Sorry, guys
11/19/2009 1:01:54 PM
Courtesy. |
If you tell your wife that your love her in a very public way -- as I did in this column -- you should count on some flak.
Not from your wife, of course.
And not from other women. They love hearing a man talk about how much he loves his wife.
They turn to their husbands and say, "How come you never wrote a love note to me on the back of an elm leaf?"
There's the rub.
I get pushback from men of a certain age every time I mention Lynn in print.
My name is mud at the Elks Lodges and at the Knights of Columbus.
Sorry, guys.
P.S. I love you, Lynn.
On the run with Rossini
11/13/2009 9:38:00 AM
Chapter 2 of my life with an iPod Shuffle had me running again this morning with the happy notes of Rossini quickening my step.
It was like a dreadful remake of "Breaking Away," a movie that could never be made any better, and especially not with a fat 46-year-old protagonist and no bicycles.
Cutters rule!
I haven't mastered the "shuffle" element of the Shuffle yet. So, in the middle of "La Cenerentola" I got a revisit from my old friend Queen Elizabeth, who doesn't seem to have gotten any happier in the time we were apart.
I thought about clicking past her, but for old time's sake I let her proceed.
It brought back thoughts of last Tuesday. Holy heavens, did this city really send Jim Mautino back to the City Council!
But in a few minutes Rossini was back in my ear, Tuesday was a forgotten memory and I hummed away over the horizon.
Here's my favorite scene from "Breaking Away."
George Washington poll under investigation -- by its funders
11/12/2009 2:22:00 PM
Do you think I'll run out of stock images of George Washington before I run out of stories about this polling controversy? Courtesy |
I hope you'll forgive my continuing coverage of the controversy ginned up by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs poll of Oklahoma high school kids. The telephone poll earlier this year showed state teens to be basically ignorant of U.S. history and civics.
I've started thinking about it with the short-hand name of the George Washington Poll, because its most startling result was the about three out of four Oklahoma public high school students couldn't identify the first president of the United States, a result that I couldn't duplicate in unscientific encounters with teenagers. Others have tried and also found the kids were in better shape than the polling showed, but again the challengers were not using any sort of organized, scientific methodology.
Here's an intersesting blog by Matthew Ladner or the Goldwater Institute. Goldwater Institute is an Arizona-based sister organization of OCPA.
Both the Goldwater Institute and the OCPA have done civics knowledge polls of high schoolers using the Strategic Vision polling company.
The results and legitimacy of those polls have been questioned, most publicly by well known blogger Nate Silver in this piece.
Ladner's response (which was sent to me by Brandon Dutcher of the OCPA) says they have asked for a paper trail from the polling company and that they plan a close examination to make sure the results are legitimate.
"…(B)oth myself and OCPA are investigating the validity of the survey. We have asked for and received call logs for the surveys, and we are awaiting receipts for the marketing lists employed in the survey. If, it stands to reason, a polling firm were simply fabricating data it seems terribly unlikely that they would pay thousands of dollars for marketing lists. If there has been a fraud, myself, the Goldwater Institute and OCPA were all victims of it."
He goes on to a less convincing argument that the results of the two polls do not stretch credulity because other surveys show kids at Ivy League schools don't do well in civics testing either.
He concludes with this thought: "So my request to everyone is to stay calm and give us time to run the traps on this. If I got snookered, I’ll own up to it, but the jury is still out."
"How the iPod ate my political brain" OR "Did Dewey win? I can't hear."
11/11/2009 9:04:00 AM
My new best friend. File |
David, are you following me? File |
Last night's other big winner. STEPHEN HOLMAN/Tulsa World |
Two big things happened last night.
Dewey Bartlett Jr. was elected the next mayor of Tulsa.
More about that later.
Second, my iPod Shuffle arrived via Federal Express.
While I should have been staring at my computer screen constantly updating the screen to read the latest election results and switching madly back and forth from 6 to 8 for their counts, I was, instead, staring into the computer screen trying to figure out how to sync my new toy.
