Letters from Lisa

I recently discovered Verla Kay’s website and forums. The site is full of information about writing children’s books, and the forums are great… There’s even a thread dedicated to response times from different publishers, so you know what’s typical/expected when you send things out.

Yet another way to procrastinate research the field!

Spanish — Practical and obvious, considering that Spanish is one of the most common languages spoken and is very prominent near where I live. I have a strong knowledge of romance languages, and Spanish is phonetic and easy to read. Actually my ability to read Spanish is far beyond my ability to listen to it, since I can puzzle out the sounds and make the connection to English and French words that seem similar.

Latin — I love studying etymology and this obviously makes Latin a natural choice — and it doesn’t hurt that I loved visiting sites from the ancient Roman empire and I think the history is fascinating. As long as I don’t have to conjugate anything!

Hawai’ian — A rare example of a native language on the upswing. Bravo! So much of culture is bound up in its language, and native Hawai’ian culture is bouncing back. I love Hawai’ian music and love the idea of learning a Polynesian language. It would probably be incredibly difficult, though, being that English and Hawai’ian have very little in common!

American Sign Language (ASL) — I took a 3 week immersion course a few summers ago, and it was magnificent. The course was led by a Deaf woman who was extremely skilled and a wonderful teacher. Because I took the class through my graduate school, there was a secondary focus on communicating with students who might have a hearing impairment — something that comes in handy in my own line of work, although my students’ primary difficulty lies in processing language, not sound per se.

ASL is NOT English translated into hand signals. It has a distinct vocabulary and grammar, and a cultural style that reflects its status as a language of the Deaf (capital D = Deaf culture; small d = hearing impaired). I’ve heard that if you don’t learn ASL as a young child, you have to study for MANY years before achieving proficiency, which I’m sure is true.

Using one’s hands, face and body posture for communicative purposes probably predated spoken language and perhaps entered human culture even before dancing, which makes me think it must be one of the most natural and effective things to learn how to do.

Now the only question that remains is which of the Tolkein languages I’d choose first? Perhaps Sindarin or Quenya, the Elvish tongues? Then again, when kids in my class decide to misbehave, perhaps I could snap them back into line with the Black Speech of Mordor? Hmm… maybe not.

You should check out this website. Extremely cool!

Here’s my list. It took a while, but I got up to 43 things!

I’ve been thinking about life trajectories, what people want out of life and what they go through to get it. What constitutes an acceptable life, a “good life”. Intellectually I know what the “right answer” is — that ANY life is a good life. Just living is a crowning achievement. Most of us manage that for a little while, but none of us for very long.

There’s this sticky, imprecise calculus that we employ when judging the lives of ourselves and others. We think of biological productivity — children. Then there’s economic and societal factors– making money, supporting one’s family, not being a burden on others. Some of us hold the ideal of being important in a large number of lives, or of having influence on someone who is prominent. Contributing to a field like medicine or art. Helping others. Being remembered.

People have different priorities and values when it comes to calculating the value of an individual’s life. I do it, despite my professed belief that all life is valuable. I’m not yet able to see how all life is equally valuable. I think about accidents, birth defects, illnesses and the effect that they have on the people who suffer with them… or don’t suffer. Some people lead very full lives with “impairments” and don’t seem to sit around feeling impaired, while others, who are ostensibly healthy, suffer greatly and are not satisfied with their lives. I often hear people say that they couldn’t take the reduced “quality of life” that would come with being paralyzed — but goodness, I’m glad that Stephen Hawking didn’t think that way.

It’s subtle, and therefore difficult for me to realize when I’m making a judgment about the worthiness of a career choice, belief choice, or economic choice. I get angry at certain groups of people who have different political and religious stances, and therefore devalue their contributions, or to put it another way, fail to see the common humanity in them. (And in less charitable moments, I notice how much they have the very same failings… but that’s no argument for me to stoop to it.) I notice certain prejudices popping up in my thoughts about certain careers being less helpful to society, or requiring less intellect or skill. Therefore it’s hard to see the value in the people who make those choices. And on a broader level, I see some cultures as repressive, unjust, wicked — or frivolous, flightly, bereft of redeeming values — and this causes a disconnect between myself and all the people who identify with those cultures.

But people are not their jobs, their religions, their clothes, their language or their intellects. They’re all people. Just people.

It’s tempting to judge in moralistic terms — who has relieved suffering versus who has caused it. In other words, who “deserves” a good life vs. who “deserves” death. (Or as Gandalf puts it, “Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?”) This doesn’t work, either. One can act to do good, and have unintended ill effects. Or one can intend to do harm and still benefit humanity in some way. Is it better to be a philanthropist, donating time and money to some great cause, or focus on raising one’s own children and benefitting one’s own community? There’s no clear answer to me, particularly when it involves weighing who is more “worthy” — the child in one’s house, or the child next door, or across the ocean. Evolutionarily speaking, we should value our own blood relations more than those unrelated to us — but as scientists have shown, all humans are closely genetically related, and if you trace your family tree far back enough, you will find the entire human race somewhere in it.

