A Place for Strangers and Beggars

New Collection Cover Art

Sat, 26 May 2012 23:36:16 GMT

Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press has posted the cover for my new collection, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille. He found this spot-on image for it, but the artist was Russian, and it took a bit to contact her to negotiate the rights. Thank goodness we were able to, because the art is perfect for the cover story. The collection should be out in October.

"The Hurt Club" Podcasted

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:51:07 GMT

Every Day Fiction has created a podcast of my 2011 Halloween short short story, "The Hurt Club."

It is interestingly weird to hear my story read by someone else.

To Plan or Not to Plan

Tue, 22 May 2012 21:09:03 GMT

Author Richard Parks being smart about process in writing fiction.

How Fast Do You Read?

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:20:59 GMT

I measured at 567 words per minute on this quicky test, which is in line with how I rated forty years ago. My middle sister clears 1,000 words a minute easily without skimming. Watching her read a book is impressive.

When I started teaching high school, I had several sections of "Reading," which was really a study skills class. I learned that high school students averaged 200 or so words a minute. Much below that pace and reading would not be an enjoyable activity. The slower reader couldn't make the movie-in-the-mind that faster readers enjoyed. At some point in slowness, the reader is "word calling," which doesn't even make a sentence comprehensible since each word presents a new, disconnected challenge from the word before.

Source: Staples eReader Department

Here's a table of reading speeds in a reader-friendly format. I've seen these reading speeds interpreted differently, but they're close enough for this post.

Summer Mode

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:50:35 GMT

I'm jumping the gun a bit, since we have 3 1/2 days with students still, and a teacher work day to finalize grades, but I'm mentally feeling summerish.

What's nice about the beginning of summer is that I have a ton of days that I can make plans for. Whether those plans will come through, and whether it will feel like I've had a "ton of days" by early August is a problem for the future. For right now, summer seems as filled with possibility as it did when I was in the last days of 5th grade.

Writing, of course, dominates my plans. Last summer I started going to the bagel shop regularly to write. I'd like to do that again. I have a novel I'm in the midst of, and it would be nice to finish it. Also, other writing projects could use attention.

The yard needs work, as does the house (mostly painting projects there).

Also, I should be able to continue running consistently. I started my running regimen (for the umpteenth time in my life) last July, so I'm coming up on a year. About twenty pounds of weight loss, and who knows how many benefits for my heart and lungs are tied to running, so the anniversary is significant.

In the meantime, the roses are looking darned good. Here's my third unidentified rose photo. This is the closest to a classic rose that I'm growing. The bush is about four feet tall and sports these gorgeous big flowers. When the wind blows hard, I find the petals everywhere.

The Deliciousness of a Dream Nondeferred

Fri, 18 May 2012 21:17:32 GMT

A good friend of mine let me know that an editor for a major publisher likes his book and is going to pitch it to the publisher. Knowing the editor (a major force in the field), the prospects for the manuscript actually becoming a book . . . you know, a real book, Pinocchio, seem better than average.

His situation started me to thinking about that magical, intimidating moment when the possibility of becoming an honest to god, real-life, major publisher novelist looks like it might come true.

I asked him, how is it, walking around work, knowing that your novel is a heck of a lot closer to being published than it ever has been? That's the dream, right? That's why a gazillion people show up at writing conferences and go to conventions and buy WRITERS DIGEST and try fiction writing software, right? This is the dream that started with closing a book you loved, and you realized for the first time that an acutal person (just like you) had written the words that moved you, and that maybe you could do it too. This is the dream that started with pages and pages of failed drafts that you'd probably be embarrased to show anyone now, and the hours and hours spent dreaming your way around fictional characters in fictional worlds whose lives become so entwined with your own that sometimes you felt you knew them better than your friends.

Well, maybe your path to this point doesn't look quite like what I wrote, but you've been on a path, and it's been a lengthy one to get you to the point in the journey that a vanishingly small percentage of writers get to.

I remember when an agent told me he wanted to represent Summer of the Apocalypse after I first started shopping it around. He called me at school to tell me he liked the book! He told me that not only did he think he could sell it, but he also had Hollywood agent friends who were looking for material. I was ecstatic for about six weeks until I learned he was a scam agent who was trying to shuffle me off to a book doctor at a couple of bucks a page. Argh!

Still, I had those six weeks.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:31:01 GMT

As I said, roses don't die in my yard. This is the next unidentified rose that flourishes despite my poor gardening karma.

