Warrior Dash 2012

I've signed up to run a 5k on August 25, 2012 called Warrior Dash.   Apparently it is 3.1 miles of obstacle course involving barbed wire, open flame, mud and various other obstacles intended to ruin your day.  While I admit this will be physically daunting, it also looks like a lot of fun if you watch the linked video.  I mean who doesn't enjoy following up potentially fatal (no, really, I had to sign a waiver in case I die) physical exertion with red meat and beer?

My new-found enthusiasm for physical rigor results from a lifestyle change I made around December.  The changes involve diet and an exercise plan.  Since I've made the changes I feel a lot better, mentally and physically.  I ran today (albeit it was only across my front lawn), and I actually felt strong, like my body wanted to keep going.  Usually I feel like either a) my knees or ankles are ready to give out at any moment, or b) my heart (pancreas, liver, gall bladder, etc.) is going to explode.  Lately I just feel a lot better.

St Jude's sponsors the event.  In case you didn't know, St. Jude's is the patron saint of desperate cases, as well as a children's hospital.  My wife's cousin, Katherine McVey was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in December of 2005.  She passed away on March 18, 2007.  Katherine was an extraordinary young person, and St Jude's offered care, support and hope for Katherine and her family during the ordeal.  I made a pledge to raise $250 by August 25, 2012.  If you can help by donating I would appreciate it.  Just click the St. Jude's link to pledge in my name.

There's an article in the opinion section of the New York Times about Change.org today.  If you're unfamiliar with the site, it's worth a few moments just to see what it does.  Here's a link to a few of the issues I have supported.  It's an easy way to take some sort of action to support issues you happen to agree with.

Lonely Island in the Classroom

So I showed the video for Lonely Island's song "Threw It On The Ground" in class on Friday.  A friend and colleague suggested the song would be an interesting way to introduce Transcendentalism to teenagers.  Some of the song's more memorable refrains came back to me: "You can't trust the system" & "I'm not a part of this system."  My love for the Transcendentalists is tempered with an awareness that at their worst, they remind me of petulant, pretentious hipsters.  After watching the video I asked my students to get out a piece of paper and make two columns: "label one column 'Stuff I Throw on the Ground' and the second column 'Stuff I Don't Throw.'"  I hoped to get them to think about Thoreau's message to "Simplify, Simplify, Simplify," and didn't want to come across as either preachy or pretentious, so we started with the objects mentioned in the video.

1) The Energy Drink.  I made sure that they understood I was not an energy drink prude: I had tried Red Bull and Full Throttle, and  Monster.  The former two made me feel like a shooting star (and not in a good way), while I've always appreciated the crushed Smarties taste of the lattermost (in small doses).  I related a tale of driving back late from Columbus and picking up a 16oz. Monster.  After choking it down, the oncoming headlights of approaching cars were drawn into startling focus, and I could see my heart beat.  We finally decided that Energy Drinks represent Trends.  Do we need trends?  Most felt they made life more interesting but decided they weren't necessary for survival.  One brave soul may have suggested that trends encourage Groupthink.  Most chose to list Energy Drinks in the Stuff I Throw on the Ground column.  Catchphrase: "Pump that garbage in another man's veins."

2) The Hot Dog.  We decided the hotdog could represent processed foods.  I asked them whether or not it would be possible to live without canned and processed food.  The Rural Kids immediately shook their head yes, and didn't blink when the group suggested getting a few goats, chickens and a rototiller.  The Urban Kids pointed out that people in the city don't have the space for goats and chickens, etc.  Someone pointed out how raising your own food isn't going to simplify your life, just your diet.  We all agreed it's easier to walk into a Circle K and grab a hot dog and a Polar Pop than it is to milk goats. Ultimately it's easy to agree that hot dogs are high in fat and salt and have the preservative sodium nitrate, believed to cause cancer.  Most chose to list Hot Dogs in the Stuff I Throw on the Ground column.  Catchphrase: "You can't buy me hot dog man."

