#side effect of an english teacher on summer break i fear

[nikosasaki]

would you guys want book recs. I'm starving to give people reading recommendations

[belonglab]

Growing Up Brown in America: When Every Day is Halloween

By Neha Sampat, Esq.

October 16, 2018

(Previously published in News India Times, The Teal Mango, and Thrive GlobaI)

Sometimes, taking off the mask is what is really scary.

I’ve been working on that the past few years. I found myself struggling to process a personal loss, mainly because I was more worried about how others perceived my loss and my reaction to it than allowing myself to just feel what I felt and honor those feelings. I realized I had become so swift to gauge others’ needs and so preoccupied with telling them what they wanted to hear, that I had forgotten in some ways who I was. I had covered myself in a cloak of expectation, carefully crafted over four decades of my life, and it was suffocating me.

“How did I get here?” I wondered. I thought back to kindergarten, when I proudly raised my hand when the teacher asked who knew the alphabet. Upon her request, I began to recite it, but was brutally stopped at “H” by my classmates’ uproarious laughter. I couldn’t comprehend why they were laughing at me, which only added to my distress. Finally, someone explained to me that it was pronounced “aych,” not “etch,” as my mom had taught me through her Indian accent. From there sprouted a seed of self-consciousness, a ceaseless suspicion that there was the equivalent of a “Kick me” sign taped to my back, and the silencing shame of being different.

I started to adapt by downplaying my differences. I figured I had to try to be like them in order to be with them, and I had to say what they wanted to hear so they would listen to me. And thus, I gathered the fabric of fitting-in and the string of assimilation, and I began to assemble my costume.

Once I had a passable prototype, I began to perfect it with the right props. For me, one such prop was the simple fork. In my Indian-American family, I remember from early childhood eating with our hands. My mom and grandmother would use their hands to carefully and evenly work warm jaggery into crumbled wheat rotis to create glistening spheres of goodness, which they would lovingly pop into my mouth. Even in the moments we resorted to silverware, we went straight for the spoons, effectively cutting food by forcefully and frantically sawing with the spoon’s side. When invited to a white friend’s home for a meal, I initially feared the fork. I would meticulously study how my friend’s family ate, marveling at their mastery of interchangeably using three utensils in one meal, and I would bring home with me those lessons in “civility, normalcy, and good manners.”

In middle school, I was thrilled to discover another useful prop: Lip gloss in the perfect shimmery shade of frosty pink. It made all the white girls look so shiny-sparkly-good, and that’s what I needed to be! But with my darker lips asserting themselves from beneath the cotton candy sheen, I couldn’t quite achieve the desired effect. Yet, there was no room in my world for the question my mom gently proffered as to what was the right shade of lip gloss for me, so I persisted with the pink.

Thankfully, we all grew out of the Bonne Bell stage. But for many of us brown folks, that just meant our costumes needed to be updated. I observed with an eagle-eye every expression, every choice, every quiet movement made by my white counterparts, and I plotted how I could improve my costume to make it more real and more believable. I started to become more accustomed to wearing the costume and, soon enough, was rarely taking it off. In the safe space at home with my Indian-American friends, I thought I was taking the costume off, but I realize now that remnants of the deception remained: an expression, a choice, a quiet movement.

All of this seemed to work well enough for me as I graduated from my educational endeavors and entered the professional world. I knew how to dress like a white girl, talk like a white girl, and for the most part, act enough like a white girl to get by. And trust me when I tell you that this is what it takes to get by in many professions. Even worse is that in most professions, mimicking a white girl isn’t even enough to excel, due to a cultural bias against women leaders.

In spite of this set-up, I took some risks. Once, when I was a summer intern at a law firm, I asked my assigned mentor attorney if I could wear an Indian outfit to an off-the-clock gathering at a law firm partner’s house. My mentor shook her head incredulously and issued a resounding “Noooooo!” Curiously and quite distressingly, despite my consistently well-received work product, I later was denied a position with the firm for reason of “not being a good fit.” It doesn’t take more than one or two outcomes like that to shake your confidence and chase you right back into your costume, which then is what begins to feel like the safe space.

Without even consciously realizing it, my M.O. became more and more about flying under the radar. If they didn’t notice me, it meant that I was fitting in. That my disguise was working.

Eventually, my costume started to fray from overuse, and the seams started to split to reveal more of my true personality, which, as it turns out, does not want to fly under the radar. I want to do something big and important! I’m tired of the same ineffective solutions to the same problems in business and society, particularly when it comes to diversity. And I’m tired of listening to people tell me their stories and then walk away before hearing mine.

I’ve tried to share with some people how much I was bullied as a child because I was different, but I often find they start to get visibly uncomfortable or try to tell me that my race may not have been a reason, for they, too, were bullied for being nerdy or not wearing the right clothes. I’ve learned through my now well-honed observational skills that people don’t really want to hear me talk about how I was called a “sand n_____” by my elementary school classmates. Or how, even after being the last one picked in 6th grade gym class, my square dance partner considered my brown skin too dirty to even touch, and we both miserably do-si-doed with a deep, dark chasm between our outstretched hands. Or how my high school English teacher told my mom that my potential was less than that of my white classmates since I was “English as a second language.” All of those stories make people break eye contact with me, wriggle in their seats, and try to change the subject.

I have this friend who is Jewish. She and I often have connected over some of the similar traits of our cultures. She is a gifted storyteller who doesn’t shy away from questions that help her understand others’ experiences, and I accordingly have found her to be compassionately and sincerely open to my stories. I recently relayed to her a detailed version of the story about my request to wear Indian clothes to the law firm gathering. Her eyes welled up as I related the events that led to me being dinged from the firm. I could see that it was hard for her to hear. As it should be, because it was hard for me to tell and even harder to experience. In fact, there was a new pain I felt in relating that experience. It was the pain of knowing better. It was the ache of wisdom telling me that I shouldn’t have put up with that and regretting that, as a young, female law student of color eager to make a good impression, I felt disempowered and showed up to that event costumed up, asking them to drop a treat in my bag.

Unfortunately, yet understandably, this form of disempowerment is common among minorities and women. In the 1960’s, sociologist Erving Goffman coined as “covering” this behavior of a known stigmatized individual attempting to mitigate the obtrusiveness of the stigma. It is difficult to metrically ascertain the impact of covering, when it includes lost professional opportunities, decreased confidence, identity and self-worth, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. But as law professor Kenji Yoshino recognized, “covering” amounts to a civil rights issue: African-Americans have lost their jobs over wearing their hair in cornrows; Women have been demoted for choosing to become mothers; and Jews have been terminated from the military for wearing yarmulkes. Professor Yoshino explains that courts are willing to protect immutable traits such as the color of one’s skin and one’s sex, but “will not protect mutable traits, because individuals can alter them to fade into the mainstream…If individuals choose not to engage in that form of self-help, they must suffer the consequences.” Such consequences are too often dire in these days of rampant racial profiling, especially for our African-American brothers and sisters who might wear a dark hoody on a candy run. And so, as incentivized by some of our classmates, teachers, neighbors, mentors, and bosses, and also by the law of the land, we cover, hiding our true selves behind masks of the majority and resigning our society to a persistent and oppressive homogeneity.

Abby Norman, in her article about liberal progressives not enrolling their children in her predominantly black neighborhood school, asks, “Really, if we are experiencing diversity on white terms, what good is that diversity anyway?” I’d guess that Ms. Norman and I would agree that the answer is, “not very good at all,” but you don’t have to take our word for it; the data speaks loudly and clearly. In spite of ongoing claims of diversity as a top value and mission of many organizations, African-Americans and Latina/o-Americans remain significantly underrepresented in many industries, even more so in senior leadership roles. Even in a legal profession charged with upholding justice, barely modest strides have been made in diversity metrics.

Clearly, “success” needs to be redefined when it comes to diversity, and innovative and diverse approaches must be welcomed, supported, and earnestly attempted to reap the many benefits of diversity and inclusion. To genuinely engage our underrepresented brothers and sisters, we all must battle our own implicit biases, in part by expanding our own social networks to be genuinely inclusive of others who have different backgrounds and experiences from us. If organizations truly seek diversity and inclusion (and that is a question meriting candid organizational introspection), they must make space for everyone, especially minorities and women, to bring their true selves to the table. Most, like me, have learned the art of “covering” to survive in organizations because that is what our society has required of us. It is now on our society and our organizational leaders to undo that to allow minorities and women to thrive and offer their unique perspectives and ideas for assured organizational and societal improvements. Seats at the table aren’t enough; organizational leaders must warmly and earnestly ask minorities and women to share their stories and then must listen, especially when it is painful and uncomfortable.

At the same time, we minorities and women must be more aware of and intentional about when we put on our costumes. There always will be some amount of care and strategy we employ in determining with whom, in what scenarios, and to what extent we show our true colors. However, it is important that we not be scared by past risks that didn’t pay off and continue to share our stories with the people in our lives who will be moved and impacted, and who will remind us of the power of our true narratives.

For me, that means remembering the way food always tasted better to me as a child when it was fed to me by my mom’s or grandmother’s hand instead of a cold-clawed fork. And it means acknowledging that the pretty pink lip gloss made me look like the living dead.

I’ll save that costume for Halloween.

Neha Sampat is founder, consultant, trainer, and coach at GenLead|BelongLab, where she collaborates with clients through consulting, training, and individual coaching to innovate approaches to leadership, inclusion, and professional development that are both data-driven and grounded in the subjective experience. Her best Halloween costume to date was Buffila Slayerjee (the South Asian vampire slayer), and when she wears lip gloss, it is in the shade of coco plum. Find her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram (@belonglab) and Twitter (@nehamsampat and @BelongLab).

[p-k-dreamin-blog]

This is the life I’ve settle

1. Emotional Obstacles  🤔

Like I’ve always said in the previous projects, I think the most emotional obstacles I’ve met in my high school years, even more in my entire life until now, is the decision that moves to America and abandoned everything and everyone I had and loved. I won’t say it’s sentimental or tragical to leave the people all around me and the place I’ve lived for fifteen years, because that is how the things going on, leave your hometown, leave your family, encounter new people with new personalities, it’s everyone’s life. We have to get used to it. For me, an immigrant as a Junior student, it is just like have the opportunities to experience the mood swings: from excitement to depression, from joy to sorrow, from inner harmony to inner chaos. Even though I always heard elder people talk about how the old friendships go and new friendships develop, I’ve thought it would always have a way to maintain a relationship and never fade away, “how a friendship that is so stable and seems forever to die in the future? It makes no sense.” But the truth is, when I moved to a new country and went through such much things, I think I become more and more lazy to talk with my friends on phones. Am I only a virtual character to them? It seems like they also have the same feeling as me. How to find the best distance between a relationship? I’m considering. If the distance is so close we would fear more and be a coward when we really need to say goodbye and fuddle ourselves in the pathetic emotions; so how about pushing away the distance? We would possibly become more and more cold-blooded without realizing. I mean, I think the human being is just like other animals in the world, we need to accompany, to avoid the sense of loneliness, but we are more complicated. We have the emotions that most of the animals don’t have, jealous, suspicious, arrogant, the way we express our hate, and the way we express our love. I’m feared to pull the relationships so close to anyone and feared to push the relationships so far to them. All the people I’ve met, whether I like or dislike, they’re a lesson to me in some ways, if I appreciate them they are even the treasures, and I don’t want them either slip away from me or destroyed by time.

2. Past Actions 😏 🛫 🗽

I still remember in last year’ today and before the summer break, how I tried to persuade my parents to buy the air tickets and pre-order ten days and almost two months of vacation rentals in my hometown. I made a promise, then I did it, without any bargaining with my parents and hesitation to put into effect. I remember the feeling when I woke up at 8:00 AM on weekends, lock myself in my study room and spent three hours a day to memorize three hundred SAT vocabularies without rest; faced the mirror to practice my spoken English; and squeeze my time to prepare presents to my old friends. But now when I recall all these memories. Am I doing these hard work for myself, or to others? My uncle taught me when I was a child that never live for others in your lifetime, live for yourself. Yes, I improved my overall English skills in one year, got 1400+ on SAT and a good GPA, successfully earned my air tickets two times as I promised. However, I also remember how I laughed at my favorite shopping mall’ square when I called my mother to tell her I broke up with my Ex, I can’t say I did nothing wrong in the relationship, I just felt so funny, and I understood that there is actually something in the world that you can’t trade with hard work. But what would I become if I don’t try too hard to earn the air tickets？ Wander around for my entire Junior year? Give up the SAT because I noticed that there’s such a test too late? Only social with Chinese friends and avoid unnecessary communication with English speakers? For now, I can’t imagine what I will become if I don’t even try to do all of them. The experience when I went back taught me an unforgettable lesson, and I guess I just get my rewards in a way that leads me to become a more complete and sober person in the future.

3. Current Inactions 😑

I don’t really have something that I regret for my Senior year, just like when I tried to make a wish on my Birthday party when I blew the candles on my cake, I can’t think out anything I want for now. I have the friends that like me, a room that I decorated with a pair of big French windows, a lovely golden retriever, and a pair of AJ1 in my favorite colorway. For my Senior year, I took the classes that are challenging but also good for my future; I lay down burdens and bad memories and have a brighter view for future; I met the coolest teacher. If I really have some inactions to say, I would say I could call my old friends more frequently and let them know how much I miss them; and I could put more efforts on my classes and earned even better grades, but I’m also cool with the grades I have now.

4. Legacy (Best Friend)  👺

Hmm…. It’s really a more difficult question to think than my family members. Webber Yamaura is my best Japanese friend, and also my best of my best friends because we shared a similar taste on food, animes, Japanese TV dramas, he is the closest friend I had in my previous school, and few of the people that I would share both happiness and sadness in my high school years. I like him because of the way he tries to make me laugh when I was depressed or stressed out and how we live together before I move to America for days and after I returned to my hometown. I will use his tone to write a legacy for me.

At the very beginning, I apologize for my hesitation to write this for you. Afterall I don’t want to write it at all, or I’m fear to write it. Because this would be the very last letter I wrote for you and you would never come back to me again. I think you didn’t know me from primary school to Junior high school, but I always knew you, this is because of fate. We are always together, and you just like another half in my heart, you are my first time have met bosom friend really understand me!

You let me understand the world, how the world runs, you let me happy and I treated you back. Recall the memories when I poke fun of you every time, try to embarrass you, I was just trying to make you laugh. Can’t you imagine that lol! But you were always being depressed. ( I was really really afraid that you suffer from depression or something like that.) But saying more carefully, I’m also very glad to have you for my sophomore year. Even you can’t physically be with me anymore. I know how you try to be low key after you move to a new country, and I appreciate you to do so even though it doesn’t look like the old you. You used to want to be memorized of your achievements and grades for many years from primary school to high school and I guess you don’t want it anymore. Because when I reopen your social account and review all of your posts. You’re becoming quieter after you move to America and less out-going and flaunting. However, you are the people who can really care about others in true heart and respect others without judgments. You try to comfort the people around you when they’re depressed but you can’t really find a good way to comfort yourself. You seemed always have directions of what you want to do but sometimes no ready for the next step; seems so casual but self-confident, but you also lost yourselves in the nights. I’ve seemed the real side of you and that’s all the things I want and I’ve learned.

Although the last, we did not meet again.

(Reference some sentences from 2016-2017 Yearbook)

5. Legacy (Family Member)  👴🏻 👵🏻

Elder people in my life always think I’m a good child that has a good grade at school, respect the eldership, have a bright future. But I think my closet family members know that versatility is not the best way to define me as a teenager, a person. Like other teenagers, I’ve rebelled my parents, made them heart-broken by ravings. I’m a lazy child in person, I even gave up studying violin for a year and forgot most of the skills I learned for 7 years.  I had puppy love, which is OK in America but strongly against in my hometown. After all, I’m not as good as some adults think I’m. My parents would probably say:

“Our son is a child with a dream to become an adult, knowing who he is and knowing who he wants to become.”

It seems like a general parents comment to their children, isn’t it? But I think this featureless comment is actually very important to me. Somehow I don’t want to become an adult anymore when I realize how much obstacles and difficulties I need to meet in my future career. I want to pause at my age now and be myself as a high school student, no matter where I’m. My parents know me as a good child also, but they know how I’m not a perfect good child.

6. Epitaph Reflection  🍂 🍂 🍂

Michael Leroy Luther - 2007 - “Game Over”

I don’t want my epitaph seems so sentimental like what I’ve described who I’m for the entire semester. I want it to be brief, and don’t leave regret and sadness to people who loved me and thought highly on me. “Game over” is a good way to express me also because I’m not a nerd who only know how to study in some adults recognition, I like games also. even more, Pretty like. I brought a PS4 at home this year and try to collect all the games I want to play from 2013 to 2018. Even though I don’t have enough time to play it. And on the other side, it’s also good to describe my manner to live in a proper way. I think my life, and anyone’s life is like a gambling. We put ourselves as chips on the table and see what will we win or lose after game round by round. Life for me is just a more realistic name of the game for many years already.

Douglas Glenn Colvin - 1951-2002 - “O.K… I gotta go now.”

This epitaph is both laid-back and practical at the same time. If I recall my description in my previous project and this one I would say I’m somehow easy on everything for now because I gained everything I want as a Senior. But I’m also a practical, kinda old-fashioned teenager who prefer use the vinyl machine than Bose Speaker. Is Vinyl machine practical? Definitely yes, the modern Vinyl machine can play Vinyl and use Bluetooth at the same time, and they are way more beautiful than a hulking black box. If I would die young I will use this way to summarize my life because death is unnecessary to be so sad, I’m not saying I’m not afraid death, but I’ve imagined using the weirdest Indian music in the world as my BGM for my funeral, but that’s what I want. Don’t be so sad, people die. I caught the moments of my life, while I’m young and quick, and I do not regret for both the good and bad decisions.  

  7. Epitaph Creation  😇

“Here Lies a dreamer. Arrogant but low key.”

Before I think about my own epitaph, I thought about who I’m again for the third time for this project. The conclusion I had is that I a, a contradict person. Like Hamlet, I have the directions on what I want to do in the future, but most of the time I don’t have a specific plan on enacting my dreams.

