This true story was posted to a tech support mailing list earlier this week. The names are being withheld, and you’ll understand why by the time you finish reading.

This just happened this afternoon. Once in a while we all get a chuckle like this:

A school employee calls me and says: “I just rebooted my PC and now it says ‘invalid system disk’, what now?”

I reply: “If you have a disk in the floppy drive, please pull it out.”

Employee: “Now what?”

Me: “Hit any key.”

I wait a few seconds, then, “Did it work?”

Employee: “Wait a minute! I can’t find it!”

Me: “Find what?”

Employee: “The any key.”

The tech support guy reported that he ended up going to the classroom to assist the teacher.

Today is Roald Dahl Day, the birthday of the man who gave the world James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and Matilda. He is less known, however, for his stories and novels written for adults, stories which explore a dark side of the human psyche.

• In “Beware of the Dog,” a British pilot recovers after being shot down during World War II. He is not sure where he is.
• “Man from the South” explores just how far gamblers will go for a bet.
• “Lamb to the Slaughter” examines the mettle of a desperate housewife.

Roald Dahl — not just for kids!

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary site lists 20 official new words in its 2007 Collegiate edition. They have gone beyond mere neologisms and have reached the point legitimate lexicographers consider them dictionary-worthy. They include these (definitions are mine):

• crunk — No one is sure of the original meaning, but now it’s a kind of music.
• ginormous – bigger than “big”
• perfect storm — everything worked out horribly wrong
• smackdown — four definitions listed, all involving someone getting hurt
• speed dating — Didn’t we used to call this activity “a mixer”?

The Library of Congress usually observes the historian’s practice of allowing 25 years between an event and its historical interpretation. The exception is The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project, which began immediately after the terror attacks of 2001 and is on display online.

From the site description:

The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project captures the heartfelt reactions, eyewitness accounts, and diverse opinions of Americans and others in the months that followed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93. Patriotism and unity mixed with sadness, anger, and insecurity are common themes expressed in this online presentation of almost 200 audio and video interviews, 45 graphic items, and 21 written narratives.

In 2002 the project was exhibited at the Library of Congress under the title “Witness and Response: September 11 Acquisitions at the Library of Congress.”

The Library of Congress American Memory Project archives documents, photographs, and other digital data related to a variety of topics: advertising, literature, and Native American history, to name just 3 of the 18 listed. Another valuable component for educators is The Learning Page, which includes lesson plans, activities, and professional development. It is a wonderful resource for teachers every day of the year.

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that “separate but equal is inherently unequal;” a year later the Court ordered the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed.” By 1963, however, the schools in Birmingham, Alabama, were still racially segregated. George Wallace, Governor of Alabama at the time, did everything in his power to defy court order and keep schools segregated. He even famously stood in the doorway to the University of Alabama, stopping incoming African-American students, until federal marshals forced him to step aside.

Strong feelings gripped the city. State Troopers and National Guardsmen were called out to support opposing views. On this date James Armstrong, sharing the dream that Dr. King had articulated just days earlier, took his sons Dwight and Floyd to Graymont Elementary School. They became the first African-American students to attend classes there. Throughout the city other schools were also being integrated.

Birmingham had already been dubbed “Bombingham” for its historic response to civil rights issues. The following Sunday morning, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had an African-American congregation. Dozens of people were hurt, and four girls were killed. The city was deeply affected, and the cause of civil rights gained supporters both locally and nationally as a result.

In 1995 Christopher Paul Curtis wrote The Watsons Go to Birmingham: 1963, using the bombing of the church as a key plot point. The book received a Newbery Honor in 1996. The ALA wrote:

From its hilarious opening chapters to its shattering conclusion, The Watsons Go to Birmingham is a compelling novel that brings to life an African-American family. It draws together everyday events in such a way as to send the Watsons on a journey to Birmingham that will change them forever. In his first book, Curtis uses the devastating events in Birmingham to integrate the dichotomy of familial love and stability with the racial strife of the 1960s.

