tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61723065083533893152024-03-05T18:37:19.215-08:00Random musings on reading & writingAuthor and historian Tiffany K. Wayne, PhDfragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-83580305364116162232022-01-05T10:07:00.003-08:002022-01-05T10:07:36.914-08:00New Year, New Site, New Books <h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="color: #800180;"> Hello! If you have returned this site to see what I'm still up to, or somehow landed here while looking for something else, I invite you to visit me at my new comprehensive author website <a href="http://www.womanwriting.com"><i>www.womanwriting.com</i></a> for updates on the research and writing life! </span></b></h3><div><span style="color: #800180;"><b>Please feel free to sign up for my email newsletter by joining at the bottom of any page on that site. </b></span></div><div><span style="color: #800180;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="color: #800180;"><b>Thank you and Happy 2022! </b></span></div>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-11199619938595720022020-11-29T19:00:00.004-08:002022-01-05T10:28:20.678-08:00 On Writing and Teaching <p>Because this year of such intense change and upheaval is coming to a close, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on my new identity. I left my teaching job in June and I seem to have effortlessly transitioned to my new focus as a full-time writer. (Note: This doesn’t mean that I’m effortlessly writing! Just that I’ve embraced the identity of full-time writer again.)</p>I have been a historian and a writer since receiving my PhD in 2001. (Yikes, almost 20 years!) Between 2001 and 2013 I was an independent writer and editor working from home, so one would think that, after a brief 7-year detour into teaching high school, I am now simply returning to my full-time writing career. But those years were different than what I want to do now, starting with how many years I spent constantly hustling for paid work. In addition to writing, editing, and adjunct college teaching - some of which paid very well and some not - I also applied for DOZENS of full-time jobs over a ten-year period between 2003 and 2013. I applied for tenure-track college faculty jobs, publishing jobs, curriculum development jobs, and education think-tank research jobs. At one time I also considered law school, but as I still had student loans from graduate school, and we wanted to pay for private school and college for our children, I decided that was not a great financial decision. <br /><br />For all of my seeking, I never considered or planned to be a high school teacher, but in 2013 I was offered and grew into a job teaching high school history & government at the private school my children attended and it turned out to be one of the best surprises of my life. In my early days at the school, I remember telling a colleague that I considered myself a historian and a writer who just happened to teach. But as each year passed, teaching took over not only more months of my year and ALL of the hours of my day, but completely consumed my intellectual, social, and emotional energy. The demands of spending all-day, every day, engaging with young people meant that I very quickly moved from feeling like I was just hanging out, sharing my love of history, to actually embracing the new pedagogical responsibilities and joys of the job, reading articles and attending workshops and meetings on topics such as grading, assessments, curriculum mapping, and meeting students’ different learning needs. I learned so much from students’ curiosity and questions, reading new books and learning new subjects I might never have read or learned on my own, and researching curriculum materials and pedagogical resources to try to understand how people learn best. I did so many new things I never would have done or known about, such as becoming a Model UN leader, developing LGBQT resources and curriculum, mentoring students about college and career plans, and participating on administrative committees, learning how school communities work and function. <br /><br />In addition to the steady paycheck that eluded me as a freelancer, teaching brought immediate gratification in a way that YEARS of working on a book never could. I might write a book that people, including future students, might read and maybe even find important, but there was no questioning the sense of purpose and immediacy in teaching. Right there in the classroom, at that moment, whatever was said / discussed / communicated / felt between myself and the students made an enormous and lasting impact. There was also immediate gratification in the feedback received from students in our hundreds of tiny interactions over the course of a day or year or multiple years of high school. Whether I felt inspired or not on any particular day didn’t matter, as EVERY day there were students waiting for me to open the door on a chilly morning and fire up the heater and say or do something, and that something could have ripple effects for years. There was also gratification in collaborating with colleagues and in receiving appreciation and trust from parents, in being part of a team committed to launching young people into the world. <br /><br />Was I building, then, a new career? Was I first-and-foremost a teacher now, more than a historian and writer? What about the books I still yearned to research and knew I could still write? Even if I never wrote another academic book, what about the stories I wanted to tell and the novels I wanted to write? Even in the midst of loving what I was doing as a teacher, I could not fully see a way to combine my different goals and identities. I could see no way forward - no end goal. I realized that I did not see myself as a career teacher. <br /><br />I saw that I would either have to pull back and give less to my students and school community, or accept that this is where I would give all of my time and energy, giving up other pursuits and life goals (such as writing books). And I couldn’t really accept either of those options. I began to contemplate that perhaps I had given all I could give to teaching. I had not built a career out of it, but I had a 7-year run in a unique and privileged position and I learned so much. <br /><br />Still, I don’t see myself “returning” to the same writing life I had before I taught high school. For starters, I don’t want to hustle. Unless it becomes financially necessary, I'm not looking for freelance jobs and I don’t want to work too hard for too little money (including in teaching). I published 8 non-fiction books between 2003 and 2020. (<a href="https://www.womanwriting.com/published-works">https://www.womanwriting.com/published-works</a>) I truly enjoy the research and writing, but I don’t actually want to write those kinds of reference books anymore. I do want to write and publish both nonfiction history and historical novels, and I hope to get an agent in 2021 to help make that happen! I've been focusing these past 5-6 months on learning the craft of storytelling, sharing my work and accepting feedback on my creative writing for the first time, thinking about ways to develop my identity as an artist and think outside the box as a historian. <div>So maybe instead of seeing my path as one of uncertainty and hustling and detours, I actually HAVE been building something all along. I am entering a new phase as a historian and writer and I do believe that everything I’ve done to this point - including every day I spent teaching high school kids - will somehow inform and enrich whatever my next steps will be. <br /></div>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-50216892336874423492020-10-19T17:22:00.000-07:002020-10-19T17:22:01.599-07:00<br /><br /><b><i> At the Mercy of the Sun<br /></i></b><br />Whatever gossip our classmates heard, the truth was worse. Our teachers were alerted to watch the “moods” of the Hooper girls, and the other students were instructed not to make play of death or madness in our presence. An occasional slight from one outside the circle and the cruelty lurking beneath the surface of childhood reminded me of where I stood in time – past, present, and future. <br /><br /><i>You’re going to end up like your mother, Clover Hooper. </i><br /><br />I wanted to be happy, like my name, growing green and effortless in the sun. But every time I tried, even for a moment, someone was there to remind me that such happiness was not mine to claim. <br /><br />My older sister Nella took upon herself the impossible burden of protecting my happiness; impossible, because she and I were bound together by what happened in Mother’s room that winter. <br /><br /><br />Mother was sick for three days with fever and convulsions, vomiting and severe pain. The family tended to her, not knowing the cause, but worried for both her and the babe. A child of only five, I was sent to fetch fresh water and warm cloths from the kitchen every few hours. On the morning of the fourth day, I returned from my errand and entered the bedroom as the infant was finally expelled, without effort on Mother’s part as she was nearly unconscious by then. Doctor Phelps was called in hopes that the child, though too early, might still be saved. Father stood across from the bed, stunned. Aunt Cary leaned in at her younger sister’s head, smoothing Mother’s brown hair back, and shouting orders and questions at the doctor or at anyone who might listen. Doctor Phelps was all action, opening his bag and pulling out bandages and salves, his face betraying any knowledge of what was actually to be done in this situation. <br /><br />What was the situation? I have since tried so desperately to discern what I could have known or been told as a child compared to what I know now. I knew that Mother had a baby inside of her, but I had never witnessed a birth. I wondered if the baby might still emerge and cry and be fine. Perhaps this is just what women have to go through. No one had ever spoken to me about the possibility of Mother dying. I had a horse that died once, but we just found him, sleeping peacefully on his side in the stable one morning. Father said the horse had reached old age and was tired out. But Mother wasn’t old and tired. Just the week before she was walking with us outside, collecting gold and red fallen leaves to decorate our table, remarking on the coming chill and on my brother Ned’s return from school. <br /><br />Mother convulsed again but made no sound. Aunt Cary scolded me and Nella to leave the room at once. Nella ran to our bedroom and hid herself under the quilts, a place where she remained for the next week. I ignored my aunt, who was too busy to notice if I followed through on her command, and moved my body silently against the cold wall until I made myself invisible behind the plank door. The doctor pushed Mother down on the bed and tried to roll her nightdress up over her resisting body. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and then all was quiet, the room collapsed. I was soon forgotten in the chaos and grief and thus witnessed from the crack in the door the moment my mother expired in a pool of blood, without a cry, the limp babe still attached by a knotted rope the color of ash in the forgotten corner fireplace, intended to warm her through the previous night. I strained to see the baby – I wanted to see if I had a brother or a sister – but the doctor wrapped it up and placed the silent bundle away in his bag. Aunt Cary screamed in anger – she screamed at Father for doing this to her and at the doctor for not doing enough. Father slid to the floor and covered his face with both hands. <br /><br />Doctor Phelps revealed to the immediate family that the loss of both mother and child was not an accident of illness. Mother had inserted into the birth canal a small wad of arsenic-soaked wool, which was expelled immediately before the delivery of the child. Father and Aunt Cary did not accept the doctor’s words as explanation for this double tragedy and sent him away, though he was a trusted friend and presented the bloodied wool as evidence. <br /><br />They could not deny, however, that my mother had access to arsenic, as Father was a regular physician and had numerous bottles of remedy solution on hand as a general cure for imprecise complaints. Although some gossiping neighbors blamed my father for making the poison so easily available, a physician’s approval was not required and many fashionable ladies easily acquired it for cosmetic purposes. My mother’s intentions were clear, however, and the manner in which she had administered it to herself brought great shame upon the family, who spoke of neither the incident nor the fact of the child. <br /><br /><i>Forever hushed that voice whose welcoming <br />Was the last note the unsphered soul did sing – </i><br /><br />My mother could have been a great poet, but she was undone as a mother of three (nearly four) who lived just long enough to share her gifts, but not enjoy their flourishing in the world. <br /><br />I grew up feeling that, like my mother, and her mother before her - for our Grandmother Sturgis deserted her family and later ended her own life under the mental strain of losing her only son in a swimming accident – my life would be cut short. I took some odd comfort in acceptance of this fact of nature’s cruelty and understood from an early age that such entanglements as love and marriage lead only to pain, especially for women. Young girls who dreamed of filling their lives with weddings and houses and cradles did not want to hear such pronouncements, however, and so my sister Nella was my only childhood friend. <br /><br />No image of my mother exists to remind us of her likeness. Three children and a dozen poems: This was all the proof that she had existed. Though I strained to develop the vision of myself as a mother, the image remained unclear. <br /><br /><i>Those poor motherless Hooper girls, how can they be raised up without a mother? </i><br /><br />I was raised up with a mother, though – just not a living one. <br /><br /> <br /><br />fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-83593704512184267342020-08-26T12:45:00.008-07:002020-08-26T13:37:58.659-07:00Women's Equality Day and the Suffrage Centennial <b>On August 26, 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment was certified as part of the U.S. Constitution.</b> <div>The amendment reads in its entirety: <div><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.</p></div><div><div><span face="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.</span></div></div></blockquote><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Nothing in the original U.S. Constitution of 1789 or in the subsequent Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments ratified in 1791) guaranteed any citizen either a right to vote or protection from discrimination in voting laws. It would take several more constitutional amendments, and a fair amount of congressional legislation, to institutionalize the most basic rights that many of us consider the foundational features of democracy. On the contrary, the founders never set out to create a <b>direct</b> democracy, but rather a republic, a representative democracy ruled by elite property-holding white men making decisions for all. But in the 19th century, more and more economically and politically disenfranchised groups - workers, non-property holding individuals, enslaved peoples, immigrants, members of religious minority sects, and women - challenged the nation to expand upon the Enlightenment ideals articulated in the Constitution and to expand civil and political rights to a broader group of Americans. </div><div><br /></div><div>Several decades into the American experiment, by the 1850s the nation had made some strides toward "democratization" with expanded property and educational rights for white women, and with the oxymoronic "universal white male suffrage" which had, state-by-state, removed property ownership or wealth (but not race or sex) as a legal requirement for voting. By the 1850s, as well, the anti-slavery and women's rights movements were in full force and the expansion of white male political rights only highlighted the lack of rights for either African Americans or women of any race. A major shift occurred in the mid-19th century with the abolishment of slavery (with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865), followed by two additional constitutional amendments expanding political and civil rights: the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting states from denying voting rights based on race (but not sex). </div><div>Constitutional change still did not guarantee the free exercise of the franchise for black men, and the civil rights movement spent another 100 years (and beyond) protesting state and local-level obstacles to black voting and office-holding, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, gerrymandering, lack of education, difficult voter registration processes, intimidation, and violence. Additionally, it took another 50 years—between the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—and many state-by-state victories, for a federal amendment finally extending the right to vote to all American women.