Tag: school

When’s the Last Time Anyone Used Cursive, Anyway?

What’s a skill you consider basic, that most people don’t actually know how to do?

Gather around, you young whippersnappers! Let me tell you what school was like back in my day! grumble grumble, dagnabbit …

I remember learning cursive in elementary school. “Fancy writing” that did serve a practical purpose despite how unintuitive and confusing it could be. Cursive allows one to write faster and more efficiently. The line of each letter flows into the next, creating a long string of interconnected symbols that aren’t slowed down by print writing’s need to lift the pencil and move it over to start the next letter.

It’s quite beautiful, actually, but cursive is hampered by a basic fact of modern life:

How often does anybody need pencil and paper anymore?

Typing is all the rage. Keyboard, smartphone, you name it. And those letters on the screen are in print, so how urgent is it to learn cursive? Do they even still teach it in schools nowadays? Well, you whippersnappers? Do they?

Truth be told, as basic and mandatory as cursive once was in my school days, it’s practical value was limited even then. I grew up in the dying days of cursive handwriting, and I certainly don’t use it anymore now. I could likely remember the forms if I was pressed to give a demonstration. Probably. Maybe.

Beautiful, but obsolete. Maybe in another ten years it will become a secret code of sorts. The kids won’t have a clue what you’re writing down in front of their eyes. It’ll be a whole new form of cipher. Faced with cursive letters, people will be at a loss to explain the strange, archaic glyphs. Hmm, that has possibilities …

Maybe the old can find a new purpose, after all.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

When the Future Was a Distant Gleam

What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?

As a kid I never truly believed I would grow up and go to college. Silly, of course, to all us adults reading this post, but time is skewed for a child. A week seems like a year, a year is practically a lifetime. Ten years is an epoch away, all events therein as insignificant to a six-year-old as the dimming of a star in another galaxy is to a fish in the sea.

I didn’t think about the future as a kid. All those papers teachers made us write about where we saw ourselves in twenty years were strictly academic. I never really cared, even if I dreamed and boasted of what I’d be doing. A part of me never believed it would be real. It wasn’t real, not until I arrived on the college campus the weekend before my freshman year started.

Maybe that’s why college is such a big deal. Kindergarten, elementary school, high school – the days of childhood, when the real world is far off, something that exists only in textbooks and lectures. To be honest, college is no closer to the real world, but it was the time when I started seriously thinking about a future beyond education. I thought about getting a job, moving out of my parents’ house, living on my own. Kids don’t worry about those sorts of things.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

My Best School Teacher

Who was your most influential teacher? Why?

Our best teachers are the ones who push us to our limits. For me, that was Mrs. Wall, 9th grade English.

A summer reading assignment of The Once and Future King by T. H. White. Weekly essays. In-depth dissections of grammatical structure in complex sentences. Reading plays out loud in class. And never, ever letting up on improving our writing skills. It was a hard, hard class for everyone in it. I felt exhausted at the end of every week. Heck, the weekends, too.

And it was the best thing that ever happened to me in school. I had always loved reading, and I was already toying with the idea of becoming a writer, but Mrs. Wall’s class was what made me into a writer. She instilled the modicum of discipline and grit in me that is needed to write a book; to write every day, revise, and take criticism to heart.

I don’t know where she is now, or if she is even still alive, but my thanks to Mrs. Wall and the misery she subjected me to, because her lessons got me through the rest of high school, through college, and are still with me now.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.


“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

The Moment I Knew I Had Grown Up Whether I Wanted to or Not

When was the first time you really felt like a grown-up?

Growing up is a tough thing. We don’t leave childhood behind. It simply skips away, leaving us behind. And we find ourselves in the world of grown-ups. We certainly do gain quite a few things as adults, though: Responsibilities, duties, jobs, bills …

But at what point does it hit home that we’ve grown up? Is it a slow, dawning realization, or a thunderbolt to the head?

I first felt the pangs of adulthood when I moved to college. I had never lived apart from my parents before. Well, there was that one week in summer school, but that didn’t really count. Now, I was in the car with my parents going to a campus miles away from home and with the full knowledge that I wouldn’t be coming back with them.

