If you’ve been paying attention to Corpus Christi’s local media this week, you surely missed the latest news about the historic Oak Park United Methodist Church. You know, the one the whole city was talking about for a few days after it burned one night in March.

Well, the church finally closed for good on Sunday.

This is the church that old-timers still remember from it’s glory days when its neighborhood was the richest in town, the one  that played to crowds approaching 1000 (or more)  every week for decades, the one that hosted hundreds of the city’s most important weddings and funerals, the one that educated countless local kids.

Last you probably heard of the church, its couple of dozen current member were saying things like this “When we found out the fellowship hall (the church’s original sanctuary) was still standing, it was a celebration. It’s like God is getting the church back to its roots so it can grow again.”

The congregation’s last pastor led the “deconsecration” ceremony in front of 20 people or so under an old oak tree on the church’s front lawn. My father, who grew up near the church, was not the only one who cried throughout.

Everything on the property (yes, even that fellowship hall) will soon be raised entirely.

“This place has so much history,” my dad said when I found him after the ceremony, gazing quietly at the destroyed sanctuary, not wanting to leave, wondering if even the trees on the property would be chopped down. (That depends on who buys the land, I’m told.)

I listened as Dad recalled all of his school buddies — including several local legends –  who grew up in that neighborhood and had spent countless hours at that church.

I felt tears too.

But my tears were mostly of rage. Dozens of reporters, editors, columnists and news directors in our city have done a damn lousy job by this church!

I guess I know the power of journalism too well. It’s frustrating to realize the pain that can come about when the craft is done poorly.

It shouldn’t be just a fantasy that  my father could have been surrounded by many of his old friends at that ceremony,  all of them standing emotionally before reporters and microphones,  telling great tales of their childhood in the neighborhood and giving editors material their staffs can expound upon for weeks.

But that is just a fantasy.

Our local media quit talking about the church less than a week after the fire. So I’m sure that news of its death (if it ever reaches them) will be a surprise to thousands. In fact, I’ll bet  that some of Dad’s old friends are still halfway expecting to hear about Oak Park’s grand re-opening in 2012, maybe even halfway planning to attend.

And here’s something even more infuriating that my years of journalism taught me: Oak Park Church didn’t necessarily have to close at all.

Had anyone in our local media bothered to inquire, even a little, about the church after they fire, they would have quickly heard that the local Methodists were far from unanimous about its future. There were a myriad of ideas for the property circulating across the town, but all of them were hurriedly conceived and insecurely financed. (What else could be expected on such short notice?) As none of the ideas seemed likely to catch on over the summer, church leaders finally decided upon the wisest decision under the circumstances:  close the church, sell the property, and merge the membership with another local congregation (which happens to be my church, St. Luke’s United Methodist).

Here I go fantasizing again:

Had reporters been in attendance at some of the open-to-the-public meetings about Oak Park over the summer, they would certainly have heard some of these ideas. And, just a mention two of any of them might have brought support from many others in the city.

Alas, back in real life, it’s difficult for a city to show support for ideas it has never heard about.

I can hear the overworked yeomen of our local newsrooms now: “Well, why didn’t anyone with the church just give us a call to tell us what was up?”

It’s true that folks involved with this story could have done a better job of pushing their own ideas upon the media. I happen to be one of those people, and I’m sure it would have taken just a press-release and a phone call or two to get a good bit of attention for my idea that Oak Park’s old school building be restored and re-opened as a school and community center.

But journalism, at least the way I learned it, isn’t supposed to work like that. In fact, I had an editor or two who used to send press releases directly to the trash. “No thanks! I’ll decide what’s news,” one used to say.

I guess I took my ethics classes too seriously. I didn’t call the local media  about my idea because  I didn’t want to unduly influence the discussion about the church’s future. (I’m not even an Oak Park member, after all.) I trusted that the church’s protocols would lead to the wisest decision.

And, unfortunately, they did.

But I know those protocols would have allowed for a different conclusion had the media seen fit to cover this great story properly. If only they had been given complete information, our city’s residents would have found a way to re-build that church and bring to life some of the wonderful ideas that the fire had inspired. I’m confident of that.  It’s happened many times before.

I  guess I need to stop fantasizing and come to terms with these two senseless deaths in our city. Journalism and this church are both gone. I just need to get over it.

