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The Kingdom of Homophonia

September 28, 2010

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahomophone

The Kingdom of Homophonia

On a cold, damp night, the king’s favorite knight
Was feeling a little bit hoarse
Although not allowed, he wasn’t too proud
For singing aloud to his horse
(The horse, named Harry, had a brother named Larry
Who was truly more hairy than he)
Now Harry could see it was scary to be
Overlooking great cliffs by the sea
Of course, man and horse followed coarse course
Towards the castle of Don Palindrome
They had chosen to roam to the city of Rome
For that’s where the Don made his home
At a quarter to eight, the two stopped and ate
On a knoll by the side of the trail
The pair had fair fare: an apple, a pear,
And barbecued brisket of quail
They rode down the road and passed a plain plane
Which they had not seen in the past
Man slept as horse led, though its legs felt like lead
They no longer traveled so fast
When the brave knight awoke, a spooky voice spoke,
“Just what are you doing down here?”
A giant hole had swallowed them whole
And something quite scary was near
A sorceress named Shirley appeared and exclaimed,
“Surely, you will die today!
You’ve discovered our coven and you will know
Why visitors do not get away.”
The young knight interjected he had not detected
Which witch was truly in charge
When an old witch named Carrie proceeded to carry
A bucket that was rather large
Gizzards and guts from previous guests
(Who’s to say whose innards they were)
The knight turned pale as he peered in the pail
Staggering away from her
Carrie declared, “They’re two victims right there.
And their hides ain’t going nowhere.
You’re aware that in hours your flesh will be ours
You’ll make a delicious pair”
The two were too scared and quite unprepared
To wind up as anyone’s meal
For four long days, witches roasted and braised
When Beth finally said to Lucille,
“I’d like you to meet the meat we will eat.
It’s time to sprinkle in thyme
And oh, by the way, how much do they weigh?
Does anyone have any lime?”
Although in a daze from not eating for days
The knight had come up with a plan
He had been able to steal a sharp piece of steel
Which he hid in the palm of his hand
Not able to cut clear through the knot
He managed to slide around
Then Harry bit through and off they threw
The cords which held them down
They had no time to heal with witches at heel
As they headed back to the trail
By the hair on his tail, Harry’s speed did prevail
And they both lived to tell this tale

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Poetry for Kids | Leave a Comment »

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH

May 27, 2010

Archibald MacLeish

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH

The poem’s meaning is evoked by the structure of words-as-sounds rather than by the structure of words-as-meanings. And the enhanced meaning, which we feel in any true poems, is a product, therefore, of the structure of the sounds.

–Poetry and Experience by Archibald MacLeish (23)

Scansion records units of rhythm, not units of sense

–All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele (530)

Vocabulary

Meter: The basic rhythmic structure of written and uttered words (not simply poetry)

Iamb: A unit of language consisting of an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable, in that order.

I once began a lesson on meter to a group of eighth-graders by exaggerating (both verbally and bodily) the inherent iambic rhythms of the following lines of poetry:

“I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Pegg-y Ann McKay
I have the measles and the mumps
A gash, a rash and purple bumps*

A girl in the class looked at me in utter recognition and blurted out,
“I get it:

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH”

I was happy that this student immediately picked up on the main point of my lesson, but I was really thrilled because her description of iambic poetry was, in my opinion, superior to the one that is commonly offered in textbooks, a depiction with a musical correlation which mimics a snare drum:

ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum

Here are some examples of iambic meter:

Iambic Monometer–One Beat (nuh-NUH)

Upon His Departure Hence by Robert Herrick

Thus I
Passe by
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone:
I’m made
A shade,
And laid
I’th’grave:
There have
My cave.
Where tell
I dwell,
Farewell.

Iambic Dimeter–Two Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

The Robin by Thomas Hardy

When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky

Iambic Trimeter–Three Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

Touring a Past by Dick Davis

There is no boat to cross
From that ill-favored shore
To where the clashing reeds
Complete the works of war
Together with the grass,
And nesting birds, and weeds.

