Where are teachers focusing their limited time? Here's a guess: NOT on writing.

This is the time of year when I find myself judging all sorts of individual writing and design contests from across the country. I also have six Florida papers to critique in the next month. Sometimes I get paid. Never do I get paid enough.

But here's what I am reminded of, over and over: writing is hard. Organizing is hard. Finding a clear thesis to build around is hard. And even right-clicking on an incorrectly spelled word is hard.

I have a bit of "Grammar Nazi" in me, I know, and I have tried to stifle the urge to point out the constant barrage of clear typos and meandering sentences and careless repetition that come at me in a torrent. I am not being paid to proofread.

And yet. Lack of precision in things as mundane as spelling (which shouldn't happen often when we are using a computer these days) tends to reflect a lack of precision in thinking... and THAT is something I am paid (well, many times I am just volunteering) to pay attention to.

One of the categories I just judged today was on sports writing. Students were given a fictional situation where an undefeated football team from a 6A school was thoroughly beaten by a 4A team with a 2-4 record, 45-7. So it was the team's first loss. The game featured a fundraiser for the daughter of the bigger school's principal, who is suffering from leukemia. I won't pile on the details but the bottom line is that a reporter could highlight ONE of those two things in a single game story. Well, that's my thought.

I anticipated seeing something like, "The East Something game is one the team will try to forget, being thrashed by Kenerski HS 45-7 and being shut out for the final three quarters by a team that had only two wins this season. But the sense of community and caring in the stands, united in orange and raising nearly $6,000 for Alexa Person, age 11, as she battles leukemia, will stick in the memory for a long time."

I know. This could use some work to tighten it and avoid that quite complex second sentence, but you get the idea. Suffice it to say that none of the entries came even close to my quick sample lead.

I often say that sports writing is hardly ever about scores or even extraordinary performances. Sports reveal character and provide challenges for characters to confront and overcome... or fall short against. Either way, sports are all about what it means to be human and to measure ourselves against others, against fate, against the elements... among so many other possibilities.

My sense was that the students had been taught some basic template for their reporting. Many of them began with something like, "On Friday, Oct. 12, 2022, such and such happened." The date is rarely important, but the WHAT and the WHY usually are important. We should start with one of those.

That start is what provides energy for the entire report to follow. Or a dull, lifeless start fails to give the report enough energy to engage readers who aren't being paid to judge a contest (or teachers who are paid so handsomely to respond to student work). 

Occasionally I wonder if a cruel but effective strategy might be to stop reading a story as soon as it features a typo or factual error or illogical conclusion or lack of support... all the things we repeat endlessly to our young charges. 

Then we would require the writer to resubmit the story with changes or corrections or added information, and repeat the process: read until we encounter the next error. Send it back. Repeat the drafting process. 

Most of what I read today would have led to me stopping before I could get to the second graf. 

I have no scientific evidence to prove that student writing and thinking skills are diminished compared to, say 20 years ago.

I just know it's true.

A couple reminders this week of how we are in need of better leadership

Imagine a church that is celebrating its 40 anniversary in March but does not want anyone on the ad hoc leadership team for the event (like me) to reach out to past clergy to invite them to attend (and perhaps hang out during the reception). The current clergy, in collaboration with other past clergy and current church leaders, saying it's all hush-hush and confidential and that it's no one's business to know what the problems are/were... and to just, well, not even send an informal email to people who used to spend untold hours working with church members, leading services, attending endless meetings (and no entity has more meetings than a church).

No need to imagine that, it turns out, because that's the deal with the St. Luke's 40 anniversary celebration... clearly, one of the quietest celebrations that can be imagined. But, like a good soldier, I will keep my head down and do may little bit (emceeing the one-hour ceremony). 

Also clearly: my understanding of "all are welcome here," repeated endlessly, is too literal.

Now imagine a school yearbook that receives a senior portrait that depicts the soon-to-be-graduate posing with a gun -- he's an avid hunter and, well, doggone it, that gun deserves to be part of the yearbook. 

The student editors (and this is in the state law of Colorado) are responsible to all news, opinion and advertising content in the book... and the slippery school district attorney argues that senior portraits are none of those things... and therefore the school administration can force the yearbook staff to include that photo. 

Sometimes it's tough to defend lawyers as they feverishly devise strategies to get clients what they want. But the truth is that if the school had a policy that made clear what can be included in senior portraits, perhaps the whole brouhaha could be avoided. The school media program does not have such a policy, unsurprisingly.

I was asked to carefully explain the Colorado student free expression statute this week and ended up wondering why the Eaton HS principal and superintendent were so hell bent on seeing that portrait included in the 2023 book. 

In the age of almost weekly school shootings, you might think that the "powers that be" would limit including weapons in a yearbook, and tacitly accepting them as such a key part of a kid's life that his love affair with guns must live forever in Eaton history.

My question was if that kid were welcome to bring his shotgun to graduation... or perhaps to class, as a sort of talisman to idly rub and fondle during a stressful math test. Just a guess here, but I would predict the gun would not be welcome on campus... just in the yearbook.

I would point out that the list of potential props that would have to be allowed in future Eaton yearbooks could be endless. One kid loves his Nintendo Switch and must be pictured holding it. Another loves playing baseball and wants to pose like a batter on a baseball card. Yet another yearns to be an artist's model and provides the book with a tasteful nude portrait -- no nipples or genitals, please. 

