Quotes from work

[Annie Subjunctive]

Jonathon, do you get the impression that a lot of your clients get away with their bad habits because they've been in their jobs for years upon years and the Church isn't a very cutthroat place to work? I get that impression. (And not just with clients, with some of the people in my department. It seems to me that their jobs are what you'd call in Chinese an "iron rice bowl.")

[Jonathon]

Oh heavens.

They probably taught you that in your PhD program, right?

[rivka]

I think I picked it up from a Pearl Buck novel.

[BlackBlade]

Writing this principle on the board will help students see its importance.

I never knew teaching was so easy—all you have to do is write stuff on the board, and the students will automatically see its significance all on their own!

Well, to be fair, if a teacher merely speaks a phrase it's more forgetable than when a teacher speaks a phrase and writes it on the board.

It signals to the class the teacher really wants you to consider it. It's not foolproof obviously, at most you've bought maybe a few more seconds of your kid's attention, but as a principle it work, especially if you keep referring back to it.

[Tante Shvester]

Speaking the principle out loud will help the students hear its importance.

[Jonathon]

Jonathon, do you get the impression that a lot of your clients get away with their bad habits because they've been in their jobs for years upon years and the Church isn't a very cutthroat place to work? I get that impression. (And not just with clients, with some of the people in my department. It seems to me that their jobs are what you'd call in Chinese an "iron rice bowl.")

I think that's a large part of the problem. It seems that a lot of people think that once you get a job at the Church, you're set for life. This means that a lot of people just coast once they get here. The Church Office Building also has a very insular culture, so it's hard to change things, and there's a lot of respect for authority, even if that authority is wrong. Also, I think it's sometimes hard to attract the best people in the field when you can only hire people who are active LDS and the pay isn't quite as competitive. That quote came from a seminary manual, and the problem there is that the writers aren't professional writers or instructional designers or anything. They're not necessarily even subject-matter experts—they're just seminary teachers who have been called to come to headquarters and write. Some of my other clients obviously have no idea how the publishing process is supposed to work. They've been through like four or five final reviews now because they keep treating each one as another chance to rewrite things. It's ridiculous, and I really have no leverage over them. Publishing Services is supposed to be a customer-oriented organization, and the customer is always right.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Oh heavens.

They probably taught you that in your PhD program, right?

That was what I took out of it after all was said and done, yes.

[Jonathon]

Speaking the principle out loud will help the students hear its importance.

Writing this principle on students' backs with your finger will help them feel its importance.

[dkw]

Teachers won't have any trouble smelling the importance of these directions.

[Jonathon]

 

[Jonathon]

Today, in Replies That Won't Be Sent:

Writer: "Is this written at a 4th-6th grade level? If not, can it be?"

Me: "I don't know, you tell me. You wrote the damn thing."

[rivka]

*snicker-snort*

[BlackBlade]

[rivka]

Book blurb starts: "A rouge planet".

Um . . .

[BlackBlade]

Maybe it's the future, and planets have gained self-awareness and all belong to some inter-solar system and one of the planets has decided it doesn't care for rules like gravity.

[Jonathon]

Book blurb starts: "A rouge planet".

Um . . .

Like Mars?

[Neutros the Radioactive Dragon]

It was just blushing.

[Jonathon]

Tradition holds that Isaiah died prematurely by being 'sawn asunder' at the hands of king Manasseh.

Being sawn asunder is a well-known cause of premature death.

[Tante Shvester]

I saw a woman sawn asunder by a magician, and she was just fine.

[BlackBlade]

So you're saying Isaiah alive and just waiting for somebody to give him the cue to reappear just fine from behind a curtain?!?!?!

[Tante Shvester]

Maybe Manasseh was a crappy magician who messed up the trick.

[Jonathon]

It makes perfect sense.

[Annie Subjunctive]

[Annie Subjunctive]

Literally a quote from work: one of the clients we're helping has a curriculum written for military families facing the stress of deployment and separation. It's a tiny project that was written by elderly missionaries and isn't as bad as it could be considering the limited resources they had in creating it, but as I'm helping revise and update it I'm having to track down the sources of a lot of quotations they used and a lot of them are from really old or obscure sources.

This one was tricky, even though it was attributed:

"The deeper the dark, the closer the dawn. However profound the suffering that envelops you, never forget the inner spark of hope and courage. Never lose the capacity to wait with patient enduring. Every hardship is an opportunity to strengthen ourselves, to temper our life and make it shine with greater luster. If you are going through a dark time, remind yourself that dawn is very close. Hope and courage will sustain you."
- Bishop Drew Rousse, Faith Cathedral

A quick search for Bishop Drew Rousse showed that he's a motivational speaker and there's not really anything credible published by him anywhere that I could find, so I assumed he had probably used the quote in a speech and it was attributed to him. Searching for the quote itself gets me a lot of Buddhist "thought of the day" sites and Tumblrs. Several different people attribute it to Daisaku Ikeda. The part where this gets odd is that I am one of the few LDS Church employees who would probably know who Daisaku Ikeda is. And I find that fact that one of his quotes made it into an LDS class somewhere rather funny.

Ikeda Sensei is the president of Soka Gakkai, a modern sect of Buddhism. One of the places I lived on my mission, Hachioji, is the world headquarters of Soka Gakkai and home to their university. They're, to be polite, a little wacky. And I realize that it's a little ridiculous for a Mormon to call a religious group wacky, but they display flags with the Soka Gakkai logo outside their apartments and wear lapel pins to identify themselves all the time and if you are a missionary and run into one you get an interesting militaristic pre-rehearsed spiel just for Mormons. There's kind of a cult of personality around Ikeda and he's one of the reasons that most Japanese people mistrust religion and equate "sect" with "cult." Some people call SGI (Soka Gakkai International) the "Mormons of Buddhism," which makes this all a lot funnier, but having had experience with both groups I hope I could authoritatively say this isn't true.

So, you know, it's a nice-sounding quote, but not the most legit of materials and I think I'm going to recommend that they remove it. And giggle to myself about the really weird coincidence that led me to be the one researching its origins.

[BlackBlade]

Your experiences with them sounds exactly like Falun Gong members in Taiwan.