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History Being Made

6/14/2014

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                        History Being Made:

                                 My part of 



            Southwest Minnesota State University

            I get Harry Potter updates on Facebook, mostly because I do sci-fi and also because I think the Harry Potter books are one of the literary marvels of our lifetime. When the final two books were released, I preordered them for their midnight sales event. One year I was 9th in Marshall (for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) and for the last one I slipped to 29th (for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows).

            The FB info is often about the making of the films, about the actors, now adults, looking back on the filming and all that excitement.

            Those actors, directors, Rowling herself—they must have known they were making history. I like them all—books and films; they’re masterpieces each.

            What I also think about is that rare gift in life to do something and while doing it, realize you and your actions are changing history. The 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion just passed on June 6th. On June 5, 1944, as those airmen, sailors, and soldiers geared up for the morning, they knew they were taking part, however small, in something gigantic and fantastic. Something history-making and history-changing.

            I run in a much smaller circle of world events. I’m not likely to ever produce anything nearly as artistically significant as Harry Potter, although The Marsco Saga may be a success. I doubt I’ll ever be in the political or military spotlight like Eisenhower or Bradley or Churchill, or the ordinary (often drafted) soldiers hitting those beaches at Zero Hour on D-Day.

            My place in history will be pretty small, in that regard.

            I am, however, pleased to know I have contributed to Southwest Minnesota State University.

            This university is significant for two main reasons. It produces its growing share of grads who go off to medical school and fine doctoral programs. Two of my students come to mind. One graduated from Mayo Medical and another is beginning her PhD at the University of Notre Dame.

           But the most significant reason for this university is Main Street. We educate Main Street in so many small towns around here: accountants, teachers, bankers, small business owners, and farmers. During the boys’ state basketball tournament this past Spring when only eight teams were left, SMSU had graduated five of the head coaches. That’s what we do; obviously, we do it well.

           The other significant reason for this university is its affordability and accessibility. For what we do, we are a rock-bottom priced service. Unfortunately, over the past twenty years, I’ve seen the State’s commitment to keeping costs low tip away from students and their parents and towards “tax breaks” and other sham give-to-the-rich schemes. When I came here in 1989, the State paid $2 for every $1 a student paid. The whole state of Minnesota bragged about that. Now, the State reluctantly ponies up about $0.67 (and falling) for every student dollar. Figure out the shift here.

           Besides affordability, accessibility is a major reason we’re here; it makes us such a unique and valuable school. We are not the most diverse student body. Even with three Native reservations within an hour in three directions, we don’t attract many Native students. But, we do attract, retain, and graduate many students who need a fully-accessible campus.

           And, it’s been like that longer than I’ve been here. I don’t think I have gone a semester without a student in my class in a wheelchair, who needs special assistance (like a note-taker due to mobility issues), or who needs to take exams and quizzes in a separate location from the classroom (due to learning disabilities needs).

           I’ve even had students who come in their wheelchairs and with a dog to further help them. For one pair, when I took roll, I noted when Zeus, an 80-pound Lab, was present or when the dog was excused from class. One day I stepped too close to his owner and the sleeping Zeus was up and barking ferociously at me.

           These are the students who make SMSU significant. I’ve taken our students to Europe three times through our Global Studies Program, mostly to England and France. And for all the progressive strides these countries have made, they are a generation or more behind us in disability services. Partly, Europe is built around medieval cities, but partly it is cultural. Americans raise their voices at injustice more willingly than many other cultures. Eventually, someone listens.

           I may not be changing history, but I am adding to this university which in turn adds so much to Southwest Minnesota, the state as a whole, and the nation. We’ve even graduated students from Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, so we’re international in our own small way.

           Our rising costs concern me, however. For one, the Global Studies Program I am so proud of, has risen in cost so that it’s nearly impossible to enroll enough students to make the trip possible. We used to have a subsidy for the trip and most students received a small scholarship to defray costs. But in the end, it became necessary for students to pick up the whole tab for their trip. This decision raised the cost by nearly 35% to 50%; ruinous cost inflation. 9/11 didn’t help, either.

           But the major disaster in higher education in Minnesota was the ill-considered “merger” of the tech and two-year campuses with the seven state universities, which had had their own extremely successful system. “Hostile takeover” comes to mind to describe this, since no one who was part of the universities wanted it or thought this merger was a wise decision.

           This merger has made nothing better in the state universities and often has made many aspects worse. We can’t select what general education classes to allow for transfer anymore; if a MnSCU campus says it meets set standards, we have to accept it. The two-week online Speech class, taught via a two-year campus, comes to mind as a shame, but it counts.

           It’s a sad state of affairs to see something I’ve worked for nearly twenty-five years hit a wall. If orchard growers thought every apple and pear tree should be cut for firewood, not planted, nurtured and prepared for a future harvest, we’d have no fresh fruit. Higher education, especially public higher education, is planting an orchard; its benefits are far in the future, but they are there. Nurture higher ed and in the end the state prospers. The nation prospers.  

           I hope in my final years here at SMSU, I see an upturn in public appreciation and in support for higher ed. Our work is that important. And I have hope. Our new President is sharp and on the ball. I see her leadership at work and her vision for this institution consistent with our history and our mission. All that is good.

           And I have faith. Good things happen when good people put their minds together to create positive solutions. I’m all for that.

           Harry Potter and Eisenhower would agree.

  

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SMSU Pep Band at our last home football game, November 2013. Mustangs won!
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Restarting at Long Last!

5/18/2014

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                       Restarting at long last!

            After a long hiatus, I’m re-launching my blog with a slightly different format. I intend to post twice monthly, one my own piece and one a guest-written piece. So, here is my first blog in ages.

            As many of you know, Southwest Minnesota State University has a yearly distinction, the conferring of the Cathy Cowan Award, an honor given to a faculty or staff member who has over five years of service and has demonstrated devotion to the campus and the community. I am this year’s recipient.

            With all due humility, here is the text of my acceptance. (For those who do not know, the mascot of Southwest is the Mustang. We are the Mustangs!)


Picture
             Cowan Award Thank You Speech
          SMSU Commencement, May 10, 2014

            President Gores, Distinguished Dignitaries and Guests, Parents and Family of our Graduates, Faculty and Staff, and today’s Graduates, thank you all for acknowledging me as this year’s Cowan Award Recipient. I am touched and honored more than I can say. 

            My thanks also to Marianne and Elaine, my wife and daughter, who have helped and encouraged me throughout my twenty-five years here. In fact, today marks forty years of my academic career, from high school teaching and college teaching in four states coast-to-coast and eventually to Southwest in 1989.

            I also want to thank my nominating team for their belief that I am worthy of this distinction, especially since I know all the other 11 Cowan Award recipients. I stand in awe among and with the pillars of this university. Thank you.

            But it is to you, our Esteemed Graduates, that I want to speak:

            A girl enters a wardrobe and finds herself in Narnia. A hobbit leaves his hole and ends up fighting dragons. Dr. Who enters his TARDIS and lands wherever the space-time continuum takes him. You entered Southwest years ago, and here you are today.

            These all seem different, but they are all in fact the same.

            Here’s how: Maybe you came right from high school or maybe as a transfer student. As a graduate of another college or a parent whose children just entered kindergarten, or even a high school student beginning your university career early. You might be someone who crossed a street, the state, a state line, or an ocean; it does not matter. At whatever stage of life you came from, you stepped out of your familiar world into a world you did not and could not truly imagine before.

            This excellent university has brought you to places as far from your previous lives as any magic doorway could. And it has helped make you a citizen of a broader world, a more thoughtful and deeply-concerned citizen, an inquisitive citizen.

            Oh, Southwest may have trained you for a job; perhaps you start next week. Or, it prepared you for graduate school, law or medical school, or to return to that family farm or a family business. Whatever and wherever, you return as a traveler from a foreign land. And as you move on from Southwest to the next stage of your lives, you do so with vision and ideas expanded from those you once had when you came. Savor this! Savor all of this!

            Wherever you land next and next and next, you go there transformed by your efforts, indeed, sometimes transformed in spite of your efforts. Savor that transformation! Be proud of it. As Thomas Paine reminds us: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”

            This dark world needs your enlightened citizenship.

