So yesterday I blogged about my new Kindle and how much I dig it. And then a friend sent me a link to Project Gutenberg and I realized that, WOW… there is so much INCREDIBLE reading I can do.

And none of it costs an extra dime.

Makes me think of school libraries. Sometimes, there are not enough copies of a book for every kid. Sometimes the title I wanted to teach is checked out by another teacher. Sometimes the school doesn’t even own the title so I could never bring it into my class even though I knew it was a book that could be used to rock the house.

Look, there is an inevitablity to eReaders of some sort finding their way into our schools in a permanent manner – and there is a ton of upside to us speeding up that process on many, many fronts.

And for all those who fear the death of the canon, just click here to see what the top 100 books being downloaded at Project Gutenberg are right now.
Either we English teachers own a heck of a lot of eReaders or someone is reading the classics because they are, well… worth reading.

I’ve said it a thousand times: great books will survive due to their merit… not as a result of ELA teachers shoving them down the throats of kids who are mandated to sit in hard, uncomfortable chairs and be quiet for 55 minutes a day.

Project Gutenberg is showing tales of a demise that hasn’t demised much at all. I digg it!

(BTW, on a side note, at dinner the other night I met a woman in her mid-30′s who was almost done reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Goodness, do I love Dumas. And then we got around to my favorite Frenchy of all time: Victor Hugo. And lookie who is currently number 35 on the list cited above. Niiiice!)

I’ve spent a lot of time on the iPad bandwagon this year. I scored one for myself within the first few weeks they were out and have LOVED the thing – and touted the thing – ever since.

My wife even got me a monogrammed iPad sleeve for the holidays. Cool, cool, cool!

But someone else scored me a Kindle as a gift and you know what, I really, really like the thing. A lot! Though I wouldn’t use it to jump online in any fashion (though it has a limited ability to do so) as a “reading only device” it really rocks.

Better for overall reading than the iPad, that’s for sure.
Now this is not a “me fessing up to eat crow” post because if I were to outfit a school and our nation’s students I’d still go with the iPad hands down, but reading books on the Kindle’s e-ink screen has already won me over. I like it, I will use it, and it will find a place in my “bag”.

Of course, I can’t even tell you how many people have told me how their volume of reading has practically tripled since they scored a Kindle as well. I can now see why. Between it’s usability and its portability, the device does gives voracious readers like me a chance to haul around tons of books in a way that up until a few years ago was simply not possible.

In fact, I remember back in my 20′s when I wanted to disappear for a bit, I headed down with a one way ticket to Central America with just a back pack and a lot of baggage. Emotional baggage, for sure. But physical, too. Jeans, t-shirts, shorts, soap, none of those things really weighed me down. But I HAD to carry books with me. I mean I carried like 10-15 of them at a time. Literally. People who saw what I was schlepping thought I was bonkers – clearly, they accounted for 35-50% of my travel weight – but I swear, those books saved me. And when I’d cross into towns with used book stores, I’d swap my Maugham for some Coelho, grab all the Castaneda I could locate, spend evenings with Dostoevsky and Dante and on and on.

Now I think to myself, “If only I had a Kindle then.”

Yes, the printed book will always have a space in my life – this is not an either/or world in which we now live – but the Kindle, the iPad, the color Nook (I don’t own one, but it looks quite intriguing to me, too) well… these devices are changing the manner in which we interact with and access literary content.

However, the question is, if you change the means of interaction, do you also change the content as well? This is still a “yes and no” type of territory for me.

Anyway, for now, yes, I’ve added another gadget to my reading life… and it’s only made me want to read more and more.
Welcome, Kindle.

I have a stack of stuff to do on my desk… but no matter how much stuff I do, it seems as though the stack remains at the same height.

And I swear, I do a lot.

I mean it’s just a wee bit before X-mas and New Year’s and I am still cranking at full speed, as if it were mid-May or something.

Question: If I stop actually doing work, does the stack of work for me to do stop growing? I mean it’s clear that doing work doesn’t reduce the stack so maybe not doing work will not increase the stack.

It’s Alice in Wonderland logic, for sure… but perhaps we’ve all got it wrong. I mean slackers never really have much to do and highly productive people (who do a lot) always seem to have a lot to do.

There’s gotta be a law here, somewhere, Murphy style.Here’s my first stab at it – I call it Sitomer’s Preposterous Law of Work. (Why not, right?)

