How often do you sometimes prefer exclusively using technology?

Survey results are pretty useless when the people designing the survey:

a) don’t understand how to word questions/statements to garner meaningful data from respondents, and

b) create rigid, multiple choice scales that aren’t related to the questions being asked or the statements being evaluated.

Profile of a Clayton County Board Member

You may want to read my Disclaimer before going any further. I’m about to rant.

Ok, so the AJC ran an article about a Clayton County School Board member named Trinia Garrett who allegedly downloaded some inappropriate stuff on her county-issued computer. As it turns out, this isn’t the first time Ms. Garrett has had legal troubles, and the Clayton County board itself is certainly no stranger to public humiliation, but it really wasn’t the allegation of porn-hoarding on school property that bothered me. It was Ms. Garrett’s atrocious grammar.

What if private companies were run like public schools?

I asked myself this question a while ago, and here are a few thoughts I found worth mentioning…

What if companies ran more like public schools, with teachers as managers and students as employees?

-Every company in America would be forced to employ everyone in the immediate area who is between the ages of 18 and 65.

-No interviews would be allowed, and all employees must be accepted, regardless of qualifications, willingness, or ability to do the assigned job.

-All employees must be held to – AND MEET – the same standards for job performance and competence. Any office that fails to reach this standard loses corporate funding and may fire all managers (while moving all employees to another office). In addition, this job performance standard would be increased every year until ALL employees are performing at 100% of the government-mandated “standard.”

-A company’s manager would oversee 6 or 7 shifts of about 30 in excess of 35 employees, each for an hour a day (the shift number and length may differ slightly among offices). After each shift, all employees would move on to completely different – and generally unrelated – job functions.

-All employees would be promoted to a more difficult set of job functions every year (or two), regardless of past performance or readiness.

-Family members of the employee would be allowed – and many times encouraged – to come to the office and tell managers how to better do their jobs, while simultaneously claiming that the managers’ evaluations of the employee’s job performance is incorrect.

-No employee could be fired, even in light of poor work performance, absenteeism, insubordination, theft of company property, or physical violence toward coworkers or managers.

-Instead of being fired, if an employee’s behavior is deemed inappropriate, the supervisor of the office may give that employee up to 10 days’ worth of vacation. During the employee’s vacation, all managers who oversee the employee must put together all missed work in advance (after all, that under-performing, insubordinate, violent worker still needs to reach the same performance and competency standard as everyone else).

-The government would regulate not only the rules of every company, but also the products being produced, how the products are marketed, how the products are packaged, and how many of each product must be produced (and to what quality) in order for the company to stay in business – all without knowing what products the company even manufactures.

Anyone else have anything to add?

A Civilized Discourse on Human Wind: Combating Rigor with Fart Humor

Story time, boys and girls…

So the Common Core standards are bearing down on the Georgia state Language Arts curriculum for next year, and one of the primary focuses (foci?) of the new standards is introducing more “rigor” in literary and informational texts. In student-speak, this means “more boring stuff that’s even harder to read.”

It’s difficult enough getting students to read the Gettysburg Address or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (especially the full-blown, all-SAT-words-included version), and it’s even more difficult, after reading, to get any serious discussion out of the students.

I attribute this difficulty to the fact that students just don’t care. Shocking revelation, I know, but student apathy is multiplied (and motivation is incrementally destroyed) when “rigor” is introduced. Students – especially my sixth graders – seem much more adept at discussing farts and underwear than diplomacy or canonical literature.

Then I had an epiphany. If only I could combine rigor and fart humor into one lesson! Then I’d have an engaging text that also forced students to wrestle with the rigor of the language.

Leave it to Benjamin Franklin to show me the way.

The Mick Jagger of the Age of Enlightenment

Let’s take a trip back in time…In the 1700s, the Royal Academy in Brussels, Belgium had established itself as a sort of authority on all things scientific and philosophical. Every year, the academy announced a question that would be asked to all the “learned” men in the world’s scientific and philosophical communities. Whoever came up with the most satisfactory answer to the question was most assuredly showered in all the praise and money and loose Colonial women that any prominent eighteenth century scientist or philosopher would deserve.

BUT…

Ben Franklin was none too impressed with the type of questions the academy asked, believing that there was no greater purpose – no real benefit – to the sort of floofy, metaphysical inquiries these “scientists” were asking. So in 1781, Franklin wrote a satirical letter to the Royal Academy in Brussels to vent his frustrations, and to offer an alternative question.

You can read the text of the letter here. Go ahead and read the first couple of paragraphs…I’ll wait.

Yes, he suggests asking the world’s greatest scientists how to make farts smell better. Do I really need to explain why my sixth graders were absolutely enthralled with this text?

After giving just a little background on the historical context, Franklin’s letter gave me a great opportunity to talk about basic reading strategies: predicting, summarizing, and questioning; but more importantly, I could look at the more critical strategies like clarifying (a lot), inferring, and evaluating. The rigor in the text demands that students break the text down to analyze and understand it, and the fact that it’s a sarcastic jab at the academy presents an opportunity to talk about satire and allusion.

Clearly the language is a barrier for many students, but I discovered that after the first couple of paragraphs – once the students figured out the main idea of the letter – the kids eagerly tried to decipher the text, hoping to uncover some humorous quip before their peers could. There were so many hands raised, so many voices quietly squealing in private delight – like being part of a hilarious inside joke. It was a really inspiring lesson to deliver. True, not everyone “got” the letter the first time around, and some still had trouble with the deeper analysis, but the willingness to try from all students was overwhelming. The motivation to understand the words on the page was more than I’d seen with any Shakespeare play. And remember, these are on-level sixth graders. I’d be really interested to see how this letter goes over with high school students.

