SUSAN, THE OIL CHANGE LADY

…Whacha readin’?…

Moving to a new town about five years ago, among the first tasks would be to find an outfit to perform regular maintenance on my Nissan pickup and whatever else happened to be in the garage.  I like to trade with local Mom and Pops so when the Nissan was due for an oil change, I stumbled into a shop that looked the part, walking distance from home.  Good, I’m thinking. I can drop the truck off and hoof it home or head to the local coffee outlet and wait for a call.

         I opened the door to the business only to find a woman, perhaps a few years my junior, sitting behind a computer but with a book, open, in front of her.  After two, maybe three beats, she placed an index finger somewhere in the text and said, “Hi there.  How may I help you?”  

         “Whacha readin’?” was my first comment.  

         I don’t remember her response other than it was not one of those supermarket paperbacks.  It was something about the Jamestown Colony or some cosmic nebula light years from this shop.  I mention those two examples because in the ten or twelve times I visited the shop for service to the truck or the Subaru – “You have a Subaru?  We love our Subaru.  Michael likes working on Subes and we both enjoy driving ours.” – she’d have a book at her workstation and her index finger was regularly employed keeping her spot in the narrative.  Once she told how she was fascinated by what she had just read about the pilgrims and their hardships, another time, space.  

         “What are you reading?” she asked.

         The woman’s name was Susan and Michael, her husband, turned wrenches in the back.  A true Mom and Pop.

On about my third visit, I chose to pack a book rather than hike home.  It was a Longmire mystery.  As I settled in, she asked, “Is it like Nevada Barr or CJ Box?”  I explained by affinity for Craig Johnson’s series because I’d visited with the author a couple of times at conferences but admitted that I don’t really go in for series novels too frequently.  “They often seem to become formulaic,” we agreed.  The chat lasted until Michael appeared, wiping his hands on a shop towel.  Neither she nor I had turned any pages.  She looked at him and then tipped her head in my direction.  “Honey.  We’ve got a reader here.”

         On a subsequent visit, I had just finished Richard Flannagan’s brutal and brooding World War II Mann Booker masterpiece  The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  We talked about it and I mentioned my desire to read two categories of books: the stuff I avoided in high school and books that were considered for international awards like the Mann Booker.  “I need to up my game,” I said, “if I’m ever gonna die literate.”  

         She held up The Great Gatsby, saying, “I’ve read this twice before, once in high school when I had no idea what I was reading about…”  

         “You sound like me,” I said. 

         “Actually, I sound like you and Mike.”

         Over the course of the next three years, I looked forward to my visits with Susan always thinking that an oil change place is just about the last place I could go to talk about books and be challenged to read something more or better or, at least, different.

         

Shortly after Thanksgiving, 2017, the Subaru was due for service.  Susan wasn’t engaged in a book this time.  After she checked in the car and went outside to get the vitals, I asked, “So, what do you have planned for the holidays?  Something good, I hope.”  Susan smiled.  “The holidays are going to be a bit different this year,” she said.  “On Halloween night, Michael came in, said he wasn’t feeling well and left me to handle the trick or treaters.  He passed away before I came to bed that night.  Heart attack, they said. Massive.”  

         How could this not leave me speechless?  

         Knitting her fingers, she added, “I’m working on convincing myself that there was nothing I could have done.”  Then she brightened just a bit.  “What book do you have there?”

         

The business went on the market within months, but it took well over a year for the place to sell.  I had the good fortune of dropping in a few more times to sit and read; and it wasn’t until perhaps my third visit that I found Susan with a book in front of her again: Flannigan’s Narrow Road.  “Damn,” I said, “That’s really dark.”  

         Susan chuckled.  “No, I know dark. This,” she said waving the book my way, “is simply perspective.”

Susan, the Oil Change Lady, has moved to Texas to be closer to family.  A nice young couple took over the operation a few months back with a late-teen daughter ably running the front counter.  And although the new crew changes the oil or swaps out a battery or inspects the brakes just as well as the former owners, I no longer pack a book with me to read while I wait.  Rather, I head back home on foot often thinking of books and talking about books and how the woman who cuts my hair, my dental hygienist, the wait person at the local sushi place – each who likes to talk, by the way – never bites when I dangle something about a book as a conversation starter.  I wonder if they read and if they read, how much they read and if they don’t, where do they find their important ideas – the stuff that touches their inner self – provides them with some perspective?  

         Does it really matter?  After all, it’s really none of my business.

         These things cross my mind while I'm walking home from the oil change place along with how much I miss chatting with the Oil Change Lady.

© 2019

Church of the Open Road Press

ON OUR ACCEPTANCE OF LOUSY GRAMMAR

The Church received the following grammar related question from a correspondent:

I have a question that would not bother many people, but it is this: “Those” and “These.” It seems that in the past, people would say something like “I will take three of those.” Now it is “I will take three of those ones.” These ones, those ones, would anyone but I wonder?

The Church would opine that “these ones” and “those ones” are symptoms of an individual suffering from LGS – Lazy Grammar Syndrome.  Adding “ones” to these or those seems like a redundancy.  Further, unless one is talking about place value in the realm of mathematics – “what number is in the ones column?” or is playing the card game “Go Fish,” there is no use for the word “ones.”  [Outside of a card game, “Hmmm… Looks like Wild Bill Hickok drew some Aces and some Eights,” I’m not sure when you’d put an “s” after a word representing a numeral.  Someone correct me please.]

