Great Site, Terrible Writing

I’m currently writing site content for a remodeling contractor based out of Scottsdale, Arizona. When brainstorming for his homepage, I took it upon myself, as I often do, to peruse similar websites for inspiration.

And that’s where I came across another contractor’s website that proudly declares, “It is our goal to provide a knowledgeable foundation in which our pillars of professionalism and excellence soar from.”

I read it once, then one more time to make sure it was as bad as I thought.

Read it a third time. Yup. Still bad.

The problem here is twofold: 1) atrocious grammar, and 2) wordiness without a cause. In other words, this sentence says a lot without saying anything.

I can deduce, upon a forth reading, what the intentions of this sentence probably are. This company wants to get across the outstanding knowledge and professionalism of its employees. Honestly, though, is this sentence evidence of any of those traits? Is hiring a fourth grader to write your website really the best way to convince us of your commitment to excellence?

If I sound a bit judgmental and bitter, it must come from years of playing second fiddle to my husband’s site design and development. When clients hire Ted and me, Ted is the one with the power. He’s the one the clients really want.

Me, I just write the content. The website’s unappreciated sidekick.

Writing isn’t easy, but plenty of folks appear to think otherwise. “All that money for content?” prospective clients will sputtered indignantly. “Forget it–I’ll write the damn thing myself.”

And this, my friends, is when you get “knowledgeable foundation[s] in which our pillars of professionalism and excellence soar from.” Or whatever it says.

Please folks. You don’t have to hire me (if I’ve turned you off with my tone here, I can live with that), but for the love of peet, get someone who knows what they’re doing. If you’re short on funds, at least get someone to proofread and edit your site before it goes live. A copywriter may charge the same hourly rate for writing that she does for editing (I know I do) but editing can be done in about half the time. The savings abound.

Please–break down your pillars and hire a copywriter.

Working Smart or…Smartly Working?

Sometimes, the arguments at our house are downright silly.

Last week, Ted and I got around to discussing the validity of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I have been fairly vocal in my support of the protests (although I haven’t managed to get myself off the couch long enough to join in) while Ted has observed the whole thing with a greater degree of skepticism. He hasn’t exactly said that the protestors should should take showers and get jobs, but well…the Ted of five years ago probably would have said something like that, and the current Ted may well have said that already if he didn’t mind dealing with the tirade he’d most likely get from me in response.

I’m very glad we have the kind of relationship in which we discuss heavier topics than what TV show to watch on Tuesdays–but I’m sorry to report that Occupy Wallstreet was not the real topic of our argument. Instead, it came down to this:

Ted pointed out that the protestors, as well as the people struggling all over our country, could benefit from working a little smarter. When I said that hard work isn’t necessarily a cure-all in our downtrodden economy, Ted replied, ”Not working hard. Working smart.”

We both agreed that working smart is vital to success (we also agree that ice is cold) but I while I argued that one must work hard and work smart, Ted insisted that only smart is necessary.

Which is odd, given that my husband works harder than just about anyone I know.

When the town of Fairfield, NJ, was forced to close down in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, Ted found himself unable to get to work for the better part of two weeks. While many folks (myself included) would have taken advantage by sleeping late or mindlessly browsing the Internet, Ted spent his time mowing the lawn, vacuuming the floors, and moaning about not working. Yes, my husband can put in a nine hour day at the office and come home to freelance work without a word of complaint, but tell him he can’t go work and he’ll throw himself a pity party.

My husband has been putting in long hours–some for himself, some for others–for as long as we’ve been together. I’ve seen him nearly burn himself out for clients and projects with no future. I have not seen this happen in a very long time, however, because Ted has developed an excellent ability for choosing the right projects over the years.

In short, my husband has worked very hard at working smart.  Which would seem to prove my point, would it not?

This inane argument eventually puttered to it’s inevitable end, and I don’t remember if we came to any specific resolution. But on the upside, it did start me thinking about positive change–in situations which I can control, as well as in those which I cannot.

I’m not going to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protestors in further detail, mainly I have nothing to add that hasn’t  been eloquently covered here. But I will say that Ted and I have both been asked to sacrifice quite a lot since the economy crumbled. In the space of about two years, we were both laid of from our jobs. We have each spent months looking for employment, and we have each had to work for diminished salaries for a time. Even today, our combined yearly income is significantly less than it was at the start of 2009.

