Way Too Funny

Let’s Reinforce the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalistic Writing (A Throwback Post)

The view from my driveway this morning told me two things: 1) It wasn’t going to be an easy trip to the office and 2) at least 75% of my students would suddenly come down with food poisoning and couldn’t possibly make the 8 a.m. class.

The first decent snow of the year in Wisconsin provided me with the impetus for this week’s Throwback Thursday Post.

When it comes to weather like this, we generally have two types of drivers that account for 95 percent of the people on the road:

  • The driver who goes 12 mph, is constantly sliding all over the road, can’t avoid skids on curves and practically stops about every quarter mile. In spite of this, they will continue down the road and drive just fast enough to prevent you from passing them.
  • The driver who has the philosophy of “I got my jacked up 4 x 4 with brass truck nuts on it and God is my co-pilot, now let’s DO THIS!” as they fly past everyone at 95 mph on a two-lane road.

I spent my morning behind the former and noted a few of the latter had landed in the ditch all along Highway 21. (Dad’s theory on four-wheel drive was always, “It just means you get stuck deeper in the ditch.) Throughout my drive, I found myself going back to my days of driver’s ed, where I learned how to reverse the gas and brake process while making sure I didn’t stomp on a puppy. (It makes sense if you read the rest of this, I swear.)

I thought this post might also help those of us who are near the end of the semester and feeling a bit vexed by the students who STILL can’t seem to figure out how an attribution works, what a fact really is or why they should not have 21 adjectives in the average media-writing sentence.

As much as it seems like a good time to throw our hands up and say, “Screw it. Write however you want.” it’s actually a good time to double down on those “driver’s ed rules” of writing and pound them in even harder. The kids might not like it now, but they’ll come to value it later.

 

 

Teaching the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism

The guy who taught me driver’s ed at the “Easy Method” school was a balding man with a ginger mustache and sideburns to match. He told us to call him “Derkowski.” Not Mr. Derkowski or Professor Derkowski. Just Derkowski.

I remember a lot from that class, as he basically beat certain things into us like the company would murder his children if we didn’t have these rules down pat.

Hands on the wheel? 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock.

Pedals? Release the brake to go, release the gas to slow.

Feet? One foot only. We were required to tuck our left foot so far back into the seat that we could feel the seat lever with the heel of our shoe.

Seat belt? You touch that before you touch anything else in the car or you fail the test. (Or as one of my dad’s friends told me just before the exam, “Get in the car. Put on your seat belt. Then, have your mom hand you the keys through the window.”)

There are a dozen other things that still stick with me, ranging from the left-right-left view of the mirrors to the probably-now-unspeakable way to look behind you when backing up. (“Put your arm across the back of the seat and grab the head rest like you’re putting a move on your girl at the drive-in,” he told me once, I swear…)

After 30 years behind the wheel, I still can’t shake some of this stuff, and most of it is still really helpful. Do I use it all the time? No. (I’m sure the man would be having a stroke if he saw me eating a hash brown, drinking a Diet Coke and flipping through the radio all at the same time while flying down Highway 21 at 10 over…) However, it was important to have that stuff drilled into my brain so that I knew, when things got iffy, how best to drive safely.

When I had to drive 30 miles up I-94 in a white out, in a 1991 Pontiac Firebird that had no business being a winter car, you better believe I abided by the gospel of Derkowski.

I had my hands in the right spots, I was looking left-right-left before a lane change and I treated those pedals like I was stepping on puppies (Another one of his euphemisms, I believe; “You wouldn’t stomp on a puppy!” he’d yell at someone who did a jack-rabbit start or a bootlegger brake.)

It took two hours, more than four times what Mapquest would have predicted, as I slowly passed among the littering of cars and semis that had slid into ditches and side rails. Still, I got there alive.

The reason I bring all of this up is because with the advent of another semester (we still don’t start for two weeks, but I figure you all are up and running), many folks reading this blog will be teaching the intro to writing and/or reporting courses. That means in a lot of cases, students will be coming in to learn how to write the same way I came into that driver’s ed class so many years ago: All we know is what we have observed from other people.

My folks were good drivers, but even they were like lapsed Catholics when it came to the finicky points of the rules: Five miles over the limit was fine, seat belts were pretty optional and one hand on the wheel did the trick. Outside of them, the world looked like a mix of “Death Race” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Gunning engines at stop lights, squealing tires, the “Detroit Lean” and more were what I saw.

Students coming into writing classes have been writing for years, so they figure they’ll be fine at it. They also figure writing is writing, so what’s the big deal if I throw 345 adjectives into this hyperbolic word salad of a sentence and call it good? Nobody ever said it was a problem before…

The students need some basic “rules” pounded into the curriculum, repeated over and over like a mantra, to emphasize the things that we find to be most important to keeping them out of trouble in the years to follow. Mine are simple things: Noun-verb-object, check every fact like you’re disarming a bomb, attributions are your friend, one sentence of paraphrase per paragraph… It’s as close to a tattoo on their soul as they’re ever going to get.

It’s around this time I often get into random disagreements with fellow instructors about this stuff. Some are polite, while others react like I accused them of pulling a “Falwell Campari” moment. In most cases, the argument centers on the idea that there aren’t really rules for writing or that “Big Name Publication X” writes in 128-word sentences or that paragraphs often go beyond one sentence, so why am I teaching students these “rules” this way?

It’s taken me a long time to figure out how best to explain it, but here’s it is: I’m teaching driver’s ed for journalism.

In other words, you will eventually be on your own out there and you won’t have your instructor yelling at you about where your hands are or if you looked at the right mirror at the right time. You probably won’t die if you drive without your foot all the way back against the seat, nor will not maintaining a “car-length-per-10-mph” spacing gap lead to a 42-car pile up on the interstate.

In that same vein, you won’t automatically lose a reader if your lead is 36 words, or confuse the hell out of them if you don’t have perfect pronoun-antecedent agreement. Libel suits aren’t waiting around every corner if you don’t attribute every paragraph and if you accidentally (or occasionally deliberately) tweak a quote, you won’t end up in the unemployment line.

However, if the basics get “The Big Lebowski” treatment up front, there’s no chance of those students being able to operate effectively when the chips are down. (There’s a reason the military teaches people to march before it teaches people how to drive a tank.) Until those basics are mastered, the students will never know when it’s acceptable to break a rule or why it makes sense to do so.

