Why Students Don't Write Well, the PSAT and English Today

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High School Sports: Vulgarity vs. Virtue

 

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Women at West Point & Women in Combat

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to read this letter.

 

Combatives Class at the U.S. Military Academy

 

Oklahoma Sunrise, Going West & Getting Hitched

 

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Oklahoma Sunrise 

to read this letter.

 

View from our hotel window: sun, flag, & truck

 

Banned Books Week, Soft Bans & Selective Shelving in Schools

Please visit my new website at www.treehouseletter.com to learn about this year's Top Ten Banned Books.  Or click the link below.

Click here:   Selective Shelving in Schools

School Guidance, Common Core & the Orwellian State

Our Middle School principal sent guidance on the topic of town safety: students are discouraged from walking into town after school. He shares the numbers and concludes:

Anyway you “do the math”, you can calculate that a large number of unsupervised middle school aged students in town is not an emotionally or physically safe situation. (See full excerpt below)

Here’s the principal’s argument.

Assume 3 out of 10 of the 625 upper division students walk to town: 180-190 students in town

Assume 2 out of 10 of the 625 lower division students walk to town: 150 students in town

Estimate: 350 students in town by 3:15 pm

 

 (This may be Common Core math, but when I “do the math” I come up with 312.5 students. The 2 out of 10 of the 625 students for lower division amounts to 20% of 625, or 125, NOT 150 . Using this data 187.5 +125 is 312.5 students. Even if you skipped over the percentage calculations, 190 and 150 is 340, NOT 350. But I confess I’m not a Common Core graduate.)

 

Large groups of unsupervised students = not emotionally or physically safe

Large groups = not careful about personal safety

Students observed darting in and out of traffic

Students are rude to students, storeowners, others

 

Conclusion: Students should only walk into town if supervised by an adult or they are attending a supervised activity.

This is the truly disturbing part.

If you act inappropriately outside of school, you can still be given school disciplinary consequences since your actions may be contributing to another student feeling emotionally or physically unsafe afterward at school. 

I’ve read this sentence several times and realized it must reflect Common Core English. I highlighted it in different colors to help readers understand it.

The sentence has two subordinate or conditional clauses in blue; the first begins with If and the last begins with since. If that’s not muddy enough, then contrast the end of both clauses outside of school and at school. Confused yet?

The main clause is “you can still be given school disciplinary consequences” and that part I think I understand, but it depends on outside acts and whether those acts make another feel unsafe at school.

Did you follow?

Notice the use of the passive voice: students are discouraged and you can still be given school disciplinary consequences. Where do we see this type of language? You guessed it. Politicians. It’s ironic because English teachers instruct students to use the active voice. This is what the active voice looks like: Principal Bob discourages students from walking into town and we will punish students.

Why use the active voice? It assigns ownership to the subject doing the action. Perhaps administrators don’t want to take ownership for this, so they use students as the subjects. It’s the student who is discouraged and given discipline. How convenient that the school isn’t in this at all.

And what does it mean to be given school disciplinary consequences? Students receive discipline and punishment and these are the consequences of bad behavior. They aren’t given consequences; they suffer the consequences of bad behavior. Meanwhile the rest of us suffer from Common Core English and Common Core Math.

There's more.

Any behavior that causes interference to another student’s right to learn at School X is subject to school discipline and potentially, referral to the local police.
School Resource Officer, John Doe, will be observing the downtown activity this afternoon and will share those observations with the dept. and school.

The police WILL be involved. Officer Doe will observe and report observations to the police department AND the school!

Let’s stop and consider this guidance.

The school is telling us what our children should be doing when they are not in school. The police will observe them AND the police will “share those observations” with the school. The school will take necessary disciplinary measures if it doesn't approve of that behavior. This is not just a letter, all of it except the Officer Doe sentence is in the Student Handbook, a booklet which students and parents are required to read and sign.

I asked a local store owner to read the excerpt.

“I don’t agree with this. I strongly disagree with this,” she said.

