Creepmas

[NeverMore]

Y'all may be interested to know there is a (fairly) new celebration, a fusion of Halloween and Christmas. I didn't start it but I have been instrumental in making it popular. Christmas... and Thanksgiving, were originally a much darker celebrations than they are now. Look it up. I, and others, have just advanced this concept into modern times.

Creepmas started as a protest to the incursion of retail Christmas into the Halloween season. We... have turned it into a creepy celebration of Christmas, and Thanksgiving since Christmas has swallowed the turkey. I always say, Charles Dickens was the first Creep but Tim Burton made it popular.

I used to end my Hallowseason on the 2nd, after the Days of the Dead. Eventually extended it to Nov 5th after the movie (V for Vendetta) came out. Just so I could finish drinking my pumpkin beers and watch the movie beside a bonfire with my friends. Now? My hallowed celebration ends on December 13th, well before the winter equinox.

Throughout November I switch Halloween decorations for various scary Christmas decorations. Some serve both. Still collecting as they become available. I have a zombie Santa! I watch scary Christmas movies. I do take a break from the scary during Thanksgiving just to give it it's due. Creepmas is evolving. we are still figuring out the rules.

Interesting side effect. Those of you who knew me as I was, I couldn't even type the word "Christmas". I hated Christmas back then. The concept of Creepmas has got me over that. Still not a fan, but I can appreciate it now. Knowing monsters abound even in December make me feel... at home.

[Murfreesboro]

So I guess you do the Krampus thing on Dec 5? My husband loves the Krampus episode of the TV series Grimm.

I keep my decorations up through Nov 2 and generally watch V for Vendetta on the 5th. Then, my next movie is Luther (my husband is Lutheran, and we attend his church). I use Luther as a transition to Christmas, since he posted the 95 Theses on Halloween, but the movie sort of helps me transition to the religious aspects of Christmas. BTW, the Lutherans call Halloween "Reformation Day," so they are not big on Halloween as I celebrate it. But I don't let that stop me.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

This is something that was popular with my generation when we were younger, but we didn't have a name for it back then.

I think it started in 1993 with the release of the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, kids my age saw a opportunity to merge the 2 holidays for a celebration that lasted 3 months. It started small at first, with only a few people doing it, but by 1996 when I was in high school more students were starting to incorporate elements of both holidays into their designs for decorations.

That was the first time I saw a black Christmas tree, a girl in our art class had spray painted a 2 foot tall plastic tree black, and decorated it with small plastic pumpkins, little skeleton key chains, candy, and orange and purple streamers. I remember she even painted jack-o-lantern faces on each individual pumpkin, I wish I had got a picture of it back then. It was a beautiful thing, and the other students loved it, but the teacher was horrified and called it blasphemous and told the girl she had to do a different project or she wouldn't pass. The girl refused and was was kicked out of the class without a passing grade.

Looking back on it now, it's just funny because black Christmas trees have been commercially available since the early 2000s, and today that is considered normal and is accepted by most people. That girl was ahead of her time, she did a bunch of other decorations as well, including wreaths, creepy ornaments, and a snowman made out of pumpkins, [that is something that I saw at retail recently, but she came up with it years ago] but her tree was the one that I remember most. Sometimes you sit there and wonder what happened to some of the people you went to school with, I'd like to think that she is one of the people out there designing the decorations we buy at the stores today, and even if she isn't, I hope she is still making her awesome designs for her family.

As for Creepmas, I have been hearing about it for awhile, and I hope that it continues to grow and that more people can get involved in it, but as I said above, this concept is old news for some people my age, but we can thank the wonderfully dark and twisted mind of Tim Burton for inspiring a generation to start some new traditions that are still around today, and will hopefully be around for awhile.

As for my family, we have NBC decorations and ornaments out for both holidays, but we can't hang any creepy ornaments on the tree during Christmas or my wife will kill me. The only scary thing she will let the kids have out at Christmas is a plush Frankenstein with a Santa hat because Phoebe loves that thing.

[Murfreesboro]

How strange that the teacher found her Halloween tree blasphemous. I mean, strictly speaking, Christmas trees are just Christianized emblems of pagan worship. It's not like they were decorating fir trees in Bethlehem. Jesus was almost certainly born in the spring, anyway, since the shepherds were out in the fields with the sheep all night.