The moment I made that realization was the moment that I knew things were Different™. There was no going back to childhood ways. I was an adult. I would be living as an adult. That made me a little excited, a lot nervous, and very, very giddy.

You ever have that dream where you’re in freefall? And your whole body tingles with such severe giddiness that you feel like it will overwhelm you? That’s how I felt when I arrived at my college. I was falling, falling, falling, all the way down. The only thing keeping me from curling up into a ball of panic was the certainty that the fall would end with me hitting the ground standing upright. Everything was in order, my room was rented, my classes were scheduled, and my parents were still just a phone call away. I wasn’t going to fall forever.

And so I grew up. No more childhood games, just the memories of them. Big adult games, like Studying for the Test, Learning to Budget and Managing My Own Bedtime. Adulthood was upon me.

Of course, once I graduated and entered the Real World, I realized that college wasn’t a very grown-up place after all, but that’s a story for another time.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

A Law for Learning Language

If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?

There’s a joke that I’m far too fond of reciting to friends and family. It goes like this:

“If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak only one language, you’re American.”

Sad but true.

If I had the power to change one law in my country, it would be to make mandatory that every American elementary and high school student be taught at least one non-English language. It’s an important skill, especially in a world that is growing more interconnected with every passing year.

English may be the lingua franca of today’s society, and your average English-speaker may be able to travel to nearly any country expecting someone to cater to his limited lingual skills, but that won’t last forever, will it? And besides, just because someone can speak English doesn’t mean they’ll humor you. And they can say mean things about you that you can’t understand.

Alright, cynicism and paranoia aside, besides the practical uses of speaking multiple language is the joy of learning and fluency. It opens doors, it draws people together and, quite frankly, it makes life a little easier if you’re not hobbled by ignorance of what others are saying.

America is a very cosmopolitan place. Lots of ethnicities and cultures exist here. And learning to speak Spanish or Mandarin or Arabic or French when you’re a kid is a lot easier than when you’re an adult.

Someday, I imagine, English won’t be a language that other countries’ students are required to learn. There ought to be a law that thinks that far ahead, and that’s the law I’d like to make: Students must become fluent in another language.

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My latest book, The Trickster’s Lament, is currently available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback format.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Deep Questions about Deep Literature

Do you remember literature classes in high school? How you would spend hours every day discussing the symbolic value of the billboard in The Great Gatsby and analyzing what each character represented in The Lord of the Flies? A spade is never just a spade in lit class. There is always a deeper meaning.

So can anyone explain to me why all the books students have to read are so dang depressing?

Looking back, this is what I feel that we were doing: Taking a beautiful flower and plucking its petals and cutting the stem and digging up the roots to see why it was a beautiful flower. And we very scientifically removed everything beautiful about it.

But darn it, we got educated about great literature. We knew what metaphor was. And allegory. And the subtle social critiques and genre deconstructions that mark all literary classics. We obtained knowledge! We justified our tuition!

There are people who make their living by reading stories and telling other people whether they are good or not. And their word is law, because there is no such thing as an opinion they understand the rules that govern quality writing. Where they obtain this arcane knowledge is unknown. Presumably, they dissected enough flowers.

Good stories seem to be a case of majority rules. If enough people say it’s good, it must be good. Maybe. But I didn’t like The Great Gatsby, so does that mean it’s not a good book or I’m not a good writer? Or perhaps if I had read it on my own time instead of being forced to analyze that darn stupid billboard I would have liked it.

What does it matter what color the curtains are or what suit the one character is wearing in each scene? It matters because somebody important says it matters, but what if it’s not the author saying it? Are we seeing what the writer put there, or what we think is there? Are we seeing meaning where there is none, or is the meaning not what we think it means? Does it mean what people say it means, or does it mean something else, which means that what I want it to mean means that it means the wrong thing from what everyone else thinks it means? Because that’s just mean.

Or maybe we’re just really good at gaslighting ourselves into thinking a book somebody wrote to pay their bills is a magnum opus. The writer wings it, hears what critics say, nods sagely and says, “Yes, that’s exactly what it means.”

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.