The owner said kids come in to town and try clothes on, put things on lay-away. On a rare occasion she might ask them to quiet down, and they do so. They’re good kids. She said it’s good business for the town because students spend money.

Here are the problems with this Middle School’s guidance.

1. The school should not attempt to override a parent’s choice to allow their child to walk to town alone
2. This should not be in the Student Handbook
3. The school does not have the right to discipline a student for behavior outside of school
4. Coordinating with police about student activity outside of school is outside the school’s sphere of control
5. Police reporting of a child's behavior off school property after dismissal should be with the parents, NOT the school

The school’s argument is bogus.

They’ve committed fallacies of relevance, presumption, and clarity. They presume that all students will do what a few might do; they attribute crowd behavior to the individual. They presume businesses do not want students in town. The conclusions are unsupported and the writing is confusing.

A principal should provide guidance and report problems to parents. Parents appreciate such involvement. I happen to like this principal and his intentions are good, but this type of guidance has become so commonplace we don’t give it a second thought.

Inclusion in the Student Handbook, telling parents what choices to make, punishing students for actions outside of school, and worst of all, asking the police to take on the role of Big Brother to watch over our children and report back to the school and not the parent, are egregious violations of our basic freedoms.

I’m living in an Orwellian novel.





Here is the Middle School guidance with excerpt from the Student Handbook.

4. Safety in Town – Excerpted below is our guidance to our students as published in the School X Student Handbook:

     Students are discouraged from walking into town after school.  School X dismisses approx. 625 students at 2:05pm from the Upper Division and another 625 students at 2:55pm from the Lower Division.  If only 3 out of every 10 students in the Upper Division (7^th, 8th Grades) decided to walk downtown, we would have 180-190 students in town at approx. 2:30pm.  Then if only 2 out of every 10 students in the Lower Division (5^th, 6^th Grades) decided to walk downtown, we would have another 150 students for a total of approx. 350 students downtown by 3:15pm.  Anyway you “do the math”, you can calculate that a large number of unsupervised middle school aged students in town is not an emotionally or physically safe situation.  Students in large groups are not careful about their personal safety.  Students have been observed darting in and out of traffic while in town.  Students have been observed giving in to negative peer pressure and acting rude to other students, storeowners and members of the general public.
     We recommend that if you do go to town, you only do so when you are either attending a supervised activity at the teen center or have parent/adult supervision. 
     If you act inappropriately outside of school, you can still be given school disciplinary consequences since your actions may be contributing to another School X student feeling emotionally or physically unsafe afterward at school.  Any behavior that causes interference to another student’s right to learn at School X is subject to school discipline and potentially, referral to the local police.

[this next part of the principal's letter is added after this excerpt]

School Resource Officer, John Doe, will be observing the downtown activity this afternoon and will share those observations with the dept. and school.

View this School Handbook online here, link. (scroll down to page 15 for Safety in Town)

Like this letter? Read about Politically Correct Fractions & Fifth Grade Math Today or Literary Analysis or Amateur Psychology?

Ten Books That Stayed With Me, a Facebook Meme

"Ten books that stayed with me" is a post circulating on Facebook.  A friend asked for my list, so here it is.

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling  (favorites in series are Sorcerer's Stone & Half Blood Prince)

The Luck Factor, Dr. Richard Wiseman

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

Quiet - the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain

Chris Van Allsburg picture books (favorites are Sweetest Fig & Two Bad Ants)

Here's the problem with my list: a few haven't "stayed with me" long because I read them recently.  Quiet and Quixote are recent reads and I have hope for the Man of La Mancha because, let's face it, we're still reading it 400 years later.  Quiet, on the other hand, may topple off the list but Susan Cain gave me a priceless gift in this book, and that is enduring whether she remains in the top ten or not.

 

One FB post advised, don't overthink it.

 

That may have fallen on deaf ears.  What I did do, is allow myself time because I like this exercise.  I wrote a couple titles on my whiteboard and added to them over the last week or so, giving my middle-aged brain time to scan its dusty shelves, trek back along forgotten corridors, peek in hidden rooms, visit places from my childhood, from my children's childhood,  and from different stages of my life.