Three men involved in the bombing were eventually convicted of murder and sent to prison. Governor Wallace later regretted his earlier beliefs and actions, apologized to Civil Rights leaders, and supported African-Americans who wanted to enter public service. Historians point to the tragedy as a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

On this date in 1998, the search engine Google was incorporated. In the nine years since then, it has become not only the most robust general search engine available but also a source of maps, graphics, blogs, e-mail, video, scholarship, and, of course, holiday logos like the one pictured below from Martin Luther King Day, 2007.

Google has become so popular that it has spawned spinoffs. The Google Image Labeler invites users to match labels with a partner, earning points while racing the clock. GoogleWhacking consists of finding two words that produce only one result in Google. The Funny Pages offers possible alternative Google logos (my favorite is the one for Consonant Day). There’s even a drinking game: the Google Snake Game. Google ice Cream is served in the cafeteria at the Googleplex in Mountain View (If food bears your name, you’re officially a Cultural Icon!)

Here’s the next 9 years!

We are all familiar with the 5-paragraph essay, supported by some teachers as “a useful tool for essay tests,” decried by others as “writing at its worst.” Those who object to the format explain that it reduces writing to a “fill-in-the-blanks” activity with emphasis on structure over content. Good writing, they say, is more than structure. Did Shakespeare write to a formula? (OK, besides the sonnets.) Did F. Scott Fitzgerald? Does Toni Morrison?

Writing to a formula can, however, have its benefits. Jeff Foxworthy’s “If A, then B” statements launched his career in the 1980s.

• If you’ve been married 3 times and still have the same in-laws, you might be a redneck.
• If you think the last words to “The Star Spangled Banner” are “Gentlemen, start your engines,” you might be a redneck.
• If your idea of quality entertainment is a 6-pack and a bug zapper, you might be a redneck.
• If your porch collapses and more than 3 dogs die, you might be a redneck.
• If your patio furniture used to be your living room furniture, you might be a redneck.

The idea caught on, and there are hundreds of variations now. Maybe there’s a place for writing to a formula, after all.

Special thanks to Dr. Mardy Grothe!

American public schools are required to filter Internet access in order to protect kids from inappropriate materials online. Because not all filters block the same sites, some schools use more than one filter. Because filters respond to text on a page, sometimes legitimate news sources are blocked, especially when there is news of a drug bust or sexual assault.

If filters were inconvenient but otherwise effective, we might find a way to deal with them. Time and time again, however, filters have proven ineffective: students find their way around them.

In the most recent example, the Australian federal government spent AU$84 million (about US$69 million) on a porn filter called NetAlert. The government planned to make the filter available to every family free of charge. Melbourne sixteen-year-old Tom Wood cracked the code in a little over 30 minutes. When they realized what had happened, the government added a second filter to the first. Wood hacked through in about 40 minutes.

“Unfortunately, no single measure can protect children from online harm,” commented Communications Minister Helen Coonan. “Traditional parenting skills have never been more important.”

Minister Coonan is right. The best way to protect kids from the “dark side” of the Internet is for parents and teachers to prepare kids for what they might encounter and to monitor their online activity. Information Literacy has never been more important than it is now, as technology makes almost anyone a publisher. Children are as much in danger from predators and bullies online as they are from inappropriate images. There is no filter for poor judgement, and children won’t know better unless we teach them.

Richard Wright, born September 4, 1908, is best known for two books, Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945). He presented his characters not as stereotypes or caricatures, but as African-Americans that he knew, men who were frustrated, angry, and violent. The books had a strong impact on the African American literature of the late 20th century. Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison have acknowledged his influence on their work.

Wright wrote:

• “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”
• “Our too-young and too-new America . . . insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black. . . . It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character!”
• “My life as a Negro in America had led me to feel . . . that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself; for I felt that without a common bond uniting men . . . there could be no living worthy of being called human.”
• “Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.”
• “Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain.”
• “I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.”
• “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”

(Image source: PBS)

Sometimes students have trouble understanding how they can use writing to demonstrate an attitude without using smileys, multiple exclamation points, or parenthetic expressions such as (sarcasm intended). Sometimes they just need a good example.

Enter Dawn Meehan from Illinois, a stay-at-home mother of six, ages 12 - 1. One day she took them all with her to do the grocery shopping. Without her knowledge, one of the kids slipped a package of 44 Pokemon cards into the cart and opened them in the car on the way home. When Dawn realized what had happened, she took the cards away and decided to try to sell them on eBay.

