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Journal #2- The One With The Tornado Watch

Considering I’m going to eventually be turning this into you, a teacher, I probably should be a bit more respectful in this entry than I’m bound to end up being. You asked about prejudice and injustice, though, and we’re all not going to get rid of those two nasty prefixes unless we’re brutally honest about them every so often. Fair?

So I was sitting in choir on Friday, thanking the blessed fates that it was going to be one more study hall of cramming for the Cold War test and/or watching John draw entirely vulgar things with iPhone apps, when I’m yanked out of my adolescent nirvana by the realization that another adult is in the classroom apart from the substitute. You know him, but I’ll extend the courtesy of not naming names. Needless to say, he was in a position of greater authority than nameless sub model 2.3B, and apparently here to tell us, as was his absolute right, to stop throwing food wrappers all over the music room. (This, to be clear, is a cause I and my wheels support in full.)  Anyway, he’s in-between screamed diphthongs when he says, and I quote, “you all must have brain damage”. Now, I’ll grant you, that’s a fairly innocuous turn of phrase in most circles; or at least it would be, had he not said it within a foot of yours truly, who, friendly reminder, has a brain with the health of a fish in Death Valley. Suffice to say I was contemplating at the very least unhinging my jaw to protest and at the very most unhinging it for a different reason entirely. I get that these things slip out from the maws of those who don’t know any better, but anyone who has previously proudly stated “if you don’t shape up, I’ll make you spend the day with the MH kids” has a short leash with me, in most cases with a wire running down it.

I’d like to say that, during what has now become a string of wholly ignorant ableism  I was the one who proverbially stood up and halted it. But the reality isn’t as simple. In his frenzied state, he could’ve dragged me down to the office, which as of now suffers from an acute lack of Steve Carrell. He’d be most likely to feel a momentary pang of pity that would die, as it often does in lieu of becoming awareness, as soon as it hit whatever pilgrimage of neurons had sought his frontal lobe out. Either way, it does me no good, and him even less than that. Indeed, the way I use courage is as a tower, to build up and hide inside of until better, brighter minds have slayed the dragon for me, with the knowledge that hopefully someday, people won’t need to egg other people’s houses to jack up the selling price of their own.

Journal 1: The One With The Crispy Pigskin

This might shock you, but I don’t always want to spend eighteen paragraphs bludgeoning humanity over the head with a series of stressed syllables. Sometimes, I just want to screw on my geek hat and spend a paragraph with the new Dark Knight Rises trailer. What say we do that?

After the twin successes of The Dark Knight and Inception, I have to assume that Christopher Nolan’s house is, like, made of pure melted Oscars. His contract with Warner Brothers, however, necessitates that he must one day emerge from his palace of deformed heads and finish off the highest-grossing, critically-anointed trilogy about an orphan in Bat-pajamas. How will he do it, especially when “it” contains the legacy of both one of the most tightly-written scripts and most sociopathic villains of all time?  Well, blowing up a football stadium’s a decent start, I guess.

In all seriousness, though, Nolan and newcomer Tom Hardy are blowing up more than a sports complex here: they’re making a movie that, tonally and cinematically, is the antithesis of its darling ancestor. Where Ledger’s Joker was a hellish anarchist wanting to prove that the world over is corrupt, Hardy’s Bane is the symbol of Aryan perfection, big-muscled and crushing anyone who doesn’t dare live up to the master race standard. The dark blue, shadowy color palette of its predecessor has given way to a grainy yellow, almost nauseating one. Where the central conflict of Dark Knight was a mainly symbolic war between paranoia and decency, the war in Rises seems to be a very literal one, complete with a colonial marching soundtrack, powder-born explosions, and stark image of everyone from the police to their prisoners arming themselves not with flashy comic-book weapons, but with guns, fearing for their families and their cities. The true innovation on display here, I’d say, is the character of Batman himself,  disillusioned from his own personal war, who is attempting to be a neutral power in the conflict, even when either side is begging, sometimes from hospital beds, that he enter. It’s a bold declaration by Nolan, and one you don’t normally see crop up in a superhero movie: physical chaos seldom quells emotional chaos, even and especially if a man in tights watches over it.

The Color Purple: Why Bieber Is Straight And People Are Narrow

Let’s talk about a different Justin for a change; the one who sends a hateful chill down the spines of so many teenage boys and a loving warmth down the…lady-parts of so many teenage girls. Of course, we’re dissecting none other than Justin Bieber.

There are a lot of facts about Bieber I could provide for you on the assumption you’re residing under a massive formation of rocks: the Canadian musician was discovered via the video-sharing site YouTube at the tender age of twelve, and was picked up by a record company shortly thereafter. In the brief time between then and now, Bieber has released somewhere in the neighborhood of five albums and a movie, all of which have effectively caused Bieber’s thousands of fans* to hand their PINs to some corrupt record executive, most likely while he smokes a Cuban cigar made of hundred-dollar-bills and uses the U.S.’s annual GDP for an ashtray. We miss Bieber’s Rosetta Stone, as it were, if we stop there; the one thing I haven’t revealed is just how polarizing he is.

