Steal This Blog

The university invited me to teach a writing class because of the vast knowledge I gained in my newspapering years and my obvious skill as a journalist, writer and leader.

I said yes and soon was struck by the terror of standing in front of a class with nothing to say. That won’t do, so I came up with assignments. At one point it occurred to me that writers need to be good at observing details and I told my students to submit one observation every day in an electronic journal that I can read. I wanted them to pay attention and write down what they noticed.

It was a good idea. Most of them have demonstrated a diligent awareness of their surroundings, and sometimes themselves, and are sending in their notes. I don’t grade on punctuation. I want them to see and record. Here is a sampling of my favorites:

I noticed how one house on my route to school still has white icicle Christmas lights hanging on the fence. I pass this house every time I come to school, and I only noticed it today.

Moon
Seen At Night
Looks Transparent
Far Away
Small
Changes phases

The snow today fell in sheets, and when I looked outside my window I felt like I was in a snow globe.

Finally set up my drum set and can’t wait to be back into jamming with my friends who have been hounding me to set it up for months, it’s funny how you don’t forget how to set them up even after years of not playing

I always knew this but was especially observant of the way my guitar strings looked when I strummed them. They vibrate back and forth so fast that it almost appears to look like one very thickened guitar string and then it loses its thickness as the vibrations slow. A simple but interesting observation.

The aroma of Hazelnut fills the air around me. Clear, brown, steaming liquid pours into a paper cup from a black device near the door. I pour four spoonfuls of a white, crystalline substance into the cup of hot liquid, followed by a cold white liquid. My Hazelnut coffee is complete.

While making scrambled eggs this morning for breakfast, I took note of the transformation of a liquid egg to edible, textured eggs. As the flame burns on the stove, the egg white and yoke slowly start to cook, forming texture and solidifying. Adding the pepper and cheese melts and forms into the egg.

I’ve been playing guitar for about seven years now and I never once questioned what initially inspired me to pick it up. Sure there’s many many awesome guitarists out there, but before I discovered them I was inspired by something else entirely. I recently found the theme song to the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on YouTube and took a listen. The guitar work in the theme song is really good, and considering I was watching the show at a young age, I can’t help but wonder if that was an inspiration to pick up the guitar years later.

This morning I was awakened by a scent. My roommate was up at 8am and was making her routine cup of coffee. The rich aroma of the beans grinding mixed with a hint of creamy french vanilla hit me like a wall. I literally woke up and smelled the coffee!

As the WCSU shuttle darted and weaved around the streets of Danbury the people in the rows of seats shifted from side to side in unison like a wave splashing against the shore.

I noticed this person’s eyes, a person I see all the time, but never really looked that closely. They’re clear blue, and have such a glare to them, it’s breath-taking.

Last night, I was watching the news. Tests show that smart guys are less likely to cheat than less intelligent… well, dumb ones. But then I was thinking, maybe smart guys are so smart that they don’t make the mistakes that the dumb ones do and don’t get caught.

So many people here crack their bones. With their hands or their back. Every time I’m in class I hear the noises. Do they not know that it might give you rheumatism?

There really is a large gap between generations in regards to “chivalric” actions. I was out at a restaurant with some friends, and there was an older couple across from us. The man pulled the chair out for what is presumably his wife, and stood when she got up to go to the restroom. I’ve never seen anyone remotely close in age to me do something like that.

The right button on the touch pad of my computer is starting to show wear from several years of use, a gray smudge that looks like dirt but won’t rub off.

In my academic planner, this week’s fact was that Coca-Cola was never green, that it has always been brown. I have never heard of it being anything but brown and have no idea where this came from… or why someone would have thought it was green when it first came out. This led me to try to remember if the original glass bottles it was sold in were green. (I’m not sure if this is really a detail or observation, or if it is just an odd tangent and the procession of thoughts it led me to.)

My pregnant friend is in her third trimester and it seems that she gets more tired as the days go by. I guess I’ve never thought about it until this assignment and also I don’t have any kids. But now she moans and groans about any and everything. Those little details tend to stick out now. Way out.

