Matching Tracksuits

writing

Orlando Return

Thursday 23 June 2022

Driving back from Orlando today, I got to thinking again about the writing project I’ve been considering, and I came up with yet another organizational idea for it. Indeed, not just another organizational idea, but a somewhat altered focus. So two initial drafts get shoved aside for a third. Fortunately, I was only a few thousand words into the other two drafts, so there’s no real loss there. I’m excited about the new approach and began jotting notes on my phone as I took the dog for a walk.

But the whole way, I think the Girl relived the highlights of competing in nationals.

Cliche

Wednesday 24 February 2021

In class today, we went over formal voice, and one of the rules I presented concerned the avoidance of cliche. “Avoid them like the plague” is the old joke — they didn’t get it because they’d never heard the cliche.

Cliches are a little depressing: they’re victims of their own popularity. Someone comes up with a clever metaphor or conceit, then everyone wants to use it. Suddenly, it’s everywhere, and just like that, a clever saying has become a dreaded cliche. Even “tired old cliche” is cliche.

When it came time for creative writing at the end of the day, I gave them a simple prompt: “Based on what we talked about in English, do the opposite. Try to come up with a text (about anything) that is filled with as many cliches and colloquialisms as you can.”

Here was my effort:

So, I lost track of time when thinking about cliches. Initially, I was like a kid in a candy store when the teacher told us, “Try to be like, ‘I’m such a bad writer’ and include a lot of cliches.” But I feel like a fish out of water trying to write badly. I always feel like Big Brother is watching me when I write. (I guess you can read between the lines on that.)

Writing in cliches is a snap in a way because it’s just a matter of time before anything and everything turns into a cliche. Soon it’s going to require nerves of steel to avoid cliches because everything can become a cliche. Sure, it’s likely every saying lives in heart-stopping fear that everyone will fall head over heels for it and use it all the time, thus turning it into a cliche. At that point, the saying, now a cliche, slinks off with its tail between its legs when it should be going around without a care in the world. After all, even if it’s ugly as sin, it’s not the cliche’s fault that everyone uses it. I’m just saying the saying shouldn’t cry over spilled milk. I mean, the writing is on the wall, and it’s the thought that counts.

And I’m sure some sayings just want to go straight for the cliche phase, but better late than never. They want to move right past that fresh-as-a-daisy, I’m-a-new-saying phase and straight to the tired old cliche phase.

Whatever your view on cliches, I guess we should all just live and let live.

That’s 19 cliches and 8 colloquialisms.

Growing and Writing

Wednesday 9 December 2020

My classes are growing. More specifically, they grew today — doubled, in fact. Today was the first day we had all students back at the same time. Sixth grade has been doing it for a couple of weeks now; seventh grade began last week; this week was eighth grade’s turn. So each class had 18-24 students in plexiglass-enclosed quad-desks, each six feet apart. “Remember,” I said countless times, “these plexiglass shields only serve as protection for you and your neighbor if you have your masks on.” This mean that it was the first day for everyone wearing masks all day.

How long will we stay like this? What effect will the Thanksgiving surge, now in full swing, have on it? I really don’t know.

As part of my promise to K about my beard (“I’ll get rid of it when we’re back in school 100%.”), I had the Boy shave me last night.

That was how we had some of our Daddy-E time. Tonight, it was writing: the Boy has discovered fountain pens,

and that discovery has inspired him to write short stories. We’re working on a tag-team zombie story now.