I enjoy looking at Halloween trees when I see them, but I don't wish to have one myself. I keep my tree for Christmas, though I do strip it on Jan 7th (the day after Epiphany) and then just leave it up until March, with just the lights on it. It's artificial, of course. I started doing this a few years ago when I complained to my husband that Jan always seemed so bleak and depressing after the sparkle of Dec. He was the one who suggested we do that.

My boys grew up with NBC (my daughter wasn't born yet), and my 2nd son insists it is a Thanksgiving movie. He wants to watch it that weekend. For me it is a Halloween movie. I do have a hanging Jack Skellington and Zero dog among my numerous yard decorations. I love the whimsy of that movie, and I think it has a good message for young ones.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

Things were different back then, and that teacher was from a different time, she was in her mid-sixties in the 90s so she was born in the 1930s, and I'm sure she was raised more strictly when she was young than the kids she was teaching. The funny thing is that art teachers are supposed to encourage their students to be creative and express themselves, but that teacher was so ignorant and stubborn in her ways that she tried to silence that girl and her art. Thankfully us kids were impervious to that kind of negativity, and the girl just continued to make her art for as long as we knew her.

I like your idea for leaving your tree up with just the lights, I think that people should have their decorations up as long as they want to if it makes them happy. My wife is in charge of Christmas in our house, so she usually leaves up the tree fully decorated until the 2nd week of Jan. and then she puts it away.

I absolutely agree with you about NBC, I have noticed that no matter what generation of kids watch it, everybody loves it, I know that my kids absolutely love it, and I couldn't even tell you how many NBC collectibles and clothes they have. It's one of those movies that has become a timeless classic and I hope that every new generation will enjoy it.

[Murfreesboro]

I wonder if your older art teacher maybe went to one of those churches that thinks everything about Halloween is Satanic. There was a lot of that going around in the '90s. My older boy (born '89) had a friend whose fundamentalist parents wouldn't let him read Harry Potter because it had witchcraft in it. When my son asked me about that (since we are also churchgoers, so he was confused), I told him that in the very first novel we learn how the infant Harry was saved from Voldemort when his dying mother cast a love spell on him. That the name Voldemort means something like "death wish" or "will of death," so symbolically, love conquers death. That this theme entered Western literature through Christianity, so the story, as far as I was concerned, while not exactly Christian, was by no means anti-Christian. Love conquering Death is pretty much THE message of the Christian faith.

That said, I don't really go in for the more gruesome aspects of Halloween. It can get too dark for me. My daughter likes to say that we are "pastel Goth." We like cute and lightly scary stuff. I love it when people find ways to make skeletons amusing. I have seen displays in our neighborhood that were so inventive: a group of skeletons grilling marshmallows over a silken flame, with a pet skeletal dog beside them. A skeletal mariachi band. Two skeletons perched on a roof, casually drinking Cokes from a cooler. I also love the movie Corpse Bride, where the dead in the underworld seem so much more lively than the living are.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

When I was a kid I knew a lot of older people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s that were just like that teacher, they were part of self righteous religious groups in my area that were against anything that they felt was corrupting the minds of the youth of this country. That included things like Halloween, rock music, movies, and even certain cartoons. They even went after the Smurfs and He-Man because they said the shows were filled with sorcery and it taught kids to conjure evil and worship demons. Yes, I'm serious, they actually tried to get the Smurfs banned.

Just imagine being a 4yr old and being told that you can't watch your favorite cartoons because some crazy old people said it was evil, thankfully my mother was a normal and rational person so she let us watch what we wanted, but I did know other kids that were still not allowed to. My mother told me how the cartoons she grew up with were filled with far more violence, bigotry, and unbelievable levels of racism, so she had no issue with the fantasy cartoons we were watching.

I was in my early 20s when The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies came out, so I had no interest in them, though I have watched them since I had kids, but I do remember on the news that parents groups were speaking out against the movies for the same reasons you mentioned above. I had read the LotR books when I was younger, but I didn't know that Harry Potter started out as a book. My kids love the movies, and while they aren't really for me, I don't think there is anything in them that is unsuitable for kids, but I know that occasionally you still come across some people that are against them. You have a great point of view on Harry Potter Murf, and I'll have to remember that the next time some closed minded person brings it up.

