At my school, we oftentimes have college students in the schools of education come by to do some observations of a classroom. My class, I like to think, is unique (isn't every class unique in some ways?) and so I'm always happy to have someone come in, watch what I'm doing, and then ask questions to help me understand what and why I do what and why I do it.
This year, one of the students followed up with a list of questions that I spent a good chunk of my prep time answering. As I finished, I thought that maybe someone else might be interested in what I had to say, so I figured I'd put the questions and answers here. Hope they help you.
This is pretty easy for me, as I've been given a lot of control in what I teach (I've been at the school almost since the beginning, so most of what's in my curricula has been through my choices). I think, however, if I were to be given a curriculum at a new place, the best way to stay engaged is to learn why the pieces are where and when they are. The logic of historical trends--particularly as we look at what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries--gives a strong motivation to want to teach what I do. (Having the students understand how and why the World Wars happened is a personally important component, so I see most everything that we discuss in the second semester as leading toward that.) So any course that has a logic to it, a reason for its set up, is one that I would have an easier time getting behind. 2. How do you handle the politics of your school? Politics is always a sticky thing, and for the most part I stay out of it. I do what's asked of me as much as I can, I try to do my job well, and let the rest handle itself. I do have great relationships with my administration, which can only be built via time spent together. I don't get the chance to chat with them as much as I used to, but I will sometimes pop my head in during my prep to say hello, see how the admin is doing, and get any questions I may have (say, about an upcoming assembly) answered. My school fosters that sort of relationship--it may not be applicable in other places--and I try to take advantage of it. 3. What do you do when you get overwhelmed? I pretty much just soldier on. I don't often have a lot of additional pressure (see #4 and #5 for details), so my overwhelmed feelings tend to be internal rather than external. If I mess something up that I can't fix--like I realize that I gave a false impression to a class about something in the curriculum, but I won't see them again because it's the end of the semester--I have to shrug and hope to do better next time. Despite teaching history, I can't really dwell in my own past too much, especially if I've made a mistake. Note it. Correct it. Don't perpetuate it. Don't fret on it. On occasion, I've had students/classes that were putting more strain on me than I could handle, so I talked to them about it. I basically let them know that we could either improve our behavior, or there were two massive text books that covered English and history from which they could learn the same information. They decided to change their behavior and things worked out okay. And, hey, there's nothing wrong with donuts-as-coping-mechanism, if you ask me. 4. What are your best tips for managing paper load? I have lots to grade about four times a year: Twice with the end of semester finals, and twice with large papers that I ask the students to write. So, on the whole, I don't have a lot of paperwork to do. Here are a couple of things that I do that have simplified my grading:
5. What are your best tips for maintaining work-life balance? See above. I mean, I do my best not to bring anything home--something I've been able to do as I've grown as a teacher, streamlined my style of teaching, and come up with different ways of remaining ahead of the grading requirements. I have a harder time with after-school stuff--chaperoning a dance, going to sports activities, watching the drama productions--and that comes because of how my family life and responsibilities are divvied up. I would like to do more at the school for the extracurricular stuff, but it isn't always possible. In terms of grading, though, that's school work that I do at school. The only at-home work I do would be reading/studying, which I find enjoyable and refills me anyway. 6. What is something you wish you would have known when you first started teaching? "Buckle up, my man. This is going to be a wild ride." I wish I'd known just how much teaching would stretch me, change me, and refine me. I wish I'd been a bit more humble about what I knew, more willing to learn from others, less willing to let my stress bleed into my classroom, more willing to help out. I also didn't know just how many amazing experiences were in store for me...because there will be. Lots and lots and lots of them. 7. What advice would you give a first-year teacher? "This year doesn't count." I mean, it does for the students, but your first year is the practice year. What really needs to happen by the end of that first year is that you've made a real, solid, genuine connection with some students. You have to be able to look back at what you accomplished and have it be "I made a difference in that kid's life and she did in mine," or else you'll fall apart. You'll recognize all the mistakes you made, all the embarrassing decisions you ran with, all the false starts and think you're a failure. But when I think back to that first year, though I cringe at how I taught, I smile when I remember whom I taught. This goes back to why I don't worry about tests and what-not: If I can make a legitimate, powerful connection between the student and the curricula, some sort of emotional touchstone for them, then I will have done my job. I want a student to look at a play poster for Hamlet ten years down the line and think, I really enjoyed how Dowdle taught that. I should go to this and see if I can understand it any better now. I want them to get warm fuzzies when thinking about Pride and Prejudice, rather than a revulsion about a book that they "had to read in high school". ~~~ Though that's not all I have to say about that, it is all I have to say about it for now. Thanks for reading. My trail toward fantasy literature is, in hindsight, a rather obvious one. There's probably a lot of Mormonic undercurrents that pushed me toward it (multiple other worlds, beings with extraordinary abilities, clear distinctions of right and wrong) that I won't dive into here. Maternal influence certainly had something to do with it, as my mom had (and still has) a deep affection for the fantastical. Superheroism and preternatural stories