 

It's easy to judge someone by her appearance, but there is a lot to be said about seeing her book shelf. Books, periodicals, movies, shows, social media, any content out there today,  these make up our mental, spiritual, and emotional diet.  What we choose to 'eat' reflects who we are.

 

Thank you Diane for asking and thank you also for sharing. 

 

"Reading literature connects humanity across time, place and even cultures. It's our quest for what is lasting and real; through reading, we can hang out with the great, experience things we've never done or felt before, as well as identify and empathize with our own experience. (From earlier  column here).

Below I listed information from network scientist Lada Adamic's research on this meme, (link to her full article here).

 

Here are the top 20 books, along with a percentage of all lists (having at least one of the top 500 books) that contained them. 

1. 21.08 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
2. 14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
3. 13.86 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
4. 7.48  The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
5. 7.28  Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
6. 7.21  The Holy Bible
7. 5.97  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
8. 5.82  The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
9. 5.70  The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. 5.63  The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
11. 5.61  The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. 5.37  1984 - George Orwell
13. 5.26  Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
14. 5.23  Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
15. 5.11  The Stand - Stephen King
16. 4.95  Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
17. 4.38  A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
18. 4.27  The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
19. 4.05  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
20. 4.01  The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

"As droplets fell through the dark" - a Poem for 9/11

Photo Credit One Click, One Pic

 

 

 

Poet Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate, was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem to remember the victims of 9/11 which he read at a special joint session in September 2002.  It is titled "The Names" and is worth listening to or reading.

 

This is the link to the video which is just 4 minutes long. YouTube video of Collins reading The Names

 

Here is the written poem.

 

The Names - Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

 

(Billy Collins website link)

 

 

* Collins was the United States Poet Laureate and is Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (Link Poets.org Bio). He is one of the most popular, best selling, and well-regarded poets today.   YouTube link:  Billy Collins reads The Names

Last Days in Vietnam, a Documentary in Theaters

 

Rory Kennedy, film-maker and daughter of the late Robert Kennedy, produced a film which debuted in theaters this week about the fall of Vietnam.

I haven’t seen it yet and am debating whether I will.  I'm half Vietnamese and have mixed feelings and for many years refused to watch coverage of the war and the pervasive inaccuracy in the media.  It's too close to home.  In 1995, 20 years after the withdrawal and debacle, reporters interviewed my father who was Vietnam's last cultural attaché. Perhaps they were trying to get the record straight.

My father left Vietnam with Ambassador Martin at the end, chronicled in that famous photo of the last American helicopter leaving Saigon.   And that story merits its own letter.  My mother, brother, and I were sent home to the United States from Saigon earlier that year because we knew what was coming.  I find it interesting that so many don't know about the helicopters pushed into the sea. My father shared that with me as a young child and everyone who was there knew.  Some even jumped into the water and swam to the ships because the choppers couldn't land.  

Ralph Blumenthal writes about this in an article on the documentary.(Blumethal review link)

   

Desperate to rescue Vietnamese allies and their families, some Americans quietly began an unauthorized airlift.

“Sometimes, there’s an issue, not of legal and illegal, but right and wrong,” Stuart Herrington, an Army captain at the time, says in the film.



A damaged helicopter being pushed overboard from the warship Blue Ridge to make room for more evacuation flights. Credit Associated Press



Even Mr. Kissinger seemed affected, Ms. Kennedy said. She asked him about a State Department employee who had defied orders and sneaked back into Vietnam to save Vietnamese comrades. Mr. Kissinger told her that he had been forced to rebuke the man publicly but privately greeted him in his office as “my greatest hero.” 

 As he related this, Ms. Kennedy said, Mr. Kissinger teared up. The episode, and Mr. Kissinger’s reaction, did not make it into the final cut.

