Please Help Me!

I know, this is lame. And it's a Monday, too. But I do need your help. I put a post up on YA Confidential on Friday, and it didn't get nearly the response I'd hoped for. It probably didn't help that I didn't link to it here, but I don't know whether that was the whole cause.

Please visit the post, and come up with a question for a college educator! I know, most of you are adults like me, but surely some of you have high school aged kids, or at least know some. Either way, we could us their questions!

There's also a free book involved, for anyone whose question is used, but surely the important thing is posterity, no?

iPad and the Young Mind

So I went and bought an iPad on Monday night. We'd been saving for it for a few weeks, and I decided I needed one when I finalized my plans to visit WFC in San Diego next month, and meet up with wonderful writers and author friends like Simon C. Larter, Shannon Whitney Messenger, Carolina Valdez Miller, Sara Ann McClung, and Andrew Smith.

I won't get into the things that are cool about it, or the things that it ought to be able to do, but can't, because those would be long posts all on their own. I will, hopefully briefly, discuss how cool this thing is for kids.

My daughter Madison and I played a game of scrabble on it against each other last night. She has an iPod touch she's had for a while, that she paid for by saving up her allowance, and that allowed us each to play our tiles from our own device, so that we weren't too obviously revealing our letters to each other.

Now, I have to say, in some ways I'm a bit of a Luddite. I don't believe in kids walking around with headphones constantly in their ears, shutting out the world around them, eyes glued to the screen of some device like little LCD versions of The Mirror of Erised, but the potential for interesting educational opportunities with a device like the iPad is off the charts.

The coolest thing about it is how it excites my child. When she came into my room last night (I didn't have time to set it up after buying it on Monday) and saw me installing some apps on it, her eyes lit up, and she bounded onto the bed with me.

My kid never hangs out with me in my room. She's 10. I had the horrible Braves game on the TV, which she would normally never suffer through. But she spent the next few hours hanging out with me, talking to me about the iPad, and showing me cool things like how to organize my apps into folders so I don't have 5 pages of apps. Then we played some games. Like Scrabble, pictured above.

I'm not going to go on about this any longer, but I see a very high cool factor when it comes to technology and young minds. I think if we leverage these devices properly to our children, we can help them focus on the benefits, without turning them into backlit LCD zombies.

What do you guys think? Do your kids have e-readers? Smart Phones? Other tech?

Straight A Student

These are my kids, last All Hallow's Eve.

Madison is on the left, and Kylie is on the right. I love them both more than words can articulate, and I am very proud to be their father.

But today is about Kylie. My daughter, who is 15, and a freshman at a high school that shall remain undisclosed (sorry internet pedos, you don't want to mess with this dad) is officially a straight A student for the year this year.

She's effing brilliant. Yes, she goes to public school in Georgia, and no, she did not take any AP or honors classes this year (she's always been in honors, but was scared about the transition into HS, and wanted to wait until sophomore year to pick them up again).

She got the announcement today that she is now exempt from the rest of the school year. She only has to go to class if she wants to.

So I just want to shout it to the world: YOU ROCK, KID! Oh, and I love you, shhh. I know, shut up dad.

I was an absolute moron at her age. I mean I was always a good student, but I never studied, never did my homework, and just aced the tests to end the year with a low B average. Plus I was into other really stupid shit. I am so happy to have children that are far better people than I ever was.

What is your proudest accomplishment, like, EVAR?

All Is Not Good

I would like to ask you all about something I've been wondering over lately.

I sometimes wonder whether I am too uptight with my children about using proper English. My parents were never very strict with me about it when I was young but they both were highly educated and always spoke properly, especially around the dinner table.

My children sometimes say things like "I did really good," or "I don't want to do nothing." I always make sure to correct them politely when they do this. "You did really well?" I ask. You don't want to do anything?" I correct.

In general good is an adjective and well is an adverb so it makes no sense to say "did good", but it is also not quite so simple. See Grammar Girl's excellent post on the subject for more details. Double negatives are much simpler of course, because if you DON'T want to do NOTHING, then logically you WANT to do SOMETHING.

There is nothing wrong with speaking incorrectly on purpose, to be cool, hip, or for humor, but I believe that you ought to know how to speak (and therefore write) correctly first.

I mean I can speak regional slang with the best of them:

In Boston my skills would be wicked pissah, boyo.
In New York they would be game tight, son.
In Los Angeles they would be the shizzle, dog.

Anyway that sure was silly but my point is that to truly understand slang and colloquialisms I believe you must truly appreciate proper English. I'm by no means an expert grammarian, just ask my critique group, but I do have a decent vocabulary and I believe in knowing the meaning of words, both the denotation and the common connotations before you put them to use. I hope to instill a similar love of language in my daughters.

