Category Archives: education

What I Love About Election Season

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I’m tempted to say “Nothing,” but that would be too obvious.

I’m tempted to say “Watching the debates,” but that would be a lie. (I do enjoy the Bad Lip Reading versions, which are truly hysterical. But I digress.)

I’m not tempted to say “The engaging political discourse and the spirited exchange of ideas,” because that would be a big, fat lie.

However, if there’s a woman candidate, I do like to watch and see how many times the media comments on her fashion sense and grooming and calls her voice shrill and her personality unlikeable. I can keep score and see which outlets do the best and worst jobs. But that seems somewhat unlikely this year, though there may, of course, be female VP nominees—most likely will be unless Joe decides to ditch Kamala, which he shows no sign of doing.

No, what I love about the election season is the opportunity to view rhetorical fallacies in the wild. Slippery slope? Got it. Moving the goalposts? You bet. False equivalence? You know it. Appeal to the common man? All over the place. The places to see them are the debates and the TV commercials. Again, it’s fun to keep score. Keep a checklist handy. It’ll keep you distracted from your outrage.

(One year during election season I was teaching freshman English at a university, and I had a grand time introducing rhetorical fallacies through the above-mentioned method. It wasn’t around at that time, but now there’s a card game called Fallacy, which would have been a dandy teaching aid. But I digress again.)

Of course, there are classic political ads. (Some would say notorious.) The king of them all was Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad. It starts with a daisy and ends with a mushroom cloud. It was a classic slippery slope fallacy (also called the camel’s nose). The subtext was “Give the Soviets an inch and they’ll scorch the earth.” (This was back when Russia was our enemy.) It was also a notable campaign because it introduced the phrase, “Let’s Make America Great Again,” though no one wore hats that said that. And for a little more nostalgia, let’s remember that Reagan was 69 when he was elected. Back then, we thought that was old. (An underground slogan was “Reagan in ’80. Bush in ’81.” But I digress some more.)

Speaking of Bush (H.W., in this case), he took a vivid and vicious swipe at Michael Dukakis with his “revolving door prison” ad. This was the heyday of attack ads, which I think we’ll see a resurgence of this year. It could be both entertaining and appalling, as well as full of rhetorical flaws. (Also, Dukakis didn’t help himself with a commercial showing him driving a tank, which was supposed to be patriotic, but just looked silly. It was described as “The Photo Op That Tanked,” which I have to admit was a clever headline, unlike so many others that try to be witty. But I digress even more.)

I also love seeing how many times the candidates use the words “patriotic” and “freedom” without ever defining them and whether they refrain from talking about re-education camps or death panels. What I really love about election season, though, is one when there’s no violence. May it be so.

What I’ve Learned About My Writing From Writing

blogs, books, education, etc., writing

I’ve been writing since I was in second grade. Back then, and through college, I wrote poetry, most of it pretty terrible. (Pretty depressing, actually. I was bipolar but undiagnosed. Thus begin my day’s digressions.) Gradually, my poetry turned into prose and I went where my muse took me. Maybe it was all those papers I had to write for college English that reinforced my love of prose. (I still write some poetry, but mostly to experiment with different forms like haiku, sonnets, and villanelles. I’m on my second digression already.)

But on to lessons learned.

• My ability to handle distractions has increased. It used to be that I had to write in complete silence, which helped me concentrate. But, as writing became more routine and natural, I experimented with music for writing. Instrumental music was okay with me, but anything with lyrics took me out of the zone. Now I prefer to write with the TV on in the background. I’m not really listening to it. It’s just ambient noise and I tune it out. (My mother used to put on baseball games, which she was not really interested in, just to have some noise in the house. But I digress again.)

• I can keep a schedule. The ghostwriting company I work for bases its deadlines on writers producing 1,500 words a day. I’ve fallen into a routine. I write 750 words for about two hours in the morning and another 750 for around two hours in the afternoon. If I don’t make my 1,500 because of an appointment or something, I write 1,000 words, morning and afternoon, until I’m caught up. (If only I had had this kind of discipline when I was writing my failed mystery novel! Of course, for ghostwriting, I work from an outline, which I didn’t have for my fiction. But I digress some more.) I have to work my two weekly blog posts in there somewhere, but I’ve given myself a deadline for them as well. I post them every Sunday at 10:00 a.m.