I was arrogant in the past, the most flaunting student in my grade and kinda disdain what my Chinese and English teacher taught but easily earned the very top scores on tests, so I think many teachers liked me and loved me at the same time. I was the class president in my previous school, I led my class to a wrong direction in a tricksy way which teachers probably know now when I move away and would regret their decision to let me be the class president. But I actually improve the overall test scores for my classmates in some ways, which I don’t know how indeed. I poke fun at teacher’s dialect also like other naughty students. I used to advertise myself in public and hope everyone in the school knows me as an elite student, I did successfully somehow. And I thought I would continue when I move to America.

But the truth is, I became much quieter when I move to Arcadia, probably is the environment influence. It’s really a quiet city if compared with my hometown or Los Angeles downtown. But the most important reason is that what I’ve gone through as an immigrant, a friend, a lover, a son, and a student. I think it’s unnecessary to advertise myself anymore so I’ve given up many manners I used to have and warning myself to be a low-key dreamer.

I want to memorize as a dreamer. Because a dream is better than realism when we are children. We become who we are all because of a dream, so even though I would be buried under grass and dirt I hope my dream could somehow influence some of the people I knew, like how I comforted and encouraged friends.

[hmhteen]

HMH Teen Teaser: THE LOVE LETTERS OF ABELARD AND LILY!

We’re so excited about this one, people! This is the love story of Abelard, who has autism, and Lily, who has ADHD. They’ve known one another since they were kids, but one fateful day in detention, Lily kisses Abelard. Their relationship deepens and changes in ways difficult to describe in words. Especially because Abelard’s autism makes it difficult for him to communicate verbally...so they write one another text messages, often quoting an old book they both love, and just when they think they’re finally connecting, a decision Lily makes about her own mental health changes everything. 

You can read the first four chapters of this romantic YA below! 

CHAPTER ONE

The day Abelard and I broke the wall, we had a four- hour English test. Seriously.  Every tenth grade  student  in the State of Texas had to take a four-hour English  test, which is too long to sit still even if you are a normal person. And I’m not a normal person.

After the test, I told my feet to take me to geography. If I didn’t tell myself where to go, if I let my mind drift, I’d find myself in the quiet calm of the art wing, where the fluorescent lights flickered an appealingly low cycle of semipermanent gloom. Or I’d stand in the empty girls’ room just to be alone. Sometimes I think I’m not attention deficient but attention abundant. Too much everything.

When I got to geography, Coach Neuwirth handed out a boring article about the importance of corn as a primary crop in the early Americas. Then he left the room. He did this a lot. Ever since basketball season had ended, Coach Neuwirth seemed like someone who was counting the min- utes until the school year was over. To be fair, he wasn’t the only one running out the clock. 

Thirty seconds after Coach Neuwirth left, the low murmur of voices turned into a conversational deluge. I sat in the back of the room because that’s where the two left- handed desks were — in the row reserved for stoner boys who do not like to make eye contact with teachers. Two seats in front sat Rogelio, turned sideways in his chair, talk- ing fast and casting glances in my direction.

“Cosababa, pelicular camisa,” Rogelio said, and the boys around him all laughed.

Okay, this is probably not what Rogelio said. I’m not a great listener. Also, my Spanish is terrible.

“Camisa,” he repeated.

At the word camisa, Emma K. turned to look at me, and whispered something to the blond girl next to her. I instantly wondered if I’d been talking to myself, which is a thing I do. It attracts attention.

Then it sank in. Camisa. Spanish for “shirt.”

Maybe there was something wrong with my shirt. Maybe the snap-button cowboy shirt I got at a thrift store was not charming and ironic as I’d imagined, but seri- ously ugly. Emma K. had whispered about my shirt. Even Rogelio and his friends, who often wore snap-button cow- boy shirts, had laughed at my shirt. Or maybe not, because my Spanish isn’t good, and anyway, Rogelio could have been talking about someone else. Not Emma K., though. She looked straight at me.

What if I’d popped open a button at bra level and I���d been walking around all day with my bra exposed, and was I even wearing a nice bra, a sexy black bra? Or was it just one of those tragic old bras with a ribbon or a rose that might have been cute once but, over repeated washings, had turned slightly gray and balled up like a dirty piece of dryer lint stuck to the center of my chest?

I clutched the front of my shirt, and Emma K. and the blond girl giggled. My shirt was properly buttoned, but I couldn’t sit in my chair for another minute. School was a molasses eternity, a nightmare ravel of bubble sheets and unkind whispers unfurled in slow motion. I had to leave, even though I’d promised my mother that I would under no circumstances skip school again.

I stood. My feet made a decision in favor of the door, but a squeaking metallic noise stopped me.

I turned.

Directly behind me was an accordion-folded, putty- colored vinyl wall, along with a gunmetal gray box with a handle sticking out of one end. The squeaking noise came from the metal box. The handle moved.

When our school  was built in  the sixties, someone decided that walls impede the free flow of educational ideas, because some of the third-floor rooms are all double-long, cut in half by retractable vinyl walls. Apparently, the archi- tect of this plan had never been to a high school cafeteria to experience the noise associated with the unimpeded flow of ideas. The wall doesn’t get opened much. 

 Last time anyone opened the wall was during Geography Fair. One of the custodians came with a strange circular key he inserted into a lock on the side of the box. He’d pushed the handle down and the wall had wheezed open, stuttering and complaining.

Now the handle jiggled up and down as if a bored ghost was trying to menace our class, but no one else was paying attention. I wondered if the custodian was trying to open the wall from the other side. It didn’t make sense.

I left my desk and walked to the box. I leaned over and grabbed it, surprised by the cool feel of solid metal. And suddenly, I felt much better. The world of noise and chaos faded away from me. The touch of real things can do this.

The movement stopped. I shook the bar up and down. It didn’t range very far before hitting the edge of what felt like teeth in a gear.

I pushed down hard on the handle. After a momen- tary lull, it sprang up in my hands, knocking with sur- prising force against my palms. I put both hands on the bar, planted the soles of my Converse sneakers, and pulled against it with all my might.

There was a loud pop, followed by the whipping sound of a wire cable unraveling. The bar went slack in my hands. The opposite end of the vinyl wall slid back three feet.

Everyone stopped talking. Students near the door craned their heads to see into the other classroom. Dakota Marquardt (male) said, “Shiiit!” and half the class giggled.

A rush of talking ensued, some of it in English, some in Spanish.

I dropped the handle and slid back into my chair, too late. Everyone had seen me.

Coach Neuwirth ran back into the room and tried to pull the accordion curtain closed. When he let go of the edge, it slid away, leaving a two-foot gap.

He turned and faced the room. “What the hell hap- pened here?”

It’s never good when a teacher like Coach Neuwirth swears.

I waited for someone to tell on me. Pretty much inevi- table.

Dakota Smith (female) stood and straightened her skirt. She pulled her long brown hair over her shoulder and leaned forward as though reaching across a podium for an invisible microphone.

“After you left, the handle on the wall began to move,” she began. “Lily put her hands on the handle and pushed down and the cable broke and — ”

“Thank you, Dakota.” Coach Neuwirth strode to his desk. “Lily Michaels-Ryan, please accompany me to my desk.”

I followed him to the front of the class, keenly aware that every set of eyes in the room was fixed on me. Coach Neuwirth filled out a form for me to take to the office, not the usual pink half-page referral form, but an ominous shade of yellow with pages of carbons. As I stared at the razor stubble on top of his pale head, I realized I’d messed up pretty badly. So badly, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to see my father in the summer.

“It wasn’t just me,” I said. “There was someone on the other side pushing down. I didn’t mean to break the door, it’s just . . .”

Coach Neuwirth ignored me.

“You’ll note, Miss Michaels-Ryan, that I have filled out a Skrellnetch form for you. Your mother will have to sign the kerblig and return it to the main office before you can be burn to clabs . . .”

This would be a good time to mention that I’d stopped taking my ADHD meds about a month earlier because they made me puke randomly and caused my head to ring like an empty bell at night. Side effects.

“. . . Your parents will have to sign the kerblig before you can be burn to clabs. Do you understand me?”

He waited, holding the Skrellnetch form that I needed to take to the office. Clearly, he had no plans to hand me the all-important Skrellnetch form until I answered him. I contemplated my choices. If I said yes, he would hold me responsible for remembering every clause in his statement, and I would be made to suffer later because I had no idea what he had just said. My heart pounded with a weird mix- ture of fear and exhilaration.

However, if I said no, Coach Neuwirth would consider it a sign of insubordination and general smart-assery. It didn’t look good for me.

“So . . . what copy does my mom sign again?”

Peals of laughter erupted from behind me. Someone muttered, “Ass-hat,” and the laughter increased.

“Get the hell out of my classroom,” Coach Neuwirth said. He threw the Skrellnetch paper across his desk at me.

I began my trek to the office, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone while I held the stupid Skrellnetch form. After the noise and glare of the classroom, the quiet calm of the hall, with every other row of fluorescent lights off to save on electricity, was a relief. Six steps of cool dark, six steps of bright white burn. Down the stairs. The first floor had a band of colored tiles at shoulder height: white, mustard yel- low, white, blue. I held my right hand out and touched only the blue tiles as I passed through the hall, feeling my jittery state of anxiety mute into a dull, sad place in the center of my chest.

Down at the office, kindly Mrs. Treviño eyed my yel- low Skrellnetch form with visible regret.

“Lily, what happened?” she said, as though I’d twisted an ankle in gym, or had some other not-my-fault kind of accident.

“I broke the sliding wall between Coach Neuwirth’s and Ms. Cardeña’s rooms.”

Mrs. Treviño sighed deeply. I looked away as my lips started to quiver. A gray cloud of shame descended on me with remorseless speed. I’d like to be the good, thoughtful person Mrs. Treviño had mis- taken me for. A person who doesn’t break stuff.

“Well, you’re not the only one,” she said. “Come on back.”

She escorted me to the inner chamber. There, by the vice principal’s office, were two ugly orange chairs. On one chair sat Abelard Mitchell. I took one look at him and knew he’d been on the other side of the wall pulling up on the handle while I pushed down.

Mrs. Treviño gestured to the empty chair and left us alone in the waiting area.

I’d known Abelard since kindergarten. Since my last name was Michaels-Ryan and his was Mitchell, we stood next to each other at every elementary school function. Abelard was tall and slim but broad-shouldered, with a mop of sable brown hair and dark blue eyes. He was gorgeous, but he had some sort of processing delay, mild autism or Asperger’s syndrome or something. He didn’t interact like everyone else.

But sure. Neither did I. When I was seven, I acciden- tally smacked Abelard with my metal lunchbox because I couldn’t stop swinging my arms. I cut his cheek, but he didn’t cry, and no one noticed until later, so now he had this little scar, which was weirdly sexy. Abelard never said anything. He had to have noticed that I was standing there in front of him swinging my Hello Kitty lunchbox with happy, maniacal abandon.

I liked to believe that he could have cashed me in to the teacher and he didn’t.

I dropped into the chair next to him, feeling suddenly nervous to be sitting on a chair that was actually bolted to his chair — as though even the furniture was there to be punished.

“Hey,” I said, a little too loudly. “So you were on the other side of the wall? Who knew it would break like that? You’d think a handle roughly the same age as the Titanic would be sturdier. Although I guess that’s a bad compari- son.”

He said nothing. He was probably thinking about com- puter games, or quantum physics, or the novels of Hermann Hesse. From all available information, which I’ll admit was limited, Abelard was pretty brilliant.

“You were on the other side of the wall.” Abelard glanced at me and looked away.

“Yes.” I felt a strange thrill of complicity. “Usually, I’m here by myself. Why did you . . .”

I stopped before I asked him the stupidest of questions: Why did you break that? My least favorite question in the history of questions.

“The mechanism was squeaking. One of the gears is rusted. They need to oil it.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, or if there was anything to say. I thought of Abelard, under the same anx- ious impulse to touch everything in the world of the here and now that we could feel with our hands. But unlike me, he was thinking about the hidden gears in the box, years of neglect and humidity, gears rusting away unused. He wanted to fix things, not destroy them. A more evolved monster, Abelard.

He leaned over and peered at me from under his shaggy fringe of hair. I caught a hint of his warm scent. Nice.

“Lily Michaels-Ryan,” he said. “You were in my English class last year. You hit me with a lunchbox in first grade.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I hope it didn’t hurt too much. On the plus side, I really do like the scar. It makes you look like a pirate, a little disreputable, you know?”

Abelard brought his hand to his cheek and traced the edges of the scar as though checking to see if it was still there. Suddenly, I wanted to run my hand along his cheek- bone to feel for that slightly raised skin, proof of my earlier bad act.

The sight of his hand on his cheek made me conscious of where my hand was on the arm of the chair, touching the sleeve of his shirt. A phone rang in the office around the corner. Mrs. Treviño’s voice came from the outer office, but it felt like she was on the other side of the world. We were alone.

“Abelard, why didn’t you tell anyone that I hit you with my lunchbox?” I said. “I never got in trouble for that.”

Abelard frowned in slow motion. He seemed slightly offended, like I’d accused his seven-year-old self of being a tattletale and a snitch. I’d been right. He had protected me, one freak to another. I felt a swell of something more than gratitude, more than surprise.

Abelard’s lips parted slightly, like he had something to say that he didn’t want anyone else to hear. I wanted to know what he was thinking. Suddenly, what Abelard had to say seemed like the most important thing in the world.

I turned my head and put my arm down on the chair to lean in so he could whisper in my ear. My arm slipped on the ancient vinyl, and I accidentally moved too close to Abelard, which is a thing that I do. I’m not good with per- sonal space.

Abelard didn’t say anything. I felt his warm breath on the side of my face, a thousand little hairs on my cheek moving in the soft breeze, and I thought of his cheek and how I’d wanted to run my finger along the edge of his scar. And still it seemed like Abelard had something to say, but it wasn’t coming, and maybe he was too anxious to speak. I didn’t know what to say either. My brain was not forming thoughts in English.

I lifted my face and he looked away. But his lips were there, centimeters from mine.

I kissed him. The kiss was over before I really knew what I was doing, just a momentary soft press of my lips against his. A stray impulse that didn’t make sense, my wires crossed by the randomness of the day.

What was I thinking?

“Well, it was nice of you not to tell on me, even though you were only seven.” I went on talking as though I hadn’t just kissed him. I do this a lot. When you live at the mercy of your impulses like I do, you pretty much have to.

“Maybe you should have told someone? You probably needed stitches. Not that I don’t like the scar — it’s a great scar.”

Abelard brought his index finger to his lips and frowned. He had one of those serious, symmetrical faces that a slight frown only improves.

“Lily,” he said slowly, “I — ”

I braced myself for a quick, awkward rejection, but before Abelard could finish his sentence, Vice Principal Krenwelge rounded the corner. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.

CHAPTER TWO

My mother came to get me at school. She arrived look- ing frazzled, a small coffee stain over the left breast pocket of her shirt, lipstick reapplied but the rest of  her  makeup faded, leaving her skin blotchy, nose reddened by the sun. I expected her to be mad, but this was far worse. She looked defeated. Friday, the end of a long week, and now this.

Mom had a brief conference with Vice Principal Krenwelge, and then we drove home in silence. I was tired, beyond tired, needing the comfort of a darkened room.

“Are you mad at me?” I finally said.

We were stopped on Lamar at the light in front of Waterloo Records, where Dad’s band had a CD release when I was five. I remembered Mom in a tight camisole and brightly colored skirt, holding a sleepy baby Iris on her shoulder. Her hair dyed magenta red. Happy clothes. Sexy, even. Afterward, we walked to Amy’s for ice cream. Life in the before time.

“No, Lily, I’m not mad. You’re just lucky Abelard’s mom volunteered to pay the damages.” 

This made me sit up.

“Why? Abelard and I broke the wall together. It was as much my fault as his.”

“Not according to your vice principal. Mrs. Mitchell seemed to think that it was Abelard’s idea to break the wall, and you were just following along.”

Mom rolled her eyes to let me know what she thought of this explanation. Me in close proximity to a broken thing: cause and effect. Mom knew who was at fault.

Why would Mrs. Mitchell think that Abelard was at fault? There could be only one reason. Abelard must have taken the blame for me. It didn’t feel right. Abelard wasn’t the breaky type. If I hadn’t pushed down on the stupid handle, Abelard might have found a janitor to oil the gears. “Abelard said the wall was already broken. Abelard said the gears hadn’t been oiled in an eternity.”

“Well, the next time Abelard decides to ‘fix’ something, don’t volunteer to help, okay?”

“Volunteer to help,” I mumbled.

I liked the idea that I’d jumped up because I’d intuited that the situation needed my special breaking expertise. But what if breaking and fixing were really the same activ- ity, reversed?

Did Abelard really “fix” things, or did he just break things, like me? I wanted to ask him about his experience fixing things and breaking things. I thought about the time I’d pulled up too hard on the back seat handle of the car door while pushing against the door with my hip, and the handle broke. And then for some reason, I flipped the child lock switch thinking it might fix the door, only it didn’t. It locked the door, permanently. I’d tried to fix it, I really had. “. . . and Mrs. Screngle says tuber work.” Mom glanced over at me. “Lily, are you listening?” “No,” I admitted. No point in lying. “Did you eat today?”

I had to think about it. The day seemed like an eternity, as though the time before I broke the wall and the time after served as a clear demarcation of events, like the birth of Jesus or the arrival of the dinosaur-ending meteor off the coast of the Yucatan. And now my mind was filled with thoughts of Abelard. Why had he covered for me?

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Is your lunch still in your backpack?” Mom asked.

I dug through the backpack at my feet. Sure enough, my lunch was untouched in the outer pocket.

“I would have eaten, but they told us to eat during the test, and I was still working, and I just sort of forgot about it, and then we had to go straight to sixth period, so I didn’t have time.”

“Are you hungry now?” I nodded.

We drove through P. Terry’s for veggie burgers, and we split a chocolate shake on the way home, like I was being rewarded for screwing up. I was happy enough, but I couldn’t let things go. I kept thinking about my dad in Portland.

At the start of the school year, Mom had promised that I could visit Dad if I kept my grades up and didn’t skip class. I’d been trying, but things hadn’t been going too well. My grades are all over the place, and I try not to skip, but sometimes I can’t help it.

“So, Mom, about the summer . . . I mean, could I still see Dad?”