The reason this came up is that last night my fourth grader was talking about her Horizons classes. Here in Georgia that is the accelerated track for reading and writing in elementary school. For some reason the terms B.C. and A.D. came up. She got Before Christ right but when she said that A.D. meant After Death I was surprised. When I asked her where she heard that and she said her Horizons teacher, I got a little upset.

A brief breakdown: A.D. stands for Anno Domini or sometimes Anno Domine which is a Medievil Latin phrase that roughly translated means In the Year of Our Lord. It is sometimes specified more fully as Anno Domini Nostri Iesu (Jesu) Christi (In the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ). Basically these two terms are used in the Gregorian and Julian Calendars to refer to the era before Christ's birth, and the era after. There is no year zero; 1 A.D. directly follows 1 B.C. It would make no sense for A.D. to stand for After Death (or after his death, or whatever) because then there would be no calendar reference for the 33 years he was alive.

Needless to say I was a little upset that her accelerated teacher didn't know this. This kind of thing seems to be pretty common in public education here in Georgia. Then I calmed down, reminded myself that I am sometimes an uptight and total nerd about stuff, and that this teacher was probably not a history or a latin major, and I calmly explained the correct usage to my daughter, throwing in a little B.C.E. (Before Common Era) for good measure.

She wasn't very interested, but she did listen politely. Hopefully she'll remember it.

Here endeth the lesson.

So what do you all think? Is it important to teach our children proper English? If so how high of a priority should it be? What do you do when you hear of a teacher telling your child something that you know is incorrect?

P.S. Sorry I made it to almost no one's blog yesterday. We have hired new people again and I spent most of the day training one of them. I will probably make it to very few blogs again today. I'm going to need a BA meeting very soon. Where's my sponsor?!? Beth?!?

SPASS

I want to blog about the awesome shiny new SIGNED copy of The Deathday Letter that I received in the mail yesterday because I won it on my good friend Michelle McLean's blog last week and Shaun David Hutchinson was kind of enough to offer it up as a prize. AND sign it. But I feel that I must take a nice photo for you all to feast your eyes upon, so I will try to share about that tomorrow.

Today I'm going to write about the place I went to middle school as well as 9th grade. Falen and Palindrome have probably heard of it.

It's called Saint Paul Academy and Summit School. It's a pretty snooty college prep K-12 private school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It has a lot of history. We'll get to that in a second.

The current school is actually a merger of two schools: Saint Paul Academy, an old boys only military academy, and The Summmit School ... you guessed it, a girls school. My mom and all her family attended these schools as kids, mom and her sisters at Summit and her brother at the Academy. When I went there in the 90s they had merged so that the old Academy campus is now the High School and Middle School and the Summit campus is the elementary. I think I've heard that this has changed since I left.

I enjoyed it there because they had things like Latin (though I took German), Pottery, Creative Writing, Computer Science and lots of other cool elective courses. I didn't enjoy it because my aunt was a teacher at the elementary school and there was a lot of pressure on me to succeed. I was always a pretty decent student but the other kids there were BRILLIANT. Most ended up at Harvard, Stanford or Brown. I got sent off to boarding school in 10th grade.

But this is not about my personal problems as a pissed off grieving and trouble-making teenager. This is about the ghosts that travel the halls at 1712 Randolph Avenue.

The most famous and by far the coolest Alumni of S.P.A. is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who actually did not graduate, but ended up being expelled for "neglecting his studies". I'm sure you know who F. Scott is but just in case you don't he is one of America's most famous authors who is most well known for having penned The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. I didn't really know back then that I wanted to be a writer, but I DID enjoy writing, so it was kind of cool to know that he had stalked those very halls.

Ann Bancroft actually did graduate, in 1974. She is also an author, but she is more famous for being the first woman to extensively explore BOTH the arctic AND antarctic. She was an also a Wilderness Instructor at YMCA camp Widjiwagan where I often spent my summers, though regrettably not while I was there. She is also famous for some other awesome stuff but I won't discuss it here because I don't want to alienate anyone. Look her up if you would like to know more.

SPA was also kind of famous for being a soccer powerhouse (at least among prep schools). They won two MN State Championships while I attended but I played football so was not involved, except as a spectator. We got the day off to go watch the final at the Metrodome one year though, which was pretty cool. The coach was Buzz Lagos, who later became the coach of the Minnesota Thunder pro team, until it dissolved. The most famous player from SPA was Tony Sanneh, who was a few years older than me, and who played every minute for the United States in the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan.

So anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a boastful post, so I hope it doesn't sound that way. It's not like attending there for a few years makes me cool or educated or intelligent anyway, since I left after my freshman year (not that it would have meant any of those things if I had stayed either). It is kind of fun to look back over the years though, and to dream that one day my books will sell well enough for my name to be mentioned in the Wikipedia Article, along with those other notable alumni/ae.