I guess there will always be somebody out there that thinks they know what is better for your kids than you do.

With you mentioning the skeletons it reminded me of a old photo I found on the internet years ago, I think it was around 2005, the skeletons were small, probably something you put on a table, but I liked the photo so much that I sent it to the woman that I eventually married while we were still dating. I guess in some way I was subtly trying to tell her that I wanted to spend eternity with her. I still have the photo, you can view it below.

26101364.jpg (114.11 KiB) Viewed 8548 times

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, how cute! Yes, that is the kind of skeletal display I love.

Going after the Smurfs sounds hard-core, lol.

The Harry Potter books (there are seven of them; the movie franchise split the last one into two parts) are superb, better than the movies, though I like the movies, too. When an entire generation of children was reading them, most of their parents did, too. My husband, who NEVER reads novels (he is a history guy, not much of a fiction fan), read every single one. The novels have a lot of whimsy and word play, especially with the names of characters. It is obvious to me that J K Rowling knows both Latin and French pretty well. The books get more sophisticated as they go along and their child audience matured. Stephen King famously asked Rowling when she stopped writing for children and started writing for grown-ups. A friend of mine at church, a prof of biology at the local college, remarked to me once that he was amazed by her sheer invention in creating the whole wizarding world of the novels. This is a book series that honestly has something for everyone. My second son, who just turned 30, is rereading them right now. I think I may do that, too. Keeping kids away from them is depriving them of one of the best reading experiences they could possibly have, and I think the core values of the series are quite positive.

It's really bizarre that those older people you spoke of objected to Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was an ardent Christian who was largely responsible for converting his co-worker C S Lewis, the great 20th century Christian apologist, to the faith. (They did have their differences, though. Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis chose Anglicanism over his own Catholicism, and I think they had a genuine falling out when Lewis married a divorcee.) But no way is LOTR threatening to Christianity. On the contrary, it's quite consonant with it. It's not an allegory the way Lewis' Narnia series is, but it embodies the themes.

Also, Tolkien is a superb writer, and his books rank high on my list of 20th century fiction. Oddly, I stayed away from them for decades because all my friends said you needed to read The Hobbit first, and I never really Iiked The Hobbit. I mean, it was OK, but nothing to write home about, I thought. It wasn't until my older boy was 8 that I discovered them. I'd taken him to a children's theater production of The Hobbit, and he asked me to read him that book, so I dutifully did. Then he asked me to read him LOTR, which is much, much longer. I didn't want to, but you do stuff like that when your kids ask you to. So I started in reading, and I found myself getting caught up in it. When Frodo was being pursued by the Ringwraiths, I could feel my heart speeding up. I asked myself, what's happening here? Strider when he appeared was mysterious and scary. I didn't know what to make of him. And much later, when I was reading about the beautiful, doomed kingdom of Lothlorien, I could have wept. I asked my husband, who loves these books, why no one had ever told me how much better they were than The Hobbit? He said The Hobbit had been written for children, but LOTR was for grown-ups. Boy, is it ever. What a terrific book series it is. And again, while the movies are very good, they are not quite up to the books.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

The people that were against the Lord of the Rings were specifically attacking the movie and not the books, I doubt they even watched the movie, they probably just saw the commercial, heard that the ring was forged by evil, and saw the Balrog and they ran for the hills in fear. As you said, the books had been around for years before the movies were made, and I don't remember anybody ever complaining about them. But I guess those groups will always find a reason to complain about something.

I absolutely agree with you that reading books can open up magical worlds to young readers, and I'm glad that the Harry Potter books introduced a new generation to that magic. I know that I felt the same way when I was young and I read the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum. I love the world and characters that he created in those books, the 14 books that he wrote are, in my opinion, some of the greatest stories ever written. While other writers did continue the Oz story after Baum had passed away, some were official continuations of his story, and others were not, I didn't feel the same way that I had about his books, they just seemed to lack the imagination that his writing had. I don't know, maybe that's just me, but I only count the stories that he wrote as official.

