Month: November 2015

Embracing Curmudgeonry

/ wlm3 / 4 Comments
HL Mencken

HL Mencken

There’s nothing that irritates me more as a teacher than a 9th grader offering unsolicited pedagogical advice. For example, today a freshman suggested that I not make my vocabulary quizzes cumulative, or if I felt I had to dip into previous lessons, I only go back one or two. “That way,” she said, “we’d do better on the quizzes.”

In situations like this, rather than seguing into a “best practices” mode and patiently explaining that the goal is for students to remember the word for life, not merely for a week, and that resurrecting words from earlier lists should prompt them to review words from previous lessons, I reminded the student that she merely has an 8th grade education and therefore is about as qualified to offer pedagogical advice to a 30-year veteran teacher as I am to command a nuclear submarine.

Another student countered, “But that’s her opinion, and she should be able to state it freely.”

“Well,” I said, “I think that given that I just responded to it suggests that she stated it freely. My point is merely that in the area of teaching vocabulary Euthanasia [(cough) not her real name] doesn’t know the findings of the latest studies on cognitive retention or really understands that ensuring students make high marks on vocabulary quizzes isn’t my primary goal.[1] Therefore, her offering advice in an area in which she doesn’t possess expertise might be seen by some – I-and-I for example – as arrogant.

Of course, everyone who can read and write thinks he’s capable of teaching English. Believe me, as a former Department Chair, I’ve read many a cover letter from literature lovers in mid-life funks wanting to switch careers from real estate sales to teaching Hemingway.

However, despite HL Mencken’s contention that “[t]he worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English,” I submit it ain’t as easy as it looks in the movies, and it gets old getting professional and philosophical advice from novices.

Perhaps next time, I’ll ask the irritant to diagram on the board one of Faulkner’s sentences from Absalom, Absalom .

Or, better yet, just go into the best practices mode.

Halloween on Folly Beach

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment
Jack of Cups Saloon by Wesley Moore
     Jack of Cups Saloon by Wesley Moore

Last Thursday, I was at one of my favorite Folly Beach oases, the Jack of Cups, talking Halloween with the Jessie, an impressively sophisticated twenty-something bartender who double majored in philosophy and theater in college, a young woman who can expound on Kant and Hegel as well as Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith.

I confessed that I rarely indulged in dressing up for Halloween, but that perhaps the most creative costume I put together was in grad school when I decided to transform myself into the personification of a libido. After I described the costume (black tee and jeans, white pancake makeup, red-laced fringed Lone Ranger-like mask, phallic walking stick), Jessie said that coincidentally she had been talking to three of her friends about doing Halloween as the chorus of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – you know, a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, a libido.

She went on to say that when she had mentioned the idea to someone else, the person had made a sour face and declared the concept “offensive.” What was really cool, Jessie claimed, was that her friend who originally had come up with the idea was biracial and loves the word mulatto and that she, Jessie, has been diagnosed with Ocular Albinism, Type 1, so coming up with a mosquito and libido would have been all they needed to pull it off.

I said, “Go for it. How humorously inappropriate for the politically correct crowd to chide, given the ironic brilliance of the concept.”

b21261aladdinsane-cropped-975x731 cmpltunknwn-inspiration-david-bowie-4Naw, she had abandoned the idea for an easier one. She was going as David Bowie from his Ziggy Stardust days and her fiancé was going as the mid-70’s David Bowie a la the Young Americans album. She said she and her fiancé were going to make out at parties, which, I said, made delicious narcissistic sense.

I had just reposted my “You Won’t Believe These Killer, Innovative, Somewhat Offensive Halloween Costumes,” and when Jessie disappeared into the kitchen, I checked my email to find this costume suggestion: Sylvia Plath with cardboard box oven.

Now, that’s what I call spooky.

Anyway, last night I decided at the last minute to wander down to Center Street on Folly to see what was out there, hoping against hope that I might run into twin Bowies sucking face. No such luck, but I did run into Thomas Ravenel and Kathryn Dennis.

Southern Charm

Southern Charm