School Week: Super Fun

Madeleine L'Engle died. She was 88, and hasn't written anything for a few years, and she had already logged about 60 books, so no one can say she didn't do her part while she was here. But there's something awe-inspiring to pull a Kubrick or a Puzo or a Heller or a Schultz (who all died within a few months of each other, around 1999-2000, if I remember) and get one last opus out before going to walk the purple valley. (As my journalism professor told me never to ever say in print, or he'd horsewhip me. You think I kid. You have no met Dr. Bob Cole, nor seen his reach. )

L'Engle is best known for the Time books -- A Wrinkle in Time and so on. If you haven't read them since you were 13 and a girl, they somehow work as metaphysical sci-fi and as plain old coming-of-age novels. I dare you to find another author who would make the first 50 pages be about a struggle with a mean principal, and then take the action inside a mitochondria where alien replica of the principal attack the shrunk-down protaginists. For the fate of the universe.

We named our ragdoll cat Mrs. Whatsit, because she was large and looked like a pile of furry fudge ripple. (That and "Mr. Stitch" didn't occur to me until the other name had taken.) Cindy (my wife) has a shockingly close-to-complete collection of L'Engle, which include a dozen books taking the Time characters into non-fantasy non-sci-fi non-metaphysical adventures. It's bizarre, like H. Rider Haggard sent Allan Quartermain off to be a field hand for Anne of Green Gables. There will never be another writer able to pull off what L'Engle did.

Onto the story. Super Fun might not work if you don't know a bit of information that, growing up as I did in New Jersey, I might know better some some others. Check in with the wisdom of crowds here if you don't "get" the story once you listen to it.

School Week: Like, I Am the Walrus

Some people revel in being professional students. They retreat away from the working world into the theoretical confines of academia. MBA classes are probably the least like this, since some people almost recommend you put networking over studying. Studying literature or one of the sciences,though, puts you on a track where much of your future employment is right there in academia. Provided you got tenure, you could go your whole life still working off a student ID card you got when you were 18.

I don't want to be a student again. I want to know this material, and until I can internalize a symbiote worm with someone else's knowledge in it (Deep Space 9 geek check!) grad school is the only way to go. I am spending bits of time this week walking around flocks of 19-year-olds,feeling slightly out of place with my growing flock of gray hairs. They have meal plans and campus social lives. I just airdrop in, take notes for a proscribed time, and go home.

Wally in Like, I Am the Walrus is fairly far from a professional student.Maybe Wally can shape up in his later years and shift from class goof-off to class I-love-biochemistry guy. But that depends on him surviving the particularly unfortunate test in this story, one where maybe it's not a fortunate thing to bring the recommended two #2 pencils. - Sean

School Week: Speak and Spell

Spelling bees never really appealed to me. I never had the chance to participate in one growing up, so maybe it's an indoctrinated taste. It seems a bit like memorizing the color of all the parts of a car engine, or the track runtimes of every Beatles song. Possibly useful in the right context, but not really the thing we should be focusing on.

I realize I saw this as someone who has been a professional copy editor (or copyeditor, as various seditious factions would like it). I've seen my share of "Their was a grate game on Wendsday"s. I've been in the misspelling trenches. Everyone misspells words. MS Word catches it, or I catch it before it goes into print, or I read it elsewhere in print and win a little mental battle against the uncivilized world. Training a few hundred undiagnosed-Asperger's children to recite "protostomic" and "villainous" isn't going to do more than symbolically pull up the GPA of the global village. But the mean remains meanly ignorant: the average is below average. I grok it.

Neat-o facts: only English-speaking countries have spelling bees. Other languages tend to be simple enough so by hearing the word you know how to spell it. In China they have dictionary contests, though -- how quickly can you look up a word. And in Quebec they have transcription contests: hear a paragraph and see how much you can remember. (Maybe they'll choose one of my paragraphs...dare to dream.)