Driving to work this morning I heard a clanging sound that I didn’t pay much attention to. On my way home I heard this loud rumbling sound, as if something was scraping the pavement. People are stopping in their tracks looking at me. Just my luck, I get out of the car and the muffler is actually touching the ground. So here I am in this dirty, light green 1977 chevy impala, driving 2 mph; you can hear me coming from a mile away.

Today I went shopping and noticed that there were no cute baby clothes for boys.

People are not talking about what happened in Haiti the way they did in the beginning.

Follow WCSU at www.wcsu.edu.

Steve Greenberg is a friend of Western Connecticut State University and a friend of mine. Right now, I appreciate especially that he has written this week’s blog for me. Here is Steve’s report from a recent visit to campus:

“Was up at the campus wed night for our Ives board meeting, yes, I signed up for another year and happily put together an awesome board, so things are going really well. When I entered the new student union bldg (that’s what we called them in my day), there were 2 students playing sax and trumpet in the cafe, and I was able to bribe/hire them, to come up to our meeting room, and serenade us with some Mardi Gras jazz. Was fantastic, two very polite young men, Eric and Eric, students of Fernando Jimenez, and a great representation of the quality of the students at WCSU. How awesome kids can be. Felt like telling you this, as often the portrayal of students is too stereotypical.

“Don’t know if you were down at Lake Kenosia at the Moose Lodge, watching old, young, fat and skinny take the plunge into 33 degree water for charity. It was great, WCSU had about 20 students take the plunge … from muscular football players to shrieking young women jumping in holding hands. I think it would be well-read as a human-interest article.”

Steve, as it happens, photographer Peggy Stewart was at the plunge, and she reports that several members of the women’s soccer team were there as well. I am happy to provide a link to her photos of that event and several others at which Western students directly helped or raised money for the less fortunate.

It’s the least I can do.

Learn more about Western and its great students at www.wcsu.edu

Someone who was on-scene during the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope, and who now counts herself among the legions of my dedicated readers, let me know that my last column did not live up to my usual high standards for accuracy and completeness.

My reporting implied that the Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Danbury was responsible only for manufacturing the Hubble’s primary mirror.

My friend set me straight, saying that “Perkin-Elmer not only built the primary mirror but also built the entire telescope to include the primary and secondary mirror, the metering structure that connects the mirrors, and the focal plane (where the science instruments and the Fine Guidance Sensors are housed). The entire telescope was sent to California on the Super Guppy flying from Stewart Air Field in NY to California. (PE did not supply the science instruments, except for the FGSs, which are used for pointing and for science). Once in CA, Lockheed added the spacecraft bus components and the science instruments.”

She also told me that “what you probably saw flying from Danbury was one of the Fine Guidance Sensors. Each FGS is as big as a baby grand piano. I believe a C130 was used to fly it from Danbury to California.”

Well. That kind of diminishes my brush with glory. I’m a big fan of the Fine Guidance Sensors, too, but they just aren’t as sexy as that primary mirror.

I forgive my correspondent, however, because she did admit that she enjoyed the rest of my blog. “As usual,” she wrote, “it was very well written.”

To learn more accurate information about the Hubble Space Telescope and the symposium to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its launch, go to www.wcsu.edu/hubble.

Twenty-six years ago I was a reporter for The News-Times and Paul Estefan was one of the people in charge of moving the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope from the Perkin-Elmer Corp. building where it was created to Danbury Airport and then to California for integration into the telescope superstructure.

In the newsroom, the police scanner alerted us to the traffic jam that the transport was causing so a photographer and I rushed to the airport to get the story. The Hubble had been famous for several years already and we wanted full access to the event. But Estefan, the airport administrator, stopped us at the gate leading to the runway. If we stood at the edge of the chain link we could see a little bit of the plane that the telescope was being loaded into, but the story pretty much died there. Paul and I argued but he refused to unlock the gate. I was angry and he must have felt bad about the whole scene because after that he would call me every so often and eventually we became friends.

