Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

My book has gotten bigger than I wanted it to.

It seemed like such a nice, little idea: take a bit of family lore that no one seems to know much about and make up the details. I thought it was a smallish story, a domestic piece. Admittedly, it was quite a dramatic little bit: threatened suicide thwarts a marriage, but still, I expected to tell it in 85,000 words or so.

After all, I'd written two other books, and they were both around 85,000 words. I figured that was my comfortable length.

So, I've written 65,000 or so words into this one. And the end is nowhere in sight. In fact, I suspect I'm

http://paulzizkaphotography.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/lyell1finalwm.jpg

less than 1/3 of the way in.  I took it to my critique group this past weekend, saying, basically, "Help me end this puppy!" Universally, they said that I'm not close to the end yet.

(Sigh). I really didn't want to take on something quite that large. Up until about seven years ago, I hadn't written anything longer than fifty pages. Novels are still pretty daunting creatures. Epic novels? Holy crap!

One of my critique group friends suggested thinking of it as more than one book. That helps a lot. There are already some clear and natural breaks in the story that could be End of Book One and End of Book Two. So maybe I'm actually writing three or more books.

And I love this story. It might be the best thing I ever write. It's definitely the best thing I've written so far. It's just . .. when I got on this boat, I thought it was a skiff, not the Titanic! Let's hope it doesn't sink me!

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This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group.  Click here to check out the home site with Alex J. Cavanaugh and find more great posts from other insecure writers.

EOG testing: What It's Like on the Inside

End of Grade Testing is going on in schools across our country right now (or recently finished).  I administered one on Reading today in a middle school classroom. Here's what it was like:

http://www.vintagefolly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/bored-waiting.jpg

Before we even begin the actual test, a blanket of boredom has fallen. It's stifling beneath it. We've been waiting for an hour for proctors, test materials, and students to get into place. We can't begin until everyone and everything is in the right place. The children are still and without that liveliness in their eyes they usually have. It's eerie. Only the occasional tapping foot or wiggly knee betrays the suppressed vivacity.

At last the test begins. Students begin reading and carefully coloring in little grey dots on colorful answer sheets. I wonder distractedly how come these tests can afford to print the answer sheets in color, when I can't have color copies of anything for class because it's too expensive.  I pace as the kids work, peering to make sure they are putting their answers on the right part of the paper, and not looking ahead at the math section. As the first hour nears a close, I have never been so aware of each small complaint of my body: the creaky knee, the mild pain the arch of my foot, the dry itch of underslept eyes.

Hours at school are always relative, growing long or short according to the activity at hand. But no minutes are as long as testing minutes. Entire cosmos are born and burn out and die between each rotation of the clock. We begin the second hour after a three minute stretch break.

Maybe because teachers are so accustomed to constantly interacting, it's me who succumbs first to the

feeling of impending madness. Like a character from Edgar Allan Poe, I am hyper-aware of each sound in the room. Shuffling paper sounds like a thunderclap. I know the breathing pattern of each child I pace past. A shift in a seat makes the entire room turn and look. The stillness calls attention to each wobbly desk and chair missing a foot as the furniture creaks in time to the restlessness of its occupants.

The longer we sit, the twitchier the children become. Some have given up, having encountered their threshold of ignorance, and become unwilling to invest in the remainder of the questions. They choose answers at random or doodle on the scrap paper.

Others have reached the end of their endurance for quiet concentration on a single task. They stare into space for long minutes and examine any classroom displays that didn't have to be removed for testing.

Still others are already finished. They draw elaborate scenes or patterns on the scratch paper as this is the only distraction allowed them. They may not read. This, we have been told, is because it would make others feel pressured to finish quickly. I comply with the rule because I must, but I find it silly. It's not as if the children are not already aware of who has and has not finished. They always know what is going on with each other, even if they don't know what their teachers have said.

Nearing the end of the second hour, we are growing hungry. Lunch is still a long time away. We cannot interrupt the testing session to eat. Even when we finish, we can't just go to the cafeteria. We can't move through the hallways until everyone is finished. In the second hour of testing, this group is forty minutes past the accustomed lunch hour already. We are creatures of routine at school and the change makes it even more difficult to focus.