“These” and “those” imply a gesture or the requirement of an additional clue in the context of the text or conversation.  “I’d like these apples (perhaps closer in physical proximity to the speaker) and those oranges (perhaps across the aisle)” might serve as an example.  Wouldn’t it be clearer to express, “I’ll take these apples and those three oranges.”?

There are many examples of LGS in modern speech.  Reversal of I (the personal pronoun) and me (the object of a preposition) bugs the Church no little bit.  This one grates: “Charley is walking to the store with Max and I.”  The same goes for “we” and “us.”  Other gripes?  Fragments masquerading as sentences.  And sentences beginning in “and.”

LGS should not be confused with LDS (Lazy Diction Syndrome) a spoken language issue – not LDS, the religious affiliation – wherein people mispronounce words.  Walter Cronkite was death on this practice and used the second month as his prime example: “It’s Feb-RU-ary, not Feb-EWE-ary.”  How may of us get that one wrong?  Although the late Norm Crosby made a career out of “misrenouncing” words, the rest of us would sound much more intelligent were we to avoid such malapropisms. 

What the Church finds most irritating however is LFS – please employ context clues to figure this one out – which involves the overuse of a certain profanity.  Most everyone knows that the “f-word” can be used in all seven parts of speech, but, sadly, some folks set out to prove that within about every three minutes of conversation.  Folks suffering from LFS, because it is such a preventable condition, routinely dishearten the Church.

People will argue that if the communication takes place, then the proper use of grammar is not important.  I would disagree even to the extent of suggesting that these ones (oops!) suffer from a little bit different but equally virulent strain of LFS.

Years ago, an aging (and pretty cranky) junior high English teacher complained to me, her site administrator, that the practice of decent English is lost upon our young people.  I told her I would address this within the hour.  She returned to class and I set to creating a poster with Tempera paints.  Allowing only a few minutes for it to dry, I entered her room with an eight-foot ladder, a staple gun and the fresh poster.  Amid her lecture, I set of the ladder in the front of her room climbed it high, and stapled the poster where she could not bring it down. 

The text of the poster? 

“If it sounds right, it ARE right.”

I’m not sure if that solved her problem.  I didn’t get to work there much longer.

© 2014

Church of the Open Road Press

CALIFORNIA RANCHO DAYS

…in the Great Central Valley

In grade school about a half-century ago, my classmates and I collectively read “California Rancho Days.”  Part of the California State Series – before major publishing houses were ceded tacit control of the curriculum – this state sanctioned, cloth-bound volume contained text and pictures of a pastoral landscape. 

Although probably printed in black and white (or maybe brown and white) my vision of the content was a full-color display of rich rolling fields, carpeted with wildflowers and gently grazed by cattle and sheep. In the distance, snow capped peaks towered over and provided sustenance to the verdant valley.  Small streams formed rivers that coursed across the fertile plain.  Modest hand-hewn houses dotted the valley floor and foothills, each with a well-tended garden and a tiny orchard of ever-blossoming fruit trees.  Folks living in that time rode working horses, made tortillas by hand and danced, fiesta style, every evening.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, this harmonious vision still exists for the Great Central Valley of California.

© 2013

Church of the Open Road Press

“THAT USED TO BE US” – TALK AMONG YOURSELVES…

…also, middle-of-the-road takes on current issues in politics and education…

- from this blog’s banner

A distant riding buddy surprised me with a copy of Thomas L. Friedman (recall his book The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum’s 2011 volume called That Used To Be Us.  It is subtitled: “How America fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back.”

“Great,” I thought to myself.  “350 pages of non-fiction to plow through.”  But, because “Buddy” and I get on the phone each Sunday evening for an hour to recap the week’s events in both politics and the personal, I figured, plow through was what I needed to do.  It would certainly provide fodder for some interesting long distance discussion over whiskey and a cigar.

My cynicism was quickly thwarted.  The book is based on a review of our country’s history, a look at the world in 2010 that is far different than the one in which I was reared, and discussions with educators, politicos and business leaders from the United States, India, China and a whole bunch of other places.  I found the volume to be a difficult-to-put-down portrait of America’s current reality.  Friedman and Mandelbaum identify four challenges we, as a country, face.  They are not gay marriage, the Second Amendment, larger-than-life sodas, or whether the President is a citizen. 

The challenges Friedman and Mandelbaum identify are:

• Globalization,
• The revolution in information technology,
• Our chronic deficits, and
• Our excessive consumption of energy.

A quick look at a week’s worth of headlines from the Sacramento Bee supports their contention.  Almost every article in the national news, world news or business news sections could be tied back to one or more of these challenges.  Causations identified by the authors are many.  Our shift from an ethic of investment and saving to one of consumption may have propelled the markets but isn’t the epitome of squirreling away nuts for the winter.  The polarized nature of our two-party system gets a good whack.  Even my beloved field of endeavor – public education – receives a well-deserved slap to boot. 

As I read This Used To Be Us – eagerly, it turns out – I began to reflect on the differences between the focus of Dad’s generation: we want to make sure our children have it better than we did, and my own baby-boom generation: “Cash or credit?”  “Why credit, of course!” and again realized those of us born between ’46 and ’64 might not have been the best stewards of the future.  Then I got to thinking about my kids and – although I sound much younger than a grandpa when I type – my grandkids.  I have five of ‘em.  What heritage, what legacy have we left to them? I asked myself.  Then, the life-long educator in me thinks:  What can I do to turn this around?

