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I have this shiny new student. Like most of the teenagers in my current crop of tutoring students, he's from India, and he has an insatiable appetite for fantasy novels. I get to talk about Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books with a real live 8th grader, and somebody pays me to do it. How great is that? He writes stuff, and I take him seriously, so he gets better at writing. Everybody wins.
While I was pulling out the handy chart to explain that English verbs have twelve tenses, not three, my shiny new 8th grader recited the Fourth Amendment. He'd been working on memorizing the Bill of Rights all week, so the words just popped out, like a sort of sustained hiccup. "I like the Fourth Amendment," he said. "I think it's my favorite."
"I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, myself," I said. "Hey, enjoy them while you can." He'd never heard of warrantless wiretapping, but he knew why the right of habeas corpus matters. Fortunately, I keep a pocket copy of the Constitution in my handbag--you never know when you might need the Constitution, especially when you have students who want to know why the word "clause" means one thing in English class and another thing in History class. So we took a break from the five dimensions of verbs to play with the Bill of Rights for a few minutes. Eventually, we wandered back to The Castle of Llyr.
I have this shiny old student, as in older than my parents. She's a concert pianist who's struggling though a master's degree in education. With her, I do roughly equal parts writing instruction and life coaching, because surviving in academia is hard work for an older woman who hasn't had to write a paper in 30 years. The thesis adviser she's stuck with is known throughout her university as a manipulative nutcase, and in our first semester working together, the Pianist and I could not help but conclude that he was also indulging freely in ageism. "The only thing I can think of for that," I said, "is for you to manipulate him back a little bit. Right now, he sees your experience as a performer as a threat to his personal project of ego aggrandizement. The minute he sees your successes as assets in his little tit-for-tat ego aggrandizement tally, he'll become the best ally you ever had." Every meeting for the past six months, we've given a few minutes to brainstorming about how to pull that off, and now it seems she's actually done it. He's showing her off at conferences when he wants to buttress his credibility. Hot damn! I hoped, but I didn't know it would actually work.
I have this shiny correspondence student who thought he wanted to go into business, until he had some kind of health crisis and nearly died. On his almost-deathbed, he decided to devote his life to fiction, only he hadn't developed any of the chops. I mean, he knew what nouns and verbs were, but the rest of the parts of speech were a mystery to him, and he still has difficulty recognizing his misplaced modifiers when he's looking right at them. When we started out together, I told him my publications were all in poetry, that I'd never been paid for fiction, and that a special hell awaits people who teach creative writing in genres they've never published in. "That's okay," he said, "because what I need from you, my creative writing professors at college won't slow down to give me." So maybe I'll get to skip the special hell and return to my regularly scheduled reincarnation.
Anyhow, he's revising the longest piece he's ever written, playing around with different beginnings. As usually happens in student writing, the opening he sent me had a lot of warm-up stuff that was useful for him but irrelevant to his story--a whole character whose sole purpose, as far as I could tell, was see if bathroom humor would further the effort to foster a gritty urban atmosphere. (The answer, in case you were wondering, is no. Flatulent police officers do not contribute to a gritty atmosphere in any but the most literal ways.) "The first two pages are all warm-up," I told him. "If you're trying to write a Pynchonesque post-postmodern fantasia about recreational terrorism and grassroots fascism, you should blow something up in the first sentence." And now, Kaboom! The first sentence explodes.
While I was pulling out the handy chart to explain that English verbs have twelve tenses, not three, my shiny new 8th grader recited the Fourth Amendment. He'd been working on memorizing the Bill of Rights all week, so the words just popped out, like a sort of sustained hiccup. "I like the Fourth Amendment," he said. "I think it's my favorite."
"I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, myself," I said. "Hey, enjoy them while you can." He'd never heard of warrantless wiretapping, but he knew why the right of habeas corpus matters. Fortunately, I keep a pocket copy of the Constitution in my handbag--you never know when you might need the Constitution, especially when you have students who want to know why the word "clause" means one thing in English class and another thing in History class. So we took a break from the five dimensions of verbs to play with the Bill of Rights for a few minutes. Eventually, we wandered back to The Castle of Llyr.
I have this shiny old student, as in older than my parents. She's a concert pianist who's struggling though a master's degree in education. With her, I do roughly equal parts writing instruction and life coaching, because surviving in academia is hard work for an older woman who hasn't had to write a paper in 30 years. The thesis adviser she's stuck with is known throughout her university as a manipulative nutcase, and in our first semester working together, the Pianist and I could not help but conclude that he was also indulging freely in ageism. "The only thing I can think of for that," I said, "is for you to manipulate him back a little bit. Right now, he sees your experience as a performer as a threat to his personal project of ego aggrandizement. The minute he sees your successes as assets in his little tit-for-tat ego aggrandizement tally, he'll become the best ally you ever had." Every meeting for the past six months, we've given a few minutes to brainstorming about how to pull that off, and now it seems she's actually done it. He's showing her off at conferences when he wants to buttress his credibility. Hot damn! I hoped, but I didn't know it would actually work.
I have this shiny correspondence student who thought he wanted to go into business, until he had some kind of health crisis and nearly died. On his almost-deathbed, he decided to devote his life to fiction, only he hadn't developed any of the chops. I mean, he knew what nouns and verbs were, but the rest of the parts of speech were a mystery to him, and he still has difficulty recognizing his misplaced modifiers when he's looking right at them. When we started out together, I told him my publications were all in poetry, that I'd never been paid for fiction, and that a special hell awaits people who teach creative writing in genres they've never published in. "That's okay," he said, "because what I need from you, my creative writing professors at college won't slow down to give me." So maybe I'll get to skip the special hell and return to my regularly scheduled reincarnation.
Anyhow, he's revising the longest piece he's ever written, playing around with different beginnings. As usually happens in student writing, the opening he sent me had a lot of warm-up stuff that was useful for him but irrelevant to his story--a whole character whose sole purpose, as far as I could tell, was see if bathroom humor would further the effort to foster a gritty urban atmosphere. (The answer, in case you were wondering, is no. Flatulent police officers do not contribute to a gritty atmosphere in any but the most literal ways.) "The first two pages are all warm-up," I told him. "If you're trying to write a Pynchonesque post-postmodern fantasia about recreational terrorism and grassroots fascism, you should blow something up in the first sentence." And now, Kaboom! The first sentence explodes.