 

Ms. Kennedy did not plan to include the footage of Kissinger crying about the man who went back to help the Vietnamese.  My "greatest hero" Kissinger called him.  Reading this brings tears to my own eyes and my father always felt a debt to the Marines who took him to safety.  I wonder why she cut this scene? Is there a sense of remorse and tone of regret in this film?  Because if you read the media reports at the time and for many years after, there was no such thing.   

Here's an excerpt from a review by A.O. Scott.

The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage. (complete NYTimes review here)  

A tacit admission of their own previous partisan reporting? The media and the people refused to listen, obscured facts, misrepresented policy and military objectives.   

Dr. Kissinger says that he believed Vietnam could be like South Korea today.  Quite possibly.  We lost the war at home, the American people lost their resolve because of the "media's willing self deception" (Jim Webb).  My father dedicated his professional life to this sliver of land in this far eastern part of the world and we betrayed the confidence of the very people we committed ourselves to.   This is the truth, having experienced and suffered from it first hand.  

Vietnam was the first televised war in a most liberal age with students across America doing drugs, relishing free sex, and denouncing the war, a war started and escalated by Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon came into office to fix the mess, set up a withdrawal plan, and was excoriated. He paid a price for what is laughable by current administration's standards.  

This may be the Kennedys' idea of an apology, so be it, but perhaps it is an obligation to her uncle's conscience as well as her own almost 40 years later.  Our departure from this fledgling, struggling country in its hour of need is a disgrace on many levels. 

We did not lose on the battlefield during the war.  We lost at home.

"You know you never beat us on the battlefield," I told my North Vietnamese Army (NVA) counterpart, Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant." (Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. full article link)

Colonel Tu knew military victory was not possible, but he also knew America's Achilles heel was a generational shift in attitudes that shockingly was more sympathetic to the invading communists of the north than our democratic allies in the south.  The NVA followed the Leninist playbook to win the propaganda war, and the cultural elites in our media, academia and entertainment were as Lenin would say, useful idiots.

As Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, said: 

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness. (Link to article)

Our actions had devastating consequences.  Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were murdered outright or died cruel deaths in the concentration camps as the army of North Vietnam swept through the south.  As many as a million more fled by any means possible, the ‘boatpeople’ risking their lives in rickety boats on the high seas, knowing what lay in store for them if they remained.  Many thousands didn’t survive the journey.  Our abandonment of Vietnam destabilized the region, as Laos and Cambodia quickly fell to brutal regimes carrying the same communist flag as North Vietnam, resulting in the murder of millions more. Comparisons to modern Iraq are appropriate as we watch the barbaric ISIS rampaging through Syria and Iraq, filling the void left by our departure.    

Here is one of the singularly accurate and best reviews of the media's role on the war.  The Honorable James Webb has served as senator, Secretary of the Navy, distinguished combat marine, professor, Emmy award winning journalist and author. (Jim Webb Bio link). 

If you want to understand the major factor why we "lost" the Vietnam War, read his column which I pasted below in full.  Webb begins with media tycoon Ted Turner's public apology for just one of a multitude of lies perpetrated by the media.   (Link to article)

 

The Media's War on Vietnam Vets

July 15, 1998

by James Webb, The Wall Street Journal

 

Last week CNN founder Ted Turner issued a fervent apology to Vietnam veterans for his network’s false report that the military had used sarin nerve gas in Vietnam. “Nothing has upset me more probably in my whole life,” Mr. Turner said, adding that he “would take my shirt off and beat myself bloody in the back” if it would do any good.

Those who served in Vietnam should leap to accept this apology. But a long line of journalists and scholars should follow Mr. Turner’s lead in making amends for the persistent defamation of those who served honorably and well in the Vietnam War.

This animus toward those who fought has now spanned a generation. It has deep roots in the elites among the old antiwar left, whose members not only avoided military service but openly derided those who went to Vietnam as either stupid or evil. Having placed their bets and bet their place in American history on the supposedly benign intentions of the Vietnamese communists, their response to the Stalinist relative that befell Vietnam after 1975 was to push ever harder to discredit U.S. evolvement in the war.
Routinely Ignored.