Getting back to human choices, it’s clear that many “great people” inflicted horrible pain on their families, but it is excused because of their “greatness”. Meanwhile, many other people sacrifice everything to care for a disabled parent, spouse or child. Which is more worthy? The calculus fails to compute an answer.

What good does judging do, anyway? What’s the point of it? Perhaps one could try to avoid some well-documented mistakes or emulate some goodness, though I don’t know if even that really works (what fails in one situation might work in another — what worked in past generations might fail due to changing circumstances). We just have to do what the situation calls for to be done, and reflect on what our motives are for doing it and the true consequences, not just what we fear or wish will happen.

Life is not a straightforward equation. You put in some input, and get an unpredictable result, sometimes totally unexpected. Even if you try to account for all the factors that could influence the outcome, there’s no reliable way to figure out what will happen. Sometimes you will fail even if you do everything “right”. Or you might be lucky, making a mistake and coming out relatively unscathed. You can’t predict every random occurrence or disaster. Life is impermanent, and very uncertain.

So the value of “one life” is constantly changing in our perceptions. Someone can seem indispensable and wonderful until they get sick — then all of a sudden they are a “burden”. Or someone can be out of mind, not ever particularly thought of, until they disappear or a tragedy befalls them. Then, suddenly, they matter to us. We have images, expectations, for the people around us, and these tend to influence they way we treat them and therefore the way they respond to us. The best relationships are the ones in which our expectations are shattered, and we are transformed — broken out of our rigid thinking about what life should be like. Some people transcend the normal humdrum perceptions and are seen as “inspirational”. The truth is, we are all living inspirational lives, if only someone would take the time to look and listen.

All the striving and ambition matter within the context of this life, this history, this society. Often people struggle for things that do not matter at all to others, or even seem petty and silly. Out of the context, it’s difficult to imagine what could be so compelling — in the context, the desired status or object seems all-important. All perceptions are a little bit narrow, a little bit short of the full reality. It’s easier to manage a world that is narrowly defined, to accomplish something concrete within a narrow field.

So it seems clear that there is no way to define the value of a human life, since there’s no specification for what makes a “good life”. The only thing to say is that all life is good, all life means something. All the value judgments about quality and purpose only apply within a narrow, limited context. To me that’s very disturbing, and also very comforting. I know that whatever my life ends up being, it will be Enough.

I’m playing the interview game!

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions - each person’s will be different.
3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Liz’s questions (from I Speak of Dreams)

1. You are exiled from the current space-time continuum. Which literary universe would you choose to inhabit, and why?

I could easily picture myself in Middle Earth. First of all, it’s one of the most complete literary worlds ever created, and has many charms — I could spend long hours strolling through Fangorn Forest alone, and who wouldn’t want to visit the Elven lands of Lothlorien and Rivendell? There are definitely characters I would want to meet, as well — for example, I’ve always had a great fondness for Faramir, Prince of Ithilien. There would be languages to learn, ancient books to study, wonderfully different groups of folk to meet, and if I happened to land there after the last great battle had been fought, I would get to be part of the dawning of the Fourth Age.

Now if I couldn’t get to Middle Earth, I’d probably grab the Hitchhiker’s Guide and go… well, anywhere I wouldn’t get blasted by Vogons.

2. What was your favorite daydream as a child?

I used to imagine that we were all part of one very large dollhouse on the floor of God’s bedroom. The fire bell at school would ring, and I’d get this little image of God setting up the fire drill for personal entertainment. I also thought that He developed individual lives and histories, even whole societies, sort of like a very advanced version of the Sims.

3. What made you decide to start blogging?

Back in high school, before anyone I knew had heard of or used the Internet (does that make me sound old?) I used to keep a notebook of short essays and opinions on subjects both mundane and sublime. Therefore, it seems that I was blogging before there was such a thing as blogging.

In other words, I’m too opinionated NOT to.

4. You read, you are a teacher, what (G-rated) physical activity makes you happy?

I love to dance! Im one of those people who will trip over oxygen molecules and drop my marker as I’m writing on the board, but I’m a totally different person, coordination-wise, when I’m focused on movement. I have several absolutely hysterical videos of me as a kid, throwing myself around the room in some sort of weird interpretive modern dance. Later I took tap dance lessons, and then ballet, which thankfully didn’t cramp my style all that much. In college I took modern dance, which was just fantastic — I’m not flexible, but I’m coordinated, which is almost just as useful. I’ve also dabbled in different dance traditions, and am regretful to this day that I didn’t take Brown’s African dance class.

5. Proust had his madeleines. What smell (or taste) shocks you into a vivid memory?

For me it’s not a smell or taste, but a certain feeling in the air that does it — when it’s spring, and the air is damp and fresh, and there’s a slight warm breeze and a warmth on my skin, I’m carried back to a day under a tree in front of my college dorm that I remember vividly, because I was absolutely, unreservedly happy and carefree.

