Writing Online

I write. I have for as long as I can remember.

I understand there's a correlation between hypergraphia and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). I have TLE, but it is controlled (I haven't had a seizure in 15 or 16 years); and I think I love to write before I had my first seizure at 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky is supposed to have had hypergraphia, so that's not bad company to be in. But I don't think my own drive to write can be described as "an overwhelming urge." I just like to write...

The Internet provides a lot of opportunities to write. Some of them pay money. Years ago I wrote for Suite 101 about Appalachia. I think they paid me something like $15 a month for a minimum of two articles each month. I later wrote for the Suite about special education issues on a couple of occasions and every once in a while I get a few dollars from them in my paypal account for stuff that's still online.

In 1999 I went to work for About Dot Com. About was more intensive. They paid a minimum that changed from time to time. But the goal was to attract enough traffic to be paid "by the hit," or visitor. I spent eight years with About - first as the "guide for Southeast Asia for Visitors (part of their Travel Channel) and later covering the continent of Asia as a whole - Turkey to Indonesia, Tokyo to Tel Aviv. About had a payment model that included growth incentives after the New York Times Company bought them in 2004 (I think, maybe 2005). I made $7,000 or $8,000 as a minimum per year writing from my living room in my spare time for them. There were years when I made closer to $12K and a particular year when I made $20K.



The trouble About Dot Com was keeping up. In 1999 the goal was to present other people's content, to point readers to things we'd found online and "pre-surfed" for them. Over time the emphasis changed to creating our own content. Then links away from our sites began to be discouraged. In 1999 we had to FTP our files after we'd written the HTML (the computer language that makes pages look the way they do on the Internet) ourselves. Over the years About developed tools (kind of like forms) that we used instead. Then the tools would change and some content would have to be reworked, reformatted. A great deal of time got spent changing stuff we'd already written just to keep in looking right - oh, and learning to use new tools. Then came the image gallery tool and the emphasis on pictures. This year the focus began to shift to video formats. The New York Times Company doesn't want you to have to read as much, so maybe video will take over in the future. (What's a hypergraphic to do?) My relationship with About came to an end a few weeks ago after eight year (which is, like, 56 years in Internet time). I outlived a huge number of people there. It's been something of a relief...

At the moment I write for Creative Weblogging. Their page on venture capital investment in China is a fun gig and pays okay - about $6 a blog post for me. The potential is there to make a couple of thousand a year. China Venture News is the site...

Not so profitable is Helium. I have seven articles online at Helium. All of them are technical articles about education. I've made seven cents at Helium in the eight days they've had my stuff. When you've earned $25 they pay out to your Paypal account. So at the current rate I'll get my first check in 2014. One downside: they ask for all rights forever to anything you submit. That might be okay for technical articles (I can always right something else about 504 Plans or Down syndrome); but for creative work it sucks.

Of course, if you just want to see your name on the Internet, there are plenty of sites on politics and the like where you can post comments. Raising Kaine is an example of one here I've posted recently.

I'll probably fid other opportunities to write online. And this isn't an exhaustive list of stuff I've done. But you get the idea...

The Tomatoes Are Out

The tomatoes are out. I put them out today - 14 this year. That's not as many plants as last year but it will probably do for us.

I know what you're thinking if you don't live around here: "You waited until May 20th to put your tomatoes out?" Well, it was 33°F here Friday morning. We've had frost as late as May 31st at our house. I almost put them out last weekend. Maybe they would have lived through the cold...

I was pleased this year to find an heirloom tomato called "yellow pear" on sale locally. I put some out a couple of years ago and they were great - nice taste, and the plant produced quarts and quarts of the little thumb-sized things. They have a nice taste and they dress a baby spinach salad up very nicely. I put out two plants.

I put our three Mr. Stripey tomato plants. Mr. Stripeys are irregular in shape and two-toned. They grow to be fairly large and look beautiful sliced on a plate. But last year they all blighted and I'm not sure we ate a single one of them. Maybe we'll have better luck this year. I put out three plants.

Of course I put out some Early Girl plants as well. Early Girl tomatoes turn very red and come to maturity in about 60 days. We'll probably be eating a few of them by mid-July. I have three of them.