3) The Cell Phone.  It was interesting how attached to their cell phones teenagers proved to be.  All four of my American Literature classes (Juniors between the ages of 16 & 17) decided the cell phone goes in the column Stuff I Don't Throw.  They were not willing to debate much.  Even when I challenged them with living in Thoreau like austerity, they opted to keep the cell phones.  I have a cell phone myself.  It is not a smart phone, and it does not have a keyboard, so maybe I'm not the most apt referee for this conversation, but I have overheard some of my students admit their cell phone bill is over a hundred dollars a month.  Is it wrong that I kind of want to throw it on the ground for them?  Who knows, maybe we'll all have the Internet in our brains sooner than I thought.  Catchphrase: "My dad's not a phone.  Duh!"

4) Birthday Cake.  We decided the birthday cake represents tradition.  When posed with the question "If you were going out to live in the woods for two years two months, would you need to celebrate birthdays?"  garnered a few responses involving Jehovah Witnesses.  As far as tradition in general, it was decided that most traditions are not necessary for survival, but make life bearable.   Most classes elected not to throw birthday cake on the ground.  Catchphrase: "Welcome to the real world, jackass."

5) Hollywood Phonies.  Every class elected to throw Hollywood on the ground.  Some boys wanted to keep Megan Fox, but throw everyone else and then the conversation became centered around whether or not Megan Fox was hot or not.   Catchphrase: "Nobody wants your autograph.  Phonies!"


The conversation went from there to some big topics like School, Law, Family, Religion and Tasering  buttholes.  Every class elected not to throw these big ones on the ground, although my 8th period was very, very close to a majority on throwing School on the ground.

We ended the exercise talking about the idea that though the majority vote ended up on the Smartboard, each individual's list was just a little different, and I challenged them to add some more personal items to their own lists.

Verdict: I would use this video again to instigate what became a meaningful conversation about what we cannot live without.  It was topical, not too serious, and fun.

Rubrics in the Creative Writing Classroom II

I've always been amused by the idea of a rubric for fiction writing partly because I would have liked to have had one when I first started writing stories, and partly because I know it wouldn't have a made a whole lot of difference.  Once upon a time I posted my fiction writing rubric on this blog.  It was a conglomerate of practical and impractical advice stolen from both Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King.  I don't think it was very good.  I'll go ahead and post a revised version here that I hope is more practical.  The idea is that a student reads a book and feels inspired to write something of their own.  Here's how I attempt to grade such goings on in my world:

Oh(io) What a Night

Imagine a tall building.  It is a monument of human striving, yet the process of its composition oppressed many human lives.  Drag butt, cigarette ass, sawdust memoirs.  Concrete drying the spit from our mouths.  Steel beams are not bones.  They're better.

Or are they?

I think I've been away from the city for so long that I've grown a phobia.  The last time I remember being in the city that city was Akron, Ohio, and I was reading (for the first time) the opening lines of Hermann Hesse's Peter Camanzind while driving.  I paused long enough to let the opening lines set in, and, taking my eyes from the road long enough to peer up at the GoJo building almost ran over a Canadian goose that had wandered out into the road.  For some reason the whole incident struck me as so absurd I've never forgotten it.

Yesterday at the polls I looked with admiration at my mud streaked truck parked next to an errant Harley.  The Harley was one of those gratuitous jobs with the fringe and everything, my truck being an ultra-sexy black Ram struck alongside me as some kind of working man's chorus of unspoken tenor, a heathen's litany, the local baseball field named after a local person of note, the guy with long hair, an unscrubbed farmer-philosopher, a time traveler, a San Francisco refugee speaking into someone's open window about some idea, the idea that we should all be able to agree on healthcare, and that it's something we need to support at a state level (why not?).  Inside, working the polls, was the woman from whom we bought our house, a single book on a shelf: Laura Bush's autobiography.  A scrofulous Paul off work as some I.T. guy in the dungeons of steam.

Afterward the meat store, Ohio's largest meat market, a black family: man and woman and two small girls smelling of hash, hugging over the butcher's counter.  The shiny pork livers and blood sausage, the smell, according to one cashier "of straight shit" in the air.  A wonder manure.  A wonderful manner.

