This morning on the treadmill in the gym, where I was trying to burn off some negative energy in a positive way, I was reading a recent issue of Time magazine on love and marriage.
The article included the following short poem from one of my all-time favorite poets, Ogden Nash:
To keep a marriage brimming, with love in your loving cup.
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
There’s something to be said for that approach in a lot of settings. It’s excellent advice, which I’ll endeavour to take more to heart—here and elsewhere.
Let me start with an apology to Shelley I didn’t mean to imply that she was cause of my frustration with things over at misbehaving.net. It wasn’t her comments, or even that one thread, that resulted in my frustrated post here. It’s the overall tone that seems to have taken over on that site.
One of the things I learned the hard way as a teacher is that when I’m grading an assignment, it always helps for me to find something in the work that I can praise. Even if overall I think there are serious flaws, nothing kills enthusiasm and interest quite like an overdose of criticism. So I try to provide balance, I try to offer encouragement, I try to offer suggestions on how to correct problems.
It has felt to me (and this is my perception, which is all I’m qualified to offer) as though the comments offered on misbehaving have been primarily criticism, and that there’s been precious little encouragement to balance that. And without that balance, there’s little incentive to stick with it.
I wonder if the fact that misbehaving is a group weblog isn’t a part of it…on a personal site, maybe there’s a clearer sense that when you criticize, there’s a real person that you’re dealing with.
This is so good, it must be shared. A fragment:
But only one person is the appointed bearer. And that poor sap has to carry the burden the entire way, a burden that just gets heavier and heavier as the weeks wear on. The bearer gets increasingly tired and cranky as they approach their destination — and who can blame them? Their good-for-nothing companion doesn’t do anything useful, except flit about and say things like “jeeze, I wish I could carry the burden for a while!” and occasionally fight off an enormous spider and/or fetch chocolate ice cream.
Anyone who has ever been pregnant, or lived with someone who was pregnant, should read the whole thing.
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