Love and Video Games

It's that time of year again. Spring is in the air, and sixth graders are turning into seventh graders, and then it is that their thoughts turn to thoughts of love. It also happens to be the time of year when I teach the elements of poetry.

Each year, I force (er, challenge) my sixth graders to participate in a contest wherein they must come up with the most original, never-before-used simile for love. The project begins with moans and groans, but in general the kids are completely immersed in the task within a few minutes, and I've had some truly glorious similes in the past.

My personal favorite remains:

That's a sixth grader for you.

They have to provide ten supporting arguments for how the two things are similar, and I've learned a good deal about love by reading some of their arguments. (It also makes me speculate, sometimes, on the nature of their parents' love lives.)

I always provide my own example, which is video games, because, well, video games are cool and so is love, and I know some kid would choose it if I didn't, and frankly, it's not original because Lana Del Rey's already used it.

So here it is, and it may cause you to speculate on my own love life, but nonetheless:

1. In both love and video games, there are rules, but you generally have to play to figure out what they are and sometimes you never do.
2. In either case, you can win even if you don't know the rules, and you can lose even if you know them very well.
3. Whether playing video games or playing the field, you don't have to follow the rules to play, but if you break the rules too often, you might run out of people to play with.
4. Some people become so obsessed with video games, it's all they think about. I don't think I need to explain that: stalker.  
5. If you don't go outside and get a breath of fresh air every once in a while, both can give you a headache.   
6. Video games have epic wins and epic fails. Love can be pretty epic, too. 
7. You can buy video games new or used, they come in all kinds of conditions, but you can play them in most any condition (unless they've been used so roughly that they don't work anymore). First love is new, but usually people have other loves that follow that aren't new but still work out anyway. And some people have been hurt so badly that they don't know how to love anymore. 
8. There's always another challenge in video games (but you keep playing because it's worth it when you win). Ditto, love. 
9. Video games are built by other people before the player can use them, and those builders were influenced by video games that they've played. Of all the things that have changed about humans throughout our history, love has tended to stay pretty much the same; we've learned it by watching those who've loved before us. 
10. There are many different types of video games: some are for thinkers, some are for adventurers, some are for fighters, but the best probably have many different facets. The greatest loves, the ones that you come back to over and over, are those that challenge and engage all of the parts of who you are.

Batman at the yard sale.

Last weekend I had a yard sale.

It took over a week to prepare for it. To rummage through all the stuff I've accumulated over the last seven years and decide what's worth taking and what's ok to give up.

Throughout the process, I marveled at my lack of nostalgia. I ruthlessly threw stuff into the reject pile, feeling a sense of liberation from things, which I am, in general, a big fan of.

However, on the day of the yard sale, as people pawed at what was once mine, deciding whether it might have any value to them, I did get a little heartsick.

Not over the dishes that I've served friends and neighbors on for years or over the gaudy jewelry that I've impressed countless third graders with, but over Fain's stupid toys that I've been tripping over and cursing for years. The Batcave with its real moving elevator and garage for the Batmobile. The dozen Batman action figures, cars, villains, weapons, the list goes on.

Fain didn't have any remorse over selling them to the highest bidder. In fact, he told me I could sell everything in his room except for his computer and a few of his baby toys that he wanted to keep for sentimental purposes. (I didn't sell everything, but he did get a big haul that day.)

But as I watched child after child ooh and ahh over the Batcave (and corresponding Joker toy factory/lair), I got a twist in my stomach. I wanted to yank them all back and shove them back in his room where I would, no doubt, spend the last month of our stay in this little house tripping over them and cursing them, just like in the old days.

I don't know what it is. It just got to me.

Then a young woman came and asked about the Batman assembly gathered on the tablecloth under the tree in my front yard. She told me her daughter loves Batman, and her birthday was coming up, and the young mother was practically buzzing with excitement over the find. She asked the price, and after a moment of hesitation, I sold it cheap...cave, toy factory, heroes, villains, the whole lot...because ultimately I liked the idea that there's a little girl who loves Batman. I can relate to that.

And, honestly, she'll probably get a lot more satisfaction playing with it than I'd get cursing it.

This is where I change topics.

So this is where the posts start to shift from my obsessive yammering on about education to an obsessive yammering on about THE MOVE. (I considered referring to this integral time in my life as THE CHANGE, but since that's also an old-fashioned euphemism for menopause, which I'm not undergoing currently, I felt I should stick with the more specific description.) I'm referring to the move from a small town in rural North Carolina to New Orleans. From being a single mother for seven years to being a married lady.