At lunch in the summer of 2008 we were talking again about the day Paul moved the mirror and he said, “You know, the 20th anniversary of the Hubble launch is coming up. WestConn should host a forum on the telescope. It’s a big deal.”

I stole that idea and brought it back to my bosses, who told me to make it a reality.

As anyone who has planned a big event knows, things progress in stages. First, you fall in love with the concept (especially if the date is a long way off). You pull together a committee and start making the first arrangements. As the time gets closer, not only do you need to keep track of all the details, but they have to start falling into place. (Did I remember to invite those people to sit on a panel about women in science? No, I didn’t!) Will my contact at (crucial partner) finally call me back? I need to find money for what?

The main events of what we grandly call The Hubble Space Telescope Symposium will take place from April 20-24. They include a panel of female scientists and engineers who will talk to girls and young women about how to achieve careers that are not traditionally friendly to them; a roundtable of business people talking about the future of aerospace; a lecture by former astronaut Story Musgrave, who flew on the first repair mission to Hubble; a scholarship dinner for WCSU Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Dr. Phillip Lu; and a day-long science and technology fair on Saturday, April 24, that will feature exhibits about the Hubble and other space and engineering activities, including a space suit, a meteorite, and demonstrations. Preceding the symposium, on Feb. 23, a trainer from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will lead a professional development day for science teachers. Details on all can be found at www.wcsu.edu/hubble.

At this point, things are coming together and even though I awaken and sit bolt upright every day at 2 a.m., I’m usually able to get back to sleep in an hour or so after running down a list of what is yet to be accomplished.

Normally I work hard to avoid putting myself in situations that disrupt my rapid eye movement. But, like a lot of people, I love the Hubble, whose achievements are at once beyond the reach of ordinary people and completely within our grasp. I don’t fully understand how the Hubble helped nail down the age of the universe, sometimes declared to be its greatest scientific finding but — those photos! — Hubble has sent us thousands of images that cause us to ponder who we are, and why. Who hasn’t seen one of those close-ups of an exploding star, or a light-years’ breadth of space filled with thousands of galaxies, and not been compelled to grab the arm of the person nearest to them and exclaim. Hubble makes us — me, anyway — feel insignificant and grandly human.

Michael Chabon, in his book “Manhood for Amateurs,” writes about looking through a telescope at planets and stars with his children and wondering whether one of the kids will one day feel compelled to study the universe.

“He or she will be able to look up at the sky and see not myths and legends and a history of failure but information, gases and voids, cold, infernal, luminous and pure. Or maybe my children will just look up and remember the weight of my hand on their shoulders as they stood beside me on a warm summer night, the rasp of my beard against their cheek, my voice soft at their ear, telling them, Look.”

I’m kind of hoping that if you take part in the Hubble Space Telescope Symposium you will experience something like that.

Follow Western Connecticut State University at www.wcsu.edu

Report from first day of class in the writing course I teach:

One student tells us he is a pagan. I thought there were lots of pagans around but he says he is the only pagan he knows. As he explained to the class, it’s easy to keep a low profile as a pagan because a lot of the time you are simply trying to stay in tune with natural things, which isn’t all that bizarre. And, he said, many of the holidays popular in today’s society are based at least in part on pagan observances. Christmas has ties to the ancient “Yule” celebration, for instance.

So you can practice without people thinking you’re too much of a weirdo. It’s kind of like being a vegetarian (although no one in class would admit to that).

Another student is planning to leave the university in May following her freshman year. When she graduated high school she joined the Air Force for two years. She said she had a desire to serve her country. A few weeks ago she signed up for a hitch in the Army. She hopes to serve as a military police officer in Afghanistan while she continues to work on her college career online.

I made fun of a few students who want to be journalists, especially the young man who says he plans to be both a photographer and a writer. Could he pick two other career paths less likely to result in paying jobs? He allowed himself to glare at me but he answered very politely that (in so many words) he plans to do just fine and maybe I should mind my own business. (I agreed with him.)