I went to bed frustrated because I couldn't figure it out. I thought about putting out a press release announcing that the coolness of iPods was safe because Greene couldn't figure out how to use one.
This morning I got up for what was supposed to be my first run with the new iPod. I put it on anyway, just in case, and sure enough, it worked.
The iPod fairy apparently had come down overnight at fixed whatever was wrong with it (an uncharged battery, I suspect) so I was off and running with my tiny little companion.
News alert: iPods are officially no longer cool. A gray-headed 46-year-old fat man in Tulsa, Okla., was seen running with one and humming opera as he went.
Well, actually Apple stock might be safe for a while, because as it turned out I hadn't really mastered the pod.
I had made it less than a mile when I realized that my little friend only had managed to capture three songs of the dozen I had bought the night before. Actually only one that I bought – the climactic scene from Roberto Devereux – and two tunes that seem to have come pre-loaded: about 1 minute and 7 seconds of the scherzo of Beethoven's 9th played by some nonunion orchestra in Seattle and a snap shot of one of the dullest jazz songs I've ever heard.
So, for the 45-minutes of my run, I heard Queen Elizabeth in deep dungeon five times, and enough of the second movement to begin to suspect that Huntley and Brinkley were running just behind me.
The first two times through the aria were great. The third time was a little be repetitive.
The fourth time I realized that I was not just a metaphor for the way contemporary man's obsession with technological toys and other gee gaws has disconnected him from civic life I was, in fact, the perfect crystallization of that trend. It was me.
But the fifth time was good again.
Later this morning, walking to work, I was again hooked up to my electronic pal, still listening to the same three tracks, still fascinated with it, when I saw Mayor-elect Bartlett standing in the parking lot of Boston Avenue United Methodist Church waiting for a live interview on Fox 23.
I pulled the earphones from my head and walked over to shake his hand and congratulate him.
He was friendly and excited to go to work for the city.
After the usual pleasantries I hooked back in and walked on up Boston Avenue.
The third time through the Beethoven I thought I heard someone cough in the background.
By the way, does anyone know how to resync this crazy thing?
Needed: A few more Washingtons to get to the bottom of civics controversy
11/10/2009 9:28:24 AM
A pile of dollars would help determine if Oklahoma students know who that guy is. Courtesy |
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs is ready to settle the dispute over the most famous George Washington poll in the history of Oklahoma, and they're willing to split the costs.
As you might recall, the OCPA released a scientific telephone survey earlier this year that showed Oklahoma high schools students didn't know very much about U.S. history and government.
Only about 2 percent of the surveyed public school students would have passed the test, which is used by the federal government to determine which immigrants can become citizens.
The big headline out of the survey was the about 75 percent of Oklahoma high schoolers couldn't correctly identify George Washington as the first president.
Here's my first column on the topic, which included a copy of the test questions.
The survey ginned up a lot of interest and a lot of doubts about its accuracy.
Well known blogger Nate Silver challenged the results here.
I ended up testing the results in another Sunday column, and I found kids who knew a lot more about the United States than the OCPA survey.
Lots of readers did the same and mostly came up with the same results here and and here
It all blossomed up again yesterday when state Rep. Ed Cannaday released his own private poll of high schools students in his district, which showed the kids did much, much better than the OCPA poll.
The state Democratic Party used that as an opportunity to question the validity of the OCPA poll and to suggest bias on the Council's part.
This morning I got an email from OCPA Vice President for Policy Brandon Dutcher who said: "It's clear to me that Rep. Cannaday's endeavor was fair-minded and perhaps even helpful in its own way, but it obviously has its limitations.
"My proposal is this: Rep. Cannaday and I sit down and design a survey instrument we both think is fair. Going halvsies on the cost, we commission Gallup or someone we agree upon (heck, we could even use the NEA's pollster) to perform another statewide survey for Oklahoma."
That sounds like a fair offer to me.