Of all the things I remember about Derkowski (other than that godawful straw cowboy-looking hat thing he wore) was that even though he enforced the rules with an iron fist, he could always tell us WHY the rule mattered and WHY we needed to abide by it. Say what you want to about the items listed in my “this is a rule” diatribe above, but I can explain WHY those things are important in a clear and coherent way. Even if the students didn’t like them, they at least understood them.

Sure, over the years, the rules change (Apparently 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock is now a death sentence…) with AP apparently deciding to keep all of us on our toes almost to the point of distraction. We adapt to them as instructors and the ones that are most germane to the discipline, we write into our own version of gospel.

We also know that we’re not going to be there to press the point when a former student at a big-name publication uses “allegedly” in a lead. (That doesn’t mean we still don’t. Just ask any of my former students and they can tell you about conversations we’ve had about quote leads and lazy second-person writing.)

I tell the students once they get off of “Filak Island,” they can do it however they want or however their boss wants. (I also tell them to ask their bosses WHY they want to use allegedly or randomly capitalize certain words. In most cases, the answer is silence mixed with “duh face,” I’m told.) However, my job is to teach them the rules of the road, and I think that’s how a lot of us view things in those early classes.

I will admit, however, that it’s fun when I hear back from a long-graduated student who tells me how they can still hear my voice in the back of their head when they’re writing something. (It’s even more fun when they tell me how shorter leads or noun-verb attributions are now the rule at work.)

If we do it right, enough of the important things will stick, they’ll revert to the basics when in danger and they’ll be just fine, even without us there to pump the brakes.

Why the hell I’m at UW-Oshkosh, Why the scholastic journalism division of AEJMC is wonderful and the most important question you should ask yourself more frequently: The 2024 AEJMC SJD Honor Lecture

Amy and I had a blast in Philly, where I received recognition for the Scholastic Journalism Division’s Honor Lecture. Photo courtesy of Bradley Wilson

Every year, I volunteer to present sessions at the Kettle Moraine Press Association’s Summer Camp, a week-long event on the UW-Whitewater campus that gives high school students a chance to learn from pros and professors in advance of their school year.

After I’d finished up with my sessions,  one of the college kids who had helped with the workshop approached me with a few questions. He was the editor of the Royal Purple, the student newspaper on campus, so we talked a bit about open records and crime reporting. Then, he paused.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” he began.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“You taught at Ball State, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Well… I don’t know how to say this, but… What the hell are you doing at UW-Oshkosh?”

My first instinct was to say, “Dude, you’re at Whitewater. This is like Spud Webb calling Muggsy Bogues short.” I stopped short on that and started to laugh as I explained how life led me to where I am today.

A moment of levity before things really got out of hand. Photo courtesy of Bradley Wilson.

That experience with the high school kids and the subsequent diss on my place of employment kind of kick-started my approach to the AEJMC Scholastic Journalism Division Honor Lecture I gave about a month later. Since I got word that I’d received this major honor, I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what to say and how to say it.

I also found myself trying to avoid being a massive hypocrite, as I spent about 99.3 percent of my time lecturing students that they need to think about the audience, they need to avoid making everything about themselves and they need to actually make a point that matters.

Based on what I heard back from the people who attended the lecture, I figured out how to dance the line between what I think matters, why I think the division itself is amazingly cool and what I thought might be helpful to them.

The folks at the SJD recently posted the text of the Honors Lecture. See if I pass the muster.

It’s time to do the “but I need a better grade” dance again… (A Throwback Post)

It’s about this time of year that I realize I’m apparently a lot funnier and a lot more intelligent.

The email salutations have turned from “Hey,” to “Hello Professor” to “Dear Almighty Master of Wisdom and Knowledge…”

I am also definitely much more handsome, striking and engaging, almost to the point of being an immortal being.

Yep, grades are coming due and some folks realize they’re screwed so here comes the suck-up.

The bi-annual dance between students and professors begins once again, with finals week upon us. With that in mind, today’s throwback post takes a look at both sides of the discussion as we try to survive just a teeny, tiny bit longer…

 

Translating “The Dance” between professors and students over final grades

As the term winds to a close, students and professors engage in what I refer to as “The Dance” over grades. It’s a tactical, nuanced discussion that involves trying to beg without it looking like begging, trying to answer an email without promising anything and basically engaging in nuclear-treaty-level diplomacy. If we were all trapped in a “Liar, Liar” world, it would essentially look like this:

Student: Pass me and stop being a jerk, you asshat.

Professor: Oh, now you care about this class, you little twerp? Go to hell and take a left.

However, since we have to “Eddie Haskell” it on both ends, here are the legendary begging statements I’ve gotten from students over the years or variations on those themes provided by the hivemind. I’ve added a few “internal thoughts” your professors have had over the years when it comes to responding to these pleas. Enjoy:

 

“Could you just add XX small points to my final grade?”

First, all points are created equal. Second, that figure has ranged from 1 to about 100, depending on the level of desperation. Third, when you kept doing the same stupid thing over and over again because instead of reading my comments, you just looked at the grade and thought, “Screw you, dude” you might not need those “small points.”

 

“I’m graduating this term…”

Not if you need to pass this class, you’re not.

 

“Is there anything I can do?”

Can you invent a time machine, go back in history and tell the earlier version of yourself to turn stuff in on time, not skip every third class and generally give a better overall performance than a disinterested Jay Cutler on a trick play? If not, no.

OR

Prayer can help, although I’m not certain how strong God’s will is to help you out here.

OR

Sign up for the next semester I teach this class and give a crap a little sooner in the term.

 

“Is there extra credit?”

Sure, because when the syllabus said, “There will be NO EXTRA CREDIT in this class, so plan accordingly,” I clearly included a loophole for people who didn’t care about anything until the very moment they realized they were screwed.

 

“Could I rewrite (half of the assignments) for additional credit?”

Sure, because nothing says, “I’m ready to do a good job,” like not doing a good job on anything all term and then expecting to make all of that up in 72 hours before grades are due with no real interest in learning anything other than how many points you need to slide by.

 

“Could you bump me up just this little bit?”

Sure, because I’m sure that won’t tick off the six other people in your class who sweated bullets to get a passing grade through hard work on that assignment you blew off to go to Cabo and party on the beach.

 

“Could you possibly round me up?”

I could. Now ask me if I will. Welcome to the grammar lesson you skipped.

 

“I had some issues this semester…”

Yeah. No kidding.

 

“Your class is very important to me…”

Um… I believe a lot of things people tell me to make me feel better about myself. This isn’t one of them.