Here’s where a place like Western is different than many of the elite, private universities you find in New England. At those schools, all the students are pretty much the same, and have had pretty much the same experiences. You can learn a lot about history, science and English at Private U, but you are less likely to learn life lessons from your classmates.

It’s an extra benefit of being a student at Western.

To follow Western Connecticut State University, go to www.wcsu.edu

Spring semester begins this week, which for those of us who will be standing in front of the classroom raises a question: Will our students learn anything?

The old pros are probably confident. They have seen enough semesters play out to know that their students will inevitably gain some new knowledge and skills over the next four months. I am short on experience; this will be my fourth class, (I teach one a semester) so as the first day approaches I am filled, not with fear, but an understanding that I know less than I want to.

What I have been wondering since the end of last semester is why some students who attend class the least do the best on their final project.

Specifically, I teach writing. I am happy to report that many of my students do learn during our time together and are better writers by the end of the course. It is satisfying.

I also have students who show up for half the classes, turn in some of the assignments, complain about the C-minus they get as a midterm grade, nod patiently when I give them the pep talk about working more diligently, continue to show up only every once in a while, and then turn in an excellent final paper. Dammit.

I’m not so much concerned about what to give them as a final grade — although like all the teachers I know, I worry that to death, too – but how to do well by them, to teach them something they can take into the future.

Obviously, some of my students are good writers when they get to me. They don’t need help to create a great introductory paragraph and all the rest.

I ask myself, can I do anything for them?

After much mulling, I have decided that in addition to emphasizing complete sentences, syntax agreement, and an eye for detail, the other aspects that make for success as an adult should carry as much weight in my class. In other words, skills like meeting deadline are as important as producing interesting prose. I have always talked about those aspects of the course with my students, but in truth I have let them slide as long as they could demonstrate ability in writing.

I learned one more thing last semester. A student who had just turned in her final paper told me she appreciated the lesson on writing an outline.

Although the outline was a pain to do, she said, it made writing the paper a lot easier.

So, if any of this semester’s students are reading, a lesson on outline-writing is in the syllabus no matter what. Also, make sure you show up on time for the first class.

Follow Western Connecticut State University at www.wcsu.edu.

Nothing against Yale – it’s a fine school – but Yale’s got nothing on Western Connecticut State University when it come to educating quadruplets.

A local family recently made news when it was announced that Yale cleverly offered admission to four students, all seniors at Danbury High School and all born the same day to Caroline and Steven Crouch.

The Crouch children — Carol, Kenny, Ray and Martina — haven’t decided whether any or all will end up attending Yale, but one thing is clear: They owe it all to Western.

Ha! Just kidding. It’s their parents who owe it all to Western, which is, after all, the place they met in the 1970s when they were both students.

But the four kids also have spent time at WCSU.

Back when they were students at Danbury’s Broadview Middle School, their mother, Caroline, got them involved in the ConnCAP Excel program, which is hosted by WestConn and designed to prepare middle school students for college-bound courses.

“Even back in junior high, they showed the will to go to college,” said WCSU’s Robert Pote, assistant director of the federally and state-funded ConnCAP/Upward Bound Program. “They knew they wanted to go to college and had that will to achieve.”

The quadruplets continued along their determined path by participating in the Upward Bound program, also hosted by Western, for high school students. The program has boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate for the past two years. Last summer, the Crouch quadruplets spent six weeks on the WCSU campus improving their learning skills. And a couple of them participated in the first Young Writers’ Workshop in the fall.

During all these years, Yale was no where to be found.

“I would like to think that we contributed to their success because we kept the flow of education going,” Pote said. “Sometimes in the summer, students forget some of what they learned. This kept things going for them.”

Hey, we realize it’s not just Western that led to their success. Pote said the Crouch children have worked extremely hard. He recalled one program-sponsored Spring Break trip last year where all the students were splashing it up in the swimming pool — all the students except the quadruplets, who were in their rooms reading and doing schoolwork.

