Biff. He's Back.

I started posting this in serial form a while back and stopped for some reason.  So, I thought now was a good time to start it up again.
Here is a link to the installments I posted earlier, in case you missed it:
"The Torrid Tales of Biff Wellington, Private Investigator, Installments 1-4"

Here is a link to the latest installment, if you want to just skip to that.
"The Torrid Tales of Biff Wellington, Private Investigator, Installment 4"

Let me know what you think. As Belushi once said, "It don't cost nothin'."

Choose, or "The Twitter War"

I opened my blog to post, but then I entered into a vicious twitter grammar conflict that pulled me from my task. Is it wrong that I feel incredibly fulfilled by correcting a misused word such as "cause", which can be a noun or a verb, but not a subordinate conjunction, or "its", which shows possession, but is not a contraction of the pronoun and the verb is? Is it even more satisfying to see former and current students favorite those tweets and join into the fray? Wrong may not be the correct word. Surely, it is somewhat disturbing though.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media provide us as guardians of the language (self-appointed and misguided as we may be) with an opportunity. I know many teachers despise the social media postings because they are so filled with inappropriate language, bigotry, and ignorance. However, my feed and timelines are not filled with such things. Sure, they are there from time to time, but the people I interact with do not post that way as a rule. What I do see is a chance to interact with people on another level, in another way. A way that they enjoy and are willing to use without hesitation. Where else can one get 15 to 20 young adults to willing read about grammar, syntax, and other writing conventions and actually take part in the discussion, even if it is just to click a star.

We have to take any opportunity we can to interact with people in a positive way. It might be clicking the star of a post or picture, letting a person know you appreciate their words or work, at least a little bit, sharing a photo from a quirky grammar and writing page so you can covertly reinforce a lesson from class, dropping a word of encouragement on Compliment Monday or as Beautiful Buhler, or congratulating a great group of guys that they have shown a tremendous amount of heart and guts so far this season. Carl Sandburg wrote a poem named "Choose".

"A single clinched fist, lifted and ready,
Or an open, asking hand, held out and waiting.
Choose
For we meet by one or the other."

I tell my kids in class not to be the closed fist, but to be the open hand. We have to be open and willing to give things a try. We ask our kids to do that every day, and we get excited when they do it. Sometimes, they are also waiting for us to follow suit. It might be something as simple as posting on twitter or facebook. But it is something.

I don't fool myself. I know that someone, many someones, probably, is reading what I post and saying, "Kohls is such a nerd. Wow." However, he read it, didn't he? He just saw how to properly punctuate a quotation.

Got you.

Nobody's Perfect, but We Keep Trying

I just came back downstairs after talking to my daughter Emily. She is frustrated by how her drawings have been going tonight. You see; art is Emily's thing.  I know I am a little biased, but can honestly say she is talented. I envy her ability. However, she has this issue. She is a perfectionist when it comes to what she draws, sketches, or paints. It has to be as she has seen it in her head, and when the pencil will not cooperate, when the ink does not follow her mind as smoothly as she feels it should, she becomes upset with herself.  I hate when she gets that way; she is my little girl, and she always will be. I do not like seeing her upset, for any reason, but I also know that this is the only way she will grow. If it were always easy, she would not be pushing herself to grow, to become better, and to stretch. So I console her and tell her to step away from it, as I sometimes have to do with what I write. That does not help; it needs to be a certain way and she will not be happy until she figures out how to get it to that point.
Her mom is the same way about certain things, particularly those that involve tiny details that "should be like this" but just aren't. I have seen her pour for hours (literally, not figuratively) over cancelled checks and the banks statement to locate a 32 cent error. It was in our favor too.  Ok, I did not actually watch her do this for hour (I had things to do), but she did. And she was sincerely happy and relieved when she discovered the banks error. It really did not matter in the grand scheme, but it mattered to her. It had to be fixed. Details, that is her thing. So I have learned to kiss her on the forehead and let her comb through the details, for she could not be happy otherwise.
Sometimes, I laugh to myself how foolish these two beautiful ladies in my life are to become so upset, so focused on such things that they cannot rest. Then I realize that this evening, while Emily was drawing a graphite point across the page of a sketch pad, erasing, gritting her teeth, willing the pencil to do her bidding, and creasing her forehead as she erased once again, I had spent nearly two hours trying to develop an idea, no not an idea, THE RIGHT IDEA, for a four minute video for Thursday night after practice.  I still do not have anything. I had a few thoughts, a few things that might have worked, but nothing was just what I wanted. So, I scrapped them. It's frustrating me right now, but I needed to shower, so I had to step away from it for a while. That did not help. Actually, I thought it did for a minute, after an idea came to mind amidst the steam and stream of that nightly ritual, but it wasn't quite right either.
I guess, what it comes down to is this: we are all our own kind of crazy. I am still going to blame Emily's propensity for frustration on Heidi, but she probably pulled just as much of that from me as anyone. No one knows how many pages I have crumbled up, how many digital details I have deleted, simply because I was not happy with them.
Sorry Em.

