Coming Soon—A Puerto Rican Sonnet!

“I’ve been reading up on sonnets, and I’ve decided I like the Shakespearean sonnet better than the Italian,” said Montalvo, who, until he had the misfortune of bumping into me, had happily whiled his time away with free verse. Here’s one example:

Magic Trick

Your memory

Can’t be forgotten…

Those eyes

Will always be

Remembered…

And my feelings

Will never

Die.

Montalvo has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half, with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short lines: get in, get to the point, get out.

“It sounds almost like a haiku,” said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought. Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:

The wren


Earns his living


Noiselessly.

His response?

“What’s a wren?”

It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.

“No pierda,” I tell him. We’re going over one of his poems.

“Hunh?”

“I really think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”

Well, he’s unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s. So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come back with the answer.

“It turns out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.

“So what did they tell you?”

It was, I’m sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda sounds better,” but not by much.

“Has anybody told you about the subjunctive?”

“Sub—what?”

So we did the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the words that are daggers to the heart.  

“It’s totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do. Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”

16 to 21, his current age: five years.

And what have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus “you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what a contraction was.

Or there was the Saxon genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom and did a little drilling:

“The house of Montalvo?”

“Montalvo’s house!”

And speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words derived from Latin?

“Marc?”

Well, then it was time to get down to some good examples:

“Defecation,” I tell him.

“Ummm, Latin?”

“Shit,” I say.

“Anglo-Saxon!”

“Intercourse,” I say.

He’s so excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come from?”

He’s bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure (which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.

Who knows where this is ending up?

Watch Out!

“Can I ask you a question, Marc?” said Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of the owner of the café, who was being homeschooled in Language Arts, at the time. I thought I knew what it was about, since I had been overhearing the lesson.

Language arts, you see, is what used to be called grammar, which at least was straightforward and no-nonsense. But language arts? Mealy mouthed if I ever heard it….

“Do you know how to diagram a sentence?” asked Naïa.

“Of course I do,” I said. “I personally start every day by diagramming at least three sentences, randomly chosen from The New York Times. Should the sentences prove insufficiently challenging, I create them myself. Today, for example, I decided to diagram the sentence:

Europe—roiled by war, torn by turmoil, worn and weary by woe—lurched uncertainly, in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict of the 20^th century, towards an unsteady and tenuous peace, which, despite the watery goodwill of all concerned, seemed increasingly unlikely to be achieved.”

“You diagrammed that sentence?”

“Of course I did, nor did it take me more than 33 seconds,” I swore. It’s important to maintain the illusion that these things are important. “My mother was an ardent diagrammer of sentences. She once became so engrossed in diagramming a sentence that she unwittingly missed a trip to Paris. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence is rife with people who have neglected to eat or sleep—so immersed are they in diagramming sentences. I only permit myself three sentences a day, so as not to fall into the trap.”

Naïa was completely unconvinced. Lady, Naïa’s mother, joined us. I urged her to join me in diagramming a few sentences.

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it,” said Lady, in what I thought was an unnecessarily truthful—and deflating—remark. Surely Lady understands the necessity of hypocrisy in child / adult relationships?

“It’s totally stupid,” said Naïa, and I prepared to fight the statement to one of our deaths. It did occur to me, however, that it had been years since I had diagrammed a sentence. So what was it all about? And could I still do it?

Well, that was a week ago, during which I went to New York on the flimsy excuse that I needed to hear the world’s greatest singer.

“It’s the voice I want to hear at the moment of my death,” I told Lady, who asked me what the German baritone Matthias Goerne sounded like. And Lady, who may have sniffed something fishy in my ardor for diagramming sentences, called for proof. Fortunately, YouTube came through, and I played her Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume”. She got the point.

And so I flew 1600 miles northwest, and arrived in a city that was, according to The New York Times, colder than Montana. It was not, however, colder than Wisconsin at its worst—by which I mean that it was bearable. Just….