The adults in the room--the proctor and test administrator--have to play this strange improv game of watching each other's positions. Only one may be seated at a time; the other must be standing. It's the rules of supervision. When I get very bored and tired, and feel punchy, this almost makes me giggle.

http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~osert/HotPot2013/02_dalaklioglu_dut_toker/Sore%20foot.jpg

After the third hour begins, my feet and knees really hurt. I'm getting old after all, and I'm not as svelte as I once was. I begin to pace the room in patterns, stepping only on the lines of the tiles or making geometric shapes with my trajectories.

The students who are done now outnumber those who are still working. They must all sit still and quiet until every student has finished. They begin to study their own bodies--counting their freckles, tracing the shape of their hands, running their hands over their elbows and knees. If they have long hair, they braid and unbraid it. They might tie and untie their shoes over and over. They notice each rough cuticle or oddly growing hair. They pick, scratch, and fidget. They begin to resent the students who haven't yet finished.

The last kid knows he is last, and, in spite of himself, he tries to hurry. Though no one is asking him to speed up, he feels the pressure of being last.

Finally, he finishes, and I collect the testing materials and return them to the secure room. Now, we are allowed to read, but we still cannot talk, as others are still testing in the nearby rooms. We still cannot go to lunch, as others are still testing in the nearby rooms. We hang in a limbo of waiting, watching the clock and door and hoping the next person to walk by invites us to go eat lunch.

Tomorrow, we do this again. In math, this time.

Testing Season

http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/rabbit2.jpg?_sm_au_=isVHLDFJTMPWkQZt

So, it's testing season. When the teachers and students feel like rabbits being chased into their various holes.

It's not a happy time at school.

Everyone (teachers, administrators, students, families) is under stress and pressure, just when they are also exhausted and least able to deal with extra stress and pressure.

My oldest daughter in eighth grade. So, her list of standardized tests this year includes: Math End of Course Exam (for high school credit), English End of Course Exam (for high school credit), Reading End of Grade Exam, Math End of Grade Exam, Science End of Grade Exam, Social Studies Final Exam. On top of this she had a placement test for Humanities in high school and a choral audition for placement in high school.

She also had a major research essay due today in English, a math project due late last week, and a couple of other smaller projects due in the next few days.

It could have been worse. She didn't take yearlong world language for high school credit, so she isn't taking that End of Course Exam. She chose not to do the portfolio for advanced placement in visual art, even though she could have performed at that level. She just felt too buried and it was something she *could* take off her plate. So, she did.

I hope you've never seen such a bright and vivacious young woman turn into a grey and listless zombie in such a short time.  It's harrowing, as a teacher, and as her mother.

All this is required by external organizations at the state and federal levels. Very little of the decision making about how and when to test our children is in the hands of the individual schools, school districts, or parents.

I have to fight my anger or I could drown in the tide of it.

My daughter has wonderful teachers. If you went to each of them and said, "Does Samantha's daughter know the class material?", they could tell you. They could even list her specific areas of weakness and strength and suggest materials to shore up her weaknesses. If you give them the time and resources to do so, they would address those weaknesses themselves, and shore them up before they send her on to the next level. They care about her and her learning. They are professionals with experience and expertise in assessment and instruction of their given subjects.

Even that one year, when she didn't have a wonderful teacher, she had an adequate teacher. She still learned. Not as much as she would have learned with someone more inspired, but she still learned. 

But for some reason, we've decided to spend millions of dollars in this country to get assessment information we could get by asking the teachers. Don't get me started on my theories about why. We don't want another diatribe about sexism and classism, do we?

I could write dissertations on what's wrong with this picture. But no one would read them.

Maybe it was always this way. I don't know. I've only been a teacher for eighteen years and a mom with a school age child for nine years. I do know there is more testing for higher stakes now then there was when I was a child. I feel that my daughter's education is not improved by it, that the education she receives is not more rigorous or challenging then the education I received. It's just full of more tests, written by companies that were created to write tests and take government dollars to torture our children with them.