Secretly, I planned to go visit Dad and just stay on. Dad taught English at a homeschool cooperative connected to the farm where he worked, kids getting life credit for milk- ing goats and picking organic beets. Heaven. I’d miss Mom and Iris, but clearly I belonged in a “less-structured learn- ing environment.”

“I know you want to see your dad.” Mom paused. It wasn’t quite a pregnant pause, just an awkward millisecond or two. “But it’s not that simple. We’d have to talk to him, and he may not be in a position to have houseguests . . . and of course, your grades . . . and no more skipping . . .”

I stopped listening. A qualified yes is almost a full yes. I’d have to improve my grades and attend all my classes, blah, blah, blah. I could do that.

“You know, Lily, seeing your dad again isn’t going to solve all your problems.”

I nodded to let her know I’d heard her and stared out the window. She was wrong. My father had solved my big- gest problem. There was no reason to think he couldn’t solve my smaller ones.

***

My father taught me how to read.

When I was in second grade, the school reading spe- cialist decided I was dyslexic. She told my mom to read to me every single night, but Mom worked nights. So Dad read to me.

In the beginning, he read me books about cat warriors while he drank craft beer. When Dad got tired of reading books about cats, he picked up Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators from a used book store. These books amused him with their gee-whiz ’thirties and ’forties references: chaste country club dances, German housekeepers devot- edly making strudel, and clubhouses with secret tunnels made out of packing crates and junk. Nancy Drew ushered in cheaper beer: Tecate in cans. I laughed at Dad’s earnest voice for Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s straight-arrow boyfriend, and I fell asleep worrying how Nancy was going to get out of that cave by the ocean before high tide.

“Choral reading,” my mother said, echoing the reading specialist’s advice. “Dad reads a passage, Lily reads a passage.”

My father sat by my bed with the book held between us as I painfully sounded out each little word. I learned to read the same way Hercules learned to hold a full-grown bull in his arms, by having to brute-force sound my way through every syllable until the words got longer and heavier. At first, I read individual words, then sentences, and eventually paragraphs.

Together we read all of Harry Potter; The Lightning Thief ; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Inkheart; and Diane Duane. When the words began to swim on the page, Dad read to me from his own personal library of medieval classics. By this time, I was sharing a bedroom with my sister, Iris, and she listened with rapt attention.

Dad read Le Morte d ’Arthur and Physica by Hildegard von Bingen, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.

At about the time we started on Tolkien, with a nightly supplement of The Prose Edda and the Nibelungenlied, my father had discovered vodka. Cheap, easy to hide, and packed more of a punch than beer.

I never questioned the hours I spent sequestered away in my bedroom with Dad, reading while he drank. It was fun, and it was too good to last.

The end came when I was in fifth grade. My mom caught me alone in my room with her copy of Jane Eyre.

“Are you reading?” she asked, hands on her hips. Her dark green eyes glittered with some internal fire I recog- nized as hopefulness. She had a sort of feral alertness that alarmed me.

“What? . . . No,” I replied, thrown off my guard. I quickly regained my composure. “This book is weird. I can’t understand this language. What’s it about?”

“It’s a love story about a girl with a strong moral compass. It’s an older book, so the language can seem a little stilted, but it’s really good.” She smoothed the hair away from my forehead and attempted a wan smile. She looked sad. “You should have your father read it to you.”

“I will.”

I felt bad about lying to her, but mostly I felt relieved. Crisis averted! My father read me Jane Eyre, or he reread me Jane Eyre, because I’d already finished it by then. I didn’t care. Mom was happy; Dad was pleasantly drunk. Life was golden.

At the end of fifth grade, the school tested me again. I’d never seen my mother so thrilled. She came home wav- ing her copy of my test results over her head.

“Your phonemic scores are still relatively low,” she said. “But your comprehension is off the charts. You’ve made amazing progress, Lily.”

I didn’t immediately get the magnitude of what I’d done, but I think my father did. He greeted the news that I was in the 98th+ percentile in reading comprehension with a queasy smile. I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was as though his usefulness on the planet had suddenly ended. Maybe he knew divorce was not far off.

“I’ve heard about this book Wuthering Heights,” I said, hoping I wasn’t overplaying the wide-eyed thing. “I don’t think I can read it by myself, though. It’s for older people, right? But we could read it together.”

“Sure thing, Lil,” Dad said, his eyes distant.

We all smiled at one another. The happiest part of my life ended there in the fifth grade.

 CHAPTER THREE 

Monday morning my mother woke me while it was still dark. She stood by my bed with a cup of tea and a piece of toast.

“Eat the toast,” Mom said. She hovered over me, already dressed for work in a white linen shirt and a fifties beaded cardigan that may have once been an ironic statement for her but that she now considers an heirloom.

“It’s the middle of the night.” I rolled over to face Iris’s twin bed next to mine. “Look. Iris is still asleep.”

My sister was an inanimate lump of covers. Iris usually springs out of bed like Snow White, ready to polish silver and sing with birds, but it was so early she wasn’t even stir- ring.

“I have to go to work early today,” Mom said. “You need to take your medication.”

“I can’t take it on empty stomach.”

“Hence the toast.” Mom thrust the plate at me. Reluctantly, I bit into the toast. At this hour of the morning, food  seemed like a human rights  violation. I chewed twice and swallowed with difficulty before slump- ing back on the bed.

“Now your medication.”

I took the pill and swallowed without hesitation. She handed me the lukewarm and very weak tea with milk to wash it down.

“You don’t trust me anymore,” I said.

“It just doesn’t seem like you’ve been taking your medi- cation lately, Lily. Maybe you’ve forgotten. I thought I would help you remember.”

Every morning for the past month, Mom had left a cup of tea, a piece of toast, and a pill on a plate for me by my bedside. And every morning I’d taken that pill and stashed it in an old pickle jar under my bed. I didn’t like the drug. It sucked the creamy goodness out of life.

Antidepressants tend to do that. I should know. This wasn’t the first one I’d been on.

Bells and whistles went off in my head. On Saturday, the day after Abelard and I broke the wall, Mom offered to take me and Iris to a movie. She didn’t go with us, and at the time, it seemed kind of weird. She must have gone home and searched the room for missing pills.

I probably should have flushed the medicine in the toilet so downstream fish and migratory waterfowl could expe- rience an unexpected rush of jittery calm and the sudden ability to meet deadlines and organize paperwork. Yes, I could have shared my drug bounty with the ecosystem, but a strange frugality had stopped me. The stuff was expensive.

Once Mom left, I looked under the bed. Sure enough, the pickle jar was gone.

I’m sure Mom was relieved to find my hidden stash, because I’d saved her a couple hundred bucks. One thing was for certain: She would never mention the pickle jar, and neither would I.

*** 

School. I met Rosalind at our usual spot under the live oaks in the courtyard for lunch.

Rosalind is my oldest friend all the way back to kinder- garten. She’s tiny and plays small children in local theatri- cal productions. With her long dark hair in braids and her giant brown eyes, she can pass for twelve. Maybe ten on a really big stage.

Rosalind was eating out of a bento box filled with brown rice, raw carrots, and seaweed salad. Rosalind’s parents are restricted-calorie-intake people who have formulated a plan to live for all of eternity. Like the children of vegan, mac- robiotic, gluten-shunning parents everywhere, Rosalind’s favorite food is pizza — though she likes classy pizza: feta cheese, black olives. Her dream is to move to New York and eat nothing but pizza. Also — acting.

“Lily, how was your trip to the vice principal’s office?” Rosalind  asked.

“Gripping and poignant. I laughed, I cried — ”

 “Was your mom mad?”

“Weirdly, no. I have a week in detention, but that’s it. She even said I can still see my dad this summer.”

“Really?” Rosalind raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Your mom said you could go to Portland?”

“If I keep my grades up and don’t skip class.”

Truth be told, Rosalind didn’t entirely approve of my plan to visit my dad and then refuse to return. She didn’t think I was cut out to be an organic beet farmer. Also, she would miss me.

I glanced across the courtyard. Abelard sat at his usual spot on the low wall under the crepe myrtle. Alone. The sight of him through the milling crowd sent a jolt of electricity up my spine. I realized I’d been scanning the halls all day, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

I settled on the bench next to Rosalind, carefully avoid- ing a patch of grackle poo, and opened the lunch that Iris had packed for me. A tomato sandwich, apple, Oreos. I nibbled on an Oreo and set the rest aside.

“You’re not eating?” Rosalind said. “Why, if I had a sandwich on actual bread — bread made from real demon wheat, mind you —”

“Here, have it. It’s yours. Taste the evil.”

I handed Rosalind my sandwich, but she just shrugged. I suspect she actually likes brown rice.

“So you aren’t eating. What’s up?”

“I’m back on my drug-based diet. My stomach will

refuse all food until five thirty, at which point I will eat my entire day’s calories in two hours, mostly in potato chips. Straight out of the bag. If we even have potato chips. Might be stale crackers.”

“Healthy,” Rosalind said. “I thought you weren’t going to take the drugs anymore.”

“After my little  trip to the  vice principal’s  office, my mother decided she would watch me take my meds,  like some hospital matron in one of those old movies your parents love.”

“The Snake Pit, Olivia de Havilland,” Rosalind said. “Whatever.”

Rosalind frowned.

“The drugs aren’t good for you, Lily. They change you.” “It’s not like I have a choice.”

“Um, you know how my mother is always talking about . . . balance between . . . gluten and sugar can . . . talk to your mother . . . only if you . . . off the medication . . . take you to a dark place.”

I shrugged, uninterested in the topic of my medication and diet. Abelard was eating cookies or crackers, reading something on his phone, dark hair falling over his eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was an attractive nui- sance, a shiny object.

“What do you think of Abelard?” I asked.

Rosalind followed my gaze. “I don’t know. He’s kind of in his own little bubble. Why do you ask?”

“He was on the other side of the wall when I — when we broke it.” Breaking the wall was beginning to feel like a shared secret, a source of pride. Abelard and I destroyed something — together.

“Okay,” Rosalind said slowly. Dubious. I know that look.

“He took the blame. For both of us. He didn’t have to do that.”

“And you think that was about you?” “Maybe it was about me,” I said.

I continued to stare. It was easy to stare at Abelard. He never lifted his head, never glanced in my direction. Plus — kind of beautiful. Rosalind had a point, though. Abelard was self-contained. Maybe he hadn’t thought about me once since I’d kissed him in the office. And here I was thinking obsessively about him, imagining we had some sort of secret kinship just because ten years ago I hit him in the face with my lunchbox.

“I’m just saying, don’t construct an elaborate fantasy about him before you find out what’s really going on in his head,” Rosalind said. “Abelard is not like everyone else.”

“Neither am I.” Rosalind sighed.

“You know what I mean, Lily. Unlike Abelard, you can carry on a conversation —”

“Almost like a normal person,” I interrupted. “You are a normal person,” she said.

I kind of loved that Rosalind thought there was nothing wrong with me that couldn’t be cured by regular helpings of wheatgrass shots and a little extra understanding. This was why she was my best friend — but it bothered me to hear her say Abelard was not like everyone else. Broken.

Whether she admitted it or not, I was also not like everyone else. Why be polite — why not just say “broken”?

I am a proud Broken American. There. I’ve said it. 

CHAPTER FOUR

Normally I leave school each afternoon like I’m running the bulls at Pamplona. Not that afternoon. I went to the bathroom and fought for space at the mirror with the girls who did their makeup.  I  brushed  my hair  in the corner, but then one of the mirror regulars, a raccoon-eyed blonde named Montana Jordan or Jordan Montana, took pity  on me.

“Here.” She waved me to a free spot in the mirror. I touched up my base and put on some lip gloss.

“You should really sclur your blash,” Montana Jordan/ Jordan Montana said. Her voice echoed noisily against the bathroom tile. “Screeb pretty.”

“Sure,” I replied. Screeb pretty. That was me.

“Sclur your blashes,” she said, holding out an eyelash curler.

“Oh.” Curl my eyelashes. My brain took the visual cue and made sense of the words. “No thanks. I’m on my way to detention. Coach Neuwirth.”

I stared at my reflection in the mirror — a slight bump on the bridge of my nose, skeptical green eyes. My wavy brown hair already starting to look like my time with the brush had been an exercise in futility. I couldn’t see how curly eyelashes would be much of an improvement.

“Really?” she said. “Me too.”

And then she went back to curling her eyelashes.

*** 

Abelard was already in detention when I arrived. The only other people in the room were Richard Hernandez from my algebra class and Rogelio. An emo boy I didn’t know wandered in after me.

I dropped my backpack on the floor and sat at the desk in front of Abelard, my heart pounding. Coach Neuwirth could show up at any moment. I turned around and faced Abelard before my heart rate settled.

“Okay,” I said. Extraneous hand movement. I do this when I’m nervous. “Why did you take the blame for break- ing the wall when it wasn’t just your fault? Because my mom said that your mom told the vice principal that you said you were to blame.”

I stopped because I’d run out of breath. Also — tortured sentence.

Abelard looked up. His eyes were a clearer, deeper shade of blue than I had remembered. He looked away.

“And when I hit you with the lunchbox in first grade, you never told anyone, but you probably should have. It wasn’t like we were really friends or anything —”

“You came to my house,” Abelard said in a surprisingly loud voice.

Tectonic shift of the earth’s crust, a realignment of everything. Abelard and I had a prior history, a reason I’d felt a natural connection between us. I wished I remembered.

“You came to my house,” Abelard repeated. “I was five. We watched Pokémon together. You insisted Charizard was a dragon, not a lizard.”

I’ve had an obsession with dragons ever since Dad read me The Poetic Edda. There’s a dragon in Norse mythology who chews on the roots of the tree of life. A bad thing, right? But my father contended that without the dragon, the tree of life would become overgrown and eventually choke itself out of existence. My personal spirit animal — the destructive dragon.

“Because — fire-breathing,” I said. “I mean, hello, dragon?”

Abelard blinked.

“Char — lizard, Charizard,” he said slowly. “Etymology.” Beside us Richard and Rogelio switched their conversa- tion seamlessly from English to Spanish. Should have been a hint, but I was too excited to pay attention. A rustling

noise at the front of the room and throat clearing. “Turn around.”

“Oh, you did not just play the Pokémon etymology card,” I said, experiencing a rush of word-borne feels. More fun words than I’d had in a long time. “Dragons are everything! It’s a dragon who nibbles on the roots of the tree of life, because otherwise —”

“Miss Michaels-Ryan! Turn around!” a voice boomed. “Stop pestering Mr. Mitchell.”

Pestering. I was pestering. A word invented by teach- ers to mean “bothering” but sounding infinitely worse, like something you’d get arrested for doing in a movie theater.

I swiveled, and Coach Neuwirth locked eyes on me. I felt my stomach flop, but at that moment Rogelio muttered something hilarious in Spanish. Rogelio is a natural-born confrontation clown, one of those guys who always have to get the last word in. It didn’t help Coach Neuwirth’s mood that the last word was in Spanish.

“We’re going to break up your little party,” Coach Neuwirth said. “Mr. Mondragon, please move next to Mr. Kreuz, Miss Michaels-Ryan, next to Mr. Hernandez.”

I moved back a row next to Richard Hernandez. Abelard turned sideways in his chair and stared out the window. The room went quiet, unearthly quiet. Montana Jordan/Jordan Montana slid soundlessly into the  room and took a seat across from the emo boy. Coach Neuwirth glared at her from his desk.

“Nidhogg,” Abelard said in a voice that cut through the thick stillness. “Yggdrasil.”

Nidhogg — the dragon.  Yggdrasil — the tree of  life. I didn’t remember the names from Norse mythology, but Abelard did. Abelard, my secret cartoon-watching friend from a childhood I didn’t quite remember. Abelard, who knew Norse mythology and the finer points of gear mainte- nance. Was there anything he didn’t know?

***

Detention was pretty boring. Half an hour later, I’d fin- ished my homework. I hadn’t eaten my lunch, and I was hungry and tired, too burnt to read. There was nothing to do.

Richard Hernandez sat at the desk next to me, draw- ing. I leaned over, expecting to see badly drawn girls with gravity-defying breasts, motorcycles, guns — the standard Grand Theft Auto love letter to chaos and faceless sex. The stuff boys draw.

Instead, Richard was drawing Abelard. Abelard with a three-quarter profile, his right cheekbone illuminated by sunlight streaming in from the window. Richard had drawn the barest line of a mouth and was filling in the details of Abelard’s chin, muscles in his jaw shaded diagonally from top left to bottom right.

The only part of the picture Richard had finished was Abelard’s eyes. He’d perfectly captured the way Abelard’s dark blue eyes held the light, the open, almost mystical quality of his gaze.

I glanced at Abelard and felt a strange thrill in the pit of my stomach. There was something otherworldly about him. It wasn’t my imagination — Richard saw it too.

Richard finished Abelard’s chin and moved to his hair. “Wow,” I murmured.

Richard wrapped his right arm around his picture to shield it from my view and looked up. He had close-set, intelligent eyes and dark hair in a Caesar cut.

“That’s really good,” I whispered. Good was an insuf- ficient word for his drawing, like telling a rock star his music was nice. I felt a little stupid about that, but what could I do? Drugs kill thought — even the happy, helpful drugs.

“Shhh . . .” Coach Neuwirth hissed. “Thanks,” Richard mouthed silently.

Richard returned to drawing, and I continued to watch. Minutes passed while he sketched in rapid, assured move- ments. It was calming, watching Richard, as soothing as a lullaby. I almost forgot that I was hungry and that the skin over my skull was beginning to crawl and itch.

One of the basketball players came by to talk to Coach Neuwirth. They stepped out into the hall, and I leaned over toward Richard.

“You’re left-handed — like me. Also Leonardo da Vinci,” I whispered. “You shade in the same direction — top left to bottom right. Do you know they think da Vinci was dyslexic?”

I held my hands out to visualize this, making the clas- sic L for loser with my left hand. Kindergarten tricks. They never get old. 

“You’re making that up,” Richard said. “How could anybody know?”

“I’m not making it up. I saw it on Nova. Da Vinci wrote letters backwards and misspelled words. Classic dyslexic tendencies. I should know. I’m dyslexic, too.”