Most of my students over the past 3 years have heard this story, and I like it for several reasons. First, sometimes I come across as Uber-Student. I always have, and as long as I’m in any classroom situation, I probably always will. I’m very fluent with language (read: verbose) and I’m relatively good at giving professors and test-writers what they want to hear. And I spell better than the spell check. This doesn’t put me in a very good position to commiserate with students who don’t sail through school, and so I’ve tried to identify areas of weakness for me that basically prove I’m not an automaton and that I do struggle once in a while. Drawing happens to be a perfect example. This leads me to the second reason I share the story — that most of my students have far superior visual and spatial skills to my own. They tend to assume that everyone has these skills. Well, everyone does NOT have these skills. I certainly didn’t, and I only do now because I worked at them.

When I tell this story to kids, I start off by demonstrating how I used to draw. Basically, I would scrawl an imperfect circle, scribble long curly hair over that, plop two triangle eyes in the center of it, make some sticks for limbs and appendages, and draw pearls and a bow. I never drew boys because I couldn’t manage the haircuts. Animals, just forget entirely. Trying to copy objects produced only weird disconnected lines and really wild proportions. It was an embarrassment. If I had to draw to get through school, I would have been a D student, no question.

As I mentioned somewhere in one of these entries, I went to Brown University, which happens to be just down the street (actually, up the hill) from the Rhode Island School of Design. One strange little perk of going to Brown is having the eligibility to take RISD classes, and vice versa. Not that the two schedules intersect in any way, since most RISD classes involve 6 hours at a clip in the studio doing serious work, and most Brown classes involve about 50 minutes of yip-yapping punctuated by the occasional lab or test.

Somewhere in my naive little college brain, I decided that I wanted to take glassblowing at RISD. I’d seen an exhibit of modern glass at some museum or other and was completely enthralled by it. The prerequisite, though, was studio art. I contemplated it for a while, feeling intimidated and then feeling silly for feeling intimidated. Then I decided to go for it. Once I braved the lottery system and got it, I was sort of committed, anyway. I took it as my fifth class (you’re required 4 per semester) and made sure it was Satisfactory/No Credit, not for a letter grade.

Shopping for art supplies was the fun part. My roommate at the time was a semi-serious painter, and guided me through the store with the syllabus in hand. I bought all sorts of goodies that I had no idea how to use. There were 12 different types of black charcoal alone, and when I asked her which kind I should get, she replied, “Well, it depends on what kind you like.” Seeing as I had no idea what kind I “liked”, I just got a whole bunch. The walk back up the hill, dragging the huge pads of newsprint and jars of ink and all the other various supplies, eliminated the need to go to the gym for several weeks. I was afraid to 0pen or touch anything for fear of using it wrong, so it sat inside the plastic bag at the foot of my bed.

My teacher was Jerry Mischak, whose artistic livelihood consisted (and still consists, I think) of making sculptures out of duct tape. Eventually, in the middle of the semester, we took a trip to his studio, and it seriously reminded me of some of the illustrations in Dr. Seuss books with teetering buildings composed of odd shapes in wild colors. It was just wonderful and had such a sense of freedom about it. I wish I could have seen that studio on the first day of class, because I wouldn’t have agonized so much about my deficient drawing skills if I had known what else was possible.

My drawing skills, which I already knew were a mess, felt especially wanting next to some of the artists in the class who were producing near-photographic quality charcoal images and perfectly proportioned figures in 5 minute sketches. Jerry would put an object down in front of us, and say “You have one minute! Sketch!” and I’d end up with a 4 year old’s scribbles, while my classmate at the next table was producing Guernica. You don’t want to know what I did to the poor models who came in during the figure drawing sections. Suffice it to say that I hope no one actually has a body with the proportions I drew. You’d probably have to order from a very special catalog.

What really froze my blood about the class, though, was that we had to hang up our homework pieces on the wall so that the class could look at them and discuss. We weren’t supposed to identify who did what work, or say anything ridiculously mean and nasty, but still. There was no way I was hanging up my pathetic doodling next to the budding Van Goghs in my class. The very first assignment sat in my portfolio (it felt so pretentious to even have a portfolio) and I never took it out. I’d taken one look at the other works and felt too embarrassed to even take the stupid paper out. It was easier to pretend I hadn’t done the work. I left that class, went home and cried.

By the third class, I was bold enough to hang my assignment up, only to hear it get ripped apart. I knew it deserved it. I had been asked to draw a portrait of myself, and I’d ended up with Madeleine Albright. Luckily, no one knew it was mine, since — surprise! — I didn’t look like the person in the portrait. Ironically, my very failure was what saved me from public embarrassment. Not that it would have been hard to figure out that it was mine. I was one of the two students in the class who really had no artistic skill. The class fell basically on a bell curve — a few very outstanding students, a lot in the middle, and a few at the bottom.

I’d thought that studio art was going to be my fifth class, something I was taking for fun, and in the beginning it really wasn’t fun at all. Even when my visual sense did begin to develop, it was frustrating when my mechanical skill with the art supplies couldn’t keep up. I often had a neat picture in my head of what I wanted something to look like, and I just didn’t have the skills to make it happen. I did a lot of sketching and a lot more crumpling/tossing. When I did get an actual finished product, I’d worked so hard that I really couldn’t handle any criticism about it. It was the absolute best I could do, and pointing out what was wrong with it wasn’t going to help me at all.

