Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

Remember that sick day post from November?  Welp, I've just about recovered from that illness.  The family and I have been taking turns being sick ever since, and we're just now clawing our way back up to normalcy.  I work in a building with 800 other people, my wife works with close to twice that, and our kids are in day care.  This adds up to a household of frequently tested immune systems.

In order to increase the number of times I get sick in a year, I also decided to punch school in the face and wrap up this degree, so that I can move on to the next one.  I'm currently taking 7 credits, leaving 3 to go in the Fall before having another degree/certificate to toss on the pile.  At the moment, I'm studying 18th Century Nonfiction, and to counterpoint it, Young Adult Literacy.  This means I get to read Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (published 1722) and John Green's Looking for Alaska (published 2005.)  These books, respectively about mortal illness and being a teenager, are designed to  make me feel terrible.

In the first place, I am just now getting over "The Crud."  I do not need to spend any more of my time reflecting on how it feels to feel awful and maybe die.  Secondly, I have found it surprisingly enjoyable to not be surrounded by teenagers for a living, and don't need to spend any time not being able to yell at them (because in this case they are fictional) about the (fictional) choices they are making.

To cap off this semester-long exercise in Severitation, I get the opportunity to take a 16 hour course on the English Department.

The same department I have spent the last 15 years in, and will be leaving in 3 credits.

Substitutes

Last Thursday, I felt the little hitch on the back of my throat that always means a nasty headcold is coming.  By Friday morning, It felt as if my joints were all on the verge of deciding that they really didn't feel like joining anymore, my head had choosen dramatically increase its density, and my throat was trying to convince my brain that I could breathe fire.  No fun.

A trip the the Express Care on Friday afternoon revealed that I didn't have strep throat, so I did the manly thing and went about the business of my weekend while complaining the entire time.  Part of the business of the weekend was hosting a board game party, and preparing food for up to 12 folks.  I strictly followed safe food prep procedures, so I didn't spread what I thought to be a tough cold to my friends, and soldiered on, keeping Purell in business the whole time.  

Come Monday morning, I still felt like I'd been punched in the throat, but since I was still able to move, and didn't want to have to rely on Substitute Plans for my classes, I headed into work.  About two minutes into my second class, I got a call from the Express Care, letting me know that there had been some kind of mix-up with my test results, that I actually did have strep throat, and that "Gosh, I probably wasn't feeling well at all!"  Since strep is highly contagious, and I work with about 210 students on a typical Monday, I let the front office know and was essentially booted out of the building until I got my 24 hours of antibiotics in.

The reason I don't like using sick days isn't because I have an overly robust work ethic, or because I don't think a substitute could do justice to my pristine lesson plan.  It's because I have separate lesson plans for every period of the day.  And, frankly, I can barely keep on top of them, and I wrote them.  

As a COmputer Lab Assistant, I see every class in the school over the course of a week, sometimes two or three times.  I have 60 minutes of prep time each day, and much of that is writing curriculum, because there is none provided.  Now, I love this setup.  The days go by quickly, I get to be creative, and I like working with kids.  My Sub Folder, which contains just the essential information for a sub to get by, weighs in at about 2 lbs of paper.  It has class lists with log-in ID's, passwords to math and typing programs, schedules for each day of the week, emergency procedures, etc.  Unless a sub shows up early, they won't have time to look at anything until after their third class of the day.

I've had to use a sub twice before.  The first time was an absolute disaster that took about 2 weeks to recover from.  The second was a mitigated disaster that just left a couple classes behind.  Who knows what awaits when I get back in today?

Two Years Later...

A lot can happen in two years. For example: Your dream job of eight years may swiftly vanish into the wind. You may have a second child. You may notice that, while it seems the world has ended, it still somehow continues to turn. You may learn a valuable lesson in humility while looking for jobs that pay 40K per year. You may learn a valuable lesson in humility while looking for jobs that pay 30K per year. You may learn a valuable lesson in humility while looking for jobs that pay 20K per year. You may find a job that you like nearly as much as the last one, and pays 12K per year. You may learn to appreciate volunteering more. You may learn to appreciate making your own stuff more. You may regret not appreciating a full night's sleep more. You may finally accept that the world continuing to turn is okay.