Do a Google search on Bieber, and you’ll gain access to unquantifiable amounts of pictures, videos, blogs, social networks, and forum posts all spinning around the gravitation pull of one boy that couldn’t even apply for his temps for the better part of his rise to stardom. It will become immediately apparent that this web-debris can be easily split into a pair of camps: those who want to give Bieber a passionate, long hug around the waist until he moves in, and those who want to give him a long, passionate hug around the neck until he stops moving. Very rarely will you find someone in the middle of this continuum**. The range becomes even narrower if you limit those surveyed to 12-through-18 year olds. I think we all know why Bieber is so popular among prepubescent girls; that’s not what I’m going to try ascertaining. The vexing question at the mushy, purple center of Bieber comes down to why so many of my peers hate him. There’s no simple answer, but I think there’s a general satellite view that we can form of the whole ordeal that was tantalizing enough for me to undertake this whole idea in the first place.

Justin Bieber, by all present signs, is a biological and heterosexual male.  You wouldn’t know that, however, from your hypothetical Google search. The most common critique of Bieber will contain without fail some variation of the words “female” or “gay”. Unfounded or otherwise, there’s clearly an effeminate aura that envelopes Bieber, at least going by the public’s impression; for instance, he makes frequent use of more “girlish”*** colors such as pink and his trademark purple in promotion materials, has a traditionally female vocal range, and recently professed to finding women’s clothing more comfortable than men’s****.  Though Bieber is a male performer, he’s more than crossed the line in the sand when it comes to upholding the gender-based nomenclature of our time.*****  Which explains exactly why the hatred and idolatry of the pop star is split so exactly among gender lines: boys feel insulted by a heterosexual, cisgendered****** male who, despite his active stance of eschewing gender roles, is financially successful. You probably could’ve made that conclusion on your own. But, to reiterate, I’m more interested in the “why” of things: among males, why is it so important to have a clearly defined and strictly uniform gender?   As with everything else in life, it’s about the tribal leftovers of what happens in the bedroom. Evolutionary biology time!

Let’s go back to a cluster of Cro-Magnons in, say, central Asia circa the pre-civilized era.  These brave men and women, lacking real societies or communities to shape their aspirations, chiefly aim to do three things: move, continue moving, and reproduce. In order to move, they needed energy, and in order to produce energy, they needed food. Because the food supply, lacking any sort of agriculture beyond berry-picking, was so scarce, food was limited to what you could kill, and what you could kill depended on how strong you were. Males who were able to obtain more food were more nourished, and thus when it came time to do a little dance, make a little love, and get down tonight (get down tonight), they were more proficient in all three. Over time, biological signs began to form that were a type of shorthand vis a vis the question “If I make scrambled eggs with this unibrowed gent, will they make it onto the plate?”: namely, cleaner teeth, clearer skin, broader shoulders, and height. So, even though we now have no survival-based need for the Cliffnotes version of Mesolithic eHarmony, given that we have enough fertility treatments to make Picasso want to have children and an actual population surplus, we keep it. Not only do we keep it, but out of fear or blind stupidity we let these rigid descriptors of sex define us, define achievement, morality and worth. It is impossible to turn around without being covertly assaulted, male or female, by your given gender role. And how do we enforce something so vast? We award those who conform, and punish those who do not.

Somehow, Justin Bieber has managed to slip through the cracks unscathed, but for how long? It is, after all, survival of the fittest.

*(Nicknamed “Bieliebers”, which seriously jeopardizes my attempt to make this journal impartial. The poor, innocent grammar…)

**(In the interest of fairness, I’m the exception that proves the rule, being more interested myself in the cause of the strong emotions Bieber inspires versus the singing chipmunk himself.)

 ***(Or, at least, more girlish colors in 21^st century America. From era to era and country to country, gender norms change radically, though that’s a topic for another entry.)

****(The fact of which was relayed to me by a disgusted friend, inspiring this whole tirade.)

*****(When public figures do this, especially if they are male, their profits are usually hurt in the short term, a recoil which has flown over the roof of Casa Bieber. I won’t try to explain why here, because I’m just as confused by this anomaly as you probably are now.)

******(Cisgendered meaning “identifying as one’s birth gender”, i.e. not transgendered, but that’s a whole other, Chaz-Bono-shaped can of worms that I’ll eventually open.)

