It is the job of schools to ensure that students develop the qualities and skills that will enable them to contribute meaningfully to the needs of future societies. In the U.S. education field’s current climate of accountability, however, this essential goal seems to be overlooked in favor of test preparation.

Tapping the Muse

For me, the secret is always the lead—that’s journalist jargon for the opening of a story, the one provocative idea that will capture a reader’s interest. 
Once I’ve found that gem, the rest of the narrative seems to flow easily from the gray matter in my head down to my fingers pounding on the keyboard...

 

Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern by Ed zern
These are Zern's basic theses:
There are people who hunt and fish;
They also drink and tell lies when they are fishing and hunting;
Or any other time;
They are not interested in anything else;
Like politics, wives, children ... you name it;
If you think they are dotty, you have another think coming.
Zern's writing is wonderfully droll. For some of us he is a lifetime addiction (I first read him in 1947). It might have to do with the names. Zern seems to know everyone and anyone in this country who spends any time at all hunting and fishing: he's constantly dropping names of people we've never heard of. Hell, I don't know --- maybe he makes them all up.
He also seems conversant with every place in America and the rest of the Western world where one can drop dry flies in a cold river, or fish from a boat, or take a shotgun to zebras, deer, woodcocks, or spend mornings shivering in a blind waiting for ducks or turkeys to happen by.
I guess some of his charm is his well-disguised intellectualism. In one of his pieces for Field & Stream --- Field & Stream, mind you --- he slips in references to Wagner (comparing his operas to big game hunting), Bach Sonatas (trout fishing with a dry fly). Proust and Joyce turn up here or there, as does D. H. Lawrence (see below).
The main reason that Ed Zern is not listed up there with S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, E. B. White and Peter de Vries is because he wrote for the sporting set at Field & Stream instead of the smart set at The New Yorker. Yet he bests many of the more famous humorists --- with the possible exception of Perelman.

Everyday English, Book 1
by Jean Sherwood Rankin
(Rare Book Collection)

To make good speech a sort of social obligation will impress a child infinitely more than all the abstractions known as rules of grammar. There is no more interesting, even fascinating subject than that of language use, whether relative to the old or young. Yet vital books about language are the exception. There seems to be a wellnigh fatal penalty attached to the handling of such a theme; to wit, the dryasdust manner, a lack of all freshness, color and movement. This is all the stranger since we are all implicated in the questions of the use and abuse of the mother tongue and no topic is more eagerly discussed or awakens a more alert attention. The little volume here following contains, it seems, a thoroughly acceptable treatment of the principles of language use for the guidance of children.