But part of my week has been spent thinking about a relatively small church trying to ward off history and reality and avoid offending anyone... and a school district that values the political statement that including a gun in a routine senior portrait can make... for at least two adults who are purportedly dedicated to providing the very best education they can to the fine children of Eaton, Colorado.

I'm not paragon of virtue, but I try my best to avoid outright hypocrisy. It seems like the least any of us can do in this life. 

I am clearly naive.

Time to rewatch 'Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'

I have to admit to some surprise that the U.S. military is now shooting down objects that stray (or are intentionally sent) into our airspace. First it was the rogue balloon that may or may not have been gathering military intelligence for the Chinese... but probably was. Today a second "object" was shot down off the coast of Alaska.

This second object was not a gigantic balloon, but was "only" 40,000 feet up and our rationale for shooting it down was that it might cause a safety threat to civilian aircraft. After all, there are so many planes flying that high at that latitude (ha!). 

I would guess that President Biden was uninterested in taking more heat from the Angry White People Party by allowing another object to "threaten" our sovereign airspace. The Chinese balloon passed across the entire width of the country a few days ago, before we shot it down so the debris would land in the ocean. 

So there was little hesitation before the order to fire.

I read today that North Korea may have enough ICBM missiles to overwhelm our west coast air defenses, should they choose to fire them all at once, and should they actually have built missiles that can survive reentry into the atmosphere. That is scary, and we know so little about North Korean leaders and their motivation that even the threat of complete annihilation of their country in retaliation may not be enough to deter them.

It seems more scary to South Koreans and Japanese governments and citizens, I assume, since they are so much closer. 

On a more positive note, the threat of Putin and the Russian military using tactical nukes, or any other kind of nuclear weapons, seems to have faded a bit. After all, it's been almost a year since the disastrous (for all) Russian invasion of Ukraine and an unrelenting series of embarrassments for the Russian military... but the nukes were never launched.

Russia appears to be going for the old-fashioned "throw half a million troops at the enemy" approach, though their renewed offensive has not yet begun, and maybe won't ever. But would you bet on Putin backing down? 

I am old enough to remember (dimly) having atomic attack drills at Roosevelt Elementary in Iowa City. It is often a joke these days, but we really were instructed to sit under our second-grade desks for five minutes during those drills. We had to be quiet, probably to attract less attention from the bombs as they would fall all around us. The theory, I guess, was that if we could just avoid being hit by the fallout itself as it fell to the ground, we would be fine. 

Ah, those were the good old days.

Nuclear Armageddon might be closer than ever, or at least since the Cuban missile crisis, but what's a guy supposed to do? In the end, aren't we all betting that opposing militaries will not make the fatal misstep and that our military has defensive weapons we can count on? We don't know, of course, but we need to believe those things.

There are much more immediate threats all around us to worry about. Last week, the feds arrested a couple rabid right wingers who had serious plans to bring total chaos to Baltimore by taking out electrical substations with various "legal" weapons. Evidently, this is not only possible but smart money would have to be on these sorts of attacks coming to an electrical substation near you and me soon. 

If you need me, I'll be in my bunker.

I won't miss January

April may be the "cruelest month," but January has to be the longest and maybe a close second in terms of nastiness. April is cruel partially due to the fickle nature of the weather, but January is mostly just bad weather of various types... with spring seeming so far off and ephemeral that it is dangerous to think about better weather (fearing we might jinx it all).

Politics is certainly full of cruelty, much of it without any particular point. McCarthy pretends to have some power as Speaker of the House by tossing some political opponents off committees, prompting anger and hurt or the joy of vengeance, depending on your POV. But not much will be happening in any House committees due to the general dysfunction of the Republican majority plus the dysfunction of the nation more widely.

Black men are routinely murdered by police officers, but also by their neighbors. And there are lots of innocent bystanders taking bullets, as well. Asian-Americans are slaughtered by angry older Asian men, robbing those massacres of even a sense that one racial group is targeting another. That means we can't make any sense of the deaths... though we all know, deep down, that it's about the nearly 400 million guns in this country of 335 million. 

Thoughts and prayers, of course.

Teachers and students have always been attacked by people with axes to grind, but the level of hate and ignorance has risen to alarming levels. There is outrage on all sides surrounding the AP course on African-American history that was rejected by Florida, mostly to play to the basest members of the Republican Party. College Board caved, say many progressives, and maybe it did.

But have we forgotten that the College Board is not in the business of education? It's in the business of selling tests. Americans aren't really sure what the heck the role of ACT and College Board might be... but assume that the education establishment supports those college-prep institutions. They aren't evil. They just aren't directly educating anyone.

College Board wants its products to sell. College Board has to listen to the customers. It's just capitalism.

American children continue to go hungry at alarming rates. Nearly 500 people a day die from Covid, but the pandemic is over. Undocumented migrants are bussed to big cities and just dropped there. As a nation, we just shrug. Cruelty is as American as apple pie.

TikTok needs to be banned because, well, China. Russian continues to murder with impunity. Does anyone remember Syria? The Taliban suppress half the Afghanistan population. 

Maybe we should just get over it: the world is a cruel place, and always has been.

And January seems to be the longest month, as well as the coldest and most brutal.

It's over, thank goodness. 

Baseball spring training is just a few weeks away, which reminds me of the cruelty of being a Rockies fan. But that's another story for another day.