Vacation Stress

What it is about vacations? They are supposed to be relaxing. They’re supposed to be stress reducers, as in, “You look stressed. Maybe you need a vacation.” And yet I find myself always feeling more anxiety before and during, relieved to finally get home.

Okay, with one exception. Going to Cancun a couple years ago without children — that was relaxing.

So obviously the children are a big factor. There will not be much relaxing at Lake Powell this weekend because I will be constantly worried about where the kids are and if they are (a) getting hurt or (b) getting into trouble.

But another factor in the stress is getting everything done in time to leave.

Here’s a taste of how crazy the past few days have been.

I ordered a birthday package to get to Arizona in time for my mom’s birthday today (happy birthday, Mom!); yesterday it showed up on my porch. Yes, there was a forehead smack involved and some minor swearing: I’d forgotten to change the shipping address when I processed the order.

Then there’s been  job stress. My students have a report due tomorrow and I needed to finish giving them feedback on all their previous assignments so they’d be able to do the reports. Plus, I needed to put together a lesson plan for last night that would help teach them how to do their reports. Specifically, since they’re required to create a chart or table, I kind of needed to show them how to do that.

So I spent all morning yesterday making sure I knew all the steps myself. I’ve done tables and charts before, but when you have to teach other people how to do something, it’s good to go through the process specifically with teaching in mind.

And — don’t laugh too hard about this — I decided the simplest chart to make on the spur of the moment was the one I’d been wishing to come across in all my cloth diaper research anyway: a comparison of brands and types and prices, etc, that I could see at a glance.

There it is, in all its glory! And maybe by posting it here it’ll be of some use to somebody Googling cloth diapers. Although I should mention that this isn’t a very comprehensive list. I’m not particularly interested in cloth diapers that require separate covers, so this only shows All-in-Ones and pocket diapers of the major brands that offer 30-day trials.

The other thing that took me all morning yesterday was then figuring out how to convert the table from Word into a jpg image. I Googled the question and was not impressed with the results, which including everything from transferring to a PowerPoint slide to pasting the table as some kind of html which would supposedly save somewhere on my computer as a picture file.

Have you ever tried to find a file that you didn’t save yourself and you don’t know the name of? Well, I’m sure some people know exactly how to do this, but I do not.

In the end, the simplest thing was to copy the table, paste it in Paint, click “crop” under the Image tab at the top, and then save it as a jpg. This takes exactly 16.2 seconds (depending on the speed of your hard drive). So there you go. Maybe this post is just for people Googling stuff that I was Googling yesterday and couldn’t find. See how helpful I can be when stressed?

Today has already shaped up to be better. I finished reading and leaving feedback for all of my students just an hour before the internet went down at our house. I’m writing this post in Word, hoping the internet will come back on before we leave so I can publish it. But maybe it’s possible that I can leave today with a little less stress. 

Anybody else hate vacation stress so much that it’s tempting to just stay home . . . always?

Leave a comment!

Change the World

Yesterday was the first day of spring semester for Salt Lake Community College, and while I’ve never considered myself to be one of those movie-type teachers that inspires and changes lives, last night I decided to give it a shot — because the more I thought about it, the more it fit with the curriculum for my intermediate class.

When they came in, I had them answer three questions. The first two were just “warm-up” questions to get them primed for the third, but I didn’t tell them that:

1. something nerdy about you
2. your claim to fame
3. one issue you’d tackle/change

(Originally, question three read “one thing you’d change about the world,” but I tested it on my intro class, and half of them said “war” or “world peace.” Oops. A little too broad.)

My answers were (1) I have my library card number memorized but not my bank account number, (2) I have students who like me enough to take both the intro and intermediate courses from me (about a third of the class last night), and (3) I’d change how English teachers teach grammar.

And my students had awesome answers. They’d change CEO overcompensation or disability awareness or put more reform in the healthcare reform or more initiative and inventiveness in education reform or stop the ways we put third-world countries into debt. I wish I could remember all the ideas.

Then I showed this clip from Pay It Forward:

Best of all, it’s not only possible to have one idea change the world, it happens all the time. In the newspaper over New Year’s I read about “People to Watch” in the next decade, and they were all working on different things: studying stem cells, mapping Down Syndrome genes, saving the Jordan River here in Salt Lake County, using saliva as disease diagnosis, running cities, serving in the senate, drawing alternative energy from waste lagoons, writing plays.

That’s how the world changes. You decide on the thing within your reach you want to tackle, and you tackle it.

My dad is part of the 29th Street Weed & Seed Coalition in Tucson — a neighborhood group that unites residents, schools, and businesses in working to reduce crime and build community. They’ve had some amazing success, including a 43% drop in crime compared to 15% in Tucson in the same period.

Also, my dad gets grants of all kinds to help improve the education of his middle school students and the lives of their parents. Last year he started teaching a weekend/evening workshop for parents that focuses on how to have stronger families. The course is free for those who are selected because of the grants my dad applied for. And it helps end cycles of domestic abuse, neglect, poverty, etc.

That’s how the world changes.