Thus negative stories about the War and those who fought it became de rigueur. Particularly, if one could tell them through the eyes of a veteran. But facts were routinely ignored.

Literally thousands of journalists have published lies, exaggerations and misrepresentation that fit a preconceived notion that made a story. I first became aware of the media’s willing self-deception in 1981, when I was interviewed by Time magazine for what turned out to be a lengthy, negative piece on those who had fought in Vietnam. The veteran who gave the most damning testimony, including claims that he shot a pregnant woman and her unborn child, was later shown never to have served in Vietnam at all. It is a simple matter for any reporter to verify many aspects of a veteran’s combat service by asking for a copy of his Form DD-214, a publicly available document. But the Time reporter did not do so, and the magazine offered no reaction after its story was disproved.

Repeated, conscious misrepresentations have become conventional wisdom. It is now axiomatic that the war was fought by the poor and minorities dragged unwillingly into battle after being conscripted. The truth is that for the first time in U.S. history, the country’s elites, who have inordinate power in the media and academia, did not show up. The poor and the minorities fought, but so did the middle class. Defense Department statistics show that 86%, of those who died in Vietnam were white, and 12.5% were black from an age group where blacks comprised 13.1%, of the population. Volunteers accounted for 77% of combat deaths.

Another canard frequently cited during the Persian Gulf War is that Vietnam servicemen were over-decorated. In his book National Defense, James Follows claims that by 1971 the military had given 1.3 million medals for bravery in Vietnam vs. 1.7 million for all of World War II.

But compare actual gallantry awards from World War II with those in Vietnam:

 The Army awarded 289 Medals of Honor vs. 155 in Vietnam,

 4,434 Distinguished Service Crosses vs. 846 and

 73.651 Silver Star Medals vs. 21,630

 The Marine Corps, which lost 102,000 killed or wounded out of some 400,000 sent to Vietnam, awarded 47 Medals of Honor (34 posthumously),

 362 Navy Crosses (139 posthumously) and,

 2,592 Silver Star Medals.

 A 1980 Harris survey commissioned by the Veteran’s Administration, the most comprehensive ever done regarding those who served in Vietnam, revealed that

 
92% of those who served in combat were “glad they’d served their country,”

74% “enjoyed their time in the military,” and 80% disagreed with the statement that “the U.S. took unfair advantage of me.”

Nearly two out of three would go to Vietnam again even if they knew how the war would end.

The only national media report on the survey’s results was an Associated Press story headlined, “One in three would not serve again if asked.”

In 1986 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study claiming that veterans were 86% more likely to commit suicide than non-veterans. The study’s authors, betraying their own political views, lamented that “men of low socioeconomic status may be less adept at avoiding military service.” The study was junk science: a blind analysis of 14,145 men born between 1950 and 1952 who died between 1974 and 1983. By comparing their birth dates to the dates on the draft lottery, the study assumed but never verified who had served and who had not. Those with high draft lottery numbers had a 13% higher suicide rate, which the study then “extrapolated” into 86% – again without identifying a single veteran. The study ignored the fact that most of those who went to Vietnam volunteered for military service (among those born in 1952: 273,110 men enlisted and only 43,706 were drafted).

The media predictably embraced the study’s flawed findings: “CBS Evening News” credited it with “documenting that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between having served in the military during Vietnam and problems later, including suicide.” Mothers, hide your daughters, the crazy vet is at the door.

Hollywood, too, has manifested a historically unprecedented, ugly pathology when it comes to the Vietnam War and the people who fought it. If you want camaraderie, dignity, heroism and sacrifice, better check out a World War II flick, or “Star Wars.” But what can one expect from the community that gave the producers of the vicious documentary “Hearts and Minds” a standing ovation at the 1975 Oscars when they read a telegram from Hanoi that announced the “liberation” of South Vietnam?

