The Opal Petty story

3703 students: When you see what happens to Darl, consider the following:

Opal Petty, whose lawsuit over her 51-year involuntary commitment in Texas mental institutions led to changes in state policy, died on March 10 in San Angelo, Tex. She was 86 and lived in Christoval, Tex.

The cause was pneumonia, said Linda Kauffman, the wife of Ms. Petty's nephew, Clint Denson.

Ms. Kauffman learned by chance at a 1986 reunion of her husband's family that Ms. Petty had been committed by her family to a state hospital in 1934, when she was 16. No one at the reunion knew exactly where she was at the time, Ms. Kauffman said in an interview, only that she was in some facility near where Ms. Kauffman lived.

When she got home to San Angelo, Ms. Kauffman called the institution closest to her home--the San Angelo State School, in Carlsbad--and found that Ms. Petty was indeed confined there.

She began to see Ms. Petty and arranged for her to make visits to the Denson home. The more she got to know Ms. Petty, Ms. Kauffman said, the more nervous and uncooperative school officials became.

Eventually she sought legal advice and was directed to Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who filed suit on Ms. Petty's behalf. Through pretrial discovery, it was learned that she had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But her lawyers argued that at worst she had had a psychotic depression. They also said she had suffered irreparable harm from being held in a "prison-like environment" for so long.

Dr. Jefferson Nelson, an Austin psychiatrist, testified, based on Ms. Petty's records and a personal examination, that she was psychotic when she was admitted, but that her symptoms quickly subsided, and that she should have been released.

He also testified that as a result of being institutionalized, Ms. Petty was afflicted with an "institutional syndrome" that left her withdrawn and unable to express emotion. . . .

Mr. Harrington said: "Being fundamentalist Baptists her family didn't approve of her wanting to go out dancing and such things. A church exorcism didn't work, so the family made the decision to commit her. One of her girl friends said she didn't see anything wrong with her."

After Ms. Kauffman found her, Ms. Petty was furloughed from the state school and lived with Ms. Kauffman and her husband for almost 20 years. She was employed at a workshop for people with mental disabilities, and bought dolls to add to a collection she had started while confined.

"They were her family," Ms. Kauffman said. "When she was buried she was surrounded by her dolls."

You can read the complete New York Times obituary by clicking here.

On Microsoft's grammar checker

From "Microsoft Word Grammar Checker Are No Good, Scholar Conclude," in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

If you've ever used Microsoft Word, chances are you've seen that jagged green line appear beneath something you've written--scolding you for drafting a fragmented sentence, maybe, or for slipping into the passive voice. That's Microsoft's grammar-checking technology at work.

But how much good does the grammar checker actually do? Precious little, according to Sandeep Krishnamurthy, an associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington. After experimenting with the tool, Mr. Krishnamurthy concluded that it cannot identify many basic grammatical faux pas--like errors in capitalization, punctuation, and verb tense.

Now he has dedicated himself to chronicling the grammar checker's blind spots, and to persuading Microsoft to improve the tool.

On his Web site (http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check), Mr. Krishnamurthy has posted evidence that he considers damning: a series of examples of poor grammar the software considers passable. One reads: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany."

Microsoft officials did not respond to calls for comment. . . .

Editor's note: The headline on this article cleared Microsoft's grammar checker.

You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

By the way, you can easily be rid of jagged red and green lines: go to Tools, Options, and Spelling & Grammar to turn off the automatic (and annoying) spelling and grammar checkers. Then just hit F7 when you want to check spelling.

Chess, life, and right answers

The games drew about 15 chess enthusiasts to a windowless conference room at City College in Harlem, where pawns and rooks were moved with such intensity of purpose that the scene could have passed for yet another high-stakes tournament.

The grandmaster and bona fide chess luminary Maurice Ashley was there, calling out commentary as he often does when championship matches are broadcast around the world. He is known to use lines like, "Pawns are attacking mercilessly!" and "The bishop is slicing and dicing!"

But what Mr. Ashley had to say about chess on this night was more academic. Literally. "A lot of times in education we try to teach kids the one right answer and that leads, in my opinion, to robotic thinking," he told the players, encouraging them to think of multiple possible moves before choosing the best play. "Real life isn't like that. Is there ever one right answer? Generating alternatives for the sake of alternatives is a good thing."