Recommendations

Wednesday 8 July 2020

This year, I had a student, E, who was exceptional in many ways, but most noticeable was her certainty that she would be a published writer. Indeed, that she would make her living writing. I have no doubt that she will: she has the talent and the drive. What she’s lacking, of course, is what all young writers lack: experience. Not just live experience — reading experience is just as important. So at the end of the year, I made her a list of books I’ve read which seem to me to teach something important about writing and a few films that teach something about good storytelling:

Books

Title

Author

Reason Why It’s Important/What To Learn

Absalom, Absalom!William FaulknerThis is simply the best book ever written. There is so much to learn from this book:

  • Non-linear, fragmented plot
  • Multiple narrators
  • Untrustworthy narrators
  • Multiple conflicting narrators
  • Absolutely gorgeous language
  • A gripping, engrossing plot

This is unquestionably my all-time favorite book, and I read it at least once every two years.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being*Milan KunderaThis novel mixes philosophical musings, random bits of weird history, and a fantastic story set in Prague, with the Prague Spring as its setting. (Google it before you read this.) Kudera uses an unconventional point of view in this book: not really first person, not really third, it’s a curious mix of both. You’ll never forget your first time reading this, and you’ll walk away wanting to imitate its totally original point of view.
As I Lay DyingWilliam FaulknerEach chapter is told by different 15 different narrators, and it uses a non-linear plotline.
Red PlentyFrancis SpuffordHistorical fiction at its best. This excellent novel blends actual historical characters mixed with invented characters. Each chapter is a different time and different place in the USSR with different characters, but there are a few overlaps that provide continuity, so it’s a good study of fragmented plot development.
The Adventures of Tom SawyerMark TwainTwain is the master of making jokes by leaving much of the joke in the reader’s mind: he gets you going and then stops, knowing your train of thought will end in humor. He’s also a master of writing in comic dialect.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
My ÁntoniaWilla CatherThere’s nothing complicated or groundbreaking in this novel. It’s just simple, linear, first-person story-telling at its best; a lovely, lovely book.
Tales of GaliciaAndrzej StasiukThis novel mixes magical-realism, untrustworthy narrators, non-linear and completely fragmented plotlines to create a masterpiece. One of my all-time favorites.
Bleak HouseCharles DickensIt’s Dickens — read all his works. He’s a master. He’s especially good at creating multiple plotlines and weaving them together.
Great Expectations
4 3 2 1*Paul AusterThe book of multiple plotlines: this novel takes one character and imagines four different lives for him. There are overlaps and similarities, but it’s the differences that make the book incredible. And that ending: you see it coming a thousand miles away, and yet it still shocks you and takes your breath away.
The Noise of TimeJulian BarnesThis novel is told in short fragments. There is a plot, but it’s not immediately obvious.
The New York TrilogyPaul AusterThe meta-fiction masterpiece in which the author mixes real life with the story, this novel layers different realities (including the reader’s) into a mind-bending blending of storylines.
East of EdenJohn SteinbeckPossibly the greatest straight, simple, linear-plotline novelist America has produced, Steinbeck simply tells unforgettable stories in a straightforward, compelling manner.
The Grapes of Wrath
Being There*Jerzy KosińskiThis novel utilizes something like magical realism in a subdued way.
One Hundred Years of Solitude*Gabriel Garcia MarquezThe master of magical realism, Marquez is a spellbinding writer. You will never read a book with a story told in quite the odd, confusing, compelling way as this book. One of the most original books you will ever read.
Go Set a WatchmanHarper LeeThis was the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. It will teach you how much a story can change upon revision.
To the LighthouseVirginia WoolfThis book completely blew my mind the first time I read it. There’s no way to describe what you can learn from this book. Just read it. It’s incredible.
Brothers KaramazovFyodor DostoyevskyThese are long, complicated novels. They are also perfect novels. Demons is my favorite and his best, but most people put Brothers Karamazov in that slot. They’re difficult to read because they require a lot of background knowledge, and the Russian names are difficult at first to someone not familiar with the language. Read along with an audio version.
Demons
Crime and Punishment
The Haunted Bookshop Christopher MorleyEveryone who loves books should read this one–a story about a bookshop?! What could be better. 
A Gentleman in MoscowAmor TowlesThis is just a charming story. Nothing experimental or bizzare — just a great story told expertly.
Jane EyreCharlotte BronteA surprisingly modern novel that’s relatively old (1847). You’ll learn how to maintain a theme throughout a novel, how to give that theme a surprising twist toward the end.
Wide Sargasso SeaJean RhysOne of the most original books written. This was written some 120 after Jane Eyre, and it is something of a prequel to Bronte’s novel. DO NOT read this without reading JE first. You’ll learn how to find inspiration from other books.
Angela’s AshesFrank McCourtThis book will teach you how to write a memoir like a novel.
The OutsidersS. E. HintonShe wrote it when she was 16. Enough said.
The PlagueAlbert CamusAn example of existentialist (look it up) writing — it’s a novel with a philosophical agenda.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of ChinaJung ChangFamily history at its finest. It will also teach you a lot about Chinese history.
The Name of the Rose*Umberto EcoHistorical fiction that’s incredible: a mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. How could you not want to read that?
The Master and MargaritaMikhail BulgakovWhat happens when a Russian writes a novel with the devil as one of the main characters? Perfection happens.
The Diving Bell and the ButterflyJean-Dominique BaubyI mentioned this in journalism; we read one of the chapters. From this you’ll learn how to write short, powerful observations about some of the most mundane things.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest DisasterJon KrakauerThis is history written like it’s a novel.
The Sense of an Ending*Julian BarnesA slim book about confusion that puts the reader in the exact same spot of ignorance as the protagonist. It will teach you pacing.
Breakfast of Champions*Kurt VonnegutA meta-novel that’s mind-bending, Breakfast also incorporates little sketches into the novel.