A Novel Approach: How To Save American English Education (In Five Dirt-Cheap Steps)

Previously on the inane ramblings of Tomato Surprise, I attempted to write a short, concise entry on the death of English education and ended up writing a six-page essay, Let’s try to avoid that today as I list five ways we can better teach reading and writing* without spending a single extra U.S. tax-dollar.  In no particular order…

1.       Bring Back The Discussion Engine

The crux of my previous argument was simply that the question-and-concrete-answer style of English education** is fundamentally dysfunctional, and that there’s no way we can tailor it to be congruous with our natural hunger for narratives***. The question I didn’t address in that line of thought was probably a point of contention to anyone who read it, namely “Yeah, genius, so we get rid of our RAP system. What the crap do we replace it with?” We replace it with guided discussion. Burn all of your tests, yes, but don’t stop there. Use the money you’ll doubtlessly save on printing/copying and buy yourself a chalkboard, Smartboard, whiteboard, or iPad.**** 

 Why? Because the new driving force of your classroom, the ultimate litmus test, will be a series of daily discussions that your students have. Every day, your students will walk in to see their desks arranged in one continuous semicircle, around the board of your choice. On that board will be two things: a ledger composed of each student’s name, and an open-ended (gasp!) question pertaining to the novel/    chapter/poem/short story/other media***** that they consumed the night before. From there, you’ll instruct any student who has a response to the question to raise their hand, and call on them. From this point, let them speak freely. Be silent, with the exception of reigning the question back in if their thoughts go on too long. For all of you who’re scratching your heads wondering where the assessment comes in, watch my next trick. The person you’ve just called on will sit down, and provided they articulated themselves, gets a check next to their name on the ledger. The last step of the process is by far the most important, though, so bear with me. You’ll ask the class “Who disagrees with what he/she just said? Who has anything to add?” That query leads to your next crop of names, and your next check on the ledger. After a while, you may find that the discussion is drifting to a whole new topic. It’s critical that you stop having a hernia and let it, only pausing to add the question to your original one with a bullet-point. Repeat the process until every student has three checks. If they’ve remained silent or been an incoherent mess, they obviously didn’t put the work in the night before; they’ll fail the grade for that period. If they only received one or two checks, they’ll receive half-credit.******

This system, while not perfect, is the most seamless compromise I could muster between the ideal but unrealistic zero-assessment style of education and the parasitic thorn of RAP-style teaching. It’s important that I address this step first because it provides so well what we need in order for all the subsequent steps to work: energy in the classroom. Let me put a bitter truth about the learning process in layman’s terms: if someone tells you that you need a colonoscopy, you will not want that colonoscopy even if they outline every logical reason why, yes, you need one. Due to the RAP-infested waters of our schools today, a lot of very intelligent people feel that way about reading. Don’t shoot them in the foot at the door; imagine what you could do if they wanted to come in.    

 2.       Free Read/Free Write Out The Wazoo

Indulge me in a personal anecdote. When I was a young lad, I had an amazing teacher. Granted, only a few of my teachers have ever not fit that descriptor, but this one in particular may as well have sprinkled it in her morning coffee.******* What earns her that accolade? She sacrificed her lunch hour every Thursday for two years so that I could use a computer in her classroom to write down some of the pesky leeches that were sucking at the fringes of my skull. In hindsight, given the heights I’ve achieved and the career I’m trying to build, her gamble more than paid off, and the check still hasn’t quite cleared. What’s so notable about her dedication to this, really, boils down to one thing: it was 100% nuts. Completely bonkers. If some random third-grader from the middle of Ohio could hone his talent the way she thought he could, the pigs weren’t just flying; they were booking fighter jets. And maybe it was crazy. But you know what? She bet on the right roulette number, and now, at the very least, she’s given the world one more eccentric bibliophile to follow in her unconventional footsteps of providing not just an education about, but an addiction to, the English language for those of all ages who may not be afflicted yet. How? When I pulled up to that desk, on nine occasions out of ten, I had no idea whatsoever what words would crawl out of the blank white woodwork. Forty-five minutes later, without fail, she’d read them back in her even cadence, and regardless of whether it was a contemplation of bigotry or a riff on Carroll or a hair-raising story about sentient locks taking over the world using tanks made out of shaving cream, she’d smile and give me honest critique of it.  Nothing was “too hard for me” or “beneath me”, but nothing was perfect, either, and she’d tell me why without sugar-coating or chewing me out. And, on the rare occasion I’d draw a blank completely, there was no punishment or disillusioned sigh. I read.  

 We need as much of the environment she created in our classrooms as can possibly fit, and I say that with full confidence. At the absolute least, you need 30 minutes of free reading with every hour of required reading you assign. The same goes for writing. If you or your superiors decide that this is a step worth skipping, reconsider. The more you tell students what to read and write about, the more they’ll develop that unnatural hated for both. In order to truly connect with this strange, intangible world, everyone has to own it.