Iambic Tetrameter–Four Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH)

Now I lay me Down to Sleep

If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

Iambic Pentameter–Five Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born a-gain
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

One Final Thought


…”scanning” a line is not a dramatic, or poetic reading of a line. Scanning a line is reading it in a special, more or less forced, way, to bring out the meter and any definite derivations or substitutions. Scanning will not bring out the other parts of the tension; it will tend to iron them out. On the other hand, a good dramatic, or poetic, reading will tend to bring out the tensions–but note well that in order to do this it must be careful not to override and completely kill the meter. When that is done, the tensions vanish. (Another reason why the meter must be observed is, of course, that if a line is truly metrical, a reading which actually destroys the meter can only be an incorrect reading–by dictionary and rhetorical standards.) A good dramatic reading is a much more delicate, difficult, and rewarding than a mere scanning. Yet the scanning has its justification, its use. We would argue that a good dramatic reading is possible only by a person who can also perform a scansion.


The Concept of Meter by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley
from The Structure of Verse, Edited by Harvey Gross (163-164)

Suggested Further Reading:

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky

Versification: A Short Introduction by James McAuley

by Richard W. Bray

* Sick by Shel Silverstein

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Posted in Education, Language, Lesson Plans, Morsel, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Hardy | 3 Comments »

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 13, 2010

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (34)

The most toxic flaw in NCLB was its legislative command that all students in every school must be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. By that magical date, every single student must achieve proficiency, including students with special needs, students whose native language is not English, students who are homeless and lacking in any societal advantage, and student with every societal advantage but are not interested in their schoolwork

—Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (102)

After 9-11, too many of us were just too damn scared to even entertain the notion that our nation was being run by a couple of incompetent poltroons. We are still paying for this in treasure and in lives. Oddly, the same people who would call Barack Obama a socialist for mandating PRIVATE insurance had little problem with a complete federal takeover of the educational system, which has historically been a state and local issue. (The federal government is barely a seven percent stakeholder in education)

Under ordinary circumstances, Republicans would have opposed the bill’s broad expansion of federal power over local schools, and Democrats would have opposed its heavy emphasis on testing. But after September 1, 2001, Congress wanted to demonstrate unity, and education legislation sailed through (94).

NCLB passed in the Senate 87-10 and 381-41 in the House despite the fact that “No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLBs most fervent supporters often claimed it was feasible” (103).

Today many critics of what they consider invasive federal involvement in the healthcare industry would sue the federal government in the name of the basically moribund (since the Civil War) Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But when George W. Bush was president, instead of standing up to a draconian law which demands the surreal goal of universal success, Republicans as well as Democrats overwhelmingly preferred to toe the line and “[m]ost states devised ways to pretend to meet the impossible goal”(16).

Ravitch does a masterful job of laying out how school administrators across the country were forced to engage in deceptive practices or risk losing their jobs in her chapter entitled, The Trouble with Accountability. She draws on the work of Daniel Koretz and Richard Rothstein and other sober-minded thinkers who are wise enough to eschew a harebrained law which delivered us unto a macabre world where students now “master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself” (159).

Sadly, the Magical Thinking which infects our nation continues to thrive in education. President Obama supports policies which have been proven ineffective and he has appointed a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, whose record as superintendent of Chicago schools was dismal if not downright fraudulent:

In 2009, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released a study demonstrating that the city’s claims of dramatic test score gains were exaggerated….The Study concluded, however, that “these huge increases reflect changes in the tests and testing procedures—not real student improvement” (158).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Essay, Morsel | 2 Comments »

Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 4, 2010

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Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Our society is just beginning to recover from a long spell of Magical Thinking. Instead of confronting our problems and dealing with them, Americans spent the better part of a decade hoping that great men on horses would ride into to town bearing sanctified sidearms which fire magic bullets—instead we got George W. Bush in a flightsuit. But after 9/11, most of us we’re too scared to acknowledge or even see The Emperor’s Clothes. We just pretended that there were new, bold serious solutions that would preternaturally eliminate serious issues. Decisive Federal Action would fix public education just as it would defeat Islamo-facism and unfetter the Titans of Finance. Those were some heady times.