            In her address at a commencement several years ago, J.K. Rowling stated, “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”

             And so, Graduates, of whom we are so proud, as your amazing lives unfold, transform your world. Transform our world. Bring it your light. Imagine for us all a better world.

             And if in a year or ten or twenty-five, when you look back on the road you’ve just trod, let no one, including yourself, ever say, “You did too little with your life; you shone too dim; all because you dreamed too small.” Dream BIG with your lives and your loved ones, with your communities and your careers.

            Play BIG.

            And remember always, you are not Shetland ponies!

            You are Mustangs!

            Play BIG!

            Congratulations once again and thanks to all of you for allowing me this slice of your wonderful day.
                                                                                                        *

            If you are a longtime reader, thanks for looking once more at my blog. If you are new to the Eclectic Blog, welcome.

             At this point in my career, I am off for the summer and will teach only 66% next academic year. The following two academic years, I will teach 50% each year. At that point, I will fully retire. This change allows me to write and publish more. The Marsco Dissident, now available in e-download only, will be available in print this summer. (Details forthcoming.) Marsco Triumphant, Book II of the four-part Marsco Saga, will be available in print and e-download in December 2014. Watch for them.

             Thank you all for checking out my blog and for checking out my fiction. I will be posting a guest blog by Tessa Miller, one of the main characters in The Marsco Dissident, in about two weeks. She will be speaking of her frustrations with the Marsco world and her life just before she enters at the start of Chapter 1. I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing from her. 

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Marsco Readings and Reports

9/28/2013

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September 28, 2013 – Saturday – Grading and Game Day

            Okay, so I am slow on the uptake of technology. I have begun to make PowerPoint presentations for class in the past year, for example; it’s taken me that long to get going on that.

            I was looking for my Cloud connection today, so I can send my work from my office computer to my laptop easily. Instead of finding the Cloud, I found this instant blog link. So, I’m writing this “entry” in my journal this morning with the intention of posting it via my computer right to my blog. We’ll see if it, one, works, and two, if I have anything to say.

            I started my blog to get more buzz out there about my work, specifically The Marsco Saga, my four-volume speculative sci-fi piece. I am happy to report (as many of you know) that the first novel, The Marsco Dissident, is now available on Amazon for e-reader download. It has been up since June and sales are happening.

            This month, I did a pair of radio interviews locally (NPR hasn’t called yet). These shows were via SMSU and owe their manifestation to Jim Tate who is the campus PR guru. Jim organized them and was my front man for them. In a word, they were a hoot. I had never really been on a show like this. (I have to add, by the way, that Jim is part of a gaggle of SMSU folks who have made this project possible: Jim, Marcy—the cover, Dana—Kindle format, Neil—encouragement to go to e-publishing format: SMSU all!)

            The first locally, KMHL in Marshall, I sat in the booth with the glass separation and deadening sound. Earphone and mic. I saw the radio host on the other side of that dividing glass. It went pretty well. The second I was at home and did the same over a pre-arranged phone call. I liked the first better; it gave me a sense of “being on the air” as opposed to just chatting and looking at all-too-familiar surroundings. Those listeners who heard me said I did a creditable job. I thought so, too.

          I was asked to speak of future projects, so I explained that all English profs have at least one novel in them parodying academic life. That caught the campus attention. I do have such a novel organized; it will have to wait until after The Marsco Saga and The Aries-Augustan Saga are published; both multi-volume sci-fi works. Marsco is finished; Augustan is underway.

        My two readings went extremely well on Tuesday September 17th. At noon I was at the Marshall/Lyon County Library. That night back at SMSU.

     The Library garnered a small crowd of 16 listeners. But, they listened and asked good questions. This experience was a great warm-up for my evening reading.

     Back on campus, I spoke and read to 115 people. I was blown away by their attendance and interest. I spoke, read my first passage and then answered some questions. Once more, good questions. Then I read a second passage with answers following. My whole time went an hour. Not sure how many sales I made, but it has all generated a host of Spur articles, (our campus student newspaper) and a bit of buzz in Marshall.

     To current readers and owners of The Marsco Dissident, I once more say thanks. To future readers, I do want you to know I have reduced the price to $3.99. Dissident can be downloaded to a Kindle, an iPad or iPhone, or any PC with the right (and free) app. I am looking into print-on-demand; will keep you posted on that. Of course, I won’t chase away the chance to have a publisher pick it up for mass marketing. To viewers of this blog who might be unwilling to buy the book, there are two chapters posted on my site that give you a taste of the novel. Enjoy them first before you download the whole piece. I am sure they will convince you that my work is worth the time and effort to read.

     Until next time, good reading and Go, Mustangs!  And Go, Irish! Beat the Sooners!

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Taking Stock: Third Week of April 2013

4/16/2013

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             Taking Stock: Third Week of April 2013
                                       *

                          A Year in a Nutshell
                                       or
                              Welcome Home!

            This is my second blog post in Spring ’13 semester. I originally began this blog site in February 2011, and kept posting essays fairly regularly until last Spring. Then things got pretty crazed; I have only now settled down into a routine. And I do know that this is the second blog in a row I’ve begun with a whining excuse. So, enough sniveling excuses, here it is.
            This past summer, I moved about 25 feet, from BA 221 to BA 224. But that short distance was, metaphorically speaking, enormous. I moved from the office of Chair of the English Department back to my longstanding faculty office, almost immediately next door. It’s the same office I’ve occupied since I arrived on the Southwest campus in August 1989.
            Five and a half years ago when I began my first term as Chair, I took over from an excellent Chair and colleague, Dr. Lori Baker. I left the office in steady, capable hands, with Dr. Neil Smith at the helm. I came in to the Chair’s office under President David Danahar, and left while an interim president, Dr. Ron Wood, ran the show. Late this past February, a new President was named, Dr. Connie Gores, SMSU’s first woman president. I expect great things out of Dr. Gores when she takes over July 1, 2013; I’m sure the campus, community, and I won’t be disappointed.
            Changes and more changes.
            This past summer, a neighbor, Bob, moved to the Cities. Bob was here next door when we first moved to this house in 1991. He and all of us in the neighborhood struggled through the ’93 floods together. Several summers later, we celebrated when the city finally redid the back easement and our main sewer lines, and tore up our lawns and removed our privacy hedges. Over all these years, we’ve exchanged Christmas gifts and dinners. He and I fell into a routine of going to breakfast at Mike’s or Hy-Vee every so often; I miss those eggs and hash browns mornings.
            Surviving events like a flood can bond us. Bob is retired and has all his family and many of his friends in the Cities; he wanted to be closer to all those family events. Didn’t take long for him to pack up and move leaving a void in the neighborhood.
            On campus, the Whitman Room is quiet different as well; its voices and laughter and youthful energy. That’s our English student hangout and lounge. Last May, in one of my final acts as Chair, I formally greeted our newly-minted graduates as they received their degrees at Commencement. Several great students with whom I had worked closely for the past four or five years graduated that day. Many are currently at law school or graduate school in the Cities, Iowa, or Alabama, points over the horizon.
            All these folks off on their new adventures.
            But moving 25 feet is an adventure, too, a grand adventure.
            For one, I teach differently. Specifically, I am back to fulltime in the classroom since I no longer have the added duties of Chair. No extra meetings, no interrupted days with gloom and joy, deaths in families near and far, engagements, expectations of new life, broken hearts, disappointments and acceptance letters, problems with a DARS (our electronic academic record-keeping system), and complaints about the weather. No more long conversations with profs concerning students, schedules, career choices, lack of opportunities, lost causes, fellow colleagues, my decisions (good ones and bad ones—plenty of those), the Admin, the Contract, our pay frozen for four long years, and the weather. Always the weather.
            We live in Minnesota. Somehow the damnable weather must be someone’s fault. And of course, we live in Marshall. Someone must be able to shut off its continuous wind.
            And my short move over last summer hasn’t been as easy as just closing one door and walking through another. I had a semester sabbatical in Fall ‘12, rich with possible blog posts but instead you had to follow me on Facebook. Great travels to London, Bath, and Canterbury to study, to immerse myself in British literary heritage, and to daily walk the ways of Dickens, Browning, Chaucer, Austen, and Pip, Little Dorrit, and so many others.
            But, it is this term’s classes that are occupying me now. Four classes, all different preps, two new to me and both almost still just-out-of-the-box brand new to the campus. My third class I regularly teach, but I significantly changed it. The last is a milk run for me, but one I haven’t taught in five or six years. Frankly, I’m struggling to juggle all this, to know all my 85 students’ names, to plan ahead when at times I have only my experience and intuition to guide me. But, I’m managing. And, I don’t have any of those endless, albeit, necessary meetings.
            (One of my good friends once had a sign on his door: “Call a meeting, the creative alternative to work!” So right he is.)
            Five years as Chair! It still boggles my mind. I had planned on one year; it grew into five.
            But I did like it. I’ll leave it to others to judge how good a job I did, but I know I enjoyed myself. “Enjoyed” in the sense that each day I did have a strong sense that what I did mattered and that I had actually helped people, students mostly. I have the same sense as a professor (i.e., one who’s teaching fulltime), the awareness that what I do matters. The classroom, however, is planting an orchard knowing I will not taste the fruit.
             Being a Chair is often like being an air traffic controller: okay, that one’s landed; this one’s taxiing; that one has taken off. You can see what’s what, often the day it happens. With deadlines and specific tasks, you know when to check off something from the “To Do” list. Not so with lecturing on Browning to high school teachers-in-training or future grad students. Will this end up at Marshall High? In a MA thesis at Kansas State? And what of those who are struggling even to pass the class? Is their possibility of graduation fading?
            In addition to returning to the classroom after a restful sabbatical, I returned to the classroom after an amazing weekend in the Cities called the Landmark Educational Forum. A few of you may at this point believe I drank “the Kool-Aid” or suffered a mind-meld or was abducted by aliens in London, but far from it. Marianne and I went together to our Forum; it was intense and enlightening.
            First off, be clear: Landmark is not a cult. And be forewarned, it is brutally honest. However, the sharp honesty it demands starts with each participant, (that would be me) being honest about the games and stories we (that would be I) believe are true. And believe them even when we know they are our own fictions.
            I won’t give away too much on the whole weekend’s experience, but I will say that even here in Marshall, there are introduction sessions open to all. Or, wherever you live, you can look up Landmark Educational Forum online and find out about introduction opportunities in your location. It is worth the time, effort, and (yes) money to attend a Landmark Forum Weekend.
            And so, this semester: I believe the rest and change in routine created by sabbatical, the passing along of Chair duties, and the personal enlightenment of Landmark have all helped me begin this term on much better footing. I’m behind in grading. Break Week became a grading frenzy marathon, and still I stayed way behind. But, it’s all good.
            And it’s good to be back where I belong, at the chalkboard, at the lectern, holding office hours, grading those long-neglected stacks of frosh comp.
             T. S. Eliot said: “And the end of all our journeys will be to return to the starting point / And know the place for the first time.”
            It’s great to be home.

