Renegade Writing Center Weblog

 I use Leslie Knope as a positive example a lot in my lessons. Not just because I’m a Parks & Rec fan or in utter awe of Amy Poehler as a creative person, but because the dauntless positivity and energy of Leslie Knope are precisely what I try to channel as a speaker.   But today, I’d like to talk about one of the things she got really, really wrong.      Listen, Leslie, slam poetry doesn’t have to be “your thing”, but you are making an aggravating mistake that people in any artistic community go through a LOT.   Just because you don’t understand the structure of something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because you never learned the rules, doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Just because you don’t understand what makes something great in slam poetry, or woodworking, or theatre, or giant Charlie Chapman statues, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter a great deal.    Remember this?   So no, slam poetry is not “just talking…lik...

  There’s an old TV show from the 90’s that I love called Babylon 5 . I have just written and deleted many “short” explanations for why I love this show – sprinkled with all the ways in which it falls short of the standards of the Golden Age of Television which we live in now. That’s the problem with things you love, right? It’s hard to be brief about why they are awesome.  It's not this guy.  He is not one of the reasons.  Which is what this post is about.  When I taught a high school speech class, the first assignment was to share a small passion in a presentation.  The exact prompt was, "Something you care about more than you know you objectively should."  In the form of a rant or a burst of praise or a plea to join you in your fandom, what is something you care more about than it is objectively important?  Most students who chose a true passion struggled to keep their speeches to the 5 minute time limit.  And yet, these same students, ...

One of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, wrote in an essay collection that teachers are, by definition, Liars to Children. Believe it or not, he did not mean it as a criticism. His example was the structure of an atom. Middle school teachers tell students the structure is something like this:  When the truth is that the electrons, in the words of Tom Stoppard from Hapgood , are much more interesting:   “I could put an atom into your hand for every second since the world began and you would have to squint to see the dot of atoms in your palm. So now make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of one atom then the atom is as big as St Paul's, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in the empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar... Every atom is a cathedral. I cannot stand the pictures of atoms they put in schoolbooks, like a little solar system: Bohr's atom. Forget it. You can't make a pictu...