Today, our institutions are just beginning to recover from the febrile dreams which have infected (and continue to threaten the very existence of) our body politic. Sadly, no one is yet bowing in obeisance to the heroes who were banished from the Punditocracy for the crime of premature wisdom (i.e., Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield and Robert Sheer). Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the people who advocated these asinine and self-destructive policies over the last decade are still running this country and they’re not about to begin pointing fingers at one another.

That’s why Diane Ravitch should be praised for speaking up about her recent recovery from Hedda Payness Disease:

I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope(3-4).

I remember seeing a documentary years ago about how hospital administrators in the Soviet Union (who obviously knew nothing about how hospitals actually work) used to do surprise inspections in hospitals in which they would randomly swab the walls looking for evidence of bacteria. Consequently, the medical staff wasted a good deal of time scrubbing the walls with bleach. Funny thing about big bureaucracies, they tend to replicate such madness:

Measure, then punish or reward. No education experience needed to administer such a program. Anyone who loved data could do it. The strategy produced fear and obedience among educators; it often generated higher test scores. But it had nothing to do with education (16).

In our age of Magical Thinking, even really smart guys (because we all know that the billionaires are the best among us) like to dream of a simple world with simple solutions. For example, Bill Gates was blissfully “unaware of the disadvantages” of promoting smaller highs schools as a one-size-fits-all panacea for American education:

It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation decided that schools size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of students were starting high schools without having mastered basic skills…the root cause of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades (205).

After pissing away a couple of billion bucks, the Foundation wised up, but it wasn’t about to admit any mistakes:

In late 2008 the Gates Foundation announced that it was changing course. The $2 billion investment in new small high schools had not been especially successful (although it was careful not to come right out and say it was unsuccessful) (211).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Diane Ravitch, Education, Essay, Morsel | 3 Comments »

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch

April 6, 2010

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, I simply can’t pronounce it
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, it’s my duty to renounce it
Rough and tough rhyme with stuff
So why does cough rhyme with off?

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, there’s no rule of explanation
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, it’s just a spelling complication
I ought, I thought, never get caught
Saying bout when I mean bought

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, my English teacher doesn’t care
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, nobody warns: Speller beware!
If I threw my shoe at you
Would it be true that we are through?

Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, the cranial overload
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, might just make my brain explode
Though I reach out and grow like a bough
I’ll flunk my spelling test anyhow

by Richard W. Bray

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Resources for a Lesson Plan on Redundancy and An Amusing Teacher Story

March 30, 2010

George Carlin

Resources for a Lesson Plan on Redundancy

Use the list of redundancies from George Carlin’s wonderful book Braindroppings and The Redundant Little Short Story to teach a lesson on redundancies. Carlin’s list includes examples such as PIN number, safe haven, closed fist and linger on. (However, I would quibble with Carlin on the terms time clock and security guard. There’s a difference between a clock and a time clock just as there is a difference between a guard and a security guard.)


The Redundant Little Short Story

The two twins Ted and Ned lived in a teeny tiny little bungalow in the city of Chicago. The silly clown Fred Toolshed was Ted and Ned’s closest best friend. Fred lived in a small cottage near the University of UCLA. One day Ted, Ned, and Fred decided to go on a long journey in search of a famous celebrity or a royal queen. Ted said, “Fred, you would have to be a crazy maniac to travel through snowy blizzards and blustery tornadoes.”

“Ted,” said Ned, “only a stupid ignoramus or a cheap miser would pass up an opportunity to meet big giants, brilliant geniuses and dead mummies.”

So Ted, Ned and Fred had many exciting adventures in search of renowned luminaries and distinguished dignitaries. They also ate frozen popsicles with a young infant named Bed Wetter and an elderly octogenarian named Jed Sledder. The five of them met all kinds of living organisms, including a smelly skunk, a sleepy insomniac, a tiny microorganism, and a tall giraffe.

An Amusing Teacher Story

Sadly, due to the ill-conceived efforts of our current Education Secretary and his two immediate predecessors, frightened school administrators across the country are doing their best to eradicate all traces of art and humanity from the teaching profession (because, you know, teaching should only be about raising test scores).

