Dumbing down?

I know educators mean well, but have they really thought the issue out?

I recently ran across an “adaptation” of The Wind in the Willows that nearly made me throw up. Sentences were shortened and converted to simpler grammatical forms; shorter words were substituted for longer (and more poetic and more precise) words; and the text was rendered so flat and lifeless that I don’t believe any self-respecting third-grader would WANT to read it. The Wind in the Willows is ALREADY a children’s book, and so what if the language is a bit challenging? That didn’t stop the Harry Potter books from being devoured by millions of youngsters.

In fact, researchers have found that reading complex language such as Shakespeare’s causes the brain to become more active and engaged, while reading less complex language triggers much less brain activity. I have found with my own students that when I give them something complicated to read, they generally work harder and get more out of the work.

Yes, there are those who argue that giving students something difficult to read may frustrate them and make them give up on the struggle, to the point, even, of hating school and everything about it. Thus, books should be “dumbed down” to make them more accessible.

I disagree. I believe that giving students something challenging to read will give them a greater feeling of accomplishment when they discover it isn’t really “too hard” after all. And being bored with school work—rather than being frustrated with it—is a major reason students disengage with education and drop out of school.

Take, for example, this sentence from the original The Wind in the Willows:

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely NOTHING—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

And this from the adaptation:

“If you’re doing it in a boat, it’s the best time ever!”

Which of these is more likely to benefit a third-grader?

Don't bait your English teacher; you may regret it

My National Novel Writing Month adventures continue. I've fallen behind in my word count, so I'm trying to catch up. In this excerpt, Hannah has given her class an exercise similar to the one that I give in this post, in creating descriptive writing that aims to show, rather than tell, a highly emotional moment in the students' past. In case you're wondering, yes, this sort of thing has actually happened to me, more than once. And no, I didn't respond quite as, um, graphically as Hannah does -- much as I would have liked to -- or I probably wouldn't still have my job. But I did respond in a toned-down version of Hannah's response. Since this is an all-ages blog, I'm also redacting what the student actually wrote.

When she got to the end of the descriptive writing exercise, she had one student volunteer to read his piece, a student who had been something of a class clown while completing almost no homework and turning in essays that were so under-developed that they were really just outlines. As he stood to read, he and the other members of his group started to snicker. He held up his paper, on which Hannah could see he had scrawled only a couple of lines, and began to read: “I went in the room with the girl and she took her clothes off and laid down on the bed. I took my clothes off and laid on top of her, and then I ----ed her and she said she liked it and I did it again and she said I was the best that she ever had and it was my first time.”

By the time he got to the end of his reading, his group-mates were having a hard time containing themselves, but the student himself was looking less and less sure of himself, his voice becoming weaker and his face turning red. Hannah guessed he was now beginning to regret that his buddies had talked him into this. Still, she knew the original plan the the four of them had hatched was probably intended to shock her or otherwise disrupt her composure. She decided to take the offering with a straight face. “Surely you can do better than that,” she said. “We want description, and you had only two adjectives and only two adverbs in that entire piece – and two of those were in what the girl said to you. Since it was your first time, surely your memory of it was more vivid than that.

“What did the girl look like? Short? Tall? Young? Old? What color was her hair, blonde, brunette, red? Was it natural, or did she have roots of another color? Was she fat or skinny? What did her body look like after she took off her clothes – and what sort of clothes were they in the first place? How did you meet her, at a party or on the street or in a brothel? What did you say to each other before you went to the room? What kind of room was it – a motel room, the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ house, some other sort of room? What condition was the room in – was it clean, dirty, with new furnishings or beat-up stuff? What did the air smell like, musty, smoky, flowery air freshener? Was the air in the room cold or hot or just right? Was the lighting dim or bright?

“When you got into the bed with her, what did she smell like – was it some sort of perfume or just sweat or something else? What did the bed sheets smell like – were they clean, or did they smell sour from being used a whole lot since they were last washed? Were they smooth or rough? Did the bed springs creak when you moved? Did the girl make any sounds? When she told you that she liked it and that you were the best that she had ever had, what were her exact words? How did she say them? Did she have any sort of accent?”

Hannah knew that this line of questioning was perhaps a bit cruel. But what she wanted to get across was that vivid descriptions were essential to effective writing, no matter what the subject matter. She knew the old saying about people with inadequate vocabularies being the ones who resorted to obscenities, and perhaps that was the case with this student. She was hoping that thinking a little more deeply would lead the student to write a little more deeply. This was a student who turned in essays that were three-quarters of a page long, triple spaced, and she was trying to get him to stretch a bit. If he wanted to write porn, more power to him, if doing so helped him to provide descriptive words and phrases.

The student was now seriously red-faced, as were his group-mates. The rest of the class had mixed reactions. Some had gone red, some had gone pale, and a few had started laughing, especially a couple of the young women in the class who had previously found this student’s behavior annoying or maybe even offensive. They clearly enjoyed seeing him get some comeuppance.

“Um, Ms. Montgomery,” the student said in a somewhat subdued voice, “I’ll have to get back to you on those answers.”

Rhetoric Moment: Well developed writing

Beefing up your paragraphs

When you write an essay, you need to provide sufficient supporting details to prove the point that you are making. If you don’t have enough details, your reader may not be able to figure out exactly what you mean. The same holds true for many types of writing. If all you have is a collection of broad, general ideas, you may have a picture inside your mind of what you mean, but your reader may form a totally different picture inside of her head.

Short paragraphs have their place. Carefully placed following several long paragraphs, a short paragraph packs a punch, giving special emphasis to the idea it presents. It makes the reader take notice. But if every single paragraph in your essay (or whatever else you are writing) is only one or two sentences, chances are you haven’t filled in enough details. You need to bulk up those wimpy, short paragraphs.

Let’s start with this very short one-sentence paragraph from a hypothetical essay reviewing a restaurant:

The service was crappy.

Faced with a paragraph like this, I would start by asking the student, “What do you mean by this?”

“Well,” the student might say, “it was, you know, crappy.”

“No, I don’t know. Can you tell what you mean by ‘crappy’? What did the server do that was crappy?”

“He took so long bringing out our food that it was cold when we got it. He was never around when we wanted our iced tea refilled. And he had an attitude.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you know, an attitude.”

“No, I don’t know. Was it a happy attitude, or a sad attitude, or angry? How could you tell what kind of attitude he had?”

“He acted superior. He never looked directly at us, and he always had a frown on his face. We had trouble getting his attention when we wanted something, as if we were invisible. It’s like he didn’t want us wasting his time and energy.”