I planted a couple of new roses this spring, but I know what they are: Austrian Coppers. They're gorgeous in the spring when they mature.

The rose pictured below is carrying a bunch of blooms as attractive as this one. I can see why some people become rose fanatics.

Our seniors graduated last night, so there's no school. I'm watering and writing, a great way to spend the day.

Flowery Meditation

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:59:29 GMT

My luck with gardening, or even lawns, has been abysmal. My house is where plants go to die. I even managed to kill a huge tree by my driveway by a too enthusiastic application of weed killer to the weeds growing up in the driveway's cracks. If I had even thought for a couple of seconds, I would have realized that half of the tree's root system went under my driveway. That's why the driveway has buckled and cracked in places!

So, I've been quite proud of my roses that not only haven't died, but actually florish. My pride was only slightly tempered when a Master Gardner friend of mine told me that the Grand Valley is the ideal place to grow roses, and that here most roses once established are hard to kill.

I have five kinds of roses growing in my front yard. I don't know their names, but they're blooming and beautiful. I got this picture yesterday:

Song of the Day

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:12:02 GMT

Do you ever hear a bit of music from a television show or movie, and then just HAVE to know where it came from?

Season one of Scrubs, episode 13, "My Balancing Act." The song is "New Slang," by the Shins, a group I'd heard of but whose music I never associated with them.

This will keep me sane tomorrow, I think. Eight days of student contact left.

The Glass Menagerie (that is my back)

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:27:05 GMT

One of the built in hazards of trail running is falling. Another English teacher at my high school is also a long-time trail runner. He says he manages to take a full tumble at least once a year. My wife fell several weeks ago, opening a gash in her arm that needed stitches. And yesterday, I hit the dirt.

Falling feels stupid. I mean, I feel stupid on the way down. My mind has just enough time to say, "Oh, crap," and then I'm lying on the ground doing the instant inventory: "Am I bleeding? Did I break anything? Am I going to be able to get up, or will I have to stay in this position until the Flight for Life copter gets here?"

Fortunately all I suffered was a cut on my arm (at about the same place my wife cut hers, but not nearly as impressively deep), and other scrapes and bruises.

My other worry when I fall is my back. My back has been "tweakable" for years. If I step off a stair wrong, or jump off of something too tall, or sprawl on a trail, there's a possibility that I'll feel it in my back for days. So, at first, I thought my back was okay. Later last night, though, while I was sitting on the couch with my wife, I laughed, which triggered a total back spasm. It took a few minutes for the spasm to retreat, and as I sit at my desk this morning, I can feel the threat of a repeat. I'm one good cough or an ill-considered turn to pick up a book from provoking those muscles.

I have a friend I met just after I graduated from high school. We're going to hit the 40th anniversary of our friendship this summer, so we talk about aging quite a bit. His 60th birthday is this spring! We were chatting about falling a couple of months ago. When we were young, falling was a basic part of our lives. We'd make diving catches at frisbees, and heroic football completions in the air where we'd hit the ground rolling. Falling just wasn't that big of a deal.

How times have changed.

Robograding Essays

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:07:04 GMT

A CNN article in their "Schools of Thought" section talked about developments in grading student essays electronically. They pointed out that a human grader might be able to grade thirty essays in an hour (a pace I've never achieved), while a robograder could grade 16,000 essays in twenty seconds.

I imagine a classroom where a student finishes an essay, submits it electronically, and has the essay fully graded in seconds, with a complete diagnostic of where the writing needs improvement.

Yowza!

Evidently, there are numerous qualities in writing that a program can pick up, like extensivenous of vocabulary, sentence variety, sentence complexity, paragraph development, etc. The programs are not flawless, of course. As the article pointed out, the computer can evaluate composition, but not accuracy. The New York Times followed up on the same article I read, and talked to experts who offered numerous examples of how an e-grader makes mistakes or rewards incoherence. The e-grader can tell if a writer is offering evidence in support of an argument, but not if the evidence is accurate or if the argument is sensical. Still, one of the developers claimed, "This technology works well for about 95 percent of all the writing that’s out there.”

Also, once a writer knows something about the algorithms the program is using, it wouldn't be too difficult to "game" the program to raise an essay's evaluation. In fact, the article pointed out that a clever computer science major could design an iPhone app that could generate an essay that would receive the e-grader's highest score, raising the specter of students turning in computer-generated essays for the computer grader to grade, thereby cutting out the human input on both the student and teacher end.