To not do work will result in there being less work for you to do, but to do a lot of work will result in there being a lot more work for you to do.

In other words, “Work or Work not, that is the question.”

I have a file in my filing cabinet drawer in my home office titled REJECTION LETTERS.

It’s stuffed. However, I am sad to say that I spent years and years and years throwing out rejection letters written to me by agents who did not want to represent me, publishers who did not want to publish me, and editors who did not want to edit me, publish me or even speak to me. Boy, do I wish I would have kept them. Wish I wouldda kept them all. Instead, I didn’t really start keeping track of all the rejections until well after I began to understand that being a professional writer meant you were going to get rejected. Probably for the rest of my career.

Learning to live with the disappointment, sorrow, angst, anger, bitterness and hurt was just a part of the job. Like baseball, there’s no shame in striking out. Even Hall of Famers do it a few times a week.

That’s why I was ticked to read this. It’s an article on how…

• George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected under the premise that “it’s impossible to sell animal stories in the United States.”

• Lord of the Flies was called “an absurd an uninteresting fantasy”

• The Fountainhead was called “unsaleable and unpublishable”

And on and on and on.

Football coaches teach that there is no shame in getting knocked down… so get back up and go make a play.

Basketball coaches talk about how there is no need to pout when your opponent scores on you (that’s what they are trying to do, after all) so take the ball out of bounds and keep playing the game.

But writers often seem to think that rejection is a wall instead of an inevitable speed bump. If Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Hemmingway and Orwell can get rejected, so can I… and so can you.

Feel the sting, let it become more coal for your inner furnace and KEEP ON GOING!

(BTW, I think this is a rule for all professions, one we simply do not often enough teach to our young people today.)

I like to read stuff from all sorts of perspectives written by all kinds of people. If they are “thinkers in their field” in any way, shape, or form, I will often cut them a wee bit of slack and try to hear what they have to say.

Not that I always agree, but listening to others weigh in helps me in many ways”think about what I really think” in my own life.

And often I see connections to school from what people “think” about life from outside the world of education.

To wit, Seth Godin just wrote a blog post which illustrates this point exceptionally well. (Here’s the link.) Essentially, his basic point is, when someone asks you what you are working on, you ought to be enthusiastic about your reply… or else you are, as he says, “wasting away”.

I am not sure I agree with the “wasting away” part because I truly LOVE what I do for a living but still, there are times where it’s a heck of a lot of blue-collar, roll up your shirt sleeves and execute, execute, execute type of work. (Nothing is ever all glamour and people who try to sell that idea to other people annoy me because persevering through the mundane – after all, God is in the details, right? – is a very under-appreciated quality of success, in my opinion) However, I do agree with the idea that the over-arching energy behind what “you are working on” ought to be fueled by enthusiasm, inspiration and passion.

And when I think about how so many kids go through school these days, I can’t help but be shocked by how absent these feelings are from their educational experience.

Top students, well, we often see how fervent they get when it comes to things like math-a-thon or science fair or moot court or debate club and so on. But if you slice away the top 10% of the highest achievers in any school and you took a measurement of “the enthusiasm for learning barometer”, I fear the ratings would be in the tank.

And who does well in anything that they do not find meaningful, personally relevant or authentically exciting.

Seth Godin is preaching to the business world in his blog post but I think the same thing can be said in education. The kids need to care (internal motivation; Daniel Pink has spoken to this a great deal) and the teachers need to feel enthusiastic and driven about their profession duties as well. (Which of course, can’t ever be legislated, much less measured… another post entirely.)

If you don’t care on the inside, eventually, it’s going to show in the work on the outside.

I did a student assembly while I was in South Florida for about 10 different high schools on Tuesday at the African American Library of Broward County (great facility, BTW) – and it was a home run.

So many of the kids had read my books before I even entered the auditorium that you could feel the buzz before I ever said a word. And by the time I was done, I think it felt to everyone in the room (the students, their teachers, the administrators in the district, me) that we had just bonded at a very deep level through books. Truly, it was a rip-roaring day.

And then I went to sign books – something I love to do cause hey, there were years and years and years of my life spent wondering if ever anyone was ever going to ask me to sign a book I’d authored (or if anyone was ever going to publish me, for that matter). The lines were long and boisterous.

I left feeling wiped out. Spent. I pour a lot of energy out when I am “on stage” – especially for student assemblies – but there was a feeling of contentness underlying the tiredness. At the risk of sounding immodest, I’d done good and I knew it. (However, it did takes me about 10 hours to prepare for those 75 minutes… another story indeed.)