Tick Tock

I broke my promise to blog at least once a week, so I am going to make up for it by posting twice this week. This is the first post, and it will be a doozy, I am sure.  I am trying to pare down a writing lesson for my freshmen so it fits in today's class period. It is not happening. Yesterday's lesson has spilled over into today, like the frothy head of root beer float, leaving its sticky residue on the tabletop that is today. So, I am going to go with it.  Sometimes, lessons cannot be bound by this man-made convention we call time. Learning goes at its own pace, and in trying to rush it, we risk splattering it all over the place.  Ew.

We do it all the time though, don't we. We have to finish this by the end of the hour, this must be completed by Tuesday, my plans say we move on next week to something new. I hate it. A second year teacher, who is developing into a very good English teacher, asked me the other day if it mattered that one of our units spilled from first nine weeks into the second nine weeks. Would that mess up the grading? I told her that as far as I am concerned, it did not matter at all. We need another week and a half to do what is right for the kids and the material. She went with it, which is a happy moment because she is a schedule maker of the highest degree. I wonder how much it actually bothers her that our first nine weeks is only eight weeks long.  (By the way, the world does truly need people with the compulsion to make schedules and annoy the rest of the world with them, people such as my wife, such as this teacher and those of the same bent in our department, for they provide just enough structure for the rest of us to make it to meetings and meet deadlines. So, thank you. Now leave me alone.)

I could go on. Perhaps I will. Later. I just looked at the clock and I have freshmen entering my room and they will need some instruction in about ten minutes. Dang clocks.

Tick Tock.

"The Torrid Tales of Biff Wellington" Installment 3

For anyone who may be reading, here is the third foray into the world of Biff Wellington, PI. Enjoy.
Serial Version Of "The Torrid Tales of Biff Wellington..."

Words Have Meaning

I was thinking today how language changes, how what we say and write changes as time does. Maybe what we write and say does not change, so much as the meaning of what we write and change changes, the meaning of our language changes. (Yes, I have written about how language is a living organism, a being that grows and changes before, but it is Labor Day weekend, so I give me a break, OK.)
A Facebook friend of mine posted recently about the shift in weather. I paraphrase here, but she basically said something along the lines of "Oh Lord this weather. But since God is perfect, I am blaming Mother Nature." Simple enough. I doubt any of our mutual friends was offended, even slightly by the status update. However, this morning, as I was filtering clips of Rose Hill into playlists that our Crusaders can view as they prepare for our opener on Friday, I started to think just how much irony is hidden in that innocent expression of frustration with 100 degree temps and 70% humidity. Is it possible that sometime in our shared history that this statement could have earned the writer harsh ridicule from her neighbors, church leaders, and even family members. After all, by making the effort to deflect any appearance of dissatisfaction with our Christian God, the writer recognized the existence of a pagan god of nature, did she not? Is this not heresy? Would this not be enough to earn the writer a harsh scolding, or if she was a landowner whose neighbor coveted her north 40, an accusation of witchcraft and the occult?
Ok, so maybe I went a little too far. Not really though. According to History.com, and my preparation to teach The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials that was actually about the McCarthy hearings that scoured Washington, Hollywood, and the rest of the country for  communists in the 1950s, 19 people were hanged as witches in Salem, Mass, most because other members of the community had some sort of axe to grind and saw an opportunity to gain an advantage. We see people raked over the coals for saying something with no intention of stirring up controversy.
Words have meaning. Is my FB friend a witch or pagan worshipper of some ancient goddess of the forest who holds reign over the weather? No, and I am sure no one, besides me I guess, considered her statement as any more meaningful than a complaint about the heat. Her status is directed at no one, except maybe the weatherman.  However, history is full of words carrying heavy meaning. Vince Lombardi was once asked what made the Green Bay Packers such as great organization. His response was one word: love. He later said he wished he had never said that because people did not understand what he meant by using that word, especially when referring to an organization as masculine as the Green Bay Packers. He said he regretted the use of the word love, because people did not understand that what he meant was the power of the heart, "heart power" he called it. Heart power is the ability to put something before yourself, so feel strongly enough about another person, about other people, to sacrifice in some way so that that person, that group of people can find success, and in turn, happiness. And, in turn the person who feels that "heart power" gains happiness as well. Football coaches can be pretty deep, can't they. But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah, innocent facebook statuses. Some statuses and statements have more insidious, although sometimes unintended, consequences. Words have meanings, and using them can inflict harm, just as sometimes they can save a person. Macklemore recently released a song titled "Same Love". I do not care what your political, religious, or moral views are; the song has some meaningful messages. The artist goes out on a limb to express what he feels he must say, and he is willing to accept the blowback.  What I want to focus on is how Macklemore addresses the use of negative language in rap and on the internet. Those words have meaning, and they are thrown about with little thought to whom they might hurt or degrade. Words have meaning. Sometimes, the word you drop into a conversation with the intention of being funny, or flippant, or just trendy, can stab like a dagger. You did not mean it to stab anyone, but the wound is not less deep. The only way to avoid the unintended pain and scars that follow, is to not throw the word out in the first place. A sheathed dagger leaves no wound.

Ok, I will step off the soapbox. I had actually intended this entry to go in a much more humorous direction, but as often happens when writing, ideas flow and you just have to ride the current. So there you go. I thought a little more tonight than I might have intended. I thank the blog for that. Words have meaning, and thoughts have power.