40,560 words in July

I have an old man’s sensibility about writing more than a young blogger’s. Young folks text message with cute little abbreviations that are mostly unfathomable to me. Also, they can be quite careless about the niceties of writing like spelling, punctuation, correct grammar and proof reading.

As a teacher I used to force my students to write essay questions which they hated. I graded kids based on what I could divine they learned from my history lessons not their penmanship or the other niceties I just mentioned. I have a couple educational principles that I hold dear one of which is: don’t be afraid to make mistakes because they are your best lessons.

To give my students some confidence that mistakes were OK I tended to emphasize my own. If we could joke about Mr. Welty’s spelling, or factual mistakes I hoped to free them from anxieties about making their own. The marvelous Pulitzer Prize Bio by Robert Caro, the first of his yet to be completed tetralogy on Lyndon Johnson, described how Lyndon got his students to loosen up. He made them make animal noises in class. In the stuffy era he taught this was a means to get kids to hear their own voices and enjoy the laughs that followed knowing that no one could ridicule them for their version of a hee haw or a cock-a-doodle do.

I apply the same principle to the blog although, as a point of pride, I like to give each post at least a cursory edit. I haven’t had the of time to do that for much of the past month. I’ve posted a series of very long posts most of which I haven’t once gone back to polish up. Geez, half the Gary Glass email I’ve gotten and turned over to his enemies on the school board I’ve never read to completion when they were received. I was often too busy to read them in full a year ago let alone before the School Board’s attorneys starting spinning me in circles.

When I send out a 300 word letter to the editor I typically labor over it for three or four hours. With today’s new found free time I got curious about just how many words I’ve cranked out so far in July with almost a third of the month left to blog. Its pretty impressive in bulk at 40,560 or so words. That’s ten thousand more than last month’s record for the entire month and I’ve got several posts in my head that I’m not sure I’ll ever get to.

The blog ethic, much like the twitter ethic, champions immediacy over anything else. Its sort of a write first ask questions later practice. The only thing that will give a blogger credibility is a little humility and willingness to admit and correct mistakes.

For instance, in the post about Bob Nygaard that I wrote a couple days ago I made an historical error. I wrote that Bob was chosen to replace Dorothy Neumann. Bob wrote friendly email afterward reminding me that in fact he was selected to replace Board member Pati Rolf when when she moved to Wisconsin to coach. I admitted the mistake and joked that it reflected my growing senility.

I’d like to one of those old coots about which its said “he’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know.” I hope to demonstrate that I still have a reasonably good memory when I publish my book on the Red Plan. In fact, I’ll be counting on my blog posts, hasty as some of them are, to help me along the way.

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