* Indicates mature content.

Films

Title

Reason Why It’s Important

In the Mood for Love (PG)A Chinese film. A slow, measured story that seems simple yet has incredible tension just beneath the surface. Excellent ending.
The Lives of Others (R)A German film. Absolutely the best ending of any film on the planet. My all-time favorite drama.
Conspiracy (R)This film features a bunch of men sitting around a table talking for 90% of the film. Incredible acting, though, and it will teach you what good dialogue sounds like.
Dangerous Liasons (R)Intersecting plots and plotters plotting against each other, this film will teach you how to tell a story in which emotions (in this case, fury and contempt) are always present, always hinted at, yet never fully shown — until the end. I think there was a remake of this. I’m referring to the 1988 original with John Malkovich, who is utterly brilliant in this film.

Sadly, most of these are rated R, so your folks will have to make the call on them.

Revisited

Monday 7 January 2019

In my journalism class, we’ve decided to shift from pure journalism to a bit of literary nonfiction, so we began the day with a writing exercise. I provided a starter and fifteen minutes to write: “During winter break, I learned…”

I wrote along with them and found myself thinking again of Bida and so began writing again about Bida:

During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it. I learned all this watching and participating in my daughter’s grief as our family cat slowly died as she lay on our couch.

We’d had Bida for ten years. My daughter had never known life without that gray, grumpy, yet sweet rescue cat. She looked pitiful when we got her, hence the name, which means “poor little thing” in Polish. She looked even more pitiful as she lay dying, thin, slow, her bones protruding, her long gray hair matted because we could no longer brush her without causing her pain.

When we arrived home that night, my wife went to check on her in the room in the basement where Bida always loved to sleep. In a panicked voice, she called me downstairs. The poor cat had fallen off the bag of insulation that she loved to sleep on and landed on her back, wedged between the bag and some shelving. I thought she was already dead, but when I pulled her out gently, she shuddered, gasped, and began breathing in shallow breaths.

“Go get the kids,” I told my wife. “They’ll want to say goodbye.” She headed upstairs while I gently carried Bida to the couch in our basement family room and lay her down on the middle cushion. The four of us sat around the old, ornery cat for two hours as her breathing slowed, then stopped.

The first to come running from upstairs was L, my daughter. She was already beginning to cry, and when she saw Bida, the cat that had been around for as long as she could remember, she broke down into a sobbing, shuddering cry.

