September, 2012

Mockery—The Permissible Form of Bullying?

Working against bullying is a big deal in schools, as well it should be. I’ve seen workshops, policies, text hotlines, and more. Some efforts seem more effective than others, and for some, I really have no idea whether they work or not. When teens already know they shouldn’t do something, does telling them it’s wrong again really stop them if they’re so inclined?

Not sure. The main things I feel I can do are make it clear that I won’t tolerate bullying in my classroom, and more importantly, set a good example.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of example we set amongst ourselves, though. Especially in this age of social media.

As I browse through my Twitter lists, it’s mostly fun, games, and good information. There are also opinions, which are great. What’s not so great is when opinions are of a type akin to “Anyone who thinks this way/votes this way/belongs to this party or organization is an idiot AND a lesser human being.”

I’m nowhere near perfect, but whenever I disagree with someone, I do try to come at it from an angle that isn’t judging them as a person. It takes a lot of effort—sometimes a crap-ton of effort, sometimes more effort than I can manage—but often I can get myself to the following head-space:

Their view on this is the total opposite of mine. We couldn’t disagree more on this. But I see where they’re coming from, and coming from there, what they think is reasonable for them. I still believe what I think is reasonable for me. We see it differently, and that’s okay.

I have friends all along various spectrums—political, religious, whatever—so this mindset is very important to me. They’re fabulous people—even the ones who hate math!

If a student vocally, stridently denigrated (for instance) people who buy into creationism, or gay people, or people who own guns, or people who have a live-in boyfriend … if they did that in the middle of class, knowing there’s every likelihood that someone in the room falls into that category, would we let it go?

Why, then, is it okay to watch a political party convention (either one) and go to town with mocking tweets, declaring the utter stupidity of everyone associated with that party?

Because we’re adults and should be able to take it? Isn’t that the old response to bullying? “You need to toughen up and just take it.” Because we’re free to fight back? That always goes well.

My opinion (and yes, just my opinion, so you can disagree): The way forward is in understanding. Not necessarily agreement. Definitely not homogeneity. But understanding where other views come from, and trying to find common ground.

Mockery closes doors and raises walls. My hope is that we all (myself included) will remember to think before we tweet (or post, or whatever). Who will be on the receiving end? Might I be actively insulting them by saying this?

Are my words hiding hate behind a veil of snark?

And what kind of example am I setting for future generations?

Speak up:

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"But My Writing Teacher Said (or Asseverated) …"

Speaking of undoing what other teachers have done …

Did anyone else go to school and have a poster or handout with 75 or so alternatives to “said”? Bellowed, whispered, mumbled, hissed—ooh, that last one sparks fights. Can you actually hiss words?

Enter the world of aspiring novelist and you’re told to only use “said,” if you must use a dialogue tag at all. Maybe “asked” if you really think the question mark isn’t doing its job.

There’s another one I see all the time when students ask me to look at their writing assignments. I’m not sure what their English teacher’s stance is on it, which makes it hard to know what to say.

Descriptions. Extreme overuse of adjectives. Since I don’t teach English or creative writing, I don’t have a volume of teenage story samples, but from what I have seen, it’s near impossible for a character to enter a scene without making their hair and eye color known, at minimum.

Thing is, they’re kids. They’re learning. Maybe their teacher wants them to be more descriptive and develop that skill. If their own character/setting visualizations are too transparent on the page, maybe that’s all right for now. Maybe they need to lay it out there in black and white as they practice, working toward more nuanced ways of painting pictures with words.

Weaving description into a narrative is an art all its own—one I’m constantly working on improving myself. Getting characters to speak (or whisper or mumble or even hiss) for themselves is another one.

How do you take students (or writers in general, at any age) from these school-days practices to more seamless techniques?

How did any of us get there? Personally, I find it hard to pinpoint where/how I learned specific things about writing. I can tell you how I learned about differential equations. I can’t tell you how I learned about writing dialogue that works, creating multi-dimensional characters, or even most grammatical conventions.

That’s always made the idea of teaching something like language arts mind-boggling to me.

Any such teachers out there who can share how they approach teaching creative writing in their classrooms? When students decide they want the math teacher’s opinion (because word of her “other job” got out), what kind of feedback might I want to give?

Speak up:

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Undoing the Work of Other Teachers

It’s an inescapable fact of education that what we do as teachers today affects the work of other teachers later in a student’s life. That means we inherit strengths a good teacher built, which is great. It also means sometimes we have to fix mistakes other teachers made.

This fact came to mind last week as my classes worked on proportions. Some students referred to something called the “Fish Method.” Let’s use this proportion:

Start with the number in a fraction with x (in this case, 8). Draw a line from the 8 diagonally up to the 2 (multiply those numbers), curve down to the 3 (divide by that), then diagonally up to the x (your answer equals x). What you’ve drawn looks kind of like a fish.