But before I do, please indulge me this one last grief stricken story:

When I heard the date and time of Oak Park’s final ceremony (which had been eminent for weeks), I almost decided to see my ethical stubbornness through to the end. I planned to not say a word to the local media about the ceremony, to just be content to let the church die a quiet death, entirely unannounced.

But the thought proved too much for me as I saw how eager my father was to attend the closing.

Ninety minutes before the ceremony, I called our city’s two television newsrooms and the newspaper. I spoke to one man who seemed grateful for a way to fill his newscast on that slow Sunday, and I have yet to hear back from the others.

The one station did send a crew out and the reporter did a decent job with the story. Grateful that the church’s death was not entirely ignored, I figured I would send out email  links to the story on the station’s website.

But I’ve not yet been able to find the story listed amidst all the others the station has run in recent days.

Such much, even for that fleeting fantasy. I’m off to grieve.

This just in! Big news before I close!

This tragic tale may have a happy ending in store after all.

The man who once edited the Oak Park newsletter is one of those my church is welcoming these day. He and I talked for two hours today about the distressing state of journalism in our city, and we think it’s possible that our church could begin publishing its own Corpus Christi newspaper in 2012.

Update: December 27 — I just stumbled upon this interesting link to the story of a church apparently saved by a small group in suburban Rochester, New York.

Here goes:

Growing up around Galveston during Prohibition years in the United States,  William Curtis Scherdin didn’t have benefit of a case worker from Child Protective Services (CPS didn’t get started until the ’70′s.) or any other sort of government appointed mentor. Who knew a drunk monkey could be a good stand-in?

William’s father was a Gulf Coast bootlegger who often had his son in tow on  boat trips across the Galveston Bay with his illegal cargo. Young William, his father, and a crew of helpers would regularly meet a supplier near Texas City, load their liquor onto a small ship, and sail it to a hideout on Bolivar Peninsula, more than an hour away.

This, of course, is akin to a 21st century drug dealer taking his 2nd grader along on runs, and I’m guessing that thought horrifies just about everyone who contemplates it. CPS could surely expect a call or two, if a parent were to try something similar today.

Nevertheless, William’s son Eddie Scherdin (my wife’s 73-year-old cousin who lives in Sweeny, Texas) speaks nostalgically of these days. And he seems especially proud of what his father said happened on one particularly interesting  trip to Bolivar.

Family legend has it that one day in about 1914, when William was just 6 years old, his father and the other crew members found themselves delayed at their dock for several hours with a shipload of booze. (Eddie says he thinks it was because of dangerous weather, but he can’t be sure.) William’s father was as well established a drinker as he was a bootlegger so, to pass the time, he liberally sampled the cargo — and encouraged the other men to join him. By the time the ship was ready to leave, none of the crew were sober enough to pilot it.

So William, the grade-schooler, became the captain that day.

Gadzooks! What have I done? I can hear chatter from my local CPS office already. I can even envision a worker paying me a visit soon.  Per Texas law, I may have just put myself in legal peril. Not officially reporting one’s suspicion of child abuse is a serious offense these days, and I’m not sure even it matters that both parent and child have long since passed on.  (Eddie, I guess they could be coming for you, too!) Well, the damage is done, I guess. I might as well keep going.

No one can be sure of whether William was energized or traumatized by this wild ride across the bay. About the only sure detail of this trip is that boat, crew and cargo all, apparently, arrived intact. Imagine that!

But Eddie says the experience did help launch in his father an intense love for alcohol that lasted through his adolescence .

“My father grew up around alcohol, and he loved it from the very beginning,” Eddie says. “But” (here’s where the monkey comes in, finally) “he quit drinking as a very young man.”

That last part deserves repeating.

Despite a childhood surrounded by booze and drunks on illegal  rum running trips, and despite the drama of steering an illicit ship across a bay at such a young age, and despite having no one to intervene in his disturbing life,  William managed to “quit drinking as a very young man.”

Astonishing. Who would have thought?

Here’s how it happened.

One day about 15 years after his adventure upon the bay, William and his brother, both accustomed to the delinquent life by then, ended up drunk in front of a monkey’s cage at the Houston zoo. Having nothing better to do, they sat and drank and watched the monkey for more than an hour before deciding upon their next bit of fun. “Let’s get this ole’ boy drunk,” one of them said.