“No you’re not.” Richard looked up, his close-set eyes in a savage frown. “You can read.”

Richard said the word read with the naked bitterness I usually reserve for the terms late slip or instruction sheet. Dyslexia. You can pass for normal for a while, but even- tually the anger gives you away. The monster will out. I decided I liked Richard.

“Yes, I’m totally normal,” I replied. “That’s why I’ve been in the same algebra class with you for two years running.”

“But I see you reading all the time. You always have a book —”

“I hear talking,” Coach Neuwirth boomed.

Richard startled at the sound of Coach Neuwirth’s voice. His pencil slipped, and the picture of Abelard floated off the desk, slid across the floor, and landed face-up in front of Rogelio Mondragon.

Richard froze, a stricken look on his face.

Coach Neuwirth was in the hall talking, his back half turned but still in the line of sight. I eased out of my seat in a crouch and moved slowly toward the picture, hoping to snatch it before Rogelio noticed.

I was too slow. Rogelio spotted the picture and grabbed it. He glanced at Abelard and back to the picture as his expression changed from perplexed to positively gleeful. It was as though he’d found a secret love letter, ready-made for a million stupid jokes. Someone was going to be made to suffer in both English and Spanish. Rogelio scanned the room, searching for his victim.

At the exact moment Rogelio’s eyes settled on me, Coach Neuwirth strode down the aisle and ripped the pic- ture out of Rogelio’s hands.

“Whose picture is this?” Coach Neuwirth demanded. Richard looked a little sick.

“It’s mine.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. Lies are like that sometimes.

Coach Neuwirth held the picture and examined it care- fully.

“So, this is your boyfriend?” Coach Neuwirth chuckled. “Pretty good likeness of our friend Abelard here.”

Hard to determine who he was trying to humiliate at this juncture, Abelard for being unlikely boyfriend mate- rial, or me for being, well, me. Sometimes I think Coach Neuwirth lets the cruelty fly randomly just to see who might get hit.

Abelard turned to look at me briefly. I couldn’t tell whether he was horrified, embarrassed, or intrigued that Coach Neuwirth just told the whole world he was my boy- friend. I looked away.

Coach Neuwirth handed the picture to me.

“Put it away, Ms. Michaels-Ryan,” Coach Neuwirth said.

I folded the drawing of Abelard and slipped it into my book.

 ***

In the afternoon when I returned home, the picture fell out of my book. Abelard, beautiful and distant. Richard Hernandez’s own version of the Mona Lisa, a mystery for the ages. Abelard, no doubt named for Peter Abelard from the twelfth-century text The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Strange.

I drew a thought bubble over his head and wrote the words I am Abelard, medieval French philosopher and time traveler. I have come to the future on a quest for love and beauty, but find only the barren wasteland that is high school. My tra- vails are for not!

I stuck the picture on the bulletin board and collapsed on my bed, empty. I opened my book, a novel about a girl on the run with her brilliant, eccentric father. After three pages, I quit reading, because I didn’t care what happened with the father’s new girlfriend or the daughter’s desire to go to a normal school for more than three months at a time. My head had begun that drug-fueled end-of-the- day descent, circling the empty runway of a town called Apathy.

I put my book away.

My sister came into our bedroom.

Iris is in seventh grade. Tall like me, brown eyes to my green. Same wavy brown hair, same bump on the bridge of her nose. Iris doesn’t seem to have inherited my moth- er’s large breasts like I have. She wishes that she had my breasts, but she is wrong about this.

Iris attends the Liberal Arts, Math, and Engineering Academy — LAMEA, or LAME as everyone calls it. She is the perfect student, equally adept at the long-form essay and robotics, and building musical instruments out of found objects. Found objects are a big part of the curricu- lum at LAME.

For someone with such a full curricular life, Iris has an overdeveloped interest in my activities. Like being me has a 1950s-motorcycle-and-leather-bomber-jacket sort of glam- our for her, because she has never tasted the fruits of failure. I could tell her that living outside the lines is not all that, but she probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

“What are you doing?” Iris said. “Nothing.”

“Who is that?” She leaned over the picture of Abelard, studying it with the dreamy intensity she usually reserves for K-pop stars with ice-blond dyed hair and too much mascara.

“No one,” I replied. “A kid at my school. His name is Abelard.”

“He’s adorable,” she said.

“No.” I stared at the picture. “Well, yes, he is.”

I thought about my impulsive kiss, and my heart flopped in protest. Continued exposure to the sight of Abelard’s faraway eyes was unfair.

“It’s dinnertime,” Iris said. “Mom told me to tell you.” “Not hungry,” I replied.

“Mom made a really good salad. We’ve got Supernatural cued up.”

Supernatural. Salad. These are the things we do together, eat salads and watch Supernatural because all three of us, Mom, me, and Iris, think those guys are hot. Iris likes the taller baby-faced one, but Mom and I prefer the deep- voiced snarky brother. It’s like a miracle, Mom says, to find such transgenerational hotness on TV.

This was our familial idea of a good time. It meant nothing to me at that moment — good TV, hot guys in a seventies ride, salad.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just lie here and listen to the inside of my skull buzz.”

Iris wandered off. I played Candy Crush on my phone until I saw little orange and blue striped candies exploding on the insides of my eyelids when I closed them, and still it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough pleasure, not enough light or color to fill the emptiness of my brain. It didn’t feel good or fun, but it was motion of a kind. If I stopped playing, I would realize that there were no thoughts left in my head and I was truly alone. This was what happened when my ADHD medicine wore off. This was why I hated drugs.

*** 

I left the picture of Abelard in my room, thinking I would show it to Rosalind over lunch. But when I packed my stuff up for school in the morning, the picture was gone. This didn’t surprise me in the least. Most pieces of paper I come into contact with disappear suddenly and without reason. It’s just the way it is.

******

Want to learn more about Abelard and Lily? Pre-order the book today from any of the links below!

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[writerspink]

K-12 Words

K

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1.1

anything syllables past describe winter even also eleven moon fruit sand apple women nose solve Math problem plus minus equals stone pants shirt starry thousand divided just train shall held short lay dictionary twelve suddenly mind race clothes learn picked probably raised finished end plaid years bill place hundred different drop came river milk beautiful square lake hole fingers flat sea type over new sound take only little work know live me back give most very after things our name good sentence man think say great where help through much before line right too means old any same tell boy follow want show around form three small

1.2

interest job because such think thirteen subject answer letter meet north length need times divide (by) times table edge soft months present energy point sound log south wide members exercise flowers set found things heart cause site brother teacher live read billion another distance written kept direction developed wall east happy million world must house turn west change well twenty felt put end does large big even here why ask went men land different home us move try kind hand picture again off dress play spell air away animal page mother study still learn should America

2.1

paragraph weather window third believe discovered simple gone paint new store form cells matter follow perhaps cannot good means around line center kind reason move forest sentence return instruments beside represent wild study back farmers sum difference product quotient remainder mother animal land region record summer general caterpillar scratch modern adjust passenger promise equal creak almost croak book dainty song high every near add food between own below country plant last school father keep tree never start city earth eyes light thought head under story saw left don’t few while along might close something seem next hard open example begin life always those both paper together got group often run

2.2

misty poor caution pest phrase life startle squirm alone centaur rise mountain above illustrator footprint temperature decorate country sweat sometimes hair smiled everything began thick compass themselves enough took although splendid crowded second act attach sly talk wonder let’s whirl someone Africa borrow beat belong blink per fasten pain begin drenched bed shell free earth tiny slippery count factors important until children side feet car mile night walk white sea grow river four carry state once book hear stop without late miss idea eat face watch far Indian real almost let girl mountains cut young soon list song being leave family it’s

3.1

drowsy bashful hatch glad copy possible wicked grin sibling shovel run verb sail polish ride young steep case Indian laughed soil appear bolts costume melody narrow behave howl example flee together lot filthy alarm spiral selfish idea conductor fight rolled middle glacier tree dizzy gather sneaky already construct every miss lively metal couldn’t gold plant mask chat nation hear either bundle section near rescue face divide sob celebrate family loosen jealous crash chimney daily own cozy ripe cut son natural serious carry care paper broken cue within body music color stand questions fish area mark horse birds problem complete room knew since ever piece told usually didn’t friends easy heard order red door sure become top ship across today during short better best however low hours black products happened whole measure remember early waves reached

3.2

being instead ache exactly hard speed buy age late artistic close affordable fraction eyes appetite complain sleep seem eat below remove rusty grow glum stormy trust enormous scale open add grab upset weed denied expensive story terrified lead jumped died basket side bear bend list tomb while batch grateful father gleaming dress light sprinkle amount exclaim result yank leave cheat whimper angle outside remain heap champion surprise dodge moment fancy squeeze pretend village shriek city thunder rapid iron striped don’t attitude bell hat tug isn’t applause children honest cross spring freezing listen wind rock space covered fast several hold himself toward five step morning passed vowel true hundred against pattern numeral table north expert slowly money map farm pulled draw voice seen cold cried plan notice south sing war ground fall king town I’ll unit figure certain field travel wood fire upon

4.1

pattern cave hope mile group travel blush killed seed bottom hide important let ticket timid pounds restart silent cranky keep real bright quite curved repeat trip without dart consonant mountains quiet apologize roar grip groan bolt food injury century exhausted cabin atmosphere floor it’s scold transportation delighted giant hill something build fog method rough left everyone obey deserve speak therefore soon french switch until pushed state knob hobby between surround collect fire I’ll arrive road happened certain top order astronomy inches club catch farm nibble color yourself received connect told gaze check wear English half ten fly gave box finally wait correct oh quickly person became shown minutes strong verb stars front feel fact street decided contain course surface produce building ocean class note nothing rest carefully scientists inside wheels stay green known island week less machine base ago stood

4.2

round award crowd slowly yet products, goods, services vowel himself strange whose draw team hold feel flood sent save stood yard notice warn enemy deep please flap coast music wrote safe blast behind island lizard figure famous garden correct whisper listen joined clear share net thus calf maybe cried piece fold seen england decided bank fell pair control clean telescope trouble glass float morning horse produce course hunting rest step statement contain shouted filled zigzag accident cents instrument fly single express visit desert seeds chew dome experiment break gravity against branch size low plane system ran boat game force brought understand warm common bring explain dry though language shape thousands yes equation government heat full hot check object am rule among noun power cannot able six dark ball material special heavy fine circle include built

5.1

mark wealthy row feeling across attention ran map students inside design art mouth ring skill hot during shelter full till log (book) blossom discard bring quickly scientists party town covered wise early cram grain harm goal pause inform heal clue fame freeze badge pimple dim missionary diet dumb rod march agree stick government bulb mall ban greed skiing poison stove image grew fact material dangerous flow gap ago stack explain didn’t strong voice true drawing surface gift corner cloud since king dawn pulled dozen friends greedy burning upon knew insect decimal nervous pay foot weak smooth aware steady serve lost nonetheless beach front atlas questions less cost slight motor banner wire area carefully separate equation local minutes fast table plan fine waves fair sing dive suppose boat thousands shape among toward gas factory birds wait understand sure ship report captain human game history reflect special brave bounce though else can’t matter square syllables perhaps bill felt suddenly test direction center farmers ready anything divided general energy subject Europe moon region return believe dance members picked simple cells paint mind love cause rain exercise eggs train blue wish drop developed window difference distance heart site sum summer wall forest probably

5.2

include cage language base red brain building feast better built demolish excess leap tower ocean plains cold claw information scholar climbed woman worry strand heavy herd common ground damp pack choose president least increase half english invent class measure dash tremble object become doubt became bare wheels continued shiver engine core couple business stars week peak numeral brought nothing touch reached uncle symbols however rumor evening inasmuch (as) force curious heat career system valley dust flock spray robber practice lonely remember luxury warm heard calm rock frighten leader difficulty best gum cheer key support universe stream bit usually fish parade balance money note cliff stand proof you’re pale machine complete cool shown street today shy easy several search unit war power caught settle itself fuel mention fresh planet plane straight period person able direct space wood seal field circle lady board besides hours passed known whole similar underline main winter wide written length reason kept interest arms brother race present beautiful store job edge past sign record finished discovered wild happy beside gone sky grass million west lay weather root instruments meet third months paragraph raised represent soft whether clothes flowers shall teacher held describe drive appreciate structure visible artificial

6.1

afraid absorb british seat fear stretched furniture sight oxygen coward rope clever yellow albeit confess passage france fan cattle spot explore rather active death effect mine create wash printed process origin rose swift woe planets doze gasp chief perform triumph value substances tone score predict property movement harsh tube settled defend reverse ancient blood sharp border fierce plunge consider terms vision intend total schedule attract average intelligent corn dead southern glide supply convince send continent brief mural symbol crew chance suffix habit insects entered nursery especially spread drift major fig diagram guess wit sugar predator science necessary moisture park ordeal nectar fortunate flutter gun forward globe misery molecules arctic won’t actually addition washington cling rare lie steel pastime soldiers chill accordingly capital prevent solution greek sensitive electric agreed thin provide indicate northern volunteer sell tied triangle action opposite shoulder imitate steer wander except match cross speak solve appear metal son either ice sleep village factors result jumped snow ride care floor hill pushed baby buy century outside everything tall already instead phrase soil bed copy free hope spring case laughed nation quite type themselves temperature bright lead everyone method section lake iron within dictionary bargain loyal resource struggle vary capture exclaim gloomy insist restless shallow shatter talent atmosphere brilliant endure glance precious unite certain clasp depart journey observe superb treasure wisdom

6.2

prepared journey trade delicate arrived track cotton hoe furnish exciting view grasp level branches privilege limit wrong enable ability various moreover spoil starve dollars digest advice sense accuse pretty wasn’t industry adopt loyal suggested blow treasure cook adjective doesn’t wings tools crops loud smell frail wisdom fit expect ahead lifted deed device weight gradual respect interesting arrange particular compound examine cable climate division individual talent fatal entire advantage opponent wouldn’t elements column custom enjoy grace theory suitable wife shoes determine allow marsh workers difficult repeated thrill position born distant revive magnificent shop sir army struggled deal plural rich rhythm rely poem company string locate church mystify elegant led actual responsible japanese huge fun meat observe swim office chart avoid factories block called experience win crumple brilliant located pole bought conditions sister details primary survey truck recall disease radio rate scatter decay signal approach launch hair age amount scale pounds although per broken moment tiny possible gold milk quiet natural lot stone act build middle speed count consonant someone sail rolled bear wonder smiled angle fraction Africa killed melody bottom trip hole poor let’s fight surprise French died beat exactly remain fingers clever coast explore imitate pierce rare symbol triumph ancient cling disturb expose perform remote timid bashful brief compete consider delightful honor reflex remark brink chill conquer fortunate fury intend pattern vibrant wit

7.1

capture remark western outcome risk current bold compare resident ambition arrest furthermore desire confuse accurate disclose considerable contribute calculate baggage literacy noble era benefit orchard shabby content precious manufacture dusk afford assist demonstrate instant concentrate sturdy severe blend vacant weary carefree host limb pointless prepare inspire shallow chamber vast ease attentive source frantic lack recent distress basic permit threat analyze distract meadow mistrust jagged prefer sole envy hail reduce arena tour annual apparent recognize captivity burrow proceed develop humble resist peculiar response communicate circular variety frequent reveal essential disaster plead mature appropriate attractive request congratulate address destructive fragile modest attempt tradition ancestor focus flexible conclude venture impact generosity routine tragic crafty furious blossom concern ascend awkward master queasy release portion plentiful alert heroic extraordinary frontier descend invisible coax entrance capable peer terror mock outstanding valiant typical competition hardship entertain eager limp survive tidy antonym duplicate abolish approach approve glory magnificent meek prompt revive watchful wreckage audible consume glide origin prevent punctuate representative scorn stout woe arch authentic clarify declare grant grave opponent valid yearn admirable automatic devotion distant dreary exhaust kindle predict separation stunt

7.2

evade debate dedicate budge available miniature petrify pasture banquet pedestrian solitary decline reassure nonchalant exhibit realistic exert abuse dictate minor monarch concept character strategy soar beverage tropical withdraw challenge kin navigate purchase reliable mischief solo combine vivid aroma spurt illuminate narrator retain excavate avalanche preserve suspend accomplish exasperate obsolete occasion myth reign sparse gorge intense revert antagonist talon aggressive alternate retire cautiously blizzard require endanger luxurious senseless portable sever compensate companion visual immense slither guardian compassion escalate detect protagonist oasis altitude assume seldom courteous absurd edible identical pardon approximate taunt achievement homonym hearty convert wilderness industrious sluggish thrifty deprive independent bland confident anxious astound numerous resemble route access jubilation saunter hazy impressive document moral crave gigantic bungle prefix summit overthrow perish visible translate comply intercept feeble exult compose negative suffocate frigid synonym appeal dominate deplete abundant economy desperate diligent commend boycott jovial onset burden fixture objective siege barrier conceive formal inquire penalize picturesque predator privilege slumber advantage ambition defiant fearsome imply merit negotiate purify revoke wretched absorb amateur channel elegant grace inspect lame tiresome tranquil boast eloquent glisten ideal infectious invest locate ripple sufficient uproar

8.1

apprehensive dialogue prejudice marvel eligible accommodate arrogant distinct knack deposit liberate cumulative consequence strive salvage chronological unique vow concise influence lure poverty priority legislation significant conserve verdict leisure erupt beacon stationary generate provoke efficient campaign paraphrase swarm adhere eerie mere mimic deteriorate literal preliminary solar soothe expanse ignite verge recount apparel terrain ample quest composure majority collide prominent duration pursue innovation omniscient resolute unruly optimist restrain agony convenient constant prosper elaborate genre retrieve exploit continuous dissolve dwell persecute abandon meager elude rural retaliate primitive remote blunder propel vital designate cultivate loathe consent drastic fuse maximum negotiate barren transform conspicuous possess allegiance beneficial former factor deluge vibrant intimidate idiom dense awe rigorous manipulate transport discretion hostile clarity arid parody boisterous capacity massive prosecute declare stifle remorse refuge predicament treacherous inevitable ingenious plummet adapt monotonous accumulate reinforce extract reluctant vacate hazardous inept diminish domestic linger context excel cancel distribute document fragile myth reject scuffle solitary temporary veteran assault convert dispute impressive justify misleading numerous productive shrewd strategy villain bluff cautious consist despise haven miniature monarch obstacle postpone straggle vivid aggressive associate deceive emigrate flexible glamour hazy luxurious mishap overwhelm span blemish blunt capable conclude detect fatigue festive hospitality nomad supreme

