Category Archives: True Stories

Anecdotes from my past and present.

Students who teach, teachers who stude…

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Wine Reflections

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…

Looking for miracles in the app store

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Happy Canada Day, fellow northerners!

I am a firm believer in stepping away from the Internet when trying to write. I think better when I don’t face temptation in the form of a quick check of the Twitter feeds, status pages, Google reader, etcetera blah blah. One part of Cafe Calabria’s allure, for me, is that it hasn’t really got wireless.

Calabria is not an entirely distraction-free environment, but its diversions feel more human and, somehow, worthwhile. I don’t begrudge the occasional moment spent trying to comprehend the italian lyrics of Frank Senior’s eclectic musical choices, for example, or eavesdropping on the other early-morning regulars. As I write this, the fellows I think of as “Chatty Guy,” “Brother of Chatty Guy” and “Their Friend” are chewing over the ethics of hunting. They’re good with it in cases of self-defense, I’ll have you know and mostly all right with the idea of hunting for food. (“There’s something so right about killing something and eating it,” one of them opines.)

The conversation has bogged down, though, over the issue of sport fishing and catch-and-release. It is a typical morning jaw over java, and the longer the conversation goes on, the less sense it makes. Friend Of seems to be saying that you might as well eat fish because you don’t know they wouldn’t attack you if they could.

(Obviously that isn’t what he is actually saying, but it sounds funny as hell. Usually they talk about Celine Dion or Arnold’s Divorce or the Canucks. I find this topic preferable.)

Calabria is across the street from a Starbucks with fairly robust Wi-Fi, which has been tricky as I adapt to writing on my newest toy, an iPad. I can just barely pick up a feed if there are no big trucks parked on the corner. And the pad will sync if I’m online, which is a nice little hedge against data loss. So every now and then I get sucked into checking: is there Wifi after all? From there, it’s a short hop to The Forbidden: checking my Inbox.

In other words, I have not perfected my new regime.

I did write 187 words on Thursday–revising again, and adding as little as possible–which brings me to 35% of my Write-A-Thon goal of 20K words. And not having the 5 pound laptop on my back wherever I go is a very nice lifestyle change. Having got the weight of the laptop off my shoulders, the next goal is to give my hands a break as much as possible, so I’m working to make more effort to dictate things like e-mails and blog posts. I like the iPad version of Dragon, especially the part whereby I don’t need a tangly-corded external microphone to use it.

Of course, though I am trying to make the gadget serve my writing and health needs, I really spent the three months saving for the thing because I wanted a damn TOY. I spend a lot of time in the App Store, looking for the two dollar piece of software that will change my life forever. Have you found it? I am a fan of Simplenote and Dropbox, but I was already using them on the iPod. And though I love Flipboard, and am having fun with Sketchclub, I have yet to find anything, you know, miraculous.

Cafe Calabria

Making the quick getaway

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Kelly and I spent Saturday night in Victoria last weekend; I had a meeting for the mentoring gig and rather than spend an entire day getting there and then back on the ferry, we decided to make an Occasion of it.

Before 2001 we used to visit the city periodically–check out Canada’s most magnificent bookstore, poke around, admire the waterfront, hit Craigdarroch Castle. Then when the parents moved to Parksville, all our Vancouver Island to-ing and fro-ing got subsumed into family visiting. We’d catch the ferry to Nanaimo, get a ride to their place, and hang out. They were great trips–I still miss doing that–but all we’ve seen of Victoria since then was a brief sail-by last year when the Alaska cruise we went on with my family happened to pause in Canada.

This wasn’t exactly leisurely either, but kelly-yoyoKelly and I did manage to pack in some foodie tourism. We hit a lounge named Clive’s Classic Lounge, where they made interesting cocktails: their punch was incredible, and I had a thing called a rhubarb fizz that was very tasty. We also had insanely good Vietnamese food at a place called Kim’s on Johnson and a good brekkie at a hipstery joint, Mo:le.

Our big dinner at Il Terazzo was only just okay; the salads gave me high hopes, but the food–while nicely put together–was entirely lacking in special, or nuance. It is also a massive place, a pack ’em in cheek by jowl and let the noise mount venue. Nothing there was terrible, but the end result was, essentially, meh.

There were a couple big events happening in Victoria–a 90K bike race, and a boat festival of some kind. We were lucky to get a room at the Best Western. We were even luckier to get one on the fourth floor, directly across from a nesting seagull. Her egg began cracking as we were checking out of the hotel, and part of me wanted to stay until the thing not only hatched but grew to adulthood and started applying for colleges. It’s a good thing I didn’t–after kicking a hole in the roof, it crawled out of the bottom of the egg. Kelly and I saw some wriggling and one waving leg above the crown of the nest, but the miracle of bird birth didn’t yield any pictures more amazing than this blurry close-up of parent bird peering at the progress of its offspring as it busted out.