The two coaxed the animal to the cage’s bars and slipped him a beer. (And no one at the zoo tried to stop this, Eddie? “Well, zoo’s back then weren’t like they are today.”) The monkey downed the bottle, and came back for more. And more. And more. And more.

“Pretty soon that damn monkey was drunk as a skunk. And he was doin’ all kinds of crazy monkey business all over that damn cage,” Eddie says.

And that’s when the monkey saved William’s life.

“When my father got a good look at how crazy that drunk monkey was, he thought, I must act like that all the time, too,” Eddie said. “So right then, he decided he wasn’t ever going to be like no drunk monkey ever again. He never picked up another drink. That damn monkey saved my father’s life! Mine too, probably!”

William passed away in 1960, and we’ll never know whether he would have welcomed the type of “intervention” that would have likely come about had his childhood happened, say, 70 years later. But we do know that he lived to tell the tale to his son, who now shares it nostalgically with us.

Perhaps it is okay after all to just let God work His strange magic in our world.

Enter God.

A fire on March 30 at Oak Park United Methodist Church, in the neighborhood where my father grew up, has inspired me to put the dream to writing.

I am posting this article  just one day before the congregation of Oak Park is scheduled to meet about what should be done with their once-majestic church. I’m told that the group will likely go along with proposal that the local elders of  the United Methodist Church have put forth (with much sadness, I am certain) to formally close the church and raze the buildings.

I do not wish for this article to be taken as some sort of dramatic, last-minute attempt at saving the buildings. (Neither Chris nor I are in any position to attempt such a thing.)  But I think it is important to note that this article does owe its timing to my glimmer of thought, shared for at least a few recent days by a number of people involved with the church, that a restored Oak Park Church would be a great place for a school. I suffer no delusion that I will be persuasive with the next section — in fact, I encourage readers active in the case of Oak Park Church to simply skip over it, if that’s their inclination –  but I do feel God calling me to begin this article with a brief argument for returning to the idea of starting a school at the church.

The Case For A Neighborhood

Oak Park UMC  sits in the middle of a Corpus Christi neighborhood that has quietly defied, for decades, the local populace’s attempts to desert it. The area was once home to the city’s luxurious country club, it’s most energetic shopping district, and it’s most heralded schools,  but, for reasons best left for historians and sociologists to ponder, its prominence has steadily fallen since about 1960. Nevertheless, as plywood, graffiti and weeds have taken over commercial sectors, dozens of the area’s stately homes remain stubbornly in good repair. (I checked a few addresses on the county appraisal district’s website the other day and found them to all be valued at $250,000 or more. ) I’ve done no formal study on this neighborhood’s current demographics, but my years of knowing friends who have lived in the neighborhood lead me to this hypothesis: most of the homes that have weathered the area’s decline are owned by people of two broad categories. They grew up amidst relative wealth in the neighborhood’s glory days and have stayed all these decades in their childhood homes, or they are people who secured their family’s nest for a steal  from other families frightened away by the area’s economic troubles. Either way, since this neighborhood is their family’s homestead, these people have plenty of non-economic incentive to keep their houses and streets in excellent shape even as commerce has abandoned them. And their diligence has certainly kept this neighborhood viable over the years — despite the economic forces working to the contrary.

But, as these long-time homeowners pass on or decide, finally, to cash in their family’s real estate windfall (perhaps with the fear that the eventual profit their families have long-counted upon may disappear entirely), the area’s third category of homeowner seems poised to become even more prevalent: those seeking inexpensive investments. Non-economic incentives don’t exist for the real estate investor, of course. So, for him, the amount of care devoted to a home depends directly surrounding commercial districts. If commerce is shabby, rental homes in the area will be shabby too. That’s just the way our free market works. As things currently stand, only increased shabbiness seems to be the fate of the Oak Park neighborhood.

I appear to be in the minority in Corpus Christi, but I’ve long believed that our city owes it to the long-time residents of this great  neighborhood to make a serious attempt to restore its prominence.  The last thing the Oak Park Church’s neighbors need is yet another lot that used to be bustling with energy.  The death of any church is always sad, but this one would be a tragedy (albiet, one that would be largely unrecognized, unfortunately) for our city. I’ve felt the same sadness dozens of times over the years at the closing of the neighborhood’s various department stores, restaurants, and even a movie theater.