The extensive coverage of the 20th anniversary of South Vietnam’s 1975 demise was rife with former foreign correspondents congratulating themselves on their courage under fire. But the coverage all but ignored the accomplishments of an American military that was transported halfway around the world where it met a determined enemy on its own terms. The coverage seldom discussed the many tragedies that befell Vietnam once the communists took over. And it ignored the most significant announcement of that anniversary period: Hanoi’s admission that it had lost 1.1 million soldiers dead in the war, plus another 300,000 missing in action, compared with U.S. losses of 58,000 and South Vietnamese losses of 254,000.

Earlier this year, CBS’s “60 Minutes” marked the 30th anniversary of the bloodiest year of the war with a feature on the My Lai massacre. Ostensibly designed to recognize the humanity of two helicopter pilots who saved several civilians during the killing, the piece was instead a gruesome rehash of America’s darkest moment in Vietnam. In deciding to revisit 1968 CBS might have looked at the bravery of American soldiers under attack on battlefields across South Vietnam. If it was interested in ugliness, it could have examined afresh the systematic executions of more than 3,000 South Vietnamese civilians in Hue by communist cadres during the Tet offensive. But its intent was clearly elsewhere.

Shattered Lives

 This unending agenda has shattered many lives, but there are indications that an accounting may be at hand. Today’s best young scholars tend to question the dogma of an antiwar left that has grown gray without abandoning its animus toward those who served. As one example: Mark Mayor won the 1993 prize for historical research at Harvard University by peeling away the shibboleths that have surrounded the Phoenix Program, an effort directed against Vietcong leaders. Mr. Moyar’s book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey (Naval Institute 1997), is a product of that research and a groundbreaking piece of revisionist history on the war.

Of equal import, next month B.G. Burkett, a Dallas businessman and Army veteran of Vietnam, will self-publish one the most courageous books of the decade, Stolen Valor (Verity Press www.stolenvalor.com) looks at the cases of more than 1,700 people who have distorted or lied about their service in Vietnam, often distorting the public’s understanding of the war. His book constitutes a damnation of the major media so great that the CNN Time story on saran will take its right context as a rare moment when the purveyors of dishonesty got caught, rather than as the journalistic aberration many would like to term it.
 

Did You Get Your Latex-Free Gloves? Back-to-school Supplies

My son has a rotating eight day schedule annotated in as many colors. A suggestion is noted in bold on his shopping list:  "Please try to have students color-coordinate their class supplies with their class colors (ex. Yellow Binder for Yellow Math class)." 

This begs the question of course, just what is Yellow Math and is it different from Blue Math? My son has Red Math so should he be alarmed? 

My son and I discussed his schedule hues: royal blue vs. purple and yellow, orange, and tan.  Staples ran out of plastic folders and they had 15 cent paper folders in numerous colors, but we didn't find tan. Brown might work and he subbed black for orange. Pink and green were for specials like art and music, and gray was the only color which made sense.

Gray was reserved for whatever: assemblies, workshops, health class. Dubious, changing, the combination of black and white, gray was a color that merited its name. The color scheme is designed to help students remember which class they have and what they need.

Staples "Better Binder" which starts at $9.99

Two boys settled onto desk chairs by Staples' entrance, Sit 'n Spin skills in full force. I lost track of time and my daughter didn’t need or appreciate my input on her supply list. So when the spinners’ mother collected them at the door, I swooped into the seat to watch the chaos.

It was the day before school starts.

My children finished and we joined the line which extended to the back wall, scurrying enough to beat four families. We counted ten buyers ahead of us and three cashiers.  We got to the head of the line in ten minutes.

The manager directed customers to open cashiers.  I told him this was quite a line, I appreciated the pink duct tape on the floor directing us where to stand, but most importantly, I’m sure he liked hearing my final comment.  “You beat the post office.  It took me 26 minutes for 9 people and your line took one customer per minute.”  (See Going Postal - Miss Trunchbull & the Chokey to appreciate government tax dollars at work). 

He smiled and said, “Oh, we’re not the post office, but funny you say that.  We’re putting in a post office here.”

