August, 2012
The Comfort of Inertia
When I mention inertia, here’s one of the first things that comes to mind.
“An object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by a net force.”
Generally applied to physics, but so true in other areas. It’s so easy to keep doing what we’ve been doing, and keep not doing what we haven’t been doing.
As a teacher, it’s easy to teach as I’ve always taught. As a writer, it’d be easy to write the way I’ve always written. I’ve done it before, so I know I can do it. Continuing to do it is no problem at all.
Inertia is so darn comfortable.
You know what isn’t comfortable? Growth.
Growth hurts. Growth feels awkward. Growth is trying to put on clothes that were designed for a body type very different from mine.
But if we push ourselves through that discomfort, we stretch. Our shape changes. We mold into something new.
And just as that new place starts to feel comfortable, we find the next new thing we need to put on.
(Now I have this vision of people made of clay. Just roll with it.)
I have new things to try this year as a teacher. I have areas to improve in with my writing. It’s uncomfortable and awkward.
It’s also necessary.
If I let inertia carry me, what’s the point of having a brain at all?
Where do you find yourself getting caught in inertia? How do you push yourself out of those ruts?
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5 commentsNot My Job … Or Is It?
With a change in location and employment comes the return of an old idea. It’s not universal among math teachers—I hope it’s not common for even a majority of teachers. But every once in a while, I hear something along these lines:
“It’s math class. I don’t do English.”
I just came from a school with the philosophy that every teacher is a language arts teacher. (Honestly, to such a degree that it could be a pain sometimes … but a necessary pain.) Other schools likely feel the same way to one degree or another. But not all teachers buy into that.
Does it mean docking points when the math is all correct but there are spelling or grammar errors? No, I don’t think so. What, then?
As writers (and particularly YA writers), many of us have considered how our books might be read and used in schools. Visions of curriculum guides, worksheets, projects, discussions … almost all in English class, right?
How could other teachers use our books? Historical fiction could tie into social studies classes. Science fiction might work in some science classes, at least in portions. But what could teachers do beyond straight-up reading assignments to encourage both interest and skill in reading and writing?
A few things I’ve done:
- When a new, strange word comes up, take a few seconds to discuss it … even if it’s not a “vocabulary” word for my unit.
- Have students do small writing assignments to explain their thinking. I encourage clarity and completeness, and while I don’t mark off for grammar errors, I give little nudges.
- TALK ABOUT BOOKS. Just because it’s math class doesn’t mean I don’t have moments here and there to talk about what I’m reading, what students are reading, what they think of the last book in one trilogy or another, etc.
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1 commentStudent-Centered, Math-Anchored
There’s something in education you may or may not have heard of—the student-centered approach. Here’s what some people think it looks like:
Students doing whatever they want, however they want, as long as it has some tenuous connection to the subject at hand. There are no wrong answers. Math facts are left by the wayside.
Basically chaos, with very little education happening.
I imagine some teachers actually carry it out that way, but that’s not the philosophy as I understand it. When we hear the term “student-centered,” I think we tend to have ideas of, “Let the student lead the way. Let the student determine everything.” So I try not to think about student-centered without including something else.
Math-anchored.
I envision students out at sea, paddling around in the water, exploring to their hearts’ content. The earlier illustration would end there, but when I think of it, each student also has a tether. How much rope they have might vary, but all the lines are connected to a stable post. They’ll reach that post from different sides and at different rates—of course, as the teacher, I’m there giving gentle tugs to each rope to urge them in my general direction—but they’ll all get to the same endpoint.
That destination is the core principle, the major mathematical idea that’s the reason we’re doing the activity or exploration at all. Students are empowered to delve into the thick of it, really engage their brains to make sense out of a situation. They see the different approaches their classmates took and discuss whether they’re equally valid.
Most importantly, they come away with an understanding of that root concept.
Like most things, easier said than done. Even if I set up a great lesson, it can be awfully tempting to forget those “gentle tugs” and just haul each student in by their tether. It’s also easy to run out of time before they reach the destination, and then forget the next day that I’ve left them adrift.
Before we even get started, then, I’d better make sure they all have life preservers. In other words, setting up a classroom environment where they know the expectations and what to do when they’re left without the mathematical understanding we’re looking for.
Can you tell the first day of school is coming up?
Wish me luck.
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1 commentThe Awesomeness of Terrible/Wonderful, No-Good/Very-Rad Days
Remember a couple of months ago, how I had the most hectic day ever, yet it was still awesome?
It happened again recently, where my “real life” had me pretty occupied, yet my “literary life” demanded sudden attention.
Here’s the upshot of it, as reported in the Publishers Weekly Children’s Bookshelf:
Catherine Onder at Disney has acquired debut author R.C. Lewis’s Stitching Snow, a sci-fi YA thriller due out in summer 2014. In the book, a royal teen runaway is scraping together a living in a mining settlement on the far side of the universe, until she is discovered and “rescued” against her will. Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency brokered the two-book, six-figure pre-empt.
Mind = boggled … maybe even scrambled Saturday-morning-egg style.