Here’s a beefed-up version of the student’s paragraph that makes use of these details:

The service was crappy. Our server took so long bringing out our food that it was cold when we got it. He was never around when we wanted our iced tea refilled. And he had a superior attitude. He never looked directly at us, and he always had a frown on his face. We had trouble getting his attention when we wanted something, as if we were invisible. It was like he didn’t want us wasting his time and energy.

Now we have a stronger, brawnier paragraph that gives the reader a clear idea of how crappy the service was and in exactly what way. If you have lots of wimpy paragraphs in your writing, see if you can ask yourself the same sorts of questions to bring out the details. Or if you have trouble thinking of questions, try to find someone else who can help you. It doesn’t have to be a teacher or tutor, either. It could be a friend, family member, or classmate – anybody who can spot where you have a vague, general term that could use more explanation.

Here’s another activity you can try for developing a beefy paragraph. Start with the sentence, “As soon as I woke up, I knew it was going to be a(n) ____ day”; fill in the blank with an adjective of your choice. The day in question can be any day in your life – today, or some important milestone date – or something completely made-up. Now, write at least ten sentences supporting that statement. If you get on a roll and find yourself going beyond ten sentences, that’s great; keep going! But you must produce at least ten sentences describing how your day began.

These exercises may seem very hard at first. It’s going to take some work to beef up those scrawny paragraphs. But Arnold didn’t get those muscles overnight either. He had to do a lot of work. As you work on your paragraph-building, your writing will gradually bulk up its muscles, too.

Writing project: approaching a milestone

So, what should the prize be this time?

This blog is about to reach a historic milestone. As I start to type this post, Sitemeter has registered 99,677 visitors. That means, in just a few days, I will be seeing the 100,000th visitor to this blog.

To mark the event, I want to provide a really cool prize to Visitor #100K. In the past, I've offered such things as dinner at my favorite brewpub or a sailing trip on Black Magic, but, alas, nobody has yet made it to New Mexico to claim such a prize.

So, I'm open to suggestions. To sweeten the deal, not only will I grant the prize to Visitor #100K, but also to whoever comes up with the winning suggestion. So, let the writing project begin. You have from now until whenever lucky Number 100,000 shows up.

Guest post: A Bit of Happiness

Some of my students wrote such great essays in response to the cuisine topic that I have asked them to allow me to share their work here. The first (but I hope not the last) to respond to my request is Phil Coen, who wrote a review of his favorite restaurant. OK, so it’s hard to get to – if you ask Google Maps how to get there from New Mexico, one leg of the journey involves getting into a kayak. But then, part of what makes this restaurant a great place is that it’s located somewhere that … well, you have to cross some water to get there.

A Bit of Happiness
by Phil Coen

When people ask me what my favorite restaurant is, I always hesitate and think about the wonderful memories of so many places, but, in the end, I always answer without a doubt that it would have to be Holuakoa Garden. When I am looking for a good restaurant, I am looking for several things; first of all would be the atmosphere. I look for the overall feel of the place, whether it is comfortable and whether I feel at home, as if I belong here. Next, I think about how the food tastes in combination with the presentation of the dishes. Finally I analyze the experience and evaluate whether or not it was worth the price.

What makes Holuakoa Garden stand out from all the other restaurants that I’ve been to is the ambiance of the restaurant. The restaurant has a romantic feel from its small waterfall to the freshness of the gardens in the middle of the restaurant. The ambiance creates a relaxing dream-like state of mind. All that would be enough to set the full experience Holuakoa Garden has to offer apart, but Holuakoa Garden is located on the side of a mountain overlooking a breathtaking ocean view. I would recommend that you go there at sunset, to get the full experience Holuakoa Garden has to offer. Most of the restaurant is outside, giving it an open unrestrained feel with lovely smells of all the local flowers of Hawaii.

Being in an outstanding setting is only a small part of Holuakoa Garden, for the culinary masterpieces were worthy of a king’s last meal. When I had the pleasure of eating there, I started off with a caprese salad. The salad was one-of-a-kind, involving fresh heirloom tomatoes and basil from the restaurant’s own garden, topped with a type of balsamic vinegar dressing, pine nuts and of course the mozzarella . The tomatoes made this salad because they were sweet, ripe and juicy, maintaining a bright red and yellow tint. I was left wanting more and wondering, if a salad can be that good, what type of masterpiece did I have to look forward to next?

I ordered the filet mignon since the island was famous for the beef because of the quality of grass due to the volcanic soil. It was something I had been looking forward to the entire trip, so I felt it was a now or never moment. Knowing that I was anticipating a moment of genius from the chef, the staff took its time, building on the anticipation of the upcoming entrée. This made my anticipation of the entrée all that more magical. The filet mignon was artistically centered on the platter with an array of colorful vegetables and potatoes, and lightly drizzled with a savory balsamic reduction making the entrée like a painting. The filet mignon was cooked perfectly to my individual taste. There was nothing that I would change, making for a perfect entrée.

What better way to end a perfect meal than with a special dessert? Earlier in the day I had been hiking in the Hawaiian forests and came across a fruit called lilikoi. After hearing the dessert menu I knew that having a cheesecake with this fruit would be amazing. To bring the night to an eventful close I ordered something I knew would be amazing. When I finally got the dessert, it lived up to my expectations and, in fact, exceeded them. The cheesecake was able to satisfy not only the desire to have something amazing but to have an adventure come to a memorable closing.

In conclusion, I recommend this restaurant to anybody that is visiting the Big Island of Hawaii. The only regrettable thing about this restaurant is that it is so difficult to return to, to be able to enjoy it once more. I’ll always have a desire to go back, to enjoy not only the wonderful food, but the ambience and landscape that went with it.

Deadline extended

Sometimes, you have to go with the flow

OK, so the official deadline has passed for my latest writing challenge. I got one entry before the deadline, from Tillerman, with his own take on New Mexico's Official State Question, "Red or Green?"

In addition, I had one other entry that missed the deadline for the Pacific time zone, but which I allowed because O Docker made a persuasive argument that it's always 11:55 somewhere: "A Kernel of Truth," exploring the nature of popcorn.

Given the paucity of entries, I'm giving Tillerman and O Docker extra-credit points, but I'm extending the deadline for entries until April 15.

Essay 4 (in-class)

Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):

· What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.

· Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?

· How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.

· Red or green? Explain.

· Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.

· In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.

The basics: Write a blog post and put a link in the comments here, or if you don't have a blog, send your entry in email to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com . It doesn't have to be an academic essay (my definition of that format is pretty broad anyway); just write what you want to write.

A new writing project

Imagine you're a student in my class ...

OK, I've been accused of trying to turn this into a food blog. It does seem lately that I've been digressing into food-related matters. Well, here's another digression -- and everybody is invited to go foodie.