3.       Teach Narratives, Not Just Books

Above all the other concepts on the list, what I’m about to persuade you of will be the most controversial. As with most divisive topics, the idea alone is very simple: we live in 2011, an age where the media we consume is rapidly expanding beyond print-only. I’ve never had good bedside manner, so here’s the honest prognosis: television programs, movies, comic books, songs, web media, and even video games contain narratives that can hold up with the best of print media, and it’s high time we treated them that way.********* Today’s television, especially with the advent and rise of so-called “serial dramas” like Lost. V, The Sopranos, and Oz, was built to be dissected as a complex narrative in exactly the same way a Steinbeck novel or a Giovanni poem was, and the trend has extended to comics, video-games and, in some cases, cartoons. Our curriculum, however, has not extended at all.

This is by no means a scorched-earth policy with regards to novels in the classroom. Just because we’re discussing Draper’s downfall doesn’t mean we can’t gab about Gatsby’s gaffes. Alternative media education is often presented as an all-or-nothing gambit: movie days are, let’s be honest, filler. But these constraints, so often held up on silver platters as gospel, are completely arbitrary. With services like Netflix and Hulu Plus offering a nubile entrance to the ground floor of online streaming, we’d best wise up to them before the powers-that-be realize they could be charging us a pair of limbs for it. This is a chance, using the discussion engine above, to explore narratives that are, in most cases, extremely new and uncharted.  In limiting the media we learn about, we only limit ourselves.

4.       Stop Being Stale

I hope that the previous three steps, more focused on how we should change our educational environment versus how we should change our educators, didn’t lull the latter group into a false sense of security. I love you dearly, my zookeepers, but it’s time to face facts: you‘ve all been infected to varying degrees by RAP thinking, and American schools can’t stop the swine flu without telling doctors to cover their mouths.  For the remainder of this list, I have but one request for you: reach into your collective skulls and turn off the excuse-laden track that plays in your brain whenever you talk about my generation. I’m about to give you the bluntest advice in this entire monologue, so don’t render it useless by allowing it to sail over your head. I do know about the pages and pages of concepts and standards you’re required to talk about each year in order to keep your jobs, notwithstanding that it seems the previous three steps, with their less lucid and factual style, ignore them in full.  In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to adhere to any such things, but there are realities of the world that we absolutely must follow to get by, and the existence of such a document is one of them; I can’t and won’t change that, and neither can you, but what I will use this point to advocate changing how we deal with them.

Here’s my relatively simple proposal: if you’d like to bring that excitement we addressed in step two back to the classroom, the ways that you’ve used to teach ideas like persuasion, figurative language, rhyme scheme, point-of-view, foreshadowing, contrast, and their brethren just won’t work anymore, even and especially if you’ve used them successfully for years on end. At the onset of your lesson-planning for the year, open that book and go through every requirement. Your job, as a professional on the forefront of a new era of English education, is to physically write next to each idea an interesting, worksheet-free way to work with that standard. Why do we still ask students to write persuasive papers on school uniforms and the effects of the media when we could be introducing persuasion by asking students to write a persuasive paper on whether a crew of pirates or clan of ninjas would win in a fight, citing actual history to back their views up? Why not introduce students to poetry through things they’re already familiar with, like pop and rap songs? Why not illustrate foreshadowing by watching or reading an episode of The Twilight Zone, and asking students to predict the ending?  Could we teach the power of word choice by simulating a restaurant in which, say, prepositional phrases, verbs, or pronouns are banned? Honestly, once I get into an “anything goes” method with the sagging remains of our dull educational tropes, I practically start salivating. A solid 75% of the curriculum ideas I listed are probably terrible, but it’s the mindset that counts. If I can come up with those in an hour, imagine what a thousand teachers could come up  with in a week, or a month, or a year. If we want to shock students out of a literary coma, and those with enough patience to read this far are sure to desire, those who shape them must be shocked as well. Enjoy your renaissance…     

 5.       Kill Your Sacred Cows

…but don’t think we’re done here. I saved the most painful part of the process for last. Rhetorical question ahoy: what would be the worst possible thing to spawn from a generation of teens who haven’t read A Tale Of Two Cities? Animal Farm? A Wrinkle In Time? Even The Great Gatsby?