I called Rep. Cannaday, who said he'd love to work on a poll with Dutcher, but he can't see committing himself financially to paying for a poll.
I pointed out that Brandon Dutcher isn't likely to be writing a check from his own bank account to pay for his half. He'll get donors to back him.
But Cannaday – a retired teacher and principal – wasn't ready to commit to that either.
My guess: There won't be a second poll, but what do I know? This story has already gone on further than I ever would have imagined. Anyone out there got a big checking account and a desire to get to the bottom of the question about the true civics literacy of Oklahoma students?
Civics survey questioned again
11/9/2009 3:01:23 PM
Rep. Ed Cannaday. File |
A state legislator is questioning a conservative think tank's survey, which claimed – among other things – to show about 75 percent of Oklahoma public high school students couldn't identify George Washington as the first president of the United States.
I've written about the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs survey in two columns and in some blogs. Here's the latest column.
No one I've seen has been able to match the results of the Council's telephone poll, although no one has tried a scientific survey of the sort used by the Council.
The broadest sample I seen so far is in the latest effort, by state Rep. Ed Cannaday, D-Porum, who says he gave the same quiz used by the OCPA to every high school senior in his legislative district, 325 kids in ten schools.
He got starkly different results, according to a press release put out by the state Democratic Party.
The OCPA survey found only 2.8 percent of the high school students would have passed the test with six correct questions out of ten, but Cannaday, a retired educator, said students in his district averaged 78 percent correct.
"After spending decades in the classroom working directly with students, I could not fathom that the OCPA results were realistic," Cannaday said in the press release. "I'm very happy for the students that my suspicions were correct, but at the same time I'm disappointed that such obviously inaccurate survey results were so widely reported as true."
The press release included comments from Karina Henderson, communications and new media director for the Oklahoma Democratic Party, who questioned the motives of the poll.
"I'm confident that Rep. Cannaday's survey shows the achievement of real Oklahoma students, and I remain highly suspicious of the validity of the OCPA survey," said Henderson.
"OCPA and Republican leaders have an ulterior motive -- they have been trying to dismantle public education in our state for years. The fact that they have promoted such questionable results undermines their credibility and makes it look as though they're pushing a political agenda, not policy research."
I called Brandon Dutcher at the OCPA for a response and haven't heard back from him yet. He's said in the past that he's looking into questions about the survey with his polling contractor, but hasn't seen anything yet that leads him to doubt the validity of the results.
There are some obvious difference between the two surveys. The Council was talking to high schools students, but Cannaday only went to seniors, who presumably are going to do better on the test.
The Council's survey also was taken earlier in the school year, and you could argue that would change the results some.
A telephone survey is different from a paper quiz given to children. That could account for some different results too.
The Council also was surveying on a statewide basis, and it's possible (although I'm not arguing it) that the kids in Rep. Cannaday's district (the north part of Haskell County, for the most part) are just brighter than the rest of the state.
But, even in the best light, the Council's survey's results -- which was done by an independent contractor -- seem to be getting fishier and fishier.
Learning on the move with the teacher of the year
11/9/2009 9:25:52 AM
Brian Grimm in his former Will Rogers High School classroom. File |
Brian Grimm – 2009 teacher of the year for Will Rogers High School, Tulsa Public Schools, Tulsa County, and the state of Oklahoma – spoke at Sunday's meeting of the English Speaking Union.
He brought demonstrations of his "kinetic" style of teaching, which emphasizes movement (and, he admits, entertainment value, in getting 16-year-olds motivated to learn grammar and literature.
He had the somewhat-more-than 16-year-old members of the ESU up on their feet doing the persuasive paragraph dance and moving around trying to get a dissected sentence on poster-sized strips of paper back in the right order.
Why all the movement? Here's the theory: "The part of your brain that regulates memory is right next to the part of your brain that regulates movement."
That, and the fact that if he can get the kids involved in the process they might not notice that they're learning grammar.
Near the end of his speech, Grimm had a stunning anecdote.