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>The movement to secure votes for women always worked alongside other social and civil rights movements. The suffrage movement had its own leaders, organizations, newspapers, strategies, protests, and conventions. However, from the overlap between abolitionism and women’s rights in the early 19th century, to the post-Civil War connections between black civil rights, to the effort of Progressive Era women labor leaders to recruit working-class women to the suffrage cause, to the re-emergence of the women’s movement out of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to LGBTQ rights and the global connections between human rights and women’s rights, the story of the women’s movement in the United States has <b><i>always</i></b> been wrapped up with the story of the broader, and continual, expansion of the democratic promise for all Americans. </div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div>In an interview toward the end of her life, suffragist Alice Paul said, “There is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.” This is one of my favorite quotes and I often write it in the graduation cards I give to students! And yet, the story of American women’s participation in our nation’s political processes—from voting to office-holding to decision-making—has been incredibly long and complicated. Prominent white women like Alice Paul usually take center stage in the story of the dramatic years and months leading up to final passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (in fact, today, on this centennial day, I am registered for a webinar suffrage celebration called #ThanksAlice!). Yet, Paul herself complicated her own movement and legacy by favoring political expediency over lasting coalitions and a commitment to true equality, literally pushing aside the presence of black women in the movement.</div><div><br /></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwYQgrDG-7CYMkfybX9YTVnSEaVZ1HgTj_FYHw-CjBDC852Kt2YoBrXBgSf3eYZAh2Uf8KI7xq3qgnH1Q-WFna3vv_w2JHGvrkRyS83l_kl3RX-wuwomcEIfclLlduYXzSnF03LEzy3qEA/s470/republicans.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="417" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwYQgrDG-7CYMkfybX9YTVnSEaVZ1HgTj_FYHw-CjBDC852Kt2YoBrXBgSf3eYZAh2Uf8KI7xq3qgnH1Q-WFna3vv_w2JHGvrkRyS83l_kl3RX-wuwomcEIfclLlduYXzSnF03LEzy3qEA/w334-h376/republicans.jpg" width="334" /></a></div></div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">(This image itself is controversial in the history of civil rights. Note that in the 1910s, most African Americans and reformers still aligned with the Republican Party as the party of Lincoln and the party of civil rights, but a new controversial national suffrage strategy called for removal of support from ANY platform or politician who failed to support women's suffrage, regardless of party affiliation.) </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div><div><div>That legacy remains with us today. The historical connection between abolitionism, black civil rights, and women’s rights, means that black women were often hard at work at the center of these social movements, and yet, the racism of white women often limited the radical potential of these voices and these coalitions to strengthen the movement. At the same time, by separating class, race, and gender (in that order) into separate categories of constitutional rights, the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures sowed division into the very nature of these civil rights movements. Still, the fight for the vote—and the subsequent struggles for women’s broader political participation—would undoubtedly have seen greater or swifter progress if the work of women of color had not been dismissed or made invisible by white women in the movement, or in subsequent histories of the movement.</div><div><br /></div><div>While the increase in the number of female presidential candidates between 2016 and 2020, or the presence of a woman of color on a major party's ticket, might seem like exponential change (though still no presidential nomination secured and still no ERA ratified), the struggle for <b><i>all </i></b>Americans to be included in the promise of democracy in this country has crept along at an embarrassing pace. </div><div><br /></div><div>The demand for gender and racial equality in the United States - politically, economically, legally, and socially as well - is now in its fourth century, as old as the very founding of the nation and a struggle that is still not complete. Celebrating the anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment reminds us that it took 100 years to get to this point, and that we still have a long way to go.</div></div><div> </div><div> </div></div><div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">(The above is excerpted & adapted from the Introduction to my recently published, <i>Women's Suffrage: The Complete Guide to the Nineteenth Amendment</i>, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2020. </span></div><a href="https://products.abc-clio.com/abc-cliocorporate/product.aspx?pc=A6129C"><span style="font-size: x-small;">https://products.abc-clio.com/abc-cliocorporate/product.aspx?pc=A6129C</span></a><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;">)</span></blockquote><p><br /></p><p> </p></div>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-6468967148830309082020-07-31T19:11:00.002-07:002020-07-31T19:29:25.304-07:00Transitioning to a Full-Time Writing Career July has been an incredibly productive and creative month for me.<br />
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Way back in February (pre-Covid shutdown) I gave my notice to leave my high school History and Government teaching job of 7 years and return to full-time research and writing as an author and historian. I won't go into the dilemma and final reasons for making that decision, but it simply comes down to not having enough time in the day to do all the things and have all the careers I want to have. As the financial devastation and stress of the pandemic for so many people became apparent, I did reconsider whether it was a good time to leave a paying job and health insurance... But, in planning to quit my job, I had already begun putting all of my take-home pay (and my book advance - see previous post on suffrage book) in savings as a cushion and in anticipation of our family not relying on my income, at least for a while. And I have the full financial and emotional support of my husband who, luckily, remains employed and has been urging me to take this leap and focus solely on writing for some time. I could not do this if it caused hardship or stress for our family right now. Those who have known me longer than 7 years, however, will know that, before I was a high school teacher, I was a freelance author and editor, so in many ways this is just a return to that (though hopefully with less freelancing and more creative writing). <br />
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Back to mid-March... I was teaching 4 different high school courses when we shifted to remote learning "temporarily," but as we one-by-one had to cancel all of the end-of-the-year milestone trips & events, and then slowly realized that we would not be returning to campus for the entire semester, I was devastated to end my school year and my teaching career in this way, without even saying goodbye to or seeing my students in my classroom again. By the time we recorded our virtual graduation speeches and then met the students for a brief drive-up diploma ceremony on June 11th, I was both incredibly sad and incredibly relieved that it was over.<br />
I spent the remainder of June finalizing my school commitments, including going to campus with my daughter to clear out personal belongings from the classroom, organizing curriculum materials and digital files for my incoming replacement teacher, and tackling my school email in-box, while also re-organizing my home office. ("Re-organizing" makes it sound like a nice weekend project, but I spent THREE MONTHS (one advantage of shelter-in-place) clearing out boxes of books, cleaning all remaining books & shelves, throwing out paperwork, cleaning rugs & floors, setting up a new desktop computer, and sorting research and notes for each in-progress writing project into fancy file boxes and folders.)<br />
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<i>My beautiful home office with new computer set-up</i></div>
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<b>I was determined that on July 1, 2020, I would start my new job as a full-time writer. </b><br />
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And I did just that. I committed myself to sitting at my desk each day. And I started a daily journal to track and hold myself accountable to my writing, my research, and my reading.<br />
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So what did I actually <b>DO</b> in July??<br />
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Well, it has taken me several weeks to just re-enter writer mode and wrap my head around the projects I've left sitting for months and years. I needed to decide which projects to take up again, re-engage in the world of those projects, and think about new projects to start planning. I took some tangible steps, however, this past month, namely:<br />
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1. I joined an advanced-level fiction workshop and have submitted work twice to the critique group. We meet every other week (virtually, of course) and it has been amazing to get feedback and perspective and to read the work of other people committed to story and to craft. Our teacher is a long-time amazing writer friend of mine, Lydia Netzer (<a href="http://lydianetzer.blogspot.com/p/shine-shine-shine.html"><b>http://lydianetzer.blogspot.com/p/shine-shine-shine.html</b></a>), who has published three novels and I so trust her guidance and judgment. Joining this group forced me to immediately re-engage with writing as practice and identity.<br />
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<i>Going over pages for my workshop critique group </i></div>
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2. I submitted work to TWO fiction writing contests: One, a short story of about 3,000 words that was actually a revised chapter from a novel I started long ago; the other, new flash fiction written specifically for the contest. It was a lot of fun to write and revise and submit fiction that I'm really proud of. Wish me luck!<br />
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3. I started research on a project that's been rattling around in my head since I first came across the story for my suffrage book. The story is of a 1915 cross-country road trip undertaken by three suffragists who were tapped by Alice Paul to take a signed suffrage petition from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to present to President Wilson. There's a local connection, as the leader of the trip, Sara Bard Field Wood, later lived near me, in Los Gatos. My research led me to Anne Gass, a Maine suffrage historian who RECREATED the entire road trip in 2015 - I'm so jealous! (<a href="https://suffrageroadtrip.blogspot.com/2015/11/"><b>https://suffrageroadtrip.blogspot.com/2015/11/</b></a>)<br />
Anne has also written a book about her great-grandmother, a prominent Maine suffragist (<a href="https://www.florencebrookswhitehouse.com/bio"><b>https://www.florencebrookswhitehouse.com/bio</b></a>). It's been great to be in email communication with Anne and share ideas this past month!<br />
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4. I embarked on a crash course in screenwriting, a genre I've never tried before! I ordered and have already read several screenwriting guidebooks, have been watching Aaron Sorkin's MasterClass videos, and started following several blogs and writers on twitter. I am contemplating writing a screenplay based on the suffrage road trip, and started outlining that project. Already, I can see that thinking about what makes a successful screenplay is going to provide insight for any kind of storytelling, and the need to show character through action, and make every action count.<br />
This already has me thinking about what has not been working in my longer novel project... <br />
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5. <u>The big novel project</u>: At month's end, I have set myself the task of revising my historical fiction manuscript based on the life of 19th-century photographer, Clover Adams. (<a href="https://www.masshist.org/features/clover-adams"><b>https://www.masshist.org/features/clover-adams</b></a>) I wrote most of this novel in 2010-2012 and got a bunch of passes from agents, and have not known what to do with it since. Two years ago (yikes, time flies!) I received some very helpful insights when I sent the first 30 pages or so of the manuscript to novelist & book doctor Barbara Kyle for evaluation. (<a href="https://www.barbarakyle.com/manuscript-evaluations/" style="font-weight: bold;">https://www.barbarakyle.com/manuscript-evaluations/</a>) After that, I put it aside once again due to my teaching and other commitments.<br />
This past week, I reprinted the entire manuscript and, along with notes from Barbara, and notes from this video series by plot doctor, Martha Alderson (a Santa Cruz local, I believe), I began re-visioning the plot and structure. (<a href="https://marthaalderson.com/pwplotwrimoreviseyournovelinamonth/"><b>https://marthaalderson.com/pwplotwrimoreviseyournovelinamonth/</b></a>)<br />
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So, that's it. A month of rethinking, revising, reaching out to other writers & resources, and reconnecting with the writing life. I also read EVERY DAY. The best writing course is to be immersed in the work of other writers. I owe it to myself to do this and I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing. For years I've been saying, "If I only had the time..." Now this is my time.<br />
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<i>My 1956 Smith-Corona Silent Super with original case and paperwork</i></div>
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6. Oh, and I bought this mid-20th c. manual typewriter as a launch gift for myself! I'm not sure if I will type my next great work on it, but it inspires me to think about my favorite mid-20th c. authors clicking away, such as O'Connor, Jackson, Steinbeck....<br />
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<b><i>Some writing inspiration from Octavia Butler </i></b></div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-5430850950316226032020-07-09T13:11:00.001-07:002020-07-09T13:25:32.892-07:00The Dignity of Voting Rights; or, How Not to Disappoint Your Mother <br />
This week I received a surprise package of 5 copies of my new book, <b><i><a href="https://products.abc-clio.com/abc-cliocorporate/product.aspx?pc=A6129C" target="_blank">Women's Suffrage: The Complete Guide to the 19th Amendment</a></i>,</b> from my publisher.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGBi_IrSkXuWFqjC4Wul5QsL05ev_AjaVBqtCZhm33cPM1gvzemCWpZqaqqWrgOhvK70rzkHFRCySnQlGbc5gjaIrCU5zol5vzlKCrjFWnuYsv1HjJXO7z_A2lxjpg-9qv-z1GxKO-gT15/s1600/Suffrage+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="614" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGBi_IrSkXuWFqjC4Wul5QsL05ev_AjaVBqtCZhm33cPM1gvzemCWpZqaqqWrgOhvK70rzkHFRCySnQlGbc5gjaIrCU5zol5vzlKCrjFWnuYsv1HjJXO7z_A2lxjpg-9qv-z1GxKO-gT15/s320/Suffrage+book.jpg" width="204" /></a></div>
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My daughter Lillian helped me set up this photo with my purple-white-yellow suffrage flag (gifted to me by students!) draped in the background. The 36 stars on the flag represent the 36 states needed (at that time) to ratify the amendment. Here's a picture of Alice Paul unfurling the flag outside the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the National Woman's Party after Tennessee became the final state to ratify on August 18, 1920.<br />