Let me be perfectly honest before those pitchforks you’re carrying get put to use: a large portion of these novels, while not are my favorite of all time,********* are extremely good in my, er, book. For a lot of students, however, novels like those above only symbolize the continuing “no idiots need apply” sign nailed to the Little Rascals-style tree-house of literature. And, to be honest, as many teachers have professed openly to anyone with a working set of ears, some of them are just terrible to begin with. **********  We’ve beaten the lives out of these stories so much for so long that not only is it a miracle if students actually enjoy the text, it’s a miracle if they’ll ever read a novel again, much less engage with one on any thematic level. It’s like if, on his first date, this poor guy took this girl named Priscilla out to Outback Steakhouse, only to find out on the way back that she was a vegan whose parents were murdered by Aboriginal extremists, that scumball, and how dare he be so impossibly stupid as to only barely understand her? Yes, Priscilla might be an extremely good person, and you could use your dying breath to try and prove that to him, but there’s no way in Hilliard that he’ll ever ask Priscilla out again? Worse yet, he’s so humiliated by his failure to understand Priscilla that he begins to associate girls that have nothing to do with the night in question to her, and dies penniless and alone like the anti-Steve Jobs. Sure, that was the oddest of tangents, but it serves to illustrate a hard-to-describe point: the continuing illusion that all the best novels were written by white, straight, able-bodied old guys who have long since given up the ghost. Why read if, as we subtly imply in our endless anointing of Lord of the Flies and its ilk, all the real good stuff wasn’t written for you, by people like you, or temporally near you? If we expect and encourage students to become lifelong devotees of the Church Of Fiction, we must, in the form of our educators, tell students what’s out there setting fires right now, even if that means parting ways with Ulysses for a year or two.

What I’m Really Saying Here

If you’ve read down to here, through the thorns and thistles of my anecdotes, allegories, ambles, and apophenia, I’ll bet you my life that I’ve managed, at least in part, to make you angry. If your blood boiled at any point over these past five dissections, good; you’ve played precisely into my hand.  Because something I’ve reinforced over the course of this manifesto has been a complete lie, and I wanted to build enough shiny distractions so that you wouldn’t notice while I dragged it out to the forefront: I do not hate English education.

As I touched upon in the original piece, my parents read to me every night as a child, a gift which I still very much cherish. Stories, these beautiful, imponderable lies that we’ve made up together, have no tangible purpose because they have every tangible purpose. They’ve given me critical advice that I would never accepted from a person. They’ve inspired me, added color to the times in my life where I’ve happened upon a grey slum. I’ve bonded with friends and family through them, and will one day use them to provide for a family of my own. They’ve made me laugh, cry, question, and answer. They’ve made me smarter and knock me down a peg when I’m too smart for my own good. Beyond fire, beyond vaccines and rocket-ships and electron microscopes, stories have been the things that have given the most to us. So, maybe it’s time we stop making excuses and give a little of it back to them.

*(No word, at the time of this entry, on ‘rithmatic.)

**(Which I’d termed “reading-as-process”, or RAP, thinking.)

***(Again, you can see the original essay for proof of that theory.)

****(If you already have any one of these devices in your classroom, buy yourself a Blu-Ray player with that extra money.  It’s not required, but it’ll be of use in Step Three. Alternatively, buy several $100 portable word-processors, which in addition to being an insanely good investment, make Step 2 just a tad smoother. )

*****(We’ll get to the “other media” portion in a few steps, wherein a solid section of educators will crucify me for blasphemy.)

******(The grading scale I’ve devised may seem harsh at a cursory glance. Remember, however, that this process will happen daily, and the weight of several five to ten point grades will seem more dispersed. As far as absences go, the student would just respond to the original question asked that day in a half-to-full page writing.)

*******(It wasn’t coffee, actually. Strike that and make it “morning orange-juice-lime-water-seltzer-thing”. Whatever was in it, the concoction definitely contained incredible amounts of incredible.)

********(I understand the slippery slope here, educators. Take a second to understand that, like you, I do not want a stack of term papers inspired by Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, or Desperate Housewives. There are narratives that, like the preceding three, have all the depth of a Wal-Mart kiddie pool, and said narratives would be as catastrophic for the classroom as you think they would. Consider the unspoken clause there, however, and you come to a realization: there are novels out there, honest-to-Gaia books, that are just as bad as our alternate-media black sheep. We don’t teach James Patterson in the classroom, nor are we heartless enough to expose our youth to Stephenie Meyer. Does that mean that we keep all novels out of the classroom? No? Why, you’ve got a point there! Maybe we shouldn’t make a lower-tiered ghetto for media that was made with a modicum of thought, some of which exists in places that our educators may not be comfortable with. Watch any given episode of Lost, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, or Mad Men and tell me you’re not salivating at the mouth to track its themes, language, foreshowing, and motifs like you would any form of print media.)

*********(Wrinkle  comes so close it’s not even funny, but that honor goes to either Lois Lowery’s The Giver or Blue Balliet’s Chasing Vermeer, with the close second being Ray Bradbury’s short story/Work Of Genius™ A Sound Of Thunder, which hit me like a malignant brain tumor and still shapes how I conduct myself today. Seriously, if Ray Bradbury walker’d to my doorstep and ask me to cut off my left foot with proper sterilization, I’d listen.)

**********(The most commonly-mentioned one, in my experience, being S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Real sans-contextualized quotes about it: “I want to put that book on my grill and burn it to pieces.” “I practically fall asleep teaching it.” “It’s like reading a bad, BAD soap opera.”)     

thoughtnami asked: You're a creative cat, so I have to peer inside your head a bit. The DC and Marvel universes are somehow fused, and new partnerships are forged. The only twist? One has to be from each universe. So, which two characters would you put in a pair, and why?