I wish that simply getting by–and dare I say, getting ahead–were not such a struggle. And I will support any protest that demands a reasonable standard of living for as many people as possible.

It’s funny how two people can argue when they believe the same things.

Roaring Hurricane Winds Contribute to the Internet “Noise”

Things have been pretty crazy around here lately.

Ted and I recently came home from a fast-paced, two-week vacation in Europe. I had planned to write a bit about our excursions (and I’d still like to) but shortly after coming home, we had to gear up for Hurricane Irene. As many of you already know, our little town doesn’t handle massive rainfall very well. We live just down the street from a large reservoir, and it tends to overflow in situations like these.

Luckily, our street is at the top of a hill. As of Monday morning we haven’t flooded or lost power. So I’m not complaining about that.

But step off our front stoop, and there’s chaos on all sides. Police cars are parked on both ends of our street, and all roads leading to the reservoir have been blocked off. Some houses in the area have taken on close to ten feet of water, and we’re hearing stories of neighbors who were stranded in their homes and had to be rescued by Coast Guards.

Ted is working from home today. Route 23 is closed, Route 46 is closed, and apparently part of 287 collapsed into the Rockaway River, so he’ll want to avoid taking that, too.

I’m glad Ted is home. If he can spare a few minutes we may try to walk down to the reservoir, where the dangerous flood waters rushing over the sides can actually be quite beautiful. We tried to view this several times yesterday, but were continuously prevented either by police tape or rising brown waters in residential streets. Not so beautiful.

This morning I felt that before I could resume regular postings on this blog, I should write something to at least acknowledge Hurricane Irene. It seemed odd that the police cars in our streets or the water in our neighbors’ houses wouldn’t at least rate a mention.

Ted disagreed. “Don’t write about the hurricane unless you really have something to say,” he told me. “Otherwise, it’s just adding to all the ‘noise’ on the Internet.”

“I have to write about it,” I said. “When you have a blog, it’s expected that you’ll write about events like this. Wouldn’t it be weird if I don’t mention it?”

“That’s what Facebook and Twitter are for,” Ted said, in a tone that suggested he’d seen way too many hurricane status updates even in those places.

My husband, a self-proclaimed “Internet Guy,” is very protective of the medium that gives him his living. Few things irritate him more than blogs or social networking sites used to spout nonsense.

He’s a bit uptight, yes, but his concerns aren’t unsubstantiated. Terrible writing is abundant on the Internet. Search for just about anything, and you’ll likely wade through a flood of gunky, brown crap (still rising) before finding content of value.

Sadly, it’s easier than ever now for an amateur writer to publish.

But on the upside,  it’s easier than ever now for an amateur writer to publish.

The large majority of what you find online may be little more than brown gunk, but every so often the writing runs crystal clear. Just as I spent yesterday searching a flooded town for a glimpse of the beautiful, flowing reservoir waters (which wouldn’t have been there had the town not flooded in the first place) I don’t mind fighting through the occasional deluge of poor content. I understand that it’s the price we pay.

In the meantime, at least I did my small part to lessen the “noise” by taking an obligatory hurricane post and turning it into something a bit more.

Now, if only I could do the same with my (possible) upcoming obligatory vacation post…

“You Must Set Yourself on Fire”

Last week was very successful for Ted at work. I won’t go in to too much detail, but let’s just say that, after about ten years of moving from job to job (through no fault of his own) and working for small start-ups that couldn’t pay a real wage, my husband’s diligence and impressive talent were finally recognized–and rewarded handsomely.

In the days leading up to this good news, Ted had been working on writing his own annual review. He’s been with his current company for just over a year now, so this review was his chance to show the employers the many wonderful things he’d brought to the table during their relatively short time together. In typical Ted fashion he took the project quite seriously, even handing it over for me to proof and edit. It all paid off; Ted’s employers were impressed not only with his work over the past year, but also with the considerable effort he put forth on the review document itself.

The annual review contained the standard, “Five years from now, where do you see yourself?” As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Ted knows what he wants and knows how to work for it, so this question didn’t exactly throw him off his game.

His supervisors were pleased by his answer, but more pleased by the fact that he’d written an answer at all. Apparently, the overwhelming majority of employees leave that question blank.

Ted and I both find this puzzling. Shouldn’t that be one of the easier questions to pop up on an annual review? Haven’t most folks given the matter enough thought to at least fabricate a decent answer?

“Do most people not care where they’re going?” Ted asked me that night.