8.2

exclude civic compact painstaking supplement habitat leeway minute hoax contaminate likeness migration commentary extinct tangible originate urban unanimous subordinate collaborate obstacle esteem encounter futile cordial trait improvises superior exaggerate anticipate cope evolve eclipse dissent anguish subsequent sanctuary formulates makeshift controversy diversity terminate precise equivalent pamper prior potential obnoxious radiant predatory presume permanent pending simultaneously tamper supervise perceived vicious patronize trickle stodgy rant oration preview species poised perturb vista wince yearn persist shirk status tragedy trivial snare vindictive wrath recede peevish rupture unscathed random toxic void orthodox subtle resume sequel upright wary overwhelm perjury uncertainty prowess utmost throb pluck pique vengeance pelt urgent substantial robust sullen retort ponder whim saga sham reprimand vocation assimilate dub defect accord embark desist dialect chastise banter inaugurate ovation barter muse blasé stamina atrocity deter principal liberal epoch preposterous advocate audacious dispatch incense deplore institute deceptive component subside spontaneous bonanza ultimate wrangle clarify hindrance irascible plausible profound infinite accomplish apparent capacity civilian conceal duplicate keen provoke spurt undoing vast withdraw barrier calculate compose considerable deputy industrious jolt loot rejoice reliable senseless shrivel alternate demolish energetic enforce feat hearty mature observant primary resign strive verdict brisk cherish considerate displace downfall estimate humiliate identical improper poll soothe vicinity abolish appeal brittle condemn descend dictator expand famine portable prey thrifty visual

9.1

stance vie instill exceptional avail strident formidable rebuke enhance benign perspective tedious aloof encroach memoir mien desolate inventive prodigy staple stint fallacy grope vilify recur assail tirade antics recourse clad jurisdiction caption pseudonym reception humane ornate sage ungainly overt sedative amiss convey connoisseur rational enigma fortify servile fastidious contagious elite disgruntled eccentric pioneer abet luminous era sleek serene proficient rue articulate awry pungent wage deploy anarchy culminate inventory commemorate muster adept durable foreboding lucrative modify authority transition confiscate pivotal analogy avid flair ferret decree voracious imperative grapple deface augment shackle legendary trepidation discern glut cache endeavor attribute phenomenon balmy bizarre gullible loll rankle decipher sublime rubble renounce porous turbulent heritage hover pithy allot minimize agile renown fend revenue versa gaunt haven dire doctrine intricate conservative exotic facilitate bountiful cite panorama swelter foster indifferent millennium gingerly conscientious intervene mercenary citadel obviously rely supportive sympathy weakling atmosphere decay gradual impact noticeable recede stability variation approximately astronomical calculation criterion diameter evaluate orbit sphere agricultural decline disorder identify probable thrive expected widespread bulletin contribution diversity enlist intercept operation recruit survival abruptly ally collide confident conflict protective taunt adaptation dormant forage frigid hibernate insulate export glisten influence landscape native plantation restore urge blare connection errand exchange

9.2

feasible teem pang vice tycoon succumb capacious onslaught excerpt eventful forfeit crusade tract haggard susceptible exemplify ardent crucial excruciating embargo disdain apprehend surpass sporadic flustered languish conventional disposition theme plunder ignore project complaint title dramatic delivery litter experimental clinic arrogance preparation remind atomic occasional conscious deny maturity closure stressed translator animate observation physical further gently registration suppress combination amazing constructive allied poetry passion ecstasy mystery cheerful contribution spirit failed gummy commerce prove disagreement raid consume embarrass preference migrant devour encouragement quote mythology destined destination illuminating struggle accent ungrateful giggle approval confidence expose scientist operation superstitious emergency manners absolutely swallow readily mutual bound crisp orient stress sort stare comfort verbal heel challenging advertisement envious sex scar astonish basis accuracy enviable alliance specific chef embarrassed counter tolerable sympathetic gradually vanish informative amaze royal furry insist jealousy simplify quiver collaborate dedicated flexible function mimic obstacle technique archaeologist fragment historian intact preserve reconstruct remnant commence deed exaggeration heroic impress pose saunter wring astound concealed inquisitive interpret perplexed precise reconsider suspicious anticipation defy entitled neutral outspoken reserved sought equal absorb affect circulate conserve cycle necessity seep barren expression meaningful plume focused genius perspective prospect stunned superb transition assume guarantee nominate

10.1

install reticent corroborate regretfully strength murder concise cunning intention holy satire query confused progression disillusion background mundane abrupt multiple enormously introduce emulate harmful pragmatic pity rebut liberate enthusiastic elucidate camaraderie disparage nature creep profitability impression racist sobriety occupy autonomy currently amiable reiterate reproduce cripple modest offer atom provincial augment ungratefully expansion yield rashly allude immigration silence epitome exacerbate somber avid dispute vindicate collaborate manufacturer embellish superficial propaganda incompetent objective diminish statistics endure ambivalent perpetuate illuminate phenomenon exasperate originality restrict anxiety anthropology circumstances aesthetic manufacturing conventional dubious vulnerable reality precedent entity success term critical repair underscore stepmother republican hesitantly classic wary contents prediction immediate invoke notorious implicit excluding input skeptical foster element punish frank humanity profound dessert orthodox substance disappear encourage neighborhood elder superfluous naive ascertain complacent resilient deafening military tend prudent glare acceptance skillfully induce monster beam gullible conciliate vessel petty cantankerous disclose archaeology anecdote disdain electronics substantiate subjective tourism advisable joyful incredible provocative psychological ruins discipline condone indifferent misfortune judgmental industrialize tasty assume astute mission mar protective definitely escape oppress shocked virtual zealous endorse qualification hostile eccentric abstract disparate geographical scrutinize generalization tolerate activity claim dogmatic influential obsolete extol implausible subsequent resource chronic benevolent improve confidential ambiguous seriously dearth perplex hatred throughout dine contemporary evoke essentially economic flagrant obscure alleviate eloquent dreaadful clumsy sympathy victim condemn vigor condescend spontaneous quell reprehensible substantially sleeve equivocal ironic decry errand articulate progressive eradicate refreshments elicit aspiration recently exemplary bribery theoretical disingenuous partisan revere particle nostalgia self-aggrandizement debunk tyranny rhetoric hierarchy warning whimsical venerate commend assert miserable awful vibe constrain undermine explicit differentiate compliment scrupulous contempt erroneous ideal refute imply cynical rash presume insight revival vary delay renounce indignant offensive temperate circumstantial export peep logo advertise suppress distort chunk convoluted denounce overwhelming fertility rigorous acquire arrogant university antagonize profitable indulgent strategic breathing idiosyncrasy profession frugal discern accommodation adversary incredulous disturbance digress social belie roam smug continual pertinent voluntarily elite subtle blame sincerity lick horror censure involvement candid infer futile impetuous exploit bewilder sustain diligent sincere protect sealed musical empathy callous parenthetical insure acorn sarcasm seize sacrificially allege emphatic irrelevant progress diplomatic stunned improvise deride reconcile meticulous deject scientifically incontrovertible pressure justify gloomy depict supplant endurance analogous diary bolster slip contemplate pesticide glow religious advocate negligent creator lament fundamental embrace throne inherent inferior valuable thrive trivial pretense reserved capricious refresh refusal flight boost explanation coherent prevalent tenacious official royalty assassin rub poach delete

10.2

warrant circumscribed somewhat explosive optimistic mandate previously detract opinion intuitive feasible intimate persistent humble simplicity tempt deliberate painful unethical fundamentals discrepancy remorse pessimistic possibility conclusion acknowledge impregnate soberly creation paralyze suitability oblige tranquil medal arbitrate pacify illusory susceptible vibrate vengeance infection democratic stressful grave speculative sample identification stifle obligation revenge organization namely mediocre practical scream weaken consensus affectionate deficient treacherous console isolation ingenious memory melodrama despair awestruck composition regret recommendation celebrity decision devoid opaque ornamentation longevity participate dread restore interrogate aid accordingly mislead embarrassment optimism domestic apt funds virtue geography fundamentally thoroughly press despite horrible chilling rental esteemed disappointment innovative contemplation assign popularize haunt deafen serene percent estrangement suffer extravagant throng estimate comment priesthood mass dreadfully promote periphery animated saying relate clarity triple derivative succeed distortion register suicide improvement discreet inquisition probable curative incident praise convenience baffle covet dreadful genuinely weary undisturbed disgruntled humility renown nonchalant monopoly comedy vague decisive inconsequential announcement fabricated nevertheless vigilant scarce neglectful hushed attainment tedious explode snatch pslm agency sentimental tension adhere meanwhile sacred avert conformity likewise challenger accessible responsibility peril contact event roast fallible catastrophic competitor violate resolute deceive exaggeration discredit intolerable approve paste dimly novelist demeanor norm politician satisfaction obvious vehicle reservation defer involve restoration crush audible assistant backpack attain inanimate commemorate confrontation emigration parasite disperse quantitative laughter policy vulgar occasionally repay effective eulogy starvation empty therapeutic overall immortal encompass inappropriate opportune engagement illustrate turmoil observatory classification expression reminiscence comedian invention depress remedy protagonist gesture texture diplomatic election prolong conducive emotional invigorate curiosity expressive %

K-12 Words was originally published on PinkWrite

[takenkarathat]

That Tall Golfer Girl

I read a story about a girl from Missouri State University the other day and her piece of writing really hit home for me. I felt like I had to create a domino effect in sharing my story. I was that girl in school who no one really looked at as "popular." I was quiet in elementary school, had 1 best friend in middle school, and had almost no friends in high school. I grew up in happy home with a large community. Everyone knew each other despite how large it was. From what I can remember, play dates were arranged by our mothers and I was invited to all of the birthday parties. One party I remember in particular was the sixth birthday of a girl whom I still talk to today, but we'll revisit that in a little bit. I had the VERY best friend a girl could ask for in third grade. There was a new girl who moved into a house down the street from me and she was in my class. I guess you could say we were inseparable from the day we met. We had a sleepover in her empty house the first weekend she lived in my community. Her parents graciously opened their home to me and spent plenty of gas money taking my friend and I places. We even buried her blue fighting fish on the side of her house after giving it a wonderful funeral. One day in fifth grade, my best friend told me she was moving back to Charlotte. We were working on a paper mache canoe for the art history museum. To her, it was a casual conversation, but to me, it was heartbreaking. I remember leaving art class and crying with my head down on my desk for the hour that was left of school. I went home and cried in my mother's arms for hours. Why do I tell you this story in great detail? That was the last time I had a friend who I knew cared about me. She and I were as quirky cool as they get! To this day, I do not know where she is and wish there was a way to find her. I have searched Facebook and the White Pages. I only know her name and that she came from Charlotte, NC. If you read this, I am still searching for you bestie! Things began to change after my best friend moved. My life was turned upside down. I vividly remember the start of what I like to call "my other life." It started with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I was ten. I could not swallow it. I thought everything would get stuck in my throat. Each day at lunch, I would sit down at the table assigned to my class and eat yogurt in silence. My best friend was gone and I did not know how to make friends with the other girls. No one ever asked me why I only at yogurt for lunch. A short time later, I was suddenly able to eat solid food again. But before I move on to middle school, I will tell you about a highlight of my life after my best friend moved. Travel basketball was my everything. I had a really good friend who was in my class at school and our parents were great friends as well. I once gave her a Wheel of Fortune game for her birthday, which I thought was genius! She was a great friend and we drifted apart when my other life started. Moving to a new school was not an easy transition for me. I developed severe anxiety and was eventually diagnosed with panic disorder around age eleven. I remember secretly visiting my counselor's office every morning to check in with her for comfort. I knew she was always there for me. I got comfortable in middle school as eighth grade rolled around. I was a skater kid with one best friend. I never had panic attacks when I was with her or when we exploring her neighborhood. I couldn't tell you why given every other moment of my life was full of fear. Middle school ended as quickly as it started and my panic became a full blown life crisis. I drifted away from my middle school best friend. The first day of high school I got sick on the bus because I was so nervous. My mom had to pick me up and return me to 5th period journalism class. I was shaking in my shoes, but got comfortable when it came to newspaper class because I had visited prior to going to high school. The editor in chief was REALLY nice and welcomed me as soon as I walked into class as well as Doc. He was the teacher whom everyone loved! I muddled through freshman year catching mono and pneumonia at the same time from the end of September to the beginning of November. Anxiety and panic became my life. I remember lying in bed everyday while I was sick slowly losing my mind and self esteem because everyone had found their groups of friends. There were cliques that I desperately wanted to be apart of at the time. Looking back, I should have never done that to myself. Scrolling through Facebook seeing everyone I knew going to homecoming and football games made me upset and I cried myself to sleep every night. My phone was useless and the enabler of a horrid depression. No one texted me. No one called me. I just had my mom, dad, and my dog. My sisters didn't understand what was going on. As time passed, I went to a special school for 2 weeks that was supposed to make me comfortable with leaving home without panic attacks. Everyone there had a drug problem or had attempted suicide. I was not supposed to be there. I just had really bad panic attacks. They locked the doors so no one could get out. I understand now that it was protocol. When I left that school, my newspaper class was still there. They stuck by me. The editor in chief was made aware what was going on and she was older than me so she understood a little bit. I ended freshman year with no friends and many acquaintances my life allowed me to encounter. Sophomore year started with visits to newspaper class every single morning before English and history. It was my safe haven. My counselor's office was my other home within my high school. Somehow, I managed to play on the golf team, which was the only thing that did not cause me panic. I cannot tell you why. I just can't. I went homebound for school sophomore year due to severe panic. My newspaper class stuck close by me through that too. They gave my older sister a card to bring home to me and I still have it today. At the beginning of junior year, I had a much needed break from my panic. Again, I cannot tell you why I was able to attend school with minimal panic attacks. I had my daily routine. Visit newspaper class, visit my counselor, and stop by freshman year english/history class before heading to my first class of the day. November 2009 (sophomore) was the beginning of a medical mystery that took almost ten years to crack. My stomach began to hurt. It was more like a severe cramp. I doubled over constantly and ended up bedridden. Just as my life seemed kind of "normal," it slammed me back into the ground. I spent LITERALLY the next year in bed with pain in my stomach that no one could understand. My depression returned and the scrolling through Facebook feeds became more frequent. I wanted to be part of that group of girls who had all the fun and went to country concerts during the summer. I wanted it so badly! Strangely enough, Taylor Swift was becoming popular in the music industry and her music was the only thread of real life I could relate to. I felt like it was the two of us wishing we could just be pretty and liked by all of the other girls. I was a songwriter as well and clung to her music like it was the oxygen in my blood. Everything that came out of her mouth was my life and what I was hoping and wishing for in friends, boyfriends, and high school life. But there's always something "wrong" with the girl who marches to the beat of her own drum right? My stomach pain, panic, and gasps of air for normalcy through Taylor Swift's music continued into senior year of high school. All the while, I was bullied to no end for liking Taylor Swift when it was her lyrics I was so obsessed about. You have to admit she is pretty cool too! Headaches began to accompany my stomach pain. The emergency room doctors became my friends. Well, doctors were my only friends for a while. People from newspaper class once shared with me what the topic of discussion had come to be regarding where I had gone. Apparently, I had cancer, committed suicide, and died from my illnesses. At the time, it bothered me, but now I wonder how on earth anyone even noticed I was gone in the first place since I was a fly on the wall while I was there. Without taking another hour of your time, I'll explain what happened in as simple terms as possible. Bullets might be better. -I got headaches and spent 2 or 3 nights in the hospital from November 2010-June 2011. -I had surgery in May 2011 to remove endometriosis, which was the source of my stomach pain. -I missed high school prom and graduation. -I still went to college and was on great anxiety medication that kept me okay. -My freshman year roommate was and still is an angel even though we could not have been more different in college. We still talk and I consider her to be one of the kindest people I have ever met. -I slept when I was not in class freshman year of college because fatigue and headaches kept me in bed sometimes. -I got endometriosis again sophomore year and had another surgery. -I tried college basketball and failed miserably due to my lack of strength. But I met a lifelong friend whom I am texting right now! -My headaches persisted and an ENT discovered something wrong with my sinuses in the process so I had the worst surgery one could imagine. The doctors didn't tell me that the recovery pain was similar to brain surgery because they knew I might reject a surgery I needed to breathe better. -I continued school and almost failed Drawing 101. I can't believe they grade you on your ability to draw! -I still couldn't get rid of my headaches. I was in the dining hall one morning sitting in the corner and my jaw locked from eating eggs. I had to drive 45 minutes home to my dentist who sent me to D.C. for EXTREME TMJ treatment that lasted...2 years. The morning after my 21st birthday, I woke up and felt the strangest I had ever felt in my whole life. I had no headache. My jaw wasn't tight or popping. I had no panic. I began life on March 25, 2013. I got 2 jobs and began talking to people at school. None of them became my best friends because I could never seal the deal with plans due to my illnesses. Treatment for my headaches turned into Botox injections every 3 months, which have lasted 8 years. I tried them previously with no luck. I tried out for and made men's golf team after a shoulder dislocation during basketball season that sent me to a specialist who diagnosed me with a rare disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The men's golf team was a little boring to me so I decided to create a women's team with 4 months left of my junior year. It worked! Since 2014, I have LIVED! Headaches have been rare, panic is gone, and I still don't have that clique of friends I wanted. That's OK. I still talk to the girl who invited me to her sixth birthday party. She made an appearance on that show, Two Broke Girls, the other night, which she deserved more than anyone because of how hard she worked! My freshman year roommate used to live in Northern VA, but moved back home. I wish we had more time to hangout when she was here because it turns out we are very similar in personality. She is a really down to earth person who marches to the beat of her own drum. She does not care if I'm as stylish as her and really just cares about me. Let's see...I call that good people! I worked 80 hours a week running myself into the ground multiple times while trying to take a "break" from school. My dog and best friend passed away 2 months after I graduated from college, which took 2 weeks of my life from me. However, he sent me the current fluff ball I own now! Life led me to golf instruction where I currently teach the best junior golfers in the world and am on my way to my LPGA Teaching Professional certification. I am also a foreign currency trader (Forex) with a huge group of fellow traders from all over the world! What have I learned in my other life and the few years since I started living? I just want the rest of my days on this earth to be simple. I want to make everyone around me happy and make sure they know I truly care about them and what they are doing in their lives. I want to spend everyday I can with my puppy and impact as many golfers/people as I can with my story. Being part of that clique was not all it was cracked up to be, but I still have my moments when people mention memories of something I should have been able to experience. Endometriosis surgeries are routine for me these days, but it's just like going to the dentist. My rare disease causes me a great deal of pain and fatigue, which I am trying to handle as best I can. The pain isn't really a thing since my other life was...hell...for lack of a better term. What I really want you to get out of this is an interesting story that inspires you to be a better person. Life doesn't always hand you silver platters and the world is certainly not a nice place sometimes. However, it can be if you make it. I have dreams and goals to accomplish because I still have plenty of time on this earth as far as I'm concerned. I just turned 24 and am jumping over mountains because I tell myself I can. The only mountain I have yet to get over is that random selection in the crowd of Taylor Swift fans at a concert. I just want to spend a little time telling my hero how much she saved my life years ago. Some people still don't understand how huge of a fan of Taylor I am. I don't know her personally, but from what she has vulnerably allowed the world to see about her, I would honestly like to just meet her as Taylor. Not the Grammy winner or girl with a bunch of boyfriends. Just that person who was with me saving my life years ago when she didn't even know it. I am that "tall golfer girl" and that's all I really ever want to be.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