There’s no way that this would ever, ever happen, but I’d love to see a pop-art serial starring the even-headed gypsy P.I. Zatana Zatara crack a case with her mystical Jewish-mythology-spawned golem partner, The Thing. It would be all the best parts of a Hollywood fall from grace biopic and a quirky monster movie.

A Large Meatball: My Open Letter To Zombie-Kind

To Whom It May Or May Not Concern:

Hello! My name is Tomato Surprise. I am speaking to your collective conscious on behalf of humankind. I myself am a human, and if I am to be completely honest with your esteemed race, it’s not a classification that I take unceasing pride in. When viewing the deluge of talk radio, celebrity enshrinement, political warfare, and obscenely-deep-fried delicacies that my species has spawned, I fear that you may conclude your endeavors with regards to the consumption of my fellow men and women to be worthwhile and not at all deserving of guilt. This letter is an olive branch (or, if you’d rather, an olive kidney), being offered to the best and brightest of your society in hopes that you will someday reconsider caving our skulls in with your canine teeth, which is an overwrought way of expressing my innermost grovel to your species: if you must eat us, zombies, please eat us responsibly.

The modern citizen’s understanding of the brain calls it nothing less than an engineering marvel, a great anomaly far and above the rest of nature’s beast, with tens of billions of neurons and synapses allowing it to accomplish even the most ludicrous of feats. It’s my belief, perhaps through man-made stereotype, that zombiekind essentially sees this most treasured of human organs as a large meatball with which to tame their undead stomachs. This assertion is troubling. I’m not certain of the civility of your people, but my own are endowed enough to make rightly sure that everything of nutritional value has been taken away from a food before it enters the body. This rule, while encompassing nearly the whole of American cuisine, applies with a special emphasis to pieces of meat, such as the human brain. If your kind fails to, at the very least, lightly bread us in a grease-and-butter reduction before violently sustaining yourselves on our various entrails, your shambling bodies will run the serious risk of being physically fit and wholesome.

It is also not advisable for any bodily strain, however marginal, to take place during the preparation and consumption of your meals. As such, it would serve you best not to use the standard “bludgeon-and-separate” method in order to incapacitate your next course. Instead, consider making use of a bear trap designed to look like a container of Chinese take-out. This will lure all but the staunchest of racists and weakest of constitutions to your morning breakfast table and, I predict, prove quite effective at doing so. If the setting of these traps becomes overly difficult, I advise to set up several chain restaurants, who will see to it that they make the process as quick and potentially rat-infested as possible.

Now that you’re aware of how to begin your culinary conquest upon my people, it’s only fitting to give you advice on how to sustain it. Provided that we are correct in predicting how both of our cultures would react, your fellow invaders shouldn’t encounter much resistance in your quest. Our best defense against any and all of your forces seems to be that of sending a few grizzly men with chainsaws and other various power tools to the epicenter of your assault. It is difficult for any rational member of our species to believe that yours could be overpowered by a moderately-armed Will Smith, and yet he is among the best we’d have to offer.

In terms of organized counter-strikes, I wouldn’t pay them much thought. Rest assured, should one of your kind arrive on the steps of our nation’s great capital and start to gnaw, it would take at least three to four congressional sessions before anyone could determine whether or not to shoot it in the head. Against a larger onslaught, we would be comfortable in dismissing them as non-threatening, considering that they are all likely to be either in the lowest tax bracket or uninsured. If, as a whole, you were willing to construct several signs conflating members of public office with Nazis, your cause would be more likely to receive national attention, but only if it is lucky enough to not compete with either a halfway-decent snowstorm, a Kardashian wedding, or a the web video of a talking baby. In the instance that one or more of the above events happen, the best course of action for your campaign would be to disguise it as a so-called “flash mob”, a group of people doing a coordinated dance to music, meaning that the initial invasion could conceivably consist of zombies dressing up as people dressing up as zombies dancing to Thriller.

Forgive me if I make a deaf-eared assumption in saying that, per the modern American depiction of your race, each and every zombie was once a living person. Supposing you were, prepare to not be shocked whatsoever when not only your cause but your entire means of being comes under fire from a small. pious clan of self-proclaimed moral crusaders. By my calculation, on the accord of the eating habits of your most violent splinter cells, it will be at least thirty years from our first encounter when any Zombican-Americans are allowed to drive, and twice that span before they are allowed to shamble in public, exercise their freedom of groaning, or swallow the brain of their significant other. Do not let this discourage you: while their picket signs will be creative (expect either “GET A BRAIN, WE’RE IN PAIN!” or “NO I.D., DEAD ZOMBIE!”), their methods will not be. On behalf of humankind, I grant you permission to make any and all of these people among your first appetizers; the finger sandwiches here are to die for.