On the Use of Technology in My Future Classroom

My goal is to teach a secondary level creative writing program.  I think that the value placed on the creative elements of writing is not keeping pace with the expressive mediums available to our modern society.  The blogosphere, the twitterverse, and the various other forums, newsgroups, and comment sections of the internet offer uncountable settings for fiction, poetry, memoir, advice, and more.  The abilities to critically assess, appreciate, and understand a text are incredibly valuable, but with no well-crafted texts to work with, those skills atrophy.  The digital world of words is infinitely broad, but its landscape is sparsely lit by few and far between lighthouses of heartfelt good writing.

I plan on helping students develop the tools needed to write well, to communicate effectively with the written word.  And the vast majority of that communication, for them, will take place online, and with digital tools.  Future writers will not only need to understand how different expressive techniques can be used to generate content that expresses their thoughts, experiences and beliefs, but will also need to have an understanding of the rules of conduct when creating and posting that content online.  They will need to know the formatting techniques necessary to prepare a document that will be part of a website.  They will need to know what can be done with cloud-based word processors, vs. what can best be done on a hard-drive based program. 

And I, as their teacher, will be using any and all tools available to me to develop those skills.  I will be using spreadsheets to teach vocabulary, I’ll be using presentation tools to share texts with the class.  I’ll be using web-based video programs to give the students a venue to share their work with the world.  I’m hoping to use tablet PCs to create a peer-review environment that gives student reviewers the tools they need to comment on a piece of writing, but preserves the “face-to-faceness” of an old-school writing workshop.  It will be my responsibility to teach students how to protect their writing online, and how to recognize what digital media is available for them to incorporate in their own work, and what is not.

Much of this territory is just now being explored in English classrooms, and it makes for an exciting, frustrating, and, above all, open, frontier for young writers (and teachers of young writers.)  In developing the best way to teach these skills, I’ll be modeling them to students as well. 

The most challenging part may be addressing the fact that, in two or three years, many of the terms and tools I’m describing here and now will be passé at best, and more than likely completely obsolete.  I will be constantly given opportunities to explore new tools, new norms, and new venues.  With any luck, my students will be exploring them with me, and together we’ll find ways to fill them with poetry.  Poetry and spreadsheets.

Pax and Petra,

Ben Geile

On Motion Games

I've been asked to play some motion-based games, and then give my ideas of what these games might bring to the table in a creative writing classroom.  I would advise you to read the previous post on rhythm games, as we'll be heading down the same road.
But first, A haiku:

Every Kinect Game Ever

artificial hip

seventy pounds overweight

wildly flailing limbs

Don't get me wrong, Kinect Adventures is a blast.  I'm just saying that the catlike grace I can display via Solid Snake in a Metal Gear game does not translate to my gaming performance in the 'real world.'  The Wii, on the other hand, forces me to focus my real-world motions on simply my hands, and occasionally my feet.  I am an absolute ninja at Wii Fit Yoga.  Something about the whole-body capture of the Kinect brings out my Inner-Marrionette-Caught-In-A-Ceiling-Fan. It is just so cool in the way it works that I can't bring myself to loathe it the way I do rhythm games.

How would I use it in a classroom?  Well, like rhythm games, many mo-cap games are twitch-based.  And when it comes to poetry and short fiction, the initial drafts are also pretty twitch-based.  Sudden, improvised word choices often create literary gold, and need to be indulged when drafting.  Haiku throwdowns operate much like rhythm and twitch games, and when a group really gets into them,  they just sound cool, too.  

