Raising the Next Generation of Trouble

I was in Staples last week, picking up a four-pack of Uniball pens I didn’t need because they were on sale for 99 cents. Eventually I will need a pen, or one of my descendants will. 

I was waiting, in no particular hurry, behind two women with a boy of about 5. There was some problem with the mother’s credit card. By the Cash Register is a little tree of Tootsie Pop-style lollipops, and the young gentleman wants one. “No” the mother says, but in a language that is incomprehensible to the boy, though clear enough to all adults. As mother swaps out a different card the boy plucks a pop from the tree and slips behind Mom, giving me one of those “I could spew pea-soup if I wanted to” looks.

The sucker is still wrapped, but the boy is licking it lovingly, wetly. The mother sees this, tells the lad she had told him “no” and returns the lollipop to the tree. I have never yet done my lollipop shopping in Staples and I am confident now that I never will. While the mother tries to get a pen working on the credit slip, the boy plucks the lollipop again and applies tongue. 

Now there’s some difficulty requiring a manager, and the mother with a little more heat tells the boy that he doesn’t deserve the lollipop given some previous misadventures at Wal*Mart. “But I want it” is the extent of his argument, but it’s evidently persuasive. The lollipop returns to the tree, the sales is finalized, the child whines, and from out of nowhere swoops in Mother’s friend, who I think of as the aunt. She plucks the wetly wrapped lollipop and another one off the display and plops two one dollar bills on the counter.

“Two!?” says Mom as the aunt hands them to the young gent and they leave the store. Now all done rather discreetly: no fits or tears or violence. But is this why, every semester, I find myself warning students that some error or behavior or plagiarist activity will produce a failing grade and they some weeks later react with astonishment when it does?

 

Working at the Composition Collision Shop

In downtown Paragraph City, with sky scrapers soaring high enough around it to cast the shop in shadows for most of the day, stands the ancient Strunk’s Service Station. He and his pal Ebenezer Whitey hire high school kids and put them in snappy uniforms with their first names over the station’s crest on the chest pocket. They run out with spray bottles and shop towels to clean your glasses and check the dipstick on your inspriration the moment you pull in by the two old pumps with Pegasus on the tops and hoses with clear plastic filters and colored marbles that dance as the kids pump whatever it is they pump into your tank.

But pumping petrol is just a sideline here, like the Briar’s Birch Beer and Vernor’s Ginger Ale and Kutztown Cream Soda in the chest cooler where the glass bottles are suspended in ice water, and after you thumb in your quarter, you take the bottle you want by the crimped metal cap and work it along the rails to the corner where you can lift it out dripping wet and cold. No, the real work is revealed in the service station’s sub-title: “or Composition Collision and Towing.” Three fire engine red wreckers are parked by the rusy iron railing along the River Mnemosyne that flows through Paragraph City.  On the wreckers’ doors it reads, “to reign by due praise or to seize for vain rights.”

I asked old Whitey about the company slogan one day when I was getting a tune-up on an old scrap of Drivel I drove around one summer.  He grinned and told me it was a mnemoic for calling the shop. “You can’t reach us on a cellphone or land line,” he said. “To reach us, use a homophone.”

Some days, the writing teacher can’t find a single running idea all day, for the mechanical mayhem the students have wrought. Or written.

 

Thanks to Marilyn vos Savant and a 14 May 2006 “Ask Marilyn” column for the homophone phrase.

Driving a Thesis

In the future, a student in Paragraph City who needs to write an essay will take the Tube to the second sub-level of Locution Towers and for 25 rubles lease a 2024 Thesis. She will get behind the wheel, stroke the biometric ignition and engage in a complex set of Q & A until she arrives at her prime assertion. Next a Garmin mind map will guide her in locating supporting evidence for her assertion before the Thesis roars off on its verbal highway toward a conclusion, jettisoning as it does any words which could possibly be seen as having racial, sexual, gender, political or spiritual overtones.

Now the only good part of this fantasy is that our student would begin with a thesis, and for some of my folk, purchasing a thesis might be the only way to get their hands on one. The main obstacles seems to be the distinction between a topic and a thesis. Locating the thesis in Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space” or Amy Tan’s ”Mother Tongue” or Orwell’s ”Politics and the English Language”: they can do that. Build an essay around a thesis: well, maybe not.

Here’s the essay that so many of my students want to write, and it’s a glutenous, plastic form I see over and over again, one I suspect succeeded brilliantly for many in some adolescent Eden when naming a topic was an adequate replacement for thinking about an idea:

1. Begin with a global statement so obvious that four year olds say “duh!” “The world is filled with people, many of whom desire happiness in which to live.” Stating it awkwardly is not part of the formula, but is a frequent characteristic since the writer doesn’t care what he’s saying. He’s merely looking for a way to reach the last sentence of the first paragraph.
2. Meander around for two or three more sentences, being careful to never touch on the true topic of the essay but showing how all things are connected. “People may look for happiness in religion, in movies, in horticulture and in a loving relationship with a significant other. Some people may search for happiness unsuccessfully for years in which they live unhappy.”
3. Arrive at your topic in the last sentence of the introductory paragraph, a relatively brief and simple statement which, by its contrast with its context, is so blessedly clear that readers will mistake it for an actual idea. It is required to have at least one incomprehensible pronoun. “This happens to puppies when they are abused.”
4. Finish the introduction by giving the essay a title which is a single dramatic word so vague no one can guess what the essay is about : “Devastation!” 
5. The rest of the essay writes itself, each paragraph a description of a puppy the writer has known. The conclusion is the challenging part since the writer has to say exactly what he said in the introduction but with mostly different words. This is what makes writing so hard.

 Lately I have been abandoning the mossy “thesis” for terms that may have more meaning to students. “Main idea” is inadequate, since it is far too much like “topic” and since students already “know” by rote that thesis = main idea = topic = abused puppies are sad. “Claim” is a great word, and one which is gaining momentum in the rhetorics and handbooks I come across. However students often seem to think a claim is something false.

“Gatekeeper idea” was a phrase I used for a few semesters, thinking that the image of a concept that allowed material into the essay if it offered support but denied extraneous material admittance would communicate to my students. Mostly it didn’t.  I currently like “assertion” though it’s a bit far from student vernacular. I’m open to suggestions, though I do realize that concentrating on the label is just a way to fool myself into thinking I’m actually working on the problem when I’m actually wool gathering.

The real work has to be this: to stimulate students to think, to find or force an idea they want to say to the surface, to reject the facile observation and the stereotype and the easy excuse that they aren’t that bright, to have them seriously look at what they write, and to pay off thoughtful content with a thoughtful response.