Here's what I suggest. All politicians and policy writers must sit in public school classrooms during testing season and perform the same battery of tests the children do under the same constraints the children suffer in.  Then, they must go to another school, and administer all the tests to children under the same constraints that the teachers do. Do you think they can focus for four or more hours a day and perform well on these tests? Do you think they can go four or more hours a day without an opportunity to go to the bathroom or eat anything? I doubt it.

If they can defend this method of assessment after participating in it, then I'll listen. But, frankly, I'd be stunned if a one of them would have anything to say.

The youngest is only in first grade. There's two more years until we start torturing her. I wonder if I can get my entire government replaced by then.

#SaturdayScenes No. 5: Kodiak, Alaska

I've moved around a fair bit in my life.  I'm forty-three now, and, though I spent most of my childhood in a single location, I have now lived in fourteen places. They're clustered in certain parts of the world, but there's a fair spread.

map made at https://www.zeemaps.com/

I got to thinking about all these places in terms of scenes and settings. Right now, as I face moving into summer in North Carolina (I don't like heat so very much . .. I wilt), I'm nostalgic for Kodiak, Alaska and its lovely Pacific Northwest rain and fog.  So, for my #SaturdayScenes this week, please enjoy this poem, written by a much younger me, many miles ago.

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A Clear Day in Kodiak, Alaska

On a day such as today
when the fog has lifted at last,
when a collective dream
of green mountains
materializes in our midst,
and I can see that the sky
had been blue all this time,
I fear I have dreamed this place.
I test each step for sureness,
digging my toes under warm black sand,
and walk slowly, keeping
my feet anchored, lest the sky
drag me into its undertow.
Without the integument of clouds,
the exposed horizon makes these mountains
a mirage brought on
by miles and miles of water
with an unquenchable thirst for land.

http://www.alaskatravel.com/photos/fort-abercrombie.jpg

Who's to Blame?

Pick a bad thing that happened. Anything.

It could be something little, like falling in the supermarket and bashing your elbow. Or something big like the Elliot Rodger shooting.

Why is it that the question after any bad thing is always: Whose fault is this?

Is it society? parents? the media? movies? mental illness? poverty? nutrition? aliens? gamma radiation?

http://www.mau.com/Portals/23906/images/shutterstock_71759158.jpg

The finger-pointing and banner waving commences, then dies down. Until the next bad thing. Then it begins again. It gets really ugly.  It turns perfectly good and reasonable people into trolls. And if people were already trolls? Well, they get fed and become fatter, meaner, uglier trolls.

And I have to fight against my own urge to simply shut down and hide from the vitriol.

That's what a lot of us do. We disengage. We give in to the "almighty shrug" (an awesome phrase I read in this article about intersectionality), and thereby free ourselves of responsibility. There's nothing I can do, therefore I will do nothing.  Like Ned Flanders's Mom once said in a very good episode of the Simpsons, "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

http://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/the-20-most-cromulent-simpsons-episodes-of-all-time-19/

I get it.

I'm tired, too. But, even if we somehow made it through the chicken-and-egg, house-that-Jack-built world of argument to actually find someone or thing that was definitively to blame, how would that help? How would that keep any particular bad thing from happening again?

Engagement is the only thing that will make a difference. You have to try something.

Maybe if we could all let go of ego just enough to say, "Hey, maybe this isn't about me." If we just stopped worrying about covering our own behinds and worried about leaving a situation better than we found it. 

So, I fall in the grocery store. Do I walk away quietly cursing? Do I sue the store? Or do I tell someone about the puddle and help make sure it gets mopped up so no one else falls? The choice is up to you.

Burnout

“The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.”

― Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching

from: http://coachdawnwrites.com/wp-content/
uploads/2012/01/grumpy-dwarf.jpg

It's that time of year again. The merry merry mouth of May. The world is merry and bright and in love, and I'm the grumpy dwarf in Snow White's house. 

I'm tired. Epicly tired. Body-tired, soul-tired, brain-tired. Crazy tired. Stupid tired. 

