Three Good Things
Mar. 14th, 2013 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousThing 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 08:04 am (UTC)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.