The Other Way Covid Will Kill: Hunger (NYT) Long before the pandemic swept into her village in the rugged southeast of Afghanistan, Halima Bibi knew the gnawing fear of hunger. It was an omnipresent force, an unrelenting source of anxiety as she struggled to nourish her four children. Her husband earned about $5 a day, hauling produce by wheelbarrow from a local market to surrounding homes. Most days, he brought home a loaf of bread, potatoes and beans for an evening meal. But when the coronavirus arrived in March, taking the lives of her neighbors and shutting down the market, her husband’s earnings plunged to about $1 a day. Most evenings, he brought home only bread. Some nights, he returned with nothing. “We hear our children screaming in hunger, but there is nothing that we can do,” said Ms. Bibi, speaking in Pashto by telephone from a hospital in the capital city of Kabul, where her 6-year-old daughter was being treated for severe malnutrition. “That is not just our situation, but the reality for most of the families where we live.” It is increasingly the reality for hundreds of millions of people around the planet. As the global economy absorbs the most punishing reversal of fortunes since the Great Depression, hunger is on the rise. Those confronting potentially life-threatening levels of so-called food insecurity in the developing world are expected to nearly double this year to 265 million, according to the United Nations World Food Program.

Farmworkers face coronavirus disaster (Politico) Within days of the coronavirus pandemic taking hold, the Trump administration had to confront a reality it had long tried to ignore: The nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers, about half of whom the government estimates are undocumented, are absolutely critical to keeping the food system working. It was a major shift for a president who continues to reduce any debate about immigration to stoking fears about border defense and crime. But the Trump administration and Congress have done little to help keep farmworkers safe on the job. Six months into the pandemic, according to a POLITICO analysis, these workers appear to be victims of the worst of the Covid-19 crisis. For several weeks, many of the places that grow the nation’s fruits and vegetables have seen disproportionately high rates of coronavirus cases—a national trend that, as harvest season advances in many states, threatens already vulnerable farmworkers, their communities and the places they work. From Oregon to North Carolina, counties with the highest per capita rates of coronavirus are some of the top producers of crops like lettuce, sweet potatoes and apples. In California, six out of seven of the state’s most Covid-ridden counties, per capita, are in the Central Valley, which produces the lion’s share of America’s fruits and vegetables.

What’s next? Devastating fires are latest challenge in West (AP) The path of devastation spans thousands of miles where flames have consumed people, homes and cars while leaving a barren, gray landscape. But the massive wildfires aren’t done chewing through the West, shrouding the skies with choking smoke or driving residents from their homes. It’s an ominous harbinger of fall for the region that was the first to be hit hard by the coronavirus and where the cries for social justice have rung especially loud this summer with protests in Portland for more than 100 days. “What’s next?” asked Danielle Oliver, who had to flee her home southeast of Portland ahead of the deadly flames. “You have the protests, coronavirus pandemic, now the wildfires. What else can go wrong?” She’s one of tens of thousands of people displaced by wildfires in Oregon, California and Washington state. Many more are living with air contamination levels at historic highs. The region’s death toll has topped 30 and could increase sharply, with Oregon officials saying they are preparing for a possible “mass casualty event” if more bodies are found in the ash.

Teacher departures leave schools scrambling for substitutes (AP) With many teachers opting out of returning to the classroom because of the coronavirus, schools around the U.S. are scrambling to find replacements and in some places lowering certification requirements to help get substitutes in the door. Several states have seen surges in educators filing for retirement or taking leaves of absence. The departures are straining staff in places that were dealing with shortages of teachers and substitutes even before the pandemic created an education crisis. Among those leaving is Kay Orzechowicz, an English teacher at northwest Indiana’s Griffith High School, who at 57 had hoped to teach for a few more years. But she felt her school’s leadership was not fully committed to ensuring proper social distancing and worried that not enough safety equipment would be provided for students and teachers. Add the technology requirements and the pressure to record classes on video, and Orzechowicz said it “just wasn’t what I signed up for when I became a teacher.”

Paulette rolls toward Bermuda; Sally threatens Gulf Coast (AP) Residents of Bermuda were urged to prepare to protect life and property ahead of Hurricane Paulette, which was forecast to become a dangerous hurricane Sunday as Tropical Storm Sally intensified in the Gulf of Mexico. Paulette gained hurricane status late Saturday and was expected to bring storm surge, coastal flooding and high winds to Bermuda, according to a U.S. National Hurricane Center advisory. A hurricane warning for Sally was issued Sunday morning from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and included metropolitan New Orleans. A storm surge warning and a tropical storm warning were also in effect for parts of the Gulf Coast. A slow moving storm, Sally could produce rain totals up to 20 inches (51 centimeters) by the middle of the week, forecasters said.

As Both Sides Dig In, What’s the Endgame for Belarus? (NYT) After more than a month of protests in Belarus, there is still no clear endgame in sight for either side, with Mr. Lukashenko and his foes both insisting they can prevail but neither offering a clear and plausible path to victory—other than continued peaceful defiance by protesters and relentless repression by the government. One way to break the stalemate that all sides, including Russia, say they could support would be constitutional changes to pave the way for new elections. But Mr. Lukashenko, having declared in August that “until you kill me, there will not be any more elections,” has shown no real interest in changing anything any time soon. He refuses to even talk with his foes, denouncing them as treasonous “rats” and “tricksters” who belong in jail, not at the negotiating table. Instead, he has focused on rounding up workers who organized strikes and methodically dismantling the opposition, whose most prominent figures have, one by one, been forced to flee abroad or been thrown in jail. Protesters have defied expectations by turning out in huge numbers each Sunday for the past four weeks despite government threats, a feat they hope to repeat this weekend. But Mr. Lukashenko, emboldened by Russian support, has only grown more insistent that he is not going anywhere.

France Daily Coronavirus Cases Top 10,000, Most Since Lockdown (Bloomberg) France reported more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, the largest daily increase since the end of the country’s lockdown in May, a day after Prime Minister Jean Castex warned of a “clear worsening” in the spread of the virus. The French government is trying to avoid another national lockdown, and people will have to live with the virus and be vigilant about sticking to precautions, Castex said in a speech Friday. With cases also spiking in neighboring countries, including Germany, Spain and the U.K., Western Europe has reemerged as a global hotspot for infections.

Fed-up Lesbos islanders, migrants stuck waiting for Europe to decide (Reuters) Crisis-weary residents of the Greek island of Lesbos and the thousands of migrants stranded there after this week’s refugee centre fire are united by one thing—they all want to see the migrants moved off the island. Lesbos and other islands off the Turkish coast have been among the main entry points for migrants into Europe for years, peaking in 2015-16 when around a million people arrived in a seemingly endless stream of small boats. The overflowing camp that burned held more than 12,000 migrants—four times the numbers it was supposed to—forcing thousands to live in squalor and putting a strain on both its occupants and residents in nearby areas who have mounted a series of protests this year demanding the centre be shut down. But with the European Union unable to reach agreement between countries like Greece and Italy, which want the bloc to share the burden and others refusing to take in refugees, for the moment Lesbos’ 86,000 islanders and migrants remain unwillingly together.

Ageing and empty: Japan next premier’s hometown highlights challenges ahead (Reuters) It’s noon on a warm day in the Japanese town where Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s next prime minister, grew up, but more than half the stores in a downtown shopping arcade are shuttered and sidewalks stretch empty except for the rare elderly passerby. A building proclaiming “I Love Yuzawa” stands abandoned. A giant department store nearby hulks over the street, mostly unusable because it doesn’t meet earthquake safety standards but too expensive to tear down. The remote part of Yuzawa where Suga grew up, 480 km (300 miles) northeast of Tokyo, captures key challenges his administration will face: half the residents in the area are over 60. Depopulation and ageing have meant a dramatic fall in tax revenue, pushing the town’s government, reliant on support from Tokyo, to consider merging with other towns in Akita prefecture. “Japan is the world’s fastest-aging nation, Akita the fastest-aging prefecture and Yuzawa one of the worst in Akita,” said town employee Toru Abe, noting that close to 40% of all Yuzawa residents are over 65, compared to 28% for the nation.

Scores arrested at protests in Australia’s coronavirus hotspot (Reuters) Police in Australia’s Victoria state arrested 74 people and fined 176 for breaching public health orders as scattered protests against a weeks-long coronavirus lockdown continued for a second straight day across Melbourne. A riot squad marched through fruit and vegetable stalls at the city’s landmark, the Queen Victoria market, before the scuffling with protesters erupted, with some people throwing fruit at the police, television footage showed. The protests came after 14 people were arrested at small dispersed rallies on Saturday and as Victoria is set to ease its lockdown restrictions very slightly as of Monday, as the number of new daily coronavirus cases continued to fall in the country’s hotspot.

Israel to set new nationwide lockdown as virus cases surge (AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday announced a new countrywide lockdown will be imposed amid a stubborn surge in coronavirus cases, with schools and parts of the economy expected to shut down in a bid to bring down infection rates. Beginning Friday, the start of the Jewish High Holiday season, schools, restaurants, malls and hotels will shut down, among other businesses, and Israelis will face restrictions on movement and on gatherings. The lockdown will remain in place for at least three weeks, at which point officials may relax measures if numbers are seen declining. Israelis typically hold large family gatherings and pack synagogues during the important fast of Yom Kippur later this month, settings that officials feared could trigger new outbreaks.

[recentanimenews]

Bookshelf Briefs 10/24/19

Ao Haru Ride, Vol. 7 | By Io Sakisaka | Viz Media – Somehow I missed reviewing the sixth book, and may have missed reading it as well. In any case, things aren’t going well for our lead couple, which is suffering from the usual miscommunication drama that infects shoujo series like this. Indeed, it infects the rest of the cast as well, and so we have Kou’s brother getting in trouble for seemingly having an affair… with Futaba. It’s not what it seems. But it does inspire Shuko, who was terrified about what would happen to her crush, to confess to him. Fortunately, he’s a good teacher, so rejects her. We’re also getting some setup for a beta couple, which I think I would enjoy more if it wasn’t so obvious. This was a good volume, but I’ve grown to expect great from this series, and it wasn’t that. – Sean Gaffney

Cats of the Louvre | By Taiyo Matsumoto | Viz Media – I expected it would only be a matter of time before Cats of the Louvre was licensed, but I was initially a little surprised that Viz was the company bringing it over—up until this point, every volume of the “Louvre Collection” (including Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre and Jiro Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre) has been released by NBM Publishing. But, on the other hand, Viz has been Matsumoto’s primary publisher in English. Viz has done a beautiful job with the release if Cats of the Louvre, combining both volumes of the Japanese edition into a single, hardcover omnibus. In part, the narrative follows a declining colony of cats that lives in the hidden corners of the Louvre and the humans that come into contact with it. Both Matsumoto’s storytelling and artwork are atmospheric, magical, and melancholic. But while there’s some darkness to the work, there’s also hope. – Ash Brown

Hakumei & Mikochi: Tiny Little Life in the Woods, Vol. 7 | By Takuto Kashiki | Yen Press – I think we’ve now caught up with Japan, so expect more of a gap before the next volume of this. Till then, we see our not-a-couple couple use bird mail delivery, get taken advantage of by local doctors, have troublesome friends over for the night, wait in a very long line for food that may not live up to the line, etc. Easily the best chapter is also the most serious, as an old mentor of Hakumei’s dies and sends her a final sake bottle, which she and Mikochi wander all over to try to drink quietly before Mikochi finally moves on so Hakumei can grieve a bit. This is always going to be the sort of series where “we couldn’t buy the cups” is gripping drama, but that’s why it has its fans. – Sean Gaffney

Himouto! Umaru-chan, Vol. 7 | By Sankakuhead | Seven Seas – Is this the end of the superdeformed Umaru? Well, no, but it makes for a nice change of pace, as Umaru realizes that she’s been hanging out with friends normally for a while, and wonders if she can admit to them her big secrets—both her slothful little self, and also her masked gamer. The message turns out to be “don’t rush growing up,” which is a bit disappointing but not surprising given this has like five more volumes to go. We also see the “rival” girl again, and she turns out to also be connected to this extended family in an oblique way. Unfortunately, emphasizing the similarities between her and Umaru works a bit TOO well—sometimes I can’t tell them apart. This is the definition of moe cuteness. – Sean Gaffney

Magus of the Library, Vol. 2 | By Mitsu Izumi | Kodansha Comics – The main selling point for this series is present and correct—it is gorgeous, and rivals Witch Hat Atelier for the prettiest manga in Kodansha’s stable right now. The main plot involves a somewhat older Theo setting out to take the Kafna test, despite the fact that it’s a job, much like “librarian” is here, seen as being for women. He’s joined by a young woman who seems to tick off every single box in the “easily flustered love interest” box, to the point where I actually found her a bit annoying. The series sure does love its books, though, and also loves its grueling three-day-long test, which is known to break many of its participants. Can Theo pass? If you guessed “I bet we find out in Book Three,” you’re right. – Sean Gaffney

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Vol. 6 | By Hideyuki Furuhashi, Betten Court, and Kohei Horikoshi | VIZ Media – With the departure of Master, Vigilantes seems to be settling in for the long haul. Koichi discovers two new applications for his powers, which leads him to engage villains in ways he really shouldn’t, though this comes in handy when he helps Aizawa take on another enhanced Trigger user. In fact, there is lots of Aizawa in action, which I appreciate, as well as an example of how effectively Midnight’s powers work in the field when she goes undercover to figure out who is dosing young men with the drug. Meanwhile, there’s a mysterious speedster lurking about who easily dispatches the villain that Aizawa and Koichi struggled with. This prequel really seems to be coming into its own and I find myself increasingly captivated by it! – Michelle Smith

Mythical Beast Investigator, Vol. 2 | By Keishi Ayasato and Koichiro Hoshino | Seven Seas – Last time I called this very readable but extremely forgettable. The two qualities invert in this second and final volume, as the “twist” that happens halfway through the book is rather startling, but I don’t really like the way that it’s handled, which seems confusing and probably reads better in the novel this is based on. The focus, appropriately, changes over to Kushuna, the grumpy rabbit demon accompanying Ferry on her journeys, and we see how they originally met and how he was won over to her side. But… ergh, I don’t want to spoil the twist, but let’s just say I disliked it and leave it at that. On the bright side, I’m very glad the series ends with the second volume. – Sean Gaffney

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, Vol. 9 | By Kagiji Kumanomata | Viz Media – The bulk of this volume is given over to the demon castle’s Summer Festival, which naturally Syalis is SUPER EXCITED for, despite meaning that outsiders might actually notice she has the run of the place. With that in mind, she does a café (well, haunted house was taken) which features her, as a hostage in big fake handcuffs, begging for food. It’s brilliant and also hilarious. We get a beauty pageant, which Syalis manages to lose despite seemingly being a shoo-in, as well as the final bonfire, which she sleeps through, much to her horror. The rest of the book is just as funny, and while the gags aren’t original they arrive with precision timing. This remains a fantastic comedy manga. – Sean Gaffney

That Blue Sky Feeling, Vol. 3 | By Okura and Coma Hashii | VIZ Media – I reckon some people are going to be disappointed by the ending of That Blue Sky Feeling, in that Noshiro and Sanada are not yet formally dating, but if one looks only at the change in Sanada, then it’s a satisfying ending indeed. Probably because of his experience being accepted by Noshiro, when Sanada’s long-time friend Ayumi asks whether he likes boys, he tells her the truth. And when Noshiro starts going out with a girl, it’s Ayumi who knocks some sense into Sanada, telling him that his feelings do matter in this situation. After Noshiro ditches his date to hear what Sanada has to say, it’s confession time and it looks like the feelings may be mutual. But what really stands out to me is Sanada’s face there at the ending—happy and at peace. His love was not rejected! I hope we get more Okura in the future. – Michelle Smith

Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, Vol. 5 | By Fumita Yanagida | Seven Seas – Beta couple Carol and Misaki get the main focus in this book, though they aren’t actually a couple. Carol seems to be waiting for Misaki to take the lead, and he just isn’t doing that—though seeing her and Misuzu threatened by some punks turns on his inner rage, as the cover art shows. As for Carol, once she finds that Misaki is trying to get stronger by spending time with Tomo at her father’s dojo, Carol suddenly finds herself jealous—and decides to do something about it by seemingly seducing Jun. Of course, she’s not really doing this, but it does serve to show off Jun’s paralyzing fear of intimacy, and also possibly the sexiest “rawr!” in all of manga ever. I love this series. – Sean Gaffney

The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms | By Nagabe | Seven Seas – After a wizard named Wizdom bestowed the shape and intellect of humans upon beasts, the demi-human tribes built a grand academy. The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms is a collection of BL short stories set at that school. I must say… as a major fan of Nagabe’s The Girl from the Other Side, I thought I’d like this more. Some stories are charming, like “Mauchly & Charles,” in which a human is clearly in love with his bear friend, but others are darker, like “Doug & Huey,” in which a crow sabotages his peacock pal’s efforts to find a girlfriend so that he can remain closest to him, or “Alan & Eddington,” in which the latter brews a love potion intending to make out with the former and leave him with no memory of their encounter. I was expecting more whimsy, I think. – Michelle Smith

By: Ash Brown

[declassroomedteach-blog]

One Size Never Fits All

By Gina Fournier

August 5, 2008

13, 595 words

               Writers like Jim Harrison, Joseph Epstein and Willa Cather have long known the damage English teachers can inflict on potential readers.  In the late sixties at SUNY, before he gave up academics and focused on writing, Harrison began to contemplate the ultimate master’s level writing program, which would include living both in the city and in the country, manual labor to clear the mind and intensive reading to feed it.  Notice the absence of a central authority figure in this plan.  Epstein comments in the introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays, “Few things are more efficient at killing the taste for a certain kind of literature than being forced it in schools.”  Apparently, Cather refused to have her books anthologized in student editions for fear students would never read her again.