• I seem to be specializing in self-help books. I gave up on reading self-help decades ago, but now it’s about all I write. (I did ghostwrite one short piece of fiction, but it was pure smut. So I guess I learned that I can write smut as well as self-help. But I digress yet again.)

• Ghostwriting suits me. Yes, it’s playing in someone else’s sandbox. And no, I don’t get a byline or royalties. But it’s steady work and keeps me from stealing hubcaps. Also, it supplements my Social Security nicely—not bountifully, but nicely. I don’t know what I’d do all day if I didn’t write. Become even more sedentary than I already am, no doubt. Or steal hubcaps.

• I can pivot. I write humor. I write about social issues. I write about mental illness. I write about language. I write about writing (you may have noticed). I’ve written about flesh-eating diseases, pandemics, and baseball heroes. I’ve written prayer services and stories about nuns. I’ve written about poverty in Jamaica. I’ve written about playgrounds and childcare. I’ve written lesson plans for textbooks. (My nickname is 1,000-words-on-anything. I suppose I’ll have to change that to 1,500-words-on-anything. But I digress even more.)

• I can call on my husband to help me brainstorm topics. He also keeps an eye (and ear) for news stories he thinks might interest or inspire me. And he has plenty of quirks that are fun to write about.

• And I’ve learned that cats are no help at all when it comes to writing (especially one named Ow-Toby), except as subjects. Which I’m sure will come as no surprise to you, but I put it out there anyway.

There’s Prayer in Schools

Christianity, education, etc., government, religion, social policy, , ,

Despite what you may have heard, there is prayer in public schools. It’s totally legal.

You don’t think so? The government forbids it?

Not true! Students and even teachers pray in school every day. They always have and they always will. Pray all you want.

A student can pray before a test or just because. Groups that meet for that purpose can pray—during a free period, for example. (There was a group in my high school that did this. I attended a few times but left when they started planning a book burning.) There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from praying like this.

The only thing that’s not permitted in schools is requiring anyone else to pray with you or telling them how they have to pray. A principal or teacher can’t start class with a prayer. You can’t insist that students pray over lunch. You can’t base grades on whether or not a student prays. If a student chooses to pray, you can’t tell them which prayer to use. All those things fly in the face of the Establishment Clause of Freedom of Religion in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is what it actually says. That means that there can’t be a law that makes one religion the official religion of the US. And it means that, if you do have a preferred religion, the government can’t prevent you from practicing it. It’s left up to the individual what religion—if any—they practice.

The problem comes when we’re discussing public institutions, which include public schools. (Obviously, students in religious schools can pray whatever the school says to.) The first part of the clause says that the public institution can’t declare an official religion. That’s why there’s no compulsory prayer in schools. The second part, “prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” says that everyone is free to worship in their own way. That’s why students are able to pray in schools during their free time, by choice, without an official such as a teacher or the principal leading it. The government can’t forbid it.

If prayer were to be required in schools, there would be any number of cans of worms opened. Let’s take a basic Christian prayer—The Lord’s Prayer.

Which version of the prayer would everyone be required to say? There’s a difference between the Catholic version and the Protestant version. But the wording also differs among the Protestant denominations and individual congregations. Debts and debtors? Trespasses? Sins? Many churches specify in the church bulletin which wording to use so that they can pray in unison.

Another can of worms is that not all Americans are Christians. Increasingly, children from other faiths are entering the public schools. Why should they be required to pray a Christian prayer? But what’s the alternative? Couldn’t they just sit quietly while everyone else prays or pray their own prayer silently to themselves? No. That establishes the prayer of one religion as the official classroom prayer to the exclusion of the others. Anyone who doesn’t share that religion gets treated differently. Their prayer is not the one being said for everyone. That’s the establishment clause again.

Then, think about what it would be like if Christians weren’t in the majority in a school. (For the moment, let’s suppose that the majority rules, which is many people’s assumption.)