Anyone want to risk talking about farts with an American Lit class? Seems like a great way to introduce the founding farters…err…fathers.

21st Century Literary Forms: Comment Spam

For a new blogger, it’s always exciting to receive “new comment” messages in your email or blog inbox, but it’s also a colossal letdown when you discover the comment is a rambling, strangely worded, generic message with a hyperlink to a website selling organic ferret shampoo or novelty earwax removers.

Sure it looks cute, but have you ever tried to bathe one?

Anyone with an Internet connection is familiar with spam and its various forms, but while many people see this practice as an underhanded attempt to optimize a company’s search engine ranking, I see it as a golden opportunity to analyze the literary art of comment spamming and offer some tips to help would-be spammers avoid constantly being relegated to the digital trash bin.

Let’s look at a typical spam comment – one that was actually posted on my blog just this week:

It’s very exiting to find this survivingenglish.wordpress.com site.
It was a helpful workout for me to find this webpage. It definitely stretches the limits with the mind when you detect very good advice and make an effort to interpret it correctly. I am going to look through this web site oftentimes on my PC. Thanks for sharing

(The spam portion of this comment was a link to a lighting website embedded in the “email” field of the commenter’s information)

First things first, good job using the correct contraction form of ‘it is’. That’s a common spam error, so plus one point; however, minus ten points for being ‘exited’ about finding my blog. I don’t know how one expresses ‘exitment’, but it sounds negative, like you’re leaving. If he were ‘excited’ about my blog instead, I may have kept his comment.

Next, the spammer includes my own site link in his comment. I guess this is supposed to lend credibility to his comment, since only people with a legitimate interest in my blog would know my blog URL…or something. Maybe he’s just making sure that I’m aware of my own blog address. Or perhaps he’s trying to help out my blog ranking. Since he’s shamelessly promoting his own site, maybe it’s a trade off to get me some coverage too. Thanks, guy.

The next sentence begins the descent into madness:

It was a helpful workout for me to find this webpage.

How exactly is finding a webpage a ‘workout’? Have we become so sedentary as a nation that clicking hyperlinks and typing keywords into text boxes are now physically straining activities?

Time for a few right-click reps. Need to keep these metacarpals in top condition.

And how is this any sort of a compliment? How is it supposed to add to my blog or remark in any way on its content? “Getting to your page was a helpful workout”? I’m glad you enjoyed your journey to my blog, but what does that have to do with anything? I mean, I understand that life is about the journey rather than the destination, but you don’t tour the Taj Mahal and then tell the guide that you really enjoyed the bus ride from the airport…and you definitely don’t tell him the bus ride was a ‘workout’.

Now, maybe the spammer meant that it was a helpful ‘mental’ workout to find my blog, but that just makes the situation sadder. It was mentally straining to find this site? Are you telling me that it tested the limits of your intelligence to locate a blog post about English education? The only way this task would be a mental workout is if you built your own home server out of a toaster oven, wrote the programming code to create your own Internet-based search engine – in Latin, and then designed and constructed a pair of fully functional robot hands to type the search terms into your computer.

And then we have this monstrosity:

It definitely stretches the limits with the mind when you detect very good advice and make an effort to interpret it correctly.

So the spammer was talking about a mental workout. Again, good job spelling ‘definitely’ correctly, but then he uses the wrong preposition – ‘with’ instead of ‘of’ – and loads the sentence with a bunch of unnecessary and ill-fitting adverbs, which make the phrase sound like a sixth grader translated it from a Chinese restaurant menu.

I already checked. Google Translator doesn't have an "Idiot to English" option.

I think I’ve gotten to the root of it, however. Basically, this sentence says “When you try to explain something that’s relevant to me, it blows my freaking mind.” Thanks, spam guy. When you actually write coherently, it blows MY freaking mind. Wait, I’ll put this into your terms:

It certainly befuddles the intelligence to me when your communicating is given in such a method as to be interpreted as not stupid.

Last, we have this gem:

I am going to look through this web site oftentimes on my PC.

This sentence is great because it reminds me of Fisher Stevens’ character from “Short Circuit” – inserting so much seemingly relevant information that it actually distorts the meaning of the sentence (and I hear it in a funny accent in my head).

More useless adverbs. The word ‘oftentimes’ is about as useful as the word ‘beforetimes’ or ‘aftertimes’, or really, putting the suffix ‘-times’ on ANY word that is ALREADY an adverb for a duration of time. The phrase “on my PC” is also useless. In fact, it’s a limiting factor, telling me that my blog isn’t worth checking out while he’s on his laptop, iPad, smartphone, or Internet connected Wii console.

Then he finishes up with “Thanks for sharing”. No, no…thank you.

How he could have rescued himself from the garbage.

Simplicity and a conversational tone…and less overt flattery. And stop trying to be so generic that it looks generic. Spam comments are the failed marketing equivalents of horoscopes. They try to apply to everyone, but we all know they’re a load of crap (except a startling number of people believe in horoscopes…sigh). Know your audience – the blogger.

Simple, direct, and subtly flattering is the way to go. I’ll even give you the PERFECT SPAM COMMENT. All you have to do is take the website you’re spamming and drop it into this comment:

“Hi, I work at www.organicweaselshampoo.com and I wanted to use this blog post as an example in a presentation about effective blogging strategies. Would you mind?”

Congratulations, you just spammed your way to more website hits than you’ll know what to do with.