University of Miami - Ibis Yearbook (Coral Gables, FL)

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HE LOVED TO TEACH be intellectually honest with themselves. Dr. Lowe spent his childhood on a Pennsylvania farm. He received his B.S. and Lilt. D. degrees from Waynesboro College. He did postgraduate work at Harvard. Wisconsin. Yale. Pittsburgh. Oxford and Cambridge. He knew all sides of school mastership: he was a teacher and principal in elementary and high schools, and assistant superintendent of Alleghany county schools. Pennsylvania. For eight years he was Director of English in the Pennsylvania State Department of Public Education. While he was connected with Extension Teaching in Pennsylvania State College. Ik organized a Summer Institute of Literature where authors lectured about their work. Dr. Lowe's books are Literature for Children. Our Land and Its Literature, a book for high school English classes, and a series of school readers. Adventures in Readmit, of which he was co-editor. He also edited an anthology of short stories. I he Arabian Nights, and Coleridge's poems. At one time he was poetry editor of Scholastic and advisory editor of The Lie memory English Review' and The English Journal. He served as a member of the National Committee on the Place of English in American Life.” and the Committee on Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools. Throughout his life as a teacher. Dr. Lowe was vitally interested in young people, their education and their writings. During his work as Director of English in the Pennsylvania State Department of Public Instruction he wrote in a pamphlet on youth's poetry: . . There are enemies of free verse and free trade, many of them—and enemies of youth as well. They are in love with defining and institutionalizing. Prosody and protection lend themselves very well to impeding the natural evolution of language and economics. Prosody is a Volsteadian form of academic prohibition difficult of enforcement with youth. It is difficult to put shackles on the thinking and language of youth in an effort to induce conformity, for the outstanding characteristic of youth is variability. The creative work that youth does with language as a tool has its charm and variety. It has an added charm when it is skillfully built out of the current coin of speech. And it has permanency in proportion as it reflects life as it is actually going forward and is truthfully described by the youthful writer. Dynamic ideas do not lend themselves well to static form, especially if the attempt is made to have it done as a matter of conformity. Free verse is altogether a natural form, flexible and swift in the manner of youth itself. . . . My first observation on what a school can do in helping a student to write out his experience is this: Help him to become conscious of the fact that about him are people and an environment worth using as material for creative writing. Urge him to take time to observe, to 'stand and stare.' to pick out resemblances, and to think about what he sees and hears in the light of what he already knows. Again, show him that in the important, alert procedure of giving names to things and to actions and to qualities and to relations, it is wise to pick words from common usage, commonly understood. Language is vivid when it is clear, concrete, direct, with decisive movement. Yet again, help him to appraise in his own mind the value to his creative writing of laying hold on the significant qualities common to all layers of life at all times—struggle, and love, and death, and exultation.” The University of Miami is grateful to Orton Lowe. Alive through the students he helped, it feels deeply and understands his own eulogy upon his stone: Lover of Natural Beauty. Lover of Kindness and Good Spirit in Men. Lover of Poetry. Believer in Personal Integrity and Freedom of the Individual. The University of Miami. too. is his eulogy, for it is in great part a monument to the work of Orton Lowe.

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CONTENTS THE UNIVERSITY SENIORS JUNIORS SOPHOMORES FRESHM E N LAW SCHOOL SPORTS P RATERNITIES MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY ORGANIZATIONS MAGAZINE