               Of course writers never force readers, but unfortunately teachers tend to do so.  “Reading has been forced upon us every since we were in preschool.  Because of this most students dread to read outside of the classroom,” explains Josh, one of my Eng 1510: Composition I students in metro Detroit.       I can’t think of a worst indictment of my profession.  Teachers turn off students to learning.  Yes, aided by complacent parents and unresponsive institutions, but those problems require their own essays.  

               Signs indicating trouble abound.   Downturns in newspaper publishing, stagnancy in book publishing and the cultural shift away from words toward images all align with Josh’s testimony, as does the National Endowment for Arts (NEA) 2004 release “Reading at Risk” and the 2007 follow-up “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.” Although U.S. Census Bureau figures from 1940-2000 show huge gains in educational attainment (in 1940 under 1 in 20 adults 25 and older had earned a college diploma, while in 2000 nearly 1 in 4 had), Americans are reading less and less plus reading skills are worsening, says the NEA, even among college graduates.   A cable television commercial for Everest Institute, a college alternative specializing in certificate programs like medical billing, understands how to sell admissions, by promising hands on training over reading books.  The organization’s website relates, “You may have gone to high school cause you had to.”  The terms aren’t quite literate, but clientele may not be too discriminating.

               Asking every student in the classroom to read the same material is still the most popular approach used in English classes across all levels of study, the selections often chosen by committee and designed to somehow reach a substantial majority.   As I write that sentence in mid July when I really should be doing something else like taking a break or updating my coursepacks, a wave of boredom pins me down; as a teacher I try very hard not to forget what it was like being a student.  

               Why such a large and devoted following for such a limited approach?  In New Jersey this summer, The Star-Ledger reported that Butler High School picked a non classic, Kyle Maynard’s memoir No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life for its summer reading program.  “One book, one city” approaches began catching on about a decade ago, the paper explained, in the steps of school-wide requirements for incoming college freshmen and the ruling classroom mainstay: one-size-fits-all reading assignments.   But why did this most traditional of all approaches pick up steam amid ongoing failings in education, when all methods, even time-honored—perhaps especially time-honored—should be assessed afresh for worth?  U.S. A. Today covered community colleges this July too, in “’Turning Point’ Arrives as U.S. Community Colleges’ Purview Grows.” The down-side of the picture cited a California report regarding the state’s 109 community colleges issued from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.  It discovered that teaching approaches “are not often aligned with students’ learning styles,” but are teachers listening and responding?  Though all indicators point to serious problems in reading and writing proficiency across many levels of education, few seem to question the central tie that binds most English instruction.  

               Meanwhile, average Americans in large numbers are stammering through literacy classes in their native language.  Nationally, people are concerned.  Recently, The Tampa Tribune added to this grim discussion with “Fewer Students Read Between the Lines,” which shared a sobering comment from Don Gaetz, a former county superintendent and current chairman of Florida’s Senate K-12 education committee: “The No. 1 problem in secondary education in our state and in the country is a decline in literacy in high school.”  That same deficiency stays with students who enter community college, nearly half of all college undergraduates, according to U.S.A .Today, who often carry the extra burden of financially supporting themselves and dependents.              

               As a community college English instructor, I think the “one city, one book” approach is a big part of the problem.   Alonso High School reading teacher Janelle MacLean was interviewed for the Tampa article and is an old friend of mine— but from dancing days circa The Turning Point not teaching days, so imagine my surprise running into her within an internet link supplied by my National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (wordy title?) weekly e-mail newsletter.   Turns out she operates a special program sponsored by Scholastic, which allows her to tailor reading assignments to each student.  READ 180 is a successful program, according to MacLean, but she’s concerned. Speaking on the phone, she pointed to SpringBoard, a new program in English Language Arts and Mathematics for grades 6-12 designed by College Board, which is set to it hit Tampa schools in the fall, funded in part by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation.  She fears the program will mean a loss of choice and fluidity in the classroom.  We agreed, though the bad grammar is all mine and designed for emphasis.  Pardon me if I sound frustrated, but if a program doesn’t include choice, it ain’t gonna work.  

               This past year, for its Great Michigan Read, the Michigan Humanities Council chose the reissue of Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories, simply because the collection is set in the state—“a literary masterpiece literally made in Michigan.” (“Imagine everyone in Michigan reading the same book.  At the same time.”)  However, despite widespread use, one-size fits all reading assignments apparently fail to turn students into life-long readers, or successful reading initiatives wouldn’t be in such high demand.  

               I don’t think I’m over-simplifying cause and effect here.               Instead of learning to appreciate the world of words, common book approaches turn students away—away from reading, away from books, away from the power of their own minds.   So please, let’s rethink this thing.  Especially with the internet’s easy access to everything, uniform assignments help students avoid actual reading and writing, which are too often successfully replaced with skimming, summarizing, mimicking lectures, consulting Cliff and Spark notes, surfing, cheating and guessing, especially throughout high school and college.   Shakespeare classes, online?  

               I’m very worried that we’re working against ourselves here.  Collectively over twelve to sixteen or so years, standardized reading and writing instruction demonstrate repeatedly why, after graduation, students might continue to “hate” reading and ignore newspapers, books, articles, poetry, plays, directions for Campbell’s soup, road signs, tax forms, mortgage contracts, primarily due to a perceived lack of relation to their lives.   Summer I semester, this past May and June, sitting in the back row, back corner,  Tucker entitled his Composition I entrance essay, which asks students to compare their music listening and reading habits, “Music-Easy, Books-Hard.”  Meanwhile, his friend Garrett sitting next to him explained, “I do not like reading” because he can’t “sit still for that long.”  Speaking for many of his peers, including his buddy from Central, Garrett believed at the beginning of class, “I feel that books are a waste of time.”  (University students take summer courses at community college looking for lower tuition and perhaps lower standards, too.)  However, by the end of class, after choosing to read The Lizard King by Jerry Hopkins about Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison, Garrett changed his mind.  We later communicated by e-mail and he confirmed the earnest nature of his sentiments.   Before, “I thought that no matter what I was reading, there had to be something else I could be doing with my time, like go outside or hang with friends.  This all changed when I found a book that I actually liked.”  Describing just the growth I hope for in average students over a semester, he continued, “Of course I will never like reading the boring material like research and books for classes, but at least I will be able to find something interesting within the material and build on it.”  Students must first relate to reading on a personal level before they’re willing and able to read productively and proficiently as adults—reading when they must and should, even though they may not want to.

               I first heard word about what would happen when the world equated corn with oil two or three summers ago, standing in an Osceola County field, talking to a farmer.  Go figure. But more to the point:  go to the source.   Those of us are interested in education and literacy should listen to writers—professionals and students alike—because both groups understand reading, though of course in distinct ways.  In short, what this criticism means for the classroom is that reading and writing instruction should emphasize process—how to read and write— not content—that one book that will hopefully change the intellectual life of tenth, eleventh or twelfth graders for the better, which sounds so childish.  Yet this critical juncture is where preventable mistakes are being made.  

               My favorite example of what English teachers should not do comes with my personal bias intact, operating in full force.   A highly rated part-time instructor already on staff, I was not hired for a full-time position at this particular local community college (not even given an interview, which really unnerved me), so what follows is axe grinding but with a point.  Here’s who got a living wage and health care coverage instead:  an overweight, cigarette smoking out of stater, who planned one semester’s entry-level composition course around pornography. This stroke of brilliance, the kind of thing that gets David Horowitz going (and blowing bad teaching issues way out of proportion), came from an individual who self described the “foci” of his interest to be vaguely and sophomorically “everything” on the department website.  At the time, a Michigan company formerly called Weyco was making national headlines regarding their new policy of not hiring cigarette smokers, which launched a debate about employer rights, such as the possible right not to hire people—due to prohibitive healthcare costs— who are both obese and willing to kill themselves with nicotine.  Then as now, Michigan was ensconced in its post 9/11 economic woes.  Community colleges were demanding more money from the state, for very good reasons, but this one didn’t feel the need to help out the state’s employment figures or tax base in return.  Furthermore, the school is located within a city that is home to a large Arabic population, comprising a third of residents, including a disturbing number of female students who wear the hijab.  (As a female and feminist, even one figure under wraps evokes distress.)  Such radically conservative students might feel very uncomfortable studying pornography and might avoid taking gender studies or sociology courses, where the subject might be better located.    I don’t know what happen to the competition’s lesson plans because thankfully I split. Conventional wisdom turned out to be correct in my case.  Very gratefully, I was hired full-time at a local community college across town, one other than three at which I taught part-time and learned the craft.            

               To make students analyze pornography within an entry level college writing course is of course wrongheaded.  But to make students study any topic other than how to read and how to write in a course designed to cover process is wrongheaded.  This example just happens to nicely blare “bad idea,” but the idea remains bad even when the subject matter sounds more presentable, even more contemporary, like asking an entire program full of students to read and submerge themselves for entire semester into Lee and Bob Woodruff’s In an Instant or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has been done at my institution in the remedial program.  I know because I hear about the titles when students who progress into Comp I talk about not reading the selections.  Don’t misunderstand.  Both books are fine reads, I’m sure.  I especially enjoyed Krakauer’s sidebar about father-son relations.   This year, I found that students who picked Krakauer’s 1996 investigation and tried to compare it to Sean Penn’s 2007 film encountered a far greater challenge than they had anticipated.  The point is that when students are inexperienced readers—inexperienced authentic readers—they are too often also inexperienced writers who have trouble developing an independent point.    In the simplest term, one size fits all turns out students who can’t think for themselves.

               Outside of the classroom for the last six years, the world has continued to fight and turn, some days more gracefully than others. Meanwhile, inside the classroom, I’ve learned to appreciate the necessity of diversity.   Let student readers choose their own writers and the student’s regard for reading and writing is likely to flourish, or least develop more successfully than traditional teacher-centered models.   Teaching students to make good decisions like successful corporate officers or business entrepreneurs must do is much more desirable than proffering assembly-line, book report- style regurgitation.   A military veteran and single parent commented this summer, “Before this class it had been 5 years since my last English class and I had forgotten almost everything I had learned, even the fact that I like to read.”

               Because my students collectively enliven a cacophony of personality and experience, the notion that one book will suit the needs of a substantial majority with the help of one person’s perspective—the teacher’s, mine—is absurd.  Given the opportunity to choose, most of my students select worthwhile nonfiction reading and a substantial majority claim to actually consume their selections and improve their attitudes, even if only a little.  A survey of choices made during the recently concluded brief summer semester reflects a panoply of tastes too rich to be contained in a single or even thirty-two flavors.  

               A budding philosopher read Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic starring a character called Osho, who led a flock, accumulated Rolls Royce vehicles and was arrested on immigration charges in Oregon in the 1980s.  Osho’s teachings on the joys of sex and laughter were later collected after his death by followers.  The resulting selection is sure to never make even one recommended reading list, which is not to say that the student’s time was necessarily wasted.  A male who described being passed over routinely by his teachers throughout his entire educational career found solace in Keith Dorney’s well-received football memoir Black and Honolulu Blue.  A history major accustomed to academic treatises discovered the father and son basketball biography Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel and a more personal approach to his future field.  David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk make many lives more endurable.  

               Got an obscure interest?  No problem.  Want to be a pilot?  Talk to your dad and discover Robert Standford Tuck.  Disgruntled by your education?  Gravitate toward Lies My teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen.   Both liberals and conservatives check out Michael Moore, as the NCTE advises, “to determine what is ‘real’” and “to make judgments about validity, objectivity, and bias.”  Memoirs are popular, with new reads continually popping up, such as Ashley Rhodes-Courter ‘s Three Little Words, about foster care, and Daoud Hari’s The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur.  

               This summer, students challenged themselves with Bell Hooks, Michael Korda’s Journey to a Revolution about the little-discussed 1956 Hungary revolution, Zora Neal Hurston and Freakonomics.  Like minds converged, as in Kevin Mitnick’s Art of Deception, about a career in computer hacking.   Going into health care instead?  Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance filled the prescription perfectly.  Forensics?  Mary Roach’s Stiff. Parent of an autistic child?  Spiritual sensibilities?  Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman.  The usual child rearing problems? Setting Limits with Your Strong Willed Child by Robert J. Mackenzie.  Recovering heroin addict?  Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymor on Hunter S. Thompson.  Ex-stripper trying to become a lawyer and/or media personality? Cupcake Brown.  Trying to make sense of the world around you, in which black males are best represented in prison populations?  Punishment and Inequality in America by Princeton Professor of Sociology Bruce Western, which is no doubt worthwhile reading (I’m putting it on my list) even though Taylor was one of few to report that he read only “a majority” of the book.  

               Patterns do emerge.  Lately, each semester, a few female students have been drawn to Alice Sebold’s Lucky and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.  This past semester, at least two students closely related to Sebold’s rape experience: one as a Bosnisan war survivor who witnessed more evils than a person should be subjected to in a lifetime and the other as a rape victim who found the courage to tell her parents and report the crime to the police.  So far, I’ve found that most readers don’t come out of reading Kaysen as fans (students struggle to write a cohesive and clear review of a book that is neither), yet this semester the book was well-received by one young woman who had recently spent time in a mental institution and like Kaysen felt helped by it. A strong but reserved “A” student, Brittany shared her view that assigned reading is “very difficult.”  Clarifying her position about her past educational experiences, she added, “I am not saying that the books were bad.”  Instead, she has a problem with being told what to read.

It’s just when somebody tells me I have to read a certain book & take notes on it then eventually write a paper, I find myself on sparknotes.com looking up chapter summaries.  But this assignment was different.  I got to choose a book that interest me & had no weekly schedule of reading dates. With Girl, interrupted I found myself staying up to all hours of the night reading it + re-reading.  So yes, I actively read my book and enjoyed it.  

               Experience tells me that neither dictatorship nor uniformity is likely to hold the answer for addressing the nation’s reading crisis. Sure, within each group a small number of students make regrettable choices like Karrine Steffans’ Confessions of a Video Vixen and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, the most popular book in southeastern Michigan followed closely by Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie.  Books that lack ideas, analysis, art or craft wouldn’t be my first choice for students, but I already know how to analyze selections.  They don’t, and people learn by doing.   Each semester, a very small number of individuals do make regrettable choices, which require them to exercise their own critical thinking more than the author did, but at least writing about the material then becomes a challenging experience, if not reading it.   Meanwhile, other students watch this scenario play out, perhaps becoming more confident in their own better decisions.  

               As an adjunct with limited choice, in my first years teaching community college English I happily used Bedford/ St. Martin’s The Bedford Reader and it’s less-sophisticated cousin, Subjects and Strategies, both of  which I liked a great deal with their mix of canonical and more quirky pieces, but then I already love to read.   Now, for Comp I, I use Catherine Lattrell’s cultural reader Remix (same publisher), which calls on a world of music that allows for hip-hop and file sharing.   Nothing from traditional recommended reading lists here; more so the likes of Salon and Wired are well-represented.   To balance group selections,  students choose essays independently from a fresh variety that includes Diane Ackerman, David Brooks, Laura Bush, P. Diddy, Firoozeh Dumas, Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, Barry Lopez, Steven Pinker, Jennifer L. Pozner, Katie Roiphe, and Sara Vowell, whose works are organized within themed-chapters such as Identity, Tradition, Romance and Technology.  Nothing from the last millennium, so no E. B. White’s “Once More to Lake” (1941), which has its place but not as mandatory reading within entry level college writing classes in America in 2008 if wanting students to actually read is a goal, and of course it should be.  

               When bored and pressed for time, students act like water trying to escape.  They take the easiest way out.  And who can blame them?  In the February and March 2008 edition of the University of Maryland’s Teaching and Learning News, assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence Dave Eubank related a classroom experience that transpired in ENG 241: Introduction to the Novel.  The article concerned a new technologically-based assessment tool, clickers, which bring, it seems (I look forward to trying them) a game show appeal to learning.  Clickers are what the name implies.  Each student holds one and pushes buttons in response to Powerpoint questions.  This system of instruction provides an opportunity for instructors to poll student learning and cull anonymous results about teaching effectiveness, but Eubank’s experiment revealed the elephant in the room: students easily avoid reading.  “Our discussion of the fact that nearly 60% admitted to not completing the novel about which each student was required to write in her final paper was less than comfortable,” he bravely relayed.   Though the goal of the article was to promote the use of clickers outside of the sciences, Eubanks admitted that answers to questions about how much of each novel students had actually read were “occasionally surprising and often disheartening.”    So, what should an English teacher do?  Make students take lie detector tests and fail non readers?  

               Certainly, White’s “Once More to the Lake” is worthwhile reading, but not something students can readily relate to, and I fear that’s true about far too many selections entrenched in classrooms and forced upon students today.   Uniform required reading operates like a sort of intellectual waterboarding-style torture using authors instead of liquid.  If students make it all the way through the White’s essay without losing focus, they encounter “the chill of death” and perhaps are engaged enough to reflect upon their own mortality, but in my experience most are unlikely to do so. Before the essay closes it thoughts about life passing from generation to generation, White’s reminiscing has him editorializing about how “the unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors” interrupted his reveries about the past.   Unlike his son, who “loved our rented outboard,” the father prefers the past and the “old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually.”  New agey perhaps, but a long way from Silicon Valley.  The average student can’t readily relate to dated, AARP reflections, or someone else’s idea of a good time.  It’s a vicious circle; they don’t read enough to empathize, yet empathy is learned through reading.