While the movie The Wizard of Oz is a classic, and nobody will ever argue with that, I felt that it strayed too far from the source material, and I understand why they made the changes, though the main plot and characters were there, I thought the singing was... unnecessary. I know that the singing is one of the main reasons people liked it so much because musicals were popular at the time the movie was made, and still are for some reason, but I thought it distracted from the story.

The sequel Return to Oz from 1985 was closer to the original stories, but again there were changes that made the movie disappointing. Since then there have be a bunch of different adaptations of the stories, in movies, tv series, and animated shows, some of them are actually really good and enjoyable, and others are not, but unfortunately none of them have come close to being a faithful retelling of Baum's original stories.

[Murfreesboro]

You have one on me. I've never read the Oz books. I think I tried to once as a kid, but the first one was so different from the movie I watched and adored every year (its broadcast used to be a major event, prior to home video) that I gave up on it. Perhaps I should revisit that series.

What do you think of Wicked? Do you consider that a continuation, or a subversion or parody? Of course, I know only the play. My daughter says the play changes the book on which it's based, too. And since you evidently don't care for musicals, perhaps it wouldn't be to your taste in any event.

LOTR: Some people love that book series so much that they read it every year, almost like the Bible. I'm not in that group, but most of the ardent fans liked the movie adaptations, so I'd say the creative team did a good job. Not a perfect job. Some things that do matter had to be cut. The Tom Bombadil (sp?) episode is self
-contained and had to go, but it does tease the imagination, and my husband regretted the omission. Also the whole cleansing of the shire episode at the end was omitted. I think both of those episodes maybe reinforce the theological themes, but they do work better in a novel than a dramatic form.

ETA: when my daughter was in high school, her American history teacher discussed The Wizard of Oz as a political or economic allegory. I forget all the details now, but you can Google it and find that theory. It had to do with going off the gold standard or substituting a silver standard or something. That was a big political discussion in the 1890s, around the time the book was conceived. I believe Baum always denied the book was allegorical, but of course authors are not always straightforward about this stuff. Also, it is not uncommon for fantasy literature to incorporate political satire or commentary. Gulliver's Travels is certainly full of it.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

In a way I'm thankful that they made us read so many books when I was in school, we got to read some of the classics such as The Catcher in the Rye, Gulliver's Travels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Odyssey, and Adventures in Wonderland just to name a few. Some of the books were a pleasure to read, while others seemed like punishment to sit through. I always said that I was going to read War and Peace one day, and there are still so many more literary masterpieces that I wanted to read but I know that won't ever happen now because I just don't have the time to.

I want to get my kids into reading more, they are still young and they know the basics, but I can already tell that they don't have much interest in reading, and I can understand why with the technological age we are living in, people would rather watch a movie than read a book. Actually, I guess it's been that way for years now, like you mentioned with watching The Wizard of Oz movie, certain mediums just appeal to you more than others. I know when I was a kid I would rather be playing video games instead of reading, but you had to do it if you wanted a passing grade.

As for Wicked, I read the 90s novel and I liked it, though I like to think of it as a story set in a alternate universe, and not a part the main story. I haven't seen the musical though as it wasn't playing near me and I wasn't going to go out of my way to watch it, I thought that they would have put it on DVD by now like they have with other musicals but they haven't. I know that they are making it into a movie that is supposed to come out next year, and they will be dividing it into 2 movies, so hopefully it will be as good as the book.

I did watch a documentary a few years ago about The Wizard of Oz and the parallels it had with the economic situation back then, I thought it was interesting and they had some good theories that made sense.

I'd like to say that I've read and watched every version of the Oz story but I can't as there are just too many out there. I think there were at least 26 other "official" books written by other authors after Baum's death, and I just don't consider them canon so I only read 5 of them before I stopped. I have watched some interesting movies and shows with their own versions of the story, without going into spoilers some of the better ones are below.

1. Tin Man, 2007, this was a three part miniseries.
2. Emerald City, 2017, this was a single season with 10 episodes.
3. The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, 2005, a fun movie with a few interesting changes.
4. Oz the Great and Powerful, 2013, this was a prequel to the first Wizard of Oz movie, there was a great scene in there right before everybody was going to start singing.

There was also going to be a movie from Tim Burton called Lost in Oz from around 2000, but only a script was written and it didn't go further than that. I can only imagine how beautiful that version would have been with Burton's style.