Originally, I’d started composing this plea as a means to get you, zombiekind, to at least reconsider the vendetta you seem to have against my undigested sisters and brothers. It turned out, however, to be merely a vessel, taking me to a vantage point where I can finally see your ideological position. I find myself agreeing with that principle to a more extreme and desperate degree every day and beg, with this piece of paper, that you please accomplish it soon.

E Plurbus Eatus,

Tomato Surprise

Night Of The Living Read: The Murder Of English Education In America

I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I don’t need statistics to tell you that, if the barometer’s worldwide, America’s test scores in reading are sharply nearing “abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Personally, I approach the declining nationwide levels of standardized test scores as something of a murder mystery. Convulsing on our collective living room floor is our generation’s enjoyment of reading, and we, or more precisely you and other English teachers, need to figure out why he’s bleeding all over the wonderfully retro shag carpet.  The first step, as with all good investigations, is to find the murder weapon.

I can already hear the frantic cries of “well, X-Box Live! Jersey Shore! Katy Perry! Paranormal Activity! Communism! Global warming! String theory! MICROWAVABLE POPCORN!”. Please, imaginary person, relax before I call the nice men in white coats.  All of these things, I’m sure, are strange and new to you, but to blame this gradual decline on these factors is akin to blaming Jews for the Black Death: it’s a convenient excuse, sure, and it probably helps the emotional sting that comes from being, I believe, the 37^th smartest country on our merry little globe, but you could sledge-hammer every PS3 and plasma TV in the nation and I doubt you’d see any substantial uptick*.

If technology-slash-media-slash-kids-these-days are taken off the blaming table, you’re left with a gaping absence of ideas in most circles. In my experience**, this explanation, the equivalent to treating a gunshot wound to the head with a band-aid and a free lollipop, is practically the only one I hear tossed around. That scares me. Certainly, the second-most-popular option is to blame teachers and their quasi-Satanic, puppy-kicking, nanny-state unions, which is so well-thought-out it was written on the back of the Titanic’s blueprints.  Which brings us to the third explanation: we’re doing it wrong. There’s some way that we’re teaching my generation about reading that has their inherent love of reading*** in a stranglehold. Good news, if you’re a teacher: it’s not you****.  Bad news, if you’re a teacher: you can do very little about it.

Because the problem, the real cut-no-corners, central problem here is a bureaucratic  one, and I mean to imply that descriptor all the way down, from federal governments to state governments to individual districts. Somewhere along the way, there was a fundamental shift in  our educational gears. At root, it’s built on a simple lie, which is this:

“Reading is a task.”

Let’s consider the gravity of that particular atom-bomb as it relates to you. If you’re a student, whether you’re primary, secondary, or collegiate, skip the next tangent, but if you’re a teacher, parent, taxpayer, or other person old enough to enjoy Meet The Press, I want you to pretend for the moment that you’re back in your high school English class. Reflect: how many books did you read in class that year? The verb in the proceeding sentence is “read”. Telling you that may seem stupid and condescending, but the word in question has become so mangled and muddy that we’ve lost what it actually means: as in our birds-and-bees example, to deeply understand, to be affected, to be imprinted upon by a foreign thought, to answer a query and be changed based on that answer.  To read is to change yourself.

Up until now, I’ve built an army of paragraphs to enforce and reinstate that miniscule six-word phrase, which given its relative crudeness seems like a waste. Going back to our time-traveling pantomime, however, new definition***** in hand, should be a sort of enlightenment. How many books did you read in high school? If your answer surprised you, don’t let it. You’ve fallen into the same bear trap as most of your fellow humans circa the modern era: the reading-as-process thinking. (RAP, from here on out).

Those questions you hated in high-school? All examples of pure, unfiltered RAP thinking. From the multiple-choice question of “What does Daisy’s green light symbolize” to the all-too-familiar drone of “Find five examples of simile in the poem”, RAP thinking presents reading, previously a necessary bodily function to maintain connection to yourself and the wider world, as a macabre dissection, as if once you chart  every simile in Infinite Jest, a grand door opens up in the fabric of the universe and shines upon you the ever-elusive Meaning or Author’s Intent. It distances the reader from the beating heart of the book. When you dissect a frog, even if you do it deftly, you’ve gone from an incredible machine to a pile of guts. Which holds your attention?

There’s two more subsequent questions to address, one of which is deserving of a whole other essay entirely. The first, of course, is “if RAP is so ineffective, why do we use it so frigging much?” The less jovial answer is that we have a tendency to be utter morons. On the other hand, at least we were provoked morons. Provoked by what, you ask? If you hear an ominous thunderclap over yonder, it must be time to profile our murderer: standardized testing******.