Here’s what I propose to do:  For my kids and my brother’s kids, I want to buy the paperback copy of the book.  I will give it to them with a book of tiny Post-It® stickees, a sharp pencil and a colored highlighter.  I will respectfully ask that each of them read the book with the following caveat:  You must highlight no more than twelve phrases, sentences or ideas that either reinforce something you believe or compel you to see something in a new light.  The pencils and stickees are provided so each can mark whatever strikes him or her in either of these veins before winnowing it down to the final dozen.

Then, in three to four months, I’ll cook the food and provide the drink with the proviso that we will engage in a 90-minute discussion of the points they each individually highlighted.

Middle of the road?  Isn’t that dangerous?

- from this blog’s banner

This indeed might be dangerous – or at least, quite interesting.  The group doesn’t get together all that often.  And for folks who are seemingly related by blood or marriage, their backgrounds and experiences vary greatly.  But isn’t that America?

• One is employed with an independent insurance agency;
• One has completed a business degree at a California State University;
• One attends UC Berkeley;
• One is underemployed as a trained diesel mechanic;
• One is a pretty conservative Christian;
• One is an outstanding percussionist and jazz and rock drummer;
• One has recently gained a management position at a local McDonald’s;
• One is an award-winning California winemaker;
• One attends a community college in Oregon;
• One - like his dad - can fix darn near anything mechanical;
• One has attended – and may still attend – some local Tea Party confabs;
• One has a fine eye and hand for drawing and art;
• One is a mother of two;
• Another will soon be a mother of three;
• At least one owns more than one firearm;
• One is attempting to establish residency out of state;
• One might be classified as a bit of an anarchist – although I wouldn’t;
• One works in a butcher shop;
• Several might be considered conservative in the neo sense;
• Not sure any are as liberal as others might perceive me;
• Four are female;
• Two are male;
• Two are married – spouses are encouraged to participate – and yet:
• All are going to have to make their way in the world we left them.

It will be interesting to see how many of the six (or eight) will be willing to partake, and how the discussion will play out over some ribs, chicken, salad and maybe some beer.

However it turns out, it seems to me that promoting middle-ground discussion about our nation’s history and how we got to where we are is the least one can do to move the country forward.  From such a foundation, perhaps we can find solutions…

o0o

Resource:  Friedman, Thomas L. and Michael Mandelbaum:  That Used To Be Us.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  New York.  2011.  Probably about 15 or 16 bucks in paper.  Please contact your local bookseller.

© 2013

Church of the Open Road Press

HELPING OUR CHILDREN TO A RICH PUBLIC EDUCATION

Every kid is an oddball kid.

As the United States progresses toward the middle of the twenty-first century, we are finding ourselves more and more immersed in global-scale realities.  Many of my memoiric tales tell of growing up in a small town that no longer exists.  The local department store no longer anchors downtown.  The corner grocer is now a 7-ll with no fresh meats or produce but lots of big, fizzy drinks.  The independent hardware store is a dying breed. We shop Trader Joe’s for that local feel, but purchase foodstuffs from as far away as one can be and still be on the planet.  A trip to the men’s department at Penney’s finds us buying Levi’s manufactured in Mexico.  I did this yesterday.  The computer I type this on was manufactured in China.  Likewise, the market for the area’s almonds or rice or navel oranges is no longer limited to the roadside stand or the Hershey factory down in Oakdale.  It is global.

There is good and bad associated with this evolution.  On the plus side, consumers can purchase product at favorable prices.  On the negative side, locally based industries face competition from across the globe.  On the plus side, we are afforded more and more selection of – on the negative side – things we don’t really need.  No longer is there a US economy.  The economy is worldwide.  We are all in this together.

What does this have to do with schools?  Education leaders are discovering that the market for their product – the 18-year-old high school graduate – is no longer limited to the community.  The market is global.  If a high school student from India is more prepared to maintain the machine that solders together solid-state componentry or uni-body automobiles than the graduate from Happy Valley High, guess who’s likely to get the job?  Or, worse, guess where the job is going to go?

Schools of late have been charged with ramping up curricular offerings to produce world-class graduates able to complete on a skills-available basis with any other kid of his or her age anywhere.  Thus, in California, students are pushed into higher levels of mathematical application, technical comprehension, and scientific reasoning.  Coupled with these new-basic skills are the ability to think critically, problem solve and get along with others.  These are the tools with which students must be equipped in order to win bread in 2050.

Parents cannot protect their children from the rigors that will be demanded of them – rigors the parents, as kids, were never asked to achieve.  Teachers, for that matter cannot rely upon that which has always worked, because, in essence, the goal posts have just been moved, and they aren’t going to stand still.  Therefore, parents and teachers may need to adopt a credo of the life-long learner if only to keep one step ahead of their kids.

How does the global view manifest itself in schools?  In the education industry’s most recent past – and I am a huge proponent of the public schools, one who served in a site-level or curriculum leadership position for nearly 25 years – efforts have been made to feed students more content and test it out the other end.  (Yes, I know what that sounds like.)  Higher levels of mathematics instruction are being addressed at younger ages.  Reading more complex works is occurring at earlier grades.  More time has been devoted to these old basics as success is measured by objective, easy-to-score tests – while those new basics (mathematical application, technical comprehension, and scientific reasoning, the ability to think critically, problem solve and get along with others) have gone unaddressed.  Also unaddressed have been the arts: literary, visual, performing and vocational.