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The story of the nail-biter final suffrage vote in Tennessee is a legendary tale of a young, 24-year-old junior state assemblyman who listened to his mother. The legend has it that in Henry's coat pocket when he cast his women's suffrage vote that day was a recent letter from his mother, Phoebe "Febb" Burn. Buried in-between news from back home about the rain and the farm, and a local wedding and a neighbor's broken arm, she brings up suffrage a couple of times, finally instructing him to "be a good boy" and do the right thing: </div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Dear Son, … Hurrah and vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. I
noticed Chandlers’ speech, it was very bitter. I’ve been waiting to see how you
stood but have not seen anything yet…. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help
Mrs. Catt with her “Rats.” Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha! No more
from mama this time. With lots of love, Mama.” </span></div>
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(<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">You can see a scan of the original full-length letter here: <a href="http://teachtnhistory.org/File/Harry_T._Burn.pdf">http://teachtnhistory.org/File/Harry_T._Burn.pdf</a>)</span></div>
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I love the anecdote, not only because that is the end of that part of the story: The 19th Amendment was certified to the U.S. Constitution just a few days later. But I love it because we want to believe that Henry listened to his mother. Suffragists had long pointed out the indignity of having to "ask" men, as the only eligible voters, to secure their rights as women. So maybe it adds a little dignity back to the story to think that it was a disenfranchised 46-year-old woman, Phoebe "Febb" Burn, who actually decided the final vote. It's interesting that she notes in her letter that she <u>did not know</u> how he stood on the issue - so they had not discussed it. And the record shows that Henry originally sided with the anti-suffragists and intended to vote "Nay." He twice voted to "table" the issue and avoid making a decision.</div>
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I have a son of about the same age and I certainly like to think that, in the end, Henry was swayed by the idea of having to report back to his mother on how he voted on the women's suffrage question. (She's wouldn't be mad, she'd just be very disappointed.) </div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Phoebe King Ensminger Burn (1873-1945)</b></span></div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-10549715085591773402020-06-22T14:30:00.004-07:002020-07-02T12:20:19.697-07:00Flannery O'Connor <br />
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Read and enjoyed this insightful New Yorker piece on Flannery O’Connor over the weekend. The title “How Racist?” seems like the wrong question, though... especially since the answer, in this reader’s conclusion, is very. “About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind...”. <br />
(Although she did admit, “I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”) <br />
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<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor</a><br />
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The author of the essay points out that O’Connor did address “the changing South” in her fiction, and was, of course, highly aware of the prejudices & history of white people in Georgia. <br />
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After reading the article, I was inspired to read a 1961 short story mentioned, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (linked in comments below). The story is an excellent psychological study of the resentment of a 20-something white son escorting his old-fashioned (in manners, appearance, and prejudice) southern white mother on a bus trip around town. <br />
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On first glance, it seems like the story is also about the generational tension between the segregationist mother with her benevolent racism (she thinks black children are “cute,” and that black people have had a rough time, but the whole premise of the story is that her son must accompany her because she’s afraid she might encounter a black person on the integrated public bus) and the more enlightened integrationist college-educated white son... but, in the end, the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that the son is perhaps only interested in integration or equal treatment of African Americans as a way to spite his mother ...? He even fantasizes about bringing home a black friend (or girlfriend!) just to shock his mother. <br />
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(Read the story - it’s short! - and share your thoughts below! <a href="https://thomasaquinas.edu/pdfs/alumni/everything-that-rises.pdf?fbclid=IwAR27We5ZMprBq3EYhc3ATkgX0lR_1SHQLqxlJPV1jOnXsu8driPObtCG7i8">https://thomasaquinas.edu/pdfs/alumni/everything-that-rises.pdf?fbclid=IwAR27We5ZMprBq3EYhc3ATkgX0lR_1SHQLqxlJPV1jOnXsu8driPObtCG7i8</a>)<br />
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Having died relatively young in 1964, at the peak of the civil rights movement, we will never know how or whether O’Connor’s views on racism might have evolved, personally or in her writing.<br />
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ADDED: Insight from my father-in-law, a retired English Literature professor:<br />
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"Thanks Tiffany, for posting this and inspiring me to post one of my admittedly long-winded responses. I haven't read the New Yorker article yet but I will. The story is typical of the strengths of O'Connor's writing. But! It's interesting that you quote her remark “About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind...”. First of all, her own writing is certainly "philosophizing prophesying pontificating." Her title, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," is taken from the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. It may be functioning ironically here, but I think it fits also with other Catholic philosophical references in the story. And there is a kind of "prophesying" quality to her mid-20th-century characterizations, the mother as the aged white "belle" nostalgic for a sentimental version of the Old South that would become harder to sustain after mandated desegregation, and the son a representative of the new Southern intellectual with an as yet underdeveloped penchant for moderate reform, alienated from his own culture but not able to actively seek an alternative, and muddling about in impotent rage. Second: despite O'Connor's reputation for being unsentimental in what is said to be a Southern Gothic tradition, as confirmed by what appears to be the anti-sentimentalism of the story, I do think there remains a certain sentimentality in her underlying religious and moral philosophizing. One of James Baldwin's main criticisms of dominant American cultures of the South AND the North, was the sentimentality that substituted for deep feeling in both popular culture and in many strains of the high culture, and allowed for comforting distraction from, and ultimately denial of, conditions of real oppression and pain, . The generation of literary critics who first wrote admiringly of O'Connor's "unsentimental" stories were raised and educated on the early to mid-20th century tradition of writing that was a reaction to Victorian sentimentality, the writing of people like Hemingway and the "hard boiled" school of writers of noir fiction. But Hemingway and those who followed in his wake, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain,etc., were themselves sentimentalists about male bonding, and about the great tradition of the American man-boy--Hemingway's Nick Adams was a kind of prototype. The Southern writers, Faulkner preeminently, could be both unsentimental in delineating the dark aspects of the dominant white culture of the post-Reconstruction South and still sentimentalize "their" Negroes. Baldwin was also critical of the "protest novel"_ drawing a ink between Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and writers of the left of the 1930s, on similar grounds of a kind of socialist sentimentalizing, as is evident in the first two essays of Notes of A Native Son, the title of which refers of course to Richard Wright's novel which Baldwin criticizes. I think, more than any other mid-to-late 20th century American writer, Baldwin understood the historical and still functional contradictions of US society and its cultures, and not just contradictions concerning race, but of gender, sexuality, class as well. Contrary to what O'Connor said of him, he didn't drop a lot of theoretical or philosophical references, and although he moralizes at times in biblical language I don't think he pontificates--that term suggests speech warranted by a powerful institution. I don't think Baldwin ever subscribed to or was a spokesperson for any kind of institutional power. But O'Connor seems bound, if somewhat ironically, to at least two powerful institutions."<br />
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ADDED: My response:<br />
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"Thanks so much, Don. I hadn’t thought about the actual meaning of the individual words she was using against Baldwin - the three “p” words. Interesting.<br />
The New Yorker piece, by the way, is written by a journalist who often covers Catholic issues , so it’s interesting that he did not take up more analysis about those specific words.<br />
You mention that O’Connor was bound by two major institutions - presumably the Church and the South - and Baldwin comes up again in the article when she is approached about meeting with him while he’s in Georgia on a trip in 1959. She says “it would be nice to meet him in New York,” but she won’t meet with him in Georgia because “I observe the traditions of the society I feed on - it’s only fair.”<br />
This is in a private letter and It’s not clear if she’s being somewhat flippant here, but it’s Interesting that she’s seen as taking a completely “unsentimental” view of that society, but not actually interested in challenging it."<br />
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FOLLOW-UP: A response to the New Yorker piece, providing more context and history of black scholars and artists (including Walker, Morrison, etc.) responding to O'Connor: <br /><a href="https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/on-flannery-o-connor-and-race-a-response-to-paul-elie-new-yorker">https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/on-flannery-o-connor-and-race-a-response-to-paul-elie-new-yorker</a><br />
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-12985832207482568062020-04-23T09:37:00.001-07:002020-04-23T09:50:12.508-07:00Harper Lee and Civil Rights <br />
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Since I just finished re-reading "To Kill A Mockingbird" with my 9th graders, I decided to finally get around to reading the copy of "Go Set A Watchman" that I picked up a couple of years ago. If you don't know the story, Harper Lee wrote Watchman BEFORE she wrote Mockingbird, the publisher rejected it & suggested instead that she play up "the childhood stuff," and so she wrote & published Mockingbird about the idyllic summers of young innocent white Scout Finch against the backdrop of Depression-era racial violence in 1930s rural Alabama. Mockingbird was published in 1960 and went on to become, by many accounts, one of the best novels of the 20th century, while Watchman sat locked away in a drawer until very near Lee's death when she was talked into publishing it in 2015. <br />
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Although written before Mockingbird, Watchman takes place LATER, in the 1950s, as the story of grown up Scout (aka Jean Louise Finch), now a 20-something independent young woman who has gone off to New York but now returns to Alabama to visit her elderly father, the heroic white lawyer Atticus Finch of Mockingbird fame. <br />
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Has anyone else here read "Go Set A Watchman?" Oof, I almost wish I hadn't. Not because it is a little clunky, more overtly political, and has none of the storytelling charm of "the childhood stuff" that became Mockingbird (that publisher was right, btw), but because, it is just not where you want the Mockingbird characters to have ended up 20 years later. And not just because it turns out, surprise! ALL the white people in Maycomb are racist! (More on that below.) But also some key characters are prematurely dead (ugh), and Watchman also has some inconsistencies with the plot and characters that were later developed in Mockingbird, so that's probably another reason she did not previously publish it. FOR EXAMPLE, although only very briefly mentioned in Watchman as part of Atticus's past legal work, the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, and the KEY plot point of Mockingbird, turns out to have a DIFFERENT VERDICT than what she wrote in Mockingbird - interesting.<br />
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As for the fast-forward 20 years to catch up with a now 70-year-old Atticus Finch in Maycomb... If you thought Atticus was the white liberal moral compass of 1930s Alabama, you may end up disappointed in how that turns out. Even Jean Louise is angry about the Supreme Court (in Brown v. Board) "telling the South what to do," but boy howdy, you should hear Atticus and Aunt Alexandra (and Jean Louise's suitor, Henry, a supposed childhood love who, by the way, never appears in her Mockingbird childhood) go off on how the NAACP is trying to get black people all riled up about their rights down here! And then there's black housekeeper Calpurnia, who helped raise motherless Scout and her brother, but somewhere in the intervening years finally got fed up with the Finches and leaves them - a credible move inserted by author Lee, although from Jean Louise's still childlike and self-centered perspective this is a personal betrayal, not a political move. <br />
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It's hard to come to a conclusion about Lee's project here. Did she intend for 1930s Atticus Finch - sensitive single dad, progressive intellectual, smalltown moral leader - to EVER be the hero that millions of (white) readers have held him up to be? Or was he ALWAYS (even in Mockingbird) just progressive *enough,* committed to the pursuit of justice under the law, and equally committed to treating neighbors (black or white, rich or poor) with civility, but actually holding the same prejudices as his white contemporaries?<br />
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One of his most famous dad lines in Mockingbird is the quote about walking in another person's shoes, and he has this calm rational perspective that everyone is battling their own struggles, which we may not know anything about. But, even in Mockingbird, his own children uncomfortably struggle with how Atticus can "defend" everyone and not take a more vocal stand against all kinds of injustices?? At the end of Mockingbird, Atticus's children CHALLENGE him - how can he defend a black man against false accusations, and yet allow the white racists to express their views unchallenged? Scout wonders how her teacher at school can teach the children that anti-Semitism is wrong because you shouldn't judge someone based on religion, but the white adults all around her constantly judge black people based on the color of their skin? Atticus says everyone is entitled to their beliefs, live and let live, but the CHILDREN know that is wrong, that beliefs lead to actions. By the white juries, by the white police, by the white neighbors.<br />
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<br />
So the first reaction of (white) readers of both books (and the reaction of Jean Louise) is shock and sadness that the gentle guiding Atticus Finch of Scout's childhood - the one who loved his black housekeeper as a co-parent and defended Tom Robinson with everything he had - is 20 years later resisting the anti-segregation and voter registration efforts of the mid-1950s and joining the local "Citizen's Council" alongside the town's most obvious racists.<br />
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<br />
Adam Gopnik writes, "So the idea that Atticus, in this book, “becomes” the bigot he was not in “Mockingbird” entirely misses Harper Lee’s point—that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along. The particular kind of racial rhetoric that Atticus embraces (and that he and Jean Louise are careful to distinguish from low-rent, white-trash bigotry) is a complex and, in its own estimation, “liberal” ideology: there is no contradiction between Atticus defending an innocent black man accused of rape in “Mockingbird” and Atticus mistrusting civil rights twenty years later. Both are part of a paternal effort to help a minority that, in this view, cannot yet entirely help itself."<br />