So I probably won't be turning my essay grading over to a computer any time soon, but the idea that I could assign writing that would be thoroughly evaluated, and that I wouldn't be spending the hours and hours that it would take for me to do the evaluating, will haunt my dreams for nights to come.

Can't Stop Laughing! Senior Edition

Tue, 08 May 2012 22:20:43 GMT

XKCD verges into brilliance once again with yesterday's comic, "Every Major's Terrible,", but true genius comes at the intersections of the Internet where one comic-creator's brilliance intersects with a clever fan's skill and willingness to bring it to life. Since we're graduating our seniors next week, the timing on this couldn't be better.

Observe and behold:

Editor vs. Teacher

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:59:41 GMT

A nice thing about being the editor who is choosing stories for a publication is that if the story I'm reading is terrible, I can quit reading it. It doesn't even have to be terrible for me to quit reading. I can quit as soon as I see it won't make it into the top ten or however many stories I'm choosing.

A teacher, though, doesn't have that same opportunity. At least I don't. I'm grading my college Creative Writing class's short stories. Some, of course, are pretty good, but, as fate would have it, the two worst writers in the class have given me stories that are three times longer than they need to be, and they read so slowly that they are like a dozen times too long.

As the teacher, I feel obligated to read all of them, every word. Argh! I can't just slip a note with the manuscript that says, "Thank you for considering us with your work. Alas, it does not fit our publishing needs at this time. Better luck with this elsewhere."

I know I should see a fat manuscript from a writer who has tons of room for improvement as a wonderful teaching moment, but it's late in the year. I'm a little tired, and the thought of trying to remain alert to the end of these heavy, tree-killing manuscripts has made me feel uncharitable.

The students won't like my efforts either. After all, they wrote way more than anyone else in the class. They won't understand why the short story didn't get a standing ovation from me. Sigh.

Maybe I should take a walk around the block.

TOC Joy

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:48:50 GMT

Editor Paula Guran has posted the table of contents for her upcoming anthology, Ghosts, Recent Hauntings, that includes my short story, "Savannah is Six."

It's a pretty kick-butt group of authors, and I'm very happy to be included.

When I was growing up, every summer my family would drive from Denver to Ohio and Indiana to visit my grandparents. As a part of those vacations, we'd spend a week in a cottage at a lake. The accidental death of the younger brother that is a part of the plot for "Savannah is Six" is caused by something that I actually planned on trying when I was ten or so, and many other details in the story are memories of my trips to the lake.

Most of our trips were to Crooked Lake, near Angola, Indiana. The picture is of my middle sister fishing in the rain. This photo was probably taken 42 or so years ago.

Liberal and Conservative Defined

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:29:58 GMT

Generally I avoid political topics, figuring I don't have enough information to weigh in in a public manner, but I liked jaylake's definition of conservative and liberal in his collection of links for today:

Conservatives' Deep-Set Fear of Women's Rights — Very interesting piece. To me this gets at the heart of the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives by definition want to foster a narrow, smaller worldview. Liberals by definition want to foster a wider, more diverse worldview. The liberal worldview almost always leaves plenty of room for conservative ideals. Don't want an abortion? Don't have one. Hate and fear homosexuality? Be straight, with my blessing. Want to deny evolution? Party on with the flat Earthers. The conservative worldview very rarely leaves room for liberal ideals, seeking to deny all of society anything conservatives themselves don't agree with. On the basis of sheer, simple fairness, I could never be a conservative.

In the meantime, today is an odd one at school. We are on a schedule that shortens all the classes to 35 minutes so that we have the afternoon free for our "Spring Fling," an hour-and-a-half long barbeque and activities session. Then we are off tomorrow and Friday to compensate for the four evening-long parent/teacher conferences we've had in the year. A four-day weekend will give me time to catch up on both grading and gardening.

And, on an unrelated note, according to The Guardian, here are the 10 best first lines in fiction.

Why I'm Enjoying HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON

Tue, 01 May 2012 19:20:36 GMT

In my unending search for quality reading material that both diverts me and reminds me why I became a reader in the first place, I found Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon.

Here's what has happened to me lately (as in the last thirty years) as a reader: I've become picky. When I started reading in elementary school, I loved all books equally. All reading diverted me. I was one of those totally immersive readers who could open a book and shut out the world.