But my grandfather could not make it to the event. He’s wanted to see me speak for years however, between the wheelchair, the early start time, the drive to the destination and so on, well… it was just going to be too much for him.

Yet later, when I returned to his side to meet up, he told me how proud he was of me. And I told him, I learned at the feet of a master. And then he told me a tale of Ravel and Gershwin.

Apparently, George Gershwin really, really, really, wanted to study music under Ravel. And when Ravel saw Gershwin’s stuff, he told him no. Refused.

Ravel told him, “You don’t want to become a second rate Ravel when you have the talent to become a first rate Gershwin. So go be George Gershwin.”

Which he did.

It was a touching moment between my grandfather and I. (I blogged the other day about me throwing a surprise 90th for him – and WOW, was he surprised. 75 people ended up making it from across the country, too – a real testament in so many ways to him.)

Now, I’m no Gershwin. But I have been raised by people who did encourage me to be me… and I fear that when I look out at our schools today, encouraging out kids to be who they are – as opposed to trying to force them into who we want them/need them to be – is a frightening and omnipresent phenomenon.

Even after nine decades, he still has more to teach. God Bless You, Grandpa Alvin.

Today I am throwing a surprise 90th birthday for my grandfather, Alvin Lester Sitomer.

My name is Alan Lawrence Sitomer… I was named after him. (Naming after the living is a somewhat dicey call… let my own life be a warning to you – LOL!)

I am not sure I can put into words as to the degree of positive impact this man has had on my personality, belief system or character. And for me to try right now will only leave me feeling as if I have done an inadequate job, so I will not.

(NOTE; it also feels as if it might have a sense of a pre-death eulogy aspect to it and as morbid as that may sound, he is 90, his health is “so so” and this weekend might be the last time I ever see him. However, I feared that 2 years ago as well when we last parted – he lives on the east coast – and I was wrong then so perhaps I will be incorrect now as well.)

Either way it’s a trip of love lined by melancholy. No one escapes the cycle of life. Not even the ones we most adore. And watching role models age – and becoming the caretaker for those who used to be our sole source of strength – well, it’s tough. (Yep, I am the one who does it all. My own father – his son – passed in 1994 and his other son, well… let’s just say it’s with honor and a spirit of love that I currently do the duty. No need to jump into family closets.)

Probably my greatest joy will be the fact that I get to bring my 4 year old daughter to see and hang out with her great-grandfather. He was a master story-teller in his day. (The sun sets on us all, I fear.) But if there is a reason I love STORY, a reason I love heroes and villains and people with guts and fortitude and determination, it certainly began with me sitting transfixed at his knee hearing him weaves tales that made me never want to grow up or leave his side. Zorro, Robin Hood, people who fought for social justice (now that I am old enough to look back and see themes – which, BTW, carry over into my own teaching and writing to this day) those are the stories which moved his soul… and in the telling of them, he moved mine.

As a lawyer, one of his greatest strengths was always oration. And a keen, keen mind.

I’d go on but I guess it’s a discombobulated post today. One filled with non-persued threads and feelings of sadness and longing, accented by love and wistfulness. Like a salad with lots of ingredients – colors and flavors – yet perhaps not really an all that edible dish.

Grandpa Alvin was married 67 years to my Grandma Dorothy… she passed about 2 years ago.

Here’s a pic of me making a trip to introduce them to my own daughter, back in 2010.

Grandpa Alvin is not only the most generous man I know… he’s almost always been the most generous man anyone who knows him knows. Literally, he always had time to be kind, offer wisdom and extend smiles and inspire hope.

Perhaps my greatest goal in this world was to one day be able to carry his water. He is beloved. And he’s my grandfather.

Phew… tough trip, this is.

Almost to a student, kids have been, in a Pavlovian way, turned off to textbooks. That especially hurts an English teacher’s aim of trying to develop them into readers through the use of textbooks because it’s not just an ELA association they have with them; they come into class with a history of pretty much loathing these things in their other core areas of study as well.

From 6th grade on, kids are pounded with math textbooks that far-too-many teachers use in a drill and kill style… and science textbooks that teachers use in a “Do the unit questions at the end of the chapter” style… and then history textbooks where it’s “remember these 15 dates and names by rote” style… so even if the ELA textbooks were the cat’s meow (and in my opinion, they ain’t) the kids come in with emotional baggage about using textbooks that is almost insurmountable.

