On this date in 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg caught fire while attempting to moor in New Jersey. The mooring was experiencing some difficulty, and newsreel cameramen had focused on the efforts of the ground crew. As a result, they missed the beginning of the fire, recording only the end. The tragic event is also recorded in still photographs and in the famous account by radio journalist Herbert Morrison, whose words were later added to newsreel footage.

Morrison, recognizing almost immediately the full implications of the fire, uttered the famous phrase, “Oh, the humanity!” as the burning craft crashed to the ground, killing everyone aboard.

The phrase became famous partly as the voice of a journalist who is helpless to stop the tragedy unfolding before him. It is echoed, though, by the radio audience and later movie audiences, recognizing the enormity of what they’re seeing.

That authentic voice is the same quality we ask our students to bring to their writing.

Reading a transcript of Morrison’s words as they watch the clip can help students understand what Morrison is reporting. It might be a good exercise in information literacy to ask students how hearing Morrison say the words affects their understanding of the events, as opposed to just reading them.

It might also be a good activity to ask them how they might edit his words. What is gained and lost by the changes?

They can then apply those insights to modern media: what are the strengths of text alone? When a journalist has strong video footage, what value is added by narration? What does this tell us about the importance of old-fashioned writing in a digital media age?

Update 6-29-08: I stand corrected. As Alpha comments, not all passengers aboard The Hindenberg died in the fire and crash.

Teachers are always on the lookout for timely examples of concepts we are about to present in class. This example of irony just hit my inbox: a factory in China discovered that the thousands of colorful flags they were producing were actually “Free Tibet” emblems. Police suspect some may appear in demonstrations when the Olympic torch passes through Hong Kong.

The Website Despair.com has good ironic visuals. (Warning — while the site is intended to be humorous, it may be dangerous for teachers in the spring. Don’t stay on the site long. You’ll see what I mean.) My favorites include “Ambition,” “Do It Later,” and “Loneliness.”

Whitelies.tv offers irony appropriate for classroom use on a couple of levels. Produced by an anti-smoking group, the commercial shows a widow explaining that her husband had always planned to start a healthier lifestyle a little later in his life. The day before his 50th birthday, they learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. It ends with this chilling statement: “Gary said he wouldn’t smoke after he turned 50. He was right.”

We have to make sure students understand the concept before we turn them loose with the fifth act of Romeo and Juliet or Jonathan Swift’s classic, “A Modest Proposal.” How do YOU introduce irony?

Pat, an English professor in Kansas, writes the following:

NOTE: Normally I blog mainly for myself, but I hope this entry gets passed on to healthcare and communication educators, who can perhaps help their students understand that language matters.

Anyone who has said a final good-bye to someone they love will understand the point of her blog: how we communicate something is at least as important as what we say; the “other damage” she refers to should have been avoided.

I last had a conversation with Mom the night of December 9, 2007. We said “goodnight” on the phone at 7:30 as she was getting ready for bed. Sometime before 5:45 that next morning Mom had a massive stroke. Mom is dead, and I’m fully aware that a timely arrival at the hospital would have not made a difference for her ultimate fate. Her stroke was hemorrhagic; the bomb in her head had already gone off, and the damage was irrevocable. But there was other damage done by the delay, and a healthcare professional with stronger communication skills could have made a difference.

When the nurse found her, Mom’s face was sagging; her speech was slurred; she seemed paralyzed on one side; her tongue was swollen; and she had difficulty swallowing. Those were her symptoms. I know these because the RN listed them when she called me at 5:50 immediately after she called 911. Unfortunately, according to the documentation, that nurse hadn’t shared those symptoms with 911. Instead she gave a diagnosis: “possible stroke.”

Zeroing in on “possible” and the nurse’s statement that Mom was still conscious, the dispatcher assigned the case to the lowest priority of transfer. A stroke victim would be transferred to the hospital as convenient.

Read the remainder of Pat’s blog to learn how the problem was compounded by other people’s lapses, making a bad situation worse than it had to be.

This blog entry could serve as a model for a writing lesson. Pat narrates, describes, analyzes, and uses an understated voice — especially in her final sentence — to make a simple point: whether it’s a professional call for help or just a mother speaking her daughter’s name, language matters.

For this entry thanks — again! — to Alex.

The message in my inbox was succinct: “Spellingcity.com. It’s new. It’s cool.”