Regarding musicals, I live with 3 women, 4 if you count the cat, so sitting through musicals is something that I do way more than any normal man should have to. I don't mind some of the older stuff as clearly I love NBC and almost anything Muppets, but sitting through some of the modern shows is like some sick new form of torture meant to drive you insane, but you do it because you love your kids and you know it makes them happy.

With that said, there are actually a a few musicals that I actually do really like, first is the South Park movie from the late 90s, I was still in my teens when this came out so I was really into potty humor, the movie was hilarious and as long as you're not easily offended then you should check it out. I also liked Heathers: The Musical, this was another one that they released on DVD, my wife found out about it and told me because she knew how much I love the movie Heathers, so we found it online and watched it. I honestly didn't know what to expect going in, but I was laughing the whole way through, it was a fun ride and I recommend it to anyone that loves the movie.

I apologize for the really long post, it's late and once again I'm the only one awake.

[Murfreesboro]

Wow, you are so knowledgeable about Baum and Oz! I am impressed.

Reading is my thing, since I was an English major and, at one point in my life, a college English prof. I've read a great, great many of the world classics, many of them in school. It's hard to explain, but I get a different feeling from reading a book I've chosen to read as opposed to reading one I've been assigned to read. This is true even though I've enjoyed almost everything I've ever been asked to read at school. Maybe it's because, in school, you always have the pressure of a deadline. Some of those 19th century novels are real tomes, written back when reading was the primary leisure time activity for almost everyone. They weren't written to be blazed through. I have gotten through several of them since my school days by reading them before I fall asleep at night. If it takes me two or three months, so what? I did read War and Peace that way, also Les Miserables, and, most recently, Bleak House. I enjoyed them all. I would really recommend that you carve out a space for Tolstoy. I have also read Anna Karenina, though I think I preferred W&P. But the thing about Tolstoy that sets him apart from everyone else is his omniscient narrator. I have never read anything else like it. If he spends two paragraphs with a character you never see again, somehow you know that character completely in those two paragraphs. There is a hunting scene in AK where you are reading about the hunt, and suddenly, for about two pages, you realize you are in the mind of the dog, and you think, yes, this is right, this is how the dog would see it. He does the same thing with a war horse in W&P. I have told people, if God were to write a novel, this is the novel God would write.

Musicals: singing has always been my avocation, and I'm good enough that I had to make a decision early on between music and literature. I have one of those high, clear, Julie Andrews type voices. As it was, I studied voice as an elective throughout college, and have always sung in school choirs, community choirs, church choirs, and the occasional musical (when I was in school). I get tapped for solos a lot, though I have always preferred small group work. I mention it because that's how I met my husband, in concert choir and chamber singers (we did early music, medieval and Renaissance stuff) when we were in school. My husband was also in a barbershop quartet. We toured Europe together with that school group. My husband has an amazing voice. He could have sung opera and been a stand out, I'm convinced, though he always preferred jazz (Al Jarreau was his musical hero, and Manhattan Transfer his favorite group). Mine is more of a chamber voice, not as big as his. Anyway, I was quite surprised to learn, early on, that my husband dislikes musicals. Somehow they really don't appeal to men as much as to women, why, I don't know. For me, theater music was my first love. But in my case, perhaps that's because I do have a strong literary bent, and theater is the most literary of the performing arts.

Kids and reading: certainly there are a great many competing leisure time activities now, and they all have some value. If you or your wife could find a time to read to your girls, and I know it's tough because you are business owners, that would help. You don't have to stop reading to them just because they've learned to read. I was reading Grimms Fairy Tales to my daughter at night when she was 13 (some of those tales are weird and dark!). Finding the balance is key. They will always cherish memories of time spent with you.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

Thanks Murf! I have my mother to thank for my interest in the Oz story, when I was 6 she put a copy of the book in my hand and told me that this was my ticket to a whole new world, and she was right. I had watched the movie when I was 3, and I was immediately drawn to the story and characters, and it was around the same time that they released the Return to Oz movie, and a Oz cartoon which went further into the story. I guess my mother saw how much I was enjoying it and this prompted her to give me the book. It was even more special to me because it was her copy that she read when she was a kid in the 60s. She would sit there and read it with me, and explain the things I was too young to understand, and as we started getting through the books, soon enough I was reading them on my own, and I can honestly say that they had a profound impact on me, as it began my fascination and respect for literature and prepared me for every great book that I would read in my life.

