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Notes from the Smithy...
April 2009 - #67
GREETINGS/CONTENTS
Greetings from Southern Oregon! Well, we are having spring weather, hot for a couple of days and then snow and cold rain. It’s time to begin wrapping up the school year already. Amazing!
NEWS what’s happening
JUST FOR FUN daffy definitions
STANDARDS in their defense
SPEAKING & WRITING the same or not?
RECENT READS a few from me
MISCELLANY as it says
NEWS
The DVD project was to have been finished in February. I did mention the date was optimistic, and so it was. We are much closer to getting the final product. The filming is done; most of the editing is done; reproduction is being planned but has yet to happen. Stay tuned. I think it will be a good DVD.
In March I spoke before a couple of small groups in California. It came about because it coincided with a short vacation to see my son and his family and my sister and her family. One of those days was spent at the Central Coast Home Education Conference in Santa Maria where I had the opportunity to meet a number of folks. I met customers, other vendors, and the nice folks who put on the conference. It was my particular pleasure to finally meet Andrew Pudewa. Although our conversation was brief, it became quickly evident that our views on writing are quite similar in many respects.
JUST FOR FUN
Below are some daffy definitions. Enjoy!
ADULT: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.
BEAUTY PARLOR: A place where women curl up and dye.
CANNIBAL: Someone who is fed up with people.
COMMITTEE: A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.
DUST: Mud with the juice squeezed out.
EGOTIST: Someone who is usually me-deep in conversation.
HANDKERCHIEF: Cold Storage.
INFLATION: Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.
MOSQUITO: An insect that makes you like flies better.
RAISIN: Grape with a sunburn.
SECRET: Something you tell to one person at a time.
SKELETON: A bunch of bones with the person scraped off.
TOOTHACHE: The pain that drives you to extraction.
TOMORROW: One of the greatest labor saving devices of today.
YAWN: An honest opinion openly expressed.
WRINKLES: Something other people have similar to my character lines.
STANDARDS DEFENDED
It has been popular for some time to decry the use of the red pen on student papers. It’s all about self-esteem and how the children don’t need such negative influences pressed upon their tender consciences. Such poor teacher behavior might indelibly influence the child to grow up recognizing less than his full human potential. The educational psychologists would have everyone believe their pronouncements as truth.
As a youngster I remember the new system of every participant getting a ribbon. At the time it was called the Danish system. Everybody was a winner; nobody was a loser. Well, it all sounded good in theory, and all the children were supposed to be happy, but practically the system did not work or prove helpful in the long run.
The following quote is from Daniel Tammet, who is autistic. He has some handicaps, but he has made his way in life and offers the following: “Obtaining guidance from experts in the subject you are learning helps you to both develop the conceptual framework necessary to master a field of study and avoid many of the potential discouraging pitfalls that can lead to discouragement. Getting feedback on wrong answers allows the brain to eliminate them from its bank of possible future responses. Consequently, learners can ignore poor choices and focus their attention on good ones.” (P33, Embracing the Wide Sky)
He’s talking about teachers and students here. He’s saying that it is the teacher’s job to tell the student where his mistakes are. He’s saying that not only is it acceptable to mark an error with a red pen, it is necessary to help prevent the student from making the same mistake again. Wow, what a defense for correcting mistakes! While the student’s ego may take a bit of a hit for the moment, if the student learns from his mistake, he won’t be taking future hits in that department.
Tammet’s statement is a rationale for quality teaching and clear materials. The teacher’s job is to teach, to put the information forward in such a fashion so as to help the student learn the material, to master it. After having taught the material, the teacher is then to assign and correct the student’s work over what has been taught, and hopefully learned. In the process of reviewing the student’s work, the teacher should praise what can be praised and note the errors that occur.
When dealing with objective facts, the process is straightforward. In math, for instance, the student either gets the right answer or he doesn’t. Content driven subjects lend themselves to objectivity. It is the same in English to some extent.
Let’s take writing as an example. The student has read a piece of literature and has been asked to write about it. Hopefully the assignment has indicated the structure of the response, a five paragraph essay perhaps. The assignment should also have given direction on what the focus of the response should be. Maybe the student is to discuss the plot and explain the movement of the story through the problem to the resolution. Perhaps the student might be directed to describe three characters from the story, the hero, the villain and one supporting character. I am assuming here that the student has been taught about these elements.
The teacher reads the assignment and notes a couple of spelling mistakes, a punctuation error or two, and finds a poorly worded sentence. These mistakes are mechanical; they are objective. The teacher also looks to see if the student followed the directions posed by the assignment and how thoroughly the student expressed his answer. This is a bit more subjective and generally requires comment on the teacher’s part, both positive and negative. Later the teacher will confer with the student about the assignment and perhaps explain some things in more detail. All of this is designed to improve the student’s performance on future assignments.
Tammet made another remark that is applicable here. “Taking pleasure in a task is an especially good way to learn.” What pleasure can a student derive from doing an assignment? It could be getting a good grade or feeling competency or getting praise for his effort. The teacher needs to be thoughtful about what comments are made and how they are made. This makes a big difference to the student, but the errors do need to be pointed out, hopefully along with some encouragement to do better and some instruction as to how to do better next time. Standards are needed, and the student needs to meet them, and the teacher’s job is to help the student achieve those standards.
SPEAKING & WRITING
At times we have likely all heard the advice, “Just write it as you would say it.” While the advice may be well intentioned, in practice it really doesn’t work very well if at all. Why? The answer is simple; speaking and writing have fundamental differences.