Home, nervous.  The washed truck, well earned muck scrubbed from quarter panels, Windex on the wheels, Armour All, Amour All, Issue 2 results on the laptop while my son seeks me from footie pajamas, daddy is in the front yard moving the burn barrel, no need for it now, save the STRIKE for another day.    

Fantasy Class: Stephen King

Why does he rock so hard in those purple Converse, elastic-cinched-waist jacket and creeper-stache? This is just a sketch of a course that I've always thought would be one of my life's work as a teacher of literature.  He's always been there for me as Constant Writer and this would be my preferred way of giving back as Constant Teacher.  

Our staple texts would be On Writing, Duma Key, Lisey's Story, Misery, The Shining, Night Shift, and Carrie.  I  would be tempted to include the complete Dark Tower Series on the syllabus, but I think it would discourage interesting people from taking the class while encouraging maybe the wrong kind of people (i.e. those who think they already know everything there is to know) to sign up.  As a compromise I would make constant references to the books with the hope of intriguing (if not shaming) those who have not read them to do so.

We'd have to start with On Writing to establish the man's story, and in part his aesthetic, though I think his works speak to that better than anything he says in On Writing.  

Next, we'd move on to Night Shift, speficially the following stories, which I think all have the earmarks of the blue collar society in which King was raised:

"Graveyard Shift"  Hall strikes me as a character close to Stephen King's heart: a "college boy" trying to make it in the world of blue-collar folks.  Hall's latent obsession with the macabre is an obvious tribute to King's own dangerous aesthetic.  In this story it leads to his death; in King's life, the terms were different, but the stakes were the same.

"The Mangler" is a fun piece colored by Ruth Pillsbury King's experience working a machine much like the one that becomes possessed by a demon in the story.

"The Boogeyman" boasts a narrator that is socially backward when it comes to the defining cultural themes of King's generation: namely the quest for greater civil rights for both women and blacks.  I get the impression King got a lot of pleasure out of torturing this guy.

"Grey Matter" if only for the Maine dialect.  This piece is a masterwork of voice.  It also comments on alcoholism, a demon King himself was fighting.

"Sometimes They Come Back" is, I think, a comment on King's days behind a desk.  More on this in Carrie .

"The Man who Loved Flowers" only because it proves you don't have to be gory to tell a horror story.  In this case King describes the mania of a hammer-murderer without mentioning a single drop of blood.  He also uses a pretty nifty bait and switch to get the effect of the surprise ending.

I'd probably stop with these stories, but would be tempted to include: "The Ledge" a brilliant suspense piece that seems to deal with class issues, "Strawberry Spring" for offering a brilliant take on the wicked Poe's unreliable narrator, and "Quitters, Inc." for just being really frigging fun.

We'd move on to Carrie in conjunction with the section in On Writing that corresponds with the writing of the piece.  I find it fascinating that King's wife encouraged her husband to write a book based on the merits of a scene like the one found in the opening pages of this novel.  The resulting conversations may be awkward, but I think this book was ahead of its time given the Columbine phenomenon and our heightened "bully" radar.  Maybe we'd come to see it as a cautionary tale.  Who knows?

The Shining and Misery would have to function as a kind of unconscious autobiography during King's darker days of substance abuse and his life-long fear that there may be something truly and inescapably damaged in his psyche.

I see Duma Key and Lisey's Story (and to a certain extent Insomnia) as autobiographical during the days after he kicked drugs and alcohol and after the near death experience of being hit by a van.

Fantasy Class: Cormac McCarthy

Punk everyone out the first day by calling The Road Cormac McCarthy for Dummies.  "You didn't actually think we'd read an Oprah book in here, did you?"

The Border Trilogy.  My favorite is The Crossing, but you need all three.  All the Pretty Horses might attract female students to the class, which would be a necessity.  An all-guys McCarthy class would consist of smatterings of sparse dialogue, a mysterious aroma of whiskey, a lot of whisker stroking, and everyone would smoke and look out the window for a long time.