But this sick, sad trend really has nothing to do with “accountability.” It’s just about power. (Accountability is a nice-sounding word, but in practice it means that schools are micromanaged by bureaucrats in Washington DC instead of being directly accountable to local school boards)

Back in the days before the federal government (a seven-percent stakeholder in education) made it so difficult for teachers to make even the smallest efforts to enrich the lives of their students, I used to show the kids gems like Donald O’Connor singing Make ‘em Laugh or the Nicholas Brother doing their thing in the movie Stormy Weather at the end of the day as we were preparing to go home.

Now, I’ve always been rather sympathetic to Freddy in My Fair Lady because I too find Audrey Hepburn to be irresistibly enchanting. So one day I was trying to explain why Freddy was so smitten with Eliza Doolittle before showing them the song On the Street Where You Live. I said that he had decided to sit in front of this woman’s house for days on end because he was in love with her but she was not in love with him.

One of my girls said, “I get it. He’s a stalker.”

I’m afraid she was right. (Kids really make you think sometimes.)

By Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Diane Ravitch, Education, Lesson Plans, Morsel | 2 Comments »

Teacher Knows Best–Not

March 22, 2010


Teacher Knows Best–Not

Teachers should feel privileged that they have been entrusted to administer education to, and oversee the wellbeing of, other people’s children for a limited period of time. Nothing has ever moved me more than seeing parents reluctantly parting with their children before school, a cogent reminder of the love and aspirations people have for their children. This is why teaching is such a monumental task and an almost overwhelming charge to keep.

Teachers are part of the Social Persistence Team, along with pastors, social workers, community organizers, various types of volunteers, police officers and other first responders, and everyone who works in the criminal justice system and the healthcare industry. But teaching is not group therapy. And it isn’t social engineering, either. Teachers who enter the profession hoping to become microcosmic gods who will erase injustice from the planet and fix the world one child at a time are destined for disappointment.

Teachers often try to fix other people’s families, which is a horrible mistake. It’s crucial for teachers to realize that they were not hired to tell parents how to raise their children. It is a teacher’s primary responsibility to work with parents in order to come up with the best strategies for facilitating learning, not to berate or belittle parents. That’s why it is so important not too come off like “Teacher Knows Best,” particularly when the teacher comes from a different socioeconomic background than his students.

Here’s one small example of what I’m talking about: Like many people, I am appalled when I see parents bringing their small children to gory, R-rated movies. And it makes my job difficult when children want to talk about these movies in class. This can be particularly irksome when, during a discussion of a particular literary trope such as the use of flashbacks, several of my elementary school students remark that there is a really good flashback scene in the movie Killer Mutant Zombies from Outer Space. Because I don’t want to get a call from my principal asking me what in the world I’m teaching these kids, I say, “That’s not an appropriate movie to be talking about at school.” But then I hear a whole chorus of, “My mom lets me see those movies.” That’s when I quickly change the subject.

I knew a teacher who not only tells her students that she would “never” let her own children watch violent movies, but she goes on to inform them that she thinks it’s terrible that their parents aren’t as enlightened as she is. Of course, it’s okay for a teacher to tell her students what she would or would not allow her own kids to do. But condemning parents in front of their children is really not helping matters. If these kids go home and tell their parents that their teacher thinks they are raising their children improperly, it is unlikely that the parents will respond favorably. They certainly aren’t going to think, “The Great White Teacher believes we’re uncivilized. Oh, no. We better go buy some books on parenting.”

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Morsel | 1 Comment »

Some Thoughts on the Efficacy of DARE-Type Programs and a Funny Teacher Story

March 14, 2010

Some Thoughts on the Efficacy of DARE-Type Programs

My existential perspective would suggest that it is heroic to try to enlist support across our institutions to attempt to reduce violence and drug abuse whether or not school-based programs to mitigate the ills that effect our society are actually effective (a hotly debated topic). But all good-doers who attempt to discover the perfect pedagogy to fix whatever ails us would do well to remember that the instructional day is finite and teachers already have a lot on their plate (particularly in an age when knuckleheaded politicians would have us fire teachers and administrators based upon student test scores.) This all brings me to a discussion about DARE (Drug Awareness and Resistance Education) and it also gives me an opportunity to relate one of my favorite teacher stories.