Would this improve service or slow down service time? That depends on whether the government will be involved. 

The supplies for this visit costs upwards of $90 and this was the third visit. The cost for everything is outrageous. There’s a school in India we support for a $1 a day and the teacher holds class beneath a tree. I’m not sure about the quality of instruction but I receive well written letters from the teachers.   

Let me share something else which might be useful.

Did you get your box of latex-free gloves? 

They're on the end of the far right aisle at Staples and they come in four varieties:  latex-free, powder free, nitrile, and textured. If I saw ribbed for her pleasure, I would refuse to be part of this. 

Latex Powder Free AND Textured

The words "exam gloves" were on each box and the association with the doctor's office made me cringe. The item seemed innocent enough on the supply list.  Nitrile, if you are curious, is defined as nitrile rubber which is preferred because it's synthetic.  Students with latex allergies despair not! 

Two of my children are in middle school and their supply lists consist of one typed page. Here's a relief: it includes all classes. This is a product of Kaizen at work in the schools, parents driving quality improvement year over year.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Yet I wonder.  Did the parents of yesteryear need exam gloves too? or Post-it notes, hand sanitizer, and a 16 gigabyte flash drive? 

And now that we have color coded supplies and latex-free gloves, are the results any better?

(Read letters:  Politically Correct Fractions and Literary Analysis or Amateur Psychology?)

 

 

Elegant Sentences, Express Ideas and Make an Impact

I am not a grammarian but I love words, their arrangement and sound, the infinite combinations and uses, their impact.

Words are responsible for founding our country, We the people; for ending a war, Tear down this wall; for perhaps the most intimate and familiar of all, the vows uniting two into one, I do.




President Ronald Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate (White House Photo)

There is a force or person behind words which when spoken change a message's tone and meaning.  But words are what we hear, what we read, and when the moment is gone, all that remains are the words. 

As you return to work, to school, to the routine and the daily grind, consider improving your writing for it can be one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox.  Sharpening the axe (Back to school parable link) in the Age of Information has a lot to do with writing, because many and maybe even most of our interactions with people in our career and life will be through written communication. 

WARNING.  If you get queasy at the thought of grammar, do not fear; this is not a grammar lesson.  If you do NOT wish to improve your writing, then stop here.  However, if you seek personal improvement and wish to write effective and elegant sentences, then read on.

Professor Brooks Landon from the notable writing institution University of Iowa has taught some 30 years and teaches a popular writing course, Building Great Sentences.  One can write short sentences and learning to do so, is simply that, by doing.  Jane ran.  Birds Fly. Short sentences are powerful and compelling: Jesus wept.

Building great sentences, "master sentences" as Landon calls them, is more involved. And it is this course which I found more valuable and immediately impactful than any writing class, program, or book.

Understanding these concepts help you sharpen your writer's axe.

The Difference Between Grammar and Rhetoric

Grammar                                           Rhetoric
Machinery of a sentence                     How sentences work, their motive and impact

 

Landon said, “Effectiveness and elegance in writing are both rhetorical issues and grammar alone can lead us to neither.”  Grammar is how a sentence operates, but the rhetoric is how we express ideas and how they make an impact. 

I will share this again, “Effectiveness and elegance in writing are both rhetorical issues and grammar alone can lead us to neither.” 

 A Sentence Reflects Three Choices

Sentences are the building block of all writing, if you master the sentence then your writing improves.  So it's important to understand that a sentence reflects three choices. 

1. What we want to say/accomplish   (propositions)
2. Which words to use                       (vocabulary)
3. What order to put them in              (syntax)

Example:

“Invisible God created the visible world.”  Port Royal Grammar 1660

There are 3 underlying mental realities to this sentence.  The words on the page are only what we physically see.  Propositions are basic elementary statements that can’t be broken into constituent parts. 

1)      God is invisible

2)      The world is visible

3)      God created the world

These three propositions are made using six words.  The words used are precise and the syntax or order is artful and balanced. 

