Once considered the domain of only deeply religious families who didn’t want to send their kids to secular schools, homeschooling has been gaining popularity among not-particularly-religious families. In “Meet My Teachers: Mom and Dad,” Business Week covers the growth of homeschooling specifically within the “creative class.”

According to Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, the creative class consists of educated, affluent people who, um, “create for a living”:

[They]…seek not only fulfilling jobs, but also tolerant and vibrant communities and cities. This new class of workers does not define itself by national boundaries, but is highly mobile, willing to relocate for the best social, cultural, and economic opportunities. The creative class, 38 million strong in the U.S., produces a disproportionate share of wealth, accounting for nearly half of all wages and salaries earned - as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined.

Sounds like a pretty good life:

Highly educated? Check.
More than adequate income? Check.
Freedom to live where you want? Check.

So what do they have to complain about, these jazzy, improvisational creators? School, apparently. If they don’t like their public schools, the creative class can presumably find a different community with more suitable schools. Or they can pony up and send their kids to private schools — in fact, some of these parents attended elite private schools themselves. But they’re homeschooling their kids instead. Why?
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As we know, one main goal of the Bush administration’s foreign policy is to “spread democracy” throughout the world. In order to protect our freedoms at home, the argument goes, we must help free other countries from authoritarian or tyrannical governments. If we succeed (via force or “diplomacy”), we must also shepherd these countries through the how-to-run-a-democracy learning process, as we’re doing right now in Iraq.

Note that we haven’t required Iraqi citizens to go through democracy training school before “letting” them run their own country; all the civics courses in the world can’t really teach democracy. You have to live it. Thus, you won’t find the Iraqi populace sitting in a classroom, studying a textbook and holding mock elections or mock jury trials before being set free as fully fledged citizens of their own country. They’re learning by doing, or in this case, by living.

Iraqi women learning about democracy
by not going to school

And if Iraqi voter turnout is any indication, they’re eager to self-govern. In January, 2005 an estimated 60-70% of eligible Iraqi voters cast a ballot in Iraq, even though they risked being blown to smithereens (and some were). A high percentage of expatriots also voted.

Hey, Aren’t We Supposed To Set the Standard?

Contrast that with our own, well-established democracy (representative republic, actually, but let’s not quibble), which we Americans tout as the example Iraq and other countries should emulate. Only 53% of eligible Americans voted in the 2004 elections. Our youngest voters voted least, with 51% going to the polls. That number represents a dramatic increase over the previous presidential election, but it’s still low, especially when you consider we’re threatened only by annoying exit pollers.

In general, half of eligible Americans don’t vote. Why? Apathy certainly plays a part. Many Americans feel as if their vote won’t change a thing. They’re jaded about the machine that our government has become.

But that explains some of the older voters. But what about our youngest voters, the newly emancipated young adults, who, much like the Iraqi citizenry, are tasting the democratic process for the first time? Why don’t they vote in droves when they finally have a say in how they’re governed?
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Someone called me that in response to my post about John Scalzi’s writing advice.

If we look at Thesaurus.com, we’ll see that I’m only 50% know it all, whose synonyms are: “brain, smart aleck, smart-mouth, walking encyclopedia.”

I think we all know which two apply and which two don’t.

And I’m only 34.6% stodgy (the hits are in bold): “banausic, blah [I say this all the time], boring, dim, dreary [I live in New England], formal, fuddy-duddy, heavy, humdrum, labored [popped out two, thank you], monotonous, pedantic, pedestrian, plodding, ponderous, square, squaresville [that’s pretty square itself!], staid, stuffy, tedious, turgid [but I prefer magniloquent], unexciting, unimaginative, uninspired [I’m not that into perspiration], uninteresting, weighty.”

I wonder what the other 15.4% is.

Don’t do everything blogger/columnist/book author John Scalzi says.

In response to a reader’s query, Scalzi posted ten suggestions for nonprofessional writers who’d like to “write better.” He offers a few good tips, such as “when in doubt, simplify” and “learn to friggin’ spell,” which really means “use the friggin’ spell checker.”

But he leaves out a couple of key guidelines, and his grammar and punctuation suggestions will create more chaos than they’ll clear up.

What he forgets

Scalzi omits one absolutely vital guideline rule: Use the active voice. Instead of saying, “The running back was tackled by the linebacker,” say, “The linebacker tackled the running back.” The passive voice moves the actor (subject) away from the action (verb) and makes it seem like the whole world sits around waiting for something to happen.