But Christians aren’t always in the majority in a public school. I always think of the example of the followers of the Bhagwan Rashneesh. A religious community in Oregon, they incorporated as a city, Rajneeshpuram, which had around 7,000 people. Nearby Antelope, Oregon, had a population of about 60.

The State School Superintendent visited the district’s high school and found that it was “permeated with religious symbolism” and “did not look, sound, or feel like a public school.” The religious symbolism was Rajneeshee, of course.

Now imagine those people from nearby Antelope. If their kids had to attend the Rajneeshpuram school, which was officially a public school, how would their parents have liked it if the students were required to say the Rajneeshee prayers? Not so fond of required prayer in public schools now? Ready to take the Rajneeshees to court to prevent their prayers as unconstitutional? That would be my guess.

In other words, be careful what you pray for.

Science Madness

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The problem these days is not so much “mad scientists” as people who are mad at science.

Where did the Mad Scientist trope come from anyway? Arguably it was Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, published in 1818. Science fiction classics like Jules Verne’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) kept up the theme and the “Golden Age” of science fiction provided many more examples.

In these novels, scientists either tampered with things better left alone or succumbed to a lust for power. Death rays and the precursors of gene splicing abounded. The outcome was mostly dreadful, except for those few gallant hero scientists who managed to save Earth from a deadly plague/alien/monster/giant something.

While the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s were the heyday of mad scientists in fiction, those years also constituted a time when real scientists were heroes. The atomic bomb ended WWII in the Pacific. Polio was conquered. The “Space Race” that led to many scientific breakthroughs began, thanks to the Soviets and their Sputnik (1957).

Back then, scientists were revered.

Later on, not so much.

The conflict between science and religion heated up. Of course, there was conflict going way back – before Mary Shelley warned us about “playing God.” Galileo and Kepler removed us from our “God-given place” in the center of the universe, and Darwin implied that we were just another animal. The Earth suddenly became billions of years old,  circling a mediocre star.

Then there was fallout, both literal and figurative, from the atomic bomb. Medical science gave us thalidomide. NASA used up billions of dollars, with no obvious monetary payoff down the line, and some people decried the space program for spending money that could be used for problems on Earth.

And all that led to changes in the general public’s attitude toward science.

By the ’60s. medicine was under fire from those who found Eastern philosophy and natural healing just as good or better. Physicists were condemned for the same atomic bomb for which they had been lauded. Science didn’t seem like such a good deal after all.

And there’s some truth to the complaints. Many scientists believed that math, physics, and chemistry were all. If it didn’t have numbers attached to it, forget it. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and most other -ologies were “soft sciences,” barely sciences at all. Hard sciences ruled.

Slowly, the ground under science shifted. Now science has become to many people the enemy, the domain of elitists and narcissists and people who feel they are entitled by their intellect to run the world.

Of course, the stereotypes from early science fiction had something to do with that.

But the Average Man (and Woman) had a bone, or at least a fossil, to pick with science and scientists. Again, science was denying what the general public believed.

Increasingly, people believed in the efficacy of non-Western medicine, or at least the non-efficacy of Western medicine. Science believed in genetics and stem cells and cloning.

People believed in the spiritual realm. Scientists believed in the measurable.

People believed in religion. Science believed in science.

You can see where this is heading – right back to the days when people thought science meant the reanimation of corpses, invasions of bug-eyed monsters, and the creation of death rays. Because what, after all, is the distance between growing human organs and creating Frankenstein, between cloning a sheep and making a half-man-half-fly, between a laser-guided missile and a death ray?

And many scientists are arrogant, dismissive of popular opinion, and unwilling to engage in dialogue with opposing viewpoints. “Because I said so,” seems to be enough for them. “Real” scientists look down their noses at “popularizers” who look to educate the public about science.

Unfortunately, everyone is shouting and no one is listening.

Personally, I am a sometimes science geek as well as a word nerd, thanks to high school chemistry and physics, college astronomy, and lots of nonfiction reading. I don’t think science knows it all, and it’s a long way from figuring it all out. I also think that psychology and spirituality and art have a lot to teach us about the human condition and our place in the universe, STEM classes and careers notwithstanding.