What's left? Three Lemon Boy plants (yeller tomatoes taste the best), a Pink Beefsteak, and two Big Boy hybrids.

Here's wishing for a good growing year and the first frost of Fall to hold off until late October of November...

Abbey's Birthday

When Abbey was young she was inquisitive. We lived in Canberra, Australia, for almost four years; and because my epilepsy prevented me from getting a driver's license back then, we went many places on a bicycle together. I peddled while she sat in the kiddy seat and asked questions. Question after question after question...

Daddy, why is the sky blue?

I know there's some answer to that - something about how molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. That's a lot to say when you're peddling up hill with a forty pound passenger on your bike.

It's just that way, sweetie.

Well, why doesn't it rain more here?

Because most of Australia is desert and the air here is pretty dry...

I worked to suck more air in so that I could talk while I peddled.

Well then why doesn't it rain less?

I'm sure there had to be some good reason for that, too.

Well, uh...

Does powdered milk come from powdered cows?

I was still working on "rain less" in my head.

Not quite, I said. We’d had a lot of powdered milk when we'd lived in the Pacific and the girls used to wrinkle their noses up and ask if it was "real" milk. I'd tell them it certainly wasn't imaginary...

Is all grass the same color green?

I knew the answer to this one and I liked "yes" or "no" questions when I was the one peddling.

No, I said. Grass comes in lots of different shades of green.

She was quiet for a moment, like she was considering the implications of that botanical fact. I waited for a follow up question. At the age of four Abbey was a pretty sharp child, probably because she was so inquisitive...

Why can't I go to school yet?

Hmmm. No follow up.

Hannah goes to school. Why can't I go to school?

Your sister is older than you, I said. You get to go to school with her next year.

We arrived at our destination. The Youth With A Mission facility in Canberra, where I worked, had a large courtyard; there were other kids Abbey's age whose parents were there for short term training of some kind or other. I unbuckled her from the bicycle seat and she ran off with one of them to play...

---

It seems like such a long time ago. Abbey's not a little girl anymore. She still asks simple-but-hard questions and often doesn't like the answers she gets.

On May 20th this week Abbey turns 20. If you read this, Abbey, happy birthday. Cheryl and I love you...

My Favorite Isogloss

I love languages. Linguistics, the study of how language works (not some particular language but all language) is one of my favorite topics.

I don't know when it started. In high school I took Latin and German (my father was stationed in Germany in the Army and we lived in Stuttgart). In college I dabbled in New Testament-era Greek. In grad school I took a year of Malay and did linguistic work with native speakers of Lugandan (an African langauge) and Finnish. And in my travels I've learned a few words of Thai, Chamorro, Chinese, Korean, French, Japanese, Tamil, Italian, Hawaiian, Tagalog, Ponepean, Russian, Arabic, and... You get the idea.

An isogloss is a geographic area that is characterized by some linguistic feature. The feature could be phonetic - like the area of the U.S. Atlantic seaboard where local people pronounce the name on one of the states as "nu joy-zee." But my favorite isoglosses have to do with vocabulary - with the words we use.

There's a line my wife and I drive across pretty regularly and when we drive across that line we leave one isogloss and cross into another. It's in West Virginia on US Rt 19. Going north, after you leave Fayetteville, you pass Smales Branch. It's the last "branch" you see. Then shortly after you leave Summersville you come to Spruce Run, and then Bear Run.

As a boy growing up I knew what a "branch" was in reference to a flowing body of water. Springs come out of the ground and, flowing away from their source turn into branches, which then grow to be creeks and eventually are promoted to rivers. We didn't have runs where I grew up. One effect of that was that I always wondered about the name of that great Civil War battle, Bull Run. I could picture the Confederates in gray and the Union boys in blue - and the bulls, running. I figured they probably interfered a lot with the battle. It's hard to concentrate on shooting when you know a bull might step on you at any time.

We've made the drive from the Bluefield, Va. area to the panhandle of Maryland many times. When I first commented on that line we crossed, my sweet wife thought that it was funny (as in puzzling or peculiar) that I thought the line was interesting. She grew up where there were runs and knew that at Bull Run all the soldiers had to cope with was a trickle of water, not bulls.

