Two new articles on TOR in the past week. One is the second in my sporadically-recurring series on writing about crime: it’s about thievery, the lure of the caper, and it’s called Imperfect Crimes.
The other, Tales out of School, is an essay about what it was like to start teaching SF and fantasy writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program in 2005, at the height of the Harry Potter craze.
Enjoy! And let me know what you like, or don’t, or maybe even disagree with.
10. Since when does ‘not allowed’ apply to felines, anyway?
9. You’re not letting me pounce on Minnow six times a day.
8. Cat hair and/or litter particles that end up in your digestive tract are hair and sand you don’t inhale or have to sweep up.
7. The adorable do as we please.
6. As the only male in the house, I find the policy sexist.
5. Seriously, you are totally welcome to help yourself to anything in my food dish!
4. Isn’t it dumb to have a rule you can only enforce when you’re home, awake, and attending to my movements?
3. Your grandma called and she’s good with it.
2. This power struggle is beneath you, human.
1. Interested stakeholders (me) weren’t consulted prior to the rule being implemented.
It is the word ‘pootling’ that makes this for me: I’ve been in this car, on this road, and that’s the verb that puts me there.
The drive didn’t take long but it was harrowing. Bunches of dead flowers were propped up at several turnins, marking the sites of fatal crashes. Merki took it slow, pootling along at forty, hitting fifty on straight stretches. A queue of cars lined up behind him, drivers who were familiar with the route forming an angry tailgated convoy, trying to embarrass him into hurrying along. He remained calm, checking them in the mirror, pulling over as much as he could to let them overtake, meeting their displays of aggression with a gentle raised hand and admonishments to ‘calm yourself down, pal.’
–THE LAST BREATH, by Denise Mina
In a post called Shaping Dreams not long ago, I talked about pickiness, about trying to encourage new writers to write prose that isn’t merely good enough… about reaching, in other words, for excellence.
A thing about adult education (all education, really) is that it boils down to the old cliche about leading that horse to water. You can lay out ideas before a person–you can sparkle and cajole and really sell, but whether or not they pick ’em up is entirely out of your hands. There’s a bit of an emotional dance you have to do: you offer the knowledge up, and say “This is cool and really important and worthwhile,” but you can’t get in a big knot if a given group or individual kinda looks at it and replies with a shrug. You have to care–you shouldn’t teach if you don’t care–but it’s wrong to take it personally.
So one of the most interesting things that’s happened to me this year was seeing this shoe on the proverbial other foot as I Pac-Missed my way through Italian I again. (Tonight, I embark on a second round of Italian II.)
Adults take classes–writing classes, language classes, silversmithing classes, whatever–because they sincerely want to learn the subject material, but the degree of want can vary. And we all have so many commitments. Even as Teacher Me boggles at students who slide their assignments under my virtual door at literally the last permissible minute, Student Me has been known to finish up her assigned Italian exercises in the osteria half an hour before class begins. And even to think Who are you kidding? when this past term’s instructor snarked at us–we were a sad little trio of language students, who could not hide from her displeasure when we slacked–for neglecting to memorize pages and pages of vocabulary and grammar each and every week in our copious spare time.
The thing is: you’re taking the class for personal enrichment and fun. There’s often no grade, so there’s no fail. The instructor probably has limited options for forcing you to your homework, or making you learn, or–in the case of workshop classes, alas–even obliging you to give feedback as good as you’re getting. This is true whether the course is face to face or online.
Seeing my instructor take our moments of student laze personally was good for Student Me. Knowing how she felt underlined the whole concept of You don’t accomplish stuff unless you make an effort. This in turn has motivated me to actually do a little studying beyond the homework minimum. And I do mean a little. At the end of the day, I’m still more apt to watch an episode of Leverage on Netflix. Still–more than zero.
I also had a couple interesting conversations with my instructor, about these two perspectives, and I discovered she’s a student, too. She’s taking an ESL program, full-time. It has a direct effect on her well-being, as success will directly impact how employable she’ll be in the near future. She’s been working hard for six months and her English is astounding.
And even she has “Oh, I am such a bad student!” stories.
It makes me wonder what classes her English teacher might be taking on the side, and so on, and so on…
I’m up to about 10,000 words on my Clarion West Write-A-Thon commitment. Here are a few of them:
The babble in her head continued on, but the words got increasingly hard to make out, as if her own voice was moving away from her, something about froglets with tails, and then she was dreaming about one, about chasing it, extending her hand to catch the froglets and finding ducklings under a leaf, ordinary ducklings from home, reaching out, trying to catch it as it scrabbled and fled, and somebody sliced her wrist, cut off her hand and no, that was her, she was holding a severed hand… Gale’s severed hand? There was so much blood and all the choking noises.