Scattershot

Trendy words

Have you noticed that no one "makes progress" or "goes ahead" anymore? It seems to be an unwritten rule now that you can only "move forward." I see and hear the phrase everywhere.

I've been conducting my own informal experiment: Is it possible to get through a day without hearing or reading "move forward"? It appears not.

My radio listening is pretty much limited to National Public Radio, but I'm starting to suspect that anyone who appears on the show must be required to say "move forward" at least once. ("Go forward" is encouraged, too.) One day this week, I turned on the radio and heard "move forward" within five minutes. The next day, soon after I flipped on the car radio, I heard "move on" three times in less than three minutes. The next day, I heard "move on" less than ten seconds after tuning into NPR.

Television is not immune. News programs are full of "move forwards," and I even heard the term in a commercial a couple of days ago. I also receive email messages that urge me to donate money so that research or a campaign can move forward.

I'm fascinated by trendy terms like this. Why, really, do they catch on? What mysterious force pulls certain words out of the vast sea of possible phrases and makes them somehow fashionable? It's a mystery to me.

Fuzzy talk

On a flight a couple of weeks ago, the flight attendant welcomed all the people on their way to what I'll call a "Glarfar" conference. (I don't remember the name.) My seat mate was one of them, so I asked, "So what does Glarfar do?"

He answered with something close to this: "Oh, we optimize growth and opportunity and transcend affordability systems on a personal and regional basis."

Oh.

Of course, I still didn't know what Glarfar does. I could have questioned him further, but it's been my experience that doing so all too often leads to what turns out to be an Amway sales pitch. So I just nodded.

I hate words that seem to say something but really don't. Right after the trip, I went to the theater and was reading a history of the musical Hair in the show program. This sentence jumped out at me: "It's still a show with a message, and the message still obtains." Huh? Obtains what? The words make no sense.

But perhaps I just need to know more optimizing growth and opportunity. Maybe then I'd be able to transcend affordability and overcome my irritation, obtaining clarity on a personal basis. Glarfar, here I come.

NCLB insanity

A teacher friend of mine started work in a new district recently, working with kids who don’t read well, often because English is their second language. This person is a terrific teacher. I have witnessed firsthand her magic touch with children, and she’s a wonder to behold. She loves the kids; the kids love her. She gets results.

But the No Child Left Behind testing insanity is putting pressure on her not to do what’s right for her students. Let’s go to her classroom and look at what happened last week:

She manages to get a group of upper elementary students excited about a book. They are reading it together every day. She stops now and then and asks questions, making sure they are understanding what they read. The kids are involved and love the book. Finally, they are enjoying reading.

In walks the principal. “What are you DOING?” he asks, as he hears her ask a question of the kids. “They are supposed to be working on SPEED.” He interrupts and has some students read to him, timing them. “You are reading only 126 words per minute. That’s only four words per minute faster than last time. You have to read FASTER!”

He tells my friend that she should be working on speed, not comprehension. “We don’t care about comprehension!” he said. “We’ve got to get their fluency scores up. Otherwise people will lose their jobs!”

Unbelievable. Just one of the many evils NCLB has brought into our educational system is this kind of myopic view, a view that makes test scores, rather than learning, the ultimate goal of education. It is a view that allows those in charge to hold views that are, quite simply, ridiculous. Speed with no regard for comprehension? Is this crazy, or what?

Feeling Kindle-ish

I sort of love my new Kindle. I sort of don't.

On the plus side, is it ever great for travelling! Instead of stuffing books in my carry-on and in my suitcase, worrying about—horrors!—running out of something to read on a trip, I simply put my petite little Kindle in my bag. Wonderful. (But I didn't realize that a Kindle is, indeed, one of those electronic devices that must be turned off on take-off and kept off until the captain says, "Okay." Now I know to bring back-up reading material.)

Another plus: I don't have to wait for the paperback version of books by my favorite authors. Kindle books are so much cheaper than hardbacks. And they are so easy to order. Click, and a moment later I have the book, with no tedious entering of personal and credit card information.

However, I'm beginning to feel it's too dang easy to order. I was a little shocked to see all the Amazon entries in my last credit card bill. Also, accidentally ordering a book is evidentally so common that Amazon has included an "undo purchase" feature on the Kindle. (I know. I've had to use it.)

I don't like how easy it is to accidentally page forward or backward. The buttons, for me, are located just where I want to hold on to the Kindle itself. Also, I read pretty fast, so it seems I'm clicking that "page forward" button every few seconds. I find myself looking with envy at people reading on iPads and seeing two pages at once.

I like the dictionary feature, and I like the "search" feature. But I miss being able to thumb backwards, page by page, to look for something I remembered seeing, say, in the middle of the left side of the left-hand page of a double-page spread.

