All Snuggied In

Well, we're having quite a fine blizzard here in Nebrasky. My sister's boyfriend claims he's coming to get me for brunch. We'll see.


Update: Rash picked me up and delivered me home in one piece. Had a great time and am home again, more than ready to be snowbound for the next few days.
Peace.

Spelling Shmelling

It's the last day before winter break and the now traditional English department last-day-of-the-year egg casserole is baking. You know the one: eggs, bread, half-and-half, jalapenos, chorizo, cheese. Mine is never as good as my mother's was, nor is it as good as my sister's, and I do not care for it, but my co-workers insist it's divine. I have donned my semi-ironic sequined sweater and am braced for the sublime madness of finals and holiday sugar bombs showing up everywhere.

With a little time to kill, checked out my Twitter feed (yes I'm a Twit, aren't you?) and as usual, Charles Blow had an interesting link to wake my brain with.

A British education blog, School Gate, posts this: Should Spelling Be Inventive?

The first paragraph is a proud summary of all the British schools gearing up for a big spelling bee. "Some things in life are either right or wrong and spelling is one of those." I agree with that sentiment, and instantly think of color vs colour, then grey vs gray, and shake my head, try to focus. Where are we going?

The author of the article quotes a principal from a Georgia (USA) elementary school regarding spelling:

“However, for written expression activities students are allowed to use inventive spelling (spelling words by how they sound)," the principal writes, "to help get their thoughts on paper and avoid spending too much time on asking how to spell words.”

Oh dear. As all those Spelling Bee entrants know, you can't go through life spelling "inventively". I am not a fan of homework for primary school aged children, but I am fine with spelling tests because children simply need to learn the correct ways to write words.

And don't think that attitudes like this are limited to the States. The guidelines in this country are usually interpreted (at least in state schools) to suggest that teachers don't correct all the wrong spellings in a child's work, so as not to make them feel too downhearted. This of course means that many children don't realise that they have spelt a word incorrectly - and then don't learn how to spell it right in the future.

(My Yankee spellchecker tells me that she has misspelled "realize" and "spelled" up above but I'll defer for now.)

Let me just address what I believe the principal was getting at (or what I would have been getting at.) First, the use of the word "inventive" might have been an unfortunate choice. I think he was trying to say that for first drafts, the young writer's attention should be given to ideas, not technicalities.

I urge my students to set aside concerns about spelling, grammar, even logic, when taking a first stab at a topic. This is not because I'm afraid they'll become downhearted. It's because these important aspects of revision, introduced too early in the writing process, cause them to become fainthearted. The writing is flaccid and careful-- no going down blind alleys where wonder may lurk, no risky plunges into damp jungles of thought, no, they're too busy looking up believe.

Later they're expected to pull out the dictionary and take the red pen to their own work. Too often young writers toil under the misapprehension that if they are very careful on a first draft, it will be perfect and no more work will be required of them. They don't want to waste a jot of ink or effort, so they grip their little pens and clench their little brains and what comes out is stiff and possibly proper and usually dull. I want them to go wild.

Full disclosure: I am a terrible speller, and I admit this to my students. I tell them adults who claim to have all the answers, all the time, are liars or fools, and they'd better get used to looking up answers and checking with experts now or they'll grow up to be liars and fools themselves. Thank heavens we don't have closed-circuit cameras in the classroom (yet).

p.s. Despite the silly Christmas sweater picture in my previous post, my dogs are usually naked all the time.

The Lost Snow Days

You've seen The Lost Weekend, right? That's the one where Ray Milland goes off on a bender and breaks your heart. I'm grateful to say I haven't had one of those weekends in a couple of decades, but that in no way means that I've healed all up. My addictions have simply taken other forms. It's the old game of whack-a-mole.

I am currently wallowing in the pure benevolence of the Universe. Snow Day Number Three. I don't remember the last time we had three snow days in a row-- it may have been when I was a kid, the glorious blizzard of I want to say '75. I was a teenager and old enough to get up to no good, that much is certain. But this is not about that.

First, yes, I had plenty to occupy me, important things that needed doing. I needed to replace my toilet seat (and have needed to for some time, purchased the replacement parts and the necessary tool some weeks ago) and I did it. I needed to get started on a bajillion batches of peanut brittle, and am now seven batches in (or eight, if you count the one ruined when the phone rang, thanks Cathy, but it was worth it!) Water the plants, feed the birds, print my free Annual Credit Report, shovel out the driveway to facilitate commiserating with my neighbors' exasperation when the plows go by and fill it up again, done, done, done, and done.

But the really important stuff, all having to do with this keyboard, with quieting my mind and overcoming the shlump (not schlump, that's something else, and not "w#&*!r's b*%#k", do not use those words around me please) I've sunk into since my ill-fated stab at NaNoWriMo (NoNoWriMe), these things I have not done. That sentence stands as proof that I'm having a little trouble with my writing.

It's just another addiction, see. Not booze, not vicodin, nothing I couldn't drive after doing. It's this damn glorious Internet. But wait, let me explain. It's not what you think.

It started with a little housekeeping. I says to myself, Let's once and for all catch up on that dang Google Reader feed. I love the Google Reader feed, a handy tool that enables me to keep track of all the blogs and news sites that at some point seemed so important or interesting that I never wanted to miss a single post. Read or deleted all 455 posts, even unsubscribed to a few feeds that no longer seemed so interesting or important.

