President Clinton no longer wants his wife to lead the fight for health care reform. White House officials said Wednesday that two lesser known aides, Carol Rasco and Robert Rubin, will head the administration’s second attempt for health care reform. Officials also said Hillary Clinton recommended the change, feeling that the health care debate has moved to another stage.
Whatever happened to make American Eagle flight 4184 fall from the sky apparently happened too fast for the pilots to call for help. “There was no distress signal sent from the plane and no indication from conversation between the tower and aircraft,” Jim Hall, the chairman for the National Transportation Safety board, said Wednesday. However an NBC News report said that the cockpit voice recorder indicates that alarm after alarm suddenly went off signaling an emergency on Monday’s flight.
Back in Washington, a Colorado man was ordered to stand trial on charges he fired 27 bullets from a semi-automatic rifle at the White House last weekend. Francisco Martin Duran is charged with possessing a firearm as a convicted felon, destroying government property, assaulting a uniformed Secret Service agent and using a firearm while convicting a crime. If convicted on all counts he could face a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison.
Cloudy today with a high of 85; lows in the 70s, cloudy and humid tonight. Currently it’s 76 degrees.
I got a lot of strange looks from people when I said I had signed up for 8:00 a.m. classes my freshman year. No one in their right mind wants to get up early for class, I was told. My response usually echoed around the concept that it didn’t bother me, but also because one of the key classes I had to take (Introduction to Broadcasting) was offered at either 8-9:30 a.m. or 9:30-11 a.m. on T-days (Tuesdays and Thursdays). I suppose I wanted to get classes over with as soon as possible so the rest of the day could be mine.
This “get it done and over with” mentality also was why I stacked my M-days (Monday-Wednesday-Friday) with classes all morning. After four hours of classes I gave myself an hour for lunch – eaten with, of course, members of the Octumvirate – before heading off to final M-day class, English Composition I. There were little hesitations about this class as I had always done exceptionally well in high school literature and composition courses. I assumed this would be somewhat similar.
It turned out to be one of my least-liked classes that year for a number of reasons. First, the official text for the course was the Grandville English Primer, a hefty 1000+page text book compiled by the university English department in an assumed effort to come up with a book that did most of the work for them. The book had a little bit of everything in it, including long-winded chapters about sentence structure and grammar; how to cite sources, which seemed an almost verbatim copy of the Modern Language Association (MLA) handbook we also had to purchase; and finally some representative poetry and prose selections that would be discussed (or were going to be discussed) in the introduction English courses. My semester was the debut semester of the book, which featured an illustration that tired to look like a woodcut of the iconic 150-year-old Grandville Building on campus but failed and instead looked like a cheaply-created illustration.
Another thing to dislike about the course was the instructor, one Ms. Mona-Itza Getnam, best described as an annoying busy-body that was guided more by departmental rules and procedures than common sense. Some instructors had Ph.D.s and taught the upper-level courses and mucked about in bureaucratic issues, while others were graduate teaching assistants and worked in the writing lab and taught introduction classes during their studies to earn a master’s degree. Ms. Getnam fit into a second and thusly less fashionable group that had attained a master’s degree but was still regulated to instructing either introductory courses or English courses taken mostly by non-English majors.
Ms. Getnam’s syllabus for the class was the same one used by all the other Composition I instructors (something discovered and discussed with Lenny and Alan during mealtime). However I found out as the semester wore on that only Ms. Getnam paid strict attention to its details. The course outline was indeed very specific about what all classes should be doing each week of the semester; its major flaw, and that of the faculty panel that authored the text, was forgetting each class of students would act differently when presented with the lessons. Some classes would instantly understand the topic at hand, while other groups of students might need reinforcement about the concepts.
And the main “concepts” and “lessons” that Ms. Getnam and other similar instructors taught that semester were basic punctuation and capitalization skills. These were the same basic skills that my high school senior year English teacher had decided to focus on the year before, sensing that as seniors we could use a refresher to “wind down” our high school experience. Therefore I was subject to another year of a topic I felt everyone should have learned back in elementary school. There was refresher – which should have been one class sessions – and then there was overkill, which lasted two weeks too many.
Apparently Lenny and Alan were in English classes with students that far excelled the instructor’s expectations because they spent very little time on those subjects and moved into the writings found in the back of the primer. Even though a majority of the class mastered the subject and passed the countless end-of-day quizzes spring on us, we still had to spend time going over capitalization and punctuation because the syllabus said we had to.
There’s a note on the syllabus about the clock. Oh, yes..the clock on the back wall. Ms. Getnam got a huge kick in class the day she finally realized it was dead and that's why it was always ten minutes until three. Yes! How funny! Right in the middle of her reading an essay! But there was precious little else to remember about this class except those darn primers we had to spend upwards of $60 on at the start of the semester. When it came time to sell books back at the end of the year, the English Department, going through the motions of another brilliant idea, had decided to not use the books again. Bookstores were on strict order not to reshelve the book.
Plenty of reruns in class...no reusing the book. And that’s how Composition I became one of the worst classes that semester.
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Writing on the Wall
(Pat Coil/Grant Geissman)
Grant Geissman
From the album Reruns
1992