Foster Dickson's Blog, page 67

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #166

As I read through my student’s letters of introduction, many implications for teaching occurred to me; I could envision opportunities for the coming school year. Yes, I had a specific curriculum to teach, but now I also had students with particular needs, clear (or vague) aspirations, marked individual differences, and varied skills. Their letters helped me get a handle on both how to teach them and what to teach them.

— from the chapter, “Day One: Getting Started,” in Writing For Real: Strategies for Engaging Adolescent Writers by Ross M. Burkhardt

Filed under: Education, High School, Schools, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, High School, students, teaching, teaching writing, writing [image error]

Watching: “Radical Grace” on Independent Lens

Earlier this month, PBS showed “Radical Grace,” a documentary about Catholic nuns, as part of the American Reframed series. The film follows the Network Lobby and the Nuns on the Bus, who made headlines in recent years for the stand against orthodox Church teaching, and it explores the Vatican’s subsequent censure of American women religious. The steady strength of the nuns, who function through love and patience rather than power and consequences, is remarkable as they share their own brand of pro-life values in the face of an abortion-centered Church view of what pro-life means.

Filed under: Catholicism, Film/Movies, Social Justice Tagged: catholic, documentary, film, Nuns on the Bus, pro-life [image error]

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #165

In the multigenre research project, the student selects a topic and does research as if it were a traditional research paper: collecting information and recording it, synthesizing the information, then presenting it through writing. Instead of the single, extended prose piece of a traditional research paper, though, the multigenre paper consists of a number of creative pieces — poetry, advice columns, diary entries, news articles, lists, artwork, graphics, alternate styles of writing — imaginative writing based in fact.

And, unlike the research conducted for a traditional paper, research for a multigenre paper often does not begin with a working thesis. That is, whereas traditionally a researcher begins with a premise and looks for evidence to support it, the multigenre researcher begins with an interest and discovers a unifying element along the way. It is this emergent theme that often suggests a thread with which the writer may create cohesion among the separate pieces of writing.

— from the chapter, “Getting Acquainted,” in A Teacher’s Guide to the Multigenre Research Project: Everything You Need to Get Started by Melinda Putz

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, multigenre research project, research, teaching, teaching writing, writing

A night club sign in Selma, 2010

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Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Random, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, selma

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #164

Indeed, many students in the public education system aren’t “catching” what they need to know about writing— the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test found almost 75 percent of eighth- and twelfth-graders in the US wrote below grade level and only 3 percent of US students, across all demographics, wrote an an “advanced” level.

— from “Is it time to go back to basics with writing instruction?” by Katrina Schwartz, published by KQED News in February 2017

Filed under: Education, Schools, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, teaching, teaching writing, writing, writing instruction

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #163

From the perspective of classic style, plain style is deficient because the theology behind plain style ignores the fact that, left to themselves, people are vulnerable to special interests and special pleading. People are weak, and common wisdom is thus often self-serving. It is perfectly possible for common wisdom to be an anthology of a community’s complacent errors, because common wisdom does not include any principal of critical validation. Without critical testing, common wisdom becomes received opinion.

— from the chapter, “Principles of Classic Style,” in Clear and simple as the truth: Writing classic prose by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: classic style, common perceptions, editing, error, style, teaching, writing

I didn’t know I was miserable, until Gallup told me I was.

Last week, the headline beckoned me to read: “The most miserable city in Alabama.” But it was worse than that. The article wasn’t just about the “most miserable city in Alabama”— the report explained that my hometown, Montgomery, is among the “most miserable” cities in the nation! I had no idea . . .

According to the well-known polling institution Gallup, Naples, Florida came out on top among municipalities, but Montgomery was #180 out of 189 cities in the study. Gallup’s webpage for the results explains a little further about the South as a whole:

Nationally, the U.S. map of the highest and lowest well-being communities generally approximates what is found among the states, with the lowest well-being found in the South and then winding north through the industrial Midwest. The highest well-being communities are scattered across the eastern seaboard as well as in the West.

Among the states, Alabama fared worse than Montgomery did among the cities. Montgomery barely cracked the bottom ten, but in the state listing, Alabama was solidly in that bottom percentile with fellow Deep Southern states Mississippi and Louisiana. It looks like Alabama came in 44th out of the 50 states. (There were no Deep Southern states in the top ten.)

I’ve long known that we have problems down here, but— miserable? Are we miserable, really? Sure, our politics are glutted and our economy is weak, but we’ve got our Holy Trinity of Saving Graces: college football, warm weather, and delicious food. So, beat that so-called #1 Hawaii! You may have warm weather and good food out there, but I’ve seen your state’s college football team . . . Uh, yeah.

Filed under: Alabama, College Football, Critical Thinking, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, gallup, happiness, montgomery

If you care about the arts . . .

Next week is the time to make your representatives and senators in Congress, your state legislators, and your local officials aware that you support the arts. If you’re like me and can’t make it to Washington, DC on a Monday and Tuesday, consider doing what I intend to do that day: contact all of my elected representatives and tell them that policies and budgets that support the arts are good for America. Here’s why, from a statement released by Americans for the Arts:

Arts strengthen the economy. The arts and culture sector is a $730 billion industry, which represents 4.2 percent of the nation’s GDP—a larger share of the economy than transportation, tourism, and agriculture. The nonprofit arts industry alone generates $135 billion in economic activity annually (spending by organizations and their audiences), which supports 4.1 million jobs and generates $22.3 billion in government revenue.