Oh well, for now at least: my favorite isogloss is that line that seems to divide people's vocabulary regarding flowing water into runs or branches...

Comes the test...

Tomorrow my school system starts the test. You know. The high stakes test. The one to see whether or not we're a good school, or whether the parents deserve to be able to send their kids someplace else.

In my state, West Virginia, the test is called the WESTEST. It's untimed. Tomorrow we'll test reading. The test will start at 9:00 am (or there abouts) and most of the kids will be finished by lunch. I believe we will test Math on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday are social studies and science.

I could tell you more of the details of testing, but I figure you'd stop reading this if I did. It doesn't really matter, those details. The bottom line is that we have to make a certain score (at least in Math and Reading) in order to be seen as having made adequate yearly progress. A certain percentage of our kids have to display mastery of the subjects tested, or we're a "bad" school. Mastery is like a low "B" and the students could score in categories above mastery on the test.

At the moment the percentage of students that have to score mastery on the test is probably reasonable for our school. Next year it will be higher. Eventually (2014), every child will have to score mastery on each of the tests. That, of course, is ludicrous considering that No Child Left Behind says it doesn't matter that they child may

• have a learning disability
  
• not speak English fluently
  
• have an IQ of 62
  
• have recently moved to the school from somewhere else
  

I would never argue that accountability is wrong. The primary purpose of schools is to teach. But I've said elsewhere that it certainly isn't the only purpose.

I also agree that we need to look not just at aggregate data for a school, but at disaggregate data. It protects minorities and shows weaknesses in the process of education.

I have no problem with the test itself. My problem with the test is with the use of the test. The test is being used to eventually show that the concept of public education is flawed. The Bush Republicans want to privatize education - or at least justify the creation of a large scale private alternative to public education. And they want it to be church-based and paid for with vouchers. They are willing to use the disabled and minorities to accomplish their goal.

In two different states I've dealt with and taught children with educational disabilities from kindergarten to high school. Children have value and their disabilities make them no less valuable. Good teaching brings increases with it in the level of skills and knowledge those children have. But the expectations placed on them that they will all perform as though they have no disability is unreasonable - purposefully unreasonable. The purpose of the unreasonableness is for those behind the Bush agenda to eventually be able to say 'most public schools are bad schools and we need an alternative."

Someone recently said to me, "This is what the school year is all about." I held my tongue, but in my head I yell:

"Bull Hockey!"

This test is not what the school year is about. The school year has been about trying to light a fire. William Butler Yeats was right when he said “Education is not filling a pail, but the lighting of a fire." And George Bush's approach to education is that of the water boy...

Mother's Day (The Lunchbox)

I suppose I was nine or ten years old. And it seems silly now...

Growing up in Augusta, Ga., in the early days of desegregation I went to three or four different elementary schools. Every year or so the schools were rezoned to create more of a racial balance. Sometime it was close enough that I walked to school; sometimes I walked to and from a bus stop each day to get to school and back home.

I never was big on school lunch. I carried a metal lunch box to school with me. And everyday on the way home I would hunt for a gift for my mother to put in the lunchbox - a live lizard.

It was probably cruel (both to her and the lizard). I never remember anything that led me to believe that my mom liked lizards. (I'm pretty sure she didn't.) But lizards abounded in our part of Georgia and it became a routine. Sometimes it was a Green Anole (Anolis carolinensis) with a big neck fan. I liked the Five-lined Skink (Eumeces fasciatus) because its blue tail was pretty (I thought). Six-Lined Racerunner (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus) were common in the lunchbox. And there were always a few Ground Skinks (Scincella lateralis) around if I couldn't catch anything else.

In retrospect the lizards may not have been a great idea. Mom had had open heart surgery in 1968, a year or two earlier. But I never really understood then that her health was fragile. She'd always be there. How could it be different?

I'd come in from school. "I'm home!"

She'd be in the kitchen. I'd take my lunchbox in and sit it on the counter. I'd sit down at the kitchen table. She'd look at me.