And Goerne? To tell you how good he was, and how completely he transfixed the audience, he stood dead still in his singing poise after he had finished the 20^th and last song of the song cycle Die shöne Müllerin. And the audience? Well, we all went into what my brother John called “negative silence,” meaning that no one even breathed, and for a space of thirty seconds. And I mean that “thirty,”—as in “one, one thousand, two, one thousand…”

At last, Goerne relaxed, and then the applause was thunderous.

“It was the best ‘shöne Müllerin’ ever,” said a lady next to me on the subway—and it was hard not to disagree. I might hear it as good, but never better….

Well, it was something I had to do once in my life—spend an inordinate amount of money on going thousands of miles away to hear a concert. And was it my guilty conscience that brought on attack of Montezuma’s revenge that utterly felled me the two days following the concert? On the third day I resurrected myself, had a nice weekend, and came home.

John and Jeanne live in the quietest building in New York. From their apartment, I could hear vague traffic sounds six floors below me. But anything else? Utter silence.

Alas, what was going on this morning when I woke in San Juan? Jackhammers, since now that the street has been re-bricked, it’s obviously time to re-brick the intersections, which hadn’t been done. And why not? Why not do the whole thing at once?

What, and limit the amount of disruption and noise? Are you crazy? Besides, if it’s two projects, then think of the exponential number of cost overruns and overtime and fraudulent-or-at-least-questionable design changes available to the contractor, the subcontractors, the suppliers, and who knows else? And so I did the trot, and turned to the café. Naïa was busy at work, still diagramming sentences. It was time to find out—what was that all about? And here, Dear Reader, is what a diagrammed sentence looks like:

Ummm? It was nothing like what I remembered, so I went to YouTube, to hear a presentation on diagramming sentences. And guess what? I understand it now—because I learned grammar on my own, and from having learned Greek and Latin. But if I were coming at it from a 12-year old’s perspective? Which is to say, Naïa?

I’d be sunk….

Look—sometimes making things too easy is simply to make things infinitely more difficult. Notice in the sentence diagrammed above that there are absolutely no grammatical terms—no transitive versus intransitive verbs, no direct versus indirect objects, no present participles versus gerunds, no prepositional versus adjectival versus participial phrases. But to diagram the sentence above? You have to grasp the concepts of all the terminology above. So why not come out, explain to kids what all this stuff is, and then figure out a scheme to diagram the sentence?

How about this?

It’s rudimentary, of course. “Forecasting” in the sentence above is actually a present participle doing time as an adjective, and “and” and “but” are conjunctions—but are they coordinating or subordinating? (Answer, they’re both coordinating….) Oh, and what to do with that “today’s forecasters?” Technically, it’s an example of the Saxon genitive, (Marc’s hat, or Naïa’s computer, or even Sam’s Club—all that “apostrophe s” stuff.) Of course, if it were “forecasters of today,” then “of” would be the preposition and “today” would be the object of the preposition. But as it is, doesn’t “today’s forecasters” sound like a compound noun, like “toilet paper” or “bowling alley?”

Of course, Franny would have wanted me to identify the predicate, which I dimly remembered from half a century ago. So I asked Mr. Fernández, who assured me: it’s utterly vital. So what is it?

Anything that’s not the nominative—which would be the subject and whatever modifiers and / or conjunctions and / or preposition phrases and / or clauses…

In short, anything including and after the verb.

Why bother?

“How was the concert,” asked Lady, coming into the café.

“Fucking amazing,” I said, forgetting that there was a 12-year kid sitting by—now populating her imaginary zoo with real-if-virtual animals.

“So glad you didn’t miss it,” says Naïa, “so busy you might have been, diagramming those sentences…”

World?

Watch out!

On Music and Teaching

Well, it’s clearly a day not to read the newspaper, since is it really sensible to be taking antidepressants one minute and reading The New York Times ten minutes later? Nah…

So I bring the story of Thomas Sudhof, who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology this year. And who was his greatest teacher? His bassoon teacher who, in Sudhof’s words, “taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.”

You know, it may be true. Anyone playing a double reed instrument like the bassoon or the oboe is openly flirting with madness; at one moment you’re playing music, the next moment you’re squawking. Oh, and you neither have any control nor any warning….

And I’m thinking about teaching, lately, because I did it for a large part of my life. In fact, I still do it, and like it. My problem, however, is that I had and have absolutely no idea of what I’m doing—I am perpetually improvising.

Other teachers know what they’re doing, as I saw yesterday when I was reading a New York Times article on schools which are “flipping.” And that is? Well, here’s the Times:

Students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Oh, and guess what? Everybody, for once, is completely on board with this idea! From the same article:

The flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. “It’s the only thing I write about as having broad positive agreement,” said Justin Reich, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who studies technology and education.

Well, it’s familiar territory: there’s Marc and there’s the rest of the world. Because when I saw the video that a flipped teacher had prepared, I was less than impressed. In fact, I was half appalled. Check it out:

Full disclosure—I am perhaps one of the few people who really enjoys a vigorous discussion of subject / verb agreement. And in fact, the topic drops by for dinner occasionally, usually in the form of Mr. Fernández sputtering about the capricious way that English handles collective nouns. Spanish, of course, is completely logical—all collective nouns in Spanish are singular. But what fun is that?

All right—about the video. First, the teacher states that singular verbs have an added “s.”

Little Marc (seated in second desk, third row—and very cute): I works? You works?

Teacher (exasperated): No, Marc….

Marc: But aren’t “I” and “you” singular?

Teacher: Yes, Marc, but we’re talking about “he /she / it.”

Marc: Oh, the third person singular in the present simple indicative?

Teacher: Ummm? 

Next, the teacher discloses a trick—something he calls the “it / they” rule. Big question: “Tony works” or “Tony work?” Well, we can replace—so sez Teach—“Tony” with “it.”

Yeah?

Marc: But isn’t Tony a “he?”

Teacher: Well, yes, but to make it simpler we’re using just “it.”

Marc: How does that make it simpler?

Next, the teacher suggests that we simply count the nouns, using the example “Marc and Mary”—that’s two, see? Plural.

Marc: What about the sentence “Neither Marc nor Mary?

Teacher (nervous—he sees what’s coming): What about it?

Marc: Well, there are two subjects, but should the verb be singular? You wouldn’t say “Neither Marc nor Mary work in the mill,” would you?

Then there’s the problem—the teacher gives it away when he says “that doesn’t sound right,” in discussing the “it / they” rule.

Marc: But what if someone doesn’t know what “sounds right?” Maybe he’s never heard it right, and so he can’t tell what sounds right? Or what if he’s learning English as a new language?

Teacher: Well, I think we can assume….

I hate to say this—no wait, let’s be honest, this causes me no pain whatsoever to declare—but the teacher in this video doesn’t seem to be too bright. How would he handle the question that I, even as a child, would have asked?

Marc: What is a subject, anyway?

Teacher: Well, the subject performs the action of the verb.

Marc: What about the passive voice? What about, “the patient is examined by the medical team?” Is “medical team” the subject?

Teacher: No, the subject is “the patient.”

Marc: But is the patient examining?

That would have lead to the old and mostly true “the subject is the noun before the verb.” A possibly useful rule of thumb, yes—but it does beg the question.

Maybe it’s time to do two things. First, I seriously think that we need to reinstitute Greek and Latin into our schools, and yes, in grade school, when those young minds can soak up the rigor and the discipline of the languages. Because then kids will be able to decline nouns and conjugate verbs, which means that he or she will be able to give an example of the third person positive singular present perfect active indicative using the verb “to see.”

(“he has seen” is the answer, by the way….)

Second, why can’t all kids learn a musical instrument? You know, I’m back to playing the cello now, and looking at YouTube clips of musicians speaking and coaching. And guess what? We’re a bright, talented, funny and quick group. And it occurs to me—have I ever met a stupid musician? If I have, I’ve forgotten him or her.

The video of the subject / verb agreement has gotten 57,000 hits, and the comments are almost all positive. Some people say that he’s really helped them. But check out the video below, of the legendary Dorothy DeLay. Then tell me…

…who’s the better teacher?