And it is. Spelling City offers kids up to about 8th grade a variety of ways to interact with words: they can hear them, drag and drop letters to spell them, and play games like Hangman as practice. Teachers can type in their own spelling lists and save them so that class time isn’t spent on random words.

I tried typing in some SAT-level words, and Spelling City objected. The site is still being developed, so down the road it may be ready for words like mendacity. In the meantime, it’s open for business. If you teach traditional spelling units, this site could be your new best friend!

Apostrophe with that?
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Daniel Dyer
Cleveland’s Plain Dealer

Normally I’m not abnormal. I don’t grind my teeth, celebrate Lizzie Borden’s birthday (July 19, 1860), murder an old man in his sleep because his filmy eye annoys me. I leave well enough alone. Let sleeping dogs lie. Etc.

But a recent contretemps with Starbucks nearly set my teeth-agrinding and got me reading Edgar Allen Poe again. I was at the drive-thru, waiting at the window for delivery of my grande decaf (”no room, please”). And then I saw it. A hand-written sign inside: “Skinny Latte’s.”

Apostrophe S.

When the little glass door slid open, I smiled, thanked the partner, and said (gently, calmly, amiably, sanely): “You know, there shouldn’t be an apostrophe on ‘lattes.’ It’s just a plural.”

She looked at me as if I’d told her I’d found a booger in my brew. But I pressed on: “Why don’t you just, you know, erase the apostrophe?” I smiled.

A horn honked behind me, and I pulled away, satisfied that I had, in my little way, improved the environment.

A few days later. Back at that same window. I looked at the sign: “Skinny Latte’s,” it insisted. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if someone had darkened the apostrophe. Made it bigger.

Read the rest of the article.

Special thanks for Mark for this one!

In the United States, ninth grade is often the year students are introduced to Shakespeare, and the play of choice is Romeo and Juliet. The unit is usually second only to the research paper in terms of difficulty; it’s just so hard to read the English Shakespeare crafted 400 years ago.

I tell my students that reading Shakespeare is like listening to a wonderful song on the radio as you are driving out of range of the station: you can tell it’s a great song, but the static makes it difficult to appreciate the music.

The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project has developed The Interactive Folio for Romeo and Juliet. This wonderful resource really helps break through the static. On the left is Shakespeare’s text, hyperlinked. Click on a link, and to the right you will see support — a paraphrase, an explanation, a picture, audio, or video. Students can read straight through where they feel confident. When they need help, click! It’s there.

While the interactive folio is currently the “star” in my book, don’t stop there. There are links to several projects that bring Shakespeare to 21st-century students of all ethnic backgrounds. Don’t miss the Learning Commons for ready-to-use activities.

Somewhere there is a student who thought she was going to hate Shakespeare. She’ll use this site and think, “Wow, this is cool. Shakespeare is cool!”

“I can’t get my kids to use capital letters,” the young teacher mourned. “It’s because of computers. The kids expect the word processor to fix it for them.”

Sometimes students really don’t see any value in pesky capital letters. I had a class that was cured very quickly, though, by a simple exercise.

• Which one are you more likely to see on the pace lap at the Daytona 500: a mustang or a Mustang?
• Which one do you sing into: a mike or a Mike?
• Which would you rather receive for Christmas: an apple or an Apple?

Boom! They got it.

Once students understand that the capital letter actually conveys meaning, our insistence on correct usage makes more sense to them.

This doesn’t mean they automatically remember to do it every time — just that, when we point out the lapse, they don’t roll their eyes quite as much.

Good enough.

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!

Source: America’s Library

With Halloween just a week away, you may be looking for some Edgar Allan Poe lessons to help celebrate the season. Here are a few Web-based resources to check out.

• Law and Order: Edgar Allan Poe
  In this unit students read both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” (The stories are available online with built-in vocabulary support.) Then they choose one of the two stories and work in small groups to write a Law and Order-style scene for the day after the story ends. Will the jury believe that the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is NOT insane, as he claims? Will Montresor confess? ::Law and Order DUN dun::
• The Interactive Raven
  As students read the poem, they are introduced to concepts like alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme. Have headphones ready — this site has sound!
• Actor Basil Rathbone reads “The Raven.”
• “The Masque of the Red Death”
  This online text includes links to vocabulary support.
• The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia
• The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland
• Poe Stories, a labor of love by graphic artist Robert Giordano
• Read about the Poe Toaster, a mysterious man who visits Poe’s grave January 19, the anniversary of his birth.