On Teaching Writing Good (Tambien: Lo Siento Perezoso)

 

Note: This letter was written in response to the Tattler’s February editorial “On Teaching Good Writing.”

 

Dear Editor of the Tattler:

So, after reading the editorial “On Teaching Good Writing” in the February edition of the Tattler, common sense and a slightly phallic grease stain on the margin of the page (I’ll probably get to that) demanded that I google this question: “Is there a term for an editorial that it is, ipso facto, guilty of the very same failings and ineptitude that it is criticizing?” I found no term for that (Oddly, “Living With a Narcissist” was the second item that popped up upon my query. Very odd.  For more on that, please do read Henry Alford’s November 2015 article in Vanity Fair…but I digress…or do I because I should also mention the fleeting image that came to mind as I was  reading the editorial in question of a sign on my college English professor’s office door that read, “The Department of Redundancy Department”…but I do, I am digressing…).  The very first item to appear from my query was a term for the opposite of what I had described called “rational criticism.” So thank you Tattler editorial staff for allowing me to coin a new literary term that I shall herewith call “irrational criticism.”  In sum, the irrational criticism editorial, about which I have already spoken about (refer to sign on professor’s door) “On Teaching Writing Good,” by virtue of its pretentious, formulaic, wooden, and “key holish” qualities, demonstratively disproved itself. Gracias, mucho! (con respecto a ese, un momento, por favor…)

To be honest, I would just as soon stop right here. I have made my point–several points, actually, and mostly in English.  Besides, I have things to do, papers to grade, dogs to walk, articles to read, dozens of eggs to set right side up, etc.. Yet, the haunting thought that a member of a top-tier school might totally overlook my very snappy letter to the editor or even my newly coined term simply because I failed to include an “interesting story or vignette” (there’s that phallic grease stain again, but later..) to which I could attach my wagon and “communicate certain values or personal strengths” absolutely compels me–I say absolutely compels me to write more. Yes! If I am going to be “Teaching Writing Good,” I will show, not tell.

Let me just say that teaching writing good at any level is not about teaching writing; it’s about inspiring thinking: “Inspiring Thinking Good.” For anything of any quality to be written good, you have to want to say something good, well not good in the Mother Theresa sense of the word, but something important, something truly interesting and exciting. If you don’t want to say anything, then don’t say it. Take the F. It’s like singing a song. You’ve got to want to sing a song, to believe in the song, to feel the song–in your gut–otherwise it’s not going to be enjoyable for anyone, least of all the top-tier school people who are really in tune with that sort of thing…

It’s like when I had a class of students, and everyday the same girl would come in late and give me some spontaneous-lie story for her tardiness e.g., her maid had lit her hair on fire with the hair drier, her sister had a panic attack while riding in a gua-gua, she ate what she  thought was a Cheeto, ad nauseum.. It was obnoxious, but when some of the other students started to do it too, I knew I had to teach them good. They were all very lame excuses, which was the real problem, actually–very lame spontaneous lie stories, without any focus or zing or guts! And once a month had turned into almost daily. So I decided to teach them good:

I remember it was a Friday, viernes, and I came running into class eight minutes late, my shirt ripped with some of the buttons pulled off, scratches on my face, you know–my hair all tousled, with charred black smudges on my face and arms, and I was kind of out of breath and wild-eyed, too. They looked up at me, mouths agape: “Dotto, que paso? What happened? Why are you late?” So I told them what had happened:

”I missed my paseo, so I had to hitch one from a guy on a moto. But it wasn’t just any guy on a moto; he was un enano, a small person, and instead of driving me to school, he suddenly veered off the calle and zoomed up this mountain road, then a traves la selva along a dirt path, and way up on the backside of a mountain I hadn’t noticed before. The jungle was like being backstage in a closed-down theatre, with wild density all around, like green steam with puffs of florets, and mite-eaten vultures and parrots looking down from thigh-thick vines, no people and no houses–jungle…and then he came up to this…this little treehouse, well not a treehouse exactly, but a four-story-high tree trunk with no branches made into a house with obtuse-angled windows and different floors and stuff, and painted all bright colors, and there were all these little people, you know, la gente enanos, circled around the big branchless trunkhouse and there were ladders on all sides leading up to the top of it where there was an antennae and on top of that sat el perezoso, a tree sloth (go figure) perched on the very top rung of the antennae, and it was apparently breaking up their radio reception, so they were trying to get it down from there, and they had tried to grab it and remove it, but no one was tall enough to reach it. Two of the men, apparently, had tried to reach it by one climbing on the other’s back, but the climber had fallen off the climbee and banged his head and some of los enanos were attending to him when we skidded to a stop on the moto, with a big backfire ‘KaBoom’! A few people were trying to coax el perezoso down from there, you know, with large cones of pink cotton candy, some of which they’d set on fire to kind of scare it, and some held candy-striped umbrellas and were twirling them to disorient it, you know, to try and get it to lose its balance, but it wasn’t working.  I understood, implicitly, why the man had brought me there. I was tall enough to reach up and remove el perezoso from his antennae redoubt. They have sharp claws, los perezosos, so, you know, someone gave me leather gloves… And after I removed it, they all let out a great shout and stopped what they were doing and joined hands in a circle and sang a song with el perezoso in the middle..

 

Lo siento Perezoso

No te queremos

En nuestro arbols

Vate muy lejos mijo

Con tus dos grandes ojos

Y tres dedos afilados!

Vaya con dios

Lo siento Perezoso

 

And then he rode me back to school and gave me a lollipop despues de desmontar. Ahi!”

I never had that problem with the students again. Oh, they were still late, but they didn’t try to hand me any more spontaneous-lie stories. They just admitted they were late because they were perezoso.  But the point is:  it’s a good thing I had the Tattler–it kept the grease from the moto’s chain off my freshly creased white pants and provided me with a fairly decent reason to write this “irrational criticism.” Lo siento!