The origin of this writing project is an assignment in my Essay Writing class. During the term, the students write two in-class essays as a way of learning how to take essay exams -- preparation, time management, and those sorts of skills. The students are given readings on the essay topics and discuss them in class ahead of time, and then on the day of the in-class essay, they have the whole two-hour class period to write the essay in the form of an open-book, open-note exam.

Because I believe students write better when the topic is something they care about, I let them choose the in-class essay topics each term. Usually, the topics are fairly standard issues: DWI, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and the like. This term, however, the students chose two unusual topics: Egypt and cuisine.

Egypt is a challenging topic because it's such a rapidly moving target. One of the students has proven to be a great resource in class discussions -- her husband is Egyptian and they lived there for seven years. With the insights she provided, the students had really good background to write their essays.

And then there's cuisine. There are all sorts of directions a writer could go with that one. The readings I gave the students included an article about the revival of home cooking and a very, very scholarly treatise from the James Beard Institute.

By the time I got done writing the essay prompt, I realized I had some interesting questions that might be fun for more than just my class. So I'm opening it out to my readers in the form of a writing challenge. Pick one of the topics in the essay prompt below and write a blog post about it. Unless you're actually enrolled in a college-prep composition course, you don't need to restrict yourself to the conditions of an essay exam; just write what you want to write about the topic. Once you have written your post, put a link to it in the comments here. Or if you don't have a blog, email your entry to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com and I will post it here for you. Deadline for entries is March 31.

Essay 4 (in-class)

Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):

· What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.

· Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?

· How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.

· Red or green? Explain.

· Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.

· In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.

wordy haiku

due to the fact that
in my humble opinion
at this point in time

Spam tombstones

When headlines collide, 21^st century style …

Way back, eons ago, when I was taking journalism classes in college, one of the courses I took was in page design. In that class, I learned about the dread “tombstone,” when two adjacent headlines on the page seem to merge into each other, conveying an unintended, often humorous and/or macabre meaning. With modern page-layout software, tombstones seldom happen anymore, since page designers have considerable flexibility and can make sure that two headlines are offset enough not to appear connected. But in the old days, that was not always the case. The headlines were written by copy-editors, who often knew only what typeface and size the page designer had specified, not where on the page the particular headline would appear. And if the newspaper was large enough to have more than one copy-editor, two adjacent stories could easily have headlines written by two different people.

Nowadays, tombstones don’t happen so often in a newspaper. Most often, it’s not two adjacent news stories, but the juxtaposition of a news story with an advertisement, since the news and advertising are produced in two different departments with little, if any, coordination between them. The most memorable such tombstone that I can recall came in late 2008. On the day following the election of Barack Obama, the Albuquerque Journal had published a front page making note of the historical nature of the event. A few days later, the Journal ran a reproduction of that front page, on page A4, in full, glorious color. On that same day, Macy’s ran a full-page, full-color ad launching its Christmas sales. Because of the way newspaper printing presses are set up, only some pages in a section can have full color, and the result was that the Macy’s ad was on page A5, directly facing the front page reproduction. Thus, page A4 had the headline “Obama Wins!” while page A5 had the headline “Yes, Virginia, there Is a Santa Claus!”

All of this is a roundabout way of announcing the newest addition to the links over in the sidebar on the left, naked in public and other things I didn’t know I’d be when I grew up. This is a blog by Harlean Carpenter, the Poetic Pinup, who is a fiction, but who is still somewhat associated with my brother Jer, of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

Harlean often comments about the vagaries of the English language, as well as about how people misuse it. I am afraid I will have to agree to disagree with her on punctuation associated with closing quote marks (she insists on being logical, while I must stick with the rules of American Standard Written English, even if said rules are illogical, if for no other reason than that I have to make sure my students produce writing that conforms with the standard). But most of what she says, I do agree with, and her observations go beyond mere grammar. I found myself especially amused (translated into tweetspeak, that means ROTFL) with her recent post on Why I Love Spam. No, she doesn’t enjoy junk emails any more than anybody else does. But she does look in her spambox on a regular basis. Maybe she originally did it to make sure that her email filter hadn’t accidentally sent some non-spam there, but now, she likes to look for the juxtapositions in which the subject lines of two adjacent spams accidentally make a humorous phrase. She calls these juxtapositions “chunks,” but really, they’re the same thing as the old tombstones. Here are some examples that she cites:

“Want those stretch marks to vanish?
Conquer the language barrier”

“Improve Your Sex Life!
Nursing Assistant Courses Online”

“Your kidney failure may
Earn generous revenue online”

“men have experienced bigger
Sprouts in as little as 5 days”

“Begin a rewarding career with
Secrets of scoring with women”

“When Wall Street crashes
We can keep your male instrument”

“Asbestos exposure is shown to
Enlarge your penis in a safe way”

“Express your feelings in an elegant way
Quit talking and start shagging”

So what’s in your spambox?

The latest accusation of bias

Courtesy of The Onion ... possibly NSFW, depending on your workplace ...

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

I'm just waiting for TPTB to come down with edicts that there is yet another class of students that we need to make sure we don't discriminate against.

FOCS best of 2009

Nothing stands out, but there were a few posts that were okay

Captain JP has issued, not a challenge, but at least a suggestion to his fellow bloggers. While he's digesting the surfeit of holiday foods (especially the mince pies), he'd like to read the best of what we have written over the past year.

I will have to admit, 2009 didn't have the same sorts of high points that 2008 did. Instead, the year started on a low note, with somebody deciding to celebrate the New Year by vandalizing our truck, and it got lower from there. The first post of the year, I started with a tagline "I sure hope 2009 is better than 2008 was," but that didn't happen. Instead, it was worse.

There was my major computer crash in January that caused me to lose just about everything, since the backup files had somehow become corrupted and wouldn't load. There were Internet access problems caused by a squabble between my ISP and the bigger telecom company from which it bought services. There was the flu that I caught in March, which left me with a lingering cough that just wouldn't go away – I'm pretty sure I was one of the first people in the country to get H1N1, which hadn't even been identified yet but which is characterized by a horrible cough. Pat's dad in South Texas has been in deteriorating health, and so Pat has been dealing with a lot of headaches trying to take care of him from a distance. My work obligations kept us from being able to go on the solar eclipse cruise that most of the rest of the family took to celebrate my parents' 50^th wedding anniversary. We've had issues with vehicles needing repairs that we can't afford. And our home in Albuquerque got burglarized again, a near repeat of the 2007 incident, except that these burglars didn't take anything of great sentimental value – the previous burglars took care of that. Finally, there are some other issues that we don't want to go into detail on in the blog, but that have made life miserable.