The rest is viral marketing history. Her eBay description is so funny that Dawn received more than 10,000 e-mails; her blog, Because I Said So, had almost 100,000 hits in one day, and the cards eventually sold for $142.51.

I’m copying the text of her story here because eBay might take the page down soon.

I’m selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn’t notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.

You haven’t lived until you’ve gone grocery shopping with six kids in tow. I would rather swim, covered in bait, through the English Channel, be a contestant on Fear Factor when they’re having pig brains for lunch, or do fourth grade math than to take my six kids to the grocery store. Because I absolutely detest grocery shopping, I tend to put it off as long as possible. There comes a time, however, when you’re peering into your fridge and thinking, ‘Hmmm, what can I make with ketchup, Italian dressing, and half an onion,’ that you decide you cannot avoid going to the grocery store any longer. Before beginning this most treacherous mission, I gather all the kids together and give them “The Lecture“.

“The Lecture“ goes like this…

MOM: “We have to go to the grocery store.”

KIDS: “Whine whine whine whine whine.“

MOM: “Hey, I don’t want to go either, but it’s either that or we’re eating cream of onion-ketchup soup and drinking Italian dressing for dinner tonight.”

KIDS: “Whine whine whine whine whine.“

MOM: “Now here are the rules: do not ask me for anything, do not poke the packages of meat in the butcher section, do not test the laws of physics and try to take out the bottom can in the pyramid shaped display, do not play baseball with oranges in the produce section, and most importantly, do not try to leave your brother at the store. Again.”

OK, the kids have been briefed. Time to go.

Once at the store, we grab not one, but two shopping carts. I wear the baby in a sling and the two little children sit in the carts while I push one cart and my oldest son pushes the other one. My oldest daughter is not allowed to push a cart. Ever. Why? Because the last time I let her push the cart, she smashed into my ankles so many times, my feet had to be amputated by the end of our shopping trip. This is not a good thing. You try running after a toddler with no feet sometime.

At this point, a woman looks at our two carts and asks me, “Are they all yours?” I answer good naturedly, “Yep!

“Oh my, you have your hands full.”

“Yes, I do, but it‘s fun!” I say smiling. I’ve heard all this before. In fact, I hear it every time I go anywhere with my brood.

We begin in the produce section where all these wonderfully, artistically arranged pyramids of fruit stand. There is something so irresistibly appealing about the apple on the bottom of the pile, that a child cannot help but try to touch it. Much like a bug to a zapper, the child is drawn to this piece of fruit. I turn around to the sounds of apples cascading down the display and onto the floor. Like Indiana Jones, there stands my son holding the all-consuming treasure that he just HAD to get and gazing at me with this dumbfounded look as if to say, “Did you see that??? Wow! I never thought that would happen!”

I give the offending child an exasperated sigh and say, “Didn’t I tell you, before we left, that I didn’t want you taking stuff from the bottom of the pile???”

“No. You said that you didn’t want us to take a can from the bottom of the pile. You didn’t say anything about apples.”

With superhuman effort, I resist the urge to send my child to the moon and instead focus on the positive - my child actually listened to me and remembered what I said!!! I make a mental note to be a little more specific the next time I give the kids The Grocery Store Lecture.

A little old man looks at all of us and says, “Are all of those your kids?”

Thinking about the apple incident, I reply, “Nope. They just started following me. I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

OK, now onto the bakery section where everything smells so good, I’m tempted to fill my cart with cookies and call it a day. Being on a perpetual diet, I try to hurry past the assortment of pies, cakes, breads, and pastries that have my children drooling. At this point the chorus of “Can we gets” begins.

“Can we get donuts?”

“No.”

“Can we get cupcakes?”

“No.”

“Can we get muffins?”

“No.”

“Can we get pie?”

“No.”

You’d think they’d catch on by this point, but no, they’re just getting started.

In the bakery, they’re giving away free samples of coffee cake and of course, my kids all take one. The toddler decides he doesn’t like it and proceeds to spit it out in my hand. (That’s what moms do. We put our hands in front of our children’s mouths so they can spit stuff into them. We’d rather carry around a handful of chewed up coffee cake, than to have the child spit it out onto the floor. I’m not sure why this is, but ask any mom and she’ll tell you the same.) Of course, there’s no garbage can around, so I continue shopping one-handed while searching for someplace to dispose of the regurgitated mess in my hand.