He had started his teaching career at a high-performing school district in Texas. Most of the parents were professionals and the students were all headed to college. He said his primary job was rigor, making sure the students learned as much as possible.
It left him completely unprepared for the realities of Rogers High School when he moved there.
Soon after he went to work at Rogers he got completely fed up with the chaos of the school and was ready to to quit.
He had broken up three fights that day and wasn't sure any student had learned anything in his classroom.
He put his classroom keys on the principal's desk and drove away from the school, swearing he would work at whatever job he could find rather than go back to the school.
When he got home he realized his house key was on the key ring he had left on his principal's desk. He had to go back, which he says was providence.
When he got there, he ended up having a turning point conversation with his principal, who told him that if he wanted to make a difference at the school he was going to have to learn a new way of teaching, a way that manages to find the students of Rogers on their own level.
He ended up taking the challenge. He immersed himself in studies on effective teaching in high-challenge schools.
He pulled together a team of other teachers with the same commitment.
Through their efforts, they have enormously reduced the number of discipline referrals from their classrooms, reclaiming 9,000 day of instructional time.
Is it different from the structured style of teaching of another era? No doubt, but Grimm offered this thought: "Education is about whatever it takes to get the kids to learn," Grimm said.
More kvetching about H.A. Chapman Centennial Park
11/6/2009 9:44:42 AM
Shown during its eternal construction phase in 2008, H.A. Champman Centennial Park is located at Sixth and Main streets. File
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Apparently, I only thought I was through complaining about H.A. Chapman Centennial Park, the downtown green space that was designed to commemorate Oklahoma's centennial.
Remember the centennial? Maybe not. It was 2007, but for downtown workers it was the year that kept on giving.
A year ago – in this blog – I declared my kvetching about the never-quite-done park to be at an end after the space was dedicated.
It had taken forever to build (a one-block park that's mostly grass) and the construction require an amazing length of street closings for no apparent reason except to provide free parking to the construction companies.
A couple of times I compared it to the building schedule of the Empire State Building, and the park never came out looking good.
But when the dedication came, the streets reopened and the green space was pleasant and I was going to let bygones be bygones.
At the time I noted that the amphitheater didn't look done, but I figured the exposed conduit would eventually go somewhere.
Well, that somewhere has finally shown up.
They've installed a ridiculous billboard advertising the city's centennial walk route right in the middle of the amphitheater.
It's absolutely silly looking, the most inappropriate backdrop for the space you can imagine.
So, nearly three years after the state's centennial, the park we built to celebrate it is finally getting finished, and will provide us all a reason to laugh and scratch our heads into what remains of the state's second 100 years.
Quiche and harsh reality at the food bank
11/5/2009 1:04:10 PM
Shown in 2008, Kenny Roberts, a warehouseman at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, puts a pallet of pudding cups onto a storage shelf. File
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I had breakfast with a side dish of harsh reality this morning.
I went to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma's third annual Hunger's Hope fundraiser.
Quiche and a lot of hard facts were on the menu.
One in six families in eastern Oklahoma is at risk of food insecurity.
One in five Oklahoma children is at risk of going to bed hungry tonight.
That means Oklahoma is the eighth hungriest state in the nation.
The food bank is doing some remarkable things fighting those statistics.
In the last fiscal year, it distributed 9.5 million pounds of food with a retail value of $16.5 million in eastern Oklahoma.
That translates into 7.4 million meals.
The food bank runs a huge warehouse on the north side of downtown, from which it distributes food to other charities throughout the region.
The food is is bought from contributions, given to the bank by the federal government and contributed by local restaurants and retailers who would rather see it given away than spoil.
Part of the food bank's operation is a commercial kitchen that takes perishable food donations and turns it into storeable meals.
Before the kitchen went into operation, the food bank saw about 30 percent of its food go to waste because of spoilage. Now that number is down to 3 percent to 5 percent and if they can figure out a way to freeze lettuce, they'll knock it down even more, said Executive Director Sara Waggoner.