pepper my younger days' reading; little surprise, then, that fantasy fiction has been a mainstay in my life. Except for the tail-end of my high school career. I was taking a science fiction class from Greg Park (a fantasy writer as well as teacher and all around good guy) and, though it was clear that fantasy could do a lot of what was being discussed in the class, I kind of developed the sort of snobbery about literature that's the inevitable result of learning just enough to be dangerous. I didn't necessarily dislike fantasy, but I preferred science fiction. Then my future sister-in-law, Becky, came over (she was dating my brother at the time) with a door-stop tome under her arm. I believe it was Stone of Tears (but I could be wrong). I asked her about it, and she said that it was a really cool fantasy series by a guy named Terry Goodkind. I asked her if there was a lot of magic in it, or maybe just a light touch. For some reason, I didn't want to read it if there was too much of the fantastical in the fantasy novel (an irony that was completely lost on me at the time and will, perhaps, become clear to you as you finish reading). I remember hoping that she would answer that it didn't have too much; instead, she said that there was quite a bit. She recommended it anyway. Stone of Tears was the second book in the series, so I didn't borrow that one. I picked up my own copy of Wizard's First Rule later--probably at MediaPlay--and started reading. Despite its unassuming first sentence ("It was an odd-looking vine"), I was rapidly pulled into the world of Richard the Seeker and his true love, Kahlan Amnell. Despite some extreme content (tame, perhaps, if you're a reader of George R.R. Martin or Joe Abercrombie, but pretty intense for a seventeen-year-old), I really enjoyed the book. I read the entire series (as far as it had been published, at least) before leaving on my mission in 2002. Goodkind inspired me to pursue fantasy in a way that I hadn't before. In many ways, he's foundational to my own writing interest (though not, necessarily, style). I purchased more of his books after I came home, eventually getting Gayle interested in them as well. I read up through the Chainfire trilogy, as well as the novella, Debt of Bones. I even listened to the connected-but-not-about-Richard spinoff novel The Law of Nines. Eventually, much like with Brian Jacques, I stopped reading the same story again and again but with a different cover. Honestly, part of the break with my appreciation for Goodkind happened in Naked Empire. (This is a major spoiler, so if you're going to read/reading his stuff you may want to skip this…and probably the rest, since I'm not really a fan anymore.) In that novel, Richard is poisoned and the only way to be saved is to drink three draughts of an antidote--one of which is destroyed by the bad guy of the story. When Nicholas the Slide (great name, by the way) pours out one of the vials, I thought something along of the lines of, Holy crap! How's Richard getting out of this one? And though there is a pretty clever piece of writing when they figure out who's been spying on them the whole time, I was immensely let down that Richard survives because his magical gift inspires him to describe how to make the concoction that would save his life. Yup. The whole thing was solved "because magic". The Chainfire Trilogy was really enjoyable, and I felt that the end of Confessor was enough of an ending to leave that world behind. But it wasn't just my disappointment in Naked Empire that made me start resisting some of Goodkind's writings: It was his objectivism. One of Goodkind's strengths is his ability to weave throughout his novels rigorous philosophical conversations without them feeling out of place…at least, he used to be able to do that. But his adoration of Ayn Rand (pretty far from my favorite philosopher, if I'm being honest) becomes larger and larger as the books progress, eventually setting up a massive strawman argument that undergirds the entire motivation of the "bad guy" nation, the Imperial Order. The great crime of the Imperial Order is the familiar distortion between communism and totalitarianism, and since I knew my Mormon history well enough to see more than a passing parallel between it and the similarly named "United Order", I felt more and more uncomfortable with what was being denigrated and what was being asserted in the libertarian thrust of the rest of the novels. I still appreciate his willingness to tackle issues that are important to him, and I love the idea that the characters are really motivated by their commitment to their principles…I just don't really jive with what he has to say anymore. The pages long (not joking) rants that some characters have as they evangelize their rugged individualism is not really a highlight of the series, if you ask me. So my own politics breaks with Goodkinds; big deal! Separate the artist from the art and all that…well, sure, but the politics is the art, in this case, so that doesn't work. And more than that, I eventually started seeing Goodkind as having hoodwinked me. As I mentioned earlier, my forays into fantasy were frequent as a kid, but I stopped reading it as much when I went into high school. With Goodkind being my reintroduction to the genre, he acted as a kind of touchstone for me, the source of what quality fantasy looked like. If it was derivative of him--or out of sync with his style--I didn't really care for it. In other words, he became the entirety of my palate. The problem with that is there are other fantasy novels out there, and most of them are different from the Sword of Truth series. So I was kind of faulting a phonebook for lack of a plot--accusing other books of not being what I thought was fantasy because I was reading "real" fantasy. And, strange enough to say this, Goodkind doesn't think that he writes fantasy. First of all, I don't write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either. (Interview) This is factually wrong on almost every single count--so much so that it's probably not worth even indulging with a response. He does, however go on to say this about his work: What I have done with my work has irrevocably changed the face of fantasy. In so doing I've raised the standards. I have not only injected thought into a tired empty genre, but, more importantly, I've transcended it showing what more it can be--and by so doing spread my readership to completely new groups who don't like and won't read typical fantasy. Agents and editors are screaming for more books like mine. (I couldn't find the original interview--which makes this suspect--but here's where I found it.) Wow.
So, while Goodkind rails constantly against this kind of cherry-picking of his quotes (claiming that they're out of context, though in reality they sound just as bad in it as out of it), I think it's fair to say that the man doesn't think of himself as a fantasy writer. He refuses to be pigeon-holed (and says calling him one an example of bigotry, which means that he really doesn't know people use that word), despite the fact that he writes fantasy novels. I don't know what he's trying to get at, really, with his rejection of the genre that's made him a millionaire. He writes about wizards, dragons, magic, dark entities, preternatural events…a whole host of things that fits inside of the very broad definitions of fantasy writing. No, there are no elves, nor dwarves, in his books. But if elves and dwarves are the requirement for fantasy, most fantasy these days isn't. It shows a shallowness of reading within the genre (in another interview, he asserts the only other author worth reading is Ayn Rand) that he's insistent on his point of view, at least to me. Do you see the irony I mentioned earlier? So here's where it kind of comes down to: I recognize that there were some really great things in his books, especially in the early ones. There's a lot of excellent development of secondary characters, as well as a hint toward a complex magic system that had a lot of interesting variation. However, I should have realized that the author has little appreciation for other people and that I ought not to add to his overinflated ego, even at the price of one more book. If you don't believe me, let me remind you the name of his first book, Wizard's First Rule. That rule, as described in the book? "People are stupid." I'm not going to say that he's a hack (at least, not completely; he definitely "borrowed" heavily from the only other voice in fantasy that I think he read, which was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series); he has moments of tension and good prose and some solid ideas. But he also has Superman with a sword and treats him about as well as someone who thinks Superman needs a sword would. There was potential in his world, I think…but it got lost somewhere along the way. I will also say that, at least as far as my own reading will go, it won't include Goodkind again. And that's sad. I did enjoy a good many moments in that series. I wish that it hadn't become tainted in my mind, that his attitude towards his readers wasn't divisive ("true fans get me" is a type of mantra that comes up again and again in his interviews) and that he embraced what he was. Ah, well. Fortunately, there is a lot of great fantasy out there. Perhaps one day I'll be a part of it. My grandmother died at the end of January. I haven't written about it because I've had a lot of conflicting feelings about it. It was one of those She's been suffering and it was her time kinds of deaths, and I don't think that's wrong. She was in her nineties and had been slipping away from us pretty steadily over the past few years.