The move is only a month away. The months from Thanksgiving to Spring Break - those were the months between visits with Jack - seemed to drag by. But the months from Spring Break until June 15th are flying - Back-to-the-Future-burning-tire-marks-in-the-road-flying. They're going so fast that I hardly have time to be nervous. So fast that I really don't even have time to think about it anymore. I'm on auto-pilot...

Except for a few moments every now and then. Like watching a BBC detective drama at night in the quiet of the house after I've locked the child and the cats away, when it occurred to me that all the things that have become familiar to me...my little house, my little routines...are about to change drastically. (But then someone else was murdered in Badger's Drift, so my musings were cut short. Thank you, BBC.)

But wow. I mean. Big change, right? So much change that I don't even think my brain can process it.

So I'm going to shift right now into using-composition-to-attempt-to-process-change-mode.

Lucky Mother

I read an article in The Atlantic recently called I Refuse to be a Grown-up that described one woman's refusal to be a grown-up-stick-in-the-mud. She equates a liberal, exciting, fun, youthful life with a life unencumbered by the attachments that drag a person into the mire of adulthood, namely marriage and parenting.

I totally get where she's coming from. I used to feel the same way. I vowed I'd never get married and have kids because I didn't want to grow up. Vast stretches of my twenties were spent daydreaming about trips that I never took, adventures that I never had, novels that I never wrote. I was completely free and unfettered, and yet I never did anything with that freedom. 

Conversely, Austin Leon, author of Steal Like an Artist, wrote a post on his blog about how having a child affected his creativity. He writes about a mother who tells him (before his son is born) that he clearly didn't have children because, presumably, people with children don't have the time or energy to be creative. After his child is born, he has to make adjustments, but he vows never to use his child as an excuse to fail at "The Thing" that he needed to do.

I like that.

I'm 38. Just turned 38 yesterday. I'm glad I'm 38. I don't have a single regret about it. It's just a number after all. I don't feel like I'm a different person than I was at 28, even though I know I am. I'm not less fun. In fact, I personally think I'm way more fun than I was then. True, I don't spend every night dancing on tables in bars (and I didn't spend every night dancing on tables in my twenties, thank you very much), but in retrospect, dancing on tables is only fun the first ten times you do it. After that, it just becomes blasé.

I'm 38 and I have one of those pesky little things called a kid (dozens of them if you count my students), but I'm hardly a grown up by any conventional standards, and it's actually age and the kid(s) that have slowed my descent into the stereotypical drudgery of adulthood. I'm able to sing Christmas songs in July loudly in crowded parking lots now without having had a drop of eggnog, and it's because of my kid. What better way to embarrass him? I can spend hours playing video games or watching cartoons, and I can discuss the relative merits of Ben 10 over Generator X with any fourth grader. I start dinner with ice cream and breakfast with cake (not every time), and the perfect meal is still hot dogs and mac n cheese. I wear skirts that look like tutus to my job, and I have the approval of third graders to credit for that.

I'm sure there are parents who got gray hairs over their kids, who gave up on childhood dreams to care for their kids, and I'm sure that there are old people who still look young and dance on tables because they didn't have kids. I needed the kid though. The kid was my howling, spastic, ever-chattering muse. 

I didn't finish a novel until I had my son, and I started and finished it in a month of naps when he was just over a year old. I didn't start making art again until he was old enough to tell me he wanted a pirate ship, and then that experience of making one out of old cardboard boxes and a legless Barbie doll reminded me of how amazing it is to create something just for the fun of it. I've been on more road trips and had more dumb but interesting ideas since I had him. In fact, it's the very thing that some people equate with aging - the responsibility of raising a child - that has really freed me from the whole aging process. I get to be a kid again with him.

Never in my life have I felt younger than I do now. Not that sort of young that I felt in my teens and twenties when I had to be more cynical and apathetic and stubborn than everyone around me, but the kind of young that I see in my kids, able to enjoy things that don't cost money or give me a hang over, able to imagine adventures and then make them happen, able to have silly, un-self-conscious fun.

Three cheers for adequacy.

Photo by Terrapin Flyer

Years ago I sat in a staff meeting at a school which shall remain nameless, but which, I feel certain, was very similar to hundreds of other American schools, and I was struck by the excitement over achieving the greatest goal imaginable in public schools: making adequate yearly progress.

Yay. We're adequate. 

Since when did being adequate become something to strive for?