Thankfully for my poor little ego, the class and Jerry were very supportive. It became easier to ignore the little nagging voices when it came time to hang work up on the wall. I didn’t mind being seen touching my own work, which would allow people to identify it as mine. The haze of anxiety cleared enough that I could start to think about the points being discussed. But my accomplishments were fragile, and I was still in the mode of trying to protect myself from feelings of failure and intimidation. To this day I don’t think I could handle any real criticism of my artwork (such as it is).

I will say, though, that I did learn to draw, and I learned more importantly to enjoy it. By the time I took Art for Teachers during the course of my master’s degree, I was ready for it. I loved it. I had absolutely no problem trying any technique and showing any old piece of junk work to any old person who wanted to see it. (Again, knowing that I wasn’t going to get slammed really helped.) I started painting and sketching for fun. I learned how to hook rugs, make paper, bind books and mix paints.

And I kept drawing, copying album covers (which tend to be dramatically lit and in black and white, which really helps). My skills have come a long way. I have a few watercolors and pastel pieces that I’m actually PROUD of. And the portrait of Bob Dylan on my wall actually looks like Bob Dylan.

I still think buying the supplies is the most fun part. That is the time when anything is still possible, before the first mark on the page is made.

I’m proud of myself for learning to draw because I deliberately went out and tried something that I wasn’t good at, that embarrassed me and made me feel less than adequate, when I easily could have chosen another writing or literature or political science course and sailed through. I think a lot of people who are basically capable miss out on huge areas because they’re not willing to take the risk of trying something outside of that proverbial “comfort zone”. I certainly have to push and prod and force myself to do it. It had some practical benefits — I’m now able to paint my own scenery and draw diagrams and read maps and easily arrange things spatially — but it probably had more spiritual benefit than anything else.

By the way, I never did get around to that glassblowing class at RISD. I got caught up in other things, and besides, I felt I might be a little too clumsy for a discipline that required that much physical coordination and skill, especially with superhot objects. So I know what I have to do. Sometime before I die, I absolutely MUST take a glassblowing class. It’s unfinished business.

My kids and I spent yesterday afternoon writing letters to Jonathan.

Who’s Jonathan? He’s one of the authors of this book,. Learning Outside the Lines. He came to speak at my school the other night about empowering students with learning differences, as well as changing the culture that pigeonholes kids into dysfunctional categories based on superficial measures of cognitive capacity and achievement. He’s also a fellow Brown graduate. (There’s lots of us roaming around, you know. Insidious!) I think I decided that my kids should write to him when he told the audience that he might have been diagnosed with dyslexia, but really suffered from dysteachia.

(Dyslexia is a really easy word to mock, actually. I seem to remember the keynote speaker at graduation last year mentioning that dyslexia was next to dyspepsia in his dictionary, and that he was glad he ended up with the dyslexia.)

I like the idea that the suffering is optional. Challenges are part of life, but suffering comes in when we have this expectation or ideal of how things “should be” and experience the pain of not having life live up to those expectations. Most people do this to themselves on a regular basis — if only I were prettier, smarter, funnier, etc. but someone with a diagnosed disability is going to experience that pain in exponentially higher doses, due to hostility and judgment and humiliation in addition to the issues of self-efficacy that all people must face as they develop. Meanwhile, we also have to ask what the effects of that suffering will be for a person over the life span. From my experiences, it isn’t pretty.

(I can’t claim to have personally experienced suffering due to academic difficulties — my school suffering came via a different road. But that is another post.)

The fact that suffering is optional means that schools are choosing to perpetuate it. And this is where it gets sticky, because I feel most teachers are well-meaning and go into teaching because they love children and loved school as children. As a teacher my instinct is sometimes to defend the educational system (seeing as it’s how I earn my living and all) but as a special educator, I often feel outside the system, particularly because I don’t work in public school. And I do know for an absolute fact that mainstream education can do horrible things to a struggling child’s self-esteem and ability to learn. Any significant difference in a child’s personality, learning style or emotional circumstances becomes a vulnerability in a school setting, and tends to become magnified in severity and importance as time goes on, especially if the school environment is unsupportive and hostile. Even a benign sort of neglect takes its toll, as kids realize the discrepancy between their work and the “ideal”.

But I do think schools are important, and that much of what is taught is extremely valuable and necessary. I happen to think that reading and writing are the best tools for disseminating, organizing, analyzing and constructing information that have ever been devised. It’s easy for me to say that, having mastered both forms well enough to utilize them daily and instruct others. An embarrassingly large portion of my disposable income is spent on books about all sorts of subjects, from Egyptian mummies to neuropsychology to sea turtles. Would I even be interested in those things if I couldn’t pick up books to read about them?

And then there are the stories. Human consciousness hinges on the ability to follow a coherent narrative, that of the self; empathy and connection with others is enhanced and deepened by an ability to understand and relate to stories of others. I find that when students can access stories in books, their own stories also come tumbling out. It’s a very deep form of communication. Sometimes I think American culture tends to devalue this sort of reading and learning even as it expects its children to master the process, or at least the outward trappings of it.