Many people have argued about the efficacy and appropriateness of programs like DARE because there is little evidence that it changes student behavior. But seeking quantifiable changes in societal behavior is asking a lot of any curriculum. And even if DARE did cause, say, one out of a hundred kids to say no to drugs, or if it were to decrease in any way the harmful effects of substance abuse in our society, how could we possibly measure such success in light of so many other confounding variables?

Like all human behavior, substance abuse involves a multiplicity of causal relationships which are difficult to gauge, and some things are easier to measure than others. Let’s look at efforts to reduce traffic fatalities, for example. It is obvious that enacting mandatory seatbelt laws and reducing speed limits will result in demonstrably fewer traffic fatalities. But how do we measure the effects of educational programs which operate on the margins of these statistics, such as traffic school and public service announcements? Just because it would be difficult for a statistician to isolate the slender portion of a decline in traffic fatalities attributable to such efforts, we would be foolish to abandon such efforts. That’s how I feel about DARE. What harm could it do? (There are those who argue that DARE actually teaches kids how to be more effective drugs users, but I find this claim dubious. There was, however, one time when Officer S____ did a lesson on the dangers of Whiteout, which was certainly news to me. I immediately put all my Whiteout away.)

Funny Teacher Story

Say what you want about DARE, it supplied me with one of my best teacher stories. One of the first things that Officer S____ always tells the kids is that it’s okay to relate stories about people they know, but they should not use real names.

So if officer S____ is talking about, say, methamphetamines, it is not appropriate for a student to say, “My uncle has a meth lab out in San Bernardino.”

Instead, the student should say, “Someone I know has a crank factory in his garage.”

So one day when Officer S____ was describing the perils of drunk driving, a student (we’ll call him David) rose his hand.

“My dad drives when he’s drunk all the time.” said David.

Officer S____ quickly cut him off. “You mean, someone you know drinks and drives on occasion”

David responded in a very condescending tone, “Well yeah, I know him. He’s my dad!”

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Morsel | 1 Comment »

New Yorker Magazine Buries the Lede in Puff Piece on Education Secretary Duncan

January 31, 2010

Arne Duncan

New Yorker Buries the Lede in Puff Piece on Secretary Duncan

I’m glad that Carlo Rotella decided to do some actual reporting in his treacly ode to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the February 1st edition of the New Yorker Magazine. Unfortunately, it’s buried at the end of the article. After four puffy pages wherein we learn that Duncan is a marvelous human being who loves basketball, the author finally begins to do his job as a reporter, and the results aren’t very comforting. You see, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence that the programs Duncan is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on actually work. I’ll let the quotations speak for themselves:

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies (who describes herself as “basically in favor of Duncan’s policies”) gives this rousing endorsement of the upshot of Duncan‘s policies as head of the Chicago schools: “I don’t think there’s any real evidence that people are made worse off, and there’s limited evidence that that they’re making things better.”

Kenneth Saltman, professor of education at DePaul University, calls Duncan a “hatchet man for (Mayor) Daley” and a “militant privatizer who label(ed) schools in black communities as failures to justify opening new charters that could skim off the highest-achieving students, thereby widening the gap between winners and losers.”

Erik Hanishek of the Stanford Institution “is one of the most outspoken senior academics in the market forces camp. But even he describes the reforms that Duncan has pursued as ‘the best guesses for how to go forward’”

According to Rotella, Diane Ravitch of New York University believes that Duncan’s so-called “market forces party can offer nothing better than a vague idea that their reforms should work, rather than evidence that they actually do.” “You shouldn’t set the agenda if you’re not sure the agenda works,” argues Ravitch.

Steven Rivkin, an economist at Amherst, “worries that Duncan may be pushing too hard for policies which haven’t proven effective.”

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Morsel | 3 Comments »

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