I couldn't resist interpreting the monotone existence of poor Manoj, subject of today's story Speak and Spell, into a recitation by an actual Speak and Spell. You think I'm joking. Take a listen. I'm not. I didn't mean to, it forced its way up past my larynx, into the mike, and then pressed about 45 buttons in order to get it recorded and posted. The tone you may hear in the background?: monotone.

School Week: Lafayette County

Jeff's been writing a lot of the intros here, for both of us. Big reason for that: I'm a student now. (It also works nicely as the theme of this week.) My first day was yesterday, after a week of orientation and a one week of unemployed bliss.

While Jeff is slacking off as a father, husband, homeowner and wage earner, all I have to do is prepare for a test some time in November. Plus commute to Newark every day, where Rutgers' business school campus just moved its full-time students, carrying enough textbooks to compress my vertebrae like Wonder Bread. Somehow, this meager amount of work is preventing me from sitting on the Internet all day and thinking about horror. The laptop's right in front of me, but I'm taking notes. And doing readings. And writing papers (already!).


Just to be different, let me introduce one of Jeff's stories. Lafayette County deals with a persistent threat for the prototypical misbehaving schoolchild: that they would be sent off to military school. What causes them to act out? Finding out may be worse than being left in the dark. -- Swamped Sean

School Week: Cross My Heart

I'm having a hard time distinguishing what I want school week to be, per se. Is a passing reference to a high school enough? Does it have to be about a student? A teacher? The concept of school? It seems we have a whole lot of latitude here, since any story involving a teacher, a child, anyone who formerly attended school, anyone who learns anything, or the vague institutional concept of collect taxes in order to fund education could qualify.

Today's story Cross My Heart qualifies in enough of those ways so it's not one I feel iffy about with regard to its relevance. Nathan, the main character, is as affected by his LACK of traditional schooling as the other kids are by their regular schooling. Since I wrote this I've read up a faiur amount on homeschooling. Homeschoolers can be a persnickety bunch when it comes to depictions of homeschooling. But they might be mollified by the fact that the kids who aren't home-schooled in this story are the sort of 12-year-olds that when they're 15 get tried as if they're 18.

School Week: Blood Relatives

Astounding as it seems -- I double-checked the audio and text files -- Sean's story Blood Relatives is not about vampires. There's not a one in there. (Well, I guess you could suppose one of the silent kids without any lines was a secret vampire, or a future vampire once they graduate and enroll in the county college--it's a two-year school, degree not diploma, but the fangs are yours to keep!) It is, frankly, a waste of a perfectly good vampire story title on a non-vampire title.

I retroactively chastise First Blood and Blood Diamond for lack of vampires.

School Week: Fire Alarm

Today being Sunday, school hasn't started yet. Tomorrow being Labor Day, it still won't have started. But its elephantine shadow looms. Find a circular in the paper which doesn't scream "back to school" for the most tenuously connected items. (Washing machines? Drill bits? Carpet padding?)

There's a chunk of the populace who hates the looming shadow of school, and a portion who loves it. I'm firmly in the latter camp, which may be due to my being lucky in life and going to good schools. Or the gerdy, neeky aspects of my personality? (Don't like that turn of phrase? Yeah, neither do I. Maybe best not to try that one out again.)

Sean's story today, without giving too much away since it's called Fire Alarm, is about Fire Alarms. I hold the boulder of responsibility for starting one, back in the day. For a project, some other students and I went up to the closed-off-but-not-locked bell tower in our high school. There was an old-fashioned elevator with accordion doors, big enough for maybe two slim people. The bell was gravitationally powerful -- I kept looking at it, like it was still vibrating from a 1943 ringing.

The period ends, and we go down to leave. On the way down I hit the elevator button, and am disappointed that nothing happens. But these elevators only work when the door is closed: with door concertina'ed out, the motor to pull the cable spins to no immediately noticeable effect. Later effects include smoke, friction fires from the old unmaintainanced fires, a school-wide fire drill that we quickly hear I not a pulled alarm but an actual fire, and an announcement that it was an act of "vandalism" in the bell tower.

Oops. Hope they don't dust the button for prints.