Somewhere along the way, probably in my twenties, I lost that ability. I found that some authors worked for me, while others lost their charm or couldn't entertain me in the first place. What a disappointment this was! Not all books are created equal! The twelve-year old me would have had his mind blown walking into a modern Barnes and Noble. I used to do all my book shopping at the wire spinny rack at King Soopers. The idea of yards of science fiction and fantasy titles would have amazed me. But now I feel like a modern channel surfer. There's a hundred channels but nothing is on.

So, when I find a book that makes me eager to return to it, like Novik's, I'm thrilled.

What I've enjoyed most about the book (I'm only a third of the way through), is how she has captured the feel of 18th Century, British mannerisms, particularly the rigid social attitudes, with an affecting series of relationships that don't look like they should work at all (there's talking dragons, for crying out loud). The point of view character, Captain Will Lawrence, is tradition-bound, formal to a fault, and keenly aware of social distinctions. In other words, he's a character I generally would make fun of or even dislike, but in Novik's story I like him, am worried about him, and I can't wait to get back to the reading.

When a book can deny my expectations in a pleasing way, I know I'm going to like it. Hooray for (at least the first 1/3) of His Majesty's Dragon.

The Real World is Weird

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:34:57 GMT

It sucks that the real world has stories just as science fictional as any I can make up. Suddenly I'm just a mainstream writer!

According to the Huffington Post, a Seattle attorney claims that he was part of a secret time travel/teleportation program during the time he was 7-12 years old. He says that he's even in a picture that was taken at the Gettysburg Address.

The attorney, Andrew Basiago, says that he will be releasing a book about his experiences soon, Once Upon a Time in the Time Stream: My Adventures in Project Pegasus at the Dawn of the Time-Space Age, so maybe this news story is an elaborate publicity ploy to attract attention to his book (which I have become a part of).

Or, he traveled in time.

I'll meditate over the possibilities while grading papers today.

Running Sideways

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:51:56 GMT

Grand Junction's weather generally relaxes people. Most of the time the winter's aren't too cold for too long. Snow melts off in a hurry, when we get it, and although the summers can have some hot days, it's a dry heat. It's not an extreme weather environment.

However, every once in a while, things get dicey, like this afternoon while Tammy and I were doing our after school run up in the canyons, and sixty mile-per-hour wind gusts ripped through the community. The sky had been overcast all day, and when we started the run, I was a little worried about the darkness in the clouds to the west--you don't want to be on adobe-clay trails when they're wet--but mostly I figured we were running short. Whatever the weather did, we wouldn't be in it long.

I didn't plan on wind. Tammy said that at one point it was in her face and absolutely stopped her. She could not advance because it was so hard. The wind picked up sand, drilling exposed skin with sixty-mile-per-hour pin pricks, filling my eyes, and taking a layer of enamel off my teeth. It was blowing so hard that I was staggering through it, just trying to stay on the trail.

A biking couple came down the trail after me, walking their bikes. A uber-gust actually took the guy's bike off the trail. He was holding onto it like it was a sheet, flapping in the wind.

I've never run in more adverse conditions.

How Schools Accidentally Create Poor Writing (and poor writers)

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:36:50 GMT

For my weekly Powerpoint for the Write-a-Book-In-a-Year Club meeting today, I put up a top-ten writing tips that I cribbed from the Pick the Brain website. When I talked about them to the club, though, I found myself pointing out how school writing unconsciously works against them.

Rule two, for example, is Cut unnecessary words. But the first question I'm asked on almost any writing assignment is "how long does it have to be?" I see rough drafts in progress where the student is lightly putting in word counts in the margin as he writes. In the essay, I'll read sentences like, "The very biggest problems in the modern, technological world of today's American citizens is their obvious inability to recognize the self-evident . . ." and so on and so on until the sentence finally gasps into an ending punctuation mark. When I point out to the student that the sentence is filled with unneeded words, he wails, "But then it's not long enough!" Although it is important to tell a student the expected length of an assignment, a student's focus on length rather than content creates wordiness. The student's urge to reach a word count works against rule five also: Keep it simple. Vigorous writing is concise.

Rule three is Write with passion. Unless you're excited about your writing, no one else will be. But students are often assigned topics that they could not care less about. Sometimes, when a student tells me that he doesn't care what he's writing, I'm reduced to encouraging him to fake enthusiasm. It's unfortunate that students will inevitably run into uninteresting subjects, and writing those uninteresting subjects without passion will do little to improve their writing. In a similar vein, rule six is Do it for love, which hardly ever describes student attitudes toward school writing.