I suppose I am consoled somewhat by the fact that another church has relatively recently moved into a former school building in Oak Park’s  neighborhood and has reportedly  established itself very well amongst people who live nearby.  I’m told that some 300 people attend worship services there each Sunday, and dozens can usually be found there working on various projects during the rest of the week. What’s more, I’m told, the church politely discourages participation from people who live in other parts of town. This interesting caveat seems proof that my hypothesis is correct: hope and vitality are still very much in the hearts off those who live in the neighborhood.

But, since Romans 8:37 tells us that we are “more than conquerors,” I am troubled to be consoled by this church’s good works. I see God clearly asking for more from us all so that this neighborhood, and our city, can achieve the great potential that He has in store.

The Simple School that I describe below can be established in any neighborhood in any city. But I hope all readers will keep in mind that the Oak Park neighborhood is the one that inspired it.

The Simple School’s Conception

As any complex project might, the idea for this school took an unexpected twist a few days ago as my co-dreamer and I began talking seriously about making it a reality. Chris typed up some notes that tied together most of the ideas that we’ve talked about informally for months. But, as I studied those notes, I realized the school we have been dreaming of  has much in common what many others have envisioned, and even attempted, recently. Project-based education is anything but our original idea. In fact, Chris reports that a school with which he has worked recently  in Keller, Texas is implementing a “project-based” curriculum these days. And a recent article in The Corpus Christi Caller Times tells of two troubled schools that local officials are transforming into “magnet schools” that appear, likewise, to be ready to follow a similar model.

I decided it would be a mistake (perhaps even a disservice) for our school to try to compete at this “project-based” idea against the much better funded public school system, so I introduced the twist which resulted in the name “The Simple School.”  To adequately explain The Simple School requires that I first describe what was in Chris’s notes, so I hope the reader will forgive me now as I delve upon that for a few lines.

Chris noted that we had talked of starting a school for 5th – 8th graders that would follow a “project based” curriculum, in other words students would learn language arts, science, math, and history, as if by osmosis, as they work through various “real-life” projects.  We decided the projects would all be centered around “communication,” and that would provide the additional benefit of teaching students media production, speaking, and other such skills that are very important in today’s world.  Some of the projects would also be counted upon to make “real” money that would be used to pay for scholarships and facility overhead.

Here are some of the projects we envisioned for the school: a newspaper serving the entire neighborhood around the school; blogs and other such websites; plays; films; science, math, and history projects that find solutions to “real” local problems and would involve “real” interaction with community leaders and local media; a small advertising agency that would assist local businesses; television and radio stations that would broadcast programing of local interest via the internet; an art gallery featuring student works as well as those of other local artists, and a band that would play “real” gigs throughout town (or even on the road).

Our idea was that a portion of the typical school day would find students practicing with teachers the practical skills they would need to work on the various projects (desktop publishing, web design, art, music, audio/video production, etc.), and the remainder of the day would find them involved directly with the projects themselves.

Each project would be run by student leaders appointed (and guided) by faculty members. The project managers would have to “hire” their fellow students who would “apply” for “jobs” in the school. Students’ “grades” in the school would be based on the number of jobs that they hold and the written reviews their work receives from project managers and teachers. The project manager’s grades would be based on the overall success of their project. To assure a good variety of learning, students would be required to work on many different projects throughout a school year.

The Simple School Twist

I’ve said that this plan is very similar to others, but careful readers will note that it is also very different in one respect, which my twist highlights even further. Whereas most other project-based learning is careful to stay centered upon the core traditions of modern education (carefully prepared lessons, formal tests, textbooks, uniform class periods, etc), our plan is careful to all-but eliminate those.  The only one to which we pay explicit homage  is that of grades, and even that one we intend to alter fairly dramatically by not pretending that it is, necessarily, a fair and objective assessment of a student’s effort. (All grades, in other words, would be open for discussion and appeal, thereby discouraging the habit of defensiveness that often results in students when grades are presented as a harsh, final judgement.) More than any other school that I know of, ours would be based upon the reality of a free-market. Students would be required, above all, to make their projects viable in the “real” world — just as they will be in, well, the “real” world.

