On writing fantasy...

I need to do a semester analysis as we wrap things up, and I've also been doing some great reading as I apply to M.Ed programs and school districts, working my way towards a unified concept of why and how I teach. So look for some thoughts on that soon, maybe next weekend as the Powers That Be don't let me teach on the Saturday before Memorial Day.  :4)  It's alright; my fantastic students are all drowning in standardized tests and end-of-year projects and certainly deserve the break.

However, if it's not too sappy and self-indulgent to do so, I wanted to post a link to the blog of my boyfriend, an aspiring fantasy writer.  I thought he had some thoughts on why one writes in fantasy/science fiction, and especially as most of my students seem to read and write in that genre, they might enjoy this:

Errors, Wrong Turns, & Exciting Opportunities

The generalized thoughts on fantasy start about halfway down the post.

Relatedly:  I wrote fantasy/science fiction above.  I could have written "speculative fiction," this being the term I've seen thrown about occasionally.  On the one hand, it seems to come from the same market-driven, oh-heavens-let-it-seem-anything-but-GENRE repackaging that lead to the frankly sexist rebranding of the Sci-Fi channel as "SyFy".  On the other hand, like so many meaningless-brand phrases, it becomes more interesting if you actually unpack it. Speculating! Both in the sense of imagining/contemplating/theorizing, and perhaps even in the sense of gambling.  Hmm.  Or maybe I'm just language-geeking a bit too much.

Shiny Syllabus! And a snazzy link!

First of all, allow me to geek out pedagogically a little bit and say that this is an absolutely fantastic example of an English teacher's website. I wish more of my college professors had been half so organized.

Secondly, my spring syllabus, behold!  More details will be forthcoming, but I'm super-excited about all of it and hope my students will be as well.  Spring 2011

DRAMA.

 No, that does not describe my life.  Well, not more so than usual. 

Fall semester of Northwest Chinese School ended on Saturday.  As usual, I ended the semester by pulling an all-nighter to get the grades in and, DESPITE the sleep deprivation, floated out of the last class deeply grateful for all of my students, excited about the next semester and feeling the usual giddy terror that if anyone knew how much I have fun teaching no one would ever agree to pay me for it. 

The Saturday class, untrammelled by school administrations and required texts, is a very open-ended one that gives me the opportunity to teach some of the projects whose long-term value is incalculable but whose short-term results might be hard to work into a standard classroom (though if and when I do have my own classroom, I'm dedicated to a yearly NaNoWriMo unit, because the results have regularly outstripped my wildest expectations.)  Just to make sure I don't teach a class that would only be interesting to thirty-five middle-school versions of me, however, I try to base most of my teaching decisions on two things.  One, the state standards for reading, writing and public speaking; this keeps me at an appropriate grade level and leads to some occasional neat connections being made between what they're doing with me and what they're doing in their weekday Language Arts classes. 

Second, I base the spring semester on their answers to the class evaluation in the fall, including the question "What would you like to cover next semester?" 

I got quite a few useful gems out of this semester's evaluations.  Less in-class work time; I was hesitant to assign too much homework, but it sounds as though the in-class working, as with our novels, was often more boring.  No love whatsoever for the "Vocabulary From Classical Roots" work; I may start designing my own worksheets based off their units rather than relying on the workbook.  If I'm going to do public speaking stuff, it needs to be scaffolded, supported and clearly laid out; that caused a lot of anxiety, and one eval said simply "In the spring: No presentations.  Seriously. I *hate* presentations." 

However, the one thing that got the most interest and the most votes was drama and acting.  Which is, of course, the area of English education where I'm the least comfortable teaching.  

I ran to my old college roommate, a talented and rigorous director, and got these basic theatrical "most important things" to add to the language arts goals I'd be focusing on.

moi: .

  Okay.

  What would YOU say were the four most important things about acting and playwriting?

18:32             Roomie:  four each? or four all together?

18:33               ....you should read David Ball's Backwards and Forwards...it would help with                         something like this...

but...
     

 
 

Acting:  

1) Motivation

  2) Obstacle

18:34 3) Creativity

18:35 ....4)....

  I'm not going to state this very well...

18:36 but the idea that...the person in the script is does not exist...that they are what you make them...when you see it as a shell, or a skeleton, you can better see what needs to be filled in.

18:37 or how to build into your portrayal what is needed to make the character a real person

  

  Ok...

  Playwrighting:

  (you should ask Jenn...she took the class :))

  but...

  1)

18:39 oh gah...I'm so not a playwright...

18:41 1) Write, knowing all the time that it will be read out loud.

18:42 2) Good exposition

18:43 addendum to 1)....write, knowing it will be seen, as well

  I don't know what 2 means...

18:44 I mean, I do...but I mean that you need to be able to apprise the audience of the situation of the play without saying "so, this is the situation of the play"

18:47 3) Conflict

12 minutes

19:00           Roomie : I don't have a 4th...