  

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Marshall High School's Annual "Schwan's Speech Spectacular"

3/8/2012

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   Here we are again. This is from last year but we're at the Schwan's Speech Spectacular weekend again. I hope to start my blog on a twice-monthly basis soon. 


   Stay tuned.
                                    *

                Marshall High School’s Annual 
                “Schwan’s Speech Spectacular”

                        "If I could pick one 
                 factor in selecting a student 
                    who will excel in college, 
 
    it would be participation in high school Speech."

        John Sexton, President New York University

Quote supplied by Mr. Rick Purrington, Marshall Senior High Speech Director

                                     *
    I was introduced to the excellence of Minnesota high school speech my first year of graduate school at the University of Notre Dame back in 1978.  One stellar Minnesotan first-year student wrote about her four-year career in high school speech. Her essay was so extraordinary that I kept it, duplicated it, and shared it with my next class, and my next, and my next.  My ND student wrote about her hours of
preparation and practice as a member of a champion-caliber team. She then explained the thrill and keenness of the competition at the larger high school meets. Generally these were in the Cities, although with her skills, she eventually went to meets at the regional and national level.  I first read that essay nearly 35 years ago, and yet I still use this piece
whenever I teach composition.  
       
     When we moved to Marshall 23 years ago, I was again introduced to Minnesota speech, this time more specifically Marshall High’s stunning team.   Next to our rented duplex, a family with four children lived.  The older two were at Marshall High while the youngest was our daughter’s preschool age.  It was a perfect set-up:  a new friend for our daughter and competent babysitters right next door.  Through them we heard all sorts of praise for the Marshall schools, especially all the extracurricular activities
the high school had to offer, like Marching Band, Choir, and Speech.
       
     Very early on in our life here, we stocked our freezer with Schwan’s mini-pizzas and boxes of cookie dough sold door-to-door by MHS Speech
members.  They always seemed to come on the coldest January Sunday in pairs or sets of three. 
Perky, smart, and respectful, they had a confident, winning attitude.  
               
     Our daughter’s first year at Marshall High coincided with the first year of the Schwan’s Speech Spectacular twelve seasons ago. I was able to help with the first and second Spectaculars, both held
exclusively in what is now the Marshall Middle School campus. I did hallway monitoring to guide scurrying participants to their right rooms. Having previously taught high school for four years, I suspected that at this first Spectacular I would have to be policing noisy students, asking ebullient participants to quiet down or move along. I assumed that I might have to break up a boy/girl couple or two.  I even imagined having to confiscate cigarettes.
              
     Was I ever wrong twelve years ago at that first Spectacular.  

     I had never worked directly with speech teams before that weekend, but I was delighted with all the
students.  They were respectful, self-disciplined, focused, and polite. Also dressed professionally with suits and ties for the young men; blazers, skirts, and crisp blouses and heels for the young women. I felt like I was at a job-interview-practice-camp for Wall Street or some law school that only took outgoing and talented 17-year-olds.  

     And did they know the three key elements of excellent tournament play: “practice, practice, practice.”  You must attend one of these meets to understand what I am about to describe.  It was at my initial Spectacular that I first witnessed what can only be described as “the Speech-Wall Syndrome.”  Walk down any speech venue corridor, and scattered about at what seems to be a mandatory seven-and-a-half-foot interval are participants practicing, practicing, practicing their moving oratory, their wry smiles at a punch line, their statistical evidence backed by appropriate hand gestures. Bricks or school lockers do not respond, but these sharp contenders do not care.  They don’t want an
audience at this point; they want eight minutes to make certain their timing is perfect, their hand movements are natural, or their smiles are sincere.

     At that first Schwan’s Spectacular, I witnessed something else besides the talent and enthusiasm of individual participants. I realized that being on a speech team was a “big deal” in ways I was only just beginning to understand.  This particular tournament was able to garner participating high schools from Denver and Tennessee. I couldn’t believe it.  It
was typical Minnesota winter weather, yet buses of students from as close as Canby and as far as the slopes of the Rockies were here. And when not presenting, most of them seemed to find a quiet spot and deliver (all by themselves) with their noses brushing a brick wall or a student locker.

     I took a hiatus from the Spectacular until three years ago. Mr. Rick Purrington, the MHS director of Speech, put out a call for volunteers to help judge.  I was game. By now, the high school had its sparkling new campus across Highway 23 from SMSU where an additional set of rooms were needed to handle the 800 participants from seven states competing in
categories as varied as “Original Oratory” and “Great Speeches” (two vastly different types of presentations),“Informative Speaking” and “Discussion.” Shuttle buses run participants and
judges from the high school to the university so there are rooms enough for all the events.  A judge like myself might hear eight“Extemporaneous Readings” from a Nobel Prize-winning novel then,
after filing scores, have to hustle across the highway to hear seven “Informational Speeches”on topics like the history of Jell-O or resilience as a necessary trait of personal success.