"There's not anything in your lunchbox today, is there?" she'd ask.

"No," I'd say. Then I'd giggle like a girl and sit there and wait.

Eventually she'd open the lunchbox. The scared, confused skink would jump out and run around the kitchen. Mom would let out some audible startle response. I'd laugh; then I'd save her by chasing down that day's reptile and taking it outside. Day after day...

Somehow she still loved me.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom...

Silly Season - The Game of Professional Musical Chairs

Silly Season has started. And for the past decade, as I've watched this time of year when teaching positions in my county change hands I've compared it to a large game of musical chairs.

In West Virginia, county school districts "post" jobs and teachers "bid" on those jobs. Usually the postings are made available on the county school system's website. Often there is a phone line where you can call and listen to the postings being read. And the postings are faxed out to individual school where they are supposed to be, well, posted on a bulletin board for all staff to see.

This week in my county, eight pages of postings came out. Three pages list teaching jobs that are available for bid. Another couple of pages list coaching positions for next year. A job description or two is attached, I think. And there are paraprofessional job postings for secretarial, custodial, and aide positions.

Postings specify a level of certification the position requires. Employees who want an available position fill out a two-page bid sheet and send it to the central office. Bid sheets are correlated there by position and compared for certification and seniority. If seven teachers bid on a job and one doesn't have the minimum qualifications, the six qualified teachers have their bids compared for seniority and the most senior teacher gets the vacant position. If a teacher is interested in more than one position they can turn in several bid sheets and rank them in order of preference.

How is that musical chairs?

1. A teacher we'll call Teacher One at a school we'll call School A is tired of teaching first graders and doesn't really get along with the principal there. He or She turns in bid sheets on a few jobs and gets one. Now their position is vacant.
   
2. In a few weeks jobs are posted again. Teacher Two gets the first grade position at School A; Teacher One is at School B now and sits out this round; and now there is a vacancy at School C (where Teacher Two used to work).
   
3. Jobs are posted again and it is now summer. Teacher Seven gets the job at School C. She bid on that job because it is a shorter drive from where she lives and her life has changed recently to make that more important to her after five years at School F. Her old job at School F is vacant now.
   
4. Teacher One finds out that there is a job at School F. Who would have dreamed? School F is small and has very little turn over in staff. She submits a bid sheet and, because of her seniority, moves a second time during Silly Season. Now the job at School B is vacant again.

And it goes on and on. Teachers with a year or two of seniority bid on everything, eventually get jobs they don't really want, and bid on better jobs as those become available. Sometimes they get the better job.

Does the system work? That depends. If principals do their job and evaluate poor teachers out of the system, then the annual game of music chairs just serves to allow teachers the freedom to find teaching positions they enjoy more. If principals don't do their jobs in the area of teacher evaluations, the annual game of musical chairs allows a handful of poor quality teachers to move from position to position and start over with a clean professional slate at a new school.

The irony is that Teacher One may occasionally end up back at School A - teaching first grade again next year...

Black Wednesday

Tomorrow is Wednesday. I'll have to iron a black shirt. And a black pair of pants. And perhaps polish my black boots a little. Because on Wednesdays I wear black...

It's been that way for 132 weeks. On November 2, 2004 I worked as a poll worker for Tazewell County, Virginia, at the Springville polling place. I think I worked about 17 hours that day. I came home and went to bed. And when I got up the next morning it took me about seven or eight minutes to figure out the George Walker Bush was still president. I wore black to work that day. And for 130 of the 132 Wednesdays since the election I've worn black whenever I left the house.

The two exceptions? The day after Democrat Tim Kaine won the governor's race in Virginia I wore more festive colors to work. (Since I work in West Virginia, half my co-workers never fully understood why.) I also dressed quite colorfully on the Wednesday after the most recent midterm election - the one where Democrats won back Congress.

When is the next opportunity for a colorful Wednesday? At some point in 2008 I expect No Child Left Behind to face reauthorization. I'd like to see the Highly Qualified Teachers provision and the accountability provisions of the law revised considerably. I'd also like to see the name changed; NCLB is leaving children behind in droves.

