Three Good Things

[dr_pretentious]

Thing One:
I have in my hand a check for the world's smallest book advance. Okay, the fact that it's small isn't the good part, but the advance has the huge advantage of actually existing, when lots of small presses don't offer an advance at all. I'll probably spend all five dollars in one place, probably on a single Starbucks beverage, and that's okay. This is one advance against royalties I'm pretty sure I can earn out.

Thing Two:
Gareth's behavior at school is much better, now that we've assured him his teachers are helping us get ready to start homeschooling him over the summer. We'd been talking about maybe starting in the fall to try homeschooling , but Gareth wants to start the day right after the school year ends. Okay, that gives us the out that Dan needs: if it doesn't work for us over the summer, we can try something else when Fall comes. Seeing the teachers as allies of homeschooling, rather than the unpreferred alternative to homeschooling that he's stuck with for now, makes a huge difference in Gareth's attitude.

Thing Three:
I've got a couple of posts up at Black Gate. This week's is about Gareth's preference for heroic struggle over world peace. Last week's is about the strange status Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has among my students who are prepping for the SAT. I especially enjoyed writing this sentence about a quirk in the scoring rules: You can claim Macbeth is about some guy named Hamlet, or about two gents from Verona, or about a barbarian named Conan for that matter, and as long as you present a relationship between evidence and argument that’s coherent within the alternate universe of your essay, your evidence can be as far out of synch with the real world as you like.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the advance and on Gareth's improved behavior!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[j'aime wells (from livejournal.com)]

Spending your advance on Starbucks seems very appropriate. :) Since so much of your writing has happened there.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Someday I'll get an advance big enough for a decent bottle of champagne. Meanwhile, Starbucks is too perfectly appropriate.

[j'aime wells (from livejournal.com)]

Also: oh my God, the essay prompts they gave us in high school. SO awful. I got very skilled at churning out essays that met my teachers' expectations and had little or nothing to do with my actual opinions. Once won an award for an essay about the symbolism of the colors red, white, and blue in the American flag (gag me. I was cynical about it even as I wrote it).

Another time we got a poetry prompt, "where does the sky end?" Seriously?

Why don't they want essays about things that are actually important to the student at the time?

[j'aime wells (from livejournal.com)]

Also: I love this,

the first meanie we all need to defeat is the one we ourselves can become.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Why don't they want essays about things that are actually important to the student at the time?

Those are a mixed blessing. The ACT essay prompts are all about issues of obvious relevance to high school students, but they're all issues the students have been required to write essays about before in school, so the kids finish the prompt and they're already bored out of their minds before they've written the first sentence.

If most of my students were free to write about what's really on their minds on the morning they take the SAT, the results would all boil down to "Aaaaaaargh!" Some of them might not require much boiling.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

My history teacher recommended that we decide on 3 essays we'd like to write, then equip ourselves with 3 quotes from Impressive Sources, one each from classical antiquity, the broad sweep of the mediaeval, and the Enlightenment ("The braver souls amongst you might find Victorian poets can also add to one's gravitas - choose sparingly and wisely"), and then turn every exam essay into one of them.

It bloody worked!

In one A-level Eng Lit essay, we were asked "what Fowles intended" by something in The French Lieutenant's Woman, to which I responded, "We cannot know Fowles' intention at the time of writing without having him here to interrogate. My own reading suggests the following interpretations..." Pompous little beast, I was. Got an A, though.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

Yay! on your book advance.

Glad that Gareth is behaving better. My older one isn't exactly having a great attitude about school. I hope homeschooling works for you. I can't imagine it working for my kid--just getting a couple of pages of homework done is a huge fight a lot of days. I have a book someplace called "Peaceful Parenting" but it doesn't resemble my reality much.

I enjoyed the Black Gate posts. Now I am wondering how you could work Hitchhiker's Guide into an SAT essay. There weren't SAT essays when I was in high school but the AP exams had them. I think they had a sort of similar and strange grading system. We did some practice ones in class before the actual exam but I don't really recall being intimidated by exams or essays anymore by then.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

"Peaceful Parenting" is a lovely dream, right up there with world peace.

Weirdly, I never took any AP courses or exams. The high school on the army base in Korea where I spent my senior year didn't offer any of that stuff. Considering how frazzled my students are about their AP courses, I'm not sure I missed anything I would have wanted.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

It never occurred to me to tell him about world peace. I would like to believe in it. The closest I can come is to strive for as much peace as possible in as many places as possible. Accomplishing even that much sometimes requires defeating meanies.

One day soon, maybe I’ll figure out how to explain that the first meanie we all need to defeat is the one we ourselves can become.


This. This. This. You are so awesome, and I miss you!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I have my moments. I also have moments of being that meanie, of course.

I miss you guys, too, and all the Seattle crowd.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

Don't we all. But that's the point - the striving to be better, to live and let live - to defend and protect and find the boundries that work. Knowing that we have that meanie inside is key.

Also I can't wait for the new book to come out.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Problem is that people mistake lack of conflict for peace.

There will always be conflict on a personal and group level, often with a seemingly yawning chasm between one person or group's needs and another's. The important thing is how we deal with the conflict. Peace isn't a static state of total harmony, it's a constant, ongoing, sleeves rolled up, hands mucky, hard slog. Requires a huge up-front investment to do it right, followed by regular maintenance.

I met an ex-army officer who became a Quaker and mediated for years between the paramilitaries and the British armed forces in Northern Ireland, then the Serbs and the Croatians, and is nowadays out in the Congo. War, he said, was the inevitable outcome of not knowing how to deal with the fear of uncertainty; peace is the courage to learn the skill of sitting with it. Peace is an activity, a way of life. I said I would like to be peaceful towards myself. He said, "When you crack that one, you've got the answer to life, the universe and everything. And you'll probably be dead by then. We all take each step as it comes." Man's in his 70s, still going wherever it's most dangerous and helping people meet face to face so they have to stop thinking of each other in abstract terms and have to deal with each other's essential humanity. I, on the other hand, bit T's head off for something totally trivial about an hour ago because I hadn't woken up properly. Bad pacifist, no biccy.