But the pushback against science scares me. NASA is wasting its time chasing UFOs. Streaming channels that used to be devoted to science now feature ghost chasers and treasure hunters. I’m not saying that science never stumbles, but it provides the best answers we have to some of the problems that plague us, including plagues.

I don’t advocate returning to a time when science was the be-all and end-all of thought and education, or to the time when fictional science made scientists suspect. I just think science deserves more respect than it’s getting now.

Fun With Dictionaries. No, Really.

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When I was a kid, I had one of those small, plastic record players that came with small, plastic records of children’s songs. One yellow plastic disk had a song on it about dictionaries. I still remember it.

“Oh, the dic-dic-dictionary/is very necessary./Any word that you can cook up/you can look up./Pick the book up.” It also included a verse exhorting children to look up the words “dromedary” and “estuary.” Or maybe “actuary.” The sound reproduction was not that great. Neither word is one that I needed to know until much later in life, but I went through childhood with them stuck in my brain.  For that matter, they still are.

Also stuck in my brain is a dictionary adventure from slightly later in my childhood. Like many – perhaps most – of you, I ventured to the fount of all knowledge to look up “dirty” words. I didn’t find them all (I didn’t know them all at that point), but I found one that made a distinct impression on me. To this day, I can quote the definition of “fart” word for word: “an anal emission of intestinal gasses, especially when audible.” In other words, what was called a “poot” in our household, though that was not listed as a synonym.

There was one dictionary in history that caused quite an uproar, and it was largely (though not exclusively) caused by a different four-letter word: ain’t. Webster’s Third was not the first to include “ain’t” – even Webster’s Second did that. But Web3, notorious for downgrading (or I guess upgrading) usage labels, no longer listed the word as “illiterate” or “substandard,” but merely “colloquial,” or usable in regular conversation, though not in formal speech.

Headlines abounded: “Ain’t Ain’t Wrong, Says Webster’s.” Lexicographers were incensed and language mavens had the vapors. Not to mention the grammarians, who really got their undies in a bundle. The only people not freaking out were the linguists, who considered “ain’t” “nonstandard,” which was what they called a word that others called “substandard.”

(Lexicographers, linguists, and grammarians are different species, whose nether garments bunch at different sorts of things. Let me know if you want to know the difference. I’m lots of fun at parties. But I digress.)

Speaking of parties, there is a nifty party game that can be played with a dictionary, if you’re trapped at a party with no drinks, food, or music. It’s called Fictionary and bears no relation to Pictionary, which at least can get raucous.

For Fictionary, one person, acting as moderator, wields the Webster’s and selects a suitably obscure word. Each participant writes an imaginary definition on a slip of paper, while the moderator writes out the actual definition. The papers are then collected and read aloud. Participants vote on which is the correct definition. If a bogus definition wins out over the real one, that player gets a point. Hilarity ensues.

(The secret to winning a point is to start your fake definition with “of or pertaining to.”)

And speaking of word games, there’s Scrabble (aka Words with Friends if you’re among the techno-literate, which if you’re playing Fictionary you’re probably not).

A fascinating book (for those like me who are fascinated by such things) is Word Freak – not my autobiography, but instead a searing look into the dark underbelly of competitive Scrabble. For those who never thought competitive Scrabble was a thing or that it had a dark underbelly, it is and it does.

Now, of course, dictionaries have been replaced by the computer and particularly the internet. Among the most useful and colorful sites is the Urban Dictionary, where you can find the definition of words like “yeet,” though not its past tense, “yote.” (“Yeeted” seems to have become the past tense, though I’ll stick by “yote.” I still don’t know what the past participle is. “Yoten” is what I recommend, though I’ve never written or spoken a sentence where it was needed. But I digress again.)

The Urban Dictionary proved useful to me once when a character on House, M.D. (okay, it was House himself) used the term “squish mitten.” I pretty much got the meaning from context but felt a need to verify it, just for accuracy’s sake.

Actually, the internet is a good place to get your lexicography. The language changes constantly and rapidly, so the only place you can really keep up with it is online. Although I think it’s fair to say that “fart” hasn’t changed much, is still spelled and pronounced the same way, and still has the definition that made such an impression on me as a kid.

Teachers Under Fire

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I was going to say that the title of this post was metaphorical, but anymore, it may not be.