Still, there were some blog posts that seem worth noting, so here I offer my top 10 blog posts for the year, in the order they appeared on the blog:

1. We started the year with two great days on the water.
   
2. I had fun with a little bit of fiction titled "This is Awkward," which became the inspiration for a writing project.
   
3. Tillerman issued a writing challenge to write a list, and I came up with ten lame or not-so-lame excuses not to get to the lake, triggered by a fit of pique at Zorro for letting me down the previous weekend.
   
4. I converted one of my better classroom lectures, on logical fallacies, into a blog post.
   
5. I issued a writing challenge to readers to come up with light bulb jokes about sailors, and the results were great.
   
6. In response to another Tillerman writing challenge, I wrote a review of the short film Pirates of the White Sand, a fun romp from the Duke City Shootout film festival.
   
7. I had another sailing experience with Zorro, involving moonlight under spinnaker and other such excitement.
   
8. Then, during National Novel Writing Month, I got to write a scene that recreated my first experience of an Etchells racing sailboat.
   
9. I noted a bit of irony over Thanksgiving weekend in Arizona.
   
10. I let my scholarly side out for a discussion of Plato's "Phaedrus."
    

So there you have it: the best of Five O'Clock Somewhere for 2009. Maybe next year there will be more fun things to choose from, and less gloom and doom.

Getting back to true meanings

Caution: scholarly content ahead

Here's one word that's been misused just about everywhere I've seen it: Platonic. Over and over, I hear people say something like, "Oh, my relationship with [insert name here] is strictly Platonic." When people say that, they usually mean that they are "just friends"; that there isn't a romantic relationship involved.

To see just how seriously wrong this definition is, it is important to go back to the original work from which the term derives, Plato's "Phaedrus." If you want to follow along, you can read the entire text of the work here, in a translation by Benjamin Jowett. "Phaedrus" is considered a defining document for two reasons: It is a superb description of the ideals of classical rhetoric, and it also contains an excellent explanation of the concept of Platonic love.

I'll start with the structure of the piece. "Phaedrus" is a dialogue between Socrates and his pupil Phaedrus. Phaedrus has just come from hearing a speech by Lysias, one of the more popular sophists of the day. Phaedrus is enthusiastic about the speech, and it doesn't take much persuasion to encourage him to recite it for Socrates. Lysias' main point is that, if given the choice between the attentions of a lover or a non-lover, one should choose the non-lover.

Socrates at this point facetiously comes out with his own speech in favor of that position, but then he makes another that completely refutes this idea and comes in solidly on the side of favoring the lover. We'll get more into the details of that speech later, as it contains the meat of the ideal of Platonic love.

Next, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the three speeches. Through dialogue (there is nothing else in this work, no stage directions, no "business" aside from that which is spoken of directly), Socrates leads Phaedrus through the reasoning behind the speeches and develops principles of rhetoric which we still use today. He points out that Lysias' speech is poorly organized, full of platitudes, incompletely and sometimes fallaciously reasoned, and, in general, not good rhetoric. He also points out that his own speech in favor of the non-lover has its own shortcomings, such as reasoning from false and unsound principles.

Socrates then leads Phaedrus through many of the classical concepts of rhetoric: The speaker must know the truth of the matter spoken of, must organize ideas into a head, body, and feet (reflected in the modern terms introduction, body, and conclusion), must define terms for the audience, must follow rules of correct diction (grammar and tone), must understand who the audience is and what its needs are. Not only that, while some orators begin with a natural talent, all can improve through practice, and even the best talent will not produce great rhetoric without practice. More than 2300 years later, I'm still teaching the same principles to my students. Some things just never go out of style.

Meanwhile, it's not possible to talk about rhetoric in the abstract, but rather, a discussion of rhetoric must use examples of rhetoric, and those examples have to be about something. In "Phaedrus," the subject matter is love. In Socrates' second speech, we have not only an example of a well crafted argument; we also have a thorough explanation of the virtues of love, especially the sort that is now known as Platonic.

Love, Socrates contends, is a form of madness, not caused by human weakness but rather, by the gods and, therefore, divine. The human soul, meanwhile, can be compared to a charioteer driving two winged horses, one good and one evil. Souls aspire to be like the gods, and the souls of philosophers and lovers come close – especially lovers under the influence of divine madness. However, the horses pulling the chariot can prove to be a hindrance. When the soul sees the beauty of the beloved, the good horse behaves itself in a noble fashion, but the evil horse lusts after physical pleasure and makes trouble for the good horse and for the charioteer. It is only with a great struggle that the soul can keep control of the impulses of the evil horse, but when such a struggle is successful, the relationship between the lover and the beloved becomes something of great beauty, and the pair can enjoy true joy in a way that is not possible otherwise, on a blissful path heavenward. This is certainly not the status of "just friends," but rather, a relationship that, if anything, is deeper and more rewarding than the sexual kind.

This type of relationship is demonstrated throughout "Phaedrus" by the actions of the characters. The teacher and his pupil are walking through the countryside. At one point, they wade barefoot together in a clear stream; then they settle down on the soft grass under a shade tree full of sweet-scented blossoms. Socrates often addresses Phaedrus with terms of endearment, such as "my divine darling" and "my sweet Phaedrus." This, then, is the Platonic ideal, in this case a relationship between the teacher and the student that remains lofty and divine.

Every so often, a news story comes to light, in which a teacher has crossed the line and engaged in sexual activity with an underage student. In a recent case here in the Albuquerque area, a female middle school teacher had a relationship with a 13-year-old seventh grader; when she was questioned over the issue, she said, "It was what he wanted." No, probably that was not what the kid wanted. Based on other information in the story, I can infer that this child's parents neglected him, emotionally if not physically. What this child wanted, what would have served him best, would have been a Platonic relationship with a teacher who truly loved and cared for him, who held his best interests to heart, who kept sex out of it – not one whose evil horse took over and dragged the chariot into treacherous territory.

Of course, the relationship between teacher and student isn't the only one in which Platonic love can occur. It can be a relationship between coach and athlete, or between employer and employee, or simply between very close friends of either gender. The lover and the beloved find something of the divine when they are in each other's presence, even if they don't have a name for it. These are special relationships, deep ones that go beyond merely liking each other, far beyond "just friends." If Plato is to be believed, these are the most heavenly relationships of all.

My new 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System

Also known as a “suitcase”

My laptop is big. It has a 17-inch screen, but it’s bigger than a lot of other laptops that have 17-inch screens. The screen makes for gorgeous movie viewing, and it allows me to keep a lot of open windows going all at the same time.