I was joking with my reading kids this morning about my handwriting — specifically, how illegible it is. (When I’m teaching I tend to write sideways or upside down, which of course doesn’t help my letter formation.) Handwriting is one of those little outward trappings of literacy that people get all hung up on. To me it’s a symptom of our culture’s unhealthy obsession with appearances — if it looks good, it must contain good ideas, right? Now on the other hand, I know full well that graphomotor dysfunction is a very real barrier to getting work accomplished — if you’re thinking about how to form your letters, you’re diverting brainpower away from choosing the perfect phrase or summing up your point with the best possible concluding argument. Handwriting should be automatic and relatively legible. But if you want beauty and art in written letters, go to a professional calligrapher.

So it seems that schools have an obvious choice here — value the reading and writing, the communicating, the information — or value the trappings of literacy, like pretty handwriting. Focusing equally on everything translates into a lack of focus entirely. Correcting spelling is much more concrete, and easier to do, than remediating issues such as poor organization of ideas or vague word choice. Or rambling, as I’m doing now. When I’m choosing what to cover in my own class, I have to choose very carefully. Our time is very precious and limited, and we aren’t going to get around to, say, practicing our handwriting until it’s gorgeous. I think it’s important to have priorities.

I guess I’m wondering how those priorities come about, or what happens when a particular child’s path leads away from what I think is truly important for his or her education. That’s something I still struggle with, especially when I’m working in areas that tend to stump my students. As an adult, I sometimes bump into areas where I will never be proficient (in fact I bump into things quite a bit — I’m one of those classic types who can dance but not walk in a straight line) but I have many other choices. That’s why I’m a teacher and not a theoretical physicist. The key for each person is figuring out what those options are, and developing oneself in those directions.

But it isn’t easy. Thank goodness my kids are motivated and eager and terribly interested in everything (often in things I do not notice at all). Their letters were really cute, too. Most of them wanted to know if Jonathan got hard homework as a kid and if he liked video games. A few asked about writing and college. Most just liked the idea of writing to someone who had the same issues that they have, even though they didn’t really mention having trouble in school. Maybe I even like that better — that they asked questions like “What’s your favorite animal” instead of “What subjects did you fail at?”, trying to define him based on his likes and accomplishments rather than difficulties and failures.

That’s what it’s all about, I think.

I went home early today, not feeling well, and took a nap. When I woke up, I discovered that I had stumbled onto a disturbance in the space-time continuum in which entire hours, even days, seem to have passed by unnoticed. And oddly enough, in that woozy unfocused span of time just before I took the nap, it seemed like just the opposite — that someone had hit the Pause button on the world and time was traveling at speeds below the threshold of human perception.

Hence my excuse for not knowing what day of the week it was.

So, tomorrow’s Friday. And I think my reading group and I are going to finish the Tale of Despereaux, which we have plowed through in record time — 2-3 chapters per day. The kids wanted to take the book home and finish it, which I thought would be awfully anti-climactic, so I deliberately withheld it from them. Yes, I’m in the enviable situation as a teacher of saying to kids, “No, STOP READING that book now… You’ve read enough for one day!” There’s one kid in the group who thinks he’s being quite sneaky. “Hey, guess what? I read ahead! Ha ha ha!”

Yes, kids, the way to annoy your teacher is definitely to read more than you’re required. That’ll get ‘em real good. Yup. Nothing irritates me more. You just keep thinking that.

Anyway, the tradition in my reading group is to do some sort of elaborate final project about the book after it’s completed. At first they really wanted to do another play, but to be honest, I’m getting a bit burnt out on plays. After all I’m directing the elementary school musical for the third year in a row, and we just DID a play about our last book in February. I suggested setting up a Colonial Williamsburg-esque exhibit in which each of them played a character and interacted with visitors (I think I spoiled the idea for them by comparing it to the Middle School’s haunted hallway from Halloween) and I think we’re going to settle on a puppet show.

Tale of Despereaux, meet Avenue Q.

My favorite reading project, besides the sentimental favorite of the Braille writing we did with candy dots after reading about Hellen Keller, has got to be the orange mummies. We’d spent two months reading selections from books about Egyptian mummification techniques and the frozen Inca mummies and all sorts of deliciously nasty stuff, and I dug up a recipe on the Internet for mummifying chickens. Since I didn’t think my co-teacher would appreciate rotting carcasses in the classroom, I looked up other websites and found one that suggested potatoes and oranges. Much better. The recipe really worked, by the way. We set up a mummy museum in the room and the kids had a blast being curators.

Months later we were still picking mummified orange out of our school supplies. That stuff really lasts.

The big problem now is what to read as our next book. How can we possibly top the one we’re finishing? Part of me wants to take a break from fiction and do something completely different, and part of me wants to push them with another tough book, since they’re the type of group who will slog through anything if it involves interesting content. The other week we spent 30 minutes on a passage from a science textbook. A science textbook! It wasn’t even a particularly interesting topic (to me, anyway) — it was about liquids and gases and boiling points and air pressure.

Hmmm. I’ll have to think quite seriously about this.

Here’s a touchy subject that came up in my children’s writing class this morning: the use of slang and colorful language in children’s stories.

