I haven't forgotten about slow reads.  I've been going day and night at school, putting together a lot of new stuff this year including a new multi-user blog and grading like a madman most waking weekend hours.

My heavy grading time is October through January because of the concentrated writing we do fall semester under a writers’ workshop model.  We move from predominately writing to predominately reading in the spring.  I gradually have more time to myself as the days gradually lengthen.

Here’s a link to my honors classes’ blog.  It’s not so pretty, but it sure beats what I had the last few years.  I built it with WordPress MU (“multi-user”) with a Buddy Press overlay.  (Buddy Press is a nice set of plug-ins that makes a wpmu install into something like a private social network.)  Though I turned off many of Buddy Press’s coolest features (e.g., friends, forums, the wall) to promote esprit de corps and to have the kids focus on blogging, what’s left is great: Buddy Press provides thoughtful, site-wide navigation.  And wpmu is much better than I remember it being two years ago.  Plug-ins replace many of my old code hacks, and the skins are more plentiful and attractive.  They’re also more versatile because of built-in widgets bloggers may now drag and drop into their sidebars.

I blog as Alan this year.  I’m one of the worst bloggers there, about as infrequent there as I am here.  I’ve got to get my game on.

Some kids complain about the blogging, but they end up liking it better than my alternative, which is the same amount of writing but unpublished.  When we stop blogging in March, they generally don’t want to let go of it.  But, by then, I’m exhausted from keeping tabs on it.  (I have to read everything that eighty-plus bloggers post, including their comments!)

It’s worth it.  Blogging has done more than anything else to help my writing, and every year I see it helping many of my writers at school, too, over time.

 |

Posted November 17, 2009. Link to just this post.

letter to the editor

Here’s a letter I sent to the editor of Newsweek this past week.  For the life of me, I can’t see why it won’t be published this week.  It’s short.  It's from soneone who lives in the subject state, and it brings up a major point the article overlooks.  It even gives into that requisite touch of petulance at the end.  Go figure.

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

If next month’s Virginia gubernatorial election is “the first big electoral test of Barack Obama’s presidency,” as Steve Tuttle’s article “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” claims, modern history suggests that Mr. Obama will fail it.  No sitting president has seen his party win Virginia’s governorship since Richard Nixon saw Republican Mills Godwin win it in 1973.

We Virginians seem to want our state and national capitals in different parties’ hands, perhaps to keep Richmond, which is only two hours south of Washington, out of Washington’s orbit. Maybe Virginians also have a smoldering desire for these nearby capitals to remain at odds as they were when Richmond, like Washington, was the capital of a union of states.  Whatever the reason, the presidential election seems to vaccinate Virginians against the winner the following year.

Virginia and New Jersey hold the only gubernatorial elections during the years presidents are inaugurated, and every four years the national press frames these elections as early referenda on the newly installed or reinstalled president.  In Virginia’s case, at least, it’s quadrennial nonsense.

 |

Posted October 24, 2009. Link to just this post.

i love long sentences

It feels good to stretch out over a long sentence as over a long sofa in a warm room, to read a sentence long enough to require me to inhale and to pick out a pause for that purpose and to negotiate the breathing out again with the sentence’s resumption, the voice coming out with the air and making me live with the sentence, making me conscious again of syntax as a physical as well as a mental act, as physical as breath, as expressive as song and as accommodating as soul.  I care less about the soul of wit than about the soul itself starving for the passion the cumulative sentence can bring to a piece of writing, the sentence’s participial and absolute phrases circling back to its subject matter like fronds in the beaks of birds building a nest in which to sleep or sing.

 |

Posted October 12, 2009. Link to just this post.

closing the syntactical freak show

Like ringmasters pointing out the giant and the midget in an old-time circus's freak show, we English teachers teach the run-on and the fragment together in stark contrast. But I think our students sometimes get the mistaken idea from this pairing that we're concerned about the lengths of these famous non-sentences, and as a consequence, we tend to produce writers whose paragraphs are peopled with sentences that aren't too short or too long but are all just right.