My laptop is heavy. It has more than 4 hours of battery life for word processing and wi-fi access (less for movie watching). The ability to run this big, gorgeous screen for 4 hours requires massive batteries.

When I bought this laptop, its mission was to sit on my desk during the weekdays and come along on occasional weekends.

Then the community college where I teach went paperless. Now, all of my course paperwork, grade sheets, communications from on high, and homework submitted by students who miss class resides not in a dead-trees file folder, but on my laptop. That means that I now have to lug this behemoth around with me, gorgeous screen, massive batteries, and all.

I had a nice case for it. But that case had two problems: It had room only for the laptop and not for the other books, papers, and stuff that I have to carry around – which meant that I had to have another bag for all of that. And it hung from a shoulder – first the right, and then when that got too sore, the left. By last week, I was in agonizing pain.

Yesterday, my birthday present from my folks finally arrived – a new case for hauling my laptop around. It has wheels. It has space for the laptop (a padded sleeve that’s just barely big enough) plus room for lots of other stuff. It’s made of polycarbonate. It’s fire-engine red.

It’s officially called the U.S. Traveler Manhattan 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System. Whew. I try to teach my students to be more efficient and less verbose in their writing, and then I come face to face with an amazing example of diction inflation.

So today I loaded it up to roll off to teach my classes. I discovered that it’s not quite large enough, although it would have been had it not been for the H1N1 virus. Because of the flu, I’m supposed to carry a bottle of hand sanitizer and a box of tissues with me to all classes. I found a corner to fit the hand sanitizer in, but there wasn’t room for the box of tissues. I had to carry that separately.

Review: The Art of Spelling

A book that is both fun and useful, depending on who you are

Normally, I cringe when I see Pat browsing the bookshelves in a thrift shop. We already have far more books than we have shelf space for, and he inevitably brings home a few more.

The Art of Spelling: The Madness and the Method, by Marilyn vos Savant, which Pat picked up for two bucks, is an exception. First, it’s nice and small, so it doesn’t take up much of the precious shelf space. Second, the value of the information it contains is huge.

The first two-thirds of the book (“The Madness”) is an analysis of spelling – its importance, characteristics of good and bad spellers (less intelligent people are generally poor spellers, but poor spellers are not usually less intelligent), psycholinguistic processes involved in spelling, and why English ended up being the most infuriatingly inconsistent language to try to spell. The second section (“The Method”) has a more practical orientation: It gives the reader specific analysis and strategies to help the reader develop a customized method to deal with his or her own spelling bugaboos.

The first section of the book will appeal to scholars, word-lovers, history buffs, amateur psychologists, and the like. Vos Savant has put together some very good research with a few interviews with primary sources, and she presents the material in a light-hearted way that makes for more entertaining reading than the typical scholarly tome.

It’s the second section, however, that I find most useful. For ages, I have been searching for something that will be useful for those of my students who have trouble spelling (and thanks to spelling-checkers, that number is growing). These students are classified as “developmental,” although I prefer to think of them as “pre-college” – that is, they do not yet have the writing skills to succeed in college-level courses, so they’re working on developing those skills. These students are not helped by advice to “read lots and lots, because the more you read, the more you will learn how words are supposed to be spelled.” Yes, children who grow up amid great heaps of books and who therefore read a lot for pleasure will assimilate good spelling. That doesn’t help a high-school dropout who never associated reading with pleasure and who now has no time for recreational reading because she’s working two jobs to support her 3-year-old daughter and pay the rent while also attending college.

Another method of dealing with spelling is to bombard the student with a gigantic heap of “rules,” most of which aren’t really rules anyway – they’re just descriptions of how, in most cases, words operate. Not only are these rules overwhelming; because they are simply telling how spelling operates most of the time, they don’t cover all situations. A student who blindly follows such rules (assuming he can remember them all) will make mistakes.

One more piece of advice I often see about spelling is just simply to memorize and memorize and memorize. That may work for a 13-year-old spelling bee champion (although such a champion does learn shortcuts to cut down the required memorization). Rote memorization separates words from their meanings, while my students need to learn to spell words within a living paragraph, the words’ natural habitat.

For a short time, I had found a Website that gave good spelling advice, in a way that was helpful, accurate, and non-overwhelming. Unfortunately, that site was only available for about two semesters, and then it disappeared – no forwarding address. I Googled the site’s author to see whether she might show up somewhere else, but I came up dry. I was left with whatever advice was in the grammar text my community college’s department was using in a particular term (ranging from generally inadequate to totally inadequate) and my own advice (mostly inadequate).

Now, I have discovered this book, published nearly a decade ago, that in its second section deals with spelling in a way that, except for a couple of forays into erudition, is exactly what my students need. The first section of the book, with all of its scholarly stuff, will go way over their heads for the time being – but if they can get through the pre-college work and into college studies, they’ll be able to get it eventually. What’s valuable for them right now is the practical stuff in the second part of the book.

In that part of the book, vos Savant provides a couple of diagnostic tests that will allow a student to find a pattern in his or her spelling errors. This diagnosis is hugely useful: I often find that a student with poor spelling says, “I can’t spell anything right; I’m hopeless.” But what’s really the case is that the student has problems only with one or two issues, such as unaccented vowels or doubled consonants. Because the student has usually run his work through a spelling checker, I can’t always tell what that student’s error pattern is – all of the words in his essay are correctly spelled; they’re just not the right words. If the student knows what his particular spelling issues are, then when he’s proofreading (which he should do BEFORE running the spelling checker), he can look primarily for those particular problems.

In addition, vos Savant gives advice for dealing with each particular spelling problem. Once a student knows that her spelling problems deal with apostrophes, she can learn the relatively short list of rules about apostrophes, and she’s home free.

Another issue that vos Savant deals with is different learning styles. Something that works for a student with an auditory learning style may be totally useless for a student with a motor learning style. So vos Savant will recommend that a student with a motor learning style write a word (both with a pen and on a computer) repeatedly to embed the shape of the word in the student’s motor memory, while for an auditory student, she will recommend pronouncing the word carefully and hearing how its sounds reflect its spelling.

Now I have some tools that I can give to my students to help them with their spelling. Thank you, MvS.

Review: Pirates of the White Sand

The best 14 minutes you'll ever spend

Over at Proper Course, Tillerman has posted his next group writing project: write a review. He goes on to explain that this can be a review of anything at least somewhat related to sailing, such as equipment, books, even movies – although he notes, "your choice is somewhat limited there."

Limited, maybe, but there are some good sailing-related movies out there. One obscure gem is Pirates of the White Sand, which debuted at the 2005 Duke City Shootout film festival. Written by the Seeger Brothers, the script won the festival's Federico Fellini award, earning the brothers a chance to bring the film to the festival, in which directors are given one week to film and edit a 14-minute movie.