Yay. I'm good enough. Not great, really, but y'know, I'll do as long as there's no one more than adequate around.

For all the lip service given to 21st century skills in schools: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, problem-solving, critical thinking in addition to the old stand-bys, the educational system itself is not set up to encourage the mastery of those skills. It's not set up to achieve anything greater than adequacy. Standardized tests, the be all and end all of the educational system, as a general rule, don't necessitate any of the above skills. Some of the skills, in fact, are completely contrary to standardized tests.

Creativity and innovation, for instance, both require a learner to consider several possibilities that have never been considered before. That's the very essence of these skills: generating new possibilities. Problem-solving, likewise, requires the thinker to consider multiple ways to tackle difficult situations, acknowledging that there are several acceptable solutions to most problems, and that the best solution can vary from one circumstance to the next.

Such is not the case with standardized tests whose stems are written as such: Choose the best answer. (The best is generally italicized to draw attention to it.) Of course, best implies that there is more than one answer that could be correct, but only one is best. That best gives the illusion of choice, the illusion of problem-solving and critical thinking. Regardless of the phrasing, however, what the test-makers mean by best is simply...what your teacher would tell you...what you memorized (and will promptly forget after the test). 

The system, at times covertly and at other times aggressively, throws up obstacles to the very skills that are needed in the modern era. Efforts to turn around failing schools with innovative curriculum like the Quest Schools and the Turnaround Arts Initiative - programs that truly, unapologetically embrace the 21st century notion that our students need to be more than automatons, that they need to be independent, well-rounded thinkers - are thwarted by testing paranoia. Tests that don't even begin to measure the skills necessary to thrive in the world keep schools and students as well as teachers from achieving anything beyond adequacy by intimidating them, frustrating any attempts at positive transformation.

Until our educational policy-makers become more creative and innovative, until they communicate and collaborate with teachers and students to discover what is really needed to make classes places of authentic learning, until they recognize the problems in the traditional modes of instruction and think critically about how to solve those problems - in short, until our policy-makers become greater than adequate - we certainly can't expect much more from our schools.

I: music for a character in a dark place

Because (despite my son's assurance that our house is "quiet, too quiet") my house is full of the sounds of Minecraft mood music, cats knocking porcelain things from high shelves, imaginary light saber battles, etc., I find that I often have to plug up my ears with music that will inspire writing rather than interfere with it. In a perfect world, I'd write in perfect silence, but as it is, I find one song that helps me to picture a scene or feel a mood, and I play it over and over until it becomes a suggestive silence of its own.

Andrew Byrd is perfect for that sort of thing, and his song I was a go to for me while working on sync in November. I was the song that helped me to experience my protagonist's sense of isolation and fear in his most trying moments.

In this scene, Charlie's been dropped into the House of Darkness, the Sumerian afterlife:

If Charlie had feared the consequences of such a long fall – he could not see a bottom to the pit – his fears were soon replaced with fears of a different sort. Around him, he heard the rustle of wings flapping against the blackness, and he felt a presence nearby that he couldn't see. In the next moment, his arms were seized by what felt like talons, biting into his flesh. Something large had captured him and was pulling him through the air, in what direction Charlie couldn't tell.

At some distance, Charlie could see a faint flickering of reddish hued lights, and a shiver went through him. He was approaching the House of Darkness. His eyes had somewhat adjusted to the gloom, and the trickle of light afforded him a view of the creature that had captured him. He looked up and saw that he was in the claws of a beast with the body of a lion and the filthy wings of some giant bird. The face, though, brought a cold chill to Charlie’s heart. It was the face of a man with glowing eyes and the sharp teeth of a vampire. The creature was intent on whatever path it was on and ignored Charlie, and Charlie was glad of it.

The lights of the House of Darkness did not grow brighter as they neared, but they did grow. As the assembly of the gods had been built of a white marble that seemed to stretch in all directions, the House of Darkness must have been built of infinitely dark matter. Though Charlie sensed a structure, it was invisible in the darkness. He felt the floor when the creature dropped him, but he couldn't see it, and so he seemed to walk through nothingness, and his body jerked repeatedly, instinctively, to catch him from falling.

Amber flames flickered here and there, and Charlie, drawing near to one, saw that there were souls or demons, he wasn’t sure which, trapped in these, gnashing their teeth at him when he came too close. He backed away towards what felt like the center of the space and continued walking through the great room of the house. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he continued moving forward.

