Sometimes teaching is like writing and other days, not even close.

I stand before my students and do all that I can to hold their attention. I don’t know how to tap dance or tell good jokes, but sometimes I feel they would be good skills to have, so I can get a tight grip on my audience (yup, it is exactly like being a comic trying to make a cold room laugh) because sometimes writing is like teaching to a sleepy class of students.  Wait, usually they are a sleepy class of students. One will occasionally, actually nod off, but they are always apologetic and make an effort to remain awake. I am that soft spoken teacher who gently lays a hand on the student’s arm and says, “You need to stay awake or else you are going to miss something important, and I hate to repeat myself which means you will have to depend on your friends, and you know what that will get you.” I really need to learn how to tell jokes.

When I am trying to write the novel that is what the paying customer is out there searching the book shelves for, it gets like that disinterested class of students.  So a writer might get caught up in looking for the current flash in the pan idea that is getting all the cash flow. It’s been werewolves and vampires, and dystopian warriors (my students now know what a dystopia is. I used to have to teach this, several times each year, but now they ask me if I read dystopian novels. I teach 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but neither of these novels have beautiful girls jumping off tall buildings or fighting in coliseums.) Flash in the pan.  Wizards, remember those years? How about the scary (not scary) books of R. L. Stein or Little House on the Prairie or the juvenile detective series?

Teaching is like that. What is the current philosophy? Podcasts (never went that route, but teachers I know did), and interactive sensory experience to match the subject matter: burning hair to go with Wiesel’s Night. I didn’t do that one either, but a teacher I knew did. Now its the YouTube video. Okay, I do use that one now and then. My new mantra is if you don’t know how, search for a video on YouTube; however, as a gambit for reaching the nodding off student, it is losing its bright shiny finish as well.  Rote memorization, group work, project-based assessments (one of my favorites), crossword puzzles, word searches (hated both of those and I wasn’t even using them, but my daughter’s teacher was. Can’t tell you how many times I had to promise my daughter that the word was in fact in the torturous maze of letters she had searched for the last hour (after I had searched to frustration to find the word and finally did). I don’t know what word searches teach, patience perhaps, determination, stress management.

Recently, my teaching cadre was told that we need to be more like what is holding the students’  attention according to a YouTube video: two minutes of intense trivia, challenging group competition and ringing bells, chasing gummies across a screen. I’m still not sold because colleges are not doing this and neither are companies that make widgets nor window and door plants or Virgin Galactic and SpaceX. They expect their employees to come to work, get busy, follow directions, produce what is requested, think it through and be respectful.

So this is about writing and how teaching is sometimes the same and sometimes not. Here’s my big point: Teach what works and gets the results that will be useful to students who need to go out into the world prepared. And write, write what comes out of you naturally. If it’s currently a dystopia, well bless your heart, you stand a chance. Or be like me and write time travel because that is what you like to write and what you like to read whether or not anybody else is reading it or writing it and selling it. But if you believe in it, they will listen (yes, back to students for a moment). There is someone out there whose arm you will touch and startle awake, who will apologize for not paying attention and will turn the page and by gosh learn something.

PS (Okay, so that the metaphor worked in this discussion of writing and teaching, I did fudge a bit. My students never fall asleep. Hmm. Okay, about once a month a student was up late and will want to nod off but won’t. Hmm. Well, I do have one student who I regularly wake up, but they are the exception, not the norm. It was the metaphor that was important, so I had students falling asleep to make it work. And I do not “protest too much.”)

#writing
#teaching

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Every new skill or bit of knowledge we learn brings with it that usage curve that starts out complex, and as we gain understanding and mastery, we simplify and integrate.  That applies to life and work in general, but it is also the essence of growing as a writer.

My students practice descriptive imagery, and it is such agony for them.  They struggle with words like thing and stuff and painstakingly turn them into “blue-green fabric around stuffed spun polyester, stitched tight, bursting with fishy lushness among the two year old’s many teddy bears” and beam with pride at their accomplishment.  It is indeed worth their excitement and pleasure for creating an image.

They repeat the exercise, draw the lesson into their writing, fill the pithy lines with gaudy images, each clamoring for attention, none greater or lesser than the other.

They learn discernment. They learn to select which images need to stand ahead of others.  They learn the pithy line has a place.  “The child’s toys, a jumbled plethora of giraffes and Teddy bears, were topped with one lone length of glimmering scaled fishiness.  It flopped to one side, scalloped fins lolling over, soft tail aswamp in the white fuzz of a round-faced kitten.”

The struggle begins again to create the perfect effect. The image that sets up place without overpowering.  The symbol that will appear at necessary intervals to carry a theme, support a motif.  It is a battle of controlled inspiration that requires complex planning, the ability to draw back from the precipice of too much and pull in from the wide open range of subtlety.  It is nail-biting, tongue out the side of the mouth, pencil tapping concentration.  It is love and hate of the written word, the designed phrase, the scintillating sentence.

They take another run at it.   This time much has become just part of their writing.  Meaning and clarity hold precedence, the image part of the foundation, not the crowning glory of the effort.

Simplicity gains complexity, complexity turns to simplicity, simplicity participates in the complexity, complexity feels like simplicity.

And this process does not change. We never reach the last summit, but keep climbing to the next.

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My mom always did the cooking, but there were rare times when she was too sick and my father had to take over.  He never minded, she always did.  He would look in the refrigerator and start pulling things out.  A pot on the stove was the destination for everything he found.  In the end, the bubbling mass would look like a poor quality of concrete ready for pouring.  We would make burritos with it, adding cheddar cheese and taco sauce.  Though it looked disgusting, it was delicious.

When my mom was well enough to return to the kitchen, we would all make her “sick” with our rapturous descriptions of Dad’s “Slab” recipe.

I look at writing this way, too.  Need a name for a character to be common but memorable:  I pick an average name, Fred for instance, and add/delete a letter.  Fned Carson is one of the characters in my short story tentatively titled “Scrapper.”  He’s an average guy whose life has been flowing downhill for awhile (something that happened to my father for a time, too). My main character Moekaff, an eight-year-old boy, is left at Carson’s Rest, a transport rest stop and restaurant. There the two suffer separately as they try to deal with rough times.  I needed Fned to be both an addition to Moe’s troubles but also a man with a right to be angry and depressed, ready to take out his frustrations on this kid who is himself in mourning.  They don’t save each other, but they do share their misery and somehow walk away with possibilities.  But that is only a part of the journey Moekaff takes before he finds a place to call home again.  I am still finishing this story and hope to make it part of an anthology of science fiction stories I have written.  As soon as it’s done, I’ll finish my redraft on my second novel of my Students of Jumps series, No Time Like the Present.

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I particularly like this lesson because the students get excited about seeing things in a different way.  Later when we start examining poetry and the students have different viewpoints on meaning and imagery, I can remind them of these Escher prints and how we each saw different images at first, but ultimately, they all drew together a similar idea about what was happening in the print.  They learned for this brief moment to appreciate the different viewpoints of each student and to realize those differences increase their understanding.

So today my students enjoyed a great lesson. It was one of those I wish my principal could have been present to see on those days when he is there to evaluate my teaching.  Aw well, there will be other great days when a lesson comes together and feels like I produced magic.

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