Annals of pedagogy

Henrietta Pastorfield is an English teacher at Calvin Coolidge High School in New York City. Her colleague Sylvia Barrett, writing to a friend from college, describes Miss Pastorfield as a teacher who “woos the kids by entertaining them, convinced that lessons must be fun, knowledge sugar-coated, and that teacher should be pal.”

There’s this testimony from a former student:

In Miss Pastorfeilds class I really enjoyed it we had these modren methods like Amature Hour and Gussing Games in rows with a scorekepper and to draw stick figures to show the different charactors in the different books and Speling Hospital and Puntuation Trafic and Sentence Baseball with prizes for all thats the way to really learn English.

And from the school newspaper, the Calvin Coolidge Clarion: “The teacher who makes lessons most like games: MISS HENRIETTA (‘PAL’) PASTORFIELD.” Yes, Punctuation Traffic and the like are team games.

I’ve been quoting from Bel Kaufman’s 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase. In the 1967 film adaptation, Miss Pastorfield explains her pedagogy in a faculty meeting:

“Kid them along, make it a game. l have a new one this year: Hospital Spelling. Misspelled words are the patients, and the kids are the doctors and the nurses.”

Which prompts rakish Paul Barringer to suggest Punctuation Sex: “l shudder to think what an exclamation point might mean.”

I remember standing in a hallway years ago, listening to a game of Punctuation Football underway in a college classroom. Yes, that too was a team game. I have sometimes wondered if the instructor had read or seen Up the Down Staircase.

The past plead

I was puzzled by a graphic on MSNBC this afternoon: headshots of miscreants, each labeled Indicted or Plead Guilty. Not Pleaded?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage:

Plead belongs to the same class of verbs as bleed, lead, speed, read, and feed, and like them it has a past and past participle with a short vowel spelled pled or sometimes plead. Competing with the short-vowel form from the beginning was a regular form pleaded. Eventually pleaded came to predominate in mainstream British English, while pled retreated into Scottish and other dialectal use. Through Scottish immigration or some other means, pled reached America and became established here.

M-W goes on to say that after coming under attack in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pled is now “fully respectable,” and that “both pled (or plead) and pleaded are in good use in the U.S.” In other words, people say and write these words (including, in M-W’s examples, Sinclair Lewis and a New Yorker contributor), so the words are okay.

In contrast, Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Pleaded has always been the predominant past-tense and past-participial form. From the early 1600s, pleaded has appeared much more frequently in print sources than its rivals. Commentators on usage have long preferred it, pouring drops of vitriol onto *has pled and *has plead. . . .

The problem with these strong pronouncements, of course, is that *pled and *plead have gained some standing in AmE. . . .

Still, pleaded, the vastly predominant form in both AmE and BrE, is always the best choice.

In a sentence, the past tense plead may pose no problem for a reader: “Appearing before a judge this morning, he plead guilty.” Even there, though, my first inclination is to read plead as a present tense. On its own, plead guilty may look like an instance of the present tense, or like a mistake for pled or pleaded. And pled itself may look like a mistake for the “vastly predominant” pleaded. To my mind, Bryan Garner is right: pleaded is the best choice.

[Garner on The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage: “I really cannot read a page of that book without having a significant rise in my blood pressure.” In GMEU an asterisk marks “invariably poor usage.”]

Net neutrality in Illinois

For Illinois readers only: Please consider calling your representative in the Illinois General Assembly in support of House Bill 4819, which would protect net neutrality in Illinois. Here is a page with the names of all current House members.

“Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces”

An excerpt:


Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998).

Related posts
Borges manuscript found : Borges on reading : A sentence from “The Aleph”

Domestic comedy

“I thought you said ‘Help yourself.’”

“No, I said ‘Laurel.’”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[If you’re lost: yanny or laurel.]

Separated at birth

 
[Steven Isserlis, cellist; Pat Metheny, guitarist.]

Thanks to OCA reader Steven for suggesting this pairing and sending links to the pictures.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

[Steven Pinker, charter member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, would make for triplets. But Pinker’s hair has prompted sufficient attention and comparisons already.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its third year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our third year we read twenty-three books. In non-chronological order:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall, The Garden of Cyrus

Truman Capote, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Three Stories

Alfred Döblin, Bright Magic: Stories

Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), The Complete Stories, The Trial

Guy de Maupassant, Collected Stories, Like Death

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway

Nuccio Ordine, The Usefulness of the Useless

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Stefan Zweig, Balzac, Beware of Pity, The Burning Secret, Fear

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Anthea Bell, Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, E.K. Brown, M. Walter Dunne, Andrew Hurley, Michael Hoffman, Richard Howard, Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, Alastair McEwen, Breon Mitchell, Willa and Edwin Muir, William and Dorothy Rose, Damion Searls, Jonathan Sturges, Tania and James Stern, Dorothea Walter and John Watkins.

Here are the reports for 2016 and 2017.

Shakespeare’s and snails’

From The Guardian:

In a new study, researchers claim to have made headway in understanding the simplest kind of memory a mollusc might form, and, with a swift injection, managed to transfer such a memory from one sea snail to another.

Key word: claim.

The reason this item caught my attention: yesterday I read Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Shakespeare’s Memory,” in which Shakespeare’s memory is given by one person to another. That is, the contents of Shakespeare’s memory: Anne Hathaway, lines from Chaucer, Ben Jonson’s teasing.

One Borges sentence

Down in the cellar, there’s “a small iridescent sphere,” “two or three centimeters in diameter,” the Aleph. Looking into it, one sees everything:


Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998).

Borges was one of the first writers I discovered on my own, all the way back in high school. I am immensely happy to have now read the Collected Fictions.

Related posts
Borges manuscript found : Borges on reading

[Idle speculation: might this catalogue of things seen have influenced Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”? I’m not the first reader to see a resemblance.]

How to improve writing (no. 76)

From a David Brooks column in The New York Times:

In these places if you become successful, it is expected that you will become active in town life.

Rearranging the elements of the sentence would give proper emphasis to “if you become successful”:

If you become successful in these places, it is expected that you will become active in town life.

But the sentence still feels cumbersome to me, especially when I hear it: If, become, in, it, is, become, in. And then there’s the dire it is expected that. A possible revision:

In these places, people expect those who are successful to participate in town life.

Or:

People in these places expect those who are successful to participate in town life.

I didn’t go looking for a sentence to improve this morning: this one presented itself as needing immediate help.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard) : David Brooks and SNOOTs : PBS, sheesh : WHAT?

[This post is no. 76 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]