Another way these can be useful is as a sometimes necessary distraction when writer's block hits.  The two methods to get past WB are pretty well summed up as "Just write until more good stuff comes out" or "Go do something else for a while."  And there is absolutely nothing farther from poetry than they way most poets look like when they are playing Kinect Adventures.

Pax and Petra,

Ben

On Spreadsheets

I've been asked to evaluate a classroom project that involved the use of spreadsheets.  Before I get into the project, however, I need to explain that the Geile side of my family is genetically predisposed to view any project, large or small, as an opportunity to create a spreadsheet.  We have been creating spreadsheets since before coming to the US from Germany in the late 19th century.  If you did some reasearch, you could probably locate a handmade collection of rows and columns detailing the rate, severity, and date of occurance of scurvy incidents during the trans-atlantic journey.  And in the corner, it would read "Property of F. Geile."  Spreadsheets are in my blood.

But then, so is poetry.  Shall ever the twain meet?  More on that in a bit.

The project I looked at was aimed at 4th graders learning about volcanos.  Their teacher, Mrs. Pishl, crowdsourced a set of data that the students thought they could learn about volcanos, narrowed that list down to a list of four, and then had her students work in groups to gather the actual data.  Students then input the data into a spreadsheet, and watched as their data was translated into a graph via MS Excel.

Based on what I could glean from the videos and notes, the project was succeful in a few ways.  It gave the students the opportunity to learn the process by which data is collected for graphs, and also let them be a part of the process, by allowing them to enter the data they had collected themselves.

In my experience with short stories and poetry, identifying what makes a piece good or bad is at best tricky, and often can lead a peer-review quickly from elevated discorse to a seven-way screaming match.  And nothing takes the passion out of a problem like that infinite field of empty boxes.

I would ask students to bring me a set of objective criteria by which we could judge the "goodness" of a piece (ie.  clever use of rhyme, setting, etc.) and create a survey that the writing students could give their peers to determine what "weight" any criterium has in relation to any other (ie. realistic endings carry twice as much weight as clever titles.)

We could build a set of formulas in a spreadsheet, and then simply apply the logarithms to a piece of writing to determine an objective level of goodness, that can be represented by a graph. 

Of course, this would then lead into a discussion of whether or not our classroom "goodness" logarithm has any relation to, say a "qualitative" logarithm, or a "likeability" logarithm, and we'd need to build more spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets also give a great opportunity for practicing concrete poetry.  In a college poetry writing course, a professor led a discussion on whether a simple data set could be emotionally moving.  I pointed to this (warning: N always SFW) as my response.

Pax and Petra,
Ben

On Netiquette

I've been asked to post a set of Netiquette rules for the hypothetical classroom I'll be teaching in once I complete my English Teaching degree.  I'm dressing for the job I want here, so these rules are aimed at middle-school youth in a creative writing class.

Mr. Geile's rules of Netiquette:

1.  Remember That the People Reading What You Just Wrote are Actual People.
          Remember that while the computer you are using to communicate is a cold, unfeeling machine, there is a warm-blooded person just chock full of feelings receiving that communication.  Don't hurt their feelings.

2.  When In Doubt, Don't.
          If you find yourself unsure if you should post something, whether it is because you're not sure if it is appropriate, safe, offensive, or understandable, don't send it.  At least, don't send it until you've asked Mr. Geile about it.

3.  Using All Caps is Always Lame.  Unless Used to Type SCUBA LASER, Which is Awesome.
          If you feel that you must give a word or phrase in your online communication some emphasis, try italics, or bolding, or underlining, or "quotation marks", or anything but all caps.  Exceptions can be made for acronyms or initializations.  Especially SCUBA LASER.

4.  Read Twice, Send Once.
          Double-check your spelling, grammar and word choice before sending or posting anything.  Assume that I will be grading every piece of writing you produce this semester.

5.  Log Out. 
          Make sure to disconnect yourself from whatever device you are using when you are done using it.  This spares us some confusion when commenting on each other's work, but also prevents unscrupulous people from pretending that they are you.