The first difference is the length of constructions used. We tend to speak in packets of words, generally about seven words long. These packets may or may not be sentences; often they are just clumps of words, maybe phrases, maybe clauses, maybe just a string of words. Speaking tends to be choppy. Writing, with the exception of dialogue, uses longer sentences. While some sentences may be short, more often they exceed the seven words, and they are certainly more elaborately organized than spoken words. Good writing is more organized, has a flow of logic to it, and moves along in a more orderly fashion than speech does.
A second difference is the care with which we speak and write. Speaking is an off the cuff sort of thing. We are making up our speech as we go along, and listeners are often interacting with us because we are normally talking with others. We abruptly change direction, give all sorts of verbal and non-verbal clues, and rely heavily on context. Writing is conscious and slow. The writer takes his time to carefully craft his sentences because he knows his reader has time to read and process them.
A third difference is vocabulary. Speaking vocabularies are smaller than written vocabularies. As readers and writers, we will use words that we generally would neither say nor hear. Written English has hundreds of thousands of words, but most native English speakers have spoken vocabularies of only a few thousand words. Written words are preserved by dictionaries. Spoken languages lose old words and gain new ones rapidly.
As an aside, a written document has the ability, due to the enormous amount of words available, to be very precise in what is said. Orally we are not as defined, and much of our meaning is carried by context and tone and other verbal cues.
Of the 6,000 or so spoken languages in the world today, only about 200 are truly written languages. A written language is defined as a language that is used in official written documents and has some written literature. This does not mean that the oral languages are simple. Some are quite complex in their syntax, grammar, and tonal qualities. But for all their complexity, these oral languages are limited.
An argument is made that speaking came first, and writing came along later. In fact, it is only technology that has made writing possible. Writing with a stick in the dust didn’t last; writing with a stick in wet clay did. Later developments of ink and paper and still later, the printing press, paved the way for more and more people to write things down. Documents and literature blossomed. Today, with our computers and word processing and emails and text messaging, much more is being written than ever was in the past. Interestingly text messaging is the latest development, but it tends to mirror speaking more than earlier forms of writing.
There is one writing task where we have to be conscious of how the writing would sound when it is read. That is when we would be writing a formal speech. Speeches are unique in that they are written to be orally communicated. Most writing is written to be read silently.
Is it ever wise to write like we speak? Yes, I can think of two instances. The first is if we are writing dialogue into a script or a story; then we would reproduce speech patterns. The second is when we are brainstorming and taking notes. We need to get the essence down and flesh it out later. However, beyond those two situations, my best advice is to not write just as you speak.
RECENT READS
If you have questions about the origin of the universe, D. Russell Humphreys has a book titled Starlight and Time, which provides some answers. The subtitle is Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe. His answer is quite interesting. Admittedly, some of the science and physics in the technical section was beyond me, but the layman’s portion was abundantly clear and informative. He is a 6-day creationist.
Ken Sande’s book, The Peacemaker, is excellent for churches, individuals, families, anyone who has issues with others, which means all of us. It is full of practical guidelines and helps to solve interpersonal difficulties, be they in the family, on the job, with neighbors or whomever. A DVD series accompanies the book and is good for small group studies and Sunday School.
As mentioned in an earlier article, I read a book by Daniel Tammet, Embracing the Wide Sky. He is an autistic savant who memorized pi out to 22,514 decimal places but has trouble recognizing folks he hasn’t seen for a few weeks. In other words, he can memorize all sorts of numbers but has a difficult time putting names and faces together. I do question some of his conclusions, but it was an interesting book.
Graham Cole’s book, Engaging the Holy Spirit, was a delight. He asks and answers six questions about the Holy Spirit. His answers are systematic and thought provoking. It is a slim but valuable volume.
Scratch Beginnings was very different. It is a new book by Alan Shepard. Alan graduated from college and decided to see if the American dream was dead or alive. He drew the name of a city from a hat, bought a rail ticket, took $25, a tarp, a sleeping bag, and the clothes on his back and arrived with no prospects except a desire to succeed, which he did without using his college degree. It’s all about attitude, folks. I liked this book.
Lessons from San Quentin – H64741 is Bill Dallas’s autobiography about his struggles and the lessons he learned as a prisoner in San Quentin. It is a personal story with general applications. He is a Christian and came to a deep faith because of his experience under the tutelage of some lifers he met; they adopted him and taught him.
John Blanchard and Dan Lucarini, an Englishman and an American, collaborated on Can We Rock the Gospel? They answer the question and are very clear about how they arrive at their conclusion. It is a thoughtful book from Evangelical Press.
Kent Philpott’s book, How to Care for Your Pastor is geared toward small, independent churches since that is his experience. It was a quick and easy read.
On recommendation from a trusted friend who is quite involved with foreign missions, I read The Fever Trail by Mark Honigsbaum. It is the story of the search for the cure for malaria. Eye-opening!
MISCELLANY
1. Excerpts of material from this newsletter may be freely used so long as proper credit is given as to the source. Feel free to copy it and pass it along.
2. This newsletter is posted quarterly on the website, and it is emailed free to those who wish to subscribe. The email version is yours for as long as you want to receive it as long as I continue to publish it.
3. I continue to receive email questions from parents and teachers. Generally I try to answer them within a day or so. The more specific you are, the more likely my answer will be directly helpful.
4. It was my delight to meet and chat with home educating moms and dads in California. Thanks to the many of you who use and recommend our products. I pray you and your students will continue to have good success with our books.
5. The next issue of Smithy Notes is scheduled for distribution sometime in mid-July. By God’s grace, I will hopefully be a little more on time with the summer letter.
IN HIS SERVICE,
Frode Jensen
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