Putting that aside for now, however, teachers today face any number of other difficulties they don’t deserve, some of which have existed for decades and others that have come to the forefront in recent times.

My respect for teachers is immense. I wanted to be a teacher when I was a child. My father, though, wanted me to be an engineer. My mother finally got him to stop trying to channel me away from teaching, but by that time he already had. Not that I ever became an engineer, however. (I might have been able to become one, but I think I would have been a very unhappy engineer.)

Still, even though I never became a teacher (unless you include two years of teaching English to first-year college students while going to grad school), I became involved with education throughout much of my life as a writer. I worked for magazines that included Today’s Catholic Teacher, Early Childhood News, Private School Administrator, School Planning and Management, and Technology and Learning. I edited textbooks on religion, English, and social studies. Education was in front of me at every turn.

The obstacles that teachers face these days, though, can’t be alleviated by articles on classroom decoration tips or advice on self-care (important as that is).

Teachers put up with low pay and out-of-pocket expenses for supplies that they shouldn’t have to buy. They put up with crumbling schools that lack basic necessities like heating and air conditioning. They put up with old textbooks or newer ones that are prescribed by committees who have few choices, thanks to the power of states like California, New York, and Texas. They have to teach in school buildings that may have lead in the drinking water or lack ADA-compliant facilities. (Two years ago, a report said that 2/3 of US schools weren’t up to ADA standards.)

Not enough people going into education – and why would they? The pay is low (and staying low) and respect is not a given. The general public does not understand the process of education, or they think that the way it was in their day is the way it should always be. They place too much emphasis on test scores, meaning that teachers must “teach to the test” instead of allowing children to learn in more fruitful, organic ways such as project-based learning.

There is scientific evidence that small class sizes are better for student learning, but finding the money and the number of educators required for that is not forthcoming. In fact, subjects that aren’t considered “academic” enough, such as art, music, and drama, are being sacrificed. Even recess for grade-school children is no longer guaranteed in order to spend more time in the classroom, despite the fact that physical activity is vital to a child’s health and development.

Many of the difficulties facing teachers were recently highlighted when approximately 4,500 teachers, librarians, counselors, school nurses, and other support personnel in Columbus, Ohio, went on strike. It was the first time since 1975 – nearly 50 years – that they had done so. The teachers’ demands included pay raises of 8% (they were granted only 4%, despite a much higher rate of inflation). But many of the issues they brought forward related to infrastructure issues such as the lack of functioning heating and cooling systems in the schools, particularly since the weather has been so hot and continues to be. And the teachers went back to school after a week on strike, despite the fact that only a “conceptual agreement” was reached. It included no promises of spending on infrastructure, though that was the cause that received the most complaints and publicity.

And what were the repercussions of the strike? The district hired 600 substitute teachers to replace the 4,000 or so teachers and fill in for online classes. In addition, the movement to allow public, taxpayer-supported funds to be used for private school tuition was enhanced, which would leave even fewer dollars in the public system to effect changes. An official for the Center for Christian Virtue, which placed billboards around Columbus promoting private schools, castigated the striking teachers: “These schools are hitting kids while they are down. After all kids have been through, being blocked out of their schools for years [a reference to the COVID crisis], and having just failed attempts at remote teaching, the fact that they would strike now is the ultimate blow to kids,” Baer said.

The Twitterverse reacted as well. While many tweets supported the strike, there were also ones that decidedly didn’t. “For the 2nd time in 3 years, Columbus City Schools athletics have been paused for all Fall sports. Both sets of soccer teams looking to have off campus workouts while the teachers are on strike. Pray for all CCS students and athletics during this difficult time” was one opinion. Another said, “Give them 48 hours and fire them. Their PR is mindless, the kids would rather be in school and their extracurricular activities. If the teachers cared about the kids, they’d still be teaching.”

Nor is Columbus the only place where these battles are playing out. New York City is engaged in a court case over proposed slashed budgets advocated by the mayor, who is a proponent of charter schools that sap funds from the public schools.

I could also mention the flack that teachers are now receiving from lawmakers and parents who want to control what teachers teach, what books they have in their libraries, and even what they’re allowed to say. And don’t get me started on the let’s-arm-the-teachers thing. There’s not enough room here for my outrage. Maybe another time.

