Back to School Changes

I was messaging this morning with a teacher friend, someone I used to work with who moved on to a different school a while ago. Being that it’s mid-August right now, of course we covered the topic of what we had ahead of us in the coming school year. 

Things change for teachers in some way every year. From one perspective, this can be good, since it keeps the job fresh. Speaking as someone who has reported to the same building on the first day of school for a quarter of a century now, changes can sometimes be a good thing. 

However, when I refer to changes I mean things like maybe being reassigned to a different classroom, or perhaps a new grade or curricular area, or having to adapt to a new schedule. New people join a staff, new policies are put into place. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you show up on that first day to discover that you have a new set of chairs that are the appropriate size for the two oldest grades in the school. 

These days I’m not thinking so much about those kind of changes, the procedural or organizational or cosmetic. Not the resources available to me, both in capital supplies and the collaborative willingness of colleagues. I’m thinking more about how I’m supposed to keep my students engaged, and how I can convince them the things I’m teaching are important, while it can seem on any given day how our society and our world are in the midst of consistently building turmoil.

Last fall, following Election Day, I had a student come in from recess crying hysterically because someone had told her that the newly-elected president wanted to kill all the black people. 

Our president is currently engaged in back-and-forth posturing with the leader of an emerging nuclear power. A nuclear power, for God’s sake.

The travel ban, which first wasn’t called a ban by the administration but then finally the language evolved to a level where they admitted that’s what it is, most likely would have kept the families of some of my students out of the country, if the timing of their lives had been slightly different.

Last night hundreds of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting incendiary language and carrying torches. In the south. Today, when other groups rallied together for a counter protest, violence erupted, someone used a vehicle as a weapon, and lives ended.

People who dare to go online and express beliefs contrary to sexism, racism, homophobia, or any other set of ideals that would see one group marginalized in favor of another, are too often threatened and subjected to personal attacks. 

Now, the kids I teach are of the age where they are more concerned with which NBA or NHL teams are playing on any given night, or when Taylor Swift or Chance the Rapper will release a new song on YouTube, or what the title of the next “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book will be. Consequently they usually don’t show up in the morning looking to debate with their classmates on any of the points made the night before by the guests of The Rachel Maddow Show.

This doesn’t mean they’re ignorant, though. Not all of them. Some of these kids are surprisingly well-informed. Even more of them think they are, but only have a cursory knowledge of what’s happening in the world. These are the kids that seem to have the most questions. 

I’ll be back in front of my classes in less than a month. There are a lot of issues floating through the ether these days, and those kids are going to be grabbing onto pieces of it. It will at least be partially my responsibility to help them understand what’s going on in the world, how it might affect them and the people in their lives, and what they can do about it. 

Of course at the same time I’ll need to make sure they feel comfortable and safe while at school, and all of their basic needs are being met, and, along with that, do my best to help them end the school year with multi-digit division strategies in place and an understanding of why the Order of Operations works the way it does. 

I’m anticipating a lot of changes ahead of me this year. I can only hope I’m up to the challenge.

Trading Doubt for Relief

When school is in session, managing my teaching and my classroom and all of the peripheral nonsense that accompanies it is more than enough to keep me occupied. This usually means I start my summer with a long To-Do list. It typically includes the kinds of jobs, chores, errands, and appointments I'll decide I don't have time (or want to make time) for when I'm surviving the school year.

This year, most of that list won't get done. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to make a run to the county landfill after cleaning out my garage. I don't know if I'll bother calling the plumber to get that dang toilet in the guest bathroom fixed so the handle doesn't always have to be lifted manually after flushing. That light above my kitchen sink window, that works but is jiggled just far enough out of position to keep it from turning on? That still might be running dark this winter. Unless all of that junk mail stacking up in my office finds away to shred itself, I suspect it's going to look remarkably like it does now when the first day of school rolls around.

Usually any one of these things being left unattended would give me more than enough reason to beat up on myself. I'd be thinking, "Two and a half months of wide open days, and you couldn't set aside enough time to just take care of these things? Even though they bother you so much and really wouldn't take a lot of effort to get done, you just blew them off? Again? Still?!"

But that won't be this year. 

This year I'll be able to start school knowing that, for the first time in several years, I went from start to finish and completed the entire draft of a brand new book. I'm not there yet, but I'm close enough to see the finish line. In fact, I could almost predict the date I'll be finished.

