Exclamation!

Benjamin Dreyer writes in The Washington Post that it's time to toss out the exclamation point. I know what he means!

I just sent an email to a friend about his recent visit to my house and found myself stuck with too many exclamation points. Every period felt like dropping my voice at the end of the sentence, suggesting that the visit hadn't really been great, that I wasn't really excited, that really, I could have done without him stopping by.

This is what happens when we abuse the language and punctuation!

Another friend, as a kid, used to read the comic strip Gil Thorp, almost every panel of which contained an exclamation point or two. He used to read it aloud as it was punctuated so that Gil was Trying Out For The Sport Team! or Going To Ask Her To Go Steady! He shouted each line with a forced smile. Sometimes we would talk like Gil Thorp: Let's Have Steak-Ums For Lunch! or I Have To Take A Dump!

My students tell me that the exclamation point is unavoidable in texts. Without them the reader thinks that the writer doesn't care. It's like that episode of Seinfeld when Elaine's boyfriend doesn't add an exclamation point after the announcement of a baby. That was the end of that relationship. My students feel the same way!

An exclamation point on my old typewriter requires typing a period, backspacing, and typing an apostrophe. There's no exclamation point key (it would be above the 1 which is made by typing a lowercase L instead) so it's a pain to type exclamation points. Typewriter manufacturers knew enough about good writing (and were stingy enough about adding keys) that they influenced writers to stick with the period.

Elmore Leonard's fifth rule of writing is "Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose." As soon as you learn to write as well as Elmore Leonard, feel free to flout his rules.

Dreyer in The Post says that exclamation points are "just so tempting when you feel the need to turn up the volume on a workaday thought" but that the usage of them has "mushroomed till they've become the standing ovation of punctuation: an obligatory, performative demonstration of enthusiasm meant to reassure" readers that everything is Great! The Best Ever! But, "If everything's exciting, ultimately nothing is."

I tell college students that they are allowed one exclamation point per paper. I've thought about confining them to one per semester, but that seems unnecessarily draconian. I mean really! Dreyer has suggested "that writers confine themselves, over the course of a full-length book, to, at most, a dozen exclamation points." A writer replied, "Over the course of an entire career, you mean."

I'm unlikely to meet that goal, but, as Gil Thorp might say, it's worth a try!

A Visit & Morning Pages

My friend is here. I picked him up at the airport yesterday. We stayed up last night talking until almost two which made getting up at six a challenge but well worth it to spend time with a friend I haven't seen in a year and a half. The lack of sleep is nothing. I want to soak up every moment.

Last night, just the two of us in the living room, he said, "I love your house. It's so cozy." He's not the first to say so and each time I take it two ways. One, we make a comfortable home. Two, it's a simple kind of place. I don't mean that we have a shabby house, but no one will mistake it for fancy. It has no pretensions and feels simply like home. That's how it felt to my friend and how it feels to me.

Some of this is the effect of the furniture and decorations, but it's more that my daughters chose to sit out in the living room with their mother and me and my old college roommate. They talked and listened, joked and told stories. The comfort of this home comes from the four of us and it's palpable. Even after my wife and the girls had gone up to bed, there was the feeling of comfort and ease that comes only with a long-term friendship and a place in which two old friends can sink back into things as though no time at all has passed. No wonder we stayed up almost to two.

Four hours of sleep and off my schedule I got up, emptied the dishwasher, got laundry out of the dryer for my older daughter to have the right clothes for school, opened the blinds, turned off the furnace, and sat down to write three Morning Pages. There's a comfort there as well, though I wanted to go back to sleep or make a cup of coffee. The comfort is in doing what I do, what I have done. I sat down, uncapped the pen, and figured myself out with blue ink over three pages. I think about the blog post for the day, an idea I mapped out a couple days ago, and a note I want to write to a friend.

Less than half a page in, I'm in the groove. I have momentum and energy like rolling downhill into the sunrise.

The writing sets the table for the meal of my morning, afternoon, and evening. It creates a mood, a way of being. The results of this aren't anything I can measure or set down in exact figures try as I might. It is instead a feeling, one about which I'm as sure as of anything. The pages open me for the day, put me in a space and mode. From there the day flows.

There are things about Morning Pages which go beyond the boundaries of the written word, the ineffable effects that, like friendship, comfort, warmth, and love, must be felt perhaps without any logical understanding. Why do I do Morning Pages? Why should you? I can only begin to tell you. The rest you need to feel.

My friend said, "we have to find ways to see each other more than once a year." Why do we need to see each other? Who bother when we live so far apart? To push this defies logic. Of course it does. There is no logic in friendship, in love, in the simple need to fill three pages by hand this morning after staying up until two with my friend and then waking at six with the family. It all defies logic and works at some other level.

I'm willing to call that level what it is: magic.

Vaping In The Schools

The boys' bathroom smells fruity and sweet. Someone's been vaping in there. Again. Vaping is all the rage these days in schools. It's not quite smoking, so it feels like something schools can't ban. It's also fashionable, cool, and for many kids an irresistible urge. They have the vape pen in their pocket. There's a bathroom with a closed door. Why not take a hit?