Thinking of this difference between our idea and other project-based models, I realized that our school would likely have to be even more committed to the spirit of laissez-fair than Chris or I had anticipated.  To be true to our ideals, our list of potential projects would have to go. The students, themselves, would have to recreate it. Philosophically speaking, if our main requirement for students is that their projects prove viable in the “real” world, we have no business mandating which projects students undertake. This recalls the age-old argument for a free-market economy over communism: people are naturally more committed to their own ideas than to those forced upon them by a bureaucratic system. Our original idea ignores this lesson (as do all of the other project-based models I’ve seen so far).  Education would suffer as a result.

So, here’s my twist:

The Simple School would entail all of the features named above, except the list of projects and the teacher appointed project managers. The main job of students would be to develop commercially viable projects of their own, but they would also help other students develop projects too. Teachers, meanwhile, would become intimately acquainted with each student (and his or her family), helping him or her to make wise choices regarding the projects and to find the resources to be successful.

Simple really. Right?

Starting The Simple School

Another advantage to the twist I have introduced is that it would make starting the school much less complex and expensive than other project-based models. (Corpus  Christi ISD is currently spending millions to turn “classrooms” into “conference rooms,” and to train teachers in the new approach.)

In the spirit of simpleness, we would simply need to uncover a commercially viable idea in the mind of a single potential student. Armed with that, we could then simply coach the student (and his or her family) as she develops the idea (writing a business plan is as good of a learning experience as pouring over a term paper), finds others to support it (financially and otherwise), and generally gets the project going. This first student would then “hire” new students who would help with her project, and each of them would be required to develop a project of their own. (And the first student would be required to help with some of these other projects, too.) The school’s growth would be all-but assured from there.

If you know of (or are) a student who has a brilliant idea for a commercially viable project, just let me know, and we can get started any time.

Simple really, right?

The Texas Medical Board keeps a fairly thorough record of disciplinary actions it takes against the doctors of our state. Here’s where you can find those records online. Click the “look up a licensee” link to find your doctor’s record. If, like we did, you want to see the records of all doctors in a particular city, just type in that city’s name in the form and hit return. (In otherwords, don’t worry about the other blanks.)

We found more than 1,000 records for doctors in Corpus Christi, and, at first glance, it seems as if the vast majority have never been disciplined. Sometime before the end of April, though, we plan to click through each of those records and give you a report in this blog.

Also, we’re going to make it a weekly practice to check the Recent Disciplinary Actions link and read about the latest doctors in trouble. We intend to follow media coverage of all the cases listed and give you a quarterly report of which media outlets are doing a good job of helping patients know what’s wrong with their doctors.

Also, for folks who don’t live in Texas, we’ll be checking on what all the other states do to give you easy access to similar information about doctors in your state. Check back for more on that, and, if you know of some good links in that regard, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.

]]> http://www.doncudd.com/2008/08/19/things-that-give-writers-fits/feed/ 0 http://www.doncudd.com/2008/08/19/to-be-a-writer-ya-gotta-be-a-reader-too/ http://www.doncudd.com/2008/08/19/to-be-a-writer-ya-gotta-be-a-reader-too/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:09:55 +0000 Don Cudd http://www.doncudd.com/?p=280 It’s been said that there are more writers in the world than readers. I want to conduct a study someday to see if that’s true. My guess is that it is.

This tip is short and sweet: please do more reading, dang it. Especially if you want to call yourself a writer. You will be surprised at how your writing skills will improve just by osmosis … if you bother to read as much as, or even more than, you write.

Here’s what I do. Have done it for years. I recommend you do the same.

I make sure that I’ve always got a book or magazine with me where ever I go. So, that way, when I’m waiting at the barbershop, I can get 10 minutes of reading in. When things are slow at work, well, I’m never at a loss. While my wife is shopping, I can entertain myself for hours in the parking lot.

Why don’t you consider doing yourself (and anyone who may have to read your writing) a favor? Make a better effort to read more, dang it. I guarantee it won’t hurt you.

The fact is, writing is tough. Even for the pros. Keep that in mind as you struggle through your latest project: every decent writer goes through much the same frustration.