     On the recent Schwan’s Speech Spectacular weekend, I was unable to judge the first event
round.  But while still on the SMSU campus, I came face-to-face with a professionally dressed young woman whose hair was in a tight bun that made her look older than her high school years.  “Speech!” I blurted out, “you’re here for the Schwan’s Meet.” 
Yes, she said, and told me she was lost.  I showed her where classroom BA 235 was, but we both knew this had to be the place.  Six other nervous young men and women had already gathered outside the classroom, each as formally dressed as the next, and each talking to the wall as a gaggle of college kids, in gym shorts and sweatshirts, moved along ignoring them.  

     Later that afternoon, walking through MHS between events, I saw 800 nerdy yet competitors
practicing, encouraging, coaching teammates, and eyeing the other contenders.  I saw former students
who, as high school teachers now, brought their teams to compete. I saw ranks of Marshall High parents keeping the refreshments flowing and
helping lost participants find the right room.  The whole utter chaos of between-events is managed so miraculously that at the beginning of a competition round, the school is suddenly silent as most of the students draw a deep breath, nod to their judge, and begin.  Those not presenting wait patiently, listening with a tuned ear to their fellow competitors.  As this next round begins, 800 taut teenagers are in the right place and instantly as quiet as senior citizens at church.

     As the weekend progressed and I found the classroom where I was to judge, or wrote up my
scores, or scurried off to my next venue, I had the deep sense that I was amid such talented and hard-working high schoolers that one or two were destined to be a state governor, others will definitely become mayors and legislators and senators.  Many will be surgeons and perhaps astronauts. Most would complete university degrees and be our next generation of business leaders, teachers, and articulate parents.  Many are aspiring lawyers; a few destined to be future judges.
             
     I love many aspects of living in Marshall, but one of the best is the way the parents of current students here are really devoted to the high school and its extracurricular activities.  In some school systems, I think this devotion is tied solely to athletics.  I know many parents here follow our local winning sports teams closely, no doubt, but I have always been positively struck by how the parents and grandparents around here support the Speech team,
the Marching Band, and the arts in general.  
              
     This carries over to the high school students as well. Time and again at MHS I have seen signs pasted to lockers encouraging Speech students to “Orate Like a Champion Today!”or “Bring Home the Gold!”  It’s the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for football or basketball stars.  But in Marshall, it seems that a student can star at athletics and Speech and Band yet not seem out of place.  Striving at all the extras seems encouraged.  Being well-rounded is encouraged.  A wonderful, supportive attitude permeates the whole community. Marshall should be justly proud of this tradition; it’s rare.   
 
     The two-day meet on the last weekend of January was a dizzy, exciting event.  I have judged three Spectaculars in a row and have already blocked off my January 2013 weekend to make sure I have no conflicts for the 13th annual event.  The silent bricks along the MHS Fine Arts wing are already waiting for all that last-minute practice.  
  


   

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"Libraries of My Life"

2/5/2012

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Nota Bene: Reports of my discontinuing this blog are premature! Christmas came and went with this essay lingering on my computer.  Then the semester began in a rush.  But, I am back to the blog-task and hoping to get one a week or two a month posted throughout this semester.  Thanks for hanging in with your absent blogger! 

I hope you enjoy.  

                 
“Libraries of My Life”
        
     As an English professor, libraries have always been a part of my life.  Fortunately for me, I work on a campus with a wonderful, recently-renovated university library and also live in a town that opened a brand new city-county library. They are gems open to all out here on our wind-swept prairie. 
         
     My earliest memories of libraries go back to the Ella K. McClatchy branch library in Sacramento, California. I went there for school projects and general library use from grammar school up through high school. Set in a neighborhood, this one-time mansion became a public children’s library in the 1940s. Recently, I looked at pictures of the building on Google and remember the long exterior stairs going up to the main door.  I also remember the dark woodwork and the racks of books in salons and sitting rooms with marble fireplaces and gleaming mirrors, sentinels of times past welcoming and tolerant of the hordes of noisy children trooping through the stacks, often lost amid the Dewy Decimal System.
             
     It’s ironic, but as a child I was slow to learn to read. Grammar schools, I am convinced, are designed to teach girls not boys.  We are messy and energetic multi-taskers who find it hard to focus on neatness and the minutia of details.  Reading, spelling, penmanship—beyond most boys’ ken. My lack of precision on 1950s drill sheets led the nuns to assume I wasn’t getting it.  One spring in the 5th grade, the nuns tested me and said I read below a 2nd grade level.  

    Fortunately, my parents sent me to a reading tutor after school for a year and then a private summer school program to brush up on my reading after 7th grade. When tested again after completing that summer program, I scored high enough for my teacher to say I could get into West Point if I applied myself. (My goal in life at that time was a career in the Army.)  
 
    Taking standardized tests was boring.  I quickly got lost in the rows of circles, and after a time, I didn’t care where I marked or whether I marked C
when I should have marked D. I wasn’t a slow learner, I was a bored learner.
             
     Even so, I loved the McClatchy Library.  I knew all those books were a treasure that only a genie could open for me. That genie was the force of will it took for me to concentrate and read carefully.  I never marked up a library or school textbook, but once I bought my own books, I began marking them
and jotting notes in the back to force myself to concentrate and remember.  

    To this day, I still read with a pen in hand.  For me, that became the key.  But that key unlocked the
door when I was in college.  Getting there was an anxious and frustrating experience, but I knew I
wanted to go to college and not seek my fortune as a grocery clerk as too many of my family and teachers suggested.  Determination has always been a driving force within me not easily shut down. It also helped to have supportive parents who believed in you.
              
     I learned early on as a college student to use a library as a quiet place to study.  At Saint Mary’s College, that was St. Albert’s Hall.  I seem to have a knack for being at schools with new libraries; St. Albert had just opened when I matriculated at SMC in 1968.  I have one visual memory from those
evenings I spent studying in St. Albert’s.  One quiet reading room had a common but expensive wall clock that shows the whole world on its broad face and a wave diagram passing over the surface of the planet to designate the edge of daylight or the coming of night. Although SMC had a European travel program, I wasn’t able to swing a trip during my undergraduate years.  But that clock always reminded me of places I wanted to visit, especially
England. I finally made it, several times:  alone, with
friends, with Marianne and Elaine, with students, with my brothers.  
            
     Sacramento State University, where I earned my MA, also had a new library.  The North Wing, as it is now called, opened in 1975, two years after I started part-time there. (A South Wing was added in 1990.) Even after I went to Notre Dame to start my PhD, I used the Sac State library in the summer. There
in the North Wing, I mastered French—translation French that is. (As my colleagues in the SMSU French Department will tell you, my pronunciation of their beloved language comes out like horrendous French mixed with Klingon plus spitting and a soupçon of belching.)  But, after that summer, I could sight-read French fairly well, even Baudelaire’s poetry, a much
more difficult form of writing than prose. 
             
     At Notre Dame, I started out regularly using the Hesburgh Memorial Library, the one with "Touchdown Jesus."  At first, I had a locking cart which allowed me to check out books directly to it
instead of lugging them home.  On quiet nights, like a Friday or Saturday after a game, when only grad students were trying to study, we did race on our four-wheeled carts, but mostly I was a serious student.  
            
     In time, I got my own study carrel, about twice as big as a phone booth.  It had the same privilege
as my locking cart, which I surrendered in lieu of a private carrel. I graded papers, read, prepped for my comprehensive exams, actually took my comps and wrote my dissertation in there.  I know it sounds a little like solitary, (after all, there is no room for a carrel-mate), but for the neophyte scholar, it was all the room needed.  “The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell,” as Milton tells us.  
              
     In time, before my comps, I got one of the few study carrels with a window.  Mine overlooked the quad facing west, allowing me to see the famous Golden Dome about a quarter of a mile away.  It was under the Dome that one up-and-coming associate editor, Marianne Murphy, worked. Cutting to the chase, after we were serious, then engaged, then married, I knew when she was leaving work (before email or texting) and could watch for her crossing the library quad on her way to meet me for dinner at the end of the day. And I still got my dissertation done, her wonderful distraction aside. 
              