Teachers have had to demand compliance of students because there is too much on the agenda to screw around with the oddball child who learns differently or requires more attention.  Besides, the No Child Left Behind Act mandated, yes mandated, that 100% of all students be performing at or above grade level by 2014 – this includes the kid who arrives from the Ukraine the week before annual testing began – or the school will be labeled underperforming.  Teachers, administrators, and local realtors hoping to jack up the price of homes, don’t want this.  Meanwhile, parents grow frustrated because the child comes home frustrated because the frustrated teacher didn’t take time to meet the frustrated kid’s needs.  The whole thing is, well, frustrating.

How should the global view manifest itself in schools?  With the advancement of nationally based common core standards, we can expect some of the nit-picky factoid regurgitation to go away.  Still for schools to move kids to higher levels of competency, they will need to build curriculum not around facts and algorithms and technical comprehension, but the application of facts and algorithms those things comprehended to solve problems through critical thinking.  Checking for understanding (and parents can do this as well as teachers) will need to evolve asking such things as: 

• How did you arrive at that solution?
• What other solutions did you evaluate?
• Can this solution be used to advance new knowledge or applied to solve another problem?
• How might his idea have helped (name an historic figure) in (name an historic circumstance)?

Public schools will deliver the goods in terms of creating viable, competitive citizens when they depart from the teach and test cycle and embrace instruction that demands application of knowledge in new and different ways.  And they won’t be able to test this type of learning with fill-in-the-bubble assessments.  Sure, critics will toss up the straw man argument that Joe-High-School-Graduate didn’t even know that Lincoln was president when the south seceded.  That’s because Joe had more important levels of learning to accomplish and, besides, Joe probably knows how to look up the Lincoln answer on his Smart Phone.

What options exist for today’s frustrated parent?  Having served 19 years as a site principal, I have heard from parents that the school is not meeting the needs of the student.  I have also heard from teachers that they have 32 children who’s needs they feel they must address.  As budgets tighten there is less resource available for anyone’s kid.

So, what about private school?  Choose carefully.  Private schools are not required to adhere to content or curriculum standards.  Private schools may not necessarily employ teachers who hold valid teaching credentials or certificates.  This doesn’t mean the teacher can’t be successful, but just as there are qualification standards for those who drive semi-trucks on the highway, standards for those to whom we entrust our children’s education are probably a good thing.  Private schools are under no obligation to serve students with learning disabilities or who present behavioral issues.  Many students who return to public schools after years in private schools find they are behind the curve when compared to their grade level peers. 

What about Charter Schools?  Charter schools are publicly funded.  They may not have to employ credentialed teachers.  They get to try different things.  (So do traditional public schools, but there are some statutory limits under which traditional schools must operate, particularly when it comes to curriculum adoptions.)  Some charters are sponsored by school districts.  Foundations or corporations sponsor others.  Charter schools may have a focus like basic skills, science and engineering or the arts.  Charter schools may not deny admittance to students who apply but they may “be full” and place the interested student on a waiting list or they may suggest that, after review the student’s record that the student would be “more successful” elsewhere.  For some reason – hmmm – many charter schools serve fewer students who are educationally disadvantaged or come with an IEP.  Thus, some charter schools are able to mine for the cream of the crop students in an area.  Oddly, as recently as 2009, assessment results for charter schools in California lagged slightly behind those scores for their traditional counterparts.

How about Home Schooling?  Home schooling is a viable option for some but it is not without restriction.  School districts or county offices of education are the gatekeepers for those wishing to educate their kids at home.  A credentialed teacher meets with the provider-parent for a minimum of an hour per week to set out the curriculum that must be covered.  Kids are assessed using traditional public school assessments annually.  Scores for these home-schooled kids are figured in with the scores of the student’s home district for some reason.  The district or county may revoke the home school privilege if the parent refuses to address the curriculum or the student fails to make progress.  There are many sound reasons for wanting to school off-spring at home, but some parents choose home schooling simply if their child demonstrates difficulty with school-peer relationships.  This is shortsighted.  The way to deal with a problem like, say, a hangnail, is not to ignore it.  Parents of home-schooled children often form associations so that their "students" may interact with others.  Good solution!  Often, home-schooled kids reenter the public arena behind their grade level associates, however, just as often, home-schooled kids knock the socks off of their peer group.  Some even enter the university one, two or three years ahead of their contemporaries. 

What about another public school?  Districts in urban or suburban areas often times have more than one school serving the same set of grades.  A shift from one school in the district to another (or a shift to a school in a nearby district) will mean educating the student outside his or her neighborhood.  If a child needs a fresh start, this is a good option.  If the child is running away from a problem it is not.  A child moving to a public school outside his or her attendance area or to a school in a neighboring district may be kept on a short leash in terms of behavior.  Some school administrators will dismiss a “visiting” student who fails to perform (because it impacts the school’s scores) or exhibits behavioral problems (because it impacts the teacher/principal’s time) without due process.

My recommendation?  The local public school is the best option unless something completely unforeseen happens.  Parents working with teachers can generally move the child forward.  Ensuring that the child knows that the teacher and the parent are on the same path often presents a mountain just high enough that the kid won’t want to peek and see what’s on the other side.

Schools are under both political and economic pressure to demand excellent performance from their students.  And parents need to back ‘em up.  If questions arise about how “excellence” is defined, those questions should be asked privately, understood thoroughly and followed through upon religiously.  Beyond what the schools can currently offer, outlets for extra-curricular activities in the arts or athletics can give a kid a reason to go forth as well as a valuable means of self-expression.  Back in the day, we could depend on the school to provide these.  As we progress toward that mid-twenty-first century mark, hopefully we, like the Chinese and many European countries, will embrace the value of returning these elements to a full and well-rounded education.  But that doesn’t help the current mom or dad or the current student with the current “right now.”