  ...I was trying to think of one...but I have given up...

  Or rather, I was trying to think of how to state it, but I gave up.

So now begins the brainstorming, the planning, and the search for a good middle school sample text as far as plays and scenes go.  The go-tos for teaching theatre, once you get beyond "This Play Was Only Written To Be Anthologized For Eighth Graders," appear to be "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Crucible."  Both are awesome shows deserving of a far more character-based and subtle treatment than they usually get.  But I think both plays can get offered to middle schoolers a little condescendingly: "Look! Juliet/Abigail Williams is under eighteen, too! Don't you feel catered to? Isn't it (air quotes) 'relevant'?"

Though perhaps I say this just because I like both of those plays, and I'm not interested in only spending a single day or two at most on them. 

Despite my anxiety, I've got to say: theatre! Drama! Acting!  This is going to be fun.  And with any luck, my talentless enthusiasm will be infectious, and the students will feel less self-conscious.  :0) 

Any thoughts on theatrical possibilities? 

Finishing up the semester at NWCS!

Today was our third to last class at Northwest Chinese School, so I'm doing the end-of-semester clean-up of missing assignments, so here I'm reposting a few papers:

Dialogue Gloss or Character Paragraphs

Prewriting Exercises

Today we did a revision exercise working through five main skills:
1. Pronoun Usage
2.  Sentence Fragments & Run-Ons
3. Weak or Passive Sentences
4. Simple, Complex & Compound Sentences
5. Paragraph Organization

The details and explanations of the activity are here.

Finishing NaNoWriMo!

My lesson plan and materials for my class's last day of NaNoWriMo.  Feel free to take!

Lesson Plan: Week 10

Novel Reflection Assignment: Midterm         

Novel Mad Libs: New Year's Resolutions, The Odyssey & Make Me A Video Game

Novel Character Game: 12-Character Meme 

Verdict from the Jury

Students' responses to the questions:

What did you like about the novel project?	What did you not like about the novel project?
It is interesting I like the old times in Europe, I put them in my story.	It takes days to finish it.
It made me feel more confident about my writing. Helped me shorten my time in ESL class in my school.	Going too fast. It is hard for me.
Practicing writing Know how hard it is to write a novel.
I liked how it was really fun we had dare machines to make our stories funny and goofy. I liked how our story could be as random as we wanted to.	I didn’t like how i had way too much homework from school to make my novel better. I didn’t like how I didn’t use my time wisely si could improve my story and I couldn’t make it as long as I could.
How it was really sad but good and how my characters came out to be.
I could use my imagination to create a story. I learned that a story can come with many lessons if it’s not meant to be	It took a lot of my time.. sometimes I got stuck on wha to write.
It was fun writing a story. I liked using the dare machine.	There was a lot to write. I don’t have a 2nd one.
One is the gut and another one is the theme.	Too long, no special stuff.
Writing the story.  It was very fun and interesting.	You had to write a novel in a certain time. It was a bit tiring, because sometimes I would stay up late writing it.
I liked doing the preplanning, and actually typing it down.	I didn’t like figuring out what my characters should say, and I didn’t like figuring out the enxt scene.
I liked it when we can create our own things, also getting tickets.	I didn’t like it when we had to write, and I didn’t like to write paragraphs.
I liked it because it was fun and a good experience.	I didn’t like it because I didn’t have much time to do other things.
I liked creating my characters and my world. I liked making my characters do what they did.	I didn’t like it when I got stumped.  Also, I hated not knowing how to spell a word when needed.
I always had something to do when I was bored. I had fun making up stuff.	Too much typing. Hard to think sometimes.
the two things I liked about the novel project is you get to experience writing your own story without having to follow rules also it lets you create your own story.	There was a time limit which made it o hard to manage writing the entire novel while writing other things.
I liked getting to create and write my own story without my mom yelling at me to do my homework. I also liked the prizes.	I really wish we had more time to finish and the pace was tiring.
Well, you had an extra challenge in doing wriitng.	Writer’s block and staying on topic.

Fanfiction...

This takes much more thought than I've got the time to give it right this instant, but I wanted to share this NaNoWriMo pep talk from Mercedes Lackey on the benefits of writing fanfiction.  It's usually a knee-jerk rejected thing, but it's always been interesting to me as a writer (good place to experiment with character and dialogue and prose without getting bogged down in world-building), as an academic (communal writing, the-author-is-dead, textual ownership), and as a teacher. Four of my students did fan novel this year or last.  One has now written something like 200 pages of "Magical Starsign," a DS game, and the character development she's adding to this game and the description she's pouring into it are impressive, and I've definitely seen her confidence in her own writing grow, or so it seems.  She's putting out great work for any new writer, let alone a twelve-year-old writing in her second or third language, and is that really diminished because her jumping-off point was a video game?

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk