Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway

Papa

July 21, 2014 plthomasedd 2 Comments

As Steve Paul explains, July is an important month for Ernest Hemingway:

The month of July brings the anniversary of three defining Hemingway moments: He was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois; he took his own life on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. And on July 8, 1918, while he was serving in the Red Cross ambulance service attached to the Italian army, he was wounded by the explosion of an Austro-Hungarian trench mortar shell. The blast sliced 227 pieces of metal fragments into his body, gave him what felt like a near-death experience and ultimately shaped one persistent subtext of Hemingway’s literary career.

For me, 21 July 2014 sits just a few weeks after the birth of my first granddaughter by my only daughter—and with that event the never-ending question posed to me: What is she going to call you?

My first urge has always been “Whatever she calls me,” to leave this to this wonderful new child who will have an inordinate amount of her life decided for her as we are wont to do with children, sadly.

I named by maternal grandfather Tu-daddy, and so there is some nostalgia in that desire to leave this to my granddaughter.

But if I must choose a name, it will be Papa for Papa Hemingway. Hemingway’s first wife Hadley explains in an audio clip how Hemingway became Papa:

In this clip, Alice Sokoloff asks Hadley if she remembers how the name “Papa” began, which was sometime during their years in Paris. As we know, Hemingway was wonderful at assigning nicknames to almost everyone he knew. Throughout the tapes, Hadley enjoys remembering affectionate names between them such as “Bumby” and “Bumili”, “Hemingstein”, “Tattie”, “Hash”, “Feather Kitty”, “Wax Puppy”, and “Tiny”.

“You did a lot of playing with words,” Alice observes, later in the tape. “We both loved words”, Hadley agrees, “I loved words as much as he did but I wasn’t a magician.”

As a writer, one who loves wordplay, and someone who nicknames (I am also a name clipper: Sky for Skylar, Jess for Jessica), I have much in common with Hemingway, who poses a tremendous problem for me.

Yes, I know there is much wrong with and in Hemingway’s writing and life. And I struggle with my technical attraction to his economy of language—his craft—against those issues of misogyny and complicated glorification of the very violent man’s world.

The world is complicated—as I grow to understand better every day—so I have a special, although conflicted, place in my writer’s heart for Hemingway, and if my granddaughter takes to Papa, well, so much the better for this world, a world I want to be kinder and more gracious because she is now here as another part of the lineage begun with my daughter.

As Hadley notes above, there is a magic to words, and magic rises above this world we fumble all too often. Words, then, are hope, the sort of hope we embrace when we conjure yet more of us on this planet.

Yes, Papa is fine by me.

—

Blogs Using Hemingway

Gates Moratorium Another Scam: Beware the Roadbuilders pt. 2

The Analogy, Hyperbole Problem: “With explanation kind” (Tone, pt. 5)

From Failing to Killing Writing: Computer-Based Grading

Our Dystopia Is Now: The Circle (Eggers) and Feed (Anderson)

Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)

Poetry

the archeology of white people

Education, education reform

From Failing to Killing Writing: Computer-Based Grading

February 4, 2014 plthomasedd 4 Comments

[Header Photo by Clément Hélardot on Unsplash]

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Bill and Mike discuss Mike’s bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Someday soon, two teachers of writing will be sitting and discussing the death of teaching writing, and the conversation will sound much the same.

Teaching writing came into its own in the 1970s and 1980s with great promise that the discipline of teaching composition would find its way into K-12 classrooms; this potential rested in the arms of the National Writing Project and its state affiliates across the U.S., often connected with universities.

However, we have sat silently and watched the accountability era dismantle that hope, and as a result, we have failed the teaching of writing [1].

Standards and high-stakes testing have slowly bled that promise dry, and then the addition of the writing section of the SAT kicked writing instruction while it was down. But the final nail in the coffin?

Calls for computer-based grading of writing:

Here is where leadership is needed from teachers and administrators. Before some company comes up with a way to grade essays and boards of education become enamored with the idea, and legislators find new ways to require their use…let’s lead. The technology is here….

We must lead the conversation by knowing and understanding how the technology can improve the educational process, which is based on the most important relationship between teacher and student. In educating our communities, it is essential to begin with the intention of improving teacher and student contact time, not replacing it. We need to design the solution, not be given it. First steps are opening our minds to the possibilities.

If you take the time, this is the same self-defeating fatalism that accompanies advocacy for Common Core: Let’s shoot ourselves in the foot before someone else does it!

The piece quoted above asks Will We Ever Allow Computers To Grade Students’ Writing?—to which I say, probably because we tend to do whatever is least credible in our education policy.

A better question is Should We Ever Allow Computers To Grade Students’ Writing?—to which the answer is an unequivocal No!

And thus I offer a reader of resources for speaking that truth to such calls:

Apologies to Sandra Cisneros, Maja Wilson

NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring

Thomas, P.L. (2005, May). Grading student writing: High-stakes testing, computers, and the human touch. English Journal, 94 (5), 28-30:

As a writer, I cannot imagine composing without my trusted iMac and iBook. And as a writing teacher, I watched the value computers and word processors had for my students—particularly as the technology contributed to students’ ability to write more and to revise more efficiently. While computers and computer programs do offer a huge benefit for the teaching of writing, they must remain merely a tool; we cannot allow anyone to suggest that computers can substitute for humans in the ultimate evaluation of a composition.

Our students’ writing has “something the tests and machines will never be able to measure,” and it is now the duty of all writing teachers to make known the art of human assessment of writing. (pp. 29-30)

[1] Please see the following:

Why Are We (Still) Failing Writing Instruction?