The crew experienced some serious technical problems, such as a failure of communication between the film-editing computer and the film-industry expert provided by the film festival to assist the production that resulted in all edited footage being lost just hours before screening time. But after a seriously intense all-night editing session, an extremely rough cut was available for the final public gala, at which, despite the technical issues, it won the Audience Choice award.

The film itself is a rollicking adventure involving a crew of unruly pirates, colonial Spanish gold treasure, and nuclear weapons. The pirates, led by Captain Moab (Miguel Martinez), descend upon the remote roadside café run by the ever-efficient Ruthie (Deborah Chavez), in their "ship," the Crusader, a 1964 Lincoln Continental. This is the same model used effectively in The Matrix as a trans-dimensional transport device; it serves a similar purpose in this film.

The pirates have been on a search for treasure, a vast trove of gold looted by the Spanish from the Aztec empire, hidden somewhere in what is now the White Sands Missile Range never to be found again. While the pirates are on the trail of the treasure, someone else is on the trail of the pirates, in helicopters and big black SUVs.

After many weeks "at sea," Moab's crew is eager to unwind at Ruthie's café, enjoying "grog" (beer served in a pitcher labeled GROG that Ruthie keeps on hand for the pirates) and, of course, green chile cheeseburgers. The action is frenetic, matched with a punk-rock adaptation of the sea chantey "Here's to the Grog" that underlies the action and also emphasizes the anachronisms that run throughout the film.

Martinez does excellent work as the pirate captain, bringing a wide range of emotions to the role, as the swaggering leader of a crew of brave men, and also the man who is thoroughly in love with Ruthie but knows he will never be able to have her, as his pirate life keeps him from being able to settle down. It is easy to see why he won the Best Actor award at the Shootout. As the film industry's presence in New Mexico increases, look to see Martinez in small but memorable parts in future blockbusters. His talent should take him far.

The directing is good; director P.L. Fuego keeps the pace brisk, although in one or two places the action seems to drag. In on scene, in particular, a sight gag involving a nuclear warhead doesn't quite work right. Mostly, however, the audience will be carried along nicely by the action.

The film is, unfortunately, not widely available. Fuego has been working on a director's cut that fixes the technical problems that marred the film-festival version and adds some material that had to be left out because of the Shootout's time restrictions. He might let you have a copy if you ask him nicely, or you might be able to find a friend of his who has a copy and copy that. Uh, yeah, pirated Pirates.

Disclaimer: I know these guys. Oh, all right … I'm related to them. Uh, yeah, they're my brothers. Still, it's a good film. If it sucked, I just wouldn't have written the review.

Rhetoric Moment: Logical fallacies

Making sure your argument holds water

Whenever you write, whatever you write, it's important to know about logical fallacies, arguments that, at first glance, appear sensible – but that don't stand up to closer scrutiny. For that matter, even if you never write anything, knowing how to spot fallacies can help you with the rest of your life.

There are two good reasons to know about logical fallacies. First, you can make your writing stronger by avoiding them; an essay (or blog post) full of fallacies will not be as credible as one in which the reasoning is solid. Second, if you can spot logical fallacies in other material you see, you can develop critical thinking that will allow you to make good decisions. Advertising and politics are full of logical fallacies, and you don't want to fall for them.

Here are some of the logical fallacies that you want to watch out for:

• Hasty generalization. This is jumping to a conclusion when you don't have sufficient evidence to support it. For example, if I ride a city bus once, and the driver is rude to me, I can't logically come to the conclusion that all of the bus drivers in Albuquerque need to improve their manners. It may be that just that one driver is impolite, or it could even be that this driver was just having a bad day.
  
• Slippery slope. This is a subspecies of hasty generalization that uses the reasoning that once a given course of action is started, there is no choice but to continue. Politicians often use this fallacy: "If we legalize medical marijuana, then we will have to legalize it for all purposes, and then we will have to legalize hashish, and then cocaine, and then we will end up as a nation of hopeless drug addicts."
  
• Either/or fallacy (false dichotomy). This is the assumption that there are only two choices, with no room for compromise or gray area between the options, as in "Either you stay in school, graduate, and become rich, or you drop out and are doomed to poverty for the rest of your life." There are other possibilities: Some people don't get a college degree but go into business, find they're good at it, and make millions. Others major in something relatively useless, like English, graduate, and end up teaching in a community college, where they definitely do not get rich!
  
• False analogy. This is comparing two things that do not logically compare to each other, as in, "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we cure the common cold?" Space technology has very little to do with biomedical science.
  
• Bandwagon. This is one of my favorites. It's the argument that because everybody is doing something, it must be right. Parents will be familiar with this one: "But, Mom, all of my friends got new Camaros for their sixteenth birthdays!" The standard response, of course, is, "If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do so too?" The bandwagon fallacy is also represented by a couple of bumper stickers that I have seen. One says, "Eat more lamb; 40,000 coyotes can't be wrong." The other, which I have seen primarily on pickup trucks in Texas, follows the same reasoning: "Eat (excrement); sixty billion flies can't be wrong." (I happen to agree with the coyotes and not the flies.)
  
• Non sequitur (does not follow). This fallacy is drawing a conclusion that cannot readily be derived from the information at hand: "Janet would be a great kindergarten teacher because she loves kids." Loving kids doesn't necessarily lead to a person being a good kindergarten teacher; Jeffrey Dahmer loved kids, but he certainly wouldn't have made a good kindergarten teacher – the school officials might start wondering why the class was shrinking.
  
• Begging the question. This fallacy works by ignoring the real question at hand and assuming it has already been answered. For example, the wife says to the husband, "Honey, we need to talk about whether it's time to get a new pickup truck," and the husband responds, "All right, should we get the Ford or the Chevy?"
  
• Ad hominem (to the person). This is another way of sidestepping the real issue by talking about who the opponent is rather than addressing the points the opponent is making: "Bill Clinton supports the North American Free Trade Agreement, but he cheats on his wife."
  
• Guilt by association. This is a subspecies of ad hominem fallacy that argues that because a person is a member of a particular group, we can expect that person to act in a certain way: "The army is a strictly regimented institution; therefore, General Nimrod can't possibly understand the needs of free-spirited civilians." An uglier form of guilt by association is discrimination, when someone with brown or black skin, especially from a high-crime neighborhood, is automatically assumed to be a criminal.
  