Give the food bank $1 and it turns into seven meals, but give the food bank a pallet of won ton wrappers and it turns it into frozen lasagna.
In her speech, Waggoner quoted my favorite Bible verse, Micah 6:8 -- "…what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?"
She said that ten years ago she had a personal crisis and was considering leaving her job at a food bank.
When she went to talk to her father about her future, he pulled a piece of paper out of a drawer. It was a drawing she had made in Sunday School when she was 10 years old. She had been told to pick her favorite Bible verse and to illustrate it.
She chose Micah 6:8 and illustrated it with a picture of herself giving away a bag of food.
She didn't change jobs.
Contributions to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma can be mailed to 1304 N. Kenosha Ave.; Tulsa OK 74106.
The agency's telephone number is 585-2800 and they love giving tours.
In (budget) crisis, (manpower) opportunity
11/3/2009 3:21:00 PM
Will police give up their take-home cars to save the jobs of their fellow officers? File |
When the stimulus package was being hammered out, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual is supposed to have said, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste” or words to that effect.
I wonder if there's some of that sort of thinking going on in City Hall as we deal with the budget crisis and police lay offs.
The mayor has grounded the police helicopter and put the mounted patrol out to pasture. The officers are being returned to patrol duties.
There are legitimate uses of police helicopters and mounted officers too, but I'm not convinced they were the best used of the manpower.
A helicopter is useful in chase situation, but it also magnifies citizen perceptions of crime every time people hear the police buzzing in a tight circle overhead at night. I'm willing to say I’m not convinced it's the optimum good use of manpower or money, but once the city was invested in the helicopter business, there was really no getting out of it – until now.
Obviously, mounted patrols are better at crowd control than ordinary officers, but crowd control is typically on a lower order of police priorities than responding to calls for help from crime victims. Again, I'd rather have the officers in cars responding to calls.
Neither of those changes would have been possible without the crisis.
The real feat would be if the city could turn the budget crisis into an opportunity to break the Fraternal Order of Police's lock on take-home cars.
The cars are built into the police contract and have been for years. They are (for good reason) a bone of contention for taxpayers, who don't typically get cars from their employers and can't understand why the city is providing transportation, especially to officers who live in other cities.
But no mayor has had any chance of driving that issue out of the police contract until now.
Even now it may not happen, but there's the best chance for it in years because instead of the city trying to take a privilege away from the officers, the crisis has transformed the issue: Now it’s the union refusing to give up a perk to save the jobs of its own members.
I'm not saying there are any ulterior motives at City Hall about the budget crisis. I think the revenue shortfall is legitimate and the cuts were made in good faith: They were the best of a series of bad alternatives available to the mayor.
But I also think there's some interesting reshaping of the police department's attitudes and priorities possible in a time of budget crisis that would never have happened otherwise.
Oooo, Mendelssohnl. Me likey.
10/26/2009 10:36:18 AM
Brava to Waynesworld friend and local oboist supreme Lise Glaser on her concerto performance with the Tulsa Symphony on Saturday.
We're lucky to have her in this town.
The audience almost also earned my applause, but there they were clapping again in the middle of the Mendelssohn.
"Ooooo, I know that one. Me like it." Clap, clap, clap.
The anti-applause grumblers in the audience, and I increasingly see myself in that class, are getting less and less tolerant of inter-movement applause.
Saturday night, the older man a few rows behind me and to my left muttered "Dummy" loud enough for the clapping man three rows up to hear.
I wonder if he was the same old man whose cell phone was buzzing throughout one of the earlier pieces.
The applause is less irritating. No one came on stage and told the audience to turn off their hands before the show.
Here's a little taste of the Italian symphony. Feel free to clap along.
In undistinguished race for mayor, independent still has to be double good
10/23/2009 1:14:06 PM
Mark Perkins, the independent candidate for mayor, doesn't have the natural permanent constituency of a major party candidate. World file photo |
I wish I could get more enthusiastic about Mark Perkins.