Problem: as I'm whacking them off the front end, they keep stacking up on the back end. Became obsessed with getting them down to zero. Did so. then there's four new ones. Knock 'em down. Two more. Bam, bam. Six more. That's where my keyboard time went.

I started this post Thursday evening. It's Saturday morning and don't ask what Friday back at school was like. I'd tell you, but there are 48 things I need to read right now.

ps One other dubious accomplishment--made my dogs put on the sweaters from Aunt Mary and pose for Xmas pics. Alice is resigned, Gert is Not Amused.

In answer to a question: Balancing work and art

I just plagiarized an email to a full-time teacher who is contemplating taking the plunge into an MFA. In my defense, I told the recipient I was doing it. Here's the meat of it:

So, balance? Well, I'll be honest and say I think I did a rather poor job of it, but everything that needed to be done got done. I didn't try too many new things on the job, and I got lucky my last semester a had a wonderful, capable student teacher. But basically, I made the MFA my life. Went to bed ridiculously early so I could get up at 4am and write before work (found that after work, I was too spent to do anything but read.) Weekends were totally dedicated. I am fortunate that I have nobody to take care of or cater to except my dogs, but if you have a family, and they support you in this, it can still be done. I can hook you up with a couple of married high school English teachers, both with children, who also got through the program.

The bottom line: most of the time, the sacrifices stopped feeling like sacrifices. I finally had what felt like the perfect excuse to decline invitations-- I didn't just want to write, I had to write. It got me into a practice that I now no longer feel I have to make excuses for. It felt like an amazing gift I'd been waiting all my life to give myself. Bad sentence, but you get my meaning. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Humpday

I am not fit for company, and apologize for my long delinquency. Overwhelmed, etc, and I feel bad bitching about needing a day off when I know far too many people who have too many days off. I'm sort of sick and tired of waking up worrying about other people's kids, but it's somehow not triggering my compassionate nature. No, quite the opposite. I'm feeling particularly Melvillian and want to knock hats off heads (and suckers out of mouths and smirks off faces and you get the drift. Danger to others.) I'd really like to take to the sea today. Or the desert, forest, prairie, recliner, anywhere else really.

OK, to cheer us on our way, Neil Gaiman has linked to his Nano peptalk from 2 years ago. Thank you, Mr Gaiman, and I hope it's going well for all. I am not as far as I hoped to be by today, but still ahead of what I could be.

More Linkage: NaNoWriMo

Here's a great post from Editor Unleashed on why to do it, comparing NaNo to running with the bulls. Makes me feel all brave and wild.

Also, Dr. Wicked is going to be rolling out a new version next week, promising even more helpful evil. (Who's hoping that Electric Shock Mode finally gets enabled?) Hit me with your best shot.

Finally, I uploaded or downloaded (which is it?) the free trial of Liquid Writer just to see what all the fuss is about, and I'll tell you one thing: she's hot. I don't know if it's something I'll use, but it's fun to play with in my very limited playtime.

I'm heading in early to get a jump on grading. Today my kiddies take their first semester final. English 2 begins Monday with Romeo and Juliet, for which I am stoked. Loves me some Romeo and Juliet.

My First Fling With Dr. Wicked

Go! Goal set--200 words, 15 minutes. I am taking my first real stab at using Dr. Wicked's Write or Die site, and because I have no idea how fast I can or should write (or type, for that matter,) I thought that would be a valid first outing.

I first heard about Dr. Wicked on the NaNoWriMo site (yes, I'm obsessed, aren't you?) and thought I'd give him a go. The site allows you to set a timer and a writing goal, which my inner Luddite snottily smirks at. Did Isak Dinesen require a website with a timer? NO! And the only outside help Balzac had was the copious consumption of coffee, which I understand he drank all day and into the night, up to and past the point of madness. I can no longer avail myself of such chemical extremes, preferring to pop an extra vitamin B and swig some fish oil from the bottle instead. I like to sleep when I'm in bed, thank you very much. But anyway, I'm jabbering now not only to avoid punishment (I'll tell you about that in a minute) but also to drown out the annoying anti-nerd nerd in my head. No, Dinesen and Balzac and Asimov--

ooh, the celebratory horns just blew with 7 minutes, 47 seconds left to go. The horns are good, they mean to say I hit my word count. So that means I am capable of writing 100 words in 7 minutes. So that means if I can, wait, let me hit the calculator. So, if I'm doing my math right, that means I SHOULD be able to write that 50,000 word "novel" in 3500 minutes. which works out to be 58.33333333333333 hours. In a month. Piece of cake.

All of these calculations assume I can keep up the pace. My plan is just to freewrite for 58.33 hours spread carefully over a month. 1000 words every weekday morning before school. 3000 on Saturdays and 5000 on Sundays, taking off Thanksgiving and the day before.

But back to Dr. Wicked. If I had paused to think for a bit too long, the background on my screen would have turned pink (which it did at one point,) then red, and then a presumably obnoxious song would have started playing and continued until I began typing again. My setting right now is 'average', but if I went with the kamikaze setting, the punishment is much more severe-- the words would begin unwriting themselves until I resumed. How evil is that?

So, after one roll with Dr Wicked, I think I love him. And I'm sorry DH Lawrence didn't have a spell check, and Henry James could not avail himself of word count, but I live now and if I have to breath modern air, and be a weak ol' modern woman who will never know the joy of trimming her own quills or killing her own goose, I might as well enjoy my gadgets.