For my students this semester, they’ll be changing the world with a website. I showed them some of the ones from last semester, how one student’s site worked to educate people about the connection between drug abuse and gang violence, how another helped families of people diagnosed with a particular form of sclerosis learn how to cope, how one student used his experience working at a credit union to set up a site teaching people about avoiding debt, how another focused on finding happiness by avoiding consumer mentalities. (There are links on my English 2010 page for anyone who wants to see the sites.)

Now that I’ve taught one semester of this class, I realize that it is exactly like that Pay It Forward clip. It really is about changing the world and teaching students how, through writing, they can make things happen — the way my dad writes proposals and gets grant money.

Writing can change the world, and I like that thought a lot.

What about you? What’s something nerdy about you? What’s your claim to fame? And what would you tackle? How would you change the world?

Leave a comment!

YA as Diversity Course?

How cool would it be to fulfill one of your general ed requirements at your community college by taking a course in young adult lit?

That’s what a fellow teacher and I are trying to make happen. SLCC requires every student to take a diversity course, and we’re thinking, “What better way to explore diversity than through literature–particularly YA lit?”

Of course, there’s tons of work still to be done with researching requirements, gauging feasibility, designing the course, submitting it for review, etc, but naturally the first thing I wanted to do was make a list of potential books for the course!

What do you think of these?

Beyond the diversities of race in these ones, I also like that American Born Chinese is a graphic novel, Make Lemonade is written in verse, and The Absolutely True Diary is journal-style–complete with doodles. So there’s that diversity of style, too. That makes me most certain about these first three choices.

It also helps that American Born Chinese won the Printz award and was a National Book Award finalist, The Absolutely True Diary won the National Book Award, and the sequel to Make Lemonade–True Believer–also won the Printz and was a National Book Award finalist.

True Believer deals with sensitivity toward homosexuality in a very honest way, which is probably part of the reason for the two awards. Since it’s also told in verse, it’s a quick enough read that it might be possible to do Make Lemonade and True Believer together.

Mississippi Trial, 1955 gives a historical perspective on African American rights issues, and I think historicity is one of the requirements of the course.

The Chosen One is a frightening look at the extremes religion can be taken to, and that makes me a little wary. But of course, I wouldn’t want students to think any of these are representative of a whole race or religion, so maybe this book would provide an opportunity to discuss fictional portrayals of people.

A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life is also about religion, among other things, and stars a main character who was adopted and raised as an atheist but meets her birth mother, who is Jewish, and has to decide what meaning that heritage will have in her life.

Those are just the ones that I’ve read. Some others that I want to look into include The Possibilities of Sainthood by Donna Freitas and The Day of the Pelican by Katherine Paterson.

What YA books have you read that have enhanced your perspective on the diversity in America? Which would you recommend?

Leave a comment!

Identity Stories

Another incredible session that I attended at the TYCA-West conference Friday and Saturday was Sherry Rankins-Robertson and Duane Roen’s “Writing about Family History in the Basic Writing Classroom.”

What a cool idea!

Especially when Sherry described to us that “family” could mean so many things. If your high school football team felt like a family to you, you could write about that. If your family is losing health insurance right now, you could write arguments about health reform.

I have a student this semester writing about his brother-in-law’s battle with Friedreich’s Ataxia, and it’s been incredible to read the comments from his other family members and friends responding to the conversation that’s been opened for them through this writing project.

I think Sherry and Duane have hit on something vital, which is that the more our writing means to us, the more invested we will be in the presentation of it. I love it when students choose topics they are passionate about, and I think using the idea of “family” as a way of centering them is valuable.

For me, family history stories have shaped me so much as a person that they’ve taught me the value of all of our stories and voices.

The couple pictured here are my great-great grandparents, Silva and Chris. Silva was orphaned as a teenager, and taken in by Chris’s parents, and then Chris had to leave her for three years right after their honeymoon, and came home to find he had a three-year-old daughter. Incredible! And sometimes I think, if my great-great grandmother could endure that—the loss of her parents, then raising a baby and toddler alone—I have zero things to complain about.

The soldier is my great grandfather Willard. He fought in France in World War I. A bullet went all the way through his chest, and he was left for dead on the battlefield. My great grandmother Martha, his sweetheart back home in Arizona, didn’t hear from him for over a month. It turned out the bullet had pierced a hole in his lungs. Air was coming out his back. But Willard soon came home and married Martha. He attributed his survival to God watching out for him, and I often think of that too, realizing that if God could pull Willard through that, He can cause much simpler miracles in my life.

There are so many other stories like these in my family, and they have all shaped my identity. I always had their genes in my DNA, but now I have their stories in my head, and I think, “We are the kind of people who persevere, who do what needs to be done, who find ways to survive and be happy and triumph over adversity. We are not the kind of people who give up.”

Stories mean those kinds of things, and I think that allowing students to pursue issues that matter to their family—whatever definition of family they choose to use—would allow writing to be not only meaningful but identity-building as well.

What stories have shaped you? Funny ones? Serious ones? Embarrassing ones? Your own stories or stories of the people who are important to you? Share a story in the comments if you have a minute!

Leave a comment!

Homophones, Nazi Cows, and Other Banned Books Dangers

It’s a little funny at first, the whole concept of reading banned books. I mean, it feels dangerous, right? It feels like you’re doing something you shouldn’t, peeking at something you have no business seeing.

Until somebody explains to you that Little House on the Prairie has been banned. Or The Giving Tree. Or Alice in Wonderland. Or The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Then it just seems plain ridiculous.

I think my students recognized this yesterday when I introduced the concept of Banned Books Week to them.

Their first reaction was confusion, since they thought I was telling them Harry Potter is a “band” books (oh, the joy of homophones).

Their second reaction, after I showed them the PTA meeting clip from Field of Dreams (“Step outside, you Nazi cow!”), was laughter mixed with a tinge of uncertainty. After all, aren’t banned books banned for a reason?

Their third reaction, when I showed them the covers of the children’s books I mentioned above, was a collective gasp. 

“Wait a second,” that gasp clearly said. “Something’s not right.”

It seems to me that this is exactly what Banned Books Week is all about: showing people what censorship really looks like.

The trouble is, of course, that it’s complicated.

Does my freedom to have books available at the library impinge on your right not to walk into something offensive? If I want my children to read the picture book And Tango Makes Three, does having it on the library shelves endanger your children by exposure to the idea of gay adoption?

I live in a conservative community. I can’t pretend that I don’t understand that side of it. We all want to protect our children. But a lot of people don’t see it the way I do: that there are books and ideas out there that can save our children–except that if those books are banned, the children and the books might never meet.

For example, Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Twisted was challenged in at least two school districts this past month. She shared with blog readers the letter she was sending to those superintendents, and it included excerpts from letters she’s received from teen readers who were thinking of committing suicide–one who had even attempted it twice–and decided against it after reading Twisted.

So, yeah–I meant it literally when I say that books can save.

One of the comments in class last night that I really appreciated was that the way things should work is that parents should be in tune enough to their kids that they can communicate about every issue openly, whether suicidal feelings or gay adoption or racist terms in To Kill a Mockingbird. But too often children and teens can’t turn to their parents about the things troubling them, and it falls to a perceptive librarian or teacher to choose a book off a shelf and hand it to that student and say, “Here. Try this. See if this helps.”

That’s what I’m fighting for this week. I’m fighting for the right to have the right book on the shelf when the right reader needs it.

At the same time, I believe that parents should still have a say–for their own children.

In high school I did many alternate assignments in the library while my history or English classes watched R-rated movies, because my parents and I decided that movie rating was inappropriate for our family. We didn’t try to dictate, however, that the other students shouldn’t watch Braveheart either.

After discussing it as a class last night, it was great to see how a little bit of information helped open minds about the topic of banning books. That’s my hope for this blog post and this week, too: that a little bit of information will help stop censorship from removing books that are on the shelves for a reason.

*                    *                    *

On a side note, I once heard from some librarians at our university library that there is a case of certain books they keep locked away.

“Whoa!” I thought. “Those must be the really dangerous books.”

Nope.

As it turned out, they were books that had been locked away for their own safety.

It was the readers who were dangerous to the books. Writing over offensive words with a permanent marker. Ripping out offensive pages. Shredding whole novels.

So the librarians locked the books away to keep them safe from the efforts of censors, and you had to get special permission to check them out.

Interesting, huh?

First Comes Twitter, Then Comes Blog

It’s time.  I started tweeting once I discovered the networking possibilities with other writers, and now I need a hub from which to reach out, whether to other writers trying to publish or to my students learning to write.  Today is not the greatest timing, since I’m very stressed about getting everything ready for the start of fall semester tomorrow (sure, you don’t HAVE to have the syllabus ready the first day, but I do), but part of what I’m contemplating for the syllabus in my 2010 class (Intermediate Writing) is having the students put all their work this semester onto a website like wordpress, and as well as being the sort of teacher who has to have a syllabus ready the first day, I’m also the sort of teacher who has to read everything and try everything that I want to have my students read and do.  Thus the creation of this site.

Ironically, the novel that I’m writing now includes a blog, so my characters have been blogging much longer than I have.  That’s another reason that it’s time to do this.  If I’m going to write about blogging, it helps if I’ve had experience with it.  Plus I intend to add an “about” page for the manuscript that will give me practice answering that hellish question: “So what’s your book about?”  You know.  Stuff.  Teens.  Growing up.  All that.

Yep.  Definitely need practice.  Especially since I intend to start shopping the MS to agents within the next few months.  Maybe six months.  We’ll see how much longer it takes to get the whole thing in decent shape.  I’m meeting with a writing group at the end of September, so their opinion of it might determine how much more work it needs.

In the mean time, back to prepping for the semester.  My Intro to Writing class is pretty much ready to go, but I’ve got a lot of tweaking left to do with the Intermediate course.  And then MAYBE (fingers crossed) there will be time for working on the novel.

p.s. while deciding on supplementary readings for 2010 (textbooks are never as good as you want them to be) I came across this satire about punctuation and spelling in today’s blogging, texting, and twittering world; funny stuff (at least to a writer and writing teacher)!