Perkins, the independent candidate for mayor, spoke at the Tulsa Press Club's Page One luncheon today. It was the third and final speech of a set of three featuring the three major candidates in the race.
The two major party candidates – Republican Dewey Bartlett Jr. and Democrat Tom Adelson – have undistinguished themselves in the race with vitriolic attack advertising that has concentrated on all the wrong things.
That has turned the eyes of a lot of weary Tulsans to Perkins.
When Perkins speaks, he uses a lot of buzz words – collaboration, leadership, etc. – that are effective as rhetoric, but I don’t get enough substance with that talk.
He's strongest (and most substantial) on development issues because I think that's what he knows best. After hearing his speech today, I feel like I know how he would respond to development ideas. I wish I had the same sense about a lot of other ideas.
I've read newspaper stories about him and his campaign Web site's issues page, but I still feel like I need more steak, less sizzle.
As an independent candidate, he arguably can be held to a higher standard of preparation for office than Bartlett or Adelson, because he won't have the backing of a party apparatus after he's elected.
He won't have a permanent constituency (on the City Council or in the electorate) and he will have opponents coming at him from two directions at once.
A nonpartisan mayor has to be double smart, double quick, double prepared.
I asked Perkins about the negative campaigning that has made many voters consider him and what it reflects about Bartlett and Adelson.
He got that one right when he said the attack ads reflect poorly on the candidate they are meant to help.
Every voters watching the ads finds himself wondering about the judgment of a candidate who would approve such a message.
"How they are running reflects who they are," Perkins said, and that's undeniable.
Why Tulsans should buy canned stew
10/22/2009 3:59:39 PM
Our hero. Courtesy/Hormel |
Attention, canned beef stew lovers of Tulsa: Buy your Dinty Moore in cans not plastic from now on.
I'll admit a weakness for Mr. Moore's hearty concoction, although I left that behind me when I went vegetarian a couple of years ago. My wife makes an astounding vegetarian chili that summons memories of Dinty's best efforts, but that's all tangent.
For those of you still in the throes of DM – or any other product that comes in either canned (steel) containers or plastic ones – you now have a real ecological choice, as Michael Patton of the Metropolitan Environmental Trust (and one of the really bright guys of our community) pointed out to me.
The city's trash board just signed a contract with the trash-to-energy plant on Tulsa's west side. Any day now, our residential trash will start making its way to the burn plant instead of going straight to the landfill.
That will make the landfill last longer (a good thing) and might get Tulsa in a position in the future where it can leverage some oversight on what other customers are allowed to bring to the burn plant (a very good thing).
But here's another more immediate ecological benefit of the change: The plant automatically combs through the trash it burns for steel using giant magnets.
Mr. Moore's steel cans get recycled. They never hit the landfill (Environmental Commandment No. 1: Don't bury stuff that can be reused.) and we'll have to mine less iron to meet the quotas for future can production.
On the other hand, I don’t even want to think about some of the chromosome mangling things that might come out of burning a plastic container.
It's enough to make me want to go to the can.
James J. Kilpatrick, our nation turns its tiring eyes to you
10/21/2009 1:41:53 PM
Shall we retire the "Sentence Interminable" trophy with George F. Will's honor? |
George F. Will has done it again.
Every time I think he's set a new low for complex sentences that never should be put in print -- and certainly never in newsprint -- he outdoes himself.
Check out the 93-word leviathan first sentence in the lead of George F. Will's current column:
"Three years before Rep. Wilbur Mills, the Arkansas Democrat who then chaired the Ways and Means Committee, had his fling with a stripper named Fanne Foxe, aka “The Argentine Firecracker” (Mills joined her on stage at Boston’s exquisitely named Pilgrim Theater, which specialized in what Time magazine primly called “ecdysiast exhibitions”; this was after he had a fracas with Ms. Foxe that provoked her to jump into Washington’s Tidal Basin across from the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, who really believed that democracies could behave rationally), he decided to seek the Democrats’ 1972 presidential nomination."