More tips:

Use simple, strong verbs (not simple, weak ones, like “use”). For example, instead of saying, “The linebacker tackled the running back,” say, “The linebacker torpedoed the running back,” or say, “The linebacker flattened the running back.” Vivid verbs appeal to the reader’s senses and help make sentences more memorable. (A little alliteration doesn’t hurt, either.)

Sleep on it. In these days of blogging, breaking news, and instant gratification, it’s hard to give our writing what it probably needs the most: time. Before you publish, try to put your piece down and come back to it a day or two later. You’ll end up thinking about the piece while you’re away from it, and when you come back, you’ll look at it with a fresh eye.

Get feedback from at least two people. One, a member of your target audience and the other, a more experienced writer than you. Unless you’re Emily Dickinson, you shouldn’t write in a vacuum. During the drafting stage, a reader’s impressions or another writer’s advice can help you shape your piece or even take it in a new direction. Post-publish comments on your blog may provide some insight, but when people know you’re looking for help while you’re still writing, their feedback tends to be far more constructive.

What he nails

When he says:

Front-load your point: If you make people wade through seven paragraphs of unrelated anecdotes before you get to what you’re really trying to say, you’ve lost….Now, sometimes people write to find out what their point is; I think that’s fine because I do that myself. But most of the time after I’ve figured out my point, I’ll go back and re-write.

That’s like the old rule of thumb that recommends writing your article and then, when you think it’s finished, deleting the first paragraph.

I also like Scalzi’s point about writing as a thinking or discovery process. Writing is thinking, after all (where else would gems like this post come from?). I can think things through more clearly if I’m putting words down somewhere, and I eventually figure out what I really want to say. So the endings of my early drafts often become the openings of later ones.

With that in mind, I would just switch the order in Scalzi’s advice. I’d say: Write to figure out what you want to say, and then edit to make sure you’re quickly getting to the point.

What he gets wrong

Aw, hell, nobody’s perfect, and Scalzi’s imperfections show when he gives punctuation and grammar help. Go ahead and follow his rules for the colon and exclamation point, but venture not into the land of the period, comma, semicolon, or grammar. For these, he offers some seriously bad advice.

Mistakes in grammar and punctuation are usually, as Mina Shaughnessey said, errors of thinking by people who don’t know the rules. They guess or make up their own rules based on some vague memory of the actual rules. They can tell you why they put that comma, semicolon, or period there–because they honestly thought about it–but they’re usually wrong.

Scalzi is a professional writer, so he probably knows the rules but doesn’t have the time or inclination to write a handbook in a blog post. Or maybe he’s a porno-grammarian, someone who can’t define a proper sentence but who knows one when he sees it. Either way, he’s made up his own rules for other people to follow, and they simply won’t work.
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Tags: writing, writing tips, John Scalzi, grammar, punctuation

Okay, that line is overused, but I’m short on creativity at the moment. I just wanted to share that my Richard Thompson post, which I cross-posted at Blogcritics (an online magazine written by bloggers), has been selected the Blogcritics featured story of the day.

45 other new articles were posted at Blogcritics today, and mine was chosen as the featured piece. I’ll have to remember to thank my kids for providing the raw material.

Any blogger can join Blogcritics. It’s free, and it offers great exposure in the form of something like 20,000 unique visitors per day (maybe it’s more — I’m not sure). Check ‘em out.

On our way to my son’s preschool one day last week, the boy asked me to turn some music on. So I punched the stereo power, and out blared the Richard Thompson CD I’d been listening to a day earlier, Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years. The song was “Cooksferry Queen,” an upbeat tune with a snare drum and bass line that drive the song’s rhythm. The song kicked in at about the middle, just before the musical break, during which my son shouted:

I knew exactly what he meant. Between the drum and bass, my crappy/buzzing minivan speakers, and the volume, my heart was dancing in my chest, too. At the preschool, we sat in the car and listened until the song’s abrupt downbeat end, at which point the poor kid groaned.

I’ve played the tune for him every day since then.

About a year ago, my daughter, then six, had a different response. I my sucked my daughter in the first time with “The Goldilocks song,” more appropriately known as “The Uninhabited Man.” The refrain:

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Who’s been sitting in my chair?
Who’s been sipping my bowl?

She liked it! Then we listened to more songs, and she ultimately came to favor “I Feel So Good,” a song about a recently released inmate who’s on the prowl.

Perhaps that’s not the most appropriate theme for a six-year-old, but sometimes you just have to live on the edge. Of course, living on the edge meant living in fear that she’d one day sing a verse along with Thompson:

Now I’ve got a suitcase full of fifty pound notes,
And a half-naked woman with her tongue down my throat.
I feeeeeel so good. I fee-eeeel so good.

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