 

“I don’t understand why you downgraded me…”

You mean the page and a half of comments I included in the body of your paper didn’t clue you in that this random series of unattributed content, fragmented sentence, shifted verb tenses, incorrect word choices and cripplingly bad structure didn’t help? This wasn’t a news story. It was a disaster movie filmed out of sequence.

 

“This isn’t fair that I should have to take your course over again.”

It isn’t fair I had to grade this pile of sheep dung you referred to as “completed assignments,” but we all have our crosses to bear, I suppose…

 

“I need (A/B/C grade) to (pass/maintain my scholarship/keep my ego afloat)…”

This is not Burger King. You don’t get it your way.

Volleyball court overrules Supreme Court: Learning audience-centricity through the eyes of a child

I’ve had some interesting back-and-forths with folks online about what journalism is or what journalists should be doing. For some people, if we’re not engaging every day in watchdog journalism that demonstrates a seriousness to the craft, we’re failing.

For others, it’s about how to get out of a rut where we seem to be telling the same story to an increasingly disinterested audience. Important content gets lost among the random string of click-bait and cat TikToks, they argued, because people don’t “get it” when it comes to the value of news.

For me, everything goes back to the basic rules of audience-centricity and storytelling. A great story will grab and hold readers when it is told well by skilled craftspeople in media.

When it comes to audience-centricity, it comes back to answering two questions:

  1. What happened?
  2. Why should I (as the reader) care?

The problem with professors and journalists in that regard is that we sometimes fail to connect on these basic elements, something that came through to me in a story I recently retold.

As part of my job at UW-Oshkosh, I get to be a Team Fellow for our volleyball team. The gig is great: I volunteer to serve as a homework helper, a college-range life coach and basically an ear for anything the athletes feel they need that they can’t get from the other resources available to them on campus. Some times, like last week, I end up helping out by talking to recruits they bring around, which is where this story kind of starts.

I know almost nothing about volleyball, even after seven years of trying, but the kid who was being recruited was a libero, so I told the kid the one story about a libero that I knew.

When Zoe was in grade school, she wanted to play volleyball. The sport, generally speaking, is dominated by giants who play above the net on offense and defense, so my lilliputian child was going to be at a disadvantage, something she found completely deflating.

Around that time, I took her to a UWO game and she got to watch Rachel Gardner, the team’s fireplug of a libero. She was having an amazing game, throwing her body all over the place with reckless abandon.

Rachel Gardner, my kid’s volleyball hero.

“Do you see Rachel out there?” I asked Zoe.

“Yes,” Zoe said. “She’s the BEST PLAYER on the court!”

“What else?”

“She’s small like me!”

After the game, the team did an autograph and meet-and-greet session with the fans. I’d run into Rachel earlier that week and explained the whole “Zoe is short” situation and told her how much she’d love a picture after the game. Rachel said she’d love to.

When Rachel saw us in line, she asked, “Are you Zoe? Come on around in back here!”

Rachel gave her a big hug, we took a couple pictures and we essentially made my kid smile for a week.

Later that month, my mom, Amy and Zoe went to the American Writers Museum in Chicago to hear Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor do a reading of her book and sign copies of her children’s book for kids. Only children were allowed to meet the justice and get pictures, which Zoe was more than happy to do. It was an amazing night for everyone involved.

An impressive resume, no doubt, but did she average more than 5 digs per set her senior year?

Fast forward to the next holiday gathering of our family where we were all talking about the cool things we’d gotten to do over the past year. I then told Zoe, “Why don’t you tell everyone about the really cool experience you had recently?”

“Yeah!” she said. “I got to meet RACHEL GARDNER! She’s a libero on the volleyball team, and she’s small like me and she’s -”

I interrupted, “Um… I meant the time you and nana and mama went to Chicago for that reading…”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There was a judge lady who was nice. Anyway, Rachel gave me a hug and we took a picture…” And on and on it went.

In thinking about it from an adult’s perspective, meeting one of the nine people responsible for our nation’s highest legal opinions would have been an epic moment. Even more, Justice Sotomayor was the first Latina appointed to the Supreme Court and only the third woman to ever hold a spot on it.

To my kid, she was just a “nice judge lady.” Now, on the other hand, Rachel Gardner was something to truly behold: A small, tough, amazing student athlete who gave Zoe something to which she could aspire. In short (sorry for the pun), it was so much easier for her to grasp the “what happened” (I met Rachel Gardner, volleyball superstar) and why it mattered (She’s doing something I care about in a way that I can’t right now, but I could if I worked hard enough).

In conceptualizing audience-centricity through the eyes of a child, you learn to figure out that what WE as journalists think is SUPPOSED to be important isn’t always what IS important to the audience we serve. Learning to meet the audience where it lives is crucial in making sure we connect with the readers and viewers in a relevant and useful way.

Even more, it puts a larger impetus on us as media professionals to better explain the answer to that second question. I don’t know if telling Zoe everything this incredible woman did in terms of shattering glass ceilings and shaping juris prudence would have helped the justice measure up to a libero in her eyes. That said, I think it might have helped her think about Sonia Sotomayor as a bit more than a “nice judge lady.”

Even if she couldn’t outdo Rachel Gardner.

An open letter to college students: Please learn to give a shit

Dear students,

I know that there are a solid number of you out there who actually abide by the request in this post most of the time. That said, that number appears to be dwindling significantly recently, so I need to make this plea.

I’ve always believed that as a professor, I owe it to you to try to explain things so that you can understand them. I also believe that if I don’t actually SAY something in explicit terms, it’s my fault when you screw up. If I do my best to lay it out, like I’m trying to teach a dog how to do calculus, and you still screw up, well, then, that’s on you.

I felt the need to put this post together after the first half of a semester that had me utterly vexed and befuddled at the current state of my courses. This isn’t a typical semester in which I have a couple kids who skip class constantly, a few others who fake their way around a few things and some dumb-ass behavior that makes me question the functionality of at least one student’s frontal lobes. There will always be one kid who shows up late so often I swear they’ll be late for their own funeral.

And it isn’t about the life events that get in the way for all of us. I still get the “I’m sick” emails or the notes about emergency surgeries and funerals. That happens all the time and, honestly, any professor who doesn’t understand this is someone I don’t want to know.

No, this appears to be a pandemic level of “I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-itis” that has hit in a way I’ve never seen before on the college level. I had students miss deadlines for quizzes, writing assignments and even exams. Students were given days and even weeks to meet those goals, only to let the deadlines go by like a knee-buckling curve ball.