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<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama</a><br />
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By the way, before teaching Mockingbird, I did some research on controversies about the novel and teaching Atticus as white savior, and about how white students might read it compared to black students. I listened to this podcast on "Teaching While White," which points out that Atticus Finch, given his own family history and upbringing, could NOT HAVE EXISTED in the way white readers have wanted him to exist. And I now think that was probably Harper Lee's point.<br />
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<a href="https://teachingwhilewhite.org/podcast">https://teachingwhilewhite.org/podcast</a><br />
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In Watchman, Jean Louise realizes, and in an angry confrontation tells her father, that children don't learn racism from school or from society... they first learn it at home. And in that one accusation, Lee puts a completely different spin on Mockingbird, on going back and telling the story of how that happens in Scout's childhood. <br />
<br />
Maybe the books do work as joint novels after all.<br />
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<br />fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-50584880443663922592020-04-23T08:28:00.002-07:002020-04-23T08:28:21.220-07:00Mrs. America<div style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I watched the first three episodes of "Mrs. America" that are available on Hulu and I just LOVED this! Great 1970s vibe in the music & artistic direction & costumes, and I smiled out loud (ha) to see Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan (love Tracey Ullman!), Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm onscreen as characters!<br />And it is all so relevant to political conversations today, not only abortion and the ERA (fully ratified now but still not passed!), but I especially liked Episode 3<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;"> about Chisholm's presidential campaign, calls for "party unity," and the delegates debate leading up to the Democratic national convention in 1972. Chisholm's run was HEROIC in challenging sexism and racism (Does a black woman have any better a chance today? I think we've answered that question.), but Bernie supporters might also definitely relate to that episode... Just sayin'.</span></div>
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Btw, Phyllis Schlafly is not the complete villain here. She is hardly sympathetic in her effort to organize a false battle between housewives and feminism, but she is a complex and paradoxical character, struggling with the limitations of sexism in her own life, marriage, and career, and opportunistically stumbling into anti-ERA activism because that's where people were willing to listen to her. (She aspired to be a foreign policy nuclear arms expert, had a failed Congressional run (but refused to acknowledge that sexism impacted her chances) and when she tells her husband that she also "could have gone to Harvard law school," he reminds her that, No, actually, Harvard didn't admit women at the time Phyllis graduated from college.)</div>
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There's a great scene at the end of the third episode that provides a visual of Schlafly's intense desire for stability and security: But it's up to the viewers to conclude whether that is because she's a socially conservative Republican? or because she's a mother of three teenaged sons while the Vietnam War rages on the news every night (her main argument against the ERA was that daughters would also be drafted)? or because she's a woman and a 1970s housewife with no income or power of her own? (In earlier scenes, Schlafly's husband has to sign a credit card application for her (the law at that time), is upset when she flies to Washington and leaves the 6 kids behind *for the day,* and she worries about her own elderly mother running out of money, first dependent on her own husband and now dependent on her son-in-law.)</div>
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Watch it!</div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-91558842236903066642020-01-03T11:51:00.004-08:002020-01-03T11:56:31.265-08:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I signed up for the <b><a href="https://iandoescher.com/shakespeare/?fbclid=IwAR15El2w5JvfE6_qJHdNoMC7M4cIpK1tXY7sL1SYLzKVgmOpMg06Zct6hpo" target="_blank">Shakespeare 2020 Project </a></b>to read all of the plays in one year. They provide a schedule, weekly videos and scholarly articles about the plays, and a discussion forum to connect with other people reading the plays on the same schedule. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I just finished the first play, "Twelfth Night," ahead of schedule. On the surface, this is a simple comedy employing all kinds of typical antics around twins, mistaken identity, cross-dressing, and the ensuing romantic missteps, and it was a quick & easy one to read. But the videos and resources posted for each play are deepening my understanding of the layers and nuances, and I think the play is darker and more transgressive than i</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">t first appears. </span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This play is the source of the well-known quote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Among others. </span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I just learned that there was a 1996 Twelfth Night film starring Helena Bonham Carter, so I'm going to look for that later today.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">On to Henry VI. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> I'm also starting Romeo & Juliet with my 9th graders on Monday, so this independent reading project is providing additional context for teaching Shakespeare, in general. To that end, I also started re-reading Stephen Greenblat's 2004 cultural biography, "Will in the World." The introductory pages would be great to read aloud to students to set up study of the plays. </span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I'm not entirely in teacher mode on this project, though. Most of the plays I will be reading for the first time and it is difficult to get a full understanding from just one reading. But I want to have a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's body of work and a greater facility with his language, for my own literary and writing purposes. This is one of my self-improvement goals for 2020. </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-8737275091948068832019-03-03T19:29:00.001-08:002019-03-03T19:29:35.152-08:00<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Found my "Women's Roles in 19th-Century America" book on the shelves at San Francisco State Library. It is dedicated to Lillian, so here she is, full circle, with "her" book.<br />AND I was pleasantly surprised to see how often it has been checked out.<br />I wonder if a prof. is assigning it for a class...? <span class="_5mfr" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0px 1px;"><span class="_6qdm" style="background-image: url("https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/images/emoji.php/v9/t34/1/16/1f914.png"); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: contain; color: transparent; display: inline-block; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; height: 16px; text-shadow: none; vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 16px;">🤔</span></span></div>
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True story: When I was in grad school I used to just sit and read on the floor on the HQ (Women's Studies) aisle and my dream was to have a book published and catalogued under HQ. Don't ever give up your dreams, kids.</div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-60234728677653557432019-03-03T19:05:00.001-08:002019-03-03T19:05:52.199-08:00<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I was in Berkeley all weekend with my Model UN students - a great, experienced group, and an easy trip, even though the Berkeley campus was bigger and busier and a little trickier to navigate than we're used to at Stanford. I also got to meet up with my former student, Ruby (MMS Class of 2018) who attends Berkeley now, and Miles took the train over from SF to spend some time with me on Saturday.</div>
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We wandered into a bookstore and I found this vintage book, _Woman_, published <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">in 1901. It includes several well-known (to me, and to people in 1901, ha) contributors, including international suffragist and peace activist, May Wright Sewall; abolitionist, women's rights activist, and colonel of one of the first black regiments in the Civil War, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and David Starr Jordan, the first president of Leland Stanford Junior University (aka Stanford University).<br />The book is in perfect condition, and looks brand new, which is bad for books, but good for collectors.</span></div>
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I was recently reading an essay by John Steinbeck in which he explained why he cared nothing for collecting old or valuable books. He complained when his publisher released special anniversary or leather-bound editions of his works, or asked him to sign copies for special distribution or sale. He did not like the idea of trying to add value to a physical book, beyond the value of the words inside. He said he never spent his money collecting books, and would rather see beloved books bent and used up and passed along to someone else.</div>
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Point taken, but I love my new 118 year old book in pristine condition. <span class="_47e3 _5mfr" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px 1px; vertical-align: middle;" title="smile emoticon"><img alt="" class="img" height="16" role="presentation" src="https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/images/emoji.php/v9/t4c/1/16/1f642.png" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: -3px;" width="16" /><span aria-hidden="true" class="_7oe" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0px; width: 0px;">:)</span></span></div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-53512497424690970252019-01-21T09:13:00.002-08:002019-01-21T09:13:53.196-08:00RBG & the Constitution <div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I finally saw "On the Basis of Sex" last night. As a historian/teacher/scholar, I appreciate any effort to make research and written and oral argumentation seem exciting and suspenseful! I also enjoyed Kathy Bates as Dorothy Kenyon, an earlier feminist lawyer who had not been able to do what RBG ultimately did, and the conversation between Kenyon ---> RBG ---> RBG's let's-protest-in-the-streets teenaged daughter, Jane Ginsburg, as representative of the changes happening acro<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">ss the generations and the feminist "waves" working together. Nice touch, Hollywood.</span></div>
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Speaking of Hollywood, an older man outside the theater was handing out papers to all of us before we went in, on which he somewhat sloppily explained the the movie was full of LIES. In particular, he warned us about a scene in which young RBG notes that the word "freedom" is not in the U.S. Constitution. His handy-dandy handout helpfully pointed out that the word "freedom" is, in fact, right there in the 1st Amendment, regarding "freedom of speech."</div>
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(Hmmm.. so, he had a point, but I don't know why Hollywood would LIE about the Constitution, especially if it makes it seem like RBG doesn't KNOW her Constitution....If liberal Hollywood was going to lie, they'd want to prop up our heroine by making her look even smarter than she is, right??!)</div>
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Obviously it was my duty (as a citizen, a government teacher, and as a fan of RBG willing to turn a blind feminist eye to pesky facts like the Constitution) to respond to this dilemma, so I looked up this man's complaint and found a couple of articles that refer exactly to that scene and explain that, as a Constitutional scholar, Ginsburg was referring to the *original* unratified and unamended Constitution - in fact, her entire point in that scene in the movie was that, starting from the beginning (with the Bill of Rights), we have expanded the definitions of freedom and equality to protect citizens' rights and liberties that were not in the original Constitution. That the Constitution CHANGES, including through interpretation of the laws.</div>
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Hmph, take that old guy with nothing better to do than type up complaints about Hollywood, make a bunch of copies, and then stand outside the movie theater in the cold & rain trying to protect our democracy from RBG.</div>
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-35724029481698489552018-06-17T10:06:00.001-07:002018-06-17T10:16:08.793-07:00<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Captain Mike</span></u></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></u></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">From age 5
to age 20, I did not see my dad and had almost no contact with him. He later
told me that he often thought of us (me and my younger brother, Nathan) but he
never once worried about our safety or upbringing because he knew my mother
would raise us well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">During those
years growing up the name “Mike Loyd” took on a mythical presence in our
lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a name as big as Texas
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we were very young, my
brother got mad at me for telling him we had another dad somewhere in Texas. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thought I was crazy or mean, or both. To
me, Texas seemed so far way – like a place in the past. To my brother, it was not even real. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As we grew
older, into teenagers, my mother mentioned “Mike Loyd” more often and my
brother accepted that we had a dad we didn't know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My mother told us
stories about when they were kids – she and my father had grown up together,
been high school sweethearts. And as my brother and I grew older, she would say
that she saw much of Mike in Nathan, physically, but also his sense of humor,
and wit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You sound just like Mike Loyd,”
my mother would say, laughing and exasperated at my brother’s antics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We always knew it was a compliment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She only told us good things about Mike Loyd,
which made his absence from her life even more bewildering.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I had a good
childhood without him, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mike was
right – my mother was dedicated to us. We moved to Southern California because my stepfather was in the Navy and he was kind and dependable and
worked hard to support us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Mike Loyd thought he wasn't needed. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But I still
wondered who this funny Texas dad was. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
wondered if we looked enough like him if he would recognize us if he passed us
on the street. Yes, I knew Texas was
nowhere near California, but what if came to San Diego on a vacation or a
business trip? (I had no idea what business he was in.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or what if he came to look for us? Maybe we’d bump into him. I made eye contact with strangers, so that he wouldn't miss us. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I had to depend on him finding us, though, because I had no
idea what he looked like, other than maybe an older version of my brother. And he might be wearing striped pants. On
the top shelf of my mother’s bedroom closet there was a cardboard box filled
with all of our family photos. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> I</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">n
every baby, toddler, birthday photo of me, there’s a man without a face.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">My mother cut his head out of all the photos.