Suttree. There's nothing like getting kicked out of your estranged son's funeral.  Well, maybe waking  crusted in your own vomit.  Many of McCarthy's characters wake to find themselves crusted in various bodily fluids.  Suggest that someone write a theme paper about it.

Blood Meridian.  Suggest someone perform an interpretive dance inspired by The Judge.  Give extra credit to the student with the largest scar.  Challenge them to cut something's head off and bring it in for show and tell.  Give vocabulary quizzes until someone cries.

No Country for Old Men.  Spend an entire month making them read Yeats' A Vision even though it's not on the course syllabus.  Whenever students complain stay very calm and unfold your pocket knife.  Pick your fingernails and ask them if they'd like to file a complaint with the department chair.  Deem at least one student "The Hunchback."

Fantasy Class: Non Fiction

When teaching public high school has me down I fantasize about courses I'd like to teach given the ideal students, resources, and amount of time.  I always feel kind of sleazy when I do this.  I'm not sure why.

I've read a lot of good non-fiction lately, so I have been fantasizing about writing a non fiction course outline.  The class would be designed around getting the students to find expression for their own stories.  I once saw a cluster of video diaries that a teacher had inspired his students to create.  These were all really cool and artsy and highlighted the constrictive nature of being human while offering glimmers of hope, so in my fantasy all of my students will create really arty video diaries.

The reading material is what got me thinking in the first place, so I might as well name drop of bunch of books I'll probably never get to teach.

Non-Fiction books about Work

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.  I think this is a memoir.  It is mostly about working as a chef. I'm not even sure if it would be ethical to teach this book, but it's my fantasy, so I guess I don't really care if it's ethical or not.

On Writing by Stephen King.  After listening to this in my car a couple dozen times over the past ten years I can recite entire passages from memory.  The narrative has so permeated my mind that I've tried to imitate it in writing... without really knowing I was trying.  Scary.

Working by Studs Terkel.  I love this book.  It is one of the great un-hailed masterpieces of its day.  And in my fantasy we'd read ALL of it.  Not just the interview with the prostitute.

Non-Fiction about Coming of Age

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt.  I feel about Angela's Ashes the way young Frank feels about Shakespeare: reading passages out loud is like having rubies in your mouth.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls . This one is still fresh in my mind as I finished it not three days ago.  It would, I think, begin to round out the "growing up" section of the course with a female voice.  Plus it's a hell of a read.

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski.  Again, I know of no one with the cojones to teach Bukowski.  In my fantasy, I have the cojones.  Besides, this book is a great memoir.  It's kind of heartbreaking while managing to be funnier than hell.

Non-Fiction on Old Age

A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.  One of my proudest achievements in life is having read all of Hemingway.  This one is unique, and a lot of fun to picture the big guy doing his thing.  It is retrospective, hence the old age thing.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.  If you think it's Lifetime movie material you're also one of those people who think Harry Potter is just for kids and I don't want you in my class anyway.

Supplementals

Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by SMITH magazine.  These are like popcorn, okay?


I'll supplement the reading with in-class writing drills and lengthier out of class writing assignments.  There would be a workshop or two.

Anyway this is just a draft that I will probably obsessively come back and edit (12-4-11...there are probably errors regardless), like all of my posts, so if you're pissed I didn't mention your favorite book, it's probably because I haven't read it.  Drop me a line.

The Short List

Things I Know:

Yeungling tasted better when I thought they didn't want to give it to us because of the Browns / Steelers rivalry.

Some guys have all the luck.

Dead leaves smell better than live ones.

Some guys have all the pain.

Cats demand the perfect amount of attention from me.

Some guys get all the breaks.

Old stuff, generally, is cooler than new stuff.

Some guys do nothing but complain.

Wednesday's Lesson Plan

Given a month of priming, what's wrong with posting, at 8:20am, "Write with cautious optimism in a way that is creatively satisfying," stepping back and getting out of their way?