This isn’t just affecting my intro-level students, as several folks who are in their senior year have forgotten about midterms. The excuses are of the “I have no excuses, but let me fix this anyway” variety, with a steady stream of “I was unaware” emails, which appeared strange to me, given that I’d posted the information in the syllabus, flagged the deadline in the LMS and spoken repeatedly about it in class.

I keep thinking that these folks are suffering from whatever the hell Guy Pearce had in “Memento” and I’m strongly considering bring tattoo kits to class:

This also isn’t just affecting the students here at UWO, as I asked the hivemind of educators I trust if they’ve seen this as well. It turns out this is hitting states across the country, even those that haven’t recently legalized weed or consider a pub crawl to be a national holiday. A constant stream of attempting to spoon-feed students review questions, examples, instructions and extended deadlines has not proven to be a panacea for this situation.

Some educators speculate that this might be some sort of “long COVID” impact, with the idea that college students who spent their formative years merely trying to survive what we all assumed was the end of days weren’t properly prepared for self-reliance in their education. Others wondered if students felt their college efforts lacked value, given the high number of good-paying jobs that are currently available, sans a college degree. Still others pondered about the effects of artificial intelligence, as students looked for easier ways to get out of work. My sister-in-law, who teaches dance, had this insight:

“People are just lazy. We have a new generation of stupid on our hands.”

The cause and the cure are outside of my scope of knowledge, as I’m really not that kind of doctor. That said, please consider the following advice, as you move forward into the second half of the semester. Some of this may seem like it’s stuff you heard in second grade, but that’s probably because we need to dive that far back into the realm of education to properly reboot a few folks:

GIVE A SHIT: This is really the core of everything I’m going to say below, but again it bears repeating. If the way in which my 8 a.m. class tends to listen, I might have to say this six or seven more time before we’re done here.

I have told students over the years that the one thing I absolutely cannot teach them is how to care about a course. I can teach the basics of all sorts of rudimentary journalism skills and quite a few higher-level elements at that. I can teach students how to be tough, or brave, or nosy, or a dozen other “soft skills” that can aid them in their work.

The one thing I can’t make them do is “wanna.” If you don’t “wanna,” I can’t help you.

I get that not every course is your muse and that every class is not an Academy-Award-winning performance on the part of your instructor, but I know that a lot of us are really trying to make a difference. However, if you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

And, if you don’t care, you should probably think about why you’re sitting in that classroom, spending a boatload of money that you’ll spend decades of your life paying back.

READ DIRECTIONS: When I was growing up, we were inundated with ads for a program called RIF: Reading Is Fundamental. The idea was that if you couldn’t read, you probably weren’t going anywhere in life:

This is really true in college, as you should be somewhere further along in your personal literacy than the crew of kids surrounding a relatively young Ed Asner here. Reading directions is a fantastic way of figuring out how much content you have to write, how many citations you need to include or even when something is due.

It might not be as much fun as if we did the directions in a TikTok, but when the Feds block this app for fear that the Chinese government is using it to figure out how stupid we all are, those literacy skills might come in handy.

PAY ATTENTION: College professors often have difficulty when we see you on laptops and tablets during class, because we’d love to pretend that you’re using these items to take copious notes and add deadlines to your calendars. However, when we call on you to verbally add your thoughts to the topic under discussion and your head pops up like a prairie dog getting electroshock therapy, you kind of give up the game.

Look, I get that we’re boring, despite how hard we work. I also know that not everything will apply to any one student in class. That said, you are PAYING for this. It’s like buying entry to the Golden Corral buffet and then quietly sipping a water in the corner. If that’s all you’re doing, why the hell did you come here?

Paying attention in class is a great way to actually learn stuff. This is particularly true if you are opposed to reading directions. I’m a big fan of both, but you need to do one or the other in order to survive in college. Neither of these things is asking too much or should come as a massive shock to you. We showed you the library, the classrooms and even professors’ offices during your campus tour: Books and lectures were not hidden from you.

Unless, of course, you were on your phone the whole time…

STOP PSEUDO-APOLOGIZING: I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that start with “I’m sorry” and then follow that up with a detailed outline of some easily avoidable screw up. I finally went and looked up what an apology actually entails and this is what I’ve found:

The Three A’s of Apologies
  • Acknowledgement. Acknowledge the situation and say you are sorry for what happened.
  • Acceptance. Hold yourself accountable and work to rectify the situation.
  • Amends. Talk about what you will do and start working on corrective measures.

What I’ve come to realize is that most of the apologies I get had none of those elements to them.

You’re not really sorry, in the idea that you are acknowledging the situation. Hell, some of you wouldn’t realize you’ve been hit by a bus until your phone told you as much or your Apple Watch stopped tracking your pulse. You just don’t like the negative outcome of what occurred and you want some way out of it.

You aren’t really accepting anything. Some of the emails I get say that the sender “will accept whatever punishment” I have in mind, but quickly following that up with “but I would really like it if (Fill in way of getting away with screwing up here).”

Also, I’m looking for amends. Maybe the sacrifice of a fatted calf would be a bit much, but some actual contrition and showing up on time for at least a week or two would help.

DON’T LIE: Journalists deal with weasels for most of our lives. This is why we have such great BS detectors and why we love nailing liars to the wall. In most cases, the lies students tell are so frickin’ unnecessary that they boggle the mind.

Case in point: I had a student tell me last week that she was going to miss class because she was sick. Totally fine, as they get two skips the whole term, and I don’t care what they’re for. I even go out of my way to say, “Look, if you want to tell me, ‘I got totally ‘faced last night and I reek of vomit and vodka sweat, so I’m skipping,’ I’m fine with that.”

However, when I got home, I found out from my kid that she met one of my students, who was applying for a job at the Olive Garden where Zoe works. It was my bed-ridden sickly waif who couldn’t make it to class, because it turned out her interview for the job was at that time.

The same thing applies to using AI to write your papers. We read enough college writing to know when something comes from a college student and when something comes from a computerized dictionary that spasms content. We also know that nobody writes to EXACTLY 500 words, so stop telling AI to write you a 500-word paper on a given topic.

I have worked ridiculously hard to be an empathetic ally to my students, so when I’m doing that and you lie to me, it makes me want to bring down a raging storm of hellfire upon you.

QUIT WASTING OUR TIME: After all of this, if you STILL can’t find it in your heart and soul to give a shit, that’s fine. Just stop wasting our time.