From an article in the New York Times on "Introduction to Logical Thinking Through Chess," a course for NYC teachers. You can read the article by clicking here.

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3009 Q & A

3009 students: What's the most valuable thing you learned from reading The Grapes of Wrath?

To respond, click on the comments link below, and then click on Post a Comment. For your identity, choose Other. You can add your name or leave it blank if you prefer.

As replies come in, they'll be available to read by clicking on the comments link for this post.

Faulkner bio

From a review of One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini:

"Now I realise for the first time," wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from. I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel."

You can read the review by clicking here.

3009 links

3009 students: Here are the links. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Current conditions for migrant workers

Agricultural Worker Health Initiative
On the health of migrant workers

Health of Migrant Farmworkers in California
A report from the California Research Bureau, available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Illegal Immigration in the California Strawberry Industry
On the crucial role of migrant labor in the strawberry industry

Mexican Migrant Workers and Lynch Culture
On violence against migrant workers

Migrant Labor in the United States
A report from the PBS series Now

Research on migrant labor in Pennsylvania
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Research on migrant labor in Wisconsin
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Seeds: The Agricultural Worker Health and Housing Program Quarterly
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Two articles from the New York Times on migrant housing

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Wages in Chinese factories

China as No. 1
On manufacturing and markets

China: Awakening Giant
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Chinese factory workers begin protesting low wages, poor conditions
An article from the Knight Ridder news agency

Factsheet on Chinese factory labor From nosweat.org

How China Gets Our Business
A report from the Boston Consulting Group

Just how cheap is Chinese labour?
From asianlabour.org

Migrant Workers Call the Shots
On the influx of rural men and women seeking manufacturing jobs in China's cities

U.S. Factory Shipped To China
CBS News report on the dismantling of an American factory

Steinbeck's Salinas

From an article by Carolyn Marshall in today's New York Times:

The reputation of this farming community, known as the Salad Bowl of the World, has been burnished by giants of American history like the civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who organized the area's farmworkers, and John Steinbeck, a native son who borrowed images from the landscape and Depression-era residents in writing "The Grapes of Wrath."

The pride, fear and hope Steinbeck described were in evidence this weekend as residents, celebrities and best-selling authors gathered for a 24-hour emergency read-in to try to avert an unwelcome footnote to Salinas's legacy: the impending closing of the city's three public libraries.

Unless the city can raise $500,000 by June 30, the John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez and El Gabilan Libraries will be shuttered, victims of the city's $9 million budget shortfall. If the branches are closed, Salinas will become the nation's largest city without a public library.

The read-in, organized by groups including Code Pink and the Salinas Action League, began Saturday afternoon and included a pitched-tent sleepover on the lawn of the Chavez library and readings by authors including Anne Lamott and Maxine Hong Kingston.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

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Overheard

Someone talking on a cellphone:

No! A relationship is a 50-50 thing, Kevin.

Yet another word from the Greek

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day email:

sophomoric \sahf-MOR-ik\ adjective
*1 : conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature
2 : of, relating to, or characteristic of a sophomore

Example sentence:
The class presentations were surprisingly thorough and interesting--not at all the sophomoric commentaries I had expected.

Did you know?

Sophomores get a bad rap. A lot of people seem to think they're foolish (no matter what they do), when they know they're pretty wise. The history of the words "sophomore" and "sophomoric," which developed from "sophomore," proves that it has always been tough to be a sophomore. Those words are believed to come from a combination of the Greek terms "sophos" (meaning "wise") and "moros" (meaning "foolish"). But sophomores can take comfort in the fact that some very impressive words, including "philosopher" and "sophisticated," are also related to "sophos."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Robert Creeley died yesterday in Odessa, Texas.

Sparks Street Echo

Flakes falling
out window make
no place, no place--

no faces, traces,
wastes of whatever
wanted to be--

was here
momently, mother,
was here.

From Selected Poems (1991)

*

Why poetry? Its materials are so constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It preoccupies a life, yet can only find one in living. It is a music, a playful construct of feeling, a last word and communion. I love it that these words, "made solely of air," as Williams said, have no owner finally to determine them. The English teacher all that time ago who said, "You must learn to speak correctly," was only wrong in forgetting to say why--for these words which depend upon us for their very existence fail as our usage derides or excludes them. They are no more right or wrong than we are, yet suffer our presumption forever.

From the Preface to Selected Poems (1991)