Start the week #22

Chas and Cam, great reading, a mini essay, and more

Terry, by Terry

Greetings!

Just as I was giving myself a huge pat on the back (which I find difficult: I must do some Pilates) for managing to get Start the Week out 21 weeks in a row, I ended up having to miss last week’s. Sorry about that.

Missing a week? What’s going on? I’ve just been a bit inundated with clearing an office because we have some work about to start. By “clearing” I mean moving a whole untidy mess to a particular area of the room in order to make a rather more tidy mess.

One outcome of this rearranging is that I am way behind on my Substack reading. Hopefully I shall make some inroads into that pile slowly but surely.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.

Terry

That selfie

Me: I need to take a selfie.

E: Why?

Me: My readers might ask me for an autographed picture.

E: You’re so vain!

Me: Perhaps I should look like I’m communicating with my Muse.

E: Muse? What’s her name?

T: Or perhaps a more contemplative look.

E: That would be difficult.

Me: My readers, my legacy, posterity (mumbling fades until inaudible)

Well, that’s the selfie at the top of this newsletter. We’d gone to watch the coronation fly past near where we live, and because I thought we’d seen it all I started fiddling with taking a selfie. But then the Red Arrows flew over and my finger stopped working so I couldn’t switch to the front-facing camera.

But all is not lost. As the coronation’s unofficial artist I had a front row seat of the proceedings (in front of the tv). Here is the drawing I did, which took me hours. Enjoy.

Chas and Cam, by Terry Freedman

Elsewhere on Substack

June Girvin has written a very beautiful article with pictures to match:

So far, it’s been a slow and a cold spring. The allium are struggling to split the skins that hold their purple flowers tightly, protecting them from cold and wet. The osteospermum have started flowering and the coronilla is still a mass of flowers, on the point of fading. The early tulips are over, the mid-season Estella Rijnveld are blowsy and wavering, and the late Caribbean Parrot are bursting their gold and red frilled buds ready to take over.

Read on…

Coronations, coronilla, and contrasts....

Peter Greene suggests a way that libraries might handle requests to remove or include particular books:

First, all libraries have to make choices, because all libraries have limited space. All libraries make choices about which books not to acquire, which books not to give a slice of the valuable and limited shelf space in the library.

Read on…

How not to fight book bans

The theme of the Soaring Twenties Social Club this month was death. I’m (slowly) working my way through the collection (which includes my own take on it by the way). Tom, the convenor/boss/maestro says:

… as soon as ‘Death’ established itself as the front-runner and as soon as the first few early submissions started to arrive I knew we were onto a winner. Some topics just grab people and pull the work out of them, rather than them having to put in effort to push out some words or images that fit the bill.

I would like to say something amusing or clever to sign this off and tee-up the work that follows but all that I can say- with absolute sincerity- is that I am blown away with how good everyone’s work is this month. And I trust that you will feel the same way.

Read on…

Death

My own articles

Last week I published:

1. Three collections of Oulipo writing Look out for Kathleen Waller’s post and podcast in which she interviewed me about the Oulipo. Her newsletter is The Matterhorn.

2. We must stop muting like this

3. One way I write my articles

4. The death of writer’s block

5. Experiments in style: a mystery technique (If you really can’t figure out what I did, see the clue at the bottom of this newsletter.)

Coming up:

1. Tuesday: an article about pitching (to editors or anyone else you need to obtain work from)

2. Wednesday: my reply to Rebecca’s letter # 12 (hopefully)

Who is the expert?

A mini essay

What’s the point in having experts if you don’t consult them? Let’s take the field of health as an example. It’s all too easy to self-diagnose. Think of the person in Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. He made the mistake of consulting a medical dictionary, and came to the conclusion that he had every malady apart from housemaid’s knee.

The web has made that even worse, but guesswork and supposition are worse still. A few years ago someone told me that he had a protein deficiency. I asked him how he knew, to which he replied that he just thought he must have.

But sometimes one does know. I had been going to my doctor for several months, telling her I was sure I had a chest infection. Each time we went through the same scenario:

“Deep breath in, deep breath out”, so fast that I thought I was going to hyperventilate. But then on the last occasion she said, “No, you don’t have an infection, but I’ll send you for a chest x-ray”.

Lo and behold, the x-ray showed that I did have an infection. She prescribed antibiotics which were so powerful that I can only assume they were a by-product of a biological weapons programme. And then, a week later, I felt better than I had in months. So who was the real expert in this case?

I mention all this not because I want sympathy or flowers, though such things are always appreciated, but because in education teachers too often demur when it comes to asserting their own expertise.

“I’m just a teacher” they say, to which I say there is no such thing as ‘just’ a teacher.

Some years ago, when the ICT (as it was then) Programme of Study in England was being revised, I was chatting to the person in charge of it all, in a bar. (Where else?)

“I hope your new Programme of Study is as good as my own ICT and Computing curriculum” I said. “Because if it isn’t, I’m going to continue to use my own.”

He looked shocked.

“Sorry”, I said, “But I’m a subject expert and the curriculum I’m following covers everything, including ethical issues, programming, hardware etc etc. Why would I swap that for something less good?”

Now, anyone who has met me will know that I am not given to singing my own praises. But I do know what I know.

I experience the same feeling when I attend conferences. When some new-to-the-field person, or someone who has never taught in their lives, announces some new way of teaching, or which methods should or shouldn’t be used, it brings out my inner self-assuredness.

It's not arrogance; it's self-assuredness.

So, my view is, always seek expert advice, but do not denigrate your own expertise and experience in the process.

Further reading

Here are a few referral links to newsletter directories. If you click through and sign up to these services, you’ll be sent links to other newsletters you might be interested in. And the people who run these services will promote this one too. So it’s a potential win-win-win situation.

Refind

I find this one especially useful for discovering newsletters and articles concerning leadership matters, which I’m quite interested in.

The Sample

I very much like the variety served up. I receive one suggestion a day, and have subscribed to a few of them.

Yakreads

This has links to long reads. I haven’t really explored it yet, but it seems quite interesting. If you sign up using that link apparently I’ll get $4 credit towards an advertisement. I’ve no idea how much an advert costs though.

Finally…

Your call to action is to subscribe to this newsletter if you don’t already, and to share it if you do.

If you value my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which is currently just $45 a year (aka under 87c a week) or $5 a month.

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Or recommend it, to make yourself feel good and to build up a stock of good Karmic points (not guaranteed, I’m afraid: you could be a mass murderer for all I know).

Or buy me a cup of tea. (It all helps. I frequently write in a cafe, to escape from the cats, and the coffee ain’t cheap!)

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Thanks for reading!

Clue to the mystery technique I used:

All the words and phrases I replaced have one thing in common.