About the blog name: "Gently Hew Stone" is a pun on the author's name. Michelangelo said that while carving his statue of David, he envisioned the finished statue inside the block of raw marble and just chiseled away the pieces that weren't part of it. Writing this blog is like that: I picture myself sitting before a hunk of raw possibilities with this keyboard as my chisel, and my labor of love is to reveal the beautiful ideas inside, to hone it to perfection by peeling away layers of ordinary thought and, ultimately, to bring to light the masterpieces just below the surface of it all.
The bulk of the Declaration of Independence–the entire body section–is devoted to a laundry list of complaints against the failures of British rule, meant to justify to the world why the colonies were revolting. Among the intolerable items that pushed our Founding Fathers over the edge was this:
“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
Whoa. Can you imagine that? Being subject to a powerful, sprawling, bureaucratic federal government with infinite departments staffed by busybody stooges with nothing better to do than persecute law-abiding citizens, robbing them of their property? Living in a nation like that would truly be a nightmare. No wonder our forefathers had to rebel against it. I know if I lived in similar circumstances, I’d want to change the system.
I enjoy listening to these two shows on the radio, but they often irritate me. Not the hosts, the callers. I have to wonder about a lot of these callers; if they’ve actually listened to the shows for long, the answers to their questions should be obvious.
Typical Dave Ramsey caller: “I make $500 a year, I have no savings, and I owe a million dollars on my credit cards. Do you think I should get a speed boat?”
Typical Dr. Laura caller: “My live-in boyfriend cheats on me and steals from me, but he says he’ll leave his wife someday. I really, really like him. Should I give him the $1000 I’ve been saving for my kid to go to college?”
What’s even worse than clueless callers are the ones who argue with the host after the advice has been given. Don’t you hate it when people ask for advice and then argue about it if they don’t like it? Then why did you ask? If you only wanted to hear what you’ve already made up your mind to do, then leave me alone.
The first four weeks of school are over. Some thoughts:
As students transition into using new vocabulary words in their own writing, they seem to have an instinct for using unfamiliar words as adjectives. I find myself reviewing parts of speech much more than I’d like to at the high school level. Most teens need to be reminded that parts of speech are not interchangeable. The first word of our first unit is “adulterate,” the verb meaning “to corrupt or make impure.” Without closer guidance, they’ll just use it like this: “He was a really adulterate guy.” Of course, if they’re talking about Bill Clinton, I guess I could give them half credit.
I usually don’t like open house, the annual night where parents come in to meet their kids’ teachers. I never know what to do up there, not that it ever makes any difference, anyway. Life goes on as if it never happened, and I forget everyone I met as soon as I go home. This year, though, one parent thanked me for assigning a list of options from which students have to choose for their independent reading this quarter. “If you hadn’t assigned these,” she said, “the kids would never read them.” It’s nice enough to get a compliment, but it’s even better when a parent understands the reasoning behind what I do!
Yesterday, a college student called me to say that he’d missed the last two weeks of class because his grandmother died. He offered to bring me a note from his parents. I told him that was unnecessary.
Every year I notice this: before our morning announcements, kids in an honors class will all stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance together. Kids in non-honors classes rarely will. It’s a very stark, and very absolute, difference. This begs a chicken-or-the-egg question: is a student’s citizenship influenced by their academic performance, or is their academic performance influenced by their citizenship? Or are both, perhaps, shaped by the same factors in the home environment…
Today I thought about the following cartoon, from Berke Breathed’s 1987 collection of Bloom County comic strips, Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. It was probably meant to be satirical, but shoot, even more than twenty years later it strikes me as pretty accurate. I feel your pain, kid.
After seeing this amazingly inane drivel about teenagers with trendy, extreme body decorations defending their honor in yesterday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, I thought I’d try to understand the teenage mindset better by letting one of them take this space and explain their fascinating insights into the egalitarian tradition and their innovative adaptations thereof. Our anonymous adolescent offers the following:
Dont be hatin on me! It dont matter if I be getting earrings or tattoos or mohawks or implants or wearin bikinis to school or bitin my toenails in class or stuff like that. Thats just who I am! You cant judge me! Stop hatin!
Im just expressin myself! If I want to cover myself in egg yolk and run screaming through the parking lot, it dont make no difference to you. I was born that way. Its a free country. Dont give me your bad looks. And quit hatin up on me!
You think smearing pig slop on my feet and dancin in front you wherever you go is like bad or somethin? You dont know, you just hatin. You wrong. Thats just the way we is now. We likes to go out in public and fill our mouths with raw fish guts and spit em at each other an yell out catch phrases from this weeks popular movie and thats cool. That dont make us bad.
Its a fact that some of us who likes digging up graves and dragging bodies behind their cars is all goin to Harvard and stuff now. Yeah! Take that! Tons of folks who go around wearing baggy clothes overflowin with maggots is like doctors and lawyers and stuff now. So dont be stereotypin! It dont matter to you–its a free country. You just dont understand, so dont be hatin!
Everything that everybody does is cool now. Aint nothin bad no more. Except the stuff that you old folks like that I dont like. That stuff sucks.