A headless guy in 1970s style striped pants with a wide white belt standing
next to my mother in a mini-skirt. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">A
tall thin man with strong arms wrapped around a squirming toddler. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Why had
she cut him out of the photos?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">And then
taken us to California?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Why wasn’t he
trying to find us?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> I didn't understand my parents' choices. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">A</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">fter I turned 18 –
and then got married at 20 – we reestablished contact with the Loyd family – my
aunt and my grandmother first, then Mike.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">It took years for me to understand and open my heart to the </span><i style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">real </i><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Mike Loyd.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He was kind and gentle, he was wickedly funny
and, yes, my brother looked a lot like him.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">But he still lived in Texas and I still lived in California
and, worse, he had his own personal problems he was still working on.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I had perfected thinking about my own loss for many years by then, of
not having my biological father in my life.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Even after we reconnected, I held so much anger toward him and felt that
he was a very selfish person who had skipped out while my mother and stepfather
did all the physical, emotional, and financial work of parenthood.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">It wasn’t until after my own son was born,
however, that I realized what my dad had lost by not raising us.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I felt sorry for </span><i style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">him </i><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">for the first time, instead of just feeling sorry for me and
Nathan.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Mike tried harder and wanted to know his grandkids and be in
their lives. My brother and I called him “Mike Loyd,” but he wanted his
grandkids to call him “Captain Mike” (he had been a charter boat captain in the
Gulf of Mexico for most of his career).</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He came to visit us in California, twice.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He played with Miles and Lillian and laughed
that they were “silly and annoying.”</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I
couldn’t take pure joy in his visits, though, taking his every word and interaction
with my young children and spinning it back on my childhood: He never knew how
silly and annoying Nathan and I were together. We were pretty great kids, too, but he never knew that. He never played with us on the
floor or took a nap with us on the couch.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He never bought us gifts or sent us birthday cards, like he did for my
children now. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Why did they mean so much
to him now but he had let my brother and I go? Why weren’t we enough for him?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">The last time I saw Mike in person was 2005. He came to
California. He came to my book party when my first book was published. I took
him around to the kids’ schools and activities. He got to know my husband a bit
and bought our fishing boat and had it hauled back to Texas. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Most importantly, he started telling me as many stories as he
could. I didn’t ask or interview him – he just needed to talk. He wanted me to
know him, but he also wanted to account for the time, for the missing years.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">We even talked about writing a book together.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I was an author and he had some crazy stories
to tell about life on the Gulf of Mexico.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He also had an incredible way with words and storytelling – my mother
always said that Mike Loyd was one of the most intelligent people she had known
and she thought Nathan and I (both of us grew up to be writers and teachers) got
our “smarts” from him.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">After that 2005 visit, he got himself into more troubles –
both health-related and legal – because of his past, his addictions, his
choices.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He wrote me long letters about
regret and recovery.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He wanted
forgiveness, maybe, but there was nothing to forgive.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">By now he was more disappointed in himself
than I was in him. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Mostly, I think, he
just wanted to be honest with me. To come clean. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I never gave him much back. I listened, but I
didn’t respond or agree or ask questions. Or forgive.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Or maybe I did, just by being there and by letting him know
his grandkids.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He regularly called to talk on the telephone. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">We had long conversations at least once or
twice a month and wanted to know what books projects I was working on.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He also wanted to talk to the kids, to listen
to their stories. He thought they were brilliant and funny and creative. To them, he was never a mythical, mysterious, bigger than
Texas man from the past. He was just Captain Mike – their grandpa.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">He’d always been there. It
wasn’t complicated at all. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">I hope that
was finally enough for him.</span></div>
<br />fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-42738344630143493682018-01-19T20:37:00.001-08:002018-01-19T20:37:59.371-08:00<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Judy, Judy, Judy... I'm pretty sure Judy Blume made me want to be a writer. Or at least she made me into a reader. I *was* her target 1970s pre-teen audience and read every one of her middle-grade and teen books about Margaret, Deenie, Sally J. Friedman, and Sheila the Great. I did not read her later "adult" books, but this one intrigued me because a) I'm revisiting writer Judy in my quest to be a YA author, and b) it's based on actual events that happened in 1952, when 3 <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">planes crashed into the well-populated suburb of Elizabeth, New Jersey, within a 3-month period, killing the passengers on board as well as people on the ground. Each of the planes crashed near a school or orphanage, one of them just a few blocks from where the pilot's own daughter attended high school, and after the third plane crashed the old Newark airport location was shut down.<br />Judy Blume lived through these events as a teenager and decided to tell this amazing story of how the town dealt with these tragedies.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Short version of my writer review: Judy makes it look simple. Her prose is simple and her characters are real people with simple thoughts who use simple dialogue. Although I know it's not as simple to pull off as it looks - and, in this case, she did an incredible amount of research about the crashes and about 1950s America to flesh out these stories - it's ultimately a simple read. Maybe that makes it a great story to read - I mean, I did not put it down! And these people witnessed or lost friends in 3 plane crashes! - but there is not a lot of depth, of language or of character.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
The decision to use multiple POV is central to Blume's desire to tell the story of a *town* - an entire community - and, while the thread of the story does connect everyone through the life of a young teen character named Miri (the authors stand-in), there are ultimately probably 20 different character POVs presented. Everyone in the town is connected, and several of the passengers on the doomed plane are also connected to the townspeople. It is a story of intertwined lives.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
I understand Blume wanted to do this in order to show how the crashes affected the entire community, and how else to get to know about and care about the passengers on the planes than to introduce them in context, as characters, before the crashes? I found the "everyone gets a POV chapter" method ultimately less satisfying, though, as we just get the surface level of each character's life and the story - and the connections - often feels rushed because of it. Something to think about as a writer, especially as everything I've written so far has been 1st person POV, a single character's life and thoughts.<br />Breadth v. depth? Which do you prefer?</div>
</div>
fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-12924324155262029712018-01-19T20:35:00.000-08:002018-01-19T20:35:28.024-08:00<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="6r71" data-offset-key="fhmo3-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fhmo3-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;">
<span data-offset-key="fhmo3-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I am always telling my students (and my own kids) that, even if you have to do something you don't want to do, just be open to the possibility that you could still get something positive out of the experience. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I do not always follow my own advice. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Today I was scheduled two periods to help out with supervision during our afternoon performing arts rehearsal for the upcoming winter play. I'll admit that I was mumbling to myself about needing time to get other things done besides babysitting high schoolers backstage. </span></div>
<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="6r71" data-offset-key="e6u5u-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="e6u5u-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;">
<span data-offset-key="e6u5u-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">But I took a nice forest walk down to the theater/gym (before the rain & hail started) - so that was the first positive.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">And then I was sitting there, listening to our director get the kids organized, and then he shared this amazing quote and perspective with them about the need for empathy... </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Empathy for one another, as they each stretch out of their comfort zones (keep in mind that our performing arts program is *mandatory*) and take great risks in being on stage, singing, dancing, acting. </span><span data-offset-key="1rmd-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">But also empathy for the characters that they will embody. He read a quote about how theater builds empathy. I couldn't find the exact quote again</span><span data-offset-key="1rmd-2-0" style="font-family: inherit;">, but I found the source for the idea from the Artistic Director at the SF Playhouse website: </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">"When I think about it this way, it becomes clear why empathy in our world today is in such short supply. It isn’t always fun. To really feel what others suffer is painful. When we enter a character’s grief, her sorrow, his remorse, we kindle those feelings in ourselves. If all the circumstances in the theatre are just right, the lighting, the music, the acting, our hearts will jump to life and ache with the characters as they yearn, and suffer and hope. It hurts us like it hurts them and we feel joined with their humanity." </span></div>
</div>
<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="6r71" data-offset-key="5p81d-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="5p81d-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was intrigued by thinking about the theater experience - for both actors and the audience - in this way. And I was glad I was scheduled to be there and witness this moment, the implicit education our 14-18 year olds are receiving by being involved in this enterprise, and hearing these words from such dedicated teachers. </span></div>
</div>
</div>
fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-66337946551640170372014-01-08T17:40:00.001-08:002014-01-08T17:40:26.869-08:00<div>
Proud of Lilli's poem for 7th grade English: </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from parakeet
feathers</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
From blankets big and
small</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Pink curtains in my
room that match the green wall</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Stuffed animals piled
high </div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And clothes fit just
for me</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from quails </div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
From dry grass in the
front yard </div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Little white tails on
deer</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And green apples that
grow on a tree in the front yard that have a sour taste</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from bikers
wearing colorful clothes </div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
From houses mostly
yellow and brown but mine is a light blue</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Old mean neighbors</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And cats, orange,
white, and black</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from Sadie my
cousin who is just the most fun to play with</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
From Nate my other
cousin who has a wild spirit but is so sweet</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And Asher the
smallest of the <st1:city>Wayne</st1:city> family who
just wants to play and be your friend</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from chill out</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
From okie dokie
artichokie</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And see ya later
alligator</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Honey bunches of oats
our favorite cereal</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And muffins from
Safeway</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am from the blue
ball park in <st1:city>Santa Cruz</st1:city></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<st1:place><st1:placename>Orchard</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>School</st1:placetype></st1:place> the best place on earth</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
And my back yard</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
I am Lillian Wayne</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-75773695222841823612014-01-07T21:06:00.002-08:002014-01-07T21:42:22.365-08:00<br />
I had a headache this morning and didn't want to go to school. I still have a lingering cold and just wanted to stay in my warm bed and sleep... but I didn't. <br />
<br />
Sometimes I have it all planned out what I'm going to do with each class each day and then it gets scrapped because something else more interesting comes up or we didn't finish what we were doing the day before or whatever, so I've learned not to over-prepare. Also, our class periods are only 45 minutes long, so it's usually pretty frantic and limited what we can accomplish on any one day. Some days, though, we accomplish a surprising amount. Another factor is that our school does a lot of "extras" that take away regular class time. For example, the seniors are going away on a one-day trip this Thursday and then I only have them once next week because the whole high school goes into a "special" Performing Arts schedule with daily rehearsals leading up to the all-school production. Other times the students want to leave class to take photos for the yearbook or leave early for sports or have a Quidditch tournament. In the spring, the various grades will be going on one-week trips to various locales. Core subject teachers at our school are extremely generous with giving up their class time to all kinds of special projects! So I just go with the flow...<br />
<br />
It's not like college, though, where I am presenting detailed lectures or slides or have a set amount of material to get through. The main goal in high school English class is to discuss the literature we are reading, to do some vocabulary work, and to do creative writing exercises. Beyond that, I go in each day and look around on the internet for interesting literary news or poems of the day (Writer's Almanac is a good resource). Like today was the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, a fact commemorated on Google and especially relevant to my 11th graders who read "Their Eyes Were Watching God" last summer. <br />
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I think they were surprised to see their English curriculum validated by Google, ha. I love that - having them see connections outside the classroom. <br />
