June, 2012

Looking for Love in All the Lame Places

I’m admittedly picky about reality television. It’s a mixed bag, as I’m sure anyone who’s glanced at any would agree. I like talent-based shows (America’s Got Talent, So You Think You Can Dance?) and competitions like The Amazing Race. That last one sometimes devolves into drama and pettiness, which I’m not so crazy about. I’ve only watched a couple of seasons of Survivor for the same reason.

For me (my personality, disposition, whatever), the absolute worst are the dating shows.

Full disclosure: I’ve never actually watched so much as a single episode of The Bachelor. My opinion is based entirely on commercials and listening to other people talk about the shows. It’s been more than enough for me. Every time I see those commercials, I find myself yelling at the TV.

And there are so many of them now. Love in the Wild (dating show meets Survivor). Take Me Out. The Choice (dating show meets The Voice … clearly).

I might’ve been interested in Beauty and the Geek if they’d made it hot guys and a brainy girl. Maybe. A friend in college claimed if you pay attention to wedding announcement photos, the guy and gal are either equally attractive or the girl is distinctly better looking. So seeing that flipped around could have at least intrigued me.

With this many shows, though, clearly people are interested. There’s a reason for the popularity. Something I can’t see, I guess. Is it seeing the shallow interplay, mocking it, or is there something more?

If any of you are fans and can enlighten me, I’d love to hear about it.

Are there things that are popular with others and you just don’t understand?

Speak up:

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Where Does Your Idea-Spawner Dwell?

“Where do you get the ideas for your stories?”

I haven’t even been at this very long, and I’ve already lost count how many times I’ve been asked that. Maybe it hasn’t been that many. Maybe I’m just blocking the memories because my answer often seems to be, “Um, well … I don’t know. Places.”

Part of the problem is that no two stories have had the same clear-cut idea-spawning process. One came from a line of lyrics that I thought I’d heard wrong. One came from experiences I saw repeating for a certain subset of my students, and I realized I could fictionalize the essence of it. Most of the others, I don’t have a solid memory of where they came from. One little germ of a thought smooshed into another, then another. A main character, a premise, a plot … they just kind of evolved. By the time I had the full “idea” in my head, I couldn’t remember how I got to that original germ in the first place.

Another thing I’ve lost count of is how many times I’ve heard other authors say they’ve gotten ideas from dreams. Tons of them saying they have to keep a notepad on the nightstand so when they wake from a dream that’ll make an awesome story, they can jot down the important points before it slips from their minds.

I have a confession. My dreams are utterly useless to me as a writer.

I can’t say they’re necessarily boring. They’re just either too ordinary or too weird to make good story fodder. A lot of my dreams involve mash-ups of my current life with older memories. I’m at school, and I’m supposed to go teach something, but I’m also a student again, and it’s supposed to be my high school, but it’s more like classrooms from the deaf school I interned at got transplanted to my junior high building. The supporting characters are a mix of people I went to school with and kids I’ve taught at various stages of my career.

Oh, and the best part is when some people are using ASL while others are speaking, and it almost never matches up with who would be doing each in real life.

(Someone’s going to waltz in and do a dream analysis on this, declaring my subconscious to be either really dull or really messed up, right?)

The good news is, it doesn’t really matter where the ideas come from, as long as they come. Maybe it’s on my mind because I’m wondering where I’ll find the next one.

Do your ideas tend to spawn in ways that are easy for you to pinpoint? Or are they a little more amorphous as they sneak up on you?

Speak up:

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Covering the Full Spectrum

I seem to talk about balance a lot. (I just ran a search on “balance” and it came up with a dozen posts here on the blog.) It certainly comes up plenty when talking about writing. Balance description with pace. Balance clarity with mystery and intrigue. Adjectives aren’t evil; the overuse and abuse of them is.

Basically, I don’t go in for absolutes on a lot of things. It’s not just in writing, either. It holds in other areas, even when I make a statement that might seem absolute. For instance, I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise:

But does this mean I love math absolutely? That I love all math? That I love every single thing pertaining to math?

Nope.

There are parts I love more, parts I love less, and parts I love not at all. Like what, you ask? Here you go—examples.

Math-Thing I Love a Lot: Being able to break down a complex problem into steps or pieces that logically flow from one to another.

Math-Thing I Love Less: Sketching visuals (graphs, diagrams, etc.) by hand. I can do them pretty well on paper, but I’m a teacher. That means whiteboards. And that means, uh, not so pretty. (Favorite math quote of all-time: “Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrect drawing.”)

Math-Thing I Don’t Love At All: Having to do things the long way when I know there’s a shortcut. That might be more of a math teacher thing, but it came up sometimes when I was a student, too. If a student can prove to me they understand the foundations contained in the long way and can justify their shortcut working consistently, I’ll usually let them use it. But as the teacher, I’m generally stuck with the long way in the early days of teaching a concept.

But here’s the good news about having such a full spectrum even within something I love. I suspect it means even students who generally hate math will have some aspect of it they don’t hate. My job is to find that aspect, because that’s where I can get my foot in the door.