“No, Bida!” she shouted, dropping to her knees beside the couch and throwing an arm protectively but gently over the cat, who lay with her eyes open, her mouth gaping, the only movement being her rib cage that went up and down, up and down, up and down. “No, Bida! No!” she cried, her body shaking more and more violently.

I’d never been a big fan of that cat. I put up with her because L loved her so. But in that moment, watching my daughter wrecked with pain, her face a puddle, her voice almost instantly hoarse from crying, I realized I loved that cat because she loved that cat. I understood that I was near tears because she was in tears, and even because I was sad to see that grumpy cat go, to see that sweet cat suffer, to see my daughter suffer along with her.

When you love something, you open yourself up to pain because of that. You will feel that person’s pain with them; you will feel the pain of separation; you will eventually feel the pain of ultimate loss.

To love someone is to love their mortality, their temporariness, and the ________ness of everything they love.

A first draft — shows some promise, but nothing spectacular. That’s the idea.

Afterward, I had students choose the sentence they like most, the sentence they’re most proud of. “Be prepared to explain to a partner why you like that sentence, why that sentence fills you with a bit of pride,” I instructed. For my own sentence, I chose the first one: “During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it.”

“I like it because of the word ‘twined.’ I don’t think I’ve ever used that word, and it somehow provides a theme for the whole piece that I could go back and incorporate — images of thread, fabric, sewing, weaving, and so on,” I explained.

It was just the final lesson of a day filled with successful engagement from all students. I always worry a bit about how students will perform that first day back, and I’m always impressed. And then ask myself, “Why are you always worried? They’re always great!”

Habit and Momentum

Friday 11 April 2014

I learned riding a road bike in the mountains of southern Poland that there’s a simple trick to making it to the top of a hill: don’t stop pedaling. That of course sounds a bit axiomatic, painfully obvious even, but the simple truth of momentum is that, as long as you keep pedaling, as long as you keep that cog rotating, you have a little momentum from the last rotation to help with the next. True, it starts to become almost a token momentum, and that’s when the temptation to stop is most overwhelming. The legs burn and ache; the heart feels like it’s about to explode; the vessels in the temple pulsate with almost frantic rapidity. But as long as you don’t stop, you’ve got something to build on. Once you stop, it’s almost all over, especially if it’s a steep climb and a hundred kilometers stretch out behind you.

So too with daily writing. One day off becomes two, and threatens to become three — and you can only write about the threat. I had two entries in mind; I was just too lazy to get the pictures off the camera. Maybe later — back-posting counts if you say it does.

Teaching to the Test

Thursday 13 March 2014

1-Fullscreen capture 3132014 101053 PM“I’m so sick of the PASS test,” I said to our eighth grade administrator, “and we haven’t even taken it yet.” The test — technically now called the SCPASS, which stands for “South Carolina Palmetto Assessment of State Standards because just “PASS,” as it was called for years, infringed on some copyright or other — is the state assessment for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) compliance. It’s a silly hoop students have to jump through in an effort to provide data about effective teaching, effective schools, and effective students. In theory, anyway. It consists of math, reading, writing, science, and social studies assessments, and the first portion, the writing assessment, rolls around this coming Tuesday.

Regarding standardized tests, we teachers are always told we shouldn’t be “teaching to the test.” I’m not quite sure what this means, though, because it seems that, given the fact that we have state standards from which we form our curricula and from which test makers derive the tests, any time of standards-based teaching is, to some degree or another, teaching to the test.

This is even more confusing when I consider myself as not just a reading teacher but a writing teacher as well. We teach kids that they should always taken into account their audience and purpose when writing, and so it seems to me we should be doing the same for this test. The purpose is simple: to pass at the very least, with a score of “Exemplary” as students’ ultimate goal. The audience, too, is straightforward: the only people who will read these particular essays are the exam graders. Therefore, as a teacher, I should help students figure out how to write for this purpose to this audience. “It’s jumping through hoops,” I tell them, “not real writing. You’re just trying to show them that you can do all the things on this rubric.”

