Funny thing about words.
The ones from the day before will occasionally show up the next morning.
You know. So they can slap you around a bit.
Tripped-over words.
Words that didn’t mean what you meant.
Whole sentences of them: A writhing, groaning, syntax-train wreck of misplaced modifiers and unclear antecedents.
Heck, it’s enough to make a guy pull a U-turn on the four-lane, so he can floor it back to the driveway.
Kevin Colistra’s words still carry a rueful chuckle when he glances up at the rearview.
“Yeah,” Monongalia County’s Teacher of the Year for 2020 said.
“That’s what I got for listening to the radio on the way in to work.”
Life sentence
These days, Colistra works at Morgantown High School, where he teaches English composition to ninth-graders, besides serving as an instructor in Advance Placement creative writing classes.
Right before COVID-19 showed up without a hall pass, you would likely find him after hours at his high school.
He’s the faculty advisor to the Poetry Out Loud club and teaches the English portion of the ACT and SAT exams, for students prepping for college.
The aforementioned radio days prepped him for a career as an English teacher.
That was in Colorado, where he was a news writer and sometimes on-air reporter for a broadcast chain.
He crafted copy for the morning newscasts and would listen during his commute to the words — his words — read out loud and over the air.
Radio gave him an appreciation of the narrative. Listeners are literally being told a story.
Practitioners of it also have to live within the economy of words the medium requires.
“On some things you’d only have 30 seconds,” he said.
Which meant, sooner or later, your script would contain a word or sentence that just didn’t work.
“It could get a little cringe-worthy,” he said.
“Things jump out. But I was learning.”
The story comes back around
The ink was barely dry on his English Communications diploma from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., when he got the radio job.
He grew up in the Philadelphia area and initially came to Morgantown for WVU.
In the wandering ways of the English major, though, he did a road trip to Colorado — and promptly got himself hooked on the Rockies.
His wife, Rita Colistra, is a Jackson County native who felt the pull of the Appalachians of her home state.
She’s a public relations professor at WVU’s Reed College of Media.
Be it a public relations campaign or a term paper, it’s all about writing for an audience, her husband said.
Yes, he’s one of those English teachers who will always applaud the Oxford comma — while taking off points if he spies “very” in a sentence.
He’ll look the other way, though, if you should have to begin a sentence with, “And.”
“You can’t always get around that,” he said.
He can only hope students abide by his most important rule of all.
“Read it out loud before you turn it in,” he said of the directive that goes back to his radio resume.
“That way, you know if you’ve got the flow. You know if it ‘sounds’ right.”
The last word
For now, when he isn’t delivering distance-learning to MHS, he’s teaching on Dad-level at home.
The Colistra household hums with four children — including twin boys — all on furlough from Mon schools, courtesy of the coronavirus.
A certain (English) Teacher of the Year doesn’t have to search for the words to convey his feelings on a certain subject he must help the Colistra kids soldier through, in a time of self-quarantine.
“This math,” he said, “is killing me.”
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Morgantown Area News
'Friday, April 19, 2024'