To be clear, this isn’t a “mistake” I had to fix. Rather, it’s a case of students clinging to a method that only works in a limited number of cases. For instance, proportions like these had them flailing.

We had to discuss other methods that had broader scope. This isn’t a bad thing—I’m all for discussing multiple methods and their respective limitations. But whenever something like this comes up, I try to tread lightly. I don’t want to say that their other teacher was wrong, bad, or not as cool as I am.

There are other situations, though (not like this proportions situation), where that’s exactly what I’m thinking. It even happened to me as a student. When I was very young, I was told by a teacher (a student teacher, to be fair) that “it’s” always has an apostrophe, whether the contraction or the possessive. Yes, really. It took me a few years to (a) figure out she’d been wrong, and (b) correct my bad habit.

I’m sure it can go the other way, too. A teacher instills all kinds of wonderful things in a student, and another teacher down the line destroys all that work.

Is there a way to avoid it? Maybe not. There will always be human error, whether intentional or not. All I can do is try not to be one of those “bad” teachers, and try to repair damage where I find it.

Have you observed or been affected by cases of teachers working against each other? How did it impact you?

Speak up:

2 comments

The Teenage Human as Observed in the Wild

… the “Wild” being a local junior high school, and the specimens under study being around fourteen years of age.

This list will be random and undoubtedly incomplete.

• Teenagers have a dysfunctional sense of auditory volume. No, I don’t mean they play their music too loud (because, well, so do I). They talk too loud when they don’t want the teacher to hear them and too soft when they do.

• They have an amazing capacity to disregard (or at least not notice) the needs of anyone other than themselves.

• They have an amazing capacity to assist with others’ needs with no prompting or incentive.

• They still say thank you.

• They leave messes just like they do at home.

• They clean up better than they do at home.

• Most of them can grade their own work on the honor system just fine.

• Many are happy to read with any spare moment in class.

• A few are Rubik’s Cube geniuses.

• Some broadcast their emotions from fifty feet away.

• Some have very non-emotive faces. You have to watch their eyes.

• They will surpass your expectations.

• They will live down to your expectations.

• They will smash your expectations.

• They see each other differently than we see them.

• They don’t mind geeky adults (as long as the geeky adults care).

• They laugh at dirty jokes.

• They laugh at clean jokes.

• They laugh at dumb jokes that have been retold since they were in first grade.

• They don’t know what to do when they’re angry.

• They don’t know what to do when they’re sad.

• They know exactly what to do.

• They don’t want to be treated like children.

• They don’t want to be treated like adults (not 100% full-time, at least).

• Some already have to act like adults.

• Some think they’re more on top of things than they are.

• Some think they’re less capable than they are.

• Even the quietest have distinctive, interesting personalities. “Mary Sue” and the bland, empty-beaker persona don’t exist … and if they appear to, you’re not looking hard enough.

Speak up:

5 comments

The Name Game: Go Anglocentric or Go Home?

Naming characters is something every writer has to deal with, and every writer has strategies. Some use baby name sites/books to find names with certain meanings, some draw from names in their own lives, and some (hello, fellow sci-fi/fantasy writers!) make up names from scratch, among other methods.

I want to talk about those character names today and ignore the making-it-up situation, assuming we’re in some kind of contemporary setting.

First, a day-job detour.

I’ve heard some people bemoan the lack of time-honored, long-standing names like John and David among YA characters. As I approached the start of this school year, I looked at my class lists. Out of about 200 kids, all around 14 years old, I have no one named John. No one named David. No Sue or Jane. I do have a couple of Josephs (one goes by his initials), and a handful of Annas-or-Anns. A couple of Nathans and Andrews.

You know what else I have repeats of? Braden (or Braeden). Cole. Hunter. Parker. Brianna. And all kinds of variations on McCall, McKenzie, McKayla and the like.

So we can conclude that these names were trendy fourteen years ago. Maybe that trendiness didn’t hold, so by the time our books are published, a teenager with that name may seem out of place. In that sense, the advice to use more “tried-and-true” names makes sense.

But here’s something else from the day job that happened just yesterday. We were discussing a couple of story problems in class. If you’re in education, you probably know that in the last 10-20 years, textbook writers have made a transparent effort to include more culturally diverse names in things like story problems.

One problem involved a girl named Pietra. A student said, “That’s not a real name!” I said it was (and a boy named Pieter in the class noted it’s the female version of his name). We moved on. Another problem involved a girl named Pilar. Someone said that wasn’t a real name, either.

The Hispanic kids in class weren’t very amused, and neither was I.