Believe it or not, some of your colleagues out there are desperate for help. They are applying for internships and jobs, but need help with resumes and cover letters. They are trying to bend their brains around this new form of writing that will be the foundation upon which a lot of their work after college will depend. They actually mean it when they stop by the office and start the conversation with, “Sorry to bother you, but…”

Every time you turn in some AI bullshit, you make us waste time determining how you cheated and filling out paperwork to have you penalized somehow. Every time you skip a class because “OMG earleeeee,” you make us waste time catching you up. Every time you blow a deadline and beg for forgiveness, you make us waste time taking a moral index of ourselves to see if we should bend a rule and help you out.

That’s time we could be spending on people who actually and honestly need our help and want to do the work. You’re not just annoying us, but you are actively depriving other people of an education they paid for and value.

If you can’t get to the point where you’re going to become one of those people, fine, just don’t make the rest of us suffer because of it.

I would tell you to just go work at Olive Garden, because I know they’re hiring, but something tells me their standards are probably higher than those we have here at the U.

Sincerely,

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

 

The ‘Exploring Mass Communication’ textbook is officially available. Give it a look to get a free T-shirt (and more)

“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the book swaddled in recyclable brown paper, lying in a cardboard box…”

I don’t know if I can fully describe the feeling I had when my kid lugged this box into the house recently and said, “It’s heavy as hell. It must be a book thing.”

It was, and at that precise moment, “Exploring Mass Communication” became real for me.

Never mind that I’d seen links to digital versions on Amazon and Sage’s website.

Never mind that I’d seen cover mock-ups, proof editions and various Vantage versions.

Never mind that I had put together an hour-long presentation to Sage reps on the book about a month earlier.

That box was proof this whole thing wasn’t a St. Elsewhere Kid/Fever Dream situation. I wanted to just scream and cry and jump around and roll around in the snow while cradling a copy of it.

I quickly reached out to the folks at Sage and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I got my copies of the book! Can I tell people it’s out now?
Them: Yes!
Me: You sure?
Them: Yes.
Me: It’s not gonna be like last time, right? This is a real “go for launch” for the book?
Them: Yes… In fact, if you could write a blog post to tell people to adopt it for their classes, that would be great!
Me: Um… No…

I never wanted the blog to be a book-pimping tool because a) nobody wants to read that kind of stuff and b) I can’t promote myself worth a damn. Other people’s accomplishments, student media successes, good causes and great organizations, yes.

Me promoting myself, no.

That doesn’t mean I’m not ridiculously excited about this book and what I think it can do for people. Here is the link to the Sage page for the print text and digital version that lays out all the features, options and fun stuff we poured into “Exploring Mass Communication.” When I read it, even I was like, “Damn… I did all that?”

I have to say, though, the coolest thing about this whole thing is the Sage Vantage system. This is honestly a real game-changer for anyone teaching any course with any Sage book.

When I first heard about Vantage, every conversation went like this:

Me: I want to do (X).
Sage: Um… You can’t. It won’t translate into Vantage.

Now that I see how it works, I totally get why my weird ideas needed to be streamlined. Here is a 90-second video that explains Vantage. It impresses the hell out of me. The knowledge checks, the plug-and-play with any LMS, the ease of grading and more are all part of Vantage and this book was written specifically to work with that system.

That’s about as much self-promotion as I can handle: Bragging about someone else’s tools that make my textbook a “immersive digital learning experience.”

I have no idea how to tell you that I love this book and that I want you to love it too. So, I’m just going to offer you a bunch of bribes to make your life better in some way and perhaps get you to look at the textbook/digital-immersive-learning-experience thing.

 

BRIBE 1: REQUEST A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK AND GET A FREE “FILAK FURLOUGH” T-SHIRT

The folks at Sage are looking for people who want to adopt the book for a class. Me? I need to look cool in front of my publisher while simultaneously moving an excess supply of T-shirts.

So here’s the deal: If you’re teaching an intro to mass media/mass com class and you would be willing to take a look at the book, hit me up on the contact link here and I’ll get you on “Staci’s Magic List of Wonder” for a free copy. (Most folks like the digital version with all the Vantage toys to play with. If you’re old school or just need a new coffee coaster, I’m sure we can get you a print text.)

Send me your name, your school and your school email address. Also, send me the size of T-shirt you wear and a snail mail address and I’ll send you a “Filak Furlough Tour T-shirt.” All freebie. I’m covering shipping costs on my end.

(If you are thinking, “Vince, I’d love to see the book, but having your name on my body in any way feels profoundly creepy…” you can feel free to pass on the shirt. I totally get it. I still have trouble hearing my name as a descriptor as in, “Don’t forget to read Filak Chapter 5!”)

The shirts are a result of CustomInk doing an awesome thing and reprinting them after they made a mistake on the back of the first batch. Sage bought a bunch for a promo at its annual sales meeting, which was back in December, so when the reprinted shirts came, it was too late. Thus, I told the the Sage Folks I’d take the shirts and do something positive with them.

Sizes are somewhat limited and first come, first served. They are available while supplies last, but if that many people are that jazzed about this book that I run out of shirts, I might just do another order.

As you can see, I’m a total dork.

 

BRIBE 2: TELL ME WHAT I MISSED AND I’LL WRITE IT FOR YOU ASAP

The key reason I want you to look at the book isn’t to adopt it for your class.

Hyperventilating Breathe GIF - Hyperventilating Breathe Sheldon GIFs

Hang in there, Sage reps… I know this isn’t what you’re used to for a book launch…

My rationale is this: I know that despite five years of my life, 27 edits, five complete reboots, 128 reviews and innumerable prayers to St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes) for intervention, I probably missed more than a few things in here.

If you have ever written anything, you know that eventually you read it over and over and over until you basically go blind to it. Over the course of this journey, we added, removed, reworked, replaced, added again, removed again and reconfigured everything in here at least twice. That means I need some people to tell me what works and what doesn’t, which is where you call come in.

If you read this thing and see something that needs to be there and isn’t, tell me and I’ll write it for you and post it on the blog. It doesn’t matter how big or how small. I’ll start a complete new section of the blog called “The Exploring Mass Communication Hotline” and post all fresh content to fill in any holes, add any additions, improve on any thin spots and generally augment what you get in the textbook, regardless of if you plan to adopt the thing or not.

I’ll also credit you on the blog. If the book gets picked up for a second edition somewhere in the future, I’ll fix the problem and you’ll be personally thanked in the Acknowledgements section.

People often think I’m kidding when I say stuff like this, but it’s real. Case in point: After the reporting book came out a few years back, a rep got a hold of me and said he had some feedback from a professor. The professor told him that if I had included a section on freelancing, the book would be much better.