I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy when I was in school, I hope that I spelled the title correctly as it's been over 25 years since I read it and I'm working from memory. We were also supposed to read Anna Karenina but there wasn't enough time in the semester to get to it. Like you, I think that the books you choose to read on your own are far more satisfying, and I agree that being told to read a book as a school assignment can hinder your ability to enjoy and absorb it properly when you're facing the threat of a deadline and worrying about your grades. With that said, I also know that I probably wouldn't have picked some of those titles to read if my teachers didn't make us read them, and I would have missed out on some of the greats. As for War and Peace, with the glowing review you just gave the book, they should put that on the back cover, hopefully I will still get to it one day.

We still read to the kids regularly, especially when they are not in school like during the summer and winter holidays. They enjoy when we read to them, and they will read books with us, but I have noticed that they won't even pick up a book when they are on their own, they would rather watch tv, or play with something else instead of read a book. As I said, I understand how easily it is to get distracted with the options out there today, but I also feel that part of it is that the schools don't put as much emphasis on reading that they used to.

I know my kids are still young, they will be starting grades 1 and 4 next month, but when we ask our kids what kind of of books the teacher lets them read in class and they tell me the teacher doesn't make them read anything, it makes you wonder what's going on with the education system these days. I don't expect the school to make them read Greek mythology at this point, but they should at least be trying to encourage them to read something. If it was just the younger students I wouldn't mind as much but I have nieces and nephews that are teens and I talk to them regularly about their homework and they show me the types of books they are reading in grade 9 and it's something that I was reading in grade 5. Then when I ask my nephew about it he gets sarcastic and says that print is dead, and nobody reads books anymore.

I suppose that I can't really blame the school system as they are limited by their approved curriculum and budget, and I know that there are some teachers that don't actually care and it's just a job to them. Some of the students are also responsible, because they don't seem to care either, but there's no denying that the educational standards have continually been going down for years.

During the pandemic we home schooled our kids, and I know they were learning more here than they were in school, but when things went back to normal we sent them back to school, I know my wife and I would prefer to still have them home schooled, but as you had mentioned before, it isn't fair to deprive them of social interaction with their friends because it can be damaging to them in the long term, and we agree so we still let them go to regular school, though we will still continue to teach them as much as we can when they are with us.

I think it's really sweet how you met your husband, and that you both share the same passion. It's also great that you got to tour Europe together, I'm sure that your relationship grew stronger from the experience. I had read in some of your older posts that you sang in church choirs, but I didn't know you were so immersed in singing.

I find it funny that you would mention that musicals don't really appeal to men as much as they do to women, as I've had that conversation with a few guys that can't stand musicals, but they will sit through it for their wife. There was actually a episode of South Park that covered the subject, it was called Broadway Bro Down, it also featured Wicked as one of the musicals, I can't go into details here because the episode contains mature subject matter, but it explains why guys really put up with musicals.

[Murfreesboro]

Yes, obviously there are men who make it big as Broadway musical actors, so not every man is turned off by musicals, but a great many of them are. I just always thought it was odd that my husband was among that number, as he is someone who could have done that professionally, I think. He has done plays both in school and community theater. He is very good on stage. But he has never taken any of that seriously. Usually he was just doing it as a favor to a friend, when they needed someone to fill out a role. I have told him, truthfully, that if I'd ever been as good as he is on a stage, they'd never have gotten me off of one.

What you say about the decline of educational standards is very concerning, and it affects my husband and me, both as parents and as professionals. Well, I haven't been a professional for years, but my husband has had a lengthy career as a teacher since he left the Army decades ago. Nowadays he is primarily a counselor for intellectually gifted high school students, but his academic field is poli sci/history, and he's taught a lot of government.