Maybe the biggest problem with school writing and real writing is that for school writing the motivation is extrinsic while real writing motivation is intrinsic. I can see this in the introduction to essays. Students are told that they need to engage the reader in the introduction and to provide a background for the essay's existence. But students who have only written for school know that their audience is the teacher, who has to read the essay, whether she is "engaged" or not, and that the teacher also knows the background for the essay's topic. There is neither a "real" audience for the writing or a "real" reaction to the writing.

I know how to combat these problems as a school teacher, like by giving students a wide range of topics instead a narrow one, and by creating opportunities for an audience wider than just me (we do a lot of publication in the classroom), but I have to admit that I'm a part of the problem too.

Writing for school isn't always the best environment to foster improved writing.

Teaching Plot Through Roxanne

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:05:39 GMT

::PLOT SPOILERS FOR ROXANNE IN THIS POST::

My high school Creative Writing class is studying script writing now, and to introduce the unit, we watched the Steve Martin film, Roxanne.

Yesterday I talked about what happens in the last ten minutes of the script. All the plot threads slam together and resolve each other in the most satisfying way. To illustrate this, I put the characters' names on the board and asked the kids to identify what each character was striving to achieve.

C.D.: Wants Roxanne. Wants a competent fire department
Roxanne: Wants to find someone who is smart to love. Wants to find her comet.
Chris: Wants a girl who likes him for who he is. Wants a girl he can talk to without getting sick.
Sandy: Wants Chris. Wants to be a cocktail waitress in Tahoe.

Then we talked about how those four character's wants were handled at the end of the film, and how some of those wants helped other wants to be fulfilled, even though some of the wants looked mutually exclusive. Both Chris and C.D. can't date Roxanne, for example (the possibility of polyandry doesn't appear to be an option, as it isn't in most love triangles).

I drew the characters' line of wants on the board, and then just scribbled them together to represent what happens in the last ten minutes. Chris finds a girl who likes him for who he is (instead of the intellectual romantic that Roxanne thinks he is from the letters that C.D. wrote but Chris signed) in Sandy, who we saw earlier Chris can talk to without getting nervous. Chris and Sandy getting together neatly removes a corner of the love triangle in a way that makes everyone happy.

C.D., through writing letters for Chris, was able to express his true feelings for Roxanne, which wouldn't happen any other way in the story (writing as Chris gave C.D. the mask he needed to reveal his own thoughts, just as the screen of leaves from the trees allowed him to tell Roxanne what he thought of her from under her balcony). When Dixie reveals to Roxanne that C.D. had been writing the letters, she sees C.D. as the person she really has fallen in love with. So, Chris, who looked like a force in the story who would make C.D.'s hopes for being with Roxanne more remote, actually helps him to fulfill his dream.

The fire at the end of the story serves two purposes: first, it shows us that the fire department can behave competently in a real emergency. We see several situations where they succeed at tasks they'd failed at earlier. Afterwards, the toast in Dixie's diner when they are celebrating their victory, "We beat this fire by a nose," allows us to see that C.D. can be more accepting of people acknowledging his huge nose. Also, the fire cut short C.D.s threat to Roxanne that when he finished counting to ten that he was leaving (which leads to the great line, "Earn more sessions by sleaving"--don't ask, you have to see the movie to get that one). Roxanne is able to think about the implications of what she learned about her feelings while C.D. is dealing with the fire.

Roxanne, of course, because this is a romantic comedy, realizes that she truly loves C.D. and recreates the balcony scene from earlier in the film, except this time she's on the ground telling C.D. what she feels instead of the other way around. The kids noticed that C.D. sitting on the roof of his house, feeling blue about himself, repeats an earlier scene where a little fat boy was sitting on the roof of his house, feeling sorry for himself.

I diagrammed the plot lines, the love triangle, and talked about the plot daisy. During our deconstruction of the film, the class grew very enthusiastic about pointing out all the set ups in the story:

The comet that Roxanne was looking for appears in the closing credits.
C.D. has locked himself out of the house at the end, which is what Roxanne did at the beginning.
Dixie has an ending conversation with him where she says, "What are friends for?" and the film started with conversation as friends with her.
One of the guys C.D. fought in the film's beginning is in the bar's twenty "something better" scene, reacting to the confrontation.
Sandy shows her true feelings for Chris several times in the film.
Chris tells Sandy that he can write Roxanne a letter to break off their relationship because he's good at writing letters.
The cow, Bossie, who is in the film early is also threatened by the fire at the end.
C.D. knows there is a fire because he can smell it. This echoes the insult from earlier, "It must be wonderful to smell the coffee in the morning, in Brazil."