So, I got in touch with several former students who were working various aspects of the freelance game and wrote a three-part, 8,000-word series on how freelancing works. I then sent the professor the links to use in the class, even if she hadn’t planned to adopt the book. We then took that series and tweaked it out for an appendix in the second edition. Her response? “This is great, but you’re crazy. Why would you do this for ONE PERSON?”

Well, because you asked. I just like helping folks.

Which leads to…

BRIBE 3: IF YOU TRY THE BOOK AND HATE IT, I’LL HELP YOU PUT YOUR CLASS BACK TOGETHER USING ANY BOOK YOU WANT

I would be honored and humbled if you’d consider my book for your class. Over the past few years, I’ve come to know a lot of great folks I otherwise never would have met if I hadn’t decided to turn my life into a series of book deadlines and giant Post-It Notes.

I use a giant Post-It to keep track of each book I’m working on at any given time. Yes, this was when things clearly got out of hand…

I understand that if you’re trying out my book, it means you’re not entirely happy with the one you’re using or looking for something specific. Nobody just switches books because they’ve got six weeks of stress-free time to kill or because they’re trying to help out a friend. The goal, I assume, is to plug a hole, fill a gap or generally improve upon whatever it is you’ve been sticking with through the last five or six editions.

That said, over the last 27 years of teaching college, I’ve come up with two universal truths:

  1. Rewriting a class for a new textbook is a massive pain in the rear.
  2. I am not everyone’s cup of tea.

In combining these two truisms, I realize I’m asking a lot of anyone who might be considering adopting “Exploring Mass Communication” for a class. In short, it’s like trying out a new hairstyle: It might be awesome or you might spend the next six months saying, “How long until I can get rid of these bangs?”

(I have been bald since I was 20, so I’m mostly guessing at how hair works…)

So, here’s the best deal I have for you: If you find yourself interested in trying this book for your class and it turns out it’s like eating sardine-flavored ice cream for you, I will work with you to rebuild your class in any format using any other mass-com text out there. I will literally fill in gaps, plug the holes and improve SOMEONE ELSE’S TEXTBOOK, based on what you tell me you want so that you can use it to fulfill your needs.

(Cut to a reaction from the offices of Sage…)

The first thought you might have is, “Vince, that’s a cute idea, but I’m using (NAME)’s book and I’m sure you haven’t read it…”

Hold my beer. Here is a sample of what I read in preparation to pitch Sage on this book:

I read everything in that photo at least once, most twice and one three times. I’ve read multiple editions of all of these, and these were just the ones I could still find on Amazon with a quick search of my internet history. That’s not counting the dozen or so other texts I borrowed from people or checked out of the library. In short, I know what’s out there because it informed on what I did or didn’t do when I wrote “Exploring Mass Communication.”

The second thought you might have is, “Vince, this has to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Why would you actively improve your competition?”

Well, to start, it’s not even close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. This is comfortably below the “free tequila slammers” night and the “hey, let’s work on a pinball machine’s electric transformer without unplugging the game” situation. You could also ask my wife about the time I bought a beer can collection if you want to get me in real trouble…

Second, in answer to your question, I am constantly driven by two basic needs:

  1. Help people
  2. Make things work right

This is why Amy hates it when I see a broken lawnmower or vacuum cleaner on the side of the road. She knows I’m grabbing it and fixing it, even though we have no need for another lawnmower or vacuum cleaner. It’s also why I have a bunch of dead pinball machines in my game room and a garage full of dilapidated furniture: I’m bound and determined to fix them.

The whole reason I got into the textbook game was to help people. That’s why I did the blog, the Corona Hotline, the “Filak Furlough Tour” and pretty much everything else. To me, there is nothing that is more gratifying than feeling like someone who came to me with a problem actually left my presence with a solution.

When kids come to my office for help, they often say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but…” I immediately disabuse them of that notion: “You’re never a bother. Whatever you need is more important than what I am doing right now. Helping you is the best part of my day.” And I mean it.

So, that’s the pitch: Get a free copy of a book, get free stuff for doing so and get free help even if you don’t want to adopt the book. It should be clear from this proposal why I never went into sales and marketing.

In any case, operators are standing by, so thanks for being part of this journey with me.

Best,

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

 

 

 

How to react when a student asks, “Which classes do I really need to attend?” (A Throwback Post)

A good friend and fellow professor inspired this Throwback Post, after a student reached out to her near the beginning of the semester with this request:

“I have a lot going on this semester. Can you tell me which classes are the most important so I can try to attend those?”
She politely responded to the student that she could not classify any one class period as more or less important than any other. That level of restraint means she needs to be involved in the next round of global peace talks.
Of course, the rest of us started chiming in with some of the better dumb things we’ve been asked or told over the years by students, including one person posting this gem:
I had a student who raised his hand on the first day going — this class is a lot of work. Why? It’s supposed to be a blow off course!
Yup. I’m here just to give you three credits and a side-order of fries…
So without further ado, here’s a look at some potentially useful comebacks for generally stupid questions…

Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions: Journalism Educator edition

Despite my parents’ best efforts, I got addicted to Mad magazine as a kid and fell in love with Al Jaffee’s acerbic wit. I’m sorry, all my former, current and future students…

Al Jaffee probably had a bigger influence on me than most people wished he’d had. The longtime cartoonist for Mad Magazine who died earlier this month at age 102, was both a gifted artist and a gifted humorist.

During his time at the publication, Mad had an amazing collection of talent, and each artist brought their own special vibe to the publication. Paul Coker drew his “horrifying cliches,” movie parodies and single-panel pieces. Sergio Aragones literally filled the magazine with his dialogue-free sketches, as he drew in the margins of the various spreads. Don Martin did some truly ridiculous cartoons, of which my favorite was the detective-wannabe Lance Parkertip, Noted Notary Public.

Jaffee, however, wrote his way into history with his “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” which did exactly what the title promised. He’d present one of the dumber questions people tend to ask, and follow it with a series of sarcastic, snide or otherwise snappy responses, intended on laying low the idiot inquisitor.

As a kid, I took to Jaffee’s biting snap-backs like a fish to water, using his style of humor to keep bullies at bay in grade school and dabble in some class-clowning in high school. As I got older, I was told this kind of thing wasn’t age-appropriate for me but hey, if a guy can do this kind of stuff until he’s 102, I’ve got some time left on the clock.

In honor of Jaffee’s passing, here are a few Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions most of us tend to get as journalism educators:

 

“Sorry, I overslept. Did I miss anything important in class today?”