If the law governing public education in America is revised substantially I may well dye my hair some strange shade and wear a green shirt and purple tie to work the next day...

Talking Back to the Village Idiot?

I occasionally write letters to the editor. Often my letters are in response to someone else's letter. Someone writes in and misrepresents some data, skews the truth on some issue or topic I hold dear. I feel compelled to correct their misinformation, to point out the inaccuracy. The problem I often encounter is that if I don't respond, those who read that first letter believe it. But if I do respond, some people think I'm as dense as the first person.

So the question becomes, how do you know when you're just talking back to the village idiot? (And is that really something you want to do?)

It's not always easy to decide...

Temptations of a True Redneck?

Am I a redneck? Or a hillbilly? Or country boy? I have a small identity crisis, I suppose, when I consider the issue.

I live in a rural portion of Central Appalachia. A small creek runs through my backyard. I have a willow and a few walnut trees and four acres of land with sourwood, oak, locust, crabapple, and a few other trees. In the nine years I've lived in this house I've seen raccoons, possums, stray dogs, squirrels, chipmunks, deer, groundhogs, house cats, bobcats, my goats, and the neighbor's cows in my yard. And that's just counting the mammals. The birds are even more amazing. We've had Eastern Bluebirds in a house on our fence three of the last five years. There are scores of finches, orioles and cardinals, indigo buntings, a variety of woodpeckers, a heron that wades up our creek, mourning doves, the ever-present sparrows and wrens, robins and blue jays, and a screech owl that spends the summers in the woods around us.

I suppose anyone could live here - hillbilly or not. So my residence (and visitors) by itself doesn't make me a redneck. When I take stock of my own personal attributes that might qualify me (or disqualify me) as a redneck/country boy the verdict seems mixed, inconclusive. I've eaten escargot (snails), octopus, caviar, ox tongue and sushi - and liked it all. That probably calls into doubt my credentials as a redneck. I own a gun; but I'm not an NRA member and I haven't actually shot my gun at anything recently. I can't fix my own truck, but I do have a truck.

The fact that I don't think Larry the Cable Guy is funny further undermines my redneck standing, I suspect.

I'm not sure I want to be a redneck. While there is some semantic overlap between the three terms I'm considering ("redneck," "hillbilly," and "country boy") they are by no means synonymous. I think of "hillbilly" as almost an ethnic designation; a hillbilly is a member of the culture or society that inhabits one of the rural mountainous areas of the U.S. Being a redneck, on the other hand, seems like more of a class distinction to me and has more to do with behavior than with values or culture. Hillbillies (and country boys) grow their own tomatoes; rednecks throw them at player they don't like at ball games...

The most recent decision that I've faced that made me question my hillbilly identity occurred a week or so ago on my drive to work. I drive about 20 miles to work. When I get in my vehicle of the mornings I'm in the Tennessee River Valley. I drive north on a two lane US highway that takes me up and over a ridge and as I start to descend I enter the Big Sandy section of the Ohio River Valley. Then:

• I turn off on a state road
  
• Drive around a few hairpins
  
• Pass a few cows and horses
  
• Cross a state line
  
• Climb a mountain named after a coal mine
  
• Drive by the mine (passing a few coal trucks on the way)
  
• Go under the railroad trestle
  
• Pass a little nine-hole golf course that seems incredibly out of place
  
• Pass through a couple of unincorporated communities identified with green and white signs
  
• And arrive at the small school where I teach

On this particular day I rounded a curve and saw something in the road at 8am - a wild turkey. It was dead, recently run over by someone else. I was tempted to stop. But I was on a schedule. And turning around on that small road is a pain. So I went on to work. But I thought about the turkey much of the day. And on the way home that turkey looked to be pretty much still in tact. So I gave in to the temptation and I stopped.

In my four wheel drive sport utility vehicle I carry a Leatherman tool that my little brother gave me for Christmas (or something) one year. I took it out and used the pliers to pull a couple of feathers. Turkey feathers have some value in my part of the country and I just couldn't see passing them up.

Does that make me a redneck (or a real hillbilly, at least)? Probably not in and of itself...