     Although a bit dingy when I arrived, the SMSU Library has always been a great place for me as well. I quickly found a window seat in the campus library and went there regularly over the years for reading or grading or prepping.  My special nook was a corner which is now office space for the library staff. My particular window faced north across prairie almost as far as the eye can see.  
               
     Several years ago, the SMSU Library closed for 18 months for major renovation.  Its grand reopening was a dazzling sight.  New computer banks and labs, sleek circ and reference desks (always staffed by helpful librarians and perky students), quiet study areas, and its wonderful conference room on the top floor with its vista of the endless prairie (and now the new Marshall High School campus). There is not much to see on a prairie but wind and space; the Conference
Room gives you an unconstrained view of that endlessness.  
          
     Because of his generous bequest, the SMSU Library has been renamed the Dorothy and D. C. “Pat” McFarland Library.  Mr. McFarland left the campus a cool $2 million, the largest single donation from an individual to the university to date.  SMSU is coming of age.
      
     Besides this treasure of a library, to Marshall’s credit, a second exciting and grand library has opened just across town. Entering the new Marshall-Lyon County Library is truly an “out of Marshall experience.” It’s hard to believe you are still even in Marshall once you cross into that welcoming, lovely place.  It opened just a few months ago but I visit it regularly. The last time I had visited the now-closed, musty downtown library was seven years ago.  

    The new open and airy space invites you to sit, read, and enjoy your time there as you would savor a five-star meal in the Cities or Paris or San Francisco.  
              
     In a few months time, my five-year tenure as English Chair will end.  I will get a short sabbatical and then return to fulltime teaching.  I am looking forward to the change of pace, mainly, a change that will give me much more control over my time.  It’s a heavy teaching load, but my days will be spent around my schedule and not other people’s meetings. (The creative way to avoid work is to have a meeting!) When that time comes, I am planning on scouring both the McFarland and Marshall Libraries for just the right spot to prep and grade and then sneak in a guilty pleasure of a sci-fi or military history on the side.

    Life is good in a fine library.

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In Praise of Great Teachers

12/3/2011

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                    In Praise of Great Teachers

   “And if I were a good teacher, who would know?”  
                Robert Bolt,
A Man for All Seasons

    It’s often easier to complain than praise. Even so, this essay is about the great profs I’ve known, the rare ones who have challenged me to become a better student and a better professor, those who have inspired me personally and professionally. It is offered as thanks to those in academe who keep it alive and thriving.

    Perhaps the best professor I have ever known is Dr. Charles Nelson from my days at Sacramento State University where I completed my MA in English.  SSU was my launching pad.  I did well in my MA work, well enough to voice aloud my desire to earn a PhD and teach at the college level. The MA gave me the ability to teach in the California two-year system with its good pay and multitude of opportunities since the state boasts of so many campuses from the Sierras to the Pacific.  
            
     But Charles stirred me on to the next level. I am forever indebted to him. (As an aside, one of my worst profs at the time urged me to stay at Lucky’s, a supermarket chain where I used to work.  “You’ll make more as a store manager than a high school teacher or a professor,” he explained.  Not exactly a Christa McAuliffe comment.)  
             
     Originally from Oklahoma, in his office Charles spoke with a relaxed twang of the Sooner State. He’d
drop a few Twain-like words, including that colloquial A-word ain’t when we spoke about my next project with him. For instance:  “I ain’t too sure Hamlet’s crazy.” Besides that ain’t, his crazy seemed stretched out by the addition of several letters: crraazzzy. But, get Professor Nelson in the classroom lecturing and he held his own intellectually, bar none, with never an ain’t or other grammatical slip.
              
     Any yet, he did something that few adults do when seriously talking about any subject.  He broke into laughter about the whole situation—genuine, often self-effacing, always playful, never cynical, pure fun-loving laughter at the absurdity of the situation.  (“What?  Killing your brother and marrying his widow for the crown of Denmark? You crraasssy?”)  More than once he pulled my academic career out of the recycle bin.  
             
     I was a bit of a lost puppy at the time.  I did a start-and-stop MA.  I started at Hayward State near Oakland, ran out of money, didn’t finish, and transferred to Sac State in my hometown.  I needed to regroup, then my father got very sick, and here I was stacking groceries all night at Lucky’s, trying to
finish my MA, searching for something professionally. Dr. Nelson helped me when I applied to the Catholic Diocesan system where I taught (sometimes full-, sometimes part-time) for the next four years.  Over the course of one grueling year,
he guided me through my final MA project while I was teaching and while my Father was growing sicker.
              
     To finally graduate, I wrote a series of essays in lieu of a single thesis.  It was probably more
challenging than a thesis since it had to be passed in pieces, and Charles was no slouch about scholarship.  I remember he wrote things like, “Why are you quoting all this outside material if you don’t use it in your essay?” I learned to temper my enthusiasm for long quotes that seemed more like
padding than serious research. It’s a story I still tell my students every time I teach composition. I want my writing students to have the same skills Dr. Nelson taught me.
             
     Two men pointed me toward Notre Dame, my Father (who was a “Subway Alum” always wanting one of his sons to attend ND) and Charles.  When I was accepted, I was also accepted at several other schools, but only ND offered me four years of teaching so I could teach part-time to pay my way through the program.  Dr. Nelson assured me that ND wasn’t just a football school. The rest is history.
             
     Years later at Notre Dame, in order to finish my dissertation, I worked closely with another gem of a professor, Dr. Donald Sniegowski. He made sure that my work was edited well, and he scrupulously went over every detail with me even under adverse circumstances. (This was actually the job of my thesis director, but Don did it instead; that tells you something right there.) One Saturday, we were to meet, but he called to cancel since he was going to
the hospital with phlebitis.  He had limped into the English office that morning to put his completed evaluation in my mailbox so that even though we weren’t meeting, I would have his notes about my next chapter.  
       
     Twenty-some years later, when our daughter asked her own professor to work on a paper dealing with African literature, her prof told her that she
needed to work with Professor Sniegowski, a noted specialist on that topic.  She called, made an appointment, and met with him.  When she entered his office, Don had a copy of my dissertation open and asked her if she was related to its author.  He hadn’t forgotten although the phlebitis had long since cleared up. 
           
     The first department chair I worked with was Dr. Ed Uehling at Valpo U near Chicago but located in Valparaiso, Indiana.  Good school. I faced a rocky year, but Ed helped me so much. He was a genuine man and a stabilizing influence on me. I had high school classroom know-how, a PhD in hand, administrative and university-level teaching experience, yet I was not getting any traction on the
job search.  Ed kept up the encouragement.  When I contemplated other academic careers or different professional tracks altogether (like being a tech-writer for an engineering firm in Michigan), Ed counseled me to stay with our profession.  I did, he worked with me, and I moved along to another campus in a tenure-track situation.

     As a department chair myself now, I often think about how Dr. Uehling would do things.  His calm and thoughtful demeanor managed many a situation (a mess I created or other issues). Well-respected, Ed helped on many levels at Valpo campus-wide.  I wouldn’t be here if not for him.  Even now, I wish at times that my hot Italian temper could be as cool and controlled under fire as Ed’s.
              
     The saddest story to relate in this blog is about Dr. Bob Alexander.  He was nearing the end of his exemplary career at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where I taught for two years after Valpo. This campus and I were not a fit.  We should have been: small, Catholic liberal arts college so like my alma mater from California, my own PhD from ND where the priests of King’s were trained, and the list goes on. But, it never worked out between us. It went from bad to worse.
               
     Bob was an inspiration, however.  He was the professor who used to enter the classroom each day a few minutes late on purpose.  His explanation:  if on time, you looked cowed by the administration; if too late, you seemed to disrespect the students.  His trick was to come in consistently a few minutes late to show his students he was his own boss.  Having taught high school, I never broke with that routine of being “ahead of the bell,” but I loved Bob for his
wise, idiosyncratic attitude.
           
     His heart gave out while he was fighting severe influenza our last winter in Pennsylvania.  He was within a year or so of retirement.  It was the saddest blow since he had been such an advocate of mine at a time when my life at King’s had grown so deplorable. His wife, Gracie, told me later that Bob’s one regret was that he had never written while teaching.  I remember that every time I write now; Bob didn’t write and it haunted his widow and cast a shadow over his fine career.  