I'm the same way with Doritos. I can't blame them.

A couple of my colleagues are up in arms about this "problem." Kids are getting away with something they shouldn't be doing! I nod, but when someone asks, how do we stop them? I shrug and walk away. I just don't care very much. There are people at my school and in my school system who think I should care as much as they do, but really, what's the big deal?

My high school had a smoking area, the fearsome and cold back hall. Kids also smoked in the student parking lot, behind the water tower, and wherever else they wouldn't be seen. Teachers used to smoke at school too, but they got to do it in the offices.

In my first years teaching kids were very protective of two-liter soda bottles they carried. An experienced teacher let me in on the secret that most of the bottles were half soda, half alcohol. Some of the bottles were 100% soda but those kids just wanted to be cool.

There always been smoking (and drinking, and making out, and conceiving children, and...) in the bathroom. Kid get high before, during, and after school. Two sisters arrived at our school stinking so badly of weed we put them in an office with the windows open and the door shut. I pity the person who sat there with them.

The kids I teach lead tough lives. If vaping is the worst they do, I've got no complaints. Of course it's not the worst they do, it's just one rule they break.

Kids break rules. Kids have always broken rules. If we can't learn that, we're idiots.

A guy who ran a school in Providence said, don't write down any rules. Once you do, you can't take them back. It wasn't a place in which anything goes, but instead of rules he wanted us to follow the kids' needs.

At home, my wife and I don't have any rules for our kids that I can think of. Instead we know our daughters and they know us. We established what does and doesn't fly soon as they were born. So far, no vaping in the bathroom.

I've been by the bathroom three times today. The first time it had been vaped. Cherry. The second time it was just the usual dirty, pissy smell. During lunch someone else went in and puffed away. Was that lemon-lime? Whatever. I can't get worked up about it. If I talk to kids about it at all, I'll intentionally sound bored by the whole thing. By next October they'll have moved onto some other damn thing about which people will want to make more rules.

A colleague talked to me about all this today. I smiled. What? she asked. I said it could be worse and recalled an eighth grader we had a few years ago who came out of the bathroom giggling. Was he smoking? she asked. No. He took a dump on the floor and smeared it on the walls.

But you're right, I said. We've got to do something about the vaping.

Recovering Teacher

Looking for a new job has intimidated the hell out of me and I've been wondering why. I'm pretty smart, I write fairly well and am well read, I'm not too ugly, I can walk and chew gum at the same time (but can't rub my stomach while patting my head or vice versa), and have worked in challenging schools with really interesting kids for over two decades. I've done adjunct teaching at a couple local colleges and come out with glowing reviews. Why then do I have such difficulty imagining I could get a new job? Why do I feel so unworthy?

It's because of teaching.

There's the claim that teaching is a soft, cushy job. You get your summers off! Teaching kids is considered women's work — for years only women could be convinced to do it &mdash. This hasn't been meant as a compliment. Teaching is classified as something other than real work, whatever that's supposed to be, and there has been a very public assault on teaching and teachers that began before I graduated college, intensified under Clinton, continued through W, became even worse under Obama (who broke my heart), and was really embraced by miserable fractions of manhood such as Scott Walker. The message was simple: teachers suck and deserve no respect or pay. They are everything wrong with society.

Thanks, fellas!

Some of that message has stuck despite my knowing that teachers do good, tough work under intense conditions. I know better than to give the attacks any credence, but they've dragged down my spirit nonetheless.

Closer to home, I got mugged by the performance reviews. One year I was to be evaluated on New York State Regents scores. I teach at-risk kids who don't test well, and needed two-thirds of them to pass.

I had one kid taking it.

She didn't pass. Not even two-thirds of her.

I was rated "developing," the second lowest mark, and put on a teacher improvement plan. I was rated developing for three years straight. The ratings were all bogus, but being told annually that I suck took a toll.

This year, burned out on teaching, I decided to quit. Everyone asked, what are you going to do instead? I shrugged. I didn't know. I couldn't imagine anything for which I might be qualified. I'm a teacher and teachers all suck. Those who get poor ratings on a bad system suck even more. I really felt worthless and depressed. Instead of applying for jobs, I fell further into depression.

Yeah, I blame teaching.

I'm coming out of that depression. I've applied for jobs and had interviews. None of the jobs are in public school teaching. It will be years before I can go back to that. I'm applying for jobs that feel beyond me but which friends assure me I'm qualified. I'm learning to trust them rather than the cruel voice teaching has cultivated in me like some awful parrot repeating, you suck, you suck, you suck.

I've been a teacher a long time. It will take a while to shake off the side effects. Meanwhile, tell the nearest teacher that they don't suck, that they matter beyond their ratings, and that you appreciate them doing tough work you wouldn't ever want to do. I'm not the only one feeling the side effects. I'm not the only one quitting. And I sure hope I'm not the only one recovering from the side effects and coming to believe. We all deserve that.