One big problem he has lived through is the "No Child Left Behind" program, which was based on Virginia's state initiative " Success for all Students." We were living and he was teaching in the VA public schools when that was implemented. It sounded great in theory, and he was initially enthusiastic, but the implementation revealed the flaws. Basically, a student's success in school was shifted away from the student and onto the teacher, who wasn't allowed to fail anyone. The result? Many students stopped working when they realized they could pass without doing much of anything. Meanwhile, the success of the schools was tied to standardized test scores, so teachers and administrators became slaves to the tests. Their job security was tied to those test scores. There will always be some students in every generation who work as hard as possible, out of pride or a sincere interest in their own education, but most people will take the easy way out. To us it seemed that the program had created an atmosphere in which the top students had probably never worked harder, but the majority had never taken it easier. Also, the best students got tested to death and stopped caring about the standardized scores. They got cynical about the testing. I'm not sure what the answer should be, but I think it should start with giving the teachers the power to fail students who don't work.

There is also a legal problem with some special ed students. The law says a student cannot be punished for his disability, which makes sense. But what if his disability is anger management? My older son was in a 6th grade classroom with a boy whose disability was anger management. He went off one afternoon and literally demolished the classroom, tossing desks about, etc. The petite female teacher had no way to defend herself or her students from an out-of-control 12-yr-old male. I think the boy did get a few days out of school to cool off, but eventually he was back in the classroom. The teacher's husband was infuriated and consulted a lawyer to consider a lawsuit. He quickly discovered that his hands were tied. The husband asked the lawyer, "Do you mean that this boy has all the rights, and my wife has none?" Well, yes. Welcome to the modern classroom. Whenever there is an incident of violence in the public schools, my husband reads the articles carefully. He frequently finds, in the fine print, that the perpetrators were on some type of medication that he recognizes as drugs administered to special ed kids (he is himself a special ed teacher, though at the high end). Every time there is an instance of violence, people ask, Why didn't anyone notice? Listen, the teachers ALWAYS know who their dangerous students are. The law renders them powerless to do anything about it.

Declining reading standards: I saw this first-hand back in 2003-04, when I spent one year teaching English to intellectually gifted 7th graders. These were kids with certified high IQs, some in the 140s. And, yes, they were very bright. But a number of them struggled with the novel Treasure Island, which was on their pre-assigned syllabus. That 19th-century English seemed as foreign to them as French. I was puzzled, because I had read Treasure Island at 9 1/2. My grandmother was dying, my mother was living at the hospital with her, and I had to be there, too, because there was nowhere else to go. My mother took me to the hospital gift shop to find some book with which I could amuse myself, and about the only thing there was Treasure Island. So I read it. I didn't read it literally, analysing symbols and such, but I had no difficulty following the story. So I wondered, why could I read at 9 what these super bright kids could not read at 12 and 13?

[Murfreesboro]

Sorry, my post got so long that now I have to make another one. I'm almost done.

Ultimately I decided that the turn away from the King James Bible had a lot to do with this. My students were churchgoers, and, even though it was a public school, many of them would bring their Bibles in for outside reading. I couldn't do that as a teacher, but they could do so on their own. Anyway, I observed that their Bibles were all modern translations. But when I was their age, I was reading the King James. Moreover, I grew up in an Episcopal church, which at that time was still using a prayer book which was essentially unchanged from the 1640s. So I was exposed to vocabulary and syntax that these young people never heard. When the Bible and liturgy were modernized, they were simplified.

It's not just the religious literature that's been simplified, but everything. When my first child was in preschool, he was taught the nursery rhyme "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Everyone knows this rhyme, but I noticed that one line was changed. In the last verse, I'd learned, "Though I know not what you are/Twinkle twinkle little star." But my son was taught, "Twinkle Twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are," merely a repetition of the opening lines. When I asked the teacher why it had been changed, she said, "Well, nobody talks that way anymore." I mulled that over. I think the change was a dumbing down. "Though I know not what you are" is a subordinate clause, and subordinate clauses are a sign of more sophisticated thought. When you read freshman papers in college, the less sophisticated ones are full of coordinate clauses, meaning that every thought is equal to every other thought. But subordinate clauses imply hierarchy of thought. Preschool kids can learn whatever is presented to them. If they are taught subordinate clauses, they start to think that way.

End of lecture, lol.

ETA: in my previous post, the word "literally" should have been "literarily." At 9, I was not reading Treasure Island literarily.