Thanks to friends who’d been through the process before me, I’d been prepared for the long slog of submissions. More months of waiting, more rejections, maybe some close calls where we didn’t quite get through acquisitions. Even when we had whispers of possible good news, my stupendous agent was great about keeping me grounded. Yay, step in the right direction! But nothing’s guaranteed.
I was ready for that, I think. But I was very fortunate things fell into place just as they did. Maybe I just shouldn’t bother having expectations anymore, because nothing ever turns out quite as I expect.
I’m beyond grateful to Jennifer for everything she’s done and continues to do. She pushes me in just the right ways. I also have amazing critique partners. Big group-hug to everyone at AgentQuery Connect. Mindy in particular (Yo, BBC!) has talked me off the ledge more than once. (You know the ledge … the one every writer visits now and then that says, “I Can’t Do This!”)
So, what does this all mean?
It means it’s time to get to work.
*rolls up sleeves*
*dives in*
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19 commentsWhich Love Do You Write For?
Why do you write?
A simple question. Many common answers, some probably better than others.
I think for most of us, love comes into play somehow. Some kind of love is involved. Is it the love of the writing process? Is it the love of the finished product? Is it desire for the love of readers?
For some, that last one is a solid NO. “I write for myself, not the reader.” I think that’s valid, but I only fall partway into that category. When I start drafting a story, the first, most instinctive criterion is to write a book I’d want to read. (This is always a good idea, considering the number of times I’ll go through a manuscript with revisions and editing passes.)
But I also write for the reader … I hope I do, anyway. I try to write books teenage-RC would’ve liked to read, and I know there are plenty of current teenagers who have just enough in common with RC-of-ages-past to enjoy similar elements.
I try to create characters who resonate. Forgive the physics intrusion, but for resonance to happen, you need two things—the sounding tone (provided by the author) and the resonant object (the reader). It’s kind of a cool thing to have someone think you wrote in some brilliant symbolism, but you know it wasn’t your conscious intention. That reader brought some of the brilliance by viewing it through their own lens.
(And yeah, I think I just mixed sound and optics metaphors there … turning off physics-brain now.)
Sometimes we get so bogged down in the hard stuff about writing and publishing that we forget the love—whatever love it was that brought us to this art. We fret over query letters. (Guilty) Rejections deject us. (Guilty) We fear our writing sucks so profoundly that no one can put their finger on why, so we’ll never be able to fix whatever’s wrong. (Guilty-Squared)
If you find yourself in a place like that, stop and take a breath. Remember why you’re putting yourself through all the contortions and seeming torture that it takes. I hope on some level, it’s because you love it.
Love takes work. Love brings pain. But love is worth it.
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7 commentsWhy I Won’t Tell You What to Do
This is one of my biggest guiding principles in teaching: I won’t tell my students what to do.
Okay, I will sometimes. Like when I tell them to clear their desks before a test, to get out a piece of paper, to work with their partner, or to stop playing games on their calculator when they’re supposed to be working (and I know they’re playing because no one uses their thumbs that much when they’re calculating).
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about when a student asks, “How do I solve this problem?” Sometimes I slip, but more often than not, I answer that question with a question. “What do you know about the problem already?” “What are we trying to find?” “How is this similar to/different from this other problem?”
Yup, I’m one of those teachers.
Even when I do “tell” a little more, it’s often with options. “What are the tools we’ve been using? Tables, graphs, and equations. You could try using any of those.”
It’s easier just to tell students how to solve the problem. Really, it is. (That’s why I slip once in a while.) So why don’t I just do it that way?
Because it’s not about what’s easy … especially not what’s easy FOR ME.
It’s about getting the student to the point of doing mathematics independently. And before anyone says most people never use anything from algebra or above in “real life,” that’s not what doing mathematics is truly about. It’s about thinking and reasoning and working out what makes sense.
Like so many things from my teaching life, it carries over into my writing life. People ask for feedback, critique, suggestions. In that case it’s peer-to-peer, but that makes me even less likely to say, “Do it this way.” I try to focus on giving my reaction as a reader, what worked and didn’t, leaving it to the writer to figure out how to best resolve any problem areas—if they even agree that the area is a problem.
Some people give feedback by saying, “What if you did it like this?” and proceed to rewrite a whole paragraph or query letter. I can’t say it’s wrong and no one should do that. Maybe that works for some people. Just me, personally … it makes me cringe. Once in a while I throw in a “such as” and give a possible sentence to illustrate my point, but I try to keep that really limited with a tone of “but in your own way.”
That’s the thing. When I tell someone how to solve a problem, they’re not really doing mathematics. When someone is writing, feedback is critical. Taking in that feedback, processing it, and deciding what to do about it (if anything) is a necessary skill. It needs to be their work, their writing, their voice. We can suggest and spitball and yea-or-nay ideas, but when it’s our writing, we must do the heavy lifting.
And yes, sometimes I slip in that department, too. But I try. I just want to make people think.
But if I said my way of giving feedback is the only way, that would be telling you what to do.
Have you seen or experienced benefits of the direct-instruction approach? Have you seen downsides to being left to puzzle it out, picking and choosing from more general bits of advice?