From reading our students' writing, I believe that syntactical second place goes to short sentences, and last place goes to the long ones.  Why the prejudice against long sentences?  The misnomer "run-on" hurts, sure.  Who would know from its name that it involves two or more improperly joined sentences?  Also, long sentences increase the odds of misplaced modifiers and other forms of bad grammar, but that's hardly a reason to give them up.  Finally, almost a century of American writers have fallen under the spell of Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and others known for their spare syntax, but Hemingway was as proficient with long sentences as he was with short ones.  Great literature and good writing are made up of short and long sentences as well as the medium ones, but we've lost some of the art of writing the long ones.

My honors classes are learning how to write cumulative sentences, defined as a base clause and one or more modifying phrases.  (The previous sentence is a good example of a cumulative sentence: the clause precedes the comma, and a participial phrase follows it.)  The cumulative sentence is great for teaching phrases and clauses and their associated grammatical and punctuative rules.  Also, the sentence form emphasizes tone and description and therefore helps students relate syntax to good writing.

We're using cumulative sentences to help us explode moments – that is, to help us focus our readers on important moments in our narratives.  We're posting some of our sentences on Edmodo.com, a Twitter-like microblogging service for schools with the added advantages of enforced privacy (Twitter can be private, too, but one must rely on students to keep it so), unlimited characters per post, and threaded comments.  This month, my honors students are practicing cumulative sentences and replying to others' cumulative sentences with more phrases to make the sentences longer and richer.

This post is sandwiched by two instances of writers responding to this assignment.

 |

Posted October 12, 2009. Link to just this post.

biking

Biking through tall trees
with Bethany was like
walking down the nave
of a large cathedral to
present her to Christ.
Such a canopy.

 |

Posted September 13, 2009. Link to just this post.

an earlier south carolina rep's indecorum

When I learned that a South Carolina representative had been the man who heckled the president tonight, I thought of another South Carolina representative who breached decorum when our Union was even more divided between North and South: Congressman Preston Brooks’s caning of Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856.  I wonder if Rep. Joe Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” will be defended as vigorously in some quarters as Rep. Brooks’s caning was in the Southern press.

Here’s a comment I left on an unrelated post last month:

I don't think there's been a time in U.S. history (I can't pretend to speak of other countries' histories, hubris or no hubris) when so many people's sources of news were so biased. I've read about the campaign of 1800, the newspapers leading up to the Civil War, and yellow journalism, but I don't think they rival today's media for misinformation and vituperation. One national poll this month found that only 42 percent of respondents who identify themselves as Republicans believe that Obama was born in America. (He'd be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency if he were not, of course.) That statistic amazes me. What does it take to come to that conclusion concerning Obama's birth despite all evidence to the contrary? One talks in terms of facts, but one puts more credence on what the party (or racial or media) line is than on the facts. Facts can be twisted, you know? But I know who I am and what team I'm on.

The ramifications of such thinking are frightening.

 |

Posted September 9, 2009. Link to just this post.

defeat

Some mornings, when the light grows and I set myself to grow still, I imagine that I am debating George Bush.  I’ve fallen into this daydream for years now: it digs at something, I believe.  So the moderator asks Bush to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with.  Bush answers, “Christ, because he changed my heart.”

My place is to lose the election, to have historians view the best version of my answer – halting, unduly complicated, vaguely insincere – as the election’s turning point, and not even that, because I was losing before George Bush said Christ.

Stevenson could not win, Carter could not govern, and Lincoln, you know, governed, but only over civil war.

During long, two-term moonlit nights, we remember the reach of sunset, its sweet, spectacular defeat, its fire framed in an arched corridor where we shovel our dark ideals and reflect, demiurgical and orange-faced, an incarnate sun, a clear fabrication, a foundry of Fathers.

 |

Posted September 6, 2009. Link to just this post.

Last month's posts