To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether ’tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,

Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock’s bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell.

To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal’s opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt.

To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there’s the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household’s petty plagues,
The cook’s well-practiced kicks, the butler’s broom,
The infant’s careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten?

Who would spaniels fear,
Or strays trespassing from a neighbor’s yard,
But that the dread of our unheeded cries
And scratches at a barricaded door
No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
And makes us rather bear our humans’ faults
Than run away to unguessed miseries?

Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
And thus the bristling hair of resolution
Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
We pause upon the threshold of decision.

(original source unknown, but special thanks to Sally!)

On December 7, Doris Lessing accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, Sweden. Her acceptance speech challenges anyone who teaches, anyone who claims the benefits of literacy, anyone who understands the power of story:

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in ‘56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north west Zimbabwe early in the eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa” as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found here in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like all the schools built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas, or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros, in the library are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read: they are tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or with titles like ‘Weekend in Paris’ or ‘Felicity Finds Love’.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us but usually in more august contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they must know everyone is watching them?

My friend doesn’t have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling earlier are here to make it up. Some pupils walk every morning many miles, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can’t study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook when they get home from school and before they set off for school.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop shyly in, and all, everyone begs for books. “Please send us books when you get back to London”. One man said, “They taught us to read but we have no books”. Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.

I was there some days. The dust blew past, water was short because the pumps had broken and the women were getting water from the river again.

Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this “school” was like. On the last day, it was end of term and they slaughtered the goat, and it was cut into mounds of bits and cooked in a great tin. This was the much looked forward to end of term feast, boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.

I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.

Read the entire lecture here.

I wanted my American Lit students to understand the mindset of American writers in the years just prior to World War I. I asked them to work in small groups and find some related poems in the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. They were to decide how the poems connected, then memorize and present them. I also required simple props of some kind.

The activity went well, although there was some “discussion” about having to memorize poems. After seeing all of the presentations, students grasped the bleakness that pervaded the zeitgeist, and they carried that understanding with them as we read T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Spoon River Anthology: the definitive online edition presents the poetry for future readers. From the site:

Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology was an immediate commercial success when it was published in 1915. Unconventional in both style and content, it shattered the myths of small town American life. A collection of epitaphs of residents of a small town, a full understanding of Spoon River requires the reader to piece together narratives from fragments contained in individual poems.

Here’s one of my favorites:

“Fiddler Jones”

THE earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill–only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle–
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Special thanks to David Dillard and the Net-Gold list for this heads-up!

Blogs. Kids write in them on a regular basis at MySpace and Facebook, but teachers are still figuring out how to use them effectively in the classroom. Heather Strout, who teaches in New Jersey, took the plunge and implemented blogging as part of her Creative Writing class this year. Her success can serve as a model for others.

“It was easy to set up, easy to navigate, and, most importantly, incredibly easy to update,” she says, calling Blogger.com “an excellent fit for my classroom needs.”

Strout posts assignments, reminders, and information about contests and local poetry readings on the class blog. Students who have been absent check the blog to see what they missed.

Each student has an individual blog linked to the class page via the blogroll, making navigation easy. Strout requires at least one post each week to student blogs and at least two comments on other students’ blogs. She leverages the interactive nature of blogging to provide peer feedback from everyone, even the quiet kids who sit in the back. The discussion “is consistently respectful and constructive: I have yet to have any student use our blog in any way that is negative or hurtful. The importance of sensitivity and appropriateness is something I stress - and insist on - from Day One.”

The community of writers has broadened since the classes started blogging. Students in different class periods can respond to one another’s writing, and a couple of former students even log in now and then from college to respond to current student writing. Students understand that their audience is not just the teacher, which is an important component of authentic writing.

Strout also maintains a professional blog, From one teacher to another, a place to reflect on her practice. She says she’d like to connect with other teachers of creative writing, since she’s the only one at her school who teaches it.

“To any teacher who is reluctant to try something new on the technology front, I would highly recommend blogging as a great place to start. It is incredibly user friendly and, most importantly, it is a technology that students genuinely embrace.”

WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.

“This was by no means an easy decision, but teaching our students how to conjugate verbs in a way that would allow them to describe events that have already occurred is a luxury that we can no longer afford,” Phoenix-area high-school principal Sam Pennock said. “With our current budget, the past tense must unfortunately become a thing of the past.”

In the most dramatic display of the new trend yet, the Tennessee Department of Education decided Monday to remove “-ed” endings from all of the state’s English classrooms, saving struggling schools an estimated $3 million each year. Officials say they plan to slowly phase out the tense by first eliminating the past perfect; once students have adjusted to the change, the past progressive, the past continuous, the past perfect progressive, and the simple past will be cut. Hundreds of school districts across the country are expected to follow suit.

Read the entire story.

On Monday I blogged about the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary, now available online. I received this response with an offer for readers of this blog:

Thank you very much for the good words in the English Teacher Blog regarding Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary Online! On behalf of Merriam-Webster, we’d like to offer the editorial services of America’s foremost dictionary publisher to you and to your online community of readers. Our staff of lexicographers (the largest in America) is available to answer specific questions about words and their origin, spelling, pronunciation, meaning, usage, or just about anything having to do with the English language.

The editorial resources at Merriam-Webster here in Springfield, Massachusetts include a collection of more than 15 million citations (examples of words used in context) and a data-gathering program that produces many thousands of new citations every year. It’s the largest collection of its kind in North America. If you have a question about a particular word, such as who first used it or why it has not been entered in the dictionary, our staff can answer it!

Please don’t hesitate to contact me … with any language-related question. I’ll pass it on to our word experts and see if we can help solve a few mysteries or settle a few debates.

Best,

Arthur Bicknell
Senior Publicist
Merriam-Webster, Inc.

The message very generously includes contact information which I have edited out for obvious reasons. The offer is genuine, however. After discussion, Mr. Bicknell and I agreed that I will serve as liaison — send your questions to me, and I’ll be happy to forward them.

From YouTube comes a humorous video with practical classroom application. Master Teacher Dawn Sahouani mentions using it to work with point of view. Tell the story from the point of view of the two men in the glider, the two men on the ground, and perhaps even from that of the pilot who gets the glider airborne or a reporter (insurance agent? government aviation official? the men’s wives?) detailing the event later.

What’s that? You say YouTube is blocked at your school? No problem! If you can access it from home, you can use Zamzar.com to convert it to a file. You can save it on a flash drive and take it to school tomorrow. Zamzar is fast — I had my file converted in under 5 minutes. They are also free, though they accept donations.

YouTube resources can be blocked from student access at school — that’s probably a good thing. The legitimate ones are still available to teachers who do a little advance preparation.

Google has announced a new contest for “pre-university” students, one designed to help students become involved with open source software and code.

What does that have to do with teaching English, you ask? One option in the competition involves some serious writing: creating documentation. (Anyone who has ever searched a help menu understands how important good writing is here!) In addition to good grammar and mechanics, the winning writers will need a good grasp of process analysis.

This contest isn’t for everyone, and you might not want to make a class project of it. But you might know some high school writers who are into technology and who might be intrigued by the chance to win a T-shirt (or money or a trip to the Googleplex) and make a contribution to technology users everywhere.