Bottom line?  Even with the sharpest or most mild mannered child, it isn’t going to always be easy. Some children require more malleating than others.  (Malleating is a word I just made up.  It is based on the word malleable, and it may involve use of a mallet.)  But insulating children from the consequences of non-performance, lack of compliance, or inability to be a good friend, in the end will not serve the kid in adulthood.  And, collectively, preparing the next generation for success is the most important thing, we as a society, can do.

Finally, consider this:  Public education is a little like service from PG&E.  The utility company gets the power to the house, but it is our job to flip the switch and turn on the light.  No fair cursing the darkness.

© 2013

Church of the Open Road Press

TEN RULES FOR CLARITY IN WRITING

I AM CURRENTLY READING A NOVEL with a good story line, but one that is hard to read because it is so poorly composed. I’m hanging in there, because I want to see what happens. However, as I read, I’m getting a bit bent out of shape with the author.  I don't like my time consumed wading through poor construction, pedantic rants or typographical errors (for which there is no excuse.)

Not having been published myself, I may have little standing to be critical of someone whose words I am holding in my hands.

With that in mind, I have drafted the following ten rules (give or take) that I will post on the bulletin board in my studio if only as a reminder to myself:

1. Few nevers exist in good writing. Nothing is absolute.
2. Get grammar. Get tense. Get modifiers.
3. Know there, their and they’re; know also to, too, two. Know the word you want to use and spell it properly. Remember that a homophone is not some sort of alternative lifestyle hotline.
4. Avoid over-use of unique words in close proximity within text: “The angry birds’ angry squawks angered the sleeping giant.”  Using a word like "palpable" more than once in every hundred pages or so (excluding when it comes up in dialog) is probably too frequent.  Using it three times in five pages means someone didn't access their Thesaurus.
5. Vary sentence length. Long descriptive or technical sentences are best punctuated by short declarative statements. It keeps the reader engaged.
6. Suspend grammar rules when writing dialogue. People in conversation don’t subscribe to the King’s English. We don’t casually talk as good as we write, except, perhaps when we’re being deposed. Don’t make dialogue sound like a deposition.
7. Understand that poetry makes prose better: think alliteration, rhythm, cadence. (The last sentence in above tip might be a good example.)
8. Figure out what “passive voice” means, how it may slow down the pace of the text, when to use and when to avoid it. “Timmy was bitten by Lassie.” vs. “Lassie bit Timmy!”
9. Use spell check, but don’t depend on it. Most spell checking programs do not harbor many technical terms, nor do they get dialect. When spell check checks, check to make sure it didn’t introduce a new error.
10. Acronyms confuse readers who are not hip. Assume all readers are not hip. (This is a cogent point for those on the speaking circuit as well.) Similarly: Don’t expect everyone to know your colloquialisms.
11. A good paragraph has five sentences. A great paragraph has as many sentences as necessary to fully convey the point. Some excellent paragraphs contain only one word.
12. Oh.
13. When writing about a current event or composing a technical piece, such as a users manual for the DVD player or a how-to for leadership or administration or boat building or cake baking, report if you must. When writing fiction, don’t.
14. Typos kill kontent.
15. Self-publishing is for folks who are smarter than editors. However, too many self-published books prove that too many writers are not smarter than the editor they did not hire.
16. Reading is a creative act that involves conversing with the author. Successful authors ensure that their writing can hold up their end of the obligation that is inherent in that reader/writer relationship.
17. Effective writing is focused on truth – that goes for non-fiction and fiction.  Especially fiction.
18. Finally, avoid writing ten rules for this or ten rules for that. You’ll always either run over or short.

© 2012
Church of the Open Road Press

MONEYBALL: RECOMMENDED READING FOR EDUCATORS

MAYBE I’M LATE TO THE PARTY, but I just read Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. It came to me as a Christmas gift. Ostensibly about a low-budget baseball team out performing its available revenue, it is really about the use of data to drive success. Baseball is at once a beautifully simple game – hit, run, throw, catch – and a team sport driven by statistics: batting average, runs batted in, earned run average, slugging percentage. The mind-numbing list goes on and on.

Lewis suggests that success can be predicted when all but the most important data is thrown aside. At least that’s what Oakland Athletics front office folks figured out.

SO WHAT? For the longest time, we, as educators, didn’t give a crap about data. In fact, when asked about numeric proof, we gave every indication that we were threatened by data. We found comfort in defining success as doing what we’d always done, eschewing numbers. When asked for a measure of success, we couldn’t pinpoint anything because we relied upon how happy our students were, how content our parents were, and how the school community expectation was that younger sibling would get exactly the same thing that older sibling got. In essence, as a former superintendent aptly put it: “We weren’t teachers with twenty years experience; we were teachers who taught one year twenty times over.”

Critics of schools justifiably looked at world-wide performance in math and literacy - comparing us to them - then, like the man in Tiananmen Square a few decades ago, stood in front of our line of tanks and said, essentially: “Wait a minute.”

Educational leaders, legislators, and the publishing houses that found they could make a dime off of this discord immediately jumped on a bandwagon of testing each and every thing a kid was supposed to know. This will have proven to be a necessary step, but one with enormous costs in terms of instructional time, one which yields rafts of statistics, but few of which are of actual value.


THE TASKS BEFORE us as educators are to:

1. specifically determine which data from which assessments measures success, and then 
2. focus on curriculum content and instructional strategies that contribute to the necessary and desired measurable student performance.