And there's more like this.

At any rate, it was a good class, and I think many of them took some insights about plotting and movie making away from the session. I've had kids come back to me later to tell me that they have never been able to watch a movie the same way after having taken my class. I'm hoping that's a compliment.

Addendum: At about this time in the year, two years ago, I also was teaching Roxanne and blogged about "The Ascending String of Pearls Theory of Plotting," and I made the same comment about kids not seeing a movie the same way after taking my class. Sigh. Either you can say I'm consistent, or what settled to the bottom has resurfaced in the roil of time.

Why I Would Never Teach The Hobbit

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:03:51 GMT

There’s something peculiar about some students’ attitudes toward what we read in the classroom and what they read on their own. Have you noticed it?

This phenomenon was a part of my experience when I was in school. I was a reader. By the time I entered fifth grade, I was reading at a 10^th grade level, and I was off the chart after that, but I hated what we read in school. I can even remember some of the titles: A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, A Separate Peace, A Light in the Forest, The Red Badge of Courage, The Pearl, and Death Be Not Proud. Hated them all. And I hated the poetry and short stories too.

The only title I was assigned in all my years of school that I enjoyed was “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which I think we read in sixth grade. At the time the story so surprised me that I assumed its inclusion in the school’s lit anthology was some kind of mistake.

So why is that? There are numerous titles I’d read on my own that I loved that I found out later were assigned reading in other people’s schools: Hiroshima, All Quiet on the Western Front, Anne of Green Gables, Fahrenheit 451, Huckleberry Finn, A Wrinkle in Time, Little House on the Prairie, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and others, including work by Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather and many more. Love them all.

Why did I love the works I discovered on my own and hated the ones I was assigned? And how might that knowledge impact the kind of teaching that I do?

One of my greatest fears is that some students will hate the literature that I teach just because the works were assigned. Look at the list of titles where I might be creating student loathing: Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Red Sky at Morning, Julius Caesar, The Time Machine, Pride and Prejudice, The Natural, Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, The Glass Menagerie, Wuthering Heights and others.

What’s sad is that it’s not only possible that some students hate these works because they were required to read them, it’s an absolute certainty! I go to some of the alumni reunions, so I’ve had students who graduated twenty-five years ago tell me how to this day they can’t stand one of the books I gave them to read.

And do you know how rarely I hear a former student say, “I loved that we read {insert classic book title here} in your class.”? In fact, the only time I hear an adult make that statement is when it’s an English teacher, and we know how weird they are.

The whole situation is sobering.

How do I combat the natural antipathy that some students have to assigned reading? My best tool is my own enthusiasm. I’m pretty sure when I was given A Tale of Two Cities to read in junior high that the teacher explained how he hated the book too. Ouch! I remember that the teacher who assigned The Pearl had us read it for six weeks straight, a few pages at a time. He entered class daily with a hangdog expression, like he was trudging to his doom. Every lesson was about symbolism. Double ouch!

When I assign a book, I work hard at my own enthusiasm. Books are visceral experiences first and academic lessons second. I think a comment from me, like, “Could Mr. Collins be any more clueless?” or “Didn’t you think it was weird the cannibals didn’t eat Marlow and the other white people on the steamer?”

Despite my familiarity with the book, I shouldn’t act like I’ve been through it a dozen times already. Class goes much better if I participate in the reading experience with my students. We can get to the lit-geek stuff eventually, but I don’t think I do them any favors by starting a discussion of the reading we did in Wuthering Heights with a statement like, “I’d like you to consider doors and windows as described at Wuthering Heights as compared to the ones at Thrushcross Grange as symbols of inclusion and exclusion.”

I also give the students numerous ways to respond to the text; I let them lead discussion; I honor their opinions about the works rather than running roughshod over them with my own, and I encourage lit circles.

Still, some of my students will hate what I assigned. Argh! It’s a fact of human nature that for many people, they love what they discover on their own. They hate what they’re required to do.