My grandma gave a lot to me, especially in my early years. I learned piano at her side, I mowed her lawn for a summer or two, and I went up to her house every month to play with cousins and listen to some Bible stories. She was generous and loving and kind--as well as happy and scolding and accepting and impatient. She was, in other words, a person, and a wonderful one at that. When I got word that she was in her final days, I had just stepped off of the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, which caused more than a passing conflict of emotions. I had to kind of put the news out of my mind, as there wasn't a lot that I could do at the moment and there wasn't really much news at all…just that she'd fallen asleep and was no longer waking up. It took a bit of time for her to finally pass, which was late on Wednesday, 15 January. Earlier that week, despite the logistical problems of the day, my wife, children and I went to the care center to say goodbye. She didn't know that we were there--or, if she did, we had no way of knowing--and for my youngest, he hadn't any real memories of her save the declining woman in a wheelchair that he'd visited with his own grandmother on occasion. While we stood there, looking at her shriveled form, I pointed out that she was a lucky lady, as she'd been able to raise not only her kids, but to see her grandchildren (me) and her great-grandchildren (them). My oldest, who has a massive heart condition, said softly, "I probably won't be that lucky." That's when my heart cracked and I was unable to stop the tears that I'd stoppered while in the room. We said our goodbyes, dried our eyes, and left. We never saw her alive again. Part of what made me struggle so much with the death of my grandmother is embarrassingly selfish, a part that I'm loathe to put into words: I was, when it became clear that she was about to die, more upset that her funeral would prevent me from going to a writing retreat I'd had planned for months than because my grandmother was gone. I can rationalize some of this with the understanding that I have a few coping mechanisms that help keep me going, and attending a writing retreat is one of them. Mental health and self-care and all that. But it was a great frustration that I felt, as it were, emotionally blocked about processing Grandma's death because I was too inwardly preoccupied. Thankfully, we were able to reschedule the retreat so that my brother and I could come along--and, as it turned out, one of my fellow writers' grandmother died the day of the funeral, which meant the reschedule truly was for the best--but I still can't shake the feelings of selfishness and frustration at myself that I harbored during those days. The fact that it's now the ninth of February and I'm finally writing about this says a lot, I think, about how I felt. When the funeral came, it was the bittersweet experience of saying goodbye and nurturing the connections of the still-living, the quasi-reunion around a casket that is the paradox of death. I was happy to see my sister, who lives in Portland, as well as cousins whom I haven't seen in years. During the service, my dad spoke about his mother, playing some of the music that she loved to play on her piano--the soundtrack of my memories of her--and he cried. That was hard for me to see, not because I have a problem with seeing people cry, but because Dad doesn't normally get that emotional. He's a steady guy--marching onward resolutely and with a natural aplomb that I envy. I wept when I heard his tender words, and I listened to the music that he played for us--the intricate guitarwork that he's so well-known for, the gift that his mother gave him and he, in turn, gave to me--and I felt the reality of loss and the hope of living come over me. My contribution was a closing prayer, which I ended by quoting William Shakespeare, asking God to send "flights of angels to sing [her] to [her] rest". We all take solace in different things, I suppose, and I could think of no other way of honoring my grandmother than to share what matters so much to me in one last commemoration of her. The fog-drenched day made our trip to the cemetery more unsettling than is normal--I'm not a superstitious guy, but fog is an uncomfortable thing--and the graveside service was cold, though sweet. As a pallbearer, I got to carry my grandmother's remains to their final resting place. That is one of the great honors of being in a family, and I'm happy that I could help. After the graveside service was over, we returned to the church building for a luncheon put on by my grandmother's old friends and ward members. As we passed her home--sold over a year ago and no longer "Grandma D's house"--the sun broke through the fog enough to let a brilliant sunshine coat the road. That evening, I got to have dinner with my sister, her fiancé, and the rest of my brothers and sisters-in-law. It was another indication of God's goodness, I think, that we could take that time to be together--to use the sadness of confronting the inevitable to grow closer together. This may sound strange, but I've been thinking about Grandma almost every time I've sat down to play the drums. I bought an electronic drum set the week of the funeral; it had arrived on Thursday. It has been a new coping mechanism for me as I've been trying to understand what it is that Grandma left me, which is my own middling talents as a musician. As I mentioned before, Grandma taught me piano (as well as Sister Vest, who picked up where Grandma left off), but I learned guitar thanks to the steady patience and support of my dad. Recently--that is, in the past year or so--I've been composing my own music. I wanted to try to fully compose, rather than finding beats on the computer, so I picked up the drums. I play along with my guitar playing almost every day, striving to improve my talents in this area now. And as I drum, I think about what Grandma taught us about nuance and dynamics, about how to use the instrument to evoke a feeling. When it comes to the drums, that is a harder order to fulfill, but I find it guiding my playing nonetheless. And, since I've only had the drums after she left us, I like to think of this learning of a new instrument as an homage and invocation to and for my grandmother--a kind of rhythmic "thank you" to what she's given me. This remembrance is a poor substitute for the woman: Memories always are. Yet it's now what I have left. Yes, there are items--gifts and paraphernalia, the remnants of living--that will be in the family for subsequent generations. But it isn't about the things; it's about what I choose to make them mean. Occasionally, I will remember the jars of "Grandma loves me raspberry jam" which she would send to me while I was on my mission, or think of her stylized "OK" on the piano book where she would check off the song as completed. I may recall the smell of her home, the descent down the narrow stairs to her basement, the few months where, as a five-year-old, I stayed with Grandma and Grandpa while our home was being completed. It's possible that my thoughts of her will be perpetually shaded by the strands of pine trees at the cabin where I used to spend October General Conference in her company. It may be when I try to tease nuance out of a cheap electronic drum set, or pass by the familiar turns that would take me up the mountain to where Grandma lived. However it happens, I'm confident that I will keep remembering Grandma Dowdle. |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|