Does that invite us to teach to a more limited test?*

Absolutely not. We must demand of ourselves that all students receive a broad curriculum grounded in knowledge but richly steeped in problem solving, critical thinking and creativity. Evidence of our success will appear as student performance beyond simply the Scantron sheet.

Great! That means we can bag interim assessments and annual tests, right?

Wrong. What is means is that we make professional decisions about our assessments based on the select data that we know will serve as predictor of success later on in the student’s academic progression and ultimately in the student’s life.

Job one is to identify assessments that don’t lend themselves to this task and see that they receive less of our time, and less of our attention. Perhaps, some just need to be thrown aside.

The immediate result? More time to actually teach.

o0o

FOOTNOTE:

* Shame on us for having been cowed into “teaching to the test.” When we teach the curriculum kids’ll do well on the test; when we teach to the test, they’ll miss out on huge swaths of curriculum and we are guilty of malfeasance.


RECOMMENDED RESOURCE:

Lewis, Michael: Moneyball. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2004.

© 2011
Church of the Open Road Press

MR. BRILLIANT RECOMMENDS – FOURTH ESTATE EDITION

Fourth in an annual series…

Books that are half-read gather dust on my shelf and generally have a bookmark still placed at their point of death. More often than not, these are works of fiction: stories poorly told, too frequently told or stories written for a denominator different than my own.

Some books this year, however, were completely and eagerly read – and some reread. I am surprised to note that most are non-fiction – although they read as though an entertaining novelist plotted them – and most were written by journalists. It seems a good reporter tells a good story. Here are some examples:

WEST OF THE WEST. Mark Arax (formerly of the LA Times.) New York: Public Affairs. 2009. $15.99

As a native son of the Golden State, I once inquired about supplementing my Geography major with a minor in California. In my twenties I enjoyed the diversity of the geology, wild land, climate, histories, peoples, ways-of-life and constant change. I knew I would be intrigued by whatever “research” this study might involve. The university advisor was kind enough not to laugh. “People don’t do that,” he said. At least not for credit.

Arax pulled it off. West of the West collects eleven essays based upon stories Arax reported. Not limited to column inches, he invites readers into the world that is our state, allowing us to embrace the everyday characters we might otherwise only pass on the street: cops, drug dealers, organic farmers, military parents, immigrants, business people and barkeeps. Although personally rooted in the agricultural regions surrounding Fresno, Arax ventures north to the Humboldt, south to the Salton Sea; from the ‘burbs of LA to the dusty valley bergs like Oiltown and Taft. He examines who we are in these places and where we came from. He outlines how systems built to protect the system serve to destroy the individual and how individuals in California survive in spite of it.

He makes us examine the ironies we seem to accept: We are more than happy to pay the same $5.00 we paid in the 1990s but give little thought how that trickles down to the farmer and his field hand. And this contradiction extends to the farmer himself, who votes for the politician who wants to bar the Mexicans and then complains that his fruit is rotting on the vine because of a shortage of Mexicans. [Page 171]

California’s angst, I would conclude, we own.


THE BIG BURN: TEDDY ROOSEVELT AND THE FIRE THAT SAVED AMERICA. Timothy Egan (currently with the New York Times.) New York: Mariner Books. 2010. $15.95

I appreciate all that is done to preserve the woods for my enjoyment. A day off will find me discovering some passage into Gold Rush history on a barely-maintained road. My imagination calls me to think that maybe I’m the first one ever to see this place – ignoring the fact that I am indeed traveling on a road that was built by someone.

The combined vision of President Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot allows my fantasies to exist. In a time when a burley America was resolute on subduing the resources of our vast, open west – Manifest Destiny style – these men understood the finite nature of that which seemed infinite. Egan recounts how Roosevelt faced down a Congress bought and paid for by industrialists, railroad men, mining interests, and timber corporations. A rag-tag group of college boys, farm hands, and drunkards – our first rangers – set to the forest to protect the watersheds, trees and wildlife, much to the chagrin of those who’s fortunes rested in exploiting the virgin west. The political intrigue is palpable.

Then, after a series of drier than normal winters, a fire erupts across the Bitterroots.

…Hollinghead knew at least one thing about wildfire, a retreat strategy the Indians used: it will never burn the same ground twice. So the young forest guard led forty men at a run back through the fire to get to a clearing that had just been overrun by flame. The dash cost them – burns on hands, face and hair afire… [Page 181]

Heroism, tragedy, cowardice, and fate play roles in a work that reads like a novel but invites the reader to visit the landscape upon which the story unfolds.

History repeats, I note, upon closing the volume: corporate interests today seem to have regained the run of the House. And Senate.


NICKEL AND DIMED – ON NOT GETTING BY IN AMERICA. Barbara Ehrenreich (Harper’s, The Nation, Time, the New York Times.) New York: Holt. 2008. $15.00.

A Facebook “friend” raged, “Do you know that more than forty percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes! Before we tax the business man, let’s see about getting them to pay their fair share!”

Then, at my nephew’s suggestion, I read Ehrenreich’s book, which had been initially published in 2001. Ehrenreich went “undercover” taking on the tasks and lifestyles of those who serve us, waiting tables at a coffee shop in Florida, cleaning houses for the well-to-do in Maine and stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota. She attempted to live on what she earned making rent payments, buying food, and covering all the costs we generally absorb without much thought. Along the way she met honest people who, though possessing next to nothing, would share that which they had. She observed cultures where in management sold services those employees were instructed not to deliver quite so well. She worked for the big corporation and for the littlest of Caesars. Although the reader knows she survives to tell the tale, at times we find ourselves wondering if she will. Hunger. Bodily breakdowns. Living quarters with no heat and or working locks – when not sleeping in the car.