So, here’s the bottom line. Teachers have continued to work with purpose, care, intelligence, and dedication. They have also continued to be underpaid, overworked, under-respected, and over-criticized. That they have continued to do so is a tribute to their strength and resilience. But how long must we expect them to do so? Sure, our kids deserve better than what they are getting through our broken education system – but our teachers deserve better too. When teachers get what they need to do their jobs as well as they are able, it’s a win-win. I don’t know why that should be controversial.

As John Steinbeck said, “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”

Teachers are indeed the artists and architects of the future. We owe them a little more slack and a lot more support.

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Librarians’ Choices

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Librarians are the gatekeepers of civilization. Perhaps I should say “guardians.” “Gatekeepers” implies that librarians decide what to admit and what to keep out.

In a way, though, librarians do have to make choices about what books reside in their libraries. They must make decisions based on space, for example, although through interlibrary loans that are now available to patrons, a wider selection of books is available than can be stored in a single building. But interlibrary loans take a while to get to the ordering library. Patrons would prefer it if the book in question were available on the shelves of their nearest branch, and right away, with no queues for bestsellers.

Librarians must go through a selection process to determine what books (and CDs and DVDs and magazines and newspapers, etc.) they will stock on their shelves. Not even the Library of Congress has every book ever printed. (My two books, for example, are not in their collection.) In order to make room for new books, librarians will “weed” their collections, consult their computers to determine what books haven’t been checked out with any regularity, and then get rid of them, often by holding library book sales. That’s one part of the selection process. (Books about making fondue, for example, likely haven’t been checked out in decades and would have been weeded years ago. Besides, people can and do now share fondue recipes online. But I digress.)

At the rate that books are being published, no library can keep up. Librarians consult references like the Ingram Spark catalog, and reviewers like Kirkus and Booklist to find new books that fill a hole in their collection – both fiction and nonfiction. Of course, these new selections are limited by budget, a factor largely dependent on tax dollars and voters these days. Publishers don’t just send libraries free copies of newly published books. Libraries buy books from library “jobbers” or distributors for more than the price they’re sold for at bookstores. Libraries have to pay extra because of the special library binding.

You might think that authors don’t like having their books available in a public library, but you’d be wrong. Library sales can total even more than bookstore or online sales. And reading a library copy of an author’s book can inspire a reader to buy their own copy or seek out other works by the same author. And the author does receive royalties for sales to libraries.

Now, however, there is much talk of censorship and what ought to be included in a library. Librarians have always stood against censorship and kept numerous copies of “forbidden” books on their shelves. Not that they’ve always been successful at keeping them on the shelves. Patrons routinely steal books from libraries, and when the subject is controversial, they sometimes take the book in question into the bathroom and deface it.

Schools and other institutions have more stringent rules for what they select for their libraries. A K-6 school, for example, would not own copies of graduate-level tomes. Their selection process would favor topics that are covered in the school curriculum and books that are likely to be interesting or useful to the age group served by the school. Sometimes parents become involved, petitioning schools or school boards to remove controversial books from school libraries. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. But librarians tend to come down on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion, and have a differing opinion on what books might be interesting or useful or controversial. All of them are against book banning.

Then there are special-purpose libraries that have even more stringent selection criteria. A library in a correctional facility will have law books and even Shakespeare, but no books about gangs, Nazis, or drug use, for obvious reasons. (My husband once worked in a community-based correctional facility, which is how I know this. And no, that’s not where we met.) Prisons are also likely to include books at less-than-high-school reading levels, to take into account the population they serve. That is to say, they don’t discriminate against the minimally literate, but give them what they need and want.

It’s sad when a library closes, even if it’s just to merge with another one to offer more resources than either has individually. It still means that people who live in the catchment area of the smaller library have a harder time getting access to books and other media. But to bibliophiles and library-lovers, there was almost no historical event as tragic as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of library guru Hypatia in 415 BC. After all these years, that still hurts.

Librarians are often stereotyped as repressed spinsters who delight in shushing people who dare make noises louder than the faint rustle of pages within their domain. In reality, they are, like the libraries where they work, upholders of the tradition of free, public access to learning. I can’t imagine life without them.