“I guess not,” I said.

“So most people just float through life, ending up wherever?”

“I guess so.” The concept was foreign to me, as I tend to plan to the last possible detail. Even Ted thinks I go overboard; whenever I ask if he wants potatoes or pasta as a side dish a week from Thursday, he gives an exasperated sigh and asks would it be so bad to just order a last minute pizza?

“It makes me think of that quote,” Ted said. “You know the one. ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.’”

“Is that what that means?” I asked, in typical writer fashion. “Is that really the best quote to illustrate this situation?”

“I don’t know. You get the idea,” Ted said, as we sat down to eat the spaghetti and white clam sauce I’d been planning to make since the previous Tuesday.

I did a little searching that evening–yes, this is the kind of thing that I do–and found what I felt was an even better soundbite from an oft-quoted (but otherwise little known) humorist, Arnold Henry Glasow: “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion.  You must set yourself on fire.”

Ted and I are not the types to drift through life with no apparent plan or purpose, and we’re continuously surprised when we encounter those who don’t feel the same. My husband and I are strong believers in making our own luck, and over the years we’ve done a fair job of setting ourselves on fire. I’m proud of us, and I believe we’re going down a good road.

But I have to admit that living this way can be exhausting.

I sometimes wonder if Ted and I would be happier if we didn’t always take things so seriously. What if we didn’t spend every Saturday taking care of the little tasks on our to-do lists, and went for an occasional, spontaneous joyride instead? What if we took that joyride without first making up a list of possible places to go, extensive directions included for each?

I don’t think I prefer to set myself on fire every day. It might be more pleasant to just sit in the sun every once in a while.

Is it possible, I wonder, to live a a more carefree life and still come out successful and financially stable on the other end? Must we trade spontaneity for success? Or might there be a happy medium out there?

Perhaps someday we’ll find a balance. Knowing us, we’ll search pretty attentively.

But until then, kudos to my husband. I couldn’t be more proud of Ted: setting himself and the world on fire, one year at a time.

Cheating Teachers, Hear My Plea

This is not the kind of topic I’d usually tackle in this particular blog. Weeks ago, when the country learned of the Atlanta public school cheating scandal, I resisted the urge to comment here. This morning, however, I came across “Confessions of a cheating teacher” on The Notebook/NewsWorks blog, and I feel the need to “confess” a few frustrations of my own.

As a part-time public school teacher here in New Jersey, where secondary students must pass the HSPA (High School Proficiency Assessment), I understand the desperation of educators driven to cheat. Several years ago, I worked for a school in a low-income area, and was given the additional job of teaching an after hours HSPA prep class for kids who had struggled on the exam in the past. I prepared with the principal herself; she talked me through what I could expect for the first session, and helped me locate appropriate test prep materials.

So imagine my surprise when the students walked in on that first day and couldn’t speak English. When I handed out the materials the principal and I had gathered, it soon became abundantly clear that most of the students couldn’t read the articles and stories–let alone answer the questions that followed. Why, I wondered, had the principal not mentioned any of this? And what, I wondered, was I supposed to do (one to two days a week, for four to six weeks) for non-English speakers who would have to take a test in English? No testing strategy in the world would have addressed that issue. I could have stood there all day and said, “With multiple choice reading comprehension questions, try to eliminate two answers right off the bat,”  but really, who’s kidding who here?

I don’t mean to say that this was the students’ fault. A good number of them put in a decent effort. Unfortunately, fewer students showed up for the second session, and by the following week no one was coming at all. If the kids felt the prep sessions were absolutely pointless, I couldn’t help but agree.

I don’t remember anyone blaming me for the students’ poor performances (it probably saved me that the students stopped showing up altogether, as this wasn’t construed as my fault) but many, many teachers across our country are currently held responsible when they can’t work miracles with kids like these.  ”Here’s a a group who can’t read or write above a first grade level,” school administrators will say. “You, the teacher, must take these kids and, in less than a few months, prepare them to take a high school test intended for native English speakers. What’s that? You can’t? Well then–thanks to budget cuts, there are thousands of teachers out there looking for work. If you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can.”

And what do the helpless, terrified teachers do? The one thing they can to take control of the situation: They cheat.