I conclude: The forty-plus percent of the people who do not pay income taxes in this country do so because they don’t earn enough income to pay taxes on it.


EDWARD R. MURROW AND THE BIRTH OF BROADCAST JOURNALISM. Bob Edwards. (Formerly of NPR.) New York: Wiley and Sons. 2004. $19.95

Principles. We are exposed to so few of them in the media. Why? Because those who have found there is more money to be made if principles are ignored have convinced their viewer/listener base that only they have principles. Everyone else is lying. It’s a liberal media.

Two questions: What does the media have to gain by exposing corruption? What do the corrupt have to gain by controlling the media and its message?

Bob Edwards – a journalist who knows more than a little bit about delivering truth to power – reports: Nothing scared Murrow – not bombs, dictators, generals, members of Congress, sponsors, corporate executives or Joseph McCarthy. Murrow could not be muscled, bullied, bought, corrupted or intimidated. [Page 155.]

Edward R. Murrow looked evil in the eye and stared it down. Too few of us expect that from our news sources today. Too frequently we are convinced to concern ourselves with the labels someone else pinned on him, whether the candidate wears a flag on his lapel, whether his name sounds like the kid who sat behind us in Junior High, and what scandal our favorite media outlet has congered up. Morrow would have nothing of it. Morrow insisted that his boys report only the truth.


IN THE SECOND DECADE of the 21st century, we’ve been told we cannot trust the liberal media – interestingly almost all the time from one major media (well, cable media) source.

Poppycock. If Americans today:

• Lack the critical thinking skills or the simple will to see beyond the smoke screen;
• Care for preservation of personal well-being even in the face of evidence that our actions are leading to our own demise;
• Decide we cannot believe anyone who purports to deliver the news; and
• Convince ourselves that there is a man behind the curtain who cannot be trusted…

…then we deserve the decline in which we find ourselves.

Truth be told, print and broadcast journalists are honest folks like Mark Arax and Tim Egan and Barbara Ehrenreich and Bob Edwards. Each has a story to tell. Each does more than a day’s work to get the story out. Indeed, they are our country’s invaluable fourth estate.

But there is a “man behind the curtain” telling us otherwise. Like in Oz, we can almost glimpse him turning and manipulating and pushing smoke into our eyes – then he turns toward us and says, “Ignore that many behind the curtain.” Ed Murrow would find out who the bastard is, tear down that damnable curtain and expose him. Then, as a country, we could all stare him down.

And we’d be better off.

© 2011
Church of the Open Road Press

FIRE LOOKOUTS AND LITERATURE

I like fire lookouts. From every last one, there’s always a great view.

-- Mr. Brilliant

Duncan Peak - Placer County

THE LIFE OF A FIRE LOOKOUT seems solitary and romantic – almost idyllic. The gentleman serving at the Duncan Peak lookout appreciates the bears that wander by at dusk, the deer that laze in the grasses a few hundred feet from his tower, the marmot that whistles “good morning,” and the ever changing lighting and skyscape. “But,” he adds, “when those thunderstorms roll through and you can count 115 strikes in less than an hour…” I picture a midnight bright as mid-day and don’t hear the rest of his thought.

Although most of these installations now stand dormant, the folks I’ve met who staff the few remaining active towers talk about what they like to read or that screenplay they’re working on. While visitors are welcome, I get the feeling that the peace that comes with solitude is cherished.

What follows is a short list of books that seem to marry the romance and grit of those in service to our environment…

North of Foresthill Road

EGAN, TIMOTHY. THE BIG BURN. Mariner Books, 2009. Egan recounts the shared dreams of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot who struggle with a recalcitrant and corrupt Congress to create an institution to protect and preserve America’s great natural resources. Just as the fledgling forest service takes root, the most massive wildfire in US history sweeps across the Bitterroots bringing with it incidents of heroism and cowardice. It is a recounting of history that, at times, reads like a thriller.

Mosquito Ridge, Placer County

Coming full circle: We are often told of the Native American population’s understanding fire’s role in the ecosystem. (I suspect that the lack of hoses, ladders, Pulaskis, big red trucks and aerial tankers back then may have contributed to this “understanding.”) In contrast, our quest to preserve all forests from fire has contributed to the devastating huge fires we have seen of late. Egan notes how the Forest Service has evolved to sanction fire as a tool for maintaining healthier forests.

Grouse Lakes, Nevada County

MACLEAN, NORMAN. YOUNG MEN AND FIRE. University of Chicago Press, 1992. Maclean writes about the disastrous Mann Gulch fire in which 15 smoke jumpers parachuted into a remote draw only to be almost immediately consumed by flames. Maclean’s book has become a text used by those in many industries and institutions seeking to examine leadership, communication, decision-making and the consequences of doing a shoddy job of any of those. Maclean also wrote A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT.

An interesting connection exists between a 7-year-old Norman Maclean and one Elders Koch, a forester who rose through the ranks of the service only to turn down the opportunity to head up the agency in Washington DC:

“[He] preferred to stay in Montana, with his summers at Sealy Lake next to the family cabin of Norman Maclean, and a few steps away from some of the best fly-fishing waters in the world.” (Egan, page 268.)

The Bitterroots or DC? Good call, Elders. Good call.