So, what’s a teacher to do? Here’s what I’ve decided:

I will remain leery about teaching a book that is the core of my personality. It’s too hard for me to have a student come into class and say, “That was such a stupid book,” when it’s a book that is integral to my understanding of myself. I’d never teach The Hobbit or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Mythago Wood. I have taught The Illustrated Man, but it was to a hand-selected group.
I’ve decided that I need to leave the books I really want kids to read and love lying around my room, sort of casually. I imagine that I’ll start buying copies of The Hobbit that I can have sticking out of my backpack, hoping, secretly, that someone will steal it.
I’ll drop comments in class about books that make them sound vaguely dangerous or forbidden. “Oh, I started Othello when I was in junior high, but my parents took it away,” or “I wanted to read The Color Purple, but our library banned it.” There’s nothing better to get a kid interested in something than making it forbidden fruit.

What writing about this topic has done to me (again) is to remind me that by becoming a teacher I have morphed into “the man.” I am the authority figure who is to be questioned. I am the status quo to be rebelled against. I am lame because of my age.

Dang.

My New Personal Icon

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:15:01 GMT

One of my students left me a present on the white board yesterday. I think it will become my new, personal icon.

Don't Mail It In

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:20:07 GMT

I believe it was Ursula Le Guin who said that you should give everything you've got to everything you write. Put all your effort into every effort (so to speak), she said.

I think about that idea quite a bit for my writing and for everything else too. For writing, it means I should never "mail in" a story writing session. Every time I sit down to compose should be driven by the best I have to give. There are no "small" stories, and certainly there should be no moderate efforts.

Beyond my writing, giving it all means that before school starts I have to commit myself to being the very best possible teacher I can be for that day. It's like giving myself a little pep talk. I don't want to mail in my teaching either.

I should never waste a day. My days, like all of our days, are numbered. Why not make as many of them extraordinary as possible? I have a choice of how much to throw myself into each of those days. I choose all of it. I'm all in.

What I'm Doing When I'm Not Teaching

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:01:42 GMT

I've noticed that I've written a bunch about teaching lately, but it's not all that I'm doing!

On the writing front, the 200-words per day minimum streak continues. I'm working on a short story now from an idea suggested by my 19-year old. I'm also doing some preplanning for what happens next in book #2 of the Low High series.

Also, running and the gradual reclaiming of a fitter version of myself continues. Since the first of the year, I'm averaging about 30 miles a week running (er . . . running-like motion), and most weeks I run six of the seven days. The weight has continued to creep down, which means right now I've seen weights under 170 several times. The goal is to get to about 160 or so, and then maintain.

My attitude about work has been strong all year, but summer is starting to sound darned good. Last summer I made regular pilgrimages to our favorite bagel shop to write. I'm looking forward to picking that up again.

A Teaching Trick, or a Brute Force Leveraging of Student Anxiety

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:45:40 GMT

I'm the mentor to a first year English teacher this year, which means that I'm the go-to person for problems she is struggling with. She wrote a note to me yesterday about teaching comma usage to reluctant learners ("reluctant learners" is often a euphemism for they don't give a darn, or they actively hate what they are doing).

She worried about teaching a subject that some of them clearly didn't want to learn.

Here's what I told her:

For a tough sell like comma usage, I try not to worry about their attitude, and then I teach it anyway. If you really want to teach them about commas, then you're going to have to change the stakes for them. One way to motivate them is to give them a test that you call "The Maximum Damage Comma Usage Test." Make it worth a bunch of points. Then tell them the good news/bad news about the test, which is that it's very hard, and doing poorly on it will torpedo their grade, but you are going to give it to them three times and only keep the highest score.

What I've found about doing a test that way is that because it is a test, it makes the kids anxious and most of them study. Then, you trade and grade in class. That way you can review the problems immediately. The kids who have an "A" are excused from the next round. Give the kids who didn't earn an "A" the second test the next day. You get the same anxiety a test produces, and you can give them immediate feedback a second time by grading the test in class. The kids who got an "A" on this one are now excused from the third test. You have now identified your hardcore lack-of-skills kids and can work with them on whatever their issues are. You also have a group of "A" kids who can tutor. Then you give the third and final test.

You do have to make three versions of the test, so there's some set up involved.

When I've done this in the past, only the worst of the very worst, who haven't tried at all, will not do well on that last test. I've found that most kids raise their grades because of this high-stakes test when I do it this way. Also, I've had kids come back years later to tell me that the "maximum damage" test scared the beans out of them, but they've never forgot what they had to learn to pass it.