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So I read them a piece about Hurston's background and we talked about the Harlem Renaissance and some other writers they may or may not have heard of and I told them about Alice Walker "rediscovering" Hurston and then expanded that to talk about how women's studies and ethnic studies in the 1960s and 70s brought about a resurgence of interest in different traditions and canons, etc. etc. <br />
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None of that was planned. That was just the 11th graders. Technically, I have designated Tuesdays as Poetry Day, and I do try to be somewhat systematic about that since it is an AP Lit course and they need some technical info. So we moved from Hurston to a discussion of the <i>villanelle</i> as a form. I'm not a poetry expert, so I am truly learning with them. We talked about the form and structure that makes a villanelle and we looked at two awesome examples: Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song." Read it, if you haven't: <a href="http://structureandstyle.tumblr.com/post/30905701054/mad-girls-love-song" target="_blank"> http://structureandstyle.tumblr.com/post/30905701054/mad-girls-love-song </a><br />
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From there, I threw in another Plath poem just for fun, even though it's not a villanelle: "Metaphors." <br />
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<pre style="background-color: #fdffaa; font-family: Georgia, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; overflow: auto; width: 730px;">I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.</pre>
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Did you guess the riddle? We analyzed each line, but I mostly held back and let them figure out the imagery, the metaphors. FINALLY, they got it! </div>
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She's pregnant!<br />
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Here's the funny part, though... We had a surprise classroom visit by head of school right at exact moment students were *enthusiastically* discovering the meaning of the poem. I mean, not that that doesn't happen EVERY DAY, haha (not), but they were REALLY into this poem and it was really perfect timing. Whew.<br />
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So that was one class today. <br />
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At lunch time, Lillian and several of her friends came to visit me, asking for money for snacks and asking for sleepovers. The room is filled with high schoolers studying and talking during lunch time. One senior wants to sit at my desk to talk about the Hamlet homework questions because he's struggling with reading the text on his own. He's working hard at it and so I am THRILLED to discuss with him. He's using my copy of the text and a stack of my notes fall out. He hands them to me and apologizes - I tell him that these were my notes from over the break, when I decided to write down all of Ophelia's lines from the play because I wanted to understand her better as a character. He is more shocked at my nerdiness than anything else and kind of just stares at me, but I think it's important to let students know that teachers do things like that. I'm not a literary dictator just demanding that they "engage" with things - I am truly <i>invested</i> in getting something new out of my own reading or re-reading of each text and in being a continual and habitual student myself. :) <br />
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My 10th graders had a double English period, so we continued our reading of Hawthorne's short story, "The Birthmark." The language is really difficult for them, though the concept or theme of the story is pretty simple. But I want them to appreciate the *language.* So we read it slowly, and together. Then I decided that, even though they aren't having formal poetry study like the AP class, I would have them read the Thomas and Plath poems, too. The villanelles. Poetry is still new to them. Their favorite poets are Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss, though one student mentions Pablo Neruda and another shows me he is looking up Shakespearean sonnets on his phone. They want to know what "forked lightning" is. They want to know what makes two non-rhyming words "count" as a rhyme (Plath rhymes "again," "insane," and "men," for example, and this really bothers some students). They want to know what "counts" as a poem in the first place and we talk about epic poems and prose poems and song lyrics. You never know where the discussion will lead. <br />
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I had a big plan to start reading the Book of Job with the 9th graders today. It is next on their curriculum and it is something that I've had to do some pre-studying about because I was really not sure how to approach it with them. But yesterday for Creative Writing they started class-produced stories (one person starts a story and each person in the class adds to it) and today they wanted to finish reading them. They were having such a blast that I put Job aside for another day. The stories got a little bit out of control, though, so probably good that we didn't get any head-of-school visits during that period, haha.<br />
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I didn't have the 12th graders today. They have an elective or college advising period on Tuesdays. I have assigned them an essay to read for tomorrow: "How Should One Read a Book?" by Virginia Woolf. It came up in a review essay I read via facebook the other day and I'd never read the essay, so I found it and decided to discuss it with the seniors. The main point of the essay is how to be an active rather than passive reader, and that reading and writing must go hand-in-hand. I hope it speaks to them on some level. One of them already sent me their required short response to the piece. <br />
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The seniors are not yet college students (as I would like to treat them), but they think they already know everything they need to know from high school. I don't care *what* specific thing we are reading together - there are a million combinations you could put together for a class syllabus - my goal is just to make them THINK about literature and to encourage them to be SEEKERS. But still, some are reluctant to expend the effort. They want to do the minimum - they are put out by any expectations on my part. Not joking - when I handed out this essay yesterday, one of them said, "But we're already reading Hamlet, we're not <i>supposed to </i>read anything else." I try not to take it personally - I know they are the class that misses their regular teacher the most, but, unfortunately, they are the oldest students and should be the most adaptable. Life post-high school is going to be about adaptability. They are going to have a lot of different teachers and different expectations in college. They are not going to have their hands held the entire way. In a small school and a small class (18 students) the expectations are high - for the students and for myself - but everyone feels entitled to express their opinion, for better or worse. Because it's a small class, it is a struggle to NOT let such vocal students set the tone for the entire class or interfere with those individuals who have a more open attitude to learning. Because there ARE those seniors who recommend literary articles TO ME (love that) or email me with their assignments before they're actually due or volunteer to read parts in class or silently turn in brilliant writing or who come in at lunch to discuss the readings. Those things make my day. :)<br />
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Sometimes I start to doubt myself and I start to panic. Am I teaching them the right things at the right time? Are we doing enough? Am I working with them enough on their individual writing skills? Do they know enough vocabulary? Will they all succeed on the AP, the SAT, and in college? Of course, that's not all my responsibility right now, and it's not the definition of "education" that any of us subscribe to on the surface, but I still think about it. Other times, I trust I am just a guide and if I have good resources and follow the students' leads, the only definition of success is that they take responsibility for their own learning journey. And some days I just have a headache or can't think of what to make for dinner or have too many emails to respond to and if I don't record some of these little moments of fun and discovery, they'll be gone forever.<br />
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fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-8733424648371242692013-12-29T11:33:00.001-08:002013-12-29T12:05:07.864-08:00Career Reflections and PlansI usually take some time at the end of one year and start of a new to reflect on all the things I did NOT accomplish, all the ways my career has fallen flat, all the books I have NOT published, all the ways I am not living up to my potential or my expensive degree, haha. But I am ending this year content and surprised at where 2013 has ended and hopeful about 2014.<br />
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I spent the first half of the year ramping up my freelance editing and writing business. I took on numerous dissertation clients (thanks to word of mouth, more than I could handle, actually!) and wrote a dizzying number of textbook chapters, study guides, lesson plans, course curricula, and don’t even remember what else. I also indexed a friend’s fabulous history book, finished up editing a 4-volume encyclopedia on the history of women’s rights in the U.S., and signed on to write/edit a 2-volume work in the history of technology and inventions. I also had the incredible experience of being invited to post <a href="http://nursingclio.org/2013/04/02/same-sex-marriage-does-threaten-traditional-marriage/" target="_blank">a short piece I had written about same-sex marriage</a> that received an overwhelming and stunning number of views and reblogs and retweets. As the numbers piled up and the responses (good and bad) flowed in, I was sure this was the start of my new career as a blogger, but perhaps not, ha. Still, it was an awesome experience, the largest audience I've ever had, and I loved writing it. Lastly, I was (still am) determined to find an agent for my historical novel manuscript, and tried not to be discouraged by the rejections, focusing instead on the fact that *several* agents asked to see the full manuscript, at least. I sent the last big round of queries in July.<br />
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Even though my work plate was filling up, I needed something more regular (especially if we were going to be able to send Lillian on to middle school at Mount Madonna School), and so I also spent many months (in 2012 and 2013) looking for a full-time editing or teaching job. I finally broke into the pool to teach an online college course and completed that training over the summer, but I also sent my resume to local charter and private high schools, hoping to find a full-time position and really wanting to do something different than return to adjunct college teaching. I did not rule out the latter, though, as bread-and-butter work, and in late August I was offered two courses at two different local colleges. Surprisingly, I said No. Here I was trying to drum up work for all these months and now I had too much of it. Besides, something told me that the effort (the driving, the prep for new courses) would be more than the benefits. I always hate saying No to paying jobs, but also hate saying No to colleagues in need and to opportunities, as you never know what further doors will be opened. I said No, though, and planned to focus on my writing projects as the kids prepared to start a new school year (7th and 10th grades).<br />
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Another factor in my saying No to the local adjunct jobs was that David started a new job with a medical device company on September 1st. The offer came somewhat suddenly and he agonized over leaving his long association with the skateboard company, as they had been good to us, but besides being a positive career move for him as an engineer and allowing him to revamp his workshop and work at home full-time, the new job brought an increase in salary that relieved some of the worry about keeping both kids at MMS. Things seemed to be smoothing out.<br />
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Everything changed in September when I was asked to step in as long-term sub for the high school English teacher at MMS. I had subbed for this teacher a few times in the past, but now she needed to go on medical leave for at least 6 weeks. I was (still am) completely honored that she asked me and that she and the head of school entrusted me with the English and Creative Writing classes for the entire high school, grades 9 through 12. I felt that everything had come full circle in a weird way. Taking two years to write my novel and to continue my own literary education. Stepping away from the college classroom and writing high school textbooks and curricula and study guides. And being completely invested in the quality of instruction at MMS, for the sake of my own kids. I have brought all of this to the English classroom in what turned out to be not only a longer-term job than originally planned, but just a BIGGER job than I could have imagined.
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When I got the call in early September, it was not that I was simply "available," or wasn't doing anything else. It was that I knew immediately that this was what I was meant to do for now – that it was what *I* wanted to do, more than any other job I had been looking for, but also that this teacher needed me and I would (hopefully) be setting her mind at ease about leaving her job and her students on such short notice. And once I showed up in class on the first day, I knew this would be more than a "sub" job and more than a full-time job. I did not hesitate to tell my women’s rights editor that I couldn’t work on any of the finishing details of the book (timeline, intro, bibliography) and that they would have to do it in-house (this was huge for me, too, as I am such a perfectionist about work that goes out with my name on it – but my priorities had shifted). I immediately emailed my technology and inventions editor that the book would have to be postponed until next year or that they could feel free to find another writer (this was a big deal, too, because if they cancel my contract, I will owe them advance money I’ve already received, but so far they haven’t cancelled it or rescheduled it). I said No to a couple of other freelance offers that came up, but I have continued to teach the online college course because it’s a very flexible schedule and it was difficult to break-in to online teaching in the first place, and I don’t know how long I’ll be at MMS.<br />
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Even though the teacher was telling everyone she would be gone for 6 weeks, the message I was getting from the school was to be flexible and, in my mind, I knew I would be there at least through final exams and winter break. Indeed, the original six weeks came and went without anyone really commenting on the date, as her medical condition was raising more questions than answers. I still don't know exactly how long they will need me, perhaps through the school year now, perhaps off-and-on if she plans to return at least part-time.<br />
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YES, I would like to stay at MMS through the year as I am very invested in the work I’ve done with these particular students and have loved every day of it! I wish I’d kept a blog of it all, but I HAVE, at least, kept a really messy handwritten notebook of what we’ve done every day. It’s been very emotional at times, filling the shoes of a very beloved teacher who is out due to difficult circumstances, but the head of school, the other faculty, and the parents have all supported me 100%. And what an amazing opportunity I have had to put everything else aside and not only get to know all of these students and get new insight into my kids’ school, but to be forced to read (or re-read) an amazing list of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. That is just what writers always wish for – more time to read – and I do not doubt that, working side-by-side with the students, my own literary education will continue to unfold and enrich my own writing in new and unexpected ways.<br />
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The one thing I do miss, then, is my own creative writing. So my goals for 2014 include revising my historical novel manuscript and reviving the agent search. I also have 25,000 words of a Young Adult novel that I am feeling deserves some new attention. I started this novel last year, in 2012, but is it too much to say that it has been a fortuitous happenstance that I have had the privilege of spending the past three months in the daily company of teens, talking about books and their lives?
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<br />fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-76565995763602818442013-12-04T17:56:00.000-08:002013-12-04T17:56:00.817-08:00"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?' Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"
Who said it? Watching Dead Poets Society with juniors. Robin Williams as Prof. John Keating.
The play's the thing. Our dynamic Performing Arts teacher came to senior class and gave us ALL some new tools for accessing the text.
