Continental Paper Grading Co.

This picture is me--I mean, I. (I graded eighteen papers in three hours last night and this morning.)

[Photo taken on an Amtrak train leaving Chicago.]

Being productive in college

Various bits of advice from MetaFilter. I especially like the suggestion to use cds as units of studying time (study through one cd, then take a short break, then another cd, and so on).

LINK: "Being productive in college"

[Via 43 Folders.]

100 frequently misspelled words

acceptable
accidentally
accommodate
acquit
a lot
amateur
apparent
argument

From a list of "the 100 words most often misspelled," complete with explanations of why they're easy to misspell. An enterprising person could format these words into columns, print a page (or index card), and save many trips to the dictionary.

LINK: 100 Misspelled Words

[Via lifehack.org.]

Old and improved

I spent some time this weekend rewriting and streamlining a January 2005 post that's had a fair number of hits, "How to e-mail a professor." It's worthwhile reading for any college student.

LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"

Ands

The weaknesses of Microsoft Word's grammar checker are by now well known, via Sandeep Krishnamurthy's eye-opening demonstration. And the inherent weaknesses of any spellchecker should be obvious: the inability to distinguish between their and there, for instance, or to know that proof read should be written as proofread. Yesterday I found a further glitch when reading over a document: Word's spellchecker didn't flag the typo ands.

According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, ands is a word, at least sort of. AND, always in all caps, is a transitive verb, meaning "to combine (sets, binary signals, etc.) using a Boolean AND operator." Sample OED sentence: "The program for plot ANDs X with 7." It's also conceivable that someone might pluralize the conjunction: "This sentence uses too many ands." But wouldn't it make better sense to omit ands from Word's standard dictionary and allow users of Boolean operators to add the word to a custom dictionary? Just asking.

As my wife Elaine Fine has pointed out to me, Word's spellchecker also recognizes Julliard as correct. But the music school is Juilliard. The spellcheckers in both AbiWord and the Writer component of OpenOffice.org let ands go by, but they both flag Julliard as misspelled. Both programs are freeware, which in this case means that you get what you don't pay for--greater accuracy in spelling.

Raymond Carver's index cards

From Raymond Carver's essay "On Writing":

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by any means, but if a writer has "fundamental accuracy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: ". . . and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all--what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief--and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks.

LINK: "On Writing"

Misheard

Listening to the radio during lunch, I thought that I heard these words:

The Tao is up four points.

Nope, it's the Dow that's up. I am sadly out of "the mainstream."

"The Search for Petula Clark"

[A]t that time, climbing fast on all the charts and featured hard upon the hour was an item called "Who Am I?" The singer was Petula Clark; the composer and conductor, Tony Hatch. . . . Released in 1966, and preceded the year before by "Sign of the Times" and "My Love," it laid to rest any uncharitable notion that her success with the ubiquitous "Downtown" of 1964 was a fluke. Moreover, this quartet of hits was designed to convey the idea that bound as she might be by limitations of timbre and range, she would not accept any corresponding restrictions of theme and sentiment. Each of the four songs details an adjacent plateau of experience, the twenty-three months separating the release dates of "Downtown" and "Who Am I" being but a modest acceleration of the American teenager's precipitous scramble from the parental nest. And "Pet" Clark is in many ways the complete synthesis of this experience. . . . She is pop music's most persuasive embodiment of the Gidget syndrome.

From Glenn Gould's CBC broadcast, "The Search for Petula Clark." Gould's over-the-top analysis of Petula Clark's art is funny, obsessive, both tongue-in-cheek and somehow deeply in earnest. Gould thought Clark better, far better, than the Beatles: "theirs is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism." (And he said that in 1967!)

If you listen to this broadcast, you may at first wonder whether it's been mislabeled. But just keep listening: Petula Clark will soon turn up.

LINK: Glenn Gould radio broadcasts, from UbuWeb

[Correction: The correct title of the broadcast is "The Search for 'Pet' Clark," as I found when I checked page 292 of Kevin Bazzana's excellent biography, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. The broadcasts have since disappeared from UbuWeb.]

"Slow down and think"

Kids' thoughts about writing with fountain pens:

Do you think writing with a fountain pen improves your penmanship? Why?

"My handwriting is usually bad with a ballpen, better with a pencil, but it is 100% better with a fountain pen. I can't rush with a fountain pen because I am left handed, and get ink all over my hand. But my teachers can understand my handwriting when I write with the fountain pen Mr. Socas gave me." Raul, 8th grade.

"With a fountain pen, you have to slow down and think. You can't be messy. My essays are much better now, because I think about what I am going to write before I write it. I think the teacher gave me a pen as a trick to make me think better. The pens make my writing look nicer too, but I hate to get ink on my hand. I have to carry wet wipes with me." Ingrid, 8th grade.

LINK: "Pens for Kids" [Scroll down to the heading "Pens for Kids."]

The Hobart Shakespeareans

Below, a link to a wonderful page about the documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans, which recently aired on the PBS series P.O.V. The Hobart Shakespeareans are the fifth-grade students of Rafe Esquith, a teacher at Hobart Boulevard Elementary, an "inner-city" school in Los Angeles. Each year Esquith's students (from disadvantaged backgrounds, many from families of recent immigrants) study and perform one of Shakespeare's plays, in its entirety. The students do a lot of other reading too (check out their recommended reading).

The story of the Hobart Shakespeareans and their teacher is a wonderful example of what becomes possible when one imagines learning as a genuine possibility. In Esquith's classroom, Hamlet isn't something to be feared, something to be "supplemented" with SparkNotes and movies or presented in simplified language. It's the real thing, to be approached with reverent attention. I especially like what fifth-grader Sol Ah says: "Even if the movies they make are good, they won't be as good as the book."

LINK: The Hobart Shakespeareans