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My baggage, let me show it you

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Until I started taking pictures I was a grab the wallet and go woman: no purse, no supplies, no nothing extraneous. But when I got into photography I knew that I had to carry the camera everywhere; otherwise I’d be seeing things I wanted to shoot when I didn’t have it along. I’d also be leaving it at the library or wherever I went because if I didn’t always have it, I wouldn’t be able to remember if I’d left the house with it on any given occasion.

And so my soup to nuts big bag o’ stuff, Titanic, was born.

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Now I am trying to streamline. I have gotten myself a wafer thin bluetooth keyboard to go with the iPad I’ve finally ordered. The desired end result, after months of scrimping my pennies, is that these gadget will all but eliminate carrying the laptop around, and also allow me to move the camera and other must-have stuff into a lighter backpack.

(Oh, there were other rationales, too. We want to use it for comfort viewing when we travel. We got so media-deprived in Greece that we tried to watch Tango and Cash.)

Titanic the monster bag is gloriously big and ridiculous, and there’s no doubt benefit to my bones and muscles to be ambling around with twelve pounds on my back all the time, but the laptop makes it seventeen and that’s sheerly ridiculous.

Though the tablet hasn’t arrived yet, the keyboard also works with the iPod. So I have been tip-tapping at the cafe this rainy morning, trying it out and thinking about apps.

I do almost all of my first-draft writing longhand or on an app called Simplenote, which lets you put together simple text files and sync them, when the Wifi is flowing, to the Internets. I found Simplenote in a “top apps of 2010” article and though I’ve played with other versions of the same thing, it’s been the best so far for my needs. Ninety percent of what I do is text, after all.

Still, Simplenote won’t play nicely (or at all) with Word documents, which would make the prospect of revising 500-page novels while off-line–something I do a lot–rather challenging. I went ahead with the pad purchase on the theory that something that can handle Word files while offline, and sync to the cloud (preferably Dropbox) will eventually emerge from the nethers of the app store. Just yesterday I saw there’s something called “Office2” … I can’t tell from the salesbumf if it syncs, though.

This ornate activity and insistence on syncing comes of my being someone who refuses to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for mobile Internet access wherever I go. Even so, it does seem to me that a meta-app, something that opened up and auto-synced all one’s various cloud-based computer stuff when the Wifi was flowing, would be a good addition to the app store. It’s also one they don’t, as far as I can tell, already have.

And maybe I’ve just missed it, but I have spent a ludicrous amount of time surfing the App store. It’s just my kind of shopping: I can do it on my butt, from my house, none of the toys come wrapped in plastic and half the stuff I’m interested in is free. What’s also true, is that in an odd way, there’s not much there. Oh, there are twenty or fifty or a thousand “To-Do list” apps, but I’m guessing the average human needs one. Or two, if they want a dedicated grocery list that beeps when you’re near the store with the good price on kitty litter. I limit my game-playing to things that require at least a little brain–puzzles, essentially–and though I’ve loaded up a blogging portal for all my various online real estate, I still tend to compose things in Simplenote and then clean up the HTML on the computer when I get home.

Dear Blog: Today I did Stuff

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–Wrote but did not type words on the new story.

–Took big weekend project from 75% to 95% done.

–Decided I didn’t need rain gear and left house. Goggled at the sky: green-slate Apocalypse clouds, a day late. Went in, packed rain slicker. Came out, caught a spider with my face, relocated it.

–Tried to tweet about spider and realized a) I’d left my phone indoors; b) it probably wasn’t Tweetworthy.

–Fetched the phone and finally headed up the north False Creek seawall. Stopped ten minutes in to put on slicker. Walked in deluge to the burrito place in Yaletown. Which was, surprisingly, full of televised hockey and its worshippers, but their chorizo taco is so good I stayed anyway.

–Took Skytrain under False Creek and examined iGadgets at Best Buy. I was going to ask if any of you knew if the Belkin bluetooth music receiver was any good, but these guys say it’s about average and glitchy. Those Belkin guys! I suspect them of always making crap. Why is it they’re always the ones making the stuff I want?

–Walked the south seawall side of False Creek. Stopped halfway and stripped off rain gear to shoot ill-lit and no doubt fuzzy pictures of my Kingfisher friend. Raindrops kept falling on my head.

–Hit Safeway, Donald’s and La Grotto for groceries.

–Burst o’ teaching.

–Prepped flip chart for week’s mentoring.

–Italian homework!

–Another hour on big project. Got it to 96% and 10k words.

–Polished and submitted an article.

–Heated up the second half of godlike carnitas burrito.

–And now this!

Tomorrow, if I like, I can make like a slug.

Slug