Gift of the Magi and Creative Writing with the 10th graders. They are writing (you guessed it) parables. fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-28480108876912525312011-03-10T11:08:00.000-08:002011-03-10T11:17:32.280-08:00a-MAZE-ing rats!Today Miles has a spelling test, a Spanish test, AND an oral presentation to do... and he was STILL excited to go to school. Such a good boy. <br /><br />Lilli has a spelling test today, too. She also completed a fabulous science project on.... rats! You would have guessed it, right? She made a cardboard maze: <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilbBy49YVNlPFhomo4FWOr257QAoNgkw01TQGLOKntCIsZPCcC62AFsITC3KdKyZucZ3QyJyPpKHWBljxqUlI43q-8cstElISVA5_TgRVpXoFYdOnN_6R_ZBweEsmgnsT2bm7qyJvLjE7F/s1600/IMG_2010.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilbBy49YVNlPFhomo4FWOr257QAoNgkw01TQGLOKntCIsZPCcC62AFsITC3KdKyZucZ3QyJyPpKHWBljxqUlI43q-8cstElISVA5_TgRVpXoFYdOnN_6R_ZBweEsmgnsT2bm7qyJvLjE7F/s320/IMG_2010.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582530953496021314" /></a><br /><br /><br />Initially, the rat was not too interested - in fact, she jumped out the top of the maze, but mostly she just sat at dead ends: <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFzZkBaLK7n0GTgpQ075i5-w53gcGb_gUxYe8XSSB7dphsw8J8DN-42HcZS5LJu1unamBx5pXfOZFAHdv0RqqKk2qR6Y5wSmhzK7HTn7SBThf50UJq01Wa80PnoU43EXi96Q04hjXipLT/s1600/IMG_2022.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 229px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFzZkBaLK7n0GTgpQ075i5-w53gcGb_gUxYe8XSSB7dphsw8J8DN-42HcZS5LJu1unamBx5pXfOZFAHdv0RqqKk2qR6Y5wSmhzK7HTn7SBThf50UJq01Wa80PnoU43EXi96Q04hjXipLT/s320/IMG_2022.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582530958449169634" /></a><br /><br />BUT THEN... we saw a show on TV called "Rat Genius" or something like that - just by coincidence - and the MIT rat researcher explained how rats need "landmarks" to help them create a map in their heads and memorize a route - just like we would use landmarks (turn right at the yellow house, etc.). <br /><br />So, Lilli put some toys along the maze route as landmarks and... the rat did it! She went through, slowly, smelling & climbing on & even biting at some of the toys, until she finally, for the first time, found the treat. THEN, the truly amazing thing happened.... we put the rat back at the beginning of the maze and she ran through, briefly looking at or smelling each landmark that she had apparently memorized and she reached the end treat in record time!! The landmarks worked! <br /><br />Oh yes, I remember now... the carrot is just past the bunny & around the corner by the penguin: <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nHqf09gImFuUoVqLkSSIgSVX_CLOdMzLnu3bNLpBPfaMSGGc0LOtRPdnTR4tNAOPNTLEEFPhhcqCaujrDZQ5UZ5LzAtfxcOZnNboXYiW4jeiCOAOWsaZbcBp6spF_thA0cEYu5bH73VH/s1600/IMG_2109.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 229px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nHqf09gImFuUoVqLkSSIgSVX_CLOdMzLnu3bNLpBPfaMSGGc0LOtRPdnTR4tNAOPNTLEEFPhhcqCaujrDZQ5UZ5LzAtfxcOZnNboXYiW4jeiCOAOWsaZbcBp6spF_thA0cEYu5bH73VH/s320/IMG_2109.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582530958344253442" /></a><br /><br />Now tell me you didn't learn something new about rat brains today. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKIAdK1wNt79APu5rwCMoScBovIPQukP6jl_1W-SJunwZ2L_Rmic5KV5cSQJAgOK0Ap8ecqon8FTSjzmb6saXandw6k8QoIFCqzzA1HLKcUrgwavXoj_eRVCG396SxTW7o7yyCmkVDTe5o/s1600/IMG_2110.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKIAdK1wNt79APu5rwCMoScBovIPQukP6jl_1W-SJunwZ2L_Rmic5KV5cSQJAgOK0Ap8ecqon8FTSjzmb6saXandw6k8QoIFCqzzA1HLKcUrgwavXoj_eRVCG396SxTW7o7yyCmkVDTe5o/s320/IMG_2110.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582530960949000898" /></a><br /><br />(Don't laugh at her shirt - it's her mother's fault.)<br /><br />The moral of the story is that, if I hadn't let my kids watch random TV instead of studying for their spelling & Spanish tests, the science experiment would have been a bust.fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-25247161825390590282010-06-01T12:54:00.000-07:002010-06-01T13:30:12.905-07:00The Civil War comes to California...<div align="left">No, David & I haven't been fighting - I'm talking about the REAL Civil War, c. 1861-1865.<br /><br />We don't have an official battle site or anything like those of you eastward and southward get to experience, but it's the largest Civil War encampment / re-enactment on the west coast...<br /><br /></div><p align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX-alBjTG8Tq2e35wXU0znNtzMEO7m9vildtPVEUKYiaMHPnIpo0X8HVxmq6lzfzECl_M-ubJZ07r8hwb6kuIASpDcEwtawf3xmU6IjrTqxutWdpQN8SLhPxBJWC506C0BRiSSUsmNIlxJ/s1600/DSC_1946.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 268px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477899481011711554" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX-alBjTG8Tq2e35wXU0znNtzMEO7m9vildtPVEUKYiaMHPnIpo0X8HVxmq6lzfzECl_M-ubJZ07r8hwb6kuIASpDcEwtawf3xmU6IjrTqxutWdpQN8SLhPxBJWC506C0BRiSSUsmNIlxJ/s400/DSC_1946.jpg" /></a> Loud, too!<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmyCRwN9JfWqLFwk3cyp-ZoTIJoZVUVDqXl9ajaWqaQt1gcTAzBcm-5JUVZDhvUR5L36Cmzc5Em8UVukZ-6r2DIFYVFZvTaKMuZXAiv3HEugQaL7vb2RqLX9qWAW5uaiIS8VvR3q9IaQw/s1600/DSC_1945.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 268px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477897923694949730" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmyCRwN9JfWqLFwk3cyp-ZoTIJoZVUVDqXl9ajaWqaQt1gcTAzBcm-5JUVZDhvUR5L36Cmzc5Em8UVukZ-6r2DIFYVFZvTaKMuZXAiv3HEugQaL7vb2RqLX9qWAW5uaiIS8VvR3q9IaQw/s400/DSC_1945.jpg" /></a><br /><br />David, unaware of the Southern belles sneaking up on him... </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimECZqMTHGTtsWZRyZDTws7p3xmo1Ld_dd18mw26HBITVsp2726Wt_vrANVs9ibBCdI5bpt2IGWn-xzzUxXv4uhWxr-rLMSZIK73B1qmbn9tUEV3gg0Ovb5icQdC-wG2igXMAkLVDGlWCU/s1600/IMG_0702.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 268px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477897917892724386" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimECZqMTHGTtsWZRyZDTws7p3xmo1Ld_dd18mw26HBITVsp2726Wt_vrANVs9ibBCdI5bpt2IGWn-xzzUxXv4uhWxr-rLMSZIK73B1qmbn9tUEV3gg0Ovb5icQdC-wG2igXMAkLVDGlWCU/s400/IMG_0702.JPG" /></a></p><p></p><p>David, friend Jeff, & Miles getting a very detailed lesson on the Gatling gun: </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJC1JJUHSTu-TJrEUqWXHpyY-T6zTMtVTwB2bizCWRk5rZDrFaJTpFAkMwxz4kXy9kBYOgxhESSdUnEtvXoTEo2IKV-9zUsuIGo_fCGBNUb3PIP_iCAa5W2nUxmZGu37Rl0HjitRIvSzyy/s1600/IMG_0700.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 268px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477897915267767090" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJC1JJUHSTu-TJrEUqWXHpyY-T6zTMtVTwB2bizCWRk5rZDrFaJTpFAkMwxz4kXy9kBYOgxhESSdUnEtvXoTEo2IKV-9zUsuIGo_fCGBNUb3PIP_iCAa5W2nUxmZGu37Rl0HjitRIvSzyy/s400/IMG_0700.JPG" /></a><br />Have you ever seen a boy happier to hold a real (not replica) 1841 Civil War rifle? This one was called the Mississippian, if I recall correctly (the gun, not the rebel). </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi_W5v4MAp-T3Wa8bsTXv8gjXoqEs5RDeiyl3o8dM3Unwqxv9ovdN8vhp48XW_tXRcbC2fRCB12ycqa3kidrZLR5E4GbE6ReziHQobYWkG3wGPJqs0TGGtrkue3T3NJxlKbDO8V6pnbDPk/s1600/IMG_0696.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 468px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477897905951079314" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi_W5v4MAp-T3Wa8bsTXv8gjXoqEs5RDeiyl3o8dM3Unwqxv9ovdN8vhp48XW_tXRcbC2fRCB12ycqa3kidrZLR5E4GbE6ReziHQobYWkG3wGPJqs0TGGtrkue3T3NJxlKbDO8V6pnbDPk/s400/IMG_0696.JPG" /></a><br />After gathering information on the weapons used by the rebels, he took it right over to the Yankee side, the little spy.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_U7Jvuawt2g-jINQmPqJQfBrlWaTt_fIbG9dB9TObUe7a9jMGEaFgX10NwYPPKA0ZKOQBO1DfkcZQ2o4nKSXL7UMbs4fhpVoLAyI-CEJSaVPwo2QAjz3yZ6yYRF6ZYiNqwVFeBwUVIy0I/s1600/DSC_1963.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 268px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477898280883035922" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_U7Jvuawt2g-jINQmPqJQfBrlWaTt_fIbG9dB9TObUe7a9jMGEaFgX10NwYPPKA0ZKOQBO1DfkcZQ2o4nKSXL7UMbs4fhpVoLAyI-CEJSaVPwo2QAjz3yZ6yYRF6ZYiNqwVFeBwUVIy0I/s400/DSC_1963.jpg" /></a><br />Ok, so maybe he didn't *quite* fit in, with his skateboarding attire and all...<br /><br />I didn't get a whole lotta photos of Lilli - she and friend J were more interested in climbing trees & feeding ducks than aiding the war effort. They did wait patiently for President Lincoln's field report, but the sign said come back at 4:00pm... </p><p></p><p></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2oQ4K6QEcsJoYR9SjdtEe5JdnT26Zv4NJbZ4rQtA2lVPoxcnWOpF7ApDUDKCyV8x-cHEhGIhn8FUNIQrCq_iwgMvjep9ki7ezYm8klWNEc41yyUGCs96xz2OPYuKETsr9a_pY7juyRMzF/s1600/IMG_0701.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 300px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477902835082294258" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2oQ4K6QEcsJoYR9SjdtEe5JdnT26Zv4NJbZ4rQtA2lVPoxcnWOpF7ApDUDKCyV8x-cHEhGIhn8FUNIQrCq_iwgMvjep9ki7ezYm8klWNEc41yyUGCs96xz2OPYuKETsr9a_pY7juyRMzF/s400/IMG_0701.JPG" /></a><br /><div align="center"></div>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-30711034395690001102010-04-12T09:34:00.000-07:002010-04-12T10:09:36.981-07:00In mid-March we decided to bring Miles home for the remainder of the school year. He's in 7th grade and was failing 4 out of 6 of his classes. He just had constant struggles with organization, focus, communication with teachers. School was consuming 8 hours a day of his life, and he was still failing it. The plan is to keep him home through next year and give him a chance to improve his grades, gain self-confidence, decide what he wants to do about high school.<br /><br />Things have been going surprisingly smoothly... my usually tired, cranky, argumentative Miles has been delightful and calm and easy to have around. He sleeps later and we give each other our space, but we also spend a good part of the day working together. He has time to sit on his bedroom floor & play with Godzilla figures, hang out on the computer, read, and even started writing a short story. He very quickly let down his posturing and attitude after leaving the social pressure of school. I'm not saying he won't get bored, or miss his friends... but this past month already there have been plenty of opportunities to meet up with friends - they go skateboarding, they text & talk online, a friend is having a birthday party next weekend, he even takes my Friday class at Lilli's school (ancient Egypt and, starting this next week, a novel-writing course), and plays ping pong & board games, etc. with some of the 5th/6th graders there when we're there on Fridays. And he plays with his sister, of course ;) One of his best friends, who he sees regularly, goes to a different school anyway, so they weren't school friends. It's a real lesson for ME not to try to micromanage his social life - to help facilitate things he wants to do - but to let him take the lead. He is the kind of kid who was enjoying the social life of school, but is also happy with a lot of down time and stay-at-home time. Always has been.<br /><br /><br />One day we went downtown to the bookstores together and he collected a few more in the series he's reading, plus he bought his first Stephen King book, The Mist. He's always loved horror and the macabre and has graduated from Goosebumps to Cirque du Freak, to now he's currently reading a series called Demonata (by the same Cirque du Freak author), and now King. yikes. He's already written his own horror short story. Another day he spent an afternoon at his dad's office at the skateboard R&D shop & warehouse (where dad's office-mates were positive about homeschooling and gave him a reject skateboard deck to use for wall art).<br /><br />As for formal curricululm, he asked if he could continue with his Science program (still have textbook & workbook from school, which I'll just keep until the end of the year unless they ask for it back) and I suggested we do a chapter or unit of science per week and alternate two days of science with two days of History (don't worry - I've got that covered ;).