This won't be just some NaNoWriMo "write as fast as you can like your hair is on fire" month-long sprint to be able to claim 50,000 incoherent words in the last days of November; this will be a real, actual, honest to God BOOK. A beginning, middle, and end with all the parts in between connected together. Characters that are more than just paper doll place holders with names. A story that I feel has good chances of people wanting to read it and enjoying it after they have, because I feel happy about it.

It's been a struggle to get here. After years of ping-ponging back and forth between two other viable manuscripts with my agent to mold them into their best possible selves, I had no doubts that my skill as an editor was benefitting from tons and tons of practice. But writing again? Bringing something of this magnitude into being from nothing but a list of ideas I thought were cool? It's been a long time. I tried it last year and failed spectacularly, to the degree I legitimately began wondering if I even remembered how to start. 

Well, it turns out I did remember. And the relief that comes with that remembering is palpable. 

So those chores I never completed?
Any wandering day trips I didn't take?
The way my eyes feel permanently blurred over by evening?
The books I didn't get to read, or the TV shows I didn't have time to binge?
The hundreds of hours spent in my kitchen, looking outside as dozens of sunny days passed me by?

Totally worth it. 

Two Months In

Here we are at the end of July, and the new project continues to go well. It still only has a working title, but as time goes by that title is becoming more solidified for me, mostly because anything better has yet to present itself.

The standard length of a middle grade novel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 words. (For anyone interested in the conversion, 50,000 words translates to a book approximately 250 pages long, depending on a lot of factors.) I reached the 40,000-word benchmark a couple weeks ago. As far as drafting goes, I’m expecting the final product to end up somewhere in the range of 60,000 to 70,000 words. This is probably too long, but something Carrie said once about drafting stuck with me: “Write more than you think you need to. It’s easier to cut things out than add them in later.” So as far as drafting does, I’m not too concerned about word count for now. I know big chunks of what I’m working on won’t make it to the final draft. 

I slowed my pace once I reached that 40,000 mark, instead looking back to review things I already knew needed to be addressed: Did I have enough mentions about the house flipping storyline yet? Do I still have that one kid driving a car when I know he’s going to need a pick-up truck in chapter 15 or 16? Which pair of siblings live in the house haunted by a little girl wearing a Halloween costume? How many unnecessary paragraphs (or even pages) can be completely cut?

New ideas, or clarifying ones, always come along while drafting, so sometimes, for me at least, it’s beneficial to pause the forward progress and go back to get those details lined up correctly. There will still be more revision to do later on, but it frees up my mind to move forward if I know those things have been generally straightened out.

Discovery isn’t as big of an issue anymore since so many of the big moments in the mental routine I’m following have already been developed and connected. That outline isn’t gospel strict, though; sometimes I’ll just keep pushing forward to see what ideas might happen, especially if I can feel one about to show up.

The energy is more directed now, though. It feels like a book coming together instead of just a collection of ideas and character sketches. In fact, I’ve reached the point where this week I followed through on a ritual I seem to have with each new project; even though I have all of the work automatically backing up nightly onto an external drive, I get paranoid about losing my files and will buy a new flash drive for a secondary back-up, just to be sure. I really can’t imagine my files being any safer than in the care of this guy. 

At this stage the drafting becomes more deliberate, while still allowing for flexibility and discovery. For example, I’m currently working on a chapter that started so slowly I thought about trashing it altogether; I knew if I wasn’t enjoying it, I was probably parking a big boring lull right after what was meant to be an exciting moment. I kept at it though, since I saw chances to explore some dynamics between characters, which would be a good exercise even if I didn’t end up using any of it. Plus the seed of an idea was showing up, and I wanted a crack at it since there was always the chance it could turn into something important.

It eventually became a chapter that will influence how the story will end, at least once I prune it down. However, I wasn’t even halfway finished with it before I realized the events I’d packed in there needed to happen much earlier, so the whole chapter was in the wrong place. Even if I wasn’t feeling it at first, it was a good thing I kept at it. To a large degree, for me at least, that pretty much encapsulates what the drafting process is like. 

August starts tomorrow, which gives me one more month to work on this before school begins. I’m far enough into it now that I feel confident about being able to finish the draft, unless Carrie sees things in the section she’s reviewing that set off fire alarms and we have to do some re-evaluating. I know there will be a lot of revision to work on either way, but that’s okay. You need to have a draft finished before you can revise it, and I plan on reaching that point by the time I have to officially show up for the first day of the 2017-18 school year. 

Then it will be time for the big revisions, and that’s when the real work starts.