Arts are good for local businesses. Attendees at nonprofit arts events spend $24.60 per person, per event, beyond the cost of admission on items such as meals, parking, and babysitters—valuable revenue for local commerce and the community.

Arts are an export industry. The arts and culture industries posted a $30 billion international trade surplus in 2014, according to the BEA. U.S. exports of arts goods (e.g., movies, paintings, jewelry) exceeded $60 billion.

Arts drive tourism. Arts travelers are ideal tourists, staying longer and spending more to seek out authentic cultural experiences. Arts destinations grow the economy by attracting foreign visitor spending. The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that, between 2003-2015, the percentage of international travelers including “art gallery and museum visits” on their trip grew from 17 to 29 percent, and the share attending “concerts, plays, and musicals” increased from 13 to 16 percent.

Filed under: Arts, Critical Thinking, Education Tagged: activism, arts advocacy, arts education, Participation, The Arts

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #162

The early Greek philosophers, interested primarily as we have seen in the problem of the nature of the universe, taught that there were all-pervasive laws controlling the entire universe. Therefore, goodness for them was to be found in harmony with these laws. Further, they were so enchanted by this idea of law that even evil did not bother them much, Evil, for them, was but a phase, a note in the universal harmony and thus, was not really evil but was another kind of good, a necessary part of the whole.

— from the chapter “What is Good and What is Evil?” in Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers by SE Frost, Jr.

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, teaching, writing

Poetry on TV? On Roku? Anywhere?

Back in May 2011, I wrote about the fact that there was (and is) no poetry on TV. Browsing the listings for dozens of channels on cable TV, I saw that the literary arts had no significant representation among them, with the exception of CSPAN’s Book TV, which might be the most boring programming anyone in the world has ever seen. This exploration was prompted by my realization that the major awards shows in music, TV, and film are broadcast live during prime-time on major networks, but the same was (and is) not true of the ceremonies for literary prizes, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Pushcart Prizes. It’s no wonder that people think books and reading are dead— if you’re an average American whose main source of information and entertainment is the boob tube, you’d probably think they were!

Earlier this year, I made the switch that many Americans are making these days: I cut off my traditional cable TV service and am watching through an on-demand streaming device: Roku. My family has enjoyed Netflix and Amazon Prime, instead of listlessly settling for either bug-eating Bear Grylls or “Alaska: The Last Frontier” or five-year-old re-runs of “Antiques Roadshow.” (The simple fact is: family programming has all but disappeared amid violent action shows, comedies driven by sexual humor, dour generational dramas, and brazenly sensational reality TV.) And since so many Roku streaming channels are specific in their focus, I was thinking that there would be a channel devoted to poetry, or at least to the literary arts more generally . . . Wrong.

Using the channel search function, I started digging. First, I tried to the most obvious thing; I typed in “Poetry.” Nothing. Then “Literary.” Nothing. Then “Literature.” Nothing. Then “Writing.” Nothing. Okay . . .  Among the channels for truckers and specific musical genres and sewing, among the small-time homemade channels and local-access channels, where are the literary channels? Can’t there be even one channel devoted to poetry, an art form that its defenders swear is not dead or dying!

Trying to be positive, I thought: Maybe the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of poetry enthusiasts are engaging it on the internet now . . . Not hardly.

If you type the term “Poetry” in the search bar on YouTube, the prompt says that there are 5.7 million results. The all-powerful Poetry Foundation’s channel has a whopping 1,260 subscribers.  Poetry Out Loud’s channel has 1,700 subscribers. Poets.org has a channel, too, but there’s no indication of how many subscribers they have. A search for “Natasha Trethewey,” an astoundingly good poet and recent US Poet Laureate, yields about 3,000 results, some of which were posted by PBS NewsHour, Emory University, and various literary festivals. In short, there’s a whole bunch of people posting a whole lot of videos and a whole bunch more people not watching them.

If Janie Homemaker in Topeka can create a Roku channel, why can’t some of these nonprofits that claim to be promoting the literary arts create one? Back in 2003, Poetry magazine received gift of hundreds of millions of dollars from the late Ruth Lilly— could some of that money fund a dedicated poetry channel?

I love poetry. I read it regularly. Though I mostly write nonfiction now, it was the poetry of the Beats and of Walt Whitman that made me want to devote my life to writing. And if there was a poetry channel, I’d watch it. If its shows were more than just a static camera pointed at a podium in a bookstore, a lot of other people (who don’t want to sift through YouTube to watch short clips) would, too. If there were shows about poetry’s complex history, poets’ lives, and the stories behind famous works of poetry, if there were interview shows and live-streams of festivals, if there were shows on avant garde poetry collectives, street poets, and undiscovered poets, if there were contests where viewers could win free trips to AWP or Geraldine R. Dodge . . . people would watch.

So here’s what I want to know: is there a poetry or literary channel anywhere, on cable or on a streaming service?

And, if not, here’s my challenge to anyone who can do something about it: if poetry isn’t dead, if poets aren’t irrelevant, then get them on the TV so people know it.

Filed under: Arts, Critical Thinking, Literature, Poetry, Reading Tagged: Literature, poetry, Roku, TV