A few ladies in the class are librarians and said that parents object when books contain objectionable words — the obvious ones, of course, but also less risque terms such as “stupid”. (I have the same reaction when I see the Complete Idiot’s Guide to… and …For Dummies books, but you don’t see me complaining to booksellers or librarians about those!)

Seriously, though, books are political objects as well as stories for children. There’s potential to be offended by almost anything. Even simple board books for preschoolers, like “The Carrot Seed”, are found subversive by some who bristle at the message that the young child might know better than the adults in his life. There’s also the stories about orphans or children with mean parents, or racist people or kids with problems who curse — because it’s easier to be outraged by parental abuse or racism or bad words in a novel than in real life. Because if no one writes about it, then it doesn’t happen, right?

I’m not saying that any one book is going to be appropriate for all children. I’m also not saying to throw in risque material or curse words simply for titillation. But it does bug me when someone freaks out over the words “stupid” or “shut up” in a book (believe me, folks… your kids have heard much worse) or when someone thinks that books about getting your period or having a boyfriend or having family problems shouldn’t be written.

Books are opportunities. They are opportunities for exploring the world in a safe way, for learning about the suffering of others and understanding the suffering in one’s own life, and for trying out wishes and dreams and thought experiments that one would never dream of carrying out in everyday life. Some books are less challenging than others, and not every reader is ready to grasp every opportunity. I think children tend to be more ready than we give them credit for.

I’ve been working on a story in which the main character is an 11 year old boy. How realistic would it be if he says “Be quiet, please” instead of “Shut up”? What 11 year old is going to want to read a story in which the children are all so adult-like and polite, that is so obviously not real? I can’t worry about offending people when I’m working on an idea, especially when people are so sensitive.

I’m not insensitive to using words carefully, of course, or of treating a sensitive topic with particular care. I just think that some people have the mistaken idea that their kids must go through life and never encounter anything unpleasant or challenging, that their children are so fragile that they will never recover if their feelings are hurt or if their worldview is expanded to include uncomfortable truths.

Personally, I’d prefer my child to READ about unpleasantness in the safety of my home, with me available to answer questions and provide perspective, BEFORE encountering it in life. Or in video games.

This is what Judy Blume says about censorship on her site:

I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen.

The people in my class weren’t exactly talking about censorship, as in “banning” a book — just in not providing it at their library for fear of parental complaints. Because obviously if one parent doesn’t want her child to read a certain book, then no other parent should have the opportunity to check that book out, either…

Sigh.

First, the disclaimers:

I don’t mean for this to be exhaustive or comprehensive… just sharing some observations I have as a teacher about what successful learners tend to have in common.

I also don’t mean to imply that “successful” is in any way associated with “easy” or “straightforward”. Likewise, I do not equate learning with only school subjects, during the school day, or even during one’s school career.

And now, the list:

Characteristics of Successful Learners

1. The ability to find things fascinating. As a teacher I always want to make learning “fun” and to incorporate as much snap and pizazz into the presentation of information as I can. After all, I have to compete with the intensely stimulating visual environments of video games and modern television, which incorporate incredibly quick rewards and near-instantaneous feedback. Many, if not most teachers try very hard to make lessons fun and playful — but the point of being in school is not to be entertained. What makes learning “fun” is that it is fascinating.

I’ll tell you about a kid I worked with in the past to illustrate what I mean. He was so vivacious, full of life, and especially full of energy. He was always on the go — the wilder the activity, the better. He loved sports and games and physical feats, and was incredibly fun to be around. The problem was, though, that as soon as he sat down at a desk — regardless of what we were doing — he was “bored”. Writing was boring. Discussions were boring. Science experiments were boring. Anything that wasn’t running and jumping was boring. Basically, he was missing out on school because he just couldn’t focus long enough to be fascinated by anything.

Some kids have one or two very particular interests, and find it difficult to get interested in anything else, including what we’re doing at school. This is fine when you’re a PhD candidate and you have to spend 14 hours a day in the lab (did I say 14? I meant 20) — not fine when you’re 8 and you don’t really know what’s out there yet.

Now I’m not suggesting that kids should find everything fascinating (although the magic of children is they often do) or that we teachers don’t have the obligation to show them WHY they should find it fascinating. What I’m suggesting is that the learner has the responsibility to engage with the material, and that the ability to find it fascinating is an extremely important tool.

2. The ability to set realistic goals. In educational politics these days, you’ll hear people throw around lovely words like “standards” and “accountability”. That’s great. There’s just a word missing… and that word is REALISTIC.

The ability to set realistic goals is extremely important, even more for individual learners than for the people who work with them. A basic goal of all students is to do well in school — but what does “do well” mean? How do I know I’m doing well? Does it just mean doing better than the kid at the next desk? Does it mean getting by without failing? Most people think of performance in school as having to do with grades and evaluations, and of course, it does. It also means a lot more.

Let’s say I’m in 4th grade and learning fractions. In order to “do well” here, I need to figure out why there are two numbers printed there instead of one, why there’s a number on top and a number on the bottom, why two-thirds is the same as four sixths, why you’d want to use fractions for anything in the first place, and so on. If I am a math whiz (if being the operative word) “doing well” might mean going above and beyond what most 4th graders would be reasonably expected to know.