So we’ve spent the better part of this week and last putting together a plan to write for this purpose to this audience. And I do so in full knowledge that this is not an accurate assessment of authentic writing; it’s an assessment of prescribed writing. Still, except for bloggers, professional writers, and diarists, almost everyone in the “real world” writes primarily prescribed writing: reports, minutes, emails, summaries, proposals, invoices, and the like, so maybe it’s an accurate assessment.

Nah — it’s just hoops.

The Bar

Thursday 7 November 2013

In winter, the floor was a glistening swirl of grit from black snow tromped in on careless feet. At the door, a slushy mix of grime and granules of ice covered the concrete floor. The dirt migrated gradually from the entrance, and midway into the bar, all that remained were faint prints and smears of boots.

The slick slush provided an added challenge to staggering customers attempting to go home. Exiting the bar, drunk patrons loaded their shoes with fatal moisture that turned the ice pack outside the door into a skating rink, and the impaired reaction time more than once resulted in a soul-sickening thud and crunch. Legs sprawled, skulls cracked, and those inside drank on, their own clumsy slipping and tumbling swirling at the bottom of the pints of beer they used to chase the ghosts of cheap vodka.

Fate

Wednesday 6 November 2013

And in a way, everything was destined. Every single moment, each decision she’d made in her life, led her to that moment in the middle of the street, her heels clicking softly on the old asphalt and a finite number of beads of sweat forming along her hairline. Perhaps even the number of beads of sweat was destined, predestined in the chemical soup that made up her brain, her body, her who sentient existence. Indeed, the same could be said not just of this moment crossing the street but of every single instant in her life. Every moment and act led to this particular act, this particular moment, which was leading to a yet-unseen but just as inevitable future, though only inevitable when the future became the present and one could look back and see the line of events leading, seemingly like fate, up to that moment. Ingrained rituals made it feel more inevitable and less like fate, but the difference between “ingrained rituals” and “fate” might be merely semantic.

But was it fate, real fate, that led Pani Basia to cross that street at that moment? Such a simple act, something Pani Basia did countless times in a given week, an automated function that had become almost ritualistic: left, right, left, first step. Could fate be little more than habit and ritual? The more often one repeats an act, the greater the chance that something that smacks of fate will happen.

As a Catholic, Pani Basia couldn’t really entertain seriously the thought of fate. Such a Protestant, such a Calvinistic idea, this fate. “Destined for God’s grace” and other such formulations. Though Pani Basia had only heard of Calvin in passing and would have been unable to provide even a general overview of his theology, she certainly would have found the proposal of predestination patently absurd. “A child’s religion,” she might suggest, preferring what she saw as the grown up acceptance of consequences inherent in Catholicism.

Furthermore, it couldn’t possible be fate. Pani Basia could change her mind at any moment, pivot on her toes, and head back across the street. That would prove that crossing the street wasn’t fate, unless she was fated to prove that crossing the street wasn’t fate, or to attempt it, or to create a child’s paradox to play with.

In the end, if anyone had suggested all these flights of philosophical fancy and theological fantasy, Pani Basia would have likely waved it all off. In and out of the classroom, Pani Basia was the mistress of her will and soul.

NaNoWriMo Cheating

Tuesday 5 November 2013

I needed a store description. I recalled a picture I took this summer in Lipnica. And off I went, leaving blanks where words failed.

