Thursday

Summer has ended. Today was football equipment handout. Monday is the first practice. So long to the summer of '07. But what a summer it was! Marriage, biking, games with the kids, our vows at the wedding, the final HP novel, our bats roosting in the chimney, the cookout after the wedding, our Fourth of July picnic at Dad's, some early summer tubing, "The Transformers," fishing and camping at Stump Lake, losing numerous times to Kristie in Sport Toss, Scrabble, and Boggle, the acceptance of my essay proposal for a book, plenty of shopping trips to GF and Fargo, Kristie redoing our downstairs bathroom, early evenings watching the bats circle around me, the RRVWP, Casey's paintball excursion, one trip to the pool, Kristie's volleyball team obliterating the competition at the Fourth of July tournament (and my team finishing last), and all of the little not so trivial moments we shared as a family. Outside of Mom and Dad being here to enjoy it, it's hard to imagine a better possible summer!

*****

Yesterday I met with several other members of my department to look at the 'new' 9th grade composition class. It used to be Comp I for sophomores, but since the state moved the test from 10th grade to 9th grade, we had to move the class. But truthfully, the class does so much more than prep the students for the test.

Our book - "Write Source" - seems excellent. I'm really looking forward to it because it incorporates the Six Traits format, which I'm not that familiar with. So I'll be teaching writing differently. This is a good thing.

I believe teaching writing is what I do best. But I've been stagnant - or so it feels to me - in my approach to my Comp classes. I've fallen into that rut where I've done the same type of thing for too many years now. I need to shake that up. We are starting with a new grading system - Engaging exercises (prompts or revision exercises) are 30%, themes (three main essays students will develop and submit) are 50%, and daily work (still fuzzy on what this entails) will be the remaining 20%.

In the past, I used to try to get my students to pound out 7-10 themes - IN NINE WEEKS! This was ridiculous. Students fell into a rut where they were churning out work rather than really writing - thinking, exploring, and creating. Churning out work is fine - for passing a writing test, but for crafting writers, it's drudgery.

Now as I understand our new approach, our three main themes will be in the areas of narrative, expository, and persuasive. This should give me plenty of room to build up the skills (and refine the craft) of my writers in each area. No longer do I have to go in thinking "we only have a week for persuasive and then it is on to compare and contrast." I even envision students developing a number of rough drafts before selecting one to develop into successive drafts and then submitting for a grade.

I can't wait to get started. But I don't teach the class until third quarter, so I have a bit of a wait.

*****

I read an essay from a July issue "Newsweek" entitled "The Myth of Boyhood." Apparently there has been a rash of books aimed at young boys and their fathers concerning a return to the 'good old days' of when a father knew everything and his son soaked it all up (I envision "Leave it to Beaver" or something like that).

But what really fascinated me was that the author, Jennie Yabroff," argues that this kind of 'good old days' never really existed. Sure in generations past it was easier for a father to seem to know like they knew everything - for example, they could show you how to fix the engine on a '57 Chevy. Today that is impossible. Not because fathers are worse, but our world is completely different. Technology has rendered it so that those simple tasks (well, I'm not one to say fixing a car engine is an easy task at all), are now quite impossible. As Yabroff states, just try fixing the engine on a 2008 vehicle. It has a computer in it. Good luck with that. Or try explaining to your child how the DVR works on their DirecTV or how a cell phone works or any number of things. Our world - for better or worse - is just too complex.

Plus, and this is what is really interesting, Yabroff argues (to quote an author of one of the "Myth of Boyhood" style books) "'When you have anxieties about the present you express them by hearkening back to a safer past." And if that safer past ever really existed, well, that's debatable. Nostalgia can do incredible things.

Not only have I witnessed this in my life - every time I ask Casey to do some menial task and he begrudges having to do it and I start to get angry, I have to remember -I was the same way! I don't like to think like that, but I was. Yes, I worked hard on a farm, but when Dad was gone, I was lazy. Even when he was there, if I could drag something out or delay it somehow, I did it. As an adult, I like to think I worked much harder than I did and that I was much better about having to do something, but that is fabrication.

The same is true in athletics. Dad was forever blasting my high school coaches about not having us scrimmage enough. He flat out laughed at one of my brother's coaches who abhorred physical contact and just conditioned his players all the time. But look at what the coach at St. John's has done - the winningest college football coach at any level - and his players don't lift weights nor do they ever scrimmage! Today's athletes have changed from those my dad practiced against. The same is true for coaches with holding water from players (my coaches even did this). Now it's a sin to do that. Times have changed. And if Dad were alive, he'd still tell me, "Get those kids out and hit, hit , hit," but in reality all that does is beat the kids up. It doesn't make them better players or athletes. The weight room and off season programs (never even imagined in my dad's day) do that.


The same is true, of course, in education. Maybe even more so. "Kids don't read like the used to." I hear this a lot. But I would be willing to bet if we went back to whatever people seem to think of as the golden age of education (the 40s and 50s?), you'd find alarming rates of illiteracy. Only you didn't know it because over half the students never graduated. You could do well in the world without knowing how to read or write. My dad retired with a lot of money, and he never had a high school degree! So here too the world has changed, but our perceptions aren't facing what really was reality years ago.

What do people think if you walked in on Joan Clever and her family that you'd see the Beave reading a Hardy's Boy mystery? Would her husband be perusing his way through the paper? What did everyone just sit around and read (before big bad TV came around)? I can't imagine they did. My dad was of this generation, and he would read (he preferred westerns) but that was only after all his work was finished and there was nothing else to do. Why should we expect any different of our kids?

Well, one is that the new world of work requires more reading and writing than ever before. And we are working to meet those needs, but don't give me any of this - "kids 50 years ago could read and write better." I don't buy it.

In fact, I bet you could make an argument - given our technology and learning rates - kids are better educated than ever before. Is that good enough to keep pace with China and others? No. But let's get rid of the nostalgia bit and focus on real improvement.