You get a lot less mileage out of your learning when you outwardly focus ONLY on how you’re going to be evaluated or what the person next to you is doing. Stopping at “good enough” is a waste of your time when a realistic goal for you is higher achievement. Try to picture any accomplished person sitting back going, “Eh, I know I’m going to get an A… I can stop there.” Picture Marie Curie or Albert Einstein doing that. Picture Jane Austen or Marcel Proust going, “Eh, I’ve written a few pages, so I can stop now.” (One gets the feeling that Proust’s teachers said to him, “Marcel, I want 7-10 sentences for this paper — that’s it!” so he learned to write sentences that went on for pages…)

Related to setting realistic goals is…

3. Developing a sense of the “body of knowledge” and using it to make decisions about what to focus on. One annoying thing about history class is memorizing dates. I always hated this. 1492. 1066. 1776. “They’re just dates! Who cares?” That’s exactly the kind of question that gets asked when the person doing the asking does not have a sense of the field in which he or she is working. Disconnected information is way harder to remember (at least for most people) than information within a context. Plus, it’s impossible to study and remember absolutely every detail — but without an overall sense of the material, it’s very difficult to decide what’s worth studying, and what isn’t.

The dates that I mentioned just now, for example — 1492, 1066 and 1776 — are not random. I’m terrible at remembering dates, but these have stuck in my brain because they’re important in Western history, 1066 perhaps most of all (the Norman Conquest, for those of you playing along at home). As a further example of what I mean, let’s say you’re flipping through a book about Vikings, because they’re cool and they wear big helmets, and you happen to notice that they fought a major battle with the English in… whoa, 1066! Total coincidence! Except it wasn’t. The English were exhausted from fighting Vikings by the time the Normans showed up. Think this could have effected the outcome of the Battle of Hastings?

It’s not generally important to remember every date of every incident. It is important, however, to know general parameters. Otherwise the specifics don’t make any sense.

These are just a few… I could keep going on for ages, of course. But without these three, the others wouldn’t matter anyway.

I guess I’m a little new at this webmaster thing. I got a nice comment, something about Lemony Snicket if I remember correctly, and I accidentally deleted it instead of clicking “OK”. Whoops! I won’t make that mistake.

If you posted a comment here and it hasn’t shown up, do try again.

Oh, and read the Lemony Snicket books. Highly recommend. Start with “The Bad Beginning” if you’re patient, but don’t worry about jumping in to a later volume — they recap sufficiently for most readers to dive in mid-way.

(I don’t know if I’m allowed to get away with that. What I should have said was: Do NOT read the Lemony Snicket books, under any circumstances. They are severely unhappy and misery-inducing, and if you find yourself accidentally holding one you must put it down immediately and seek medical attention.)

The story opens with Jacob Jeremiah Duchamps McFadden — “Crazy Jake” to his friends — running away from home to find his mother. We pick up after Jake has successfully snuck out of the house and onto a bus, with $300 of “birthday money” and a photograph of his mother in a sparkly red dress.

I heard a snicker from behind me — some annoying kid peering over my shoulder.

I whirled around. “What?” I snapped.

He kicked my seat.

The lady next to him seemed oblivious to the world, so I said, “You ought to teach your son better manners.”

She gave me an icy stare. “He isn’t mine,” she said, and grabbed her shopping bag and moved to another seat.

Now I felt kinda bad for the kid, so I said, “What’s your name?”

“Shut up,” he answered, and kicked the seat again.

“Attractive,” I said. “I’m Crazy Jake.” I smiled to show him I wasn’t scared of a few seat kicks.

“Who’s the hot chick?” he asked. I finally got a good look at his face — pale and puffy with red pimply splotches. He had dark circles under his eyes and a cut lip. He almost looked like he could be named Shut Up.

“The hot chick?” I glanced down at the picture trembling slightly in my hand. “Yo, man, that’s my mom you’re talking about!”

“She’s hot,” he said. He tried to do that whistling thing that you do to girls on the street, but with a cut lip he couldn’t really manage it. “Look, my name’s Spencer. I don’t wanna be buddies or nothing. Just telling you.”

I grinned. “You got lousy manners, Spencer.”

He grinned too. “So why’re you called Crazy Jake?”

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Having been in the special ed field for a number of years, I can’t say I’m too surprised when I see stuff like this. Saddened, annoyed, yes — but not surprised.

First of all, for many people, it’s very difficult to conceive of any disability or difficulty that is invisible to the naked eye. You’ll see lots of opinions, even from doctors and other so-called professionals, that “it’s not dyslexia, it’s just a lack of exposure to reading” or “it’s not ADHD, it’s TV habits and video games”. Of course, that doesn’t explain why many children from very literate homes have dyslexia, or why children who spend hours with TV and video games don’t have ADHD. (I have more to say about TV and video games, but that’s another post.)

Whenever I talk with people, I try to disspell the misinformation that abounds. I figure institutions won’t change until people really get that this phenomenon is not conjured up by scientists and educators to bilk them out of 30 cents a year on their property tax, or whatever.