Most jobs have a cyclical nature, I've observed. A busy season, a down season. My sister is an accountant, and when she was working for a CPA, tax season tried to kill her every year. My husband's work ebbs and flows according to what projects are on his plate in any given week. The difference in both of these cases, is that there is ebb as well as flow. 

Teaching doesn't have an ebb. Starting at the end of August and straight through to the middle of June, teachers are on. Every day is high pressure. We get to our "vacation" times and collapse gasping like fish who have been pulled from the water and left on the bank. 

This year was especially rough as a series of snow days removed all teacher work days from the calendar (teacher work days are days when teachers are paid to be at school working on the things that you can't do while supervising students: grading papers, analyzing assessment data, making lesson plans, gathering materials, cleaning your classroom, collaborating with your colleagues, etc.).  The tasks that I do on those days were not removed, however. I just had to find non-paid time to do them in. 

Over the years, I've gotten more and more efficient, capable of doing more in a sixty minute prep period than some manage across an entire workday. Unfortunately, this doesn't catch me a break. It doesn't mean that I suddenly have time to have tea with a colleague or take an actual lunch break during which I don't work. It just means that I bring less of my work home into the hours of the day the state is not paying me for. 

I know, I know. I get summer, right? That depends on what you mean by "get" and "summer." Non school days amount to ten weeks for students this summer in my school district. June 16-August 25. Teachers on the other hand finish work on June 25 and start again on August 18. Myself, I also work six extra days this summer on various kinds of planning and materials development sessions. So, about six weeks. For many teachers, it's even less. 

It's just barely enough to recover from the burnout factor enough to feel like you might be willing to try that again. If you have to work a summer job to make finances meet (as many of us do), or you are trying to fit some classes into your schedule so you can move up the salary schedule from "miserable pittance" to "mere pittance", then you don't benefit from the recuperative effects of the time. 

So, it's the time of year to fight your own burnout at school. 

For me, that means upping my caffeine consumption, making sure I get at least three hours of time outdoors in the sun each week, and reading escapist literature in my downtime (Spiderman Noir was excellent). So, pass the coffee and the comics, we've got a month yet to go!

#Saturday Scenes No. 4

I love #SaturdayScenes ! +John Ward , plusser extraordinaire had this brain child, and I'm a happy participant.

The idea is that writers share a piece of their writing with you each Saturday. You can check them out en masse, by using the hashtag: #SaturdayScenes

This is the fourth week. If you want to see what I did on other weeks, you can find those posts here, here, and here.

This week I have the opening chapter of my superhero novel for you. Meet Linda Álvarez, one of the main characters in Going Through the Change (not yet published), a menopausal superhero novel.
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CHAPTER ONE

Things Get Hairy for Linda

Linda Alvarez stood in front of the mirror, horrified. She’d just been to the beauty salon yesterday, but all those weird hairs were back, like they’d never been tweezed and waxed away. She had eyebrows like Frida Kahlo Por Díos, and practically five o’clock shadow. Thank God David had already left for work. She’d have time to take care of it before he got home.

David had been her rock through all this menopause garbage. He’d fetched blankets and brought her ice as she changed temperature four and five times an evening. He hadn’t complained about the extra money she was spending at the beauty shop or commented on the way her body seemed to be shifting around her, reshaping into something else entirely. Something much thicker around the middle than she had ever been before, Linda thought ruefully. She was lucky to have him, she knew.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t just the hair today. She looked really different. There was something different about her jawline and her favorite pink tee shirt hung oddly on her, like it was too tight in the shoulders all of a sudden and didn’t quite reach her waist. Had it shrunk in the wash? She hadn’t changed anything about the way she’d been washing it.

She grabbed the new bar of soap she’d picked up at the Farmer’s Market last weekend. She’d bought it from the daughter of her old neighbor. Her name was Cindy Loo, or maybe Lou. Something like that. She was Asian, so Linda wasn’t sure how her last name might be spelled.

Ms. Lou had moved into the old house after her mother died. Linda had been meaning to bring her a welcome package of some sort, but Cindy kept strange hours and Linda had not yet caught her at home.