• Post hoc (false cause). The Latin phrase post hoc, ergo propter hoc translates as "after this, therefore because of this." It's the assumption that because event B happened after event A, event A must have caused event B: "I washed my pickup truck this morning, and this afternoon it rained." Politicians use this one a lot, and so do advertisers: "I switched to Super-Fresh toothpaste, and now the girls are crazy about me." Well, maybe it was the toothpaste, or maybe the guy just bought a cool new pickup truck and the girls all want to go for a ride.
  
• Circular reasoning. This is the argument that A is true because of B, and B is true because of A. Since the truth of each argument depends on the other, there is no outside evidence to prove the case: "We know that God exists because the Bible says so, and we know the Bible is true because it is the word of God."
  
• Arguing from strength. This is another way of ignoring the real issue or the merits of the argument. Its reasoning is, "I'm bigger and stronger than you are; therefore, I'm right." In Albuquerque, this argument is often expressed at traffic intersections by the drivers of jumbo SUVs: "I don't care what color the light is; I'm bigger than you are, and I'm going through, so get out of my way!"
  
• Appeal to pity. Yet another way of ignoring the actual question at hand, the appeal to pity tries to tug at the audience's heartstrings instead of looking at the facts: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, surely you cannot find my client guilty of murdering his mother and father; the poor boy is an orphan!" Conversely, some prosecuting attorneys will argue about how horrible the crime was, instead of looking at evidence that would prove or disprove that the defendant actually committed it.
  
• Appeal to authority. This is calling in an "expert" witness who isn't really an expert. Advertising is full of this type of fallacy. A recent example is the television commercial in which a scantily-clad Paris Hilton washes a car while promoting cheeseburgers. Given her figure, I imagine Paris Hilton is not exactly familiar with cheeseburgers. She's just in the commercial because she's famous and attractive, not because she knows anything about the product.
  
• Arguing from ignorance. This is the argument that, since we haven't seen anything to disprove it, something must be true: "We don't have any evidence that the governor and his buddies took kickbacks; therefore, they must not have taken any." Maybe they did, and maybe they didn't; if we don't have any evidence either way, we need to investigate further.
  

You may notice that there is overlap between some of these fallacies; that's the way rhetoric is sometimes. You may also sometimes run into an argument that contains more than one fallacy. It can be exciting to look at something and say, "Aha! False cause!" or, "Hey, that's a non sequitur." But even more important than being able to put a name to a particular fallacy is just to recognize it for what it is and see that it doesn't logically add up. Beware the politicians and advertisers, and keep your own arguments free of these fallacies that don't hold water.

Grammar Moment: Pronoun conventions

We want to sound educated; we don't want to sound stuffy

While some issues related to pronouns (agreement, case, reference, avoiding shifts) are primarily matters of grammar, there are some other principles that deal with style rather than grammatical correctness. One such principle is choosing the right person and number in keeping with the expectations of academic writing. The goal is to have writing that is clear, and that treats readers as respected individuals – not buddies in the dormitory basement rec room.

Using the correct pronouns serves both goals. Pronouns that are used according to academic readers' expectations will have clear meaning, and they will also communicate the proper level of respect. Here are the generally accepted conventions for pronoun usage:

• First-person singular (I/me): This is used for narrative of the writer's own experiences and actions. Some instructors will forbid the use of the first-person singular; that's not necessarily because it's wrong, but rather, because personal narratives often turn into stories without a point, and academic writing should always have an underlying point. Also, in much academic writing, such as lab reports, the emphasis is on the procedure, not the experimenters, so instead of saying, "I decanted the solution …" you will say, "The solution was decanted …"
  NOTE: You should never use phrases such as "I think" or "in my opinion"; such phrases convey a sense of apology for what you're saying and weaken your position. Stand firmly.
  
• First-person plural (we/us): In academic writing, this is the conventional choice for referring to society in general ("We must take measures to keep our nation safe …"). It is also used to refer to groups of which the writer is a member ("Women still face a glass ceiling; we must therefore …").
  
• Second-person singular and plural (you): For most academic writing, the second person is considered too informal. It is acceptable in more casual sorts of writing, such as blog posts, and for instructions, in which there is a clear rhetorical position of the writer speaking directly to the reader.
  Don't use you to refer to people in general, as in, "You don't see many drunk drivers in Connecticut." Well, of course, I've never seen any drunk drivers in Connecticut; I've never been to Connecticut. In academic writing, it would be better to say, "Drunk drivers are seldom seen in Connecticut." Also, don't use you to refer to groups of people that may not include the reader, as in, "What if you were pregnant and you didn't know what to do?" About half of the human race is biologically incapable of becoming pregnant.
  
• Third-person singular (he/him, she/her): Use the third-person singular to refer to an individual. This could be a specific person who has been named ("Wally is rich, and he is single"), or to a singular noun representing a group ("A student should keep his or her backpack neat"). Notice that in the second example, you can't use the plural their. This is not merely an issue of style; it is an issue of grammatical correctness; you can't use a plural pronoun to refer to a singular noun. That leads us to …
  
• Third-person plural (they/them): Use they and them to refer to specific groups of people. If you want to be grammatically correct and gender-neutral while avoiding the awkward phrase his or her in the previous example, you can simply make the entire sentence plural and make the problem go away: "Students should keep their backpacks neat." If you're having problems making pronouns agree with the words they refer to, you can solve the problem almost every time by making everything plural.
  On the other hand, some lazy writers use they to avoid thinking – as in, "They don't like drunk drivers in Connecticut." Who the heck are they? The entire population of Connecticut? The Connecticut highway patrol? Connecticut traffic-court judges? A careful writer will think about who it is that dislikes drunk drivers and then name that entity clearly.
  

You will note that I don't list one as a pronoun. That is because, in English, it's not a pronoun; it's a noun. In some languages, such as French and Spanish, there's a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun that usually translates into English as "one," but that often actually means "people" or the informal, non-academic "they." Yes, it is grammatically correct to use one, but then it has to be followed by the awkward pronoun phrase he or she (obviously, one is singular), or else you have to keep saying one. That leads to some really stuffy-sounding writing. Yes, academic writing has its formality, but when you get to sounding like a caricature of a constipated elderly British noblewoman, you're going too far.

You will also note that some of the recommendations I make above encourage use of the passive voice ("The solution was decanted …" vs. "I decanted the solution …"; "Drunk drivers are seldom seen …" vs. "You don't see many drunk drivers …"). Some well-meaning pedants in your academic past may have told you to avoid passive voice at all costs. That advice was misguided. When you wish to emphasize the action rather than the performers of the action, the passive voice is the best choice. It also allows you to avoid pronouns altogether, rather than using one that may not be appropriate for the academic writing task.

In Memoriam

… sorry if this is a bit late …

Shortly before the beginning of this year’s National Novel Writing Month, the world lost one of its best writers, and up-and-coming writers lost one of their best role models.

