Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving! I love that you get two days off, I love that the holiday is centered entirely on food and family, and I love that the combination of increased leisure time, food, and family seems to make people universally happy.

I still remember our Thanksgiving program from kindergarten. That would be back in November, 1983. Isn't that amazing? 26 years ago already. What I remember is my statement, "I'm thankful for my family and my dog." And I was! I remember feeling confident that I had included everything important in that statement: all the living, breathing beings that meant so much to me.

And I still feel that way, even though Josh, the dog mentioned, passed away nearly 20 years ago, and while since then I have had three siblings born, gained two great brothers-in-law, and now have two beautiful nephews. What would life be like without the unconditional love and support of families? Besides feeling protected and cherished, I can honestly say that they are my best friends and the people I most love to spend time with.

I am grateful for a job that I love. There are moments of intense frustration and times when I feel overworked and underappreciated (I admit I sometimes have to fight back my inner drama queen), but these are often reminders of how invested I am in my work. I feel privileged to work with students whose lives have so recently been turned upside down by moving to a new country and trying to navigate the perils of adolescence with the added stress of a new culture and language. These students are amazing for their resilience and survival skills, but also their gratitude and compassion.

Finally, I feel enormously blessed by my faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The joy I have felt in seeking to become more Christ-like, the refinement I have felt as I have tried to overcome my own faults, and the perspective I have been given on the meaning of life and the relative importance of what happens every day, have molded me and made me who I am.

On Plagiarism

I heart Malcolm Gladwell. He's not only extremely readable, he's also so original in the angle he takes on a story. I've been reading What the Dog Saw, a collection of his previous publications from The New Yorker. The book takes its title from an article begun as a study of Cesar Millan of "Dog Whisperer" fame; Gladwell realized somewhere in the writing process that writing about what the dog sees and experiences is invariably more interesting than a straightforward biographical piece. As he says himself in his introduction, "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head--even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be."

With that shining endorsement, here's a brilliant paragraph from "Something Borrowed," an article examining what we have culturally determined to constitute plagiarism:

"And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another--think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from The Silence of the Lambs. Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit."

Well said. I would add that, while I certainly understand the need to protect intellectual property to encourage innovation (as does Gladwell), I find the extreme reactions to plagiarism in our culture to be almost puritanical in the scope of their moral condemnation. In the academic world (where, admittedly, plagiarism is contextually more serious than in the example cited above), plagiarism is the highest crime, assuring that the perpetrator wears the equivalent of a large, red "P" for plagiarist. Considering how stringent we are in our definitions of plagiarism and how easy it might be for a scholar immersed in hundreds of articles, without perhaps the best sense of organization, to inadvertently borrow some information, this reaction seems extreme. Is plagiarism really the great evil we make it out to be?

Cate Blanchett at the Kennedy Center

Last night I saw Cate Blanchett as the lead in a traveling production of "A Street Car Named Desire" performed at the Kennedy Center. It was a breathtaking performance and an incredible production. Even after having seen Blanchett perform masterfully in variety of movie roles, I was amazed by the range of her performance, portraying the complex and tormented Blanche with power and abandon, yet never straying into melodrama. The experience was incredibly enjoyable as well, and worth the $68 tickets (front row of the balcony).

Now that I've made my attempt at a review, I feel the need to admit my extremely paltry experience with theater of any kind. In spite of my literary pretensions, I don't believe I have read more than two works by any playwright besides Shakespeare. I have seen even less live performances than I have read, and a significant portion of those were high school productions where I saw my little sisters perform. So as a conclusion to my remarks, I feel the need to quote Homer Simpson's reaction to viewing "Planet of the Apes: The Musical": "Ooh, I just love legitimate theater!"

More Funny Language Errors!

I made a language faux pas (pronounce it "fox paws" and make yourself laugh even more):
I wrote about how teaching perfectly was "illusive" due to the nature of data collection in education in my last post. Oops! I meant "elusive." Hey, I don't have an editor, okay?

In Her Own Words: A Student Tells About Immigration

Unedited student essay on the topic, "What are some reasons that people immigrate to the United States? You can use your own personal experiences in your writing." (When noting her tendency to run-on sentences and fragments, keep in mind that the student had interrupted schooling in her home country, as she alludes to).

"The people come to United States to find a good job because maybe in their country there are not works and the people can not buy food because each day is more expensive and they decide to come on here to work hard and send money for their families because with one day that they work here is how if worked one week in their country.

"Also, the people come to find a better education for their childrens, because in his country the children do not have a better education because his family do not have money to buy the books shoes or them uniform to go to school, and also they do not have money, to give them, to buy food in the school. And the childrens do not want to go to school. They want that his childrens are here. because this country is the country of the oportunities. For the immigrants to be someone in the life."

October 25, 2009--Great Falls

Lest I Should Become Too Arrogant

There's really little chance of that happening! I have a firm enough grip on reality--and enough of a sense of humor--to realize how weak I am in terms of self-discipline and how ridiculous I can be sometimes! However, just in case I should veer too far in the direction of self-promotion, I like to share stories celebrating my latest foibles.

Enough of an introduction: here's the story. I like to use a wide vocabulary, although I like to flatter myself that it isn't because of any pretension on my part but rather due to a taste for precision in language. So yesterday I had a verbal mishap (which actually isn't all that rare on my part, like the time I mixed "somnolent" and "soporific" to coin the new term "somnorific").

It's not really even a rare word, but I was using "incongruous" to describe something to friends the other day in the car. I pronounced it with the heaviest accent on the "u" (penultimate) syllable. My friend Jessi immediately answered, "I thought it was inCONgruous."

"Really?" I said neutrally. "I thought it was "incongrUous, but I could be wrong." The whole time, I felt pretty smug, certain that I was actually right, but taking the moral high ground and deciding not to insist on my correctness. "I'd love to look it up," I added, thinking, "so I could prove how right I really am."

"Well, Paul [her fiance in the front seat] has an iPhone. He can check."

He did, and passed the phone back to me. The first source listed "inCONGruous." I checked another one. "inCONgruous." A third source: "inCONgruous."

"Well, it looks like you're right," I said, grateful I had been so "gracious" in declining to insist on the way I thought it was pronounced.

Later that day I saw another friend, and asked, "How do you pronounce the word spelled 'I-N-C-O-N-G-R-U-O-U-S?"

"In CONgruous," she answered, without skipping a beat.

So that's what you get for relishing Bush-isms, Palin-isms, and any other malapropisms: an unwelcome reminder that, if you had the fame and the camera time, you could easily coin some "isms" of your own.