By the way, New York State does not use “dyslexia” as a classification for its educational paperwork. The term is either “speech impaired” or “learning disabled”.

link from I Speak of Dreams

The invisible disability
Alabama schools won’t accept that dyslexia exists
Sunday, March 06, 2005
By CHALLEN STEPHENS
Times Staff Writer, challens@htimes.com

Throughout Alabama, thousands of bright children struggle with the written word in public schools that don’t recognize or test for dyslexia. The children have trouble spelling, connecting sounds to letters and remembering what words mean.

Most can be taught to read, but many of them are falling behind.

“The teachers aren’t trained,” complains Lorraine Fredrick, a mother seated at the rear of the monthly meeting of the local dyslexia support group. In which school system aren’t the teachers trained? “All of them,” comes the immediate chorus of about 20 parents and grandparents. “The United States,” says Fredrick.

Frustrated parents say school officials fight providing their children with extra help because of the potential expense of treating a puzzling disability that may affect as many as one out of every 10 children. Cheryl Jones, a professional parent advocate, explained schools’ position as she sees it: “If we assess it, then we have to address it. And sometimes we are not sure what to do with it, because there are several forms of dyslexia.”

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Have you had the experience of picking up an old favorite book and finding that it seems dated and, dare it even be said, not that good, in the harsh retrospective light of day?

I have, and it isn’t pretty.

The most recent example, and this isn’t exactly a children’s book, is Catcher in the Rye. I suppose it could be marketed as a YA (young adult) today, being as Holden Caulfield is a teenager and it deals with heavy stuff like death and prostitutes. I don’t know what bothered me about it, exactly… I think the voice started to grate on me a bit. Maybe it was trying too hard to sound teenagery and disaffected. I remember being really impressed with it when I read it 17 years ago, but of course I was much younger then and in awe of anything “teenager…”

Examples of kids’ books that this phenomenon applies to: A Wrinkle in Time, and Harriet the Spy. I loved both when I was a kid, and I went out and bought new copies of them when I figured out I was going to be teaching older kids this year. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in both — Harriet the Spy because there was a lot I didn’t remember about it (I had fixated on her spy-journal entries and sort of ignored the rest) and A Wrinkle in Time because it was jumpy and I didn’t think the sci-fi stuff was particularly well developed. The fuzzy moralistic Christian ending really sunk it, though. The Chronicles of Narnia have a reputation for being blatantly moralistic and religious in nature (and of course they ARE) but in a way this was worse because it was masquerading as science fiction, whereas the Narnia books have this fuzzy old-grandfather-storytelling aspect that almost excuses them. Almost.

I’m a picky reader, and my choices don’t always make logical sense. I respond mainly on a gut instinct level. This time around, I had strong feelings against the books and had to put them down. Yet I remember loving them as a kid. I wonder what happened?

I was describing Val to my current students today, as part of a lesson on how to use words to create a “snapshot” of a character, so that the reader gets a picture in his or her mind. I told them about Val and his trains, his smooth round head, his frequent bloody noses and his super-exuberant booming voice. I asked them to draw pictures of Val based on my description of him, and they produced sweet little portraits. To help with the drawing, they asked me what he liked to wear, and I said, “Well, he wore different clothes on different days. But he was only four, so sometimes he had food spilled on his shirt or dirt on his pant legs.” The kids, themselves decorated with gym dust on their clothing and occasional food spills and marker dots on their sleeves, had a good chuckle.

Then one of the girls wrinkled her nose at me and scolded, “That’s not nice!”

Perhaps it was noble of her to point out the impropriety of having a chuckle at Val’s expense, even if we were chuckling at the Val of five years ago, even if we ourselves knew what it was like to be four years old and a messy eater. But her reaction bugged me a bit, and here’s why. I think sometimes children, and girls in particular, are socialized to be so incredibly polite and sensitive that, inadvertently, the message is given not to tell the truth. Some little girls try to control and sanitize the environment so that no one ever feels bad, to the point of deliberately losing at a game or pretending that something doesn’t matter to them when it really does. It goes beyond being tactful and sensitive, and enters the realm of repression.

We’ve all probably met girls and women who hide their talents and intelligence, who spend an enormous amount of time trying to please others at the expense of their own goals, who agree with whatever their boyfriends or husbands say in order to maintain “harmony” in the relationship. This, in my very unscientifically supported opinion, is how it starts in childhood — obsessively worrying about being “nice”.

Besides, I didn’t think it was particularly “not nice” of me to point out that Val sometimes had messy clothes. In fact, I felt it was my responsibility to honor my memories of Val by describing him as accurately as I could. I could have told the class any made up detail about him, and they wouldn’t have known the difference. But I would have known the difference. And to me it was important to describe him the way he was — messy clothes, super-exuberant loud voice, bloody noses and all. I liked him the way he was. I was chuckling at his messy clothes because it’s amusing when people we love are messy and human, not because I was ridiculing him for being messy.

“It isn’t a question of being nice,” I told the class. “This is writing. In writing we worry about being honest.”