Despite living down the street from the older Mrs. Lou all these years, and spending a fair amount of time visiting the old lady, Linda had only rarely seen the daughter. She had been using Cindy’s teas and lotions for years, though. Cindy’s mother had kept a booth for her in the local market and would hawk her daughter’s products, and fill the buyer’s ear with praise of her brilliant child.

Cindy worked the booth herself whenever she was in town. Linda wasn’t sure if she liked the younger Ms. Lou. She had a gruffness to her and didn’t seem to understand how to talk to customers. But she did like the things the woman made. Whether it was psychosomatic or not, those products worked. Her cramps went away, her blemishes cleared up, her mood lightened. Ms. Lou was a genius.

The new soap was called “Nu Yu.” It had a picture of a woman drawn in lines, out of calligraphy, on the wrapper. The woman’s legs were impossibly long and her stride was the length of the wrapper. Ms. Lou had said it would let the inner person shine through. Linda assumed that was just a New Age spin to sell to the hippies who came to the market, a play on the idea of inner beauty, something like that.

Whatever. Even if it had a silly name, the soap was just as wonderful as all of Ms. Lou’s other products. It smelled marvelous and made Linda’s skin tingle. She wondered what was in it that made her feel so alive when she used it. She unwrapped the new bar and reached into the now-steaming shower to set it in the soap dish atop the little remnant of the previous bar.

Linda peeled off her clothes with some difficulty. They seemed to cling to her tightly. She dropped the poor maligned pink shirt on the floor and stepped into the shower. She’d start by getting good and clean and exfoliated, then she’d figure out what to do about her crazy hormone hairs.

Her grandmother had suffered from the same problem, she knew. When she got too old to take care of it herself, Linda used to come by the assisted living place and wax her upper lip on Saturdays, so she would look her best for church on Sundays. Linda tried to remember how old her Abuelita had been when she started having the mustache problem, but she couldn’t remember. Probably Abuelita had suffered with it for a long time, and Linda only found out about it when she needed help to take care of it. Maybe she had only been forty-eight, too. Luckily, there were products for that.

Linda rolled her neck and let the warm water wash over her, grateful for the warmth and the white noise effect of the water beating against the tiled walls. It was easy to let her worries fade when she was in the shower. She stretched out her arms above her head and ran the new bar of soap over her arms and into the armpits—hairy again of course. Really hairy! Caracoles! She was sure she had shaved just yesterday.

She grabbed onto the ledge the tile wall made at the top for balance, surprised to find out she could reach it easily and grabbed the pink Daisy razor out of the little hanging basket just outside the tub area. If she was going to keep growing hair this quickly, maybe she’d need to check into some electrolysis or something. The peluquería was good with waxes and such, but she was going to need a more permanent solution. When she stood again, after shaving her legs, she knocked her head into the shower spigot. Weird. Maybe David had left it set lower than usual?

A few quick strokes and her pits felt smooth again. Linda rinsed out the razor, grimacing at the amount of dark hair that swirled around the drain between her feet. Even her feet looked strange to her today, more spread out. She thought that only happened in pregnancy. Or maybe it was time to see the eye doctor. She might have to upgrade from her simple readers to bifocals or something.

Turning her back against the warm stream of water, Linda ran the bar across her upper chest and shoulders. It felt so smooth and hard. So did her torso. Maybe her time on the treadmill was paying off. When she ran her hand up around her breasts, she gasped a little. She’d never been a busty woman, but her breasts seemed to have all but disappeared. Surely this wasn’t more cambio de vida. She’d never heard of anyone losing their breasts because of menopause. Maybe she should call the doctor and see if she could be seen this afternoon.

More tense now, Linda continued her washing. At least the soap felt good and moisturizing. It made nice creamy suds in her hands. There wasn’t any jiggle across her belly when she ran her soapy hand across it. Her belly hadn’t felt tight like that in a good fifteen years, not since the last baby, the one that had come by emergency C-section.

Then, Linda dipped her hands lower, to clean between her legs. Her eyes flew open. Something was definitely not right. It felt—it was just like—Linda looked down and screamed. There, resting against her thigh was, unmistakably, a penis.