  • “No, we only did a bunch of unimportant stuff, like we do most days.”
  • “No, we just sat here and thought about how much we missed you.”
  • “Yeah, it was the best! We didn’t have to slow down and reexplain everything to this one kid who never pays attention and is constantly missing stuff while he’s Snapchatting the class period away.”

 

“Is this going to be on the test?”

  • “No, I enjoy throwing random facts at you for the sake of seeing how you react. It’s like my own little version of giving a lab rat an electric shock.”
  • “I’m not sure yet, but God forbid you be presented with information that might be valuable in its own right.”
  • “Probably not, because even though I said, ‘You want to write this down, because it’s going to be on the test,’ at least 912 times, I’m still debating how to handle this.”

 

“Why did I get an F on this assignment?”

  • “Because the university hasn’t figured out a way for me to give you anything lower.”
  • “Because given your writing ability, I figured this was as far as you ever got in learning the alphabet.”
  • “I understand that it’s probably a mystery, shrouded in the 20 or so sentences of feedback I wrote at the bottom of your paper, clearly outlining every point deduction.”

 

“Can I get an extension on this paper?”

  • “If you mean you want me to make the paper longer, sure.”
  • “Absolutely, because the six weeks I gave everyone else to accomplish it clearly wasn’t enough time for you to craft your incredibly expansive effort.”
  • “But what will I do in the meantime, as I wait to consume your exquisite prose? How will I pass the time as I await the dawning of your genius?”

 

“Can I do some extra credit to make up some points?”

  • “Given the effort you put into your ‘regular’ credit, giving you extra credit right now would seem to be an exercise in futility.”
  • “Sure, because when I said at the beginning of the year, and at least 12 times since, that the class will offer NO EXTRA CREDIT, I only meant that for other people who didn’t have the chutzpah to ask for it.”

 

“Do I HAVE to take the final exam?”

  • “I lack subpoena power and the university doesn’t equip me with a gun, so I can’t force you to do much of anything. That said, you probably won’t pass the class without at least a decent attempt.”
  • “Given that it won’t save your grade, no matter how well you do, I’d actually prefer you avoid wasting both of our times.”

 

“You know I’m graduating in two weeks, right?”

  • “Well, not if you need this class to do it…”
  • “That puts me in a quandary, as to pass you would mean I gave up on any standard I had for this class whatsoever, but to fail you would mean I’d need to tolerate your pointless presence again for a whole semester. Let me think about how much I hate myself right now and I’ll get back to you.”

 

“Is there ANYTHING I can do to pass this course at this point in the semester?”

  • “Can you invent a time machine and travel back to the start of the term when I told you to make sure you kept up with the reading and the assignments and kick your own ass to make sure you did so? If not, probably not.”
  • “Well, I’d ask for a bribe, but given your performance in class to this point, you’d probably screw that up, too.”

 

“Do you know who my father is?”

  • “Does HE know how to build a time machine to fix things for you? If not, I’m not sure how this is relevant to your grade.”
  • “No, but that’s probably because he found out how poorly you’re doing in school and immediately entered some form of witness protection.”
  • “No, but maybe a “23 and Me” kit could help.”

If any other pathologically stupid questions have come your way and you’d like some snappy answers, feel free to hit me up here and I’ll do my best to put together another list at some point.

Cutting it short: Remember to always check to see if autocorrect correctly corrected your copy

There’s never a good reason to be lazy, particularly when it might lead to a viral moment. A Pizza Hut in Ontario apparently didn’t bother to really read a sign workers posted to let people know the dining room wouldn’t be open. What happened next is now the stuff of legends:

This led to one of the greatest leads ever written, via the New York Post:

No tips required at this pizza shop.

The rule here, as always, is that you can write quickly, but you need to edit slowly. Also, if you aren’t sure that the autocorrect correctly corrected your work, look stuff up.

 

Gone Fishin’: “So That Happened…” Edition

If you want a 30-second synopsis of how the semester went, this is pretty much it…

We started the year with an $18 million budget hole, filled it with the career corpses of about one of every six employees here, had our raises held up by a petty tyrant who somehow got away with it and then saw the Board of Regents get strong armed into changing its mind with a tactic that seems to have come straight from an old Mafia movie to accept a terrible deal.

I also had a weird year in that more students than usual seemed to think class was an optional element of their education and now are flabbergasted that they will likely have to retake a course. (At least two people came within a hair of not graduating, thanks to this philosophy.)

On the plus side, I got to have a hell of a lot of fun visiting with more than a dozen schools on the “Filak Furlough Tour,” which led to great posts, a tour T-shirt and a post about the tour T-shirt… I also didn’t have to teach law this year, which we all should consider a blessing.

Grades are due Friday, which means its time to hunker down and pass a few people who don’t deserve it, based solely on my desire to never see them in a classroom again. (I’m clearly kidding here, although don’t think that thought doesn’t cross EVERY educator’s mind at least 824 times per semester…)

After that, it’s going to be a little time off before I have to figure out how to teach Intro to Advertising.

We’ll be back in Late January with the regular schedule and, as always, if something pops up before then, we’ll cover it here. Also, if you have any requests, feel free to shoot them my way.

Have a great holiday season.

 

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

‘Tis the Season to Avoid these Ho-Ho-Horrible Cliches in your Journalistic Writing (A throwback post)

Some things only need to be said once for people to get the message:

Y’know, the basics.

Then there are things that apparently need to be said repeatedly and they still don’t get through to people with anything short of a death threat:

We’re already getting our “Turkey Day” references in the media around here, along with some “‘Tis the season-ing” that will likely only get worse. With that in mind, we offer another reminder that you can actually write about holiday stuff without resorting to cliche…

‘Tis the season to kill these 17 holiday cliches that will land you on the naughty list and get you coal in your stocking

 

The holiday season brings a lot of things to a lot of people, including family, gifts, joy and faith. Unfortunately for journalists, it also brings a ton of horrible, well-worn phrases that sap your readers’ will to live.

I tapped into the hivemind of jaded journos who were nice enough to come up with their least favorite holiday cliches. Avoid these like you avoid the kid in class with a cough, runny nose and pink-eye:

Turkey Day: The event is called Thanksgiving, so give thanks for journalists who don’t use this cliche. In fact, it took almost 300 years for turkey to become a staple of this event, so you might as well call it “Venison Thursday,” if you’re trying to be accurate.

T-Day: Regardless of if you are “turkey perplexed” or not, you’re compounding the problem with the above cliche with simple laziness. That, and you’re really going to create some panic among distracted news viewers in the military.