Mercifully, the sentence ends, but the lead goes on: "So in an almost admirably straightforward attempt to buy the votes of the elderly, he successfully championed an automatic COLA — cost of living adjustment — for Social Security."
George F. Will should offer a special prize to any reader who can diagram that first sentence with bonus points to anyone willing to justify its lack of structure or self-restraint.
It is an ecdysiast exhibition of words: George F. Will is showing his butt with language.
Since the retirement of James J. Kilpatrick, there hasn't been anyone to call foul on Will's wanton wordiness.
Each year, James J. Kilpatrick used his language column to battle excess wordiness by giving out his "Sentence Interminable" award to the most long-winded sentence by a practicing journalist, and George F. Will was one of his favorite targets.
Last year, James J. Kilpatrick started his column on this topic by telling an anecdote about how a city editor broke him of his own prolixity with a note.
"Mr. Kilpatrick," it said. "Those interesting objects are called periods. They are formed by a key on the bottom row of your typewriter. Kindly put these to immediate use."
Here's a gem that James J. Kilpatrick cited in that column:
"Americans can't have that exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called 'the private sector' has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be 'spread around.' "
That 119-word monster was written by … wait for it … George F. Will.
If he refuses to use them, the least George F. Will could do is give his readers a row full of periods at the end of his column so they could sprinkle them in a la carte.
James J. Kilpatrick once had this to say about long sentences: "Constant readers should draw no conclusions. Long sentences are not always indigestible. Gibbon served up hundreds of them in the 'Decline and Fall.' In our own time, Faulkner often went on and on. The writer who consciously, deliberately writes down to his imagined readers will not be writing professionally for long."
Here's what I think about the topic: Long sentences are appropriate for long thoughts, but there's a difference between a long thought and a jumbled mess or multiple thoughts piled one on top of the other.
George F. Will's latest offering must have James J. Kilpatrick turning over in his retirement.
James J., our nation longs for you to come out of retirement and resume your battle with the George F. Wills of the world.
Pushback from the high school civics poll
10/20/2009 11:31:00 AM
Most of us seem to agree that George Washington was the first president. AP photo |
My Sunday column about the controversial Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs poll of how much Oklahoma high school students don't know about U.S. history, government and geography has brought pretty heavy push-back from readers.
A lot of the response came from public school teachers who wanted to say the OCPA has an anti-public schools agenda and its poll results can't be trusted.
One government teacher from a middle-class local high school wrote to say he had given all of his students the citizenship test and all 120+ of his students knew who the first president of the United States was.
Almost all of them got six of ten questions correct, meaning they would have passed by the federal government's standards.
That's much better than the results of the OCPA poll, which showed about 75 percent of Oklahoma high school students surveyed couldn't identify George Washington as the first president.
On the other hand, a Tulsa Community College math teacher wrote to say she had given the test to her students on an extra credit basis.
While 72 percent knew who the first president was, the results were generally pretty dismal. Only 8 percent knew how many justices sit on the Supreme Court, and only 32 percent could identify the Atlantic Ocean as the body of water on the east coast of the United States.
Three of that teacher's students left all ten questions blank.
Her class might well balance out some of the results referred to in my Sunday column, which I admitted were probably heavily weighted toward highly motivated, middle-class students from well educated, civic-minded families.
Most of the TCC students were Tulsa Public School graduates in a class whose curriculum is material that should have been taught in middle school, according to the instructor.
I also got an email from a private school teacher who objected to the answer to the first question on the test. The question, "What is the supreme law of the land?" The answer, according to the federal government's test for immigrants, is "the Constitution."
The private school teacher points out that Article VI of the Constitution says: "…This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land…."
I told him he had a bone to pick with the immigration people.
He responded that a good argument could be made that George Washington wasn't the first president of the United States either.
I thanked him for his comments and decided to end the conversation at the point.
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