro economics. I fell asleep in every class. I never fall asleep in class.

...and yet, even a dumbass like me knows that if all the prices are going up, no one can sell their house, people are losing their jobs, and heating oil ammounts to 1/10th my yearly salary, we are in a recession. One might even say a depression. One might even say, "how do I get a work visa."

I am really tired of reading expert after expert tell me that we're just in a little slump and I'm starting to believe that expertise doesn't count for shit in this country.

Bamboo-zled

Okay, so I walked in to my house and my wife was laughing hysterically, like unstoppably. So, I thought she was on the phone since, very seldom, do things you see make you laugh as hard as the wife was laughing. But no...

She had on her lap a copy of Amy Sedaris's book, which she's read before, and she told me that she was looking up what Amy Sedaris had to say about Bamboo.

Why? Well, as it turned out the thing my wife had been laughing uncontrollably at was this. Look at it...

Then this.

Okay, in the other room, my wife...is still laughing. That's like ten minutes.

Now, I'll admit that's funny, but I have to admit something else. While I was reading this post, I realized something. Now, I don't know if it's the best catch phrase ever or an ingenius name for a character in the next Pynchon novel, but here goes...

F.U. Bamboo.

Isn't that great. It, like, totally rolls off the tongue. Can you imagine saying that to someone. They'd think you were like Kathy Bates in Misery. Or like your definition of cool was so far more hipper than theirs that it totally came all the way around the spectrum and landed back in curses that Hello Kitty might come up with. That's awesome. Thank you Becky and you're outrageous bamboo mishap. You've given me another thing to put on my checklist: "use the phrase F.U. Bamboo when someone least expects it."

My wife...other room...still laughing. She hasn't even heard my joke yet.