    Every career is filled with mentors and colleagues who rise up at precisely the needed moment. We all
could fill pages with anecdotes of colleagues or teachers who inspired us, helped us, kicked us out of our complacency, encouraged us at just the right
moment.
           
     It’s not about their published books or their impressive resumes, although many of these scholars are widely published.  It’s about their humanity in the face of so many obstacles in academe today, their humanity and their love of teaching which they shared with me and so many others. They cared about their students, embraced our profession as a vocation not an occupation, and did their best.
          
     At this time of Thanksgiving past and Christmas ahead, holidays steeped in gratefulness, it’s important to remember all those inspiring men and women from our past.  Colleagues and mentors like these point our way to the future.  


                 
 


  

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Coming Late to Being Sicilian

11/19/2011

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            Coming Late to Being Sicilian

    “You’re Sicilian? Have any relatives in the Mafia?”

    That question kept me from admitting to anyone until I was well into my 30s that half my Italian heritage is Sicilian.  (For the record, the other half is from Potenza in the Basilicata Provence where the boot of Italy forms the foot’s arch.  It’s not on the coast, but up in the mountains.  But that’s an
essay for a different blog.)

    Sicily itself sits off the “Toe of Italy” separated from the main peninsula by only a few miles of channel.  It’s so close that Italian engineers are planning either a railroad tunnel (aka, a Chunnel) or a long suspension bridge between the European
mainland that ends at that Italian toe and the port of Messina on Sicily.  Once it opens, I’m on that train.  

    The two history books of Sicily I own both start with the association of the Three-Cornered Island and the mining of obsidian going back to prehistoric
times.  This jet-black stone created by volcanic activity can be chipped and sharpened into cutting blades or polished as art objects. This natural glass is treasured for its inherent simplicity and beauty. 
Sicily is an island of volcanoes, on the island itself, and on smaller islands of its coast.  Obsidian is easy to find there.

    Obsidian:  hard and curved as volcanic glass often
is.  Beautiful when shined to a glossy night-black finish. Not a refined beautiful object as is Belleck porcelain or Waterford or Italian crystal.  And also, knowing how to break it into shards, obsidian can be sharpened enough to use as a scalpel blade; this ancient cutting edge is still in use as such today.

     What’s so ironic and puzzling about being Sicilian is that this island set in the middle of the  Mediterranean Sea is a treasure of history that gets overlooked or belittled even today.  No one should feel any shame for being part of this culture. The Greeks colonized the island long before Rome began to flourish. Siracusae, (Syracuse today), is one of the birthplaces of modern mathematics.  Archimedes, perhaps one of the greatest scientific and logical minds of the Ancient World, not only worked out intricate, axiomatic theorems, but also started other intellectuals and engineers thinking about hydrodynamics, fulcrums and levers, and the
heavens.

     I find it funny that even today Archimedes is listed as a “Greek” even though he was born in Syracuse and lived there most of his life. As a member of the New World, I am American (of Italian heritage, obviously) but I can hardly say I’m an Italian in such a way to suggest I was born in Rome.  So, why call a Sicilian of Syracuse “a Greek”? It’s all part of the bad rap Sicily continuously gets. I believe it stems from the modern bias against Sicily; the Ancients would never have considered Archimedes a Greek.

     Like any subject, you scratch the surface and you find a wealth of information. In 2005, my three brothers and I traveled to Potenza then flew from
Naples to Palermo, rented a car, and drove to Piana degli Albanesi where my father’s parents lived until they immigrated to the US in 1913. (He was born in Sacramento in 1914, an American of Sicilian ancestry.) As its name suggests, Piana degli Albanesi is itself a village of immigrants who fled Albania in the 1480s because the Muslim Turks were pushing into the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople.  

    Isn’t history a wonder?  The Balkans still can’t get along and, even as recently as the Fall of the Iron Curtain, Albanians have been loading up rusty steamers and chugging for Sicily as a refugees.  

     In her book,
Sicily:  Three Thousands Years of Human History, Sandra Benjamin states that the Albresh, (the name for these Sicilians and Italians of Albanian ancestry), have lost their language and
customs. Her research conclusion is a bit premature. During the late Fifteen-Century migration, Albanian Christians settled in 300 villages in Southern Italy and Sicily. (Coincidentally, Potenza was one of the Italian villages although my Mother’s ancestry has none of this Albanian heritage.) Over time in most of these villages, the Albresh have lost their Albanian heritage. As is typical of immigrants, over time most are indistinguishable from their neighbors.  

     Not so in Piana degli Albanesi.  Here, the Albresh
language is still spoken by my relatives.  It is the language of my father and my grandparents, so I learned. My distant Sicilian cousins are teaching their daughter Albresh to keep their heritage alive. She was about 6 or 7 in 2005 when I met her; she spoke formal Italian (the Tuscan dialect), the Sicilian dialect of Italian, plus Albresh from her family, and the basics of English she was learning in school. I am sure before she finishes high school, she’ll know French, as well. And anyone speaking Sicilian/Italian can pick up Spanish with little difficulty. Piana also has an Albanian seminary, started during the Cold War when Albanian Communists banned the Church. 
Young Albanian men can get along with Sicilian Albresh pretty well, even though my linguist cousin informs me that today’s Albresh is more like Medieval Albanian than modern Albanian.

     So, Sicily has this layer of Albanians who came in 1488.  Think of the other layers:  Greeks,
Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Muslims, Normans, the Spanish, the French, and the Germans (to be ousted by American and British forces in 1943) to provide an incomplete list. 

     The Normans seized contol in 1166, one hundred years after conquering England. The Normans knew a good island to conquer when they saw it.  They united Southern Italy with Sicily to form the Kingdom of Two Sicilies or sometimes, the Kingdom of Naples. From the 1500s or so, Sicily became the
football of Europe, something to kick around the royal households. Shakespeare makes this point in his History Plays where one of the reasons to reject a marriage proposal between the English throne and a French royal is that she’s only bringing the Sicilian crown in her dowry. The Bourbons had Sicily. Then Spain had it.  (They treated the Sicilians miserably, by the way.  Under Spanish rule, a Sicilian peasant
could not get a passport to leave the island; these peasants were virtual slaves in their own fields for 200 years.)

     I am grateful for the Normans for one particular aspect. As rulers of this island, they recognized its rich and varied history. In the 1200s, the Norman King, Roger II, ordered all the “antiquity” in his kingdom be saved. On Roger’s authority, Segesta was saved, at the time, a seventeen-centuries-old
temple.

     The Greek-style temple at Segesta is the only one in the whole Mediterranean that has all four of its column walls still standing. That means its original walls have now been standing for over 2500 years.  All other such temples are partially in ruins. This would include Roman Era temples as well. Look all you want, at the Parthenon, at the ruins in Agrigento with its Valle dei Templi, throughout all the far-flung reaches of the Greek, Alexandrian and Roman empires. Not another temple stands in its original glory like Segesta unless restored by modern archeologists.  

     This impressive and massive temple itself never seems to have had a roof.  This puzzles modern archeologists except those who believe it never intended to have a roof so that different religions could use the same space.  Local, pre-Greek Sicilians worshiped to the sky without needing a
roof. (The mild Sicilian weather cooperates.)  It’s a rare religious community today that shares its worship space without acrimony, but on polyglot
Sicily it happened 2500 years ago.

     And the surviving remnants of the village of Segesta itself, set higher up the rugged hill from the temple, has the ruins of another pagan, pre-Christian temple which then became a Christian Church, then a Mosque, and then finally a monk’s hermitage once the Moors were driven from the island. 

     I consider Segesta one of the holiest spots I’ve ever visited. Humans have found it so for close to thirty centuries. Can’t beat a track record like that.

    So, Sicily is not the darkest island of Europe, not the festering pool of Mafia that too many TV-addicted
Americans have come to believe.