Let’s bring this back around to writing.

Regarding one of my early stories, several people commented that I was trying too hard to make “unique” names for my MCs. I wasn’t—at least, I didn’t think I was. I’d chosen one Hispanic name, and one somewhat related to a Hispanic name. Not quite as straightforward as Rosa or Carmen, but Hispanic readers didn’t bat an eye. Both were names I’ve encountered in real life, so I didn’t think of them as rare.

The thing is, I didn’t state anything else in the book about the characters having any Hispanic heritage. It wasn’t the focus of the story. I’m clarifying some of that in a rewrite, but here’s my question:

Should we only use ethnically/culturally diverse names in stories deeply rooted in cultural identity or discovery? Do we stick to Tom, Dick, and Harry otherwise because that’s more “comfortable” for the caucasian majority?

Back to those sci-fi and fantasy writers. We have to be careful not to create names that are a reading-roadblock … the kinds of names that make our readers desperate to either buy or sell some vowels. Similarly, in contemporary settings, we probably don’t want to pick names that are difficult for the mental reading voice to get a pronunciation for. It interrupts the flow of the story, and no one wants that.

But is there anything wrong with a character named Pilar? Or Dai-Ling? Or Tiave?

Because those are real names.

(Of course, if we create such characters, making them culturally authentic is another matter entirely … but maybe one we should think about challenging ourselves with. Myself included.)

Speak up:

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Who Sets Your Potential and Decides When You’ve Met It?

Sometimes I get students who come into my class saying, “I love math! It’s my favorite subject, and I’m good at it.” It’s awesome when I do, but those students are definitely the minority. More often than not, students come in somewhat indifferent about math. Just something they have to get through, most of them with a mix of good and bad experiences under their belts.

Then there are those who come in with “I’m bad at math” oozing from every pore.

Some of them really do struggle, and for a variety of reasons. Learning disabilities, interruptions in their education, a string of teachers who made it impossible for them to learn one way or another … But several say they’re bad at math—loudly—but I don’t believe them. Their work on quizzes or answers to questions in class show they have plenty of potential.

Says who? Says me.

Maybe they’re holding themselves to an impossible standard of perfection, and anything less means being “bad” at it. Maybe it takes effort, and anything that isn’t easy must be something they’re “bad” at. Maybe they just don’t want the image of being good at math (or anything school-related). Maybe something else.

Whatever the reason, I can’t sit back and ignore the potential, just like I can’t ignore the potential of kids who do struggle.

Observations like this got me thinking about potential as a whole, though. Like I said, I’m the one who’s declaring an unmet potential in many of these cases. Unless I can get the student to buy in and agree that the potential is there, though, it’ll probably remain unmet. I can force some small increments at the beginning, pointing out their successes to build confidence, but I can’t force the level of self-belief it takes to achieve more.

I can see theoretical potential, but the student has to take control at some point to make it real.

Then I got to thinking about meeting potential. It’s kind of a stupid concept, isn’t it? Has anyone ever said, “You’ve met your potential—you’re done”?

Maybe some superstar athletes, who’ve reached the pinnacle of their sport, achieved its highest honors (multiple times), and retire while they’re on top. But even then, are they done? Or do they turn the level of potential they’ve reached to another target?

How do you meet your potential, when it should always be dancing ahead of you, just out of reach?

I may have mentioned before, but when I was in elementary school, everyone said I’d be a doctor. Not any particular reason other than that I was a brainy little thing, and becoming doctors is what smart people do. There are those who thought becoming a math teacher was a waste of my potential.

Was it? I’m the first to admit my academic pathway was not perfect, and there are things I’d like to have done differently. I missed opportunities. I made mistakes. But is the end result a waste? Maybe I just had a ways to go to narrow the gap to that initial potential.

After a few years of teaching, I went off to enter the world of deaf education. It added more challenges, maybe pushed me closer to that initial potential everyone saw in 10-year-old me. In the midst of that, I began writing novels, activating a part of myself that had been quietly lurking in the corners. Definitely a stretch.

I signed with an agent, and now I’m to be published. All while I’m still a math teacher.

Is this enough to equal my original “going to be a doctor” potential?

That’s the wrong question.

My potential is what it is. What I do with it can’t be quantified and compared to earlier expectations. It’s not something for me to reach, but rather something to keep me moving forward.

People in my life help me see my potential, and in the end, I’m the only one who can decide whether I’m moving toward or away from it.

So that’s what I’ll try to do with my students … help them see their potential, point them in the right direction, show them that its current position is something that can be achieved. All the while, making sure they know that by the time they get to that mark, their potential will have moved forward even more.

And that the only way to not “meet” their potential is if they refuse to move at all.

Speak up:

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