And Pote also gives credit to Caroline and Steven Crouch for encouraging their children to be determined and successful.

“I have never seen more dedicated parents,” Pote said. “They are a close family. They have traveled a lot and are very busy. And the fact that Caroline has returned to school to earn a master’s degree makes her a great role model for her children.”

Still, without Western … Oh, all right. The Crouch quadruplets would be successful no matter what. We are proud to have walked with them and their parents on their travels. However, we want the Crouch quads to know this: If Yale doesn’t work out, you have a place at Western.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure I must report that Robin DeMerell, a writer in the office of University Relations, contributed to the reporting for this blog.

For more on Western Connecticut State University, go to www.wcsu.edu

Now that the conversation has shifted from “Can traditional media be saved?” to “What’s next?” many of us are suggesting ideas. Not surprisingly, some-tried-and-true basics are returning to the forefront.

For example, generations of editors have ordered writers to “tell a story” when they report an article and to “use people” as examples in their tale. And for generations, reporters have flaunted that advice because they ran out of time before deadline or were not talented or were lazy.

Now, however, that story-telling admonition is being pushed to suit the 21st century. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff wrote a column last month in which he revealed that he consciously seeks out the most heart-rending “victims” when he writes about disasters, in part to encourage financial support for the cause he is reporting on. The Kristoff stories that get the best response in terms of donations all concentrate on a single victim of whatever calamity he is exploring. He always tries to find a girl to write about because they elicit more response than boys who face the same plight.

I think that, along the same lines, the writers who involve themselves in the story, who reveal some of their history and personality, may be the best suited to write for the Internet. With all the sorting that readers must do for themselves when they no longer rely on traditional media to choose the best reads for them, it may be that a personal connection to the writer will help readers decide what to read.

Oprah has done this successfully for years, and Kristoff does it, too. He has the advantage of traveling around the world to write first-hand about some of the most interesting issues in the world. But he also tweets and updates his 147,000 Facebook fans with daily anecdotes that will never get into The New York Times. (Most of us aren’t Kristoff. We’re more likely to be middle-aged middle managers, but there are other ways to entice readers besides traveling to Darfur.)

Kristoff is taking a well-worn tact with modern twists. Think of all the columnists who made names for themselves and syndicated their work in newspapers around the country. There was Erma Bombeck (who based an entire lucrative career based on one great book title: “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank); and on the other end of the spectrum, people like Russell Baker, who was pretty much a genius. Television newsman Walter Cronkite seemed to care about us, and we bonded with him. Each gave us a reason to seek him or her for humor or insight.

Today, personality or experience-based blogs give young journalists a route to publication that most would not have in this era of shrinking newsrooms. (Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, includes blogs among his list of writing and reporting activities that might comprise journalism in the near future.)

But an aspect that hasn’t been fully explored, and that might be the key to saving journalism, is how to apply this concept to advertising. (Traditional media are not fading away because people are less interested in journalism. It’s that the cash from advertising is drying up, starving the mass media model.)

So perhaps advertising on the Internet should look something like a blog, with advertisers talking to us directly about their wares — as they entertain us and inform us. Again, the roots of this concept already exist. We are all familiar with the overly loud and obnoxious pitchman (who gives us the creeps but, on the other hand, is a millionaire). This is not the only successful advertising model, but it might be especially suited to the Internet, where we all are trying to attract eyeballs in a fragmented marketplace.

Every morning the local grocer might offer advice on what to prepare for dinner tonight as a way to make you look at his web advertisement. It might also be another opportunity for writers to make a living, because most of these businesspeople don’t have the time, talent or inclination to pitch themselves. They would hire ghostwriters.

And any news organization, existing or new, could take advantage of it.

Finally, the efficiency of the Internet might bring a smile to all those old editors who have been talking about telling stories for all those years.

WCSU is on the web at wcsu.edu; and on Facebook and Twitter.
Write to Steinmetz at Steinmetzp@wcsu.edu and find him on Facebook and Twitter.