     Monreale Cathedral (a Norman edifice with magnificent Christian mosaics), Segesta, Agrigento with its Valle dei Templi (which the Greek poet Pindar once called “the fairest city inhabited by
mortals”), Villa del Casale, (with the grandest and best-preserved examples of Roman mosaics), Mount Etna (Europe’s largest and most active volcano):  all places I need to visit. It will be a homecoming for me, a return to that rich culture as “multi-ethnic” as any modern country. Rugged and tempestuous, historic and lavish, meditative and boisterous, quiet along its golden beaches but thunderous at the peak of Etna.

    And at its core, a bedrock of obsidian. Hard as
glass, and when necessary, sharp as any forged blade. Traits that have stood me well.  

That's me in 2005 with Segesta Temple in the background.  Note the best take of me, but there it is.  (Shirt bought in Potenza, Italy.)
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"All Children Left Behind"

11/11/2011

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                “All Children Left Behind” –
        The Decline of Reading in Our Lifetime
     
     Several years ago, a Catholic grammar school in the Cities tested their students in the mandated, standardized Minnesota proficiency exams. These students were, by all measures leading up to these tests, “at risk.”  They came from low-income, mostly minority backgrounds.  The school, once a flagship of a parish filled with European immigrants, sat in a
deteriorating neighborhood ridden by crime, drop-outs, delinquency. The parish, however, hung on, kept the doors of its school open, and worked with the low-achieving students who came through the
gates.

    When the results were in, these students—the ones predicted to fall into the lowest percentiles as all US students do from a similar background—scored
among the highest in the state. It’s almost axiomatic that the parents’ ZIP codes predict student achievement. Wealthy ZIPs mean stronger students. This case was exactly the opposite. 
 
    Of course, why? Why did these sure-to-fail students achieve at the Eden Prairie and Edina level?
         
     Easy:  they could read.  Their curriculum included reading Shakespeare in the 7th and 8th grades. Early on, they were tackling The Iliad and
The Odyssey.  When it was time to read, these young scholars read. And they devoured not the educational pap generally flung at students, which limits syllables and includes only preselected vocabulary words slipped
into unnatural and stilted sentences, but they tore through the classics at an early age.  It is the rare exception for a “young genius” not to be an avid
reader.

    Reading. It’s the key and core to all things educational.  These “at-risk” students proved it.  Asked to solve so-called“word problems”?  Math was not a problem for them; they understood the questions. Vocabulary became a breeze.  Getting the gist of the social science paragraphs was ridiculously easy, given that these young scholars read at the 11th- or 12th-grade level.  (Hopefully, they were reading texts before they were dumbed down by the Texas Board of Education.)  

    You want to reform education in the USA?  If so, then get students reading at an early age. Make them read the classics, not books expunged of what’s thought distasteful by some.  Leave Huck Finn alone, for Twain’s sake.  Anyone offended by Twain’s "politically incorrect" vocabulary should listen to 5 minutes of Rap music—our kids are.  They hear much worse on the air waves, they see much worse on cable, than will ever enter a classic novel whose plot they can understand.  There is nothing worse than “textbook” talk, especially now when the uneducated and politically biased and religiously warped are re-writing our students’ textbooks.  
 
    Many years ago I sensed a reading crisis in education was coming. I was finishing my MA in English at Sacramento State before heading off to Notre Dame for my PhD.  I had taught in a Catholic high school for two years by this time, but was between jobs and did some substituting in the Sacramento Diocesan system.  What I saw was done by students at the high end of achievement, so it was even more shocking.

     The 7th-graders I was subbing were asked to read an essay in their textbooks and then answer the
multiple-choice questions at the back of the book. 
Instead of actually reading the essay first, they all thumbed right to the questions, read Question One, and then skimmed the first section of the essay assignment. It was easy to gloss over the essay in pieces, fitting the section of the essay to the questions at the back, get the right answer for each
in turn and never really bothering with reading the essay start to finish.  The questions were in order anyway, meaning, Question 1 asked about the first few paragraphs, Question 2 the next few, and so on.  
 
    These were bright kids; they’d figured out this gig early.  And their test scores showed they were well ahead of the curve. Not bad considering they really rarely ever read anything start to finish in a sustained manner. I am sure their story is not unique.  Why read an essay when the ideas aren’t important and can’t hold your attention? The 10 points at the end are important—satisfy teacher with 10 for 10; forget any notion of actually reading the material.

     Even at the university level, I hear the same sort of notion and witness the same lack of skills. I am always dumbfounded by the lack of basic skills far too many of my students display.  When asked to
read aloud, so many (far too many) struggle over basic words.  I had a student trip up on the simple word melancholy the other day, to give just a recent example. He insisted he had never seen the word
before.  Having graded his written work, it is no wonder he’s such a weak writer.  Poor readers are weak writers, no doubt.  And worse yet, weak writer
and weak reader that he is, he’s convinced “in the real world after college” he won’t need such skills. He is part of the self-marginalizing Twenty-Something Generation I witness each day.

     Another time several years back, I gave out a very short (to me) reading list for a class on the
first day.  I had purposely already reduced the list from seven novels to six by adding two movies in hopes of getting all my students to finish the entire syllabus. At the end of my intro lecture imploring my students to actually buy the books and then read the material, one student returned my printed handouts with the admonition, “Books! Books! Why are all you
professors always demanding we read books?  Can’t you just give us the answers?”  And he was a history
major!  
 
    All this would be of little concern if I was talking about how many copies of
Harry Potter are sold each day. The real issues of declining reading skills are social and economic, not just artistic and recreational.

    The 2004 NEA report, Reading at Risk, demonstrated the steep decline in reading among our young. But the report also pointed out that “these declines will have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications,”or so Matt Burriesci concludes in his review of this NEA report.  (
The Writer’s Chronicle, Feb 2008. 
http://www.awpwriter.org/pdf/mburriesci01.pdf.) 
For his review of this NEA report, Burriesci interviewed Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, who noted “the central importance of reading for a prosperous, free society.” We are not talking about curling up with an Agatha Christie, we’re talking about a skill that is, in Gioia’s words, “both fundamental and irreplaceable for democracy.”

     The NEA report also rightly concludes that “weak reading skills strongly correlate to lower academic
achievement, lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”  A poor or non-reader is more likely to be incarcerated.  Strong readers are more than likely to vote, participate in cultural events, volunteer their time for charities, and enjoy rewarding careers.

     Life-long readers and learners are the cornerstone of a thriving democracy.  It is no wonder that dictators burn books.  You’ll note that Hitler
didn’t start a program to have his Iron Youth read widely; he closed libraries and destroyed the content of their shelves.  If Germans were to read, he was going to know what they were reading.

     Today, the censorship of the web in some dictatorial countries smacks of the same paranoia and political control.

     But this brings me back to our students, our children, our culture. I find it so ironic and extremely depressing that in a society that has every book virtually at its fingertips, our young people are electing NOT to read.  Hitler shouldn’t have
burned books; he should have made more books available to his Iron Youth.  Given the chance to read, if they are like our youth, they wouldn’t have.

     The lack of interest in reading suggests to me this horrific vision:  Our 11th- and 12th-graders are taught to drive, given their drivers’ licenses, given access to cars and paved roads and the Eisenhower
Interstate System.  But instead (in my dystopian vision), they elect to let their cars rust or run out of gas for lack of the enterprise of filling the tank.  And so, they’re forced to work closer to home (so they can walk). They’re forced to seek entertainment and cultural events within walking distance, never
finding new outlets. They’re forced to live among only their neighbors, never venturing into new neighborhoods with different foods or art style or political takes on the world.

     And it’s all self-imposed.  
 
     Perhaps the Occupy Movement is this generation’s wake-up call.  It reads less, votes less, is more inclined to be swayed by demagogues. 
And at least some now are waking up to the fact that placating the top cats comes by draining the younger citizens and newer voters dry of what society should provide its young:  a stable society; a solid, basic education; a brighter future. 
 
     Readers know of that brighter future.  And, I believe, readers can muster the skills to obtain it on all levels:  personally, professionally, culturally, and globally. 

     Let’s hope our youth don’t skip that part of the essay because there wasn’t a question about it at
the back of their books.  Let’s hope our young readers of today have a thriving economy and fully functioning, just democratic society to embrace as they grow older. Or else, the few remaining readers may have to read about such a bygone society in the neglected History Section of some neglected library. 
      