And from there it feels like we’re just putting lipstick on a pig by trying to show them just how amazing these tepid, issue-free, sanitized, 12 pound tomes are.

They don’t buy it. And yet, we keep trying to sell it to them. Worst of all, district admins remain deaf to the cries of “these things ain’t working”. Cause if they were really working, maybe our “data” would be better. After all, what’s been the primary educational tool in the classroom for the past two decades?

Textbooks have ben at the center of the curricular wheel in all of the core subject areas and yet, how come few, if any, people point to them as perhaps the problem with our curriculum/low achievement/poor test scores as opposed to viewing them as the solution?

However, here’s a school district that is embracing new ideas. And I gotta say, it makes me feel like the folks out there in Pulaski are doing the sorts of things that I’d like to see embraced by more and more and more of our schools.

I was in a store the other day – a store with a reputation for NOT being the cat’s meow, but it was convenient so I went for it – and sure enough, the purchase I made turned out to be in need of a return.

Which, of course, I didn’t find out til I arrived at home and realized, this thing’s busted.

So back I went and in I went and what did I hear? “Sir, I just work here.”

Huh?

“I’m just an employee… I just work here. I don’t run the place. I don’t own the place. I tell you, I am just an EM-PLOY-EE.”

This reminds me of something I once heard about a company with a fantastic reputation, the Ritz Carlton. I’ve heard that each em-ploy-ee has, at their discretion,, a $2000 “do whatever you need to do to make the customer happy” budget.

Why? Because they obviously know the poison of the, “I just work here” excuse.

Clearly, we could all go up and down the halls of our local schools in an effort to seek out the “I just work here” folks.

But they are not the ones who deserve the most attention. It’s the kids in our classes who have been hoodwinked into believing that this is ever an acceptable attitude to have towards the job that you do. In sports they say you play like you practice. Well, in life I think that how you perform at the smaller things indicates how you will eventually perform at life’s bigger things.

In my experience, people who don’t give a darn about how well they do on low end of tasks often do not ever get the chance to make it to the high end. And then they become grumblers about how “no one ever cut them a break”.

You make your own breaks.

“I don’t run the place. I don’t own the place.”

Buddy, you probably never will.

Scott Adams, the author and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, last year argued in an essay that smart phones represent a kind of “exobrain” that augments our regular brain, giving us the ability to store and retrieve mountains of information… and to perform tasks – like navigating unfamiliar terrain – which extend our mental capacities.

Does this mean our “endobrain” becomes less developed as a result of having an exobrain? Or does it get to actually focus on deeper, more significant (at least to the brain’s owner) things?

Is technology like an office secretary which allows the CEO to focus on (ostensibly) higher level tasks while someone else handles the more menial, more “grunt work-like” like chores of of day-to-day living?

I think about a story I once heard about Einstein. He bought something like 10 gray suits with matching shirts and ties. The reason? He didn’t want to waste precious mental energy on deciding what to wear every day. He made one good decision and replicated it so that, I imagine, he could ponder the nature of the universe… as opposed to ponder what the heck color socks would match his green tie.

Of course, I used to remember all sorts of phone numbers. No longer. Why? Because they are stored in my phone. Am I less intelligent as a result – or have my neurons been liberated to crack the riddle of the Teen Sphinx? (What does not walk on three legs at night yet think it knows the answer to every riddle it’s posed – and if it does not know the answer it deems the knowledge probably not worth knowing? Or something like that.)

Is there merit to this exobrain argument? Why should kids remember who the major players were in the War of 1812 when the info is readily available to them via google? It’s the lessons to be learned about war, leadership, governance and so on that make knowing the players in that war pertinent – and when schools only test rote memorization about such subject matters, we show our folly. (Not that I really want to devolve into bashing bubble tests right now – but sometimes, I just can’t help it. So often they merely assess such surface level knowledge that if a kid had a smartphone, there’d be nothing to these tests at all – and in an age where more and more and more of us have smart phones, what is the real value of this sort of assessment?)

And for those who posit the argument, “Well, what if the “cloud of computing goes down, where will we be then?” I wonder if they are prepared to cook by open fire and live off of salted meats should the power grids go down in all our cities. Are they ready to live without electricity? This tech is here and, like electricity, we are already dependent on it.

Is there merit in this exobrain theory?