Case in point: I’m about to resort a boring cliche that I really know better than to use. But writing is so hard, I can’t come up with anything better. I’ve spent 20 minutes pacing around my apartment trying to come up with just the right, non-cliche, phrase to make my point. Nothing’s coming. So, in the interest of moving on, I’ve decided to cut my losses and go with the cliche, painful as it is. Here goes:

Writing ain’t easy. But, then, nothing worthwhile ever is, right?

Geez. Do you see what I mean? It took me 20 minutes to finally decide to write a silly sentence that you’ve probably heard a thousand times before (except with “writing” replaced by any other gerund). I just hope you take my cliche to heart, even though it is overused and boring.

To do good writing, you have to struggle. That’s just all there is to it. You have to think harder than you probably really want to, and that’s no fun. And the really frustrating part is that — because most people don’t write well and therefore tend to think that writing is much easier than it is — great writing often goes unrecognized and unappreciated.

So, despite my cliche, good writing is not necessarily worthwhile from a financial stand point. But it is always worthwhile from an intellectual, even spiritual, point of view.

The pleasure of good writing comes well after it’s done, when what you’ve said strikes a nerve in one of your readers. The trouble is, you often never hear when this happens. So, it’s usually easy to conclude that all of your frustrating effort has been for nothing. I’m not sure how to help with that, except to point out that it’s society’s problem, not yours.

If your writing is good, it’s in tune to the truth. And that means it is eternally worthwhile. Remembering that is the best way I know to make writing pleasant (at least to some extent). I’m sorry. I don’t know of a way to make it easy.

It’s surprising how many people just don’t see a problem with saying, “The taxes were raised last night.”

Me? Well, I see a huge problem with letting the people who raised the taxes get away with doing so. There’s no doubt that the folks on the city council want you to think that your taxes “were raised” last night by some mysterious, unaccountable, force. But that’s not really what happened.

No, what happened is, you see, the city council members actually raised the taxes.

Did you catch all that? Well, it all happened kind of quickly. So, let’s review:

“The taxes were raised last night.”

“The city council member raised the taxes last night.”

Because I decided to avoid the evil passive voice in the second sentence, you now know that it’s those scoundrels on the city council who actually raised your taxes. Feel free to vote ‘em out of office next time around.

I hope you’re starting see now, why I say that the passive voice is evil: it lets people avoid responsibility. That’s why government and corporate leaders are so fond of it.

But that’s exactly why everyone else should be wary of it.

Any time you find yourself writing about some inanimate object sitting around and passively letting some unknown person do something to it, well, you’re toying around in the Gates of Hell, er, I mean, the passive voice. Get out! Fast! Don’t release the Beasts!

The only time most Godly souls have any need for the passive voice is when they don’t know who is doing a particular thing. If we don’t know who stole a glove, for example, then, well, it’s not evil to say the glove was stolen

I hope this clears it up.

A lot of teachers will tell you that the passive voice is all about the “noun receiving — rather than doing — the action in a sentence.” Well, that is true. But it’s also confusing and boring. So, that’s why most people have no idea what the passive voice really is.
I hope I’ve helped fix that.

Just remember that the passive voice is usually evil. Unless you’re hiding something, you don’t need it.

I keep thinking about Captain Yossarian in Catch 22, and I guess I’m lucky. I had an anxiety attack in early February after a typical day teaching classes at Marshall High School in Fairfax County.A few days later I ended up with Yossarian’s elusive prize: a doctor’s note ordering me to stay away from my classroom indefinitely.

This debatably happy ending to my once promising teaching career makes my case less dramatic than Yossarian’s, of course, but a similar theme is at work. My doctors are just more cooperative.

Officially speaking, I am too crazy to teach, I suppose. But, for your kids’ sake, I hope you will indulge this nut for a few more paragraphs. I want to explain the real problem. It’s what led to my demise and, unfortunately, it hardly ever gets a mention in public discussions about education.

Ask any teacher. She’ll tell you. What’s wrong with education in America is that school systems across the country (please do not misinterpret me as singling out Fairfax County Public Schools) have dramatically unrealistic expectations about how much time teachers need to do things other than teach.

Teachers have to, let’s see, plan for classes, consult with colleagues and parents, grade papers, prepare class materials, respond to e-mails, complete paper work, stay current on education issues, learn new technology, tutor troubled students, organize extra curricular