  


 
 
2 Comments

Dogs . . . and Cats (if I must)

7/10/2011

4 Comments

 
                            Dogs . . . and Cats (if I must)

    Let me be frank. I love dogs but am highly allergic to cats.  This puts me in an untenable position when trying to discuss either mammal fairly. Around a cat, my nose runs, my eyes itch and tear up, my voice gets hoarse.  I found this out the summer before I started high school.
         
     Those years were in the Dark Ages.  They may have been in the 60s, but “The Sixties” hadn’t officially hit yet.  I left a Catholic grammar school where there were at least girls in the room but where none of the “boy-girl thing” was condoned. During that summer, I didn’t know that a classmate, Alice, liked me.  But in my innocent and not-yet-grown-up boyhood, I liked another classmate, Margaret, who never liked me in that way.  This was awkward because Margaret and Alice were close friends.  
 
     These were two of the smartest and most sophisticated young women in our class.  Margaret had short, blond, school-girl hair, now longer and stylish in preparation for high school.  She was beginning to show her curves.  Slender Alice had long straight brown hair and stood taller than her friend. 
The pair had lost all girlish gawkiness and moved like women, not kids.  I was the self-conscious, scrawny boy who wore braces and who had very low, presentient standardized test scores that absolutely ruled out me ever going to college.
      
     One sultry afternoon, Margaret invited me over to sit on her shady patio
and imagine what high school would be like.  I had no illusions of my angelic blond sweeping me off my feet in an outburst of unrestrained emotion, but jumped at the chance.  I knew that at best ours was to remain a totally Catholic-guilt scripted, early-teenage scene of friendship as depicted in those stilted movies set in the English countryside with a dog nearby and no suggestion of even holding hands. 
 
    Alice was there, the only other guest. Here was my chance to behold the deity I adored, Margaret, and befriend her acolyte, Alice.  
 
     While Margaret fussed about making iced tea and opening potato chips, lithe Alice sat thigh-to-thigh right next to gangly me on a swinging bench meant for three.  We were both in Bermuda shorts; our legs even touched. 
Hers were shaved.  This position left no room for a phonebook between us. 
Girls in her class had been sanctimoniously instructed by stone-faced
Sister Mary Joseph, our former principal, to always keep a Yellow-Pages distance between themselves and boys sitting by them to avoid any near occasion of Mortal Sin.  
 
     Margaret owned a large tomcat, Merlin, whose black and white coat reminded me of our nuns.  Inexplicably, this feline took a liking to sweaty me.  He curled up on my lap and began purring.  Reaching over to pet him, Alice told me animal lovers made for caring friends, a fact she confidently knew.  

    Casting his dark and mysterious spell, Merlin immediately made me wheeze.  Soon defeated as if by Sister Principal herself, I rode my bike home hardly able to see, my first murky sortie into adulthood ended with swollen eyes brought on byallergic reactions not emotional rigidity or spiritual remorse.  
 
     They moved on to McClatchy, the public co-ed high school.  I went to Bishop Armstrong High School which at that time had no girls but, fortunately for me, no cats either.  Only in my senior year did I have a class that included young women.  Six of them, in uniforms, came over from Bishop Manogue, the all-girls’ high school.  My physics teacher, a Christian Brother
dressed like a Medieval monk, needed special permission from Rome to teach them because they were non-male.
  
     Although I was never supposed to do very well in my studies, I did okay
in high school and eventually I enrolled in an all-men’s college.
        
     My first year, I ended up with a puppy living in my dorm room, which
didn’t work since such creatures live to eat, sleep, eliminate, and whimper when ignored.  This was my older brother’s pup, but his RA was onto him and threatened to have him thrown off campus for keeping a dog.  Here I was, a lowly freshman, coerced into taking care of this dog as though it was suddenly okay for new students to house a yapping pet while upper-classmen
couldn’t.  Furious, I gave in to this forced-on-me, fraternal burden. But, in one week, I totally had it.  Fortunately, my brother was engaged and his future father-in-law agreed to take that canine off my hands.   
          
     It’s a tangled web, my relationship with cats and dogs.
  
     Here in Marshall, a friend, Cathy, often hosted us for dinner.  Several colleagues would sit around eating, telling stories, joking, when without warning Cathy would shout at the top of her lungs, “GET OFF THERE!” at her cat behind me tiptoeing on the spread of food.  She was a tall, robust woman and could be indescribably loud.  Her cat ignored her.  

    Cats are vertical, I’ve been told, with an attachment deficit.
      
     When Cathy went on sabbatical, friends agreed to take care of this cat for a year in their home. But, when she came back, the cat wouldn’t stay with her; it wandered back to that cat-sitters’ house, an independent feline to the
end.
        
     Dogs are loyal. They usually figure out who is the leader and follow that leader faithfully.  Man’s best friend after all.
          
     For five summers, I helped run a summer camp while I was teaching high
school.  The camp’s year-round caretaker, called by his initials, T. V., got a month off once 100 screaming campers descended on the place.  T. V. had an old black mongrel dog, Luke, which followed him everywhere.  Luke was no longer in his prime, but he was gentle with the kids, easy to care for, and always at my heels once the caretaker took off.
   
     Luke didn’t bark or fuss.  He was smart enough not to put his nose into porcupines which says something because we had other camp dogs, purebred St. Bernards, that never learned to avoid those smarting quills. (Saint Bernards are not a bright breed.  Those lunkhead dogs kept doing the same
thing over and over and expecting things to change. Vet bills for quill removal proved this.) 
          
     Luke followed me everywhere around camp.  If I needed to leave in the jeep, he moved off to the shade and waited until I returned, sleeping not far from where I parked.

    One hot morning, I walked across camp with Luke shadowing me.  After ten minutes in the nurse’s cabin, I came out to find Luke there on the nurse’s porch as always, but stone dead.  Dead!  Not even my dog.  Dead!  With a fly-covered trickle of blood near his breathless snout.  But steadfast!  He had followed me to the very end even though for eleven months each year he had plenty of time to shuffle off his mortal coil on the caretaker’s watch, not mine.

    The stupidest dog I ever owned was a yellow-Lab mix named Sugar.  She hated men, me in particular.  She was way too much dog for a housedog, and way too independent to live anywhere near a man used to having dogs obey him, accustomed to having his canines die at his feet.   

    Sugar ended up in Pig Heaven.  Unable to keep her, I gave her to a friend who owns a swine breeding farm.  Sugar was content to live out in the barn, eat all the hog carcasses she could dig up, and occasionally run with a pack of wild dogs.  But she lived long, died fat, and never bothered me again.
         
     The smartest dog I ever owned was really my mother’s kinetic and strong
Airedale.  I wanted to call him Brutus, but she wanted him to be Magoo. He became Brutus Magoo, but she couldn’t keep him after I went off to
graduate school.  Hyper Brutus ended up at my summer camp, living the good life until he was hit by a car.  He limped back to camp to die, but not
while I was there.

    The luckiest dog was Mollie, rescued from the local pound.  She was the oddest-shaped creature ever to walk this earth:  a sort of black Lab with stubby legs, a thick neck, a stubborn disposition, but as gentle as can be. 
Abandoned as a pup, she became a garbage gut; she’d gobble without
chewing any roadkill or dead bird she found.  Sit anywhere near her and she’d fling herself onto your lap.  She weighed 55 pounds, so if she caught you off guard, you were in for a surprise.
        
     But Maya takes the cake.  She is our Lab/Bassett mix with short non-Lab legs, long Bassett ears, and sad Bassett eyes. When excited, she barks like her Lab self then bays like her Bassett self then stops to ponder the whole confused process.  But she’s a keeper.  If a bit spoiled, that’s my fault for hiding dog treats in my office which she begs for whenever I sit down to write.  Maya was originally our daughter’s dog, but remained with us after she went off to college.  Now, several years later, there is no way Maya’s moving out to live with her “owner,”possession being 9/10th of the law. 

    And Maya’s not a cat.

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