The three letters that spell doom for our inherent need of reading are not P-S-P, nor W-I-I. They are S, A, and T,  not to mention the regional equivalents across the nation.  While standardized testing itself only lasting a week or two on average, isn’t corrosive, the sacrificial rain-dance that hundreds of thousands of educators and their superiors enact around it has all the useful impacts of an earthquake. This earthquake lasts from the minute students begins school to the second they throw their caps into the air*******. That RAP thinking, that multiple-choice, get-the-answer form of finding meaning from text, can be traced directly through the murky lineage of the paper doorstops students and staff members are expected to readily embrace each year.

And so we go backward and backward, still slipping further down the mouth of the grave as we try to salvage our youth by plunging them down the monotonous rabbit hole even more, only then wondering in our barely-crackling minds what in the blazes that faint coughing sound could be, while the shovel remains untouched. Years later, perhaps, we’ll have a name for what we’ve been doing for as long as I’ve been around, and someone smarter than the sum of our dual generations will sigh as another name is added to the police blotter.

Or perhaps, like every good novel, we’ll work toward a twist ending. The coffin will creak, and the withered stalk of a hand, covered in the very splinters it has just sent flying across the knoll, will twitch. Oh, what to do when it does?

*(If you have any further objections, consider the fact that technology has become so ubiquitous that even the smartest and highest-performing students in any given classroom are likely to have at least one pinging box in their homes, if not several. A targeted discouragement of this, let’s be real, permanent social touchtone, if you’d even grant the leniency of it having any positive effect, would be so unpopular to enact as to be impossible.)

**(Which, not to brag or anything, consists of about a dozen teachers saying, point-blank to me, “We have a bunch of students who just don’t seem to care, just don’t connect it as well as yourself. What do we DO?”, and then staring at me the way my yellow lab does when he has no idea how to open my brother’s bedroom door.)

***(Think about this for a second, because it’s one of those things that’s so obvious we never do: from the second a baby pops out of the womb, across races, geographical boundaries, genders, they are actively hungry for stories. Why? Stories, even in this age of science and statistical reason, are how we explain things. Think of” the birds and the bees”. It’s a narrative; “when two people love each other…”. So, if we’ve always had it in us, what’s the stopper?)

****(Unless, of course, you yourself hate reading. While that’s a symptom of what we’re about to talk about, and not really your fault per se, it doesn’t help matters. An aversion to reading is synonymous with an abusive relationship in that the cycle between those terrible English classes/you/your children or students/their children or students and so on never quite ends.)

*****(More accurately, very old and long, long forgotten definition.)

******(To be clear here, I’m not assaulting the idea of standardized testing itself. It’s logical that a district would want to measure its progress on some tangible level. But reading comprehension is a quark sometimes: if observed alone, if studied, it ceases to exist. That’s not to say there’s no middle ground here; it’s the idolatry that the mass-test seems to have over how teachers teach that stumps everyone with surviving neurons. Case in point: most teachers have a corporeal, de facto book of everything that they need to teach all 150-plus of their students by the end of the year, listing every metronomic entry in excruciating detail as if it’s the Necronomicon. This is not “test-as-measure-of-progress”; it’s “test-as-giant-machete”, and our teaching staff, if they want to keep their jobs, are required to conform.)

*******(I know what the cynical among you are about to say, namely that this must all be sour grapes because I got a bad standardized test score and am thus out for bloodthirsty vengeance. I won’t try to convince you that you’re wrong, but I’ll say that people who get average-to-OK test scores and people who write multiple-page essays about reading comprehension in their free time seldom occupy the same neurological swimming pool.)

racattackforce asked: Where do you see yourself in 15 years?

OK, so it’s math time.

In fifteen years, if you drop the one, carry the two, divide by zero, I’ll be approximately really old. Like, my dad probably would want to be that age, but to me it seems like half a decade away from being embalmed. And this may sound weird, but when I AM that age, I don’t want to have a steady job.

To clarify, I want and will conceivably get a steady stream of income that comes from some form of writing, be it fiction or nonfiction. I just don’t want one avenue that I can do it in. I don’t want to be typecasted as the poet, or the scripter, or the reporter. I want to be dad, friend, son, brother, and after all that, I want to use my talent to bring awesome worlds into this one, and more importantly help others do the same.

Also, barring some sort of miraculous advancement in medicine, my dog will be dead. That will suck. I ought to talk about him more often.

The Re-Broadcast

Sorry I’m late. Too busy stabbing the tumbleweeds that have rolled across this blog. But, to business! For the next two hours (11:30-1:30 ET), I’ll be attempting to shock my system back into a bloggy mood by answering ANY QUESTIONS, accepting ANY CHALLENGES, or talking about ANY TOPIC that you submit into my ask box. I’d appreciate any reblogs/retweets/comments you could give, as I want a wide and varied amount of schuffs to tackle. Thanks, and off you go!