He wasn’t alone in the House of Darkness. He heard moans and whimpers, whispers and groans around him, and when he strained his eyes against the darkness, he vaguely saw the shapes of men and women who were covered in matted, gray feathers, some sitting, some lying prone, some pulling up clumps of dirt and shoving it towards their mouths ravenously, some scurrying about carrying baskets and earthenware bowls in the pitch blackness. He could make out hills and mountains rising in the murk, and upon close inspection, he saw that these were built from the relics of the inhabitants of the House of Darkness. One mountain was made entirely of crowns: gold, silver, platinum, tarnished, encrusted with jewels that did not sparkle or glitter in the darkness of the underworld, whose royal lights had been dimmed. Here, all men were the same, thought Charlie. No wonder Gilgamesh went in search of immortality.

Ahead, Charlie saw a conflagration of the amber orbs that cast just enough dim light to allow him to make out the rising of a great throne.

“This must be the place,” he said aloud, just to hear his own voice. In the utter darkness, he had begun to get the sense that somehow he didn’t exist. He felt bodiless, and therefore voiceless, and he wanted to reassure himself that such was not the case. It was an entirely different sensation than what he'd felt on the mountaintop. Then, that bodilessness had made him feel a part of all things, now it made him feel a part of no thing.

He drew near to the throne, which was constructed of an array of bones faintly glimmering with a golden hue under the orbs, and he could see the figure of a woman seated upon it. She had wings that grew from her back, enormous and black and widespread like a vulture sunning itself in the early morning. She wore a crown of gold-tinted bones tangled in her mass of black hair, and her feet were the feet of a great bird with long, pointed talons. Sitting at her feet, her legs crossed, was another woman who held a tablet of gleaming black stone and read from it to the Queen of the Netherworld.

The two raised their heads in unison when they saw Charlie approach, examining him the way that he had seen his mother examine cuts of meat at the grocery store.

Why it's better to be worser

Years ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to participate in one of NCCAT's enrichment seminars. It was awesome, and if I could ever persuade any North Carolina teacher to do anything, it would be DO THIS!!! 

The seminars are intended to reinvigorate teachers with a healthy dose of fun learning...you may be noticing a theme in my writing. Sometimes the seminars are specifically related to pedagogy. This season, for example, one offering is "Catching Up With Your Students: Navigating Technology for 21st Century Classrooms." Many of the seminars though are strictly pleasure-learning. Science aficionados might participate in "Climbing the Double Helix: Is DNA Destiny?" Teacher-writers might try out "Writing from Sound to Sea: Awakening Creativity by the Shore."

When I went, I participated in a seminar on Nature Writing and Watercolor Painting. The first part was a breeze for me. I love nature, and I love writing, so naturally, writing about nature was something that I'd already practiced on my own for years. When I first began the seminar, I wasn't too stressed about using watercolors either. After all, I'd taken art courses in high school, and I wasn't too bad at it. I like to consider myself a fairly artistic sort.

I remember that first session when the artist who was leading the workshop quickly dashed off a beautiful mountain landscape complete with fallen logs and winging crows. It looked simple enough, and I went back to my little table eager to get started. It's just a line here and a couple of splotches there, after all. Nothing too challenging.

After only a few moments I realized that my teacher had made the act look much simpler than it really was, and I could feel my frustration mounting as I fumbled with my brush, clumsily smearing black tree trunks and blobs of orange leaves that looked at best like a kinder-gardener's nightmare. I walked around the classroom to see how my peers were doing, envious of those who had quickly picked up the skill and reassured by the rest of the crew who were as sorry as I was.

By the end of the week, I was a little better. A little. But I'd learned a really valuable lesson that I took back with me to school. Sometimes teachers need to be worser to be better.

What I mean is this: sometimes, because we're so dang good at what we do, we forget that it's not easy for everybody else. We don't always respect the learning curves of our students. I've been guilty of it when teaching writing and technology. I've found myself growing impatient and thinking, "Gah! It's so easy! Just do xyz..."

When we get to that point in our careers, it's important to do something that we're not good at. This is why I've said before and will (I hope) continue to say: A teacher who refuses to learn should retire. Because if we push our students to stretch themselves, to risk failure, then we have to remember what it's like to stretch, to risk, and yes, to fail. If we stay in our comfort zones, it's easy to get so comfortable that we forget the anxiety of learning something new. 

A good teacher should be a dilettante, not just an expert in one field. Experts forget what it's like to struggle with understanding, they forget that they once had a learning curve. A good teacher should be really terrible at a lot of things and she should strive to improve in the face of frustration and embarrassment so that she is always capable of empathizing with her students.