But what I find myself disliking the most is how "cyber-ish" the Kindle books feel. By cyber-ish, I mean that there is an amorphous quality to them. They seem less real to me than other books. In fact, of all the many books I've read on my Kindle, I can remember the name of only one of them: Tina Fey's Bossy Pants. The others have disappeared from my brain the way they disappeared from my Kindle screen when I turned it off.

I'm puzzled and intrigued by this phenomenon. Is it because I don't associate what I'm reading with a color cover that I can touch and recall in my mind later? Is it because I don't see the title of the book on every page, as I do with print books? Does the fact that the words aren't physically permanent on the page make them less likely to stick permanently in my brain? Is there a tactile component to memory? Is the brain dismissive of what it perceives as not real because of it's cyber-ness?

Does anyone else feel this way? I'm curious.

Put away your snowplows, please

Driving home from the mountains earlier this week, I once again saw the sign, "No snowplowing, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m." I found myself thinking, "Whew! It's a good thing I wasn't planning to do any snowplowing tonight!"

The first time I saw this sign, I was honestly confused. My husband had to explain that, because of budget cuts, the area can no longer afford to send out snowplows 24 hours a day. The sign warns people not to expect the roads to be plowed after 5:00 p.m.

But I wonder if others interpret it as I did. It looks like another one of those "Don't" signs to me:

No exit.

No U-turns.

No skateboarding.

No passing.

No snowplowing.

Or am I the only one to have thoughts like, "Dang! I must obey the rules and refrain from snowplowing. What an inconvenience!"?

Overkill

Have you ever been to one of those places with little warning signs everywhere? Do not lean on furniture. Hold down handle until toilet flushes completely. Cover food before microwaving. Do not touch glass. Supervise children at all times. Turn off lights when not in use. It's as though a cranky granny is following you around with a wet washcloth, just waiting to catch you leaving fingerprints somewhere.

I was thinking about those "signy" places last week at an airport as I rode one of the longest, steepest escalators I've ever seen. Suddenly I was experiencing verbal signy-ness. From the moment I got on until the moment I got off, I was bombarded with recorded messages. Do not turn around. Hang on tightly. Keep both feet on step. Stand in middle. The warnings went on and on, non-stop, adding up to the impression that the real message was, "Be careful, or this escalator will kill you!"

Oddly, however, when I later rode the up escalator, there were no messages at all. Not one. I couldn't help but wonder why. Have studies determined that up people are more cautious? Are so many parents with kids freaked out enough from the down experience that they take the elevator on the way up, relieving crowding and thus making warnings less necessary? Are people who happen to fall backwards on an up escalator cushioned by the people below, making serious injury less likely? Has someone determined that the endless down messages are sufficiently scary to carry over to the up side, without a reminder?...

....Or maybe the message machine on the up side was just broken.

Smitten by a bird

(Note to Scattershot subscribers: The post called "Grape turtles" evidently did not come through correctly. If you want to read it, it's at www.scattershot.typepad.com.)

Let me just say right off that I am not a bird person. When a friend of mine had a cockatiel that she wore on her shoulder like an accessory, I didn't like to visit. When my neighbor's chickens were killed by raccoons this summer, I was sad, but not that sad. Birds make me nervous, probably because of encounters with a mean rooster on our farm when I was a kid.

But last week, visiting Georgia, I fell in love with a bird. When I first got out of the car in Columbus, I thought that a conference of songbirds must have been going on in the tree next to us. Music seemed to float from every branch, and it was gorgeous, captivating. We peered up into the branches to get a look, but there was no chorus—just one bird producing a symphony of sound.

We heard the sound everywhere we went. Time after time, when I was supposed to be looking at a river walk or a mansion or a historical monument, I was distracted by the bird, the bird. I was smitten. What was it?

Finally someone told me it was a mockingbird. If so, it brings new understanding to the Atticus Finch line in my favorite book: ...it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Indeed.

Grape turtles

On a trip to Georgia last weekend, I got a kick out of accents and customs.The waitress asked if "yallwancoleslawontop" of our pulled pork sandwiches. (When someone finally translated for us, we found that putting coleslaw on top of a sandwich is common, something new to us.) My husband Ed was called "Ay-ud." And his friend who has been working there for several months told us about being baffled when people talked about grape turtles along the highway. It turns out they were saying crepe myrtles—a kind of tree.

The trees, to tell the truth, started driving me crazy. It wasn't the crepe myrtles specifically. It was all the trees, trees, trees along the highways. Now I really do love trees, but after awhile, I want to see something else. I even found myself looking forward to the odd billboard now and then. I guess being raised on the prairies of southern Colorado has had an impact on me. I love trees, but I like them in small bunches, interspersed with something, anything, besides highway.

But once we reached civilization, I was happy. Savannah was gorgeous. Oh, there were still trees, but they were gorgeous trees, full of character, and surrounded by people, interesting architecture, and so much history. A beautiful, beautiful place!