How about you? If you love math, what part of it do you hate? If you hate math, what part of it do you love?

Speak up:

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Being Proud or Keeping Others from Feeling Bad?

When I was in junior high, they tried doing this “character education” program with us once a week. I don’t remember much of it, other than that we all thought it was lame, and it talked about self-esteem a lot. The message that came across was that we should all be proud of ourselves no matter what.

Personally, I’ve never found that approach effective. Saying everyone should feel good about themselves is empty, hollow, meaningless. It sure didn’t work for me. What does work? Encouraging kids to do something they can be proud of, perhaps. Helping them accomplish those things. Emphasizing pride in things of more intrinsic value (like accomplishing something through hard work) than extrinsic (like being the most popular kid in school).

This week, I heard about some events at recent high school graduations. Four seniors have to complete twenty hours of community service before getting their diplomas, because their family and friends cheered when their names were called during the ceremony. I thought the no-cheering rule was odd and surely an isolated thing, but no. A graduate’s mother was arrested for supposedly cheering too much for her daughter.

From what I’ve read, the reasoning behind the anti-cheering (or anti-excessive-cheering) ceremonies is that in the past, some families have carried on so much that the following students’ names couldn’t even be heard, or delayed the ceremony by refusing to settle down for several minutes. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s been a problem in some places. (But arresting the mom? Really?)

At the same time, part of me suspects there’s a bit more beneath. Could it be that these rules are so some kids don’t feel bad that they get less cheering than some of their classmates? I don’t know. But I think it’s possible.

I just attended a graduation a week ago. It was unusual. The state governor was the speaker. The graduating class consisted of just ten kids. Most of the ceremony was in ASL, with interpreters over the sound system, so “not hearing” something wasn’t an issue. Anyone could cheer as much as they wanted.

So I thought back to my own graduation. I was in a graduating class of several hundred. The graduation was held in a university arena. They cranked through our names fairly quickly. Some kids had loud and enthusiastic cheering sections, but I’m pretty sure the sound system beat them out.

Then, when some girl I didn’t even know had her turn to walk across, half of the arena erupted. It didn’t make sense. Then I found out why.

This had just happened:

John Stockton had to feel pretty proud of himself. Deservedly so.

And I didn’t need my family to cheer that loudly for me to know they were proud of me.

What’s your take on self-esteem? How do we encourage kids to develop it without making it empty and meaningless?

Speak up:

7 comments

Gauging the Awesome

I’ve been hearing it for a while. Want to get an agent? The most important piece of the puzzle is to be awesome. Write an awesome query to get an agent’s attention, and make sure you’re ready to back it up with an awesome manuscript.

Okay, but how do you know when you’ve arrived at “awesome”?

It’s not easy. The first thing I had to accept was that I might be wrong. I wouldn’t really know. The best I could do was have a really strong belief. I also tried to keep my mind open to a need to increase the awesome.

There’s a line between “If I don’t believe in my work, why should anyone else?” and “I’ve written the most amazing novel ever and how dare anyone say I change a single thing?” It’s a thin line, and crossing to the wrong side isn’t pretty. Keeping my self-assessments honest can be a battle between my perfectionism and occasional surges of ego.

It doesn’t help when there are plenty of outside-our-control reasons for agents not to nibble. Our timing may be off trend-wise. Maybe we’re hitting agents who just signed something too similar.

Maybe the work just isn’t awesome enough (yet).

That doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome at all. Maybe it’s pretty-darn awesome, just not holy-whoa awesome.

I thought my earlier manuscripts were awesome enough. In fact, I still think there’s a lot of awesome in them. At the same time, there’s something great about retrospect. When I look back over my querying experiences, there was something different this last round—the round that resulted in signing with my agent. A different gut-feeling when I said to myself, “This bird is ready to fly.”

Thing is, I can only recognize that from here. At the time, all I could do was hope.

And keep working.

Because no amount of awesome is ever really enough, right?

Speak up:

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Even Math Teachers Can Have Math Weaknesses

I’ve taught just about every math subject and topic you can imagine right up through calculus. I’m pretty good at all kinds of math problems, which is nice when you’re expected to help kids make sense of them. But there’s a skill—mathematical in nature—that I’m not so hot at.

Spatial estimation.

How many feet are between me and the car in front of me? Couldn’t tell you.

How many gallons of water fit in my bathtub? No idea.

When it comes to teaching, this isn’t really a problem. I know about measurement. I know how to take measurements. I know a few benchmarks (like a football field) and can easily estimate whether something is more or less than those.

It’s a problem when I’m moving today. Do I have enough boxes? Is everything going to fit in the size of moving truck I’ve rented (plus the two cars coming along)?

I guess I’ll find out.

After packing up my classroom this past week, though, I’m happy to say I’ve at least gotten better at optimizing box space. I got some books packed in an arrangement that was a thing of beauty.

Is there a minor section in your area of expertise where you don’t feel so expert? Has it gotten in your way? How do you work around it?

Speak up:

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