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A Wise and Good Man

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Not long ago, I saw on Facebook a picture of Captain Kangaroo in his costume, with a silly expression on his face. The caption was something on the order of “Who in his right mind would put this man in charge of a bunch of children?”

Well, I would, for one. It’s easy to take a photograph of anyone that presents an unflattering portrait, and if that person’s job is to be a children’s entertainer and to have ping-pong balls dropped on his head, he’s even more likely to look goofy.

The reality is quite different. Captain Kangaroo may have acted goofy, but in real life, he was far from it.

I had heard that Bob Keeshan (the Captain’s not-so-secret identity) was an advocate for children, but I never realized how passionately and compassionately until I had the chance to interview him, many years ago, when I was the editor of Early Childhood News magazine. (The accompanying photo is a souvenir of that occasion, resurrected from a single frame of film that somehow survived both the tornado and all our moves. My husband found it and I found a way to digitize it. If Mr. Keeshan looks tired in the photo, it’s because he had just finished giving one of his impassioned speeches. But I digress.)

Keeshan was a friend of fellow children’s entertainer Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood), and they occasionally guested on each other’s shows, spreading their message of gentleness, care, and fun with widening audiences. After Captain Kangaroo was pushed into an unfavorable time slot, the show was picked up by PBS and ran for a number of years there.

Keeshan began his crusade of child activism while he was still The Captain to innumerable boys and girls, including me (I was particularly fond of the puppet character Bunny Rabbit because it wore glasses like I did). But Keeshan learned that there was a horror movie involving an evil Santa Claus, and that commercials for it were being shown during children’s shows, including his own. He objected and made his voice heard.

After he retired, Keeshan became a tireless child advocate and speaker. He stood strongly against violent video games, which he noted taught children nothing about the real world, and particularly against children’s shows based on those same video games or on violent toys, like “Power Rangers” and “The Transformers.”

But Keeshan’s crusade for children’s rights didn’t stop at the other side of the TV screen. At the speech I attended, he said that many run-away kids should really be called “throw-away” kids for how families and society failed them. Unfortunately, neither my clips nor my notes of my article have survived, so I can’t tell you exactly what he said, just that he said it with fervor and sincerity. And sometimes quite a bit of anger.

In lieu of the article, I offer some Bob Keeshan quotes taken from other sources over the years.

Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences. It wasn’t very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real.

Generosity has built America. When we fail to invest in children, we have to pay the cost.

Children don’t drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official.

I enjoy meeting not only contemporary children, but yesterday’s children as well. It’s nice to talk about the experiences we shared, they tell me, “You were a good friend.” That’s the warmest part.

Now, how goofy does that sound to you?

Starstuff

books, education, etc., television, , , , ,

Carl Sagan has been damned as a popularizer of science. Carl Sagan has been praised as a popularizer of science. Since the first time he put on his corduroy jacket and turtleneck to introduce the masses to the wonders of the universe in his ground-breaking TV series Cosmos, he has been many things to many people (and associated with the phrase “billyuns and billyuns”).

So. Is being a science popularizer a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a bad thing if you expect a scientist to remain in the lab and conduct research, without wasting her or his time appearing on Johnny Carson. It’s a good thing if you think science needs to be popular for society to survive.

That Sagan appeared on Carson’s show was not a fluke. Rather than being the epitome of an obsessive researcher, Sagan was an enthusiast and a promoter of science who could, at the same time, entertain as well as he explained.

Sagan was in the news a lot, too. He was the one that insisted that astronauts who had been to the moon be quarantined for a period to make sure they had brought back no alien germs. He was the one who demolished the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, famous for his book In Search of Ancient Aliens, which purported that alien civilizations have visited Earth and left their mark on ancient astronomy, archaeology, and biblical studies. (Every year when he was teaching astronomy at Cornell University, Sagan devoted one whole lecture to debunking Velikovsky.)

Sagan’s astronomy class was swamped with auditors (particularly on Velikovsky day). To be officially registered for Sagan’s Astronomy 102 class, you had to sit through Astronomy 101, a deadly boring class taught by a deadly boring professor. (I had the great good fortune of taking Sagan’s class, and met him at department parties.) His teaching was compelling and his tests were far from regurgitating dry facts.