ABBEY, EDWARD. THE BLACK SUN. Capra Press, 1971, 1981. The author of THE MONKEYWRENCH GANG, Abbey takes a stab at the baleful romanticism of being perched on a mountaintop. Bittersweet and perhaps a bit sappy at times, the reader does gain insight into the solitary mind of at least one of the fellows who keeps watch over the forest.

Mt Harkness. (c) National Park Service

Another connection: Quite by accident, as a 14-year old, my path crossed Mr. Abbey’s at the Mt. Harkness Lookout above Juniper Lake in Lassen National Park where he stood watch in about 1966. He regaled my brother and me with all manner of tales including one of deer coming to lick where he’d regularly urinated on a rock just: “down slope over there,” [he pointed] so as not to over fill the outhouse. It wasn’t until I read the same story in his memoir CONFESSIONS OF A BARBARIAN (page 203) that I realized I’d met the man whose books I would later devour.

Little Bald Mt., Placer County

STEWART, GEORGE R. FIRE. Random House, 1948. One of dad’s favorites, Stewart, always the teacher, combines the drama of an advancing wildfire with lessons about physical geography, meteorology, (fires create their own weather) and forest biology. Although he claims the locale is fictitious, I could swear I’ve walked the area he talks about. Easily, he could have been writing about Duncan’s Peak in the Foresthill district of the Tahoe. A student of the west, George R. Stewart’s many works can provide a bedrock understanding of the interface between man and nature.

© 2011
Church of the Open Road Press

THE STUDY OF GEOGRAPHY FROM A MOTORCYCLE SEAT

Geography is the study of man and land and the interrelationships between them.

Professor David W. Lantis

CSU, Chico

1971

ONE CANNOT SEPARATE a population of living things from the resources necessary to sustain it. James Algar’s film “Nature’s Half Acre” (produced in 1951 by Disney) made this point over and over.

When the principal of Rosedale School, Eldred Self, rewarded the “good kids” with a film party, and this was the film, I was elated. I probably saw the footage four or five times beginning when I was eight.

During the formative years, long weekends and vacations were spent in the old Ford Ranchwagon traveling from one place to another exploring.

Dad would hike us into the Yahi Country northeast of town. Mom once drove me down to Death Valley.

From as early as I was able to sling a pack on my back, we traipsed all over the Sierra in California and the cascades in Washington. All the while, we learned about the Indians who came before us, or the gold seekers, or the lumbermen. We’d think about living in houses made of sticks or bark. Or canvas.

We’d imagine the joy surround trips to town, once towns finally appeared. And around campfires, we’d hear stories – some factual, some not so much – about who lived here, why they came, what sustained them and why they left.

Or how they died.

EARLY IN MY COLLEGIATE CAREER, I decided my major would be Geography. “What’ll you do with that major?” “Nobody hires geographers.” “What are they going to teach you? How to fold a map?”

What I learned was how things fit together. Why civilization began around the Fertile Crescent – anthropology. How stores with like wares choose to locate in close proximity – economics. How glaciers form and what is necessary to sustain them – climatology. Why evidences of sea floor can be found atop Mount Everest – geomorphology. How the cloud of putty-colored air got locked in over the northern Sacramento Valley – physical geography. Why Constantinople is considered among the crossroads of the world – transportation. How come world maps seem to split the eastern hemisphere and not the western – cartography. Why Rome, Paris, Saigon, London, Shanghai, Lisbon and San Francisco might be centers of thought and creativity, while Oslo, Christchurch, Omaha, Panama City, and Biggs or Lodi might not be – Cultural Geography.


MANY FOLKS WHO RIDE motorcycles are asked, “Why?” They respond with terrific and varied reasons. All legitimate. Yesterday, I drove from home, up I-80 to Colfax; from Colfax into and out of the North Fork of the American to Iowa Hill; from Iowa Hill to Michigan Bluff, then down Gorman Ranch Road to the Middle Fork; thence up the ridge to Foresthill, Auburn and home.

I viewed the original route of the transcontinental railway over the Sierra, piles of slag from dry hole hard-rock mining, flume moorings that supplied water to placer claims, both clear and selective timber harvests, and evidence that a dam would one day be built – but never was.

The tiny brick jail in Iowa Hill suggests primitive criminal justice.

A steel bridge across the American suggests early public works.

The reservoir at Sugar Pine reminds of the relationship between humans and water.

The hundred-mile loop provided field lessons in history, hydrology, transportation, economics and politics. At many points I asked, “Why here?” Followed shortly by, “Oh.”


I WORRY ABOUT THOSE OF US who cannot ask “Why here?” and follow it up sooner or later with “Oh.” It seems to me that citizens of this world who do not understand that quote at the top of this piece are more likely to:

• Drink water with little concern about where it comes from;
• Consume and throw away without grasping that there is really no “away” to throw to;
• Travel paths following ancient routes without realizing the why the past passed this way, or that there even was a past;
• Assume our resources are limitless;
• Assume our people are chosen;
• Assume the future is now; and
• Not grasp the breadth of the continuum we enjoy for only a fraction of time.

There is beauty in both the world’s complexity and its simplicity. I enjoy the ride because of what I can see, learn, figure out or prompt to research as a result of having been on the journey. I need to pause to thank Dave Lantis, Jerry Williams, Bruce Bechtal, Art Kiernan and a number of other CSU Profs for the life-long gift.

And I must not forget Eldred Self.

***

RESOURCES:

“Nature’s Half Acre” may be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meaFIBdGewY


© 2011
Church of the Open Road Press