<br />He does Math and his Chinese language program on a daily basis. We search out a lot of online resources for Geography, Science, educational games, the NYTimes lesson plans & vocabulary word of the day, a billion library books... he also started a family tree project, contacting relatives by phone or email to fill in gaps. So much to do, so little time.<br /><br />At one of the last meetings of my ancient Egypt class at Lilli's school, we talked about Egyptian toys and games (dolls, stone toss, variations on jacks, chess, and mancala), and then I sent the kids out to forage for natural objects to create their own games - it didn't have to be an Egyptian game, that was just our inspiration. It could be a physical activity, a game for two or for many, items to create dolls or instruments, or a board or strategy game.<br /><br />I broke them up into groups of 2 or 3 so they could work together as a team, and so that everyone would have a part. Here's Lilli (orange shirt, looking at camera), with a couple of friends and the many items they c<span style="font-size:0;"></span>ollected - sandstone, large pieces of bark, foxtails, etc. They created an obstacle course of sorts ;)<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmxXQheQjrgbhTD1TOM9oMmAanHXf_YB6YjstA9GmrzDPB4RK4wxUjX2tJVOG-SZ09u2Ekspcj0qDASNCI1YiALuA4TJ2Pj_L411kE8uF3buKipM9CHGG9EQJbLZYR0wcYVSqvsGGtDg3w/s1600/IMG_0377.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5459290441061395490" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmxXQheQjrgbhTD1TOM9oMmAanHXf_YB6YjstA9GmrzDPB4RK4wxUjX2tJVOG-SZ09u2Ekspcj0qDASNCI1YiALuA4TJ2Pj_L411kE8uF3buKipM9CHGG9EQJbLZYR0wcYVSqvsGGtDg3w/s320/IMG_0377.JPG" /></a><br /><br />At first Miles resisted going to my class - wanted to stay home alone - but I bribed him with the offer to take him to do some things afterwards (go to the skate shop, sushi for lunch, etc. ;)<br /><br />Well, as is often the case with Miles, he had a great time *in spite of* himself. He decided to participate and he paired himself up with one of the older boys in the class (age 10 or so). They know each other already, since Lilli's school is a very family-oriented family-involved school and we have spent a lot of time there. And I think the other boy was glad to have Miles there! They created their own intricate Stratego-inspired board game using found objects:<br /><br /><div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVo1WRg1fwPOaqeydEhckBymgCNV-VlGKkSxKxmW2Sorbg06kRA-JtMUhYBE9MQmZzYhyphenhyphenkzeRtqprp2s0lPwP37umYs6Yoo5-0WDKhaQLHIHugSP8mohXwEa147TRTHcT1X6YUb5hjTms/s1600/IMG_0384.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5459290452432822770" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVo1WRg1fwPOaqeydEhckBymgCNV-VlGKkSxKxmW2Sorbg06kRA-JtMUhYBE9MQmZzYhyphenhyphenkzeRtqprp2s0lPwP37umYs6Yoo5-0WDKhaQLHIHugSP8mohXwEa147TRTHcT1X6YUb5hjTms/s320/IMG_0384.JPG" /></a><br />The class is only an hour long, but they didn't want to leave their game -so Miles and I stayed for hot lunch (Mexican food day) and then the boys went back to their game through lunch recess. We've been doing that every Friday now. Over spring break, some of these friends also visited the Egyptian museum again with us.<br /><br />I'm just so glad to have this community and for Miles to nurture these friendships. When you're in junior high, the difference between 5th or 6th grade & 7th grade seems like a generation. But when you're just enjoying yourself and making friends, the difference between age 10 and age 12 is not so great.<br /><br />During the foraging for game pieces and objects, Lilli found this.....<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdth2tk-NtE2FLlgiHgUj-JwDFSYq3irgkP3HDjDs5vyoRHoIeR9B6VoPLxYMrbmiQuQG6uviV5eBPz6gbU-X2BRyl5GuGhVbTIwyuBaaZp_9PDq8wDFebWpXPXr8GUfClRz5Ms-ZEerK-/s1600/IMG_0385.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5459290455844439074" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdth2tk-NtE2FLlgiHgUj-JwDFSYq3irgkP3HDjDs5vyoRHoIeR9B6VoPLxYMrbmiQuQG6uviV5eBPz6gbU-X2BRyl5GuGhVbTIwyuBaaZp_9PDq8wDFebWpXPXr8GUfClRz5Ms-ZEerK-/s320/IMG_0385.JPG" /></a><br />An emu egg! Yes, they have an emu at school, so it's not a mystery to find an eggshell, but it's rare.<br />Can you see the pretty blue tint at all?<br /><br /><br /><br /></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>I was happy to overhear Miles on the phone the other night telling his uncle, "Yeah, I decided to homeschool for a while."<br />I'm glad he is taking ownership of the decision. His attitude continues to be great. He seems very happy and relaxed and positive about his schoolwork. </div><br /><div>I'm feeling that it was the right decision for him. Not every child will learn best in (or succeed according to the expectations of) the traditional school environment. School is just one way to learn and I'm feeling empowered that he can get a better academic education at home. I always knew that, but if he was going with the program and succeeding according to school's terms, we would have stayed on that path. For now, there is NO reason for him to fail in school when he's an interested and engaged and capable student who just needs a different environment and needs a lot more time to explore and benefits from more individual attention. Others will disagree with us - that he should be learning to get by in school - but we've always believed that "school" is less important than learning, and wanting to learn, and succeeding on your own terms. </div><br /><div></div><div>So this is our time to learn together. It's a good feeling. </div><br /><div></div></div>fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-12091369152672799742009-12-11T10:39:00.000-08:002009-12-11T11:15:22.722-08:00A foggy morning in the coastal hills...I was taking the trash out this a.m. (very romantic) and stopped to appreciate how beautiful our little rolling hillside/valley really is... especially when it's foggy and misty outside.<br /><br />If you were coming to visit me, this is what you'd see as you pulled into the driveway:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1YIJ3keNIzaYfMy89NQSxv2rPubo3a97vVP4QMWObdWBYN1ivIucV2IqACbeRxcQzOid4EQ8pXP0ftmNCIOlCF_2Ka0fn0IDXPMUHQtHh-EOkCAHeBWdAUuBD1LZUE4LhLN_HRXSOPvpk/s1600-h/property2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1YIJ3keNIzaYfMy89NQSxv2rPubo3a97vVP4QMWObdWBYN1ivIucV2IqACbeRxcQzOid4EQ8pXP0ftmNCIOlCF_2Ka0fn0IDXPMUHQtHh-EOkCAHeBWdAUuBD1LZUE4LhLN_HRXSOPvpk/s320/property2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5414051027882219394" border="0" /></a><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />David's finished barn (it's not lop-sided, I am) -<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7TMsprsKCMko8Yvp4zcBb4PE_4SzGLfr-cVujDyv3I07CYPRf2BJEDUUHa1N2Cwx9hr1yXSHufSmZnIE5Lofn6FXlmrjViCtV6hhO5SXOEEXCu7Soi0T0AqQEW0jZrhSCj2fljyrjc3LT/s1600-h/property3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7TMsprsKCMko8Yvp4zcBb4PE_4SzGLfr-cVujDyv3I07CYPRf2BJEDUUHa1N2Cwx9hr1yXSHufSmZnIE5Lofn6FXlmrjViCtV6hhO5SXOEEXCu7Soi0T0AqQEW0jZrhSCj2fljyrjc3LT/s320/property3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5414051033815826402" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Our little blue Smurf house tucked into the hillside:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwBNNZRnkC9MlFjNzL7jp6V4JxjUWhA1sf1-L0yLa2OeA7BC6PZOU2DApojb7vsTDiUOV3heDVQR0FR2JgOujyaxvhrFdGBtdUfm3yQFztPT3fhdC3322nhMNED_CNOw344FPsU64ne-K/s1600-h/property4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwBNNZRnkC9MlFjNzL7jp6V4JxjUWhA1sf1-L0yLa2OeA7BC6PZOU2DApojb7vsTDiUOV3heDVQR0FR2JgOujyaxvhrFdGBtdUfm3yQFztPT3fhdC3322nhMNED_CNOw344FPsU64ne-K/s320/property4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5414051043841779762" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(why, yes, the barn DOES seem bigger than the house! You need to talk to David about getting his priorities straight...) <br /><br />Although we have other neighbors who are physically closer to us, they are obscured by trees & hills, so that this is the only other house we can actually SEE from our property:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSelUDiPVzaNmJo-3F071v2G0O7fBUn76TLLBPQdNKfzjJgi8FirwXu74zz88NrYeSBo4Ozc79S3Q2lZJHldJQJwWZ6R56MRD5DHmypqmVSIqRIj-foNMsZGxy_dyRahnB-tBler5qCVnx/s1600-h/property5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSelUDiPVzaNmJo-3F071v2G0O7fBUn76TLLBPQdNKfzjJgi8FirwXu74zz88NrYeSBo4Ozc79S3Q2lZJHldJQJwWZ6R56MRD5DHmypqmVSIqRIj-foNMsZGxy_dyRahnB-tBler5qCVnx/s320/property5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5414051041409364962" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Hello, neighbor! (Lived here 6 years and have no idea who they are or how one gets to their house...)<br /><br />Some of that property beyond the white fence is ours, but we are non-productive "farmers" - haha. No domesticated animals, no crops, just overgrown brush & random fences for deer to jump.fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6172306508353389315.post-33755334327959218982009-11-14T08:07:00.000-08:002009-11-14T08:20:35.274-08:00Once a week, both kids take an afterschool art class held at Lilli's school campus. It is a mixed media class and they learn various techniques in painting, drawing, and clay, primarily. This is the second year we've done the classes in the fall and both kids really enjoy it.<br /><br />Lilli has a lot of art instruction through her regular school, but the small class size (6 kids) really allows them to go in-depth and focus and get a lot of individual instruction time with the teacher. And since Miles does *not* get a lot of art instruction at school - and since he has a very positive attitude about and ASKED to do this class again - it's definitely worth it for both of them. <br /><br />Also, here's a cute thing: a few weeks ago when we had our 2 days of rainstorm, Miles said to me, <span style="font-style: italic;">"I love going to art class when it rains. It's just so relaxing to be working in the barn when it's gloomy and raining outside."</span> <br /><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://xb8.xanga.com/ce98376571760258439404/b145000760.jpg"><img title="school-barn" style="border-style: none; border-width: 0px;" src="http://xb8.xanga.com/ce98376571760258439404/z145000760.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />You just don't always know what they are getting out of it or what the experience as a whole means to them... <br /><br />As for the art itself... Well, I know I am their mother, but I am definitely IMPRESSED with the following creations:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sushi Platter, by Miles<br /><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a target="_blank" href="http://xd0.xanga.com/dc1f4a4b11432258438662/b205733631.jpg"><img title="pottery-milesfish" style="border-style: none; border-width: 0px;" src="http://xd0.xanga.com/dc1f4a4b11432258438662/z205733631.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />(love the texture, the use of a shell to make the imprint for the fin, etc.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Frog on Lily Pad, by Lillian<br /><br /></span><a target="_blank" href="http://x53.xanga.com/545f745111432258438664/b205733633.jpg"><img title="pottery-lilfrog" style="border-style: none; border-width: 0px;" src="http://x53.xanga.com/545f745111432258438664/z205733633.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">removable</span> frog on lily pad, that is...<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a target="_blank" href="http://x8b.xanga.com/368f705311432258438663/b205733632.jpg"><img title="pottery-lilfrog2" style="border-style: none; border-width: 0px;" src="http://x8b.xanga.com/368f705311432258438663/z205733632.jpg" width="400" /></a> <br /></div><br />I don't know about you, but I'm kind of amazed that an 8yo produced this. The teacher said Lilli used a photograph to model this frog & lily pad, and I can't believe the detail on the frog with the toes and the back legs, etc. Pretty cool.<br /><br />If anyone is local, we highly recommend art classes with <a href="http://www.cstevensstudios.com/about.html">Claudia Stevens</a>. She teaches both in Aptos and on the West Side.fragmentary resultshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07514072519291150287noreply@blogger.com2