Sagan’s particular field barely existed: astrobiology. Since life has never been discovered on other planets, there wasn’t much to say about it, though he could, and did, do experiments on what circumstances and elements needed to be present for life to arise out of the “primordial soup.”

He memorably said, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” He was also famous for “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge” and “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Carl Sagan is now present on Facebook, despite the fact that he’s been dead for some years. Most of the quotes attributed to him are on the subjects of today’s culture of stupidity (though he didn’t live long enough to see how thoroughly correct he was), the lack of science education in the US (or at least rigorous science education), the dumbing-down of popular culture, and the need for both scientists and people like him to make science accessible.

Many of the Facebook quotations are influenced by the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which was required reading in his astronomy class, though it had nothing to say about astronomy. Instead, it was a work that denounced what came to be known as pseudoscience, such as belief in ghosts and witchcraft.

Losing Sagan was a profound blow both to science and to making science available and understandable to the masses. Others have attempted to carry on his work as popularizers of science, notably Neil deGrasse Tyson (who had a part in the “Is Pluto a planet?” debate) and Bill Nye (The Science Guy). Tyson has even starred in a reboot of Cosmos, though nothing can rival the fascination of the original series.

Neither one, helpful as they may be to the science-ignorant, has stepped into Sagan’s loafers as a teacher, a public figure, a prescient philosopher of science, an inspiration. I miss the heck out of him.

Learning Things

books, education, etc., language, , , , ,

This is a poster I have in my study. Lately, I have begun thinking that what it really should say is “That’s what I do. I read books and I learn things.” To put it simply, I wouldn’t know things if I didn’t learn things. And now I think the learning is perhaps more important than the knowing.

I had a course in grad school that was called Research and Bibliography. (We called it R&B.) We did the usual things you do as an English major – write papers about assorted literary figures, mostly. (I once did a paper on William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. I referred to it as my “Willie and Wally” paper. But I digress.)

The final exam, however, was not an essay test or another sort of normal academic exercise. It was, in essence, a scavenger hunt in the university library. Each of the seven or so students had her or his own personal set of questions and had to find the answers. The trick was, you had to know where to find the answers, not so much what the actual answers were. Each set of questions could be answered using the same reference books (this was before computers were available to anyone except the librarians), and students were allowed to point each other to the correct ones.

For example, a question might be “When John Milton used the word pandemonium, how long had it been part of the English language?” (Trick question: Milton invented the word. It means, literally, “all the devils.”) The answer could be found in a reference book called the OED, or Oxford English Dictionary. Another student would have a different question that also required using the OED. And you could say, “you’ll find that in the OED.”

In that case, the test was not at all about knowing the answers to the questions, but knowing – or learning – where to find them (something that we should have learned from writing our papers and bibliographies).

There are different types of learning. My husband learns mostly by visual means, absorbing information through television documentaries, for example. Some children learn their letters and numbers best by drawing them in a sand tray or fingerpainting them. For a while, these multiple styles of learning – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. – were a major influence on education, and teachers were encouraged to use a different style if a child wasn’t learning through the one that was normally used to teach. (They may still be. I haven’t done textbooks in years.)

So. I read books and I know things – but only because I learn them. I was reading a book about mountaineering, for example, and came across the word salopettes. I could tell from the context that it was an item of clothing, but I just had to learn which one. A quick Google and I learned that salopettes are to the French (and mountain climbers) what bibbed overalls are over here (only, presumably, down-filled instead of denim). It’s a completely useless thing to know – I can’t imagine it being useful even on Jeopardy. But it was fun to learn.

Of course, I’m not putting down reading or knowing. For me, reading is what comes before learning, and knowing is what comes after. And, for me at least, both are pleasurable occupations.

I wrote about learning a while back, and this is what I said about it:

I count a day when I don’t learn something new as a day wasted. I love it when I’m able to start a Facebook post with TIL (Today I learned) or “I was today years old when I learned that….” Learning is all around you. You just have to reach out and grab it!

That’s still my philosophy.