In the meat department, a mother with one small baby asks me, “Wow! Are all six yours?”

I answer her, “Yes, but I’m thinking of selling a couple of them.”

(Still searching for a garbage can at this point.)

Ok, after the meat department, my kids’ attention spans are spent. They’re done shopping at this point, but we aren’t even halfway through the store. This is about the time they like to start having shopping cart races. And who may I thank for teaching them this fun pastime? My seventh “child”, also known as my husband. While I’m picking out loaves of bread, the kids are running down the aisle behind the carts in an effort to get us kicked out of the store. I put to stop to that just as my son is about to crash head on into a giant cardboard cut-out of a Keebler elf stacked with packages of cookies.

Ah! Yes! I find a small trash can by the coffee machine in the cereal aisle and finally dump out the squishy contents of my hand. After standing in the cereal aisle for an hour and a half while the kids perused the various cereals, comparing the marshmallow and cheap, plastic toy content of each box, I broke down and let them each pick out a box. At any given time, we have twenty open boxes of cereal in my house.

As this is going on, my toddler is playing Houdini and maneuvering his little body out of the seat belt in an attempt to stand up in the cart. I’m amazed the kid made it to his second birthday without suffering a brain damaging head injury. In between trying to flip himself out of the cart, he sucks on the metal bars of the shopping cart. Mmmm, can you say “influenza”?

The shopping trip continues much like this. I break up fights between the kids now and then and stoop down to pick up items that the toddler has flung out of the cart. I desperately try to get everything on my list without adding too many other goodies to the carts.

Somehow I manage to complete my shopping in under four hours and head for the check-outs where my kids start in on a chorus of, “Can we have candy?” What evil minded person decided it would be a good idea to put a display of candy in the check-out lanes, right at a child’s eye level? Obviously someone who has never been shopping with children.

As I unload the carts, I notice many extra items that my kids have sneaked in the carts unbeknownst to me. I remove a box of Twinkies, a package of cupcakes, a bag of candy, and a can of cat food (we don’t even have a cat!). I somehow missed the box of Pokemon cards however and ended up purchasing them unbeknownst to me. As I pay for my purchases, the clerk looks at me, indicates my kids, and asks, “Are they all yours?”

Frustrated, exhausted from my trip, sick to my stomach from writing out a check for $289.53, dreading unloading all the groceries and putting them away and tired of hearing that question, I look at the clerk and answer her in my most sarcastic voice, “No. They’re not mine. I just go around the neighborhood gathering up kids to take to the grocery store because it’s so much more fun that way.”

So, up for auction is an opened (they ripped open the box on the way home from the store) package of Pokemon cards. There are 44 cards total. They’re in perfect condition, as I took them away from the kiddos as soon as we got home from the store. Many of them say “Energy”. I tried carrying them around with me, but they didn’t work. I definitely didn’t have any more energy than usual. One of them is shiny. There are a few creature-like things on many of them. One is called Pupitar. Hee hee hee Pupitar! (Oh no! My kids’ sense of humor is rubbing off on me!) Anyway, I don’t there’s anything special about any of these cards, but I’m very much not an authority on Pokemon cards. I just know that I’m not letting my kids keep these as a reward for their sneakiness.

Shipping is FREE on this item. Insurance is optional, but once I drop the package at the post office, it is no longer my responsibility. For example, if my son decides to pour a bottle of glue into the envelope, or my daughter spills a glass of juice on the package, that’s my responsibility and I will fully refund your money. If, however, I take the envelope to the post office and a disgruntled mail carrier sets fire to it, a pack of wild dogs rip into it, or a mail sorting machine shreds it, it’s out of my hands, so you may want to add insurance. I will leave feedback for you as soon as I’ve received your payment. I will be happy to combine shipping on multiple items won within three days. This comes from a smoke-free, pet-free, child-filled home. Please ask me any questions before placing your bid. Happy bidding!

This is a story that helps kids understand the importance of writing in one’s own voice, the value of the appropriate tone in writing, and what parenthood is really like.