I have been tempted, in the past, to do a little cheating of my own. About a year after the HSPA prep debacle, I was called into the principal’s office to discuss the 40% of my regular ninth grade students who had D’s and F’s for the marking period. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I had to find a way to bring those grades up. No one said, specifically, that my job was at stake if I couldn’t. Still, as a non-tenured teacher in the budget-slashing state of New Jersey, I could have lost my job for no reason at all. Giving administrators a reason to fire me wasn’t in my best interest.

A few of my teacher friends told me to curve the grades. It’s what everyone else is doing, they said. How do you think we all managed to bring our grades up? Add ten points to each average, drop the lowest grades, and presto: higher performing classes. Like magic.

But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.

Instead, I decided that I would continue to run my classroom in a way that I felt was both challenging and conducive to student success. I upped my efforts. I made sure my students were aware of their grades at all times, and I reminded them often of how much a zero could impact them. I became a little more lenient on accepting late work, as long as I knew the students were making an honest effort. I took more time to meet individually with kids who were struggling, and tried to tell them not only that they could repair the situation, but also how it could be done.

I decided that if, in the end, I would lose my job for being the best darn teacher I could–well then, so be it.

As it turned out, I was able to save several kids from failing English. On the last day of school, I had the pleasure of telling one young man that he’d passed my class, at the last possible moment, because he’d gotten his act together. I’ll never forget his expression of joy.

Nor will I forget the few kids I couldn’t save. About six of my students had failed English the previous year with another teacher, so they apparently thought nothing of flushing their grades down the toilets a second time. What a shame.

And, oh yeah–I lost my job anyway. The school swore up and down that the reason was budgetary, and had nothing to do with my performance. But losing my job wasn’t fun, regardless.

Job or no job, I am happy to say that I have never helped a student cheat, and I don’t think there are too many good excuses to do so. I disagree with the reasoning of the Notebook’s anonymous teacher; apparently, she gave test answers to kids because “…there’s a whole self-esteem side that people aren’t talking about.” I hardly see how it helps the self-esteem of any student to know that they couldn’t pass an exam without a teacher feeding them answers. And this educator’s point of view seems awfully shortsighted; by giving students the answers, isn’t she teaching them to be ultimately clingy and dependent when faced with the upcoming daunting tasks of adulthood? At some point, don’t we have to step back and let kids sink or swim on their own merit?

However, when the anonymous teacher gets around to calling out the bullying, out-of-touch administrators who think they have the “magic bullet,” that I can understand.

To be fair, administrators are no strangers to being “bullied” themselves. They’re under immense pressure from the state to show that the kids in their districts can pass standardized tests. The administrators then place the burden on the teachers, who must bend over backwards to show that their kids are making progress. Everyone is afraid of losing their jobs, especially in this tough economy. They all have bills to pay and children to support. They feel they can’t afford to be moral just now.

When a student enters a classroom, many factors are out of the public school’s control. The school cannot decide whether that child should have grown up in an environment where education is encouraged. The school cannot put parents in the house who are able and available to check homework each night. The school cannot follow the child home and make sure that he is not kept from studying because of severe personal/familial issues.

The administrators can only control the teachers. And the more control they exert, the more likely the teachers become to mess with answer sheets and grade books. Sure, a teacher could spend years developing, through trial and error, strategies that might help even the most troubled students succeed. In today’s world, though, that teacher will probably be eliminated and replaced before he or she can perfect her methods. It’s much faster and easier for administrators to try to find someone “better,” and it’s much safer for teachers to give fake grades and produce phony test scores.

But this, of course, results in all those kids who manage to graduate high school without basic skills. And therein lies the real problem.

So now, once again, I’m using this blog to ask members of a given profession to take a stand. If all teachers bow to the pressure, change test answers, and push our kids through with C’s, we’re doing the students a major disservice.

Look folks, I know what it’s like to fear I’ll lose my job. Hell, I know what it’s like to actually lose my job. But I also know that, at the end of each night,  I want to lay my head on the pillow and know that I haven’t made the world a little worse. I want to rest peacefully in the knowledge that I’ve done right by the students who depend on me to shape their educational experience.

As teachers, we need to speak out about the flaws we see in the system. We need to explain patiently to more business-minded folks why merit pay isn’t a good practice for public education. We need to work together to develop an educational environment where students are held accountable, and each child knows the benefits and consequences of his or her actions.

It will be a long, hard fight, I know, and there will be many lost battles ahead. But students who cheat never accomplish anything, and cheating teachers don’t fare much better.

We wouldn’t–and shouldn’t–accept students who take the easy way out.

How can we expect any less of ourselves?