The only thing about Pani Janowiak’s shop that ever changed was the produce in the bins just to the sides of the cash register. Winter months saw only potatoes, leeks, onions, the occasional beet or cabbage, perhaps an apple or two. Summer months the bins overflowed with cucumbers, plums, radishes, pears, tomatoes, grapes, zucchini, apricots, fresh dill, strawberries, lettuce, cherries, cabbage, raspberries, even the occasional bunches of bananas or small watermelons. Other than produce, though, nothing else changed. The jars of jams and preserves on the top shelf just behind the cash register were forever in the same order, new orders simply filling the empty slots when this or that jam sold out. Below the jams were all assortments of preserved meats and fish, the squat cans of tuna stacked between jars of pickled herring, and long tins of anchovies and ________. the The piquant Polish ketchup jars and ____ stood in attention just behind Pani Janowiak’s left shoulder, four brands in five columns, the most popular brand having two columns to keep up with demand, and by them, the mustard. Just above them were the pickled vegetables and mushrooms, jars of varying sizes and shapes glowing different colors as the ever changing light shifted through the day. Over Pani Janowiak’s right shoulder was one of the pillars of Polish hospitality: myriad teas–some herbal, others black, some medicinal, others merely recreational–and coffees, some in expensive vacuum-sealed packages imported from Germany, others in loose-filled bags. Below all these shelves, on the small counter that ran the length of all the wall-hung shelves, were spices and preparations, mixes to make soups and sauces, powders to add to gravies and the like. The shelves on the left of the store, the shelves through which Pani Basia glanced every day countless time as she looked through the small window the shelves framed to see how long the shadows and grown and judge how much longer she needed to stay open, whether she could close shop early, these shelves held the other pillar of Polish hospitality: cookies and chocolates. This was also where baking goods lived, the various flours, leavening agents, and sugars. Just to the left of these sweets stood a small refrigerator with milk and cream. The right side of the shop held a refrigerated display case with hams and sausages, various meats for sandwiches and snacking. Just behind it was a chest freezer with chicken quarters, ground beef, and a few other rotating frozen products. Beside the freezer was another tall shelf for drinks: juices and sodas (national and imported). Squeezed among the empty spaces on the counter were small displays for chewing gum and a small tree-like structure for suckers. Baked goods were tucked into a small space of empty shelving in a corner of the shop, or stacked wherever room could be found.

The shop was always faultlessly clean but still had a certain tired look to it. The linoleum was curling up where it met the counter, and the shelves were painted a dull brown color that made them look dirty even when they were clean. The scale was a tired gray, the vegetable bins, painted the same brown as the shelves behind Pani Janowiak, were more worn from the constant contact of customers whereas the shelves’ paint retained a relatively new appearance as Pani Janowiak was the only one to handle products on that side of the counter.

On the day that Pani Basia died, as she was waiting in line for her Danish and juice, she glanced around Pani Janowiak’s shop and noticed all these details for the millionth time it seemed. She looked at the ketchup bottles and thought what a nice touch it would be for Pani Janowiak to arrange them in some way that made sense, either according to the size of their containers or perhaps, more subtly, in alphabetical order according to their brands. She looked at the drinks, always a little dismayed that they were arranged so hodge-podge, with little regard to type of juice or origin of soda. Shouldn’t all the Polish brands be together, with Coke and Pepsi, the newly introduced interlopers, segregated? She wondered about the wisdom of having the flour so close to the floor, for it seemed possibly–likely even–to have unsanitary consequences. After all, how easily would it be for a splash of muddy water from the daily mopping to land on the paper packing, blanch through, and contaminate the contents? She wished the cabbages had been better stacked, with all the smaller ones to one side of the bin to make it easier for customers to find precisely what they were looking for. One doesn’t always need the biggest head after all, right?

Beginnings

Sunday 3 November 2013

Truth be told, an annulment would be easier to arrange — more clear lines of power, more obvious whose hands itch. It’s easier to prove that something never was than to transfer rights. Marriage is such an obvious, simple, provable notion; ownership isn’t.

“You’d best give up that little dream,” Jozek’s neighbor told him, his breath hot with vodka. “It’s as likely as moving to America.” Which really wasn’t all that unlikely, with the wall down and Walesa’s ridiculously huge pen. Maybe that’s why Mirek chose that comparison. For a grave digger, Mirek was certainly more clever, more insightful–more ironic he’d prefer–than one might expect.

