Posts Tagged ‘adulthood’

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It’s Not What You Say

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Although I have always believed this, I was still shocked to hear the following statistic at our first faculty meeting of the year.  When you communicate with another person, here is how they interpret your message:

Words: 7 %

Tone and inflections: 38 %

Body language: 55 %

It makes sense, really.  Our principal used this statistic as the basis for our new communication policy at school, and I think it’s a good communication policy for just about anyone’s school, business or life:

Words: this is e-mail and text messaging.  Since it’s just words, it should be relegated to the simple relaying of information: “I’ll meet you at 4 PM” or “Here’s the outline for the next chapter.”  The minute the exchange becomes more complex, it should move to a more personal level.

Tone and inflections: phone calls.  Most minor negotiations and problems can be resolved this way.  “Why did my daughter get a zero for this assignment?”  “How can I get my son to practice more regularly?” “Let’s work out a time to get together.”  There’s something so much more personal about the sound of a spoken voice: it can nip a lot of misunderstandings in the bud.

Body language: face-to-face meetings.  For anything important, whether a job interview (yes, they do take place over the phone, but it’s rare) or catching up with an old friend.  Taking the time to sit down with someone shows you care enough to give them your full attention.  This is how we run our classes, and it should be how we run our lives, too.

I take a lot of flack for staying away from Facebook and chat rooms and even my own cell phone, which I would prefer to be without.  But I take pride in knowing that I can give someone my full attention, my full presence, whether it’s a client, student, or friend.  I was at a party this week where I saw a man find out his wife was pregnant via text.  Can you imagine?!  No, thank you.  I want my relationships real.

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An Encouraging Word

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

From the late John Updike:

[The rookie writer] may feel, as the gray-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume oxugen in the increasingly small room of the print world, that the elderly have the edge, with their established names and already secured honors.  How we did adore and envy them . . . we imagined them aswim in a heavenly refulgence, as joyful and immutable in their exalted condition as angels forever singing.

Now that I am their age — indeed, older than a number of them got to be — I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity.  You are not yet typecast. You can take a distant, cold view of the entire literary scene.  You are full of your material — your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation — when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news.

He goes on to talk about what it’s like to be an old writer, and about aging in general — he knew whereof he spake, as he died just a few months after this article was published.  The golden years are as fascinating as they are unknown to me, but I can only hope and pray that I can someday write with half the gravity and elegance he seems to command at the drop of a hat.  I suppose, to use a clumsily mixed metaphor, that the grass is always greener on the other side of the generation gap.

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Plagiarism is Understandable?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Stanley Fish says yes (my emphasis added:)

If you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale  (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless  you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.  It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Perhaps.  But there’s a big difference between incorrectly citing a quotation or idea and brazenly appropriating whole passages, as in the shocking anecdote that opens the article.  Besides, isn’t the very act of hanging out in someone’s house, without knowing their rules, a moral problem?  If you waltz right by the pile of shoes in the entryway and keep yours on because you think you should be able to do what you’re used to doing in your own house, you’re probably the same kind of person who asks to see a friend’s paper and lifts a few paragraphs because you would be willing to do the same for her.  That’s not the right way to live, and boy, does it complicate the life of an English teacher!

I remember my first and most traumatic plagiarism experience as if it were yesterday.  In my first year of teaching, I read two papers that were almost exactly the same (especially absurd for an opinion paper) with only a word changed here and there.  We summoned both students to the vice-principal’s office and questioned them separately.  Each broke down in tears.  I felt sorry for them, but still angry, mostly out of pride: how dumb did they think I was?!

Maybe Fish’s argument is over my head (it wouldn’t be the first time.)  But I have always agreed with Baba, of the Kite Runner, who says:

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft . . . When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness . . . There is no act more wretched than stealing.”

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A Sense of Place

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

To speak of domesticity is to describe a set of felt emotions, not a single attribute.  Domesticity has to do with family, intimacy, and a devotion to the home, as well as with a sense of the house as embodying — not only harboring — these sentiments.

Witold Rybczynski, Home

As he so often does, my husband said it best.  We were wearily riding the escalator to the departure gate at the Las Vegas airport, not looking forward to the redeye flight (complete with 4 AM layover) that would bring us home.  Too tired for conversation, we just stared at each other. Then he spoke:

“I’m glad this is our last trip for awhile.”

I nodded.  This was the summer we never saw coming.  We sure should have: when I started tallying up days, it turned out that the two months from the last day of school to yesterday, when we changed clothes in the airport bathroom and went straight to a badly-needed Liturgy, were two-thirds travel.  And even that ratio doesn’t reveal all: between eight trips, some piggybacked but all in different places, we were home for only a couple of days at a time: just long enough to unpack and repack before setting out again.  It got progressively harder to leave the garden, now in a sad state of neglect; the cat, who misses us enough to lose a few ounces each time we leave; and the house, that bottomless pit of projects and responsibilities and failures and hopes.

The afternoon before our last trip, not quite a week ago, I was trying to finish up one more project, rolling the last coat of paint on the upstairs hallway.  I don’t know if I was more shocked when I suddenly burst into tears or when I couldn’t stop for several hours, during which time I stubbornly refused to curtail the task and stood painting and sobbing while the cat yowled at me in alarm.  (We must have made a pretty pathetic tableau, and if any of her Prozac had been left in the bottle I think I would have given us both a dose.)

This physical reaction to mental stress can be partly explained by my personality — a strong introvert, I love social time but it takes a lot out of me, and all of these trips involved near-constant time with family and friends — but I also think there is something in each of us that craves the comfort of routine and a sense of place.  At home the Tupperware cupboard may be disorganized, but you know where it is, and given a minute or two and maybe one cathartic swear word, you can find the lid to the container that’s just the right size to hold the soup that will be tomorrow’s lunch.  In another place, you don’t much care what happens to the leftovers because you didn’t give up your afternoon to prepare dinner; and even if you are in favor of saving them, there’s no fridge in the hotel room — or you don’t want to trouble your host by using hers.

That may be it, in fact — the responsibilities about which we complain endlessly are dear to us because they symbolize our investment of time, energy and love.  It’s freeing to throw a towel on the floor and say, “I don’t care!” and know that someone else will pick it up and wash it; but after a few weeks it’s simply an empty gesture, and all those “I don’t care!”s add up to a person that really doesn’t.  I don’t want to be her.  I don’t even like her.  Finally home, now, I am grateful for these tiny domestic tasks; with each one, I return a little more to the center of who I am.

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An Interested Life

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Anna is no longer blogging, but I came across this wonderful quote recently and had to share it:

Live an interested life. I cannot put this in bold enough face. You are interpreting the world to your child. Is it fascinating for you? Are you engaged in creating, in thinking, in knowing people? Do you make music, take pictures, cook, teach yourself to sew, hike someplace new, learn to fish, eat at a new restaurant, take the back way into town? Are you reading about the history of mental illness, repairing furniture, learning to oil paint? *Show* your child how interesting the world is, and they will love to learn.

And that is what we’re after, isn’t it?

She was talking about homeschooling (she did it with five of her own) but I think it’s good advice for all parents, and godparents, and teachers too.  I’ve always thought it was just fine if students thought I was weird, as long as they saw I was passionate, because maybe it would inspire them to be more passionate toward the things they love to learn about.

Or, at the very least, they’d get a good laugh at my weirdness.  Which is good for both parties.

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