Gertrude Stein said, “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”  If we change the order or the words, this question is not as elegant or effective.  Think of a few of the many, many different ways she might have written this sentence:

Why should a sequence of words not be a pleasure?
 

Shouldn’t a sequence of words always give pleasure?

Words in sequence should always give pleasure.

We should always find pleasure in a sequence of words.

And so on.  Stein advances a number of propositions, but these alternatives are not as effective or elegant. 

Consider this sentence from Mark Twain's The Prince and Pauper.

Mark Twain:    “Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.” (Prince & Pauper, p. 175, ch 28 “The Sacrifice”)

What is Twain saying?  Here are the propositions of this sentence.

1) King can’t honor thee (refers to Miles )      

2) Miles has a good soul                     

3) Miles has a great soul

4) One (or God) is higher than kings

5) God has honored thee

6) King can honor Miles to men (on earth)

Word choice is precise.  What other vocabulary or substitution would be as powerful to support these propositions?

Order:  Proposition #1, 2, & 3  lead to 4&5, ultimately 6.    

***  This sentence is effective AND elegant.  ***

The Sacrifice: Miles Hendon takes the prince's lashes

Now Sharpen Your Axe

When reading, look at sentences, especially of writing you like.  If something resonates with you in particular, whether it made you laugh, cringe, or think, ask yourself what the writer is saying in that sentence, why those words, and the specific order she used them.  

When you write your next letter, note, or report, consider first what it is you wish to say, second what are the best words to use, and third what order to use.  

After completing Landon's course, for the first time I understand why a sentence is good, great, or even masterful. Doing so makes me a better reader and writer.

 

The Woodcutter's Tale, a Back-to-School Parable

 Once upon a time, there lived a woodcutter who went into the forest to chop down wood.  He felled 18 trees that day and brought them to the timber merchant.
 
"You are the best woodcutter around," the merchant said and gave him his pay.
 
The second day, the woodcutter went into the woods to begin his work, but by midday had only taken down 8 trees.  He worked through lunch and his breaks.  But all told, he had only 15 trees to sell to the merchant.
 
"Well, you are still a strong axeman and here is your pay."
 
The woodcutter told his wife about this and they agreed he would eat early and get going before sunrise. 

The third day he began chopping at first light, continued through lunch and into dusk.  He cut down only 12 trees.  He was worried the merchant might not be pleased.
 
"You disappoint me, but I know what you can do."

Now the woodcutter began to worry as he looked over his pay, less than he made just two days before and for more work. He and his wife decided he needed go to sleep earlier and eat more for his strength, so they scraped together extra food for him and packed a larger meal for lunch.  The woodcutter felt strong that morning.

On the fourth day even with the extra food and long hours, he had chopped down just 9 trees.  He hung his head, exhausted.  "I must be losing my strength," he said, "and I fear the merchant will fire me."

It was so late he did not make it to the merchant until the next day.

"I'm sorry, but I must ask for my axe back," said the timber merchant.  "I have others who want to work and will provide more trees."

It was as the woodcutter feared.  He gave him his axe.

One look at the axe and the merchant said, "Is this what you have been using?  When was the last time you sharpened your axe?"


"I never sharpened the axe," said the woodcutter. "I put all my time into chopping down trees."

Whiteboard in our "Treehouse" of an axe as a reminder to keep it sharp

I tell this story to my children each year at the beginning of school.  Sharpening the axe as students includes things like better planning and learning how to learn. My children discovered putting in more time helps, but not always.

Thinking. 

Stopping to think is the easiest and most overlooked skill.  During their year of homeschool, they met once a week to "Sharpen the axe" and discuss what each was working on and ideas for improvement and change.

Abraham Lincoln grew up with an axe in his hand; early in life he helped build his own home as well as many rail fences.  Though he did not say it, this quote is often attributed to him for his work ethic and leadership.

"Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I will spend my first four sharpening the axe."

Lincoln portrayed with his ax in an early 20th century painting by F.A. Schneider.