30 Days of Insanity

Friday 1 November 2013

NaNoWriMo 2013 is underway, which means I’ll be neglecting this site to some degree. To a great degree. My first attempt at writing a novel in thirty days. That’s 1,667 words per day. I’m over 2,000 for day one. Not a bad start.

Treading Water

Friday 26 July 2013

I’m attempting to go a full year with daily updates on this little endeavor. Sometimes, I cheat: I might have nothing really I feel like writing about, so I just post some nonsense — a quote, a short, meaningless observation. Occasionally I’m not in the mood, but I do something silly — maybe a picture from the past. Every now and then, I just don’t have the time/energy/ability, so I do some silliness — a picture from the past, a quote, some nonsense. Rarely it’s a combination of one or more — mood, ability, not having anything to write about. Even more rarely, I have something to write about but not the ability or willingness to write about it. Today, for example, we have hundreds of pictures on the camera and lots of wonderful experiences here in Charleston, but I just don’t have it in me tonight to do anything about it: mood and ability conspire. And so I cheat, and go to bed.

Sonnets, Again

Friday 14 December 2012

We’re writing sonnets again in English I. “The hardest thing I’ve ever written” is the common consensus. So much to worry about: meter, rhyme, thematic development.

Notes from the board

The kids wonder why we’re doing it. “It’s not like we’ll ever write one of these again,” some protest, and it’s true. At the same time, they’ve never struggled over a piece of writing word by word; they’ve never searched for the right word only to find it’s actually not quite right; they’ve never planned a piece of writing simultaneously word by word, line by line, quatrain by quatrain. In short, they’ve never written like a poet.

What’s the value in this? In a society where most of these kids are fluent with text shortcuts and seem never to slow down, the question almost answers itself.

Errors and Mistakes

Thursday 6 September 2012

In the midst of the process, it becomes obvious to me that the road these students are on will not lead to the results they want. They’re working hard learning a new framework for planning and writing formal essays, but there are so many larger and smaller steps — I couldn’t have covered them all the first time through. Yet I sit and wonder whether or not I’ve made a mistake. Instead of essays, many of them are going to wind up with three body paragraphs that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

I’m left wondering what to do. Do I stop everyone and make a group course correction? That’s likely only to confuse some. And besides, it’s the process I’m teaching. I’m not worried as much about the finished product at this point as I am the steps the kids are taking to create that final product.

Then it occurs to me: sometimes the teachable moment is not in the moment. Sometimes it’s best to let them stumble — knowingly, even anticipating it — so that their misstep will show them rather than tell them where they were on the wrong track.

“Mr. Scott,” I envision one young lady beginning quizzically, “This essay we wrote — it don’t make sense.”

“How so? What doesn’t make sense?” I will reply, hoping that she will see then what I already clearly see  now.

“I don’t know. It’s just,” she might continue, pausing to look for the right way to express herself. “These paragraphs. They just don’t go together somehow.”

And I will smile and say, “I know, and I’m so very glad you’ve noticed that.”

Tops

Thursday 25 August 2011

Few things are as beautiful to me as an English teacher as the tops of my students’ heads. Like thirty suns rising over the horizon of their desks, the sight of students’ crowns is a sure promise, an hint that today might be better than yesterday.

With pencils skating and tapping across their page, my students reveal the treasure in their heads through flawed but ever-charming drafts. They create maps of ideas that are perfect in their heads but somehow get a little muddled as they travel down their arms to their fingertips. But oh, the treasure they often share. What a strange and electrifying privilege to learn things about people that seem to be revealed only to the most trusted. What an honor to be the confidant of so many bright minds.