‘tis the season: According to a few recent stories, ’tis the season for car break-ins, holiday entertaining,  to propose marriage, to get bugs in your kitchen and to enjoy those Equal Employment Opportunity Commission year-end reports!

The White Stuff: Unless you are in a “Weird Al” cover band or running cocaine out of Colombia, you can skip this one.

A white Christmas: The only people who ever enjoyed a white Christmas were bookies, Bing Crosby’s agent and weather forecasters who appear to be on some of “the white stuff.”

Ho-ho-ho: It’s ho-ho-horrible how many pointless uses of this phrase turn up on a simple news search on Google. None of these things are helped by the inclusion of this guttural noise.

On the naughty list: The toys “on the naughty list” in this story “all have some type of hazard that could send a child to the hospital. The majority pose a choking hazard but parents should be aware of strangulation, burns, eye injuries, and more.” Including a cliche diminishes the seriousness of this a bit. Also, don’t use this with crime stories around the holidays: The first person to find a story that says Senate candidate Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey landed “on the naughty list,” please send it to me immediately for evisceration.

Charlie Brown tree: Spoken of as something to avoid. You mean you want to avoid having a tree that demonstrated looks aren’t everything and that tries to capture the true deeper meaning of Christmas? Yep. Can’t have that stuff.

“Christmas starts earlier every year…” : Easter, maybe. Christmas, no. It’s the same time every year. Check your calendar and stop this.

War on Christmas: Be a conscientious objector in this cliched battle, please.

“… found coal in their stockings”: Apply the logic of “on the naughty list” here and you get the right idea. The story on the Air Force getting coal for Christmas after tweeting that Santa wasn’t real could have done without the cliche. Then again, maybe we’d all be better off if the Air Force was right, given the picture included with the story.

Making a list, checking it twice: A all-knowing fat man has a list of people who are naughty and nice and will dole out rewards and punishments accordingly. Sounds cute when it’s Santa, but less so when an editorial is using this to talk about Steve Bannon. Let’s be careful out there…

Grinch: There is probably an inverse relationship between the number of people who try to use this cliche and those who actually get it right. Let’s let John Oliver explain:

Jingle all the way: Nothing warms the heart like an in-depth financial analysis of a multi-national retailer like a random reference to Jingle Bells.

Dashing through the snow: This product pitch isn’t improved by the cliche, but it might help you survive hearing the use of it over and over and over…

It’s beginning to look a lot like…: Well, it apparently looks a lot like Christmas for small businesses, at Honolulu’s city hall, through a $1.5 million investment in lights at a Canadian park, and at a mall in Virginia. It’s also looking a lot like 2006 in the NFC. Oh, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Watergate as well. Get ready with that naughty list and coal, I guess…

The true meaning of…: Nothing says, “I understand and want to engage with my readers” like lecturing them on “the true meaning” of something, whether that is Christmas or a VAD.

Wishing you all the best in this season of cliche…

Vince (The Doctor of Paper)

Buy a Filak Furlough Tour T-Shirt from the World’s Worst Businessperson!

If I’ve been through a worse day at work than Tuesday, I don’t want to remember it. UWO just passed out more than 140 pink slips to employees, with another 75 or so folks taking early retirement and dozens others not being rehired on annual contracts. According to the news, 1 in 6 employees here got canned.

In addition, the university system decided to put our UWO Fond du Lac branch on hospice care, killing off in person classes starting in the fall, which likely spells the end for all the folks there in a relatively short amount of time. Also, the chucklenut who basically runs the statehouse decided to greenlight every state employee pay raise except for those in the university system. The reason? Apparently we’re indoctrinating kids with the idea that empathy, equality of access and basic human decency should be valued.

I needed something to make me smile, and thanks to Jenny Fischer and Heather Tice, who have design and art ability far, far, far beyond mine, I got it.

The Filak Furlough Tour T-shirts are ready to go.

Since there seemed to be a split between a neutral color and a loud color, we decided to offer both.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ORDER FORM. The window is about two weeks to order with another two weeks to ship. The cost should range between $15 and $18 depending on how many we sell. Each order has a shipping charge, but it will be directly shipped to you and you pay the company directly.

No “middle-Vince” to screw things up.

Just to make this absolutely clear, what you pay is what the shirt costs based on what CustomInk is doing. I don’t make a dime on this and I sure as hell don’t want to.

Look, I’ve been accused of a lot of things over the years in academia, with many people using words that my editors at SAGE would not allow me to repeat here. Being an opportunistic entrepreneur has never been one of them.

When the Filak Furlough Tour started, people were asking, “So how much are you charging to do this? Is there a fee for you to teach a class or visit my school?”

Nope. I just figured it’d be a nice thing to do. The best part of my day is working with kids in media, helping out fellow educators and feeling like I’m relatively useful. The furloughs took all that away from me, so I saw the tour as a way to get some of that back.

Then it was, “OK, so is this your attempt to gin up some job opportunities? Are you looking for the next big career move out of Oshkosh?”

Nope. Despite UWO treating folks here like my nieces treat their diapers, I really want to stay here. I love the kids, I love my classes and it would take somewhere close to half of a year to pack up all my bobbleheads. Besides, I really like our house, my workshop and even the chickens have kind of grown on me.  If they fire me, OK, fine, I’ll go somewhere else. In the meantime, UWO is stuck with me.

Then it was, “So you’re trying to do some book-pimping, right? Is SAGE sponsoring this?”

Nope again. They had no idea  I was going to do this. Other than what people tell me, I have no idea if anyone signed up for the tour is using my books for any of their classes. Just like the blog, it’s open to everyone for without cost.

The books I’m giving away are from my author’s stash that I got for publishing each book and if I run out, I’ll buy some more on my author’s discount and use those. The bats were nicely donated from the stash my dad had in the basement of my parents’ house. I’m paying for the supplies and postage myself. I made a promise to give this stuff away, and even though I had no idea people actually liked me and/or free stuff this much, I’m making it happen.

This leads me to the T-shirt thing: I set up a design at CustomInk because I’d used them before and the quality and service are good. I could have made it a fundraiser or something, but I just wanted as many people who wanted to buy a shirt able to buy a shirt at the best price. And if I’m honest, I wanted to rub a little shame on UWO as well for this debacle.

So buy a shirt and enjoy telling the story about this insane weirdo you know who took a pay cut due to his school’s fiscal mismanagement and turned it into a Quixotic adventure that involved free books, bats and classroom lectures.

If you really want to know what I’m getting out of all this, that explanation should cover it nicely.