When I teach grammar, I try to come up with attention-grabbing example sentences. The ones that come in textbooks are notoriously dull (“The person went to the place to get the thing.”), so I want to juice it up a bit and inject a bit of my trademarked brand of life into what most folks see as a dreadfully lame subject.
Here are two examples of standard favorites in my classes:
I kicked the freshman.
“Freshman” receives the action of the verb “kicked,” so it is the direct object.
I threw Paris Hilton a live grenade.
What did I actually throw? Paris Hilton? Good gravy, no. That would require touching her. No, I threw a grenade. That makes “grenade” the direct object. Paris Hilton received the direct object, making her the indirect object. And, hopefully, soon to be an irritating, repressed memory.
This demonstration shares a bit of the twisted humor of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s classic grammar “textbook,” The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Gordon’s approach is to present clear, sprightly explications of general grammatical matters with examples that tend to be about supernatural, nocturnal creatures interacting in the prosaic lives of hapless mortals of a dizzying variety of idiosyncratic bents. (The book never makes this explicit, but I suppose the title character is meant to represent the fact that a transitive verb, like a vampire, only functions when it has an object upon which to act. Cute, yes?)
I labor intensively, ripping asunder the very dendrites of my brain in Herculean attempts to come up with more than few clever example sentences in class; Gordon has filled an entire book where every page presents at least a few laugh-out-loud such sentences.
Examples:
The robot designated the dentist his partner.
There are five more cupcakes than we have frosting for; I’ll leave them for that loner by the river.
Sophie, abandoning her rented canoe, exchanges pleasantries in the shade with a newt.
Many ward welfare committees have emergency preparedness plans ready to put into effect in case of some kind of disaster–earthquake, drought, house fires, etc. However, few areas of the Church are properly prepared for the imminent scourge of zombies. In order to help our brothers and sisters around the world, the following may be copied or adapted for inclusion in any emergency preparedness plan:
EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS PLAN–ZOMBIE ATTACK
Preparation: In order to be ready to face a sudden onslaught by a cannibalistic army of the undead, the ward welfare committee will:
Arrange for a series of regular firesides where church members and friends from the community will be invited for training in distinguishing zombies from sloppy or apathetic young people, fortifying doors and windows on short notice, stockpiling materials for those barricades, maintaining and properly using firearms for eliminating zombie aggressors, and practicing putting down unfortunate neighbors who have been bitten.
WARNING: it is not recommended that anybody be instructed to combat zombies with fire, unless a well-trained professional has access to a flame thrower that can stop a zombie in its tracks. If you set a flesh-eating monster on fire, most of the time all you get is a flesh-eating monster who can now burn your house down, too.
Hold a series of practice drills where people will be contacted spontaneously and expected to move immediately to their “safe place” with their family: either their own basement or the nearest church building.
Do not use the mall as your ward’s safe place.
HINT: the steeples of older churches make excellent nests for snipers to set up during a zombie attack.
There is a great inequity in justice in our public school systems. I refer, of course, to the fact that some students have higher grades than others. This can only be the result of institutional disenfranchisement, and must be corrected by government intervention. Besides, our nation’s future faces catastrophic academic failure if we don’t artificially prop it up now.
By which I mean, the failing students need a bailout.
All of those kids who are only half as likely to do any kind of studying or homework as they are to even show up at all will be granted a special dispensation from the Department of Education, something in the neighborhood of, say, 800 billion points. (Though, what with corruption, unforeseen needs, and poor management, that total will likely exceed a trillion points.)
So every slacker who sat there and chose to finish a class with a 2% grade will now get to graduate, which is perfectly fair. Uncle Sam will guarantee the success of every student in America. After all, what with the obesity epidemic, most American kids are “too big to fail.”
Long live Star Trek! The Mrs. and I went to see the new flick Thursday night, and the baby slept throuh the whole thing…a great sign right there! I won’t bore you with my slobbering nerd worship, but since then I’ve watched a couple of episodes of the classic original series where they’re all archived on the CBS web site. Hungry for more, I rented Star Trek II. Still ravenous, I sated myself on YouTube videos.
And that’s where I found these two astonishing, breathtaking triumphs of human genius. Wow. Just wow. Ladies and gentlemen, may I proudly present “The A-Team” and Monty Python and the Holy Grail…starring the crew of the starship Enterprise:
Family friendly web sites like this one have long labored under the baneful curse of catchy Internet acronyms, those cheesy shorthand abbreviations that allow us to communicate shallow, generic, vague profanities in a convenient manner. What are we to do, to avoid picturing unsavory phrases in our mind’s eye when these ubiquitous initials (dis)grace our screens?
Here are some helpful things to keep in mind when you no doubt come across these uncomfortable cringe-inducers:
When I teach grammar, I try to come up with attention-grabbing example sentences. The ones that come in textbooks are notoriously dull (“The person went to the place to get the thing.”), so I want to juice it up a bit and inject a bit of my trademarked brand of life into what most folks see as a dreadfully lame subject. 