Yet it’s not just the content that brings joy. The process itself is almost sacramental. Some write with furrowed brow; others look like they’re smiling; still others seem both amused and confused; a few even seem ambivalent. There are exasperated sighs and frustrated moans, and the crisp echo of someone wading paper occasionally punctuates the grey-black scratching of graphite.

I’m always torn during such in-class writing engagements. I try to set the example and write alongside my students, sharing my own drafts and troubles so they can see that all writers have problems with writing. Still, part of me wants to sit and just watch as they wrestle with themselves. “I have trouble writing when I don’t like the topic,” they almost universally write in their first assigned topic, “I, the Writer,” an exploration of writing in their lives. To remedy this, I try to allow as much freedom as I can, and the fact that I can get thirty-plus thirteen-year-olds to sit quietly and write is a testament to the effectiveness of freedom. And so I work toward a successful medium: write a little, glance up and feel proud for them, then write a little more. My writing during these sessions often turns to the joy of watching students work.

It is most clearly in these moments that I see my vocation: I am a teacher. I will always be a teacher. I cannot imagine doing anything else, for I am addicted to the warmth and trust of my students.

Motion

Friday 29 July 2011

Those things which we take most for granted are usually the same things that we could not do without. It’s the paradox of familiarity: we sometimes say nastiness to those we love the most because familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least laziness: we assume there will always be time for amends. We go from day to day assuming that the last words we say to our wife, daughter, parents that day won’t be the last words. We take for granted that we’ll wake up in the morning and be able to start, if not afresh, certainly again.

The alarm clock chirps and without thinking of the miracle unfolding in front of us, we casually slide our arm from under the sheet and smack another seven minutes of silence out of the clock. When we finally pull ourselves out of bed, an entire ballet of muscular motion has made it possible to sit up on the edge of the bed and rub our eyes in an attempt to smear the last bits of drowsiness away. A yawn is an engineering marvel that goes unappreciated, and lacing our shoes is as complicated as any dance.

Certainly that which we waste the most of is that which we can never replenish: time. We waste it as if our present moment were eternity, as if we were some kind of god, able to alter time and space and make an endless loop of tomorrows. Of all the meaningful things I could do with my time on a Friday night, for example, why do I sit and troll YouTube videos or play chess? “One day I will take all the photos and memories I have of Poland and write a book,” I promise myself continually, yet there’s always a caveat: “But not tonight. Tonight, I just want to relax,” and I load chess.com and drive myself to frustration over a silly game.

These three are related: the ability to move freely and the time to do so allows us to place our bodies in nearest proximity to those who mean the most to us. With few exceptions, these freedoms are universal, even in the most repressive regimes. It’s rare that something takes them away, at once, in a flash. It is necessarily an act of aggression, an imprisonment, a forcible, irresistible subjection of one’s will to the will of another.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves through misplaced priorities. We watch YouTube videos when there are more productive goals; we go to a class instead of attending our daughter’s performance; we rush conversations with our parents because some trifle is more important at the moment.

Occasionally, though, we’re blessed: something shakes us out of our assumption that that which we have now will never change and is therefore not worth cherishing fully at this moment. It might be something we experience that shakes us, that turns our head around, that lifts us for a moment to see where we stand and forces us to appreciate the view, regardless of what it might be.

Usually, though, it’s a vicarious glimpse of someone else’s experience, and often it’s an experience that we find ourselves wondering whether we could endure it, much less profit from it in any way. Watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or reading it, I would assume–something that’s now a high priority) is just such an experience. French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, almost completely paralyzed by a massive stroke, wrote the entire book by blinking his left eye, the only part of his body that he could move. Claude Mendibil recited the letters of the French alphabet in order of their frequency, and Bauby blinked his left eye when he heard the next letter of the word he wanted to dictate. “E S A I T N R U L O” began Mendibil again and again until Bauby dictated, letter by letter, the entire text of the memoir he composed and edited in his head. That alone says more than most could in a lifetime of babbling.

It is, in short, a film all should see.