My interactions with Tony Hillerman were brief, but they were meaningful. To see him and talk to him, you would never know that he was an internationally known author of best-selling mystery novels. He was just a regular guy, somewhat on the pudgy side, and he emanated a warm feeling, as of a teddy bear, with bright eyes that were always smiling. To journalism students at UNM, he was not so much a teddy bear as a journalist with an uncompromising sense of ethics – but with compassion underlying those ethics.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was taking some creative writing classes at the UNM branch campus in the small town where I lived. I liked reading mystery novels, and I had an idea that maybe I could write one. The instructor of the creative writing courses had a buddy at NMSU in Las Cruces who was putting together a writing conference, at which Hillerman was to be the guest of honor. I and one of the other students decided to drive down to Las Cruces to participate in the conference.

The opening night of the conference was to feature a reading by Tony Hillerman. My companion was somewhat disorganized, and we were late getting to the event. We looked around, and the only two empty seats in the place were two seats in the front row. We slipped into those seats as unobtrusively as we could. My companion sat to my right; to my left was this pudgy guy who hardly seemed to notice us; he was writing on a seriously scribbled-up yellow pad, making additional corrections to a manuscript that had already had a lot of corrections made to it. Ah, I thought as I sat down, a real writer. This is a real writers’ conference.

The master of ceremonies for the evening was a girl with her hair in a traditional Hopi style. She came to the lectern and introduced the evening’s main attraction, Tony Hillerman. Then the pudgy guy who had been sitting next to me got up and took his place. He put that yellow pad on the lectern, greeted the crowd, made a few comments, and then read from the yellow pad – if I remember correctly, it was the opening passage of The Dark Wind.

During the rest of that weekend, I went to several workshops, two of which were led by Hillerman. I remember most vividly the workshop on making good beginnings. He commented that his usual process was to start with Chapter One, write the book, and then throw out the original Chapter One and replace it with one that actually matches what takes place in the book. I have found that when I’m working with my students to improve their essays, this is one of the best pieces of advice ever.

My next experience with Hillerman came after I had transferred to UNM’s main campus in Albuquerque. I had been taking classes at the branch campus just for fun, but then I got a letter from UNM saying I had taken so many classes, I wouldn’t be allowed to take any more unless I declared a major. I looked at my transcript and discovered I was already halfway to a bachelor’s degree in English, with a concentration in professional writing and a minor in journalism.

The problem was that the courses that I needed to take in order to complete that course of study were in Albuquerque. So for the next couple of years, I had a 100-mile commute. I eased the pain of that by renting a garret in Huning Highlands to stay in during the middle of the week.

Then interest rates went down, and Pat and I bought a house in Albuquerque, which meant that he was now the one with the 100-mile commute. I became the news editor of the Daily Lobo, the UNM student newspaper. It was challenging, especially as Gerald was a toddler at the time, and it was nearly impossible to find reliable child care, especially late at night, as Pat was now the one spending mid-week nights away from home.

An anonymous source sent us details about the Lobo basketball team’s grades – most particularly that the team’s star player had a 0.0 grade point average for the previous semester (but because of NCAA regulations at the time, since he was a senior, that didn’t matter and he could still play). This same information had apparently been sent to all of the other news outlets in Albuquerque, but we had an inside informant who could confirm the validity of the information. We ran the story.

The next couple of weeks were hell. I and a whole lot of the rest of the Daily Lobo management and some of the staff were branded as being “anti-UNM,” “biting the hand that feeds you,” “How could you?!!” I even got a complaint from the local representative of the NAACP that this news was racist, since the players that were failing were all African-Americans. My response to that was that the university was profiting off of these athletes’ abilities and work, without providing the education that was supposed to be provided in exchange for that work, and that profiting off the work of others without compensating those who did the work used to be called slavery.

It was in the midst of that turmoil, when I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of what I had done, that Hillerman, then “emeritus,” which means mostly retired but still hanging around, came to the newsroom. “Don’t back down,” he said. “What you are doing is the best of journalism.” My mouth dropped open. “I mean it,” he said. “You have to say what needs to be said.” He came to my desk, and he shook my hand. He repeated, “This is the best of journalism. Keep it up.”

I had tears in my eyes. I had been battered, criticized, even condemned for what I had done, and here was someone whom I respected more than anyone else, telling me what I had done was right.

Tony Hillerman touched my life only briefly, but he touched it in a way that meant much. Vaya con dios, Antonio.

Gift shopping puzzler

What to get for the college student who has everything?

Two weeks ago, Pat and I installed Gerald in a dorm at Arizona State University, where he plans to study architecture. Two weeks from now, he has a birthday, and we’re at a loss to figure out what to get him that will be both useful and special.

His dorm room is already well furnished with the basics – he and his roommate between them have covered all the necessities: television, fridge, microwave. Stereos aren’t the necessity they were when Pat and I were students – their computers have speaker systems, and they also have iPods for personal entertainment. We went on a shopping spree for most of the less glamorous stuff, too: desk lamp, wastebasket, laundry hamper, and so forth.

And speaking of computers, Gerald got a nice one from his grandparents as a high school graduation present, so that’s taken care of, and his roommate has a nice printer the two can share. The other big-ticket item that’s taken care of is a bicycle – Gerald bought himself a nice, heavy-duty mountain bike last week.

He has expressed a wish for accessories for his vehicle, the Gila Monster, such as new fender flares that will accommodate the larger tires. But he doesn’t have the Monster with him, and since I’m now the primary driver of the vehicle, getting anything for it would really be getting it for me and not for him.

I thought of the possibility of dorm-room décor – the place was pretty bare when he moved in. It seemed that when Pat and I were in college, just about every men’s dorm room had the obligatory Farrah Fawcett pin-up poster. If you grew up in that era, you know the one that I mean. But I don’t know what pin-up Gerald would go for, and besides that, he brought his own wall décor – replicas of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and I think maybe the Magna Carta too. (Gee, maybe he should be studying law, or perhaps journalism, rather than architecture, especially since his favorite class, judging by how much email space he gives it, is English composition/rhetoric.)

So, what’s a gift for a college freshman who pretty much has everything he needs – something a little bit special and perhaps offbeat, something he wouldn’t just go out and buy for himself, but that he would appreciate? I was originally going to add the criterion that it be small enough to fit into (or get towed behind) a Ford Expedition, but then I realized the dorm room is smaller than the Expedition’s interior and is shared with a roommate, so the size restriction is more like what would fit into a small station wagon.

So, faithful readers, especially those of you who have been in college more recently than I, what’s a cool gift for The Gerald?