               Frank McCourt’s marvelous memoir Teacher Man gracefully shapes teaching’s true grit.  Over the course of the book, he calmly accepts his fate.  McCort taught English in New York City public high schools for thirty years before making it big with his first memoir about growing in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes.  Still, he mentions more than once that the young people in Greek drama murder the old people who get in their way.  Of course, one of the many reasons to read is to recognize the difference between art and reality.

               In teaching, separating good ideas from bad is important because ideas take so long to implement and, if institutionalized and they turn out to be bad, they take a very long time to undue.  A few years back, The Detroit Free Press published a dandy profile, “Outboards Got Started in Detroit,” about local inventor Cameron Waterman (great name, given his claim to fame), who utilized a Detroit boiler plant and the waters off Gross Ille to test his invention in 1905, after first hitting upon the idea for the outboard motor thanks to his participation in the rowing crew at Yale.  (In short, according to Waterman, rowing “stinks.”)  Turns out, the Great Lake State is not only the once revered motor car capital of the world but also responsible for spawning a large boating industry.  As a teacher, at first I thought, “Here’s a great unit waiting to be born!  E.B. White, outboard motors, the Motor City, up north in the Great Lake State!”  Great in theory, perhaps, as students in  southeastern Michigan should maybe be interested in these marvelous connections and the opportunity to discuss them in an invigorating college setting, but not in a classroom where I’ve got to teach writing process, including sentence, paragraph and essay structure, some awareness of the wide-range of approaches to writing essays, what I want in particular from student writers, as well as reading and research techniques, dreaded outlining in some form, how and why to use a dictionary, documentation techniques, the difference between a subject and a noun, distinctions between summary and response, and more, to students from the inner city who are less likely to go up north as well as suburbanite students who are more likely to return to familiar lakes for a week’s stay.  Want to talk about the time and energy it takes to teach revision to over a hundred college writers fall and winter semesters?

               Composition instruction entails a very long list of hands-on how tos and practical concepts. Not E.B. White nor J. K. Rowling nor any single author is bound to magically deliver all those lessons to 27 diverse students who would rather privately surf the internet, listen to their ipods or play with their cellphones (one in the same yet?), who well know how to avoid reading as they have been doing so successfully for years, for many learning to also dread writing in the process.

THE DISMAL STATE OF READING IN AMERICA.  According to the NEA data, nine year olds are more likely to read voluntarily than thirteen to seventeen years olds, a fact that surprises no one.   Imagine a precocious pre-teen, curled up with Harry Potter.  It’s a scene one can imagine happening inside an elementary school free reading period or during summer vacation.  Bob Wise of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based think tank, told The Tampa Tribune that major problems occurred when middle and high school teachers neglected to teach reading, assuming incorrectly that those lessons were over.  My understanding is the standardized tests of No Child Left Behind have only made matters worse.  The students I work with in the metro-Detroit area have all come from high schools that serve a steady diet of standardized forced reading, on which students are gagging and choking and dying of boredom.   Meanwhile, teenagers want to be social year-round, and they want to belong.  Even if reading material relates to them personally, many would rather hang out with peers or electronics.  

               Comparatively, college students may be ripe for the picking, but NEA figures suggest colleges are not turning students into readers but rather colleges are turning students away from books.  Citing UCLA’s Your First College Year and College Senior Year surveys, the NEA relates that reading for pleasure rates drop over the course of a college career.  Turning to the National Survey of Student Engagement conducted by Indiana University, NEA comments, “If we accept that voluntary reading habits are central to a liberal arts education, then surely it is troubling to find that the majority of freshman and seniors alike read only 1-4 books for pleasure throughout the entire school year or they read no unassigned books at all.”  

               But are students truly reading much of anything, assigned or otherwise?  And what about after college?  The NEA’s information about the habits of all Americans suggests that serious reading is slipping away as a pastime.  In 1982, 82% of college graduates were literary readers; by 2002, that percentage had fallen eighteen points to 67%.  

               We must ask: Where are we headed?

               Dana Goia, chairman of the NEA, describes the stakes in “To Read or Not to Read”:

How does one summarize this disturbing story? As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. (The shameful fact that nearly one-third of American teenagers drop out of school is deeply connected to declining literacy and reading comprehension.)With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.

               Meanwhile, my profession appears to be deeply involved in the business of ignoring the obvious.  Recently a co-worker shared her philosophy.  In essence, students don’t have to like reading, they just have to do it. But the thing is, since many students don’t like reading, pragmatically, they’ve simply found strategies for avoiding it.  (For some, skimming is taught in high school.)  I figure that I’ve worked with over two thousand students and seventy class groups to date.  My candid conversations with students leave me absolutely convinced that vast numbers of students simply elect not to read more often than they do read, and for their actions they receive passing grades and diplomas.  Possibly, this ease presents a false picture regarding the amount of work required to pass life successfully too.  (Low standards certainly confused me.)  In the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr admits to having “troubles with reading” due to time spent zipping around online reading in short fragmented bits, and his “literary” friends agree.  “The more they use the Web,” Carr explains, “the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”  If intellectuals and professional are skimming more and finding their reading skills diminished, of course busy college students who don’t love reading are too.

               Politics play a big part on campus, as in greater life, adding unfortunate complications to the mix.  When I arrived, I discovered that adjuncts and their students were forced to deal with (or perhaps pay for only to ignore) a dull textbook, which I could not read and sought to replace immediately.  However, doing so on probation as a new full-time hire meant risking tenure and contradicting all advice given to me.   Yes, over one book.   All voices inside and outside the institution, even the most progressive and dedicated, urged personal protection and counseled me to wait until “after”—after I achieved union protection, which I now thankfully enjoy, though the advice was right on.  Trust me, I’ve paid for my insubordination.  When I said, in effect, this textbook sucks, some of my peers evidently heard, “You suck.” Jennifer Haberling, a Baldwin Middle School English teacher and the 2008-2009 Michigan Teacher of the Year, as awarded by the Michigan Education Association, told the association’s newsletter that she felt embarrassed by the honor and that she enjoys collaborating with her peers.  Here’s what I think: First off, good English teachers don’t have much time for collaboration with peers (way too many students!), and secondly my guess is that being singled out among your immediate and statewide peers as the best teacher in the state may actually cause some discomfort, as some of those peers deemed less talented by default are bound to feel jealousy and act out any number of insidious ways.  Young children and Shakespeare can tell you: teachers are human and not necessarily nice people.  

               I’m not trying to agitate.  Waiting until I was safe among peers would have meant facing far too many deserving students— approximately a thousand individuals over three years—with my hands tied, holding inadequate materials.  And since something I call “The Honesty System” is my number one  tool for fighting plagiarism (though it’s imperfect), I had to tell each group that first year as a full-timer, “Your pricey required reading sucks, I’m sorry,” then launch a discussion about textbooks to give student’s a voice and let them know I feel their pain.   It’s terribly upsetting when you must ask people to spend forty to over a hundred bucks on a lousy textbook you don’t even respect, but this sort of thing happens all the time.   It’s too bad, too, because students could use that money to buy a few novels, some poetry and a collection of essays or two they might get more out of in the long run.  The way teachers use (or, as in the case of adjuncts and other department members not given a choice, don’t use) assigned texts influences student attitudes toward reading and book purchasing, for better or for worse. Each semester, savvy students with tight budgets ask, their enthusiasm long ago dampened, “Will you actually use Remix?”  Based on experience, some have a hard time believing my reply.  Forced to read Lord of the Flies one too many times (he claims four times in five years), Leroy struck back:

I chose to boycott the book report and formed the mentality that reading just isn’t for me.  I never looked back after that moment I would fight teachers tooth and nail in a desperate plea not to read.  The teachers however would fight me off and make me do work.  I would turn in half assed reports based on what they said the day before and the teachers would just push me along.    

GET YOUR READ ON.  Since composition courses ask students to write nonfiction essays, I help students find their own nonfiction book to augment Remix. Even better, as one of my students put it, I help folks get their read on.   Guiding groups of students as they make their selections is a nonstop thrill-ride in the amusement park of everyday life.   Don’t worry.   In class, I counsel students who’ve picked up the cliché not to describe their book as a “rollercoaster ride.”  

               However, I do want to purposely mix metaphors for a screaming neon effect because I so want people to see what I see.  Teaching composition in a free reading environment lets me spend valuable time in a garden of humanity, infinitely more rich than the jungle of coneflowers, coreopsis, the potted hibiscus we winter inside that needs transplanting, tons of black-eyed susans, some overpowering a small group of stinky Asiatic (?) lilies, rose of sharon, purple liatris, cultivated wild daisies (yes, preserved this late in the season due to deadheading), gladiolas, butterfly bush, yarrow, tiger lilies, a few tropical New Guinea impatiens and their annual friends begonia and coleus mixed into the perennials for ongoing color, amid the miniature old-fashioned Hollyhocks transplanted from Chris Allen’s grandmother’s house that do not attract ants, a few rather sickly white, orange and fuchsia dahlias I bought down the street (never again; Chris Allen’s mom never liked that place, I’m told), red rose, Russian sage, some struggling bergamot (bad location), sunflowers, some planted by birds, so located directly under the feeder beneath the apple tree, scented wild geranium, a weak strain of re-seeded cleome from last summer (welcome!), late planted but still appreciated cosmos, and even some lingering spring pansies all blooming in our yard and attracting monarch and swallowtail butterflies.  

               New arrivals in Comp I and Comp II are adults who have reached the end of the road, their last required English classes ever.   Imagine. Teaching literacy to grown- ups, I get to hang out among a non-stop gusher of individuals who each act in very interesting ways as they commandeer their individual projects and also mix with one another.  No two students or groups are exactly alike.   Though I want to savor every last nano-second of summer vacation (important for assessment, updates to lesson plans, preparations for the new school year and a well-deserved break), I am very much looking forward to classes this fall during the November election.

               Some of my findings:

1.       After a lifetime of forced reading, students need help learning how to choose reading material, which is a reasonable byproduct of assembly-line treatment.  Once teachers stop telling students what to read, students often stop reading (or stop approximating).  Too often, metro Detroit high school graduates don’t know how to find books to read on their own.  They don’t have an accurate idea about the available range of material, and they don’t know what they enjoy.  

               Fitted with narrow, rigid views of the world of books—one at a time, single file—students don’t automatically understand the difference between fictional literature and nonfiction stories, or the difference between “novels” and “memoirs” in particular.  Of course, they’re not alone.   James Frey and Oprah help get this conversation going.  And thanks to Augusten Burroughs, of course, for keeping it alive.  For some students, keeping “autobiography” and “biography” straight is challenging like keeping “me” and “I” under control, maybe not to the same degree, but all together equally repulsive.  Some have never tried commentary and find they like it (or hate it); others learn to love (or hate) true life stories.  

               Students don’t necessarily know how to navigate the world of information, in person or online.  The chance of falling into a discussion about the differences between Dewey Decimal and the Library of Congress systems of classification is remote in any busy classroom, yet bookstores organize differently from the town and school library, which may organize differently from one another, adding yet another layer of distance.   The mere act of going to a library or bookstore overwhelms students at the bottom, who are likely to take the most time making a selection.  Librarians have been typecast as mousy and boring, making them difficult to approach, especially for the unsure.  To the unfamiliar, searching for books at a bookstore can be a nightmare, especially if the student makes the oft repeated rookie mistake: asking for a “nonfiction book” without narrowing focus.  A tired clerk may snap back with sarcasm.  

               One thing that amazes me among many is the fact that many students are not much more tech savvy than I am, and they certainly aren’t automatically information and media savvy, either.  Online, the distinction between amazon.com customer reviews, a short blurb from Booklist and long scrolls of blog entries blurs for a steady stream of students, who can’t necessarily identify the NBC peacock.  Thankfully, as a full-timer, most of the time I can snag a classroom with computers to help facilitate the process of teaching all the processes necessary to reading, writing and thinking today.  (At our campus, adjuncts and their many students go without choice and computers.)  Learning how to look up the key to pronunciation in a print dictionary is important, especially if the power goes out.  Otherwise, the dictionary is online now complete with actual pronunciation of “taciturn” (soft “c”).  

 2.       Many students write vaguely about books at the beginning of the semester, without naming any books or authors, because they have not established literary relationships. Institutionalized students know few books and even fewer authors specifically by name. If specifics are shared, I may scan To Kill A Mockingbird referenced by title within student testimonials, but I’m less likely to spy Harper Lee next to her book. I regularly hear a very few big names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but very rarely encounter a literary writer.  And just about never an idiosyncratic choice.  The last ones I can recall are punk musician Henry Rollins and media observer Chuck Klosterman.  Even the best prepared students like Erin are likely to have “always hated” reading despite parental efforts (paying tuition for an upscale all-girl Catholic high school) until they find their own favorites.   Even though Erin discovered two novels she likes, Nappily Married and Nappily Ever After by Trisha R. Thomas, the nonfiction book assignment “was challenging initially” because she could not find anything she wanted to read within the confines of the assignment.  However, she “eventually realized that I love music and have started to love reading and decided to pick a book that related to the two,” so Erin read Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz and raved about it.

 3.    Coming into college, too many students cite Dr. Seuss and Dave Pelzer as their main literary influences.  The frequency with which I read about Green Eggs and Ham and Oh, the Places You'll Go! as most memorable and favorite books, particularly absent more substantive and mature corollaries, is remarkable and disconcerting.  A Harry Potter tale is often the last book read.  Amir elected to dual-enroll as a junior in high school and an entry-level college student in Comp I.  He mentioned loving books when he was a “little boy,” naming Clifford, Arthur and Dr. Seuss, but now that he’s older, he allowed, “I still like to read books every once and a while,” in other words, the J. K. Rowlings’ series.  Now, as a teenager, for Amir books must be “descriptive and have many scenes in the book where there is action in the books that just sucks me and makes me feel like I am involved in the story taking place. An example would be if the author said, ‘He stalked his enemy like a hungry predator ready to attack with his shiny silver dagger in his enormous hands.’”  During the last class meeting, the student congratulated himself and thanked me for an experience more challenging than high school, where he ‘wrote down’ to please the teachers.  Amir certainly seemed to enjoy a sense of mastery over babyish course work.    

 4.       There are many reason why students don’t read: they have little clue about what to read, lack confidence in their skills, haven’t the time, feel no inclination, miss a sense of mastery, but many react well to a strong nudge.  Unfortunately, students don’t necessarily grow up in homes with books or know reading mentors.   It takes time and practice to get beyond James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, no matter who you are, which makes the plight of the unwilling even more challenging.   Tabitha entitled her entrance essay “The Love of Music vs. the Agony of Reading.”  She recognizes the value in reading but simply doesn’t want to bother:

For some indulging in a 300 page book, is like escaping to a deserted island. However, for me personally, being handed a 300 page book and being told to read it is pure agony.  Every now and then, I will find a book that looks interesting to me and be able to finish it in a maximum of 3 days.  Although, if I am being handed a book by my professor, then told that if I do not read the book I will fail the class, I become that much more inclined to not read the book.  

To her credit, though her friend stopped attending class, Tabitha hung in there.  Despite troubles curbing her cellphone addiction, she wrote a nice book review and finished the class.  Likewise, John, a little edgy perhaps because he quit heroin and cigarettes simultaneously, admitted in his course evaluation, which he signed, “I have a new found like towards reading.  Not love don’t get ahead of yourself.”  Turns out, he hadn’t realized that making personal connections with books and writers was okay: “I always thought I was reading wrong.”

 5.       Reading material choices are critical.  Remix understands the central tenet of literacy instruction: the need to relate. Amy is extremely uncomfortable in groups.  Her therapist even called me about the student’s performance in class, which did suffer due to social inhibitions.  (I thought the therapist’s action was great, a network of service providers networking).  In her entrance essay Amy wrote, “I like stories where the characters have challenges and problems that I can relate to.”  However, in her exit essay she recognized that changes might occur in personality and reading habits as a person matures: “Today I like the band Silverpun Pickups and to read books that can relate to my problems, such as Perks of Being a Wallflower, but in the future that can all change.”  She continued, “Going from fairy tale books to a woman suffering with OCD is a big change. Just to think what I will be reading later on in my life.”  At the end of the semester, she connected reading to her major, architecture, and described a move from Cosmo to Architectural Digest and Designing Homes.   In her entrance essay, she said she didn’t like popular musician Eminem just because he’s popular.   His music, “does not appeal to me because of the way it sounds.”  By her exit essay, this painfully shy young woman looked forward to reading professional texts and the future when she can see herself “liking jazz.”  

               Clint read Black Like Me by John Howard Grifith because books are a “reflection of character” and his white family adopted an African American little sister.   He wasn’t thrilled when I urged him to research the science and commentary surrounding Grifith’s unusual experiment (about which there appears to be less written than I’d like), but it’s okay for students be a little uncomfortable.  The main thing is that students must build and maintain a personal connection to reading and writing in order to take the next step, reading outside of their interests’ increasingly more challenging material.  

 6.       Even students at the bottom show personal growth when individuals are encouraged to find themselves as readers and writers.   Students who don’t consider themselves readers often recognize reading as something they might do when they mature, at some point later in life.  But does later ever come?

               Jack, dead set against reading, became at least hopeful he may someday change his attitude.  Meanwhile, he said he pretty much finished the difficult text he chose, a 19th century treatise by Sir Benjamin Thompson, or Count Rumford as he’s known by followers.  I thought the kid was full of blarney until I left his e-mail and went to Wikipedia and Amazon.  Turns out Jack’s dad is a chimney sweep, Jack is set to take over the family business, and the Count had some important things to say about the nature of heat, which remain true today.  If not an honest accounting, at least the student made up a great story.  Paulus from Poland elected to read a few books during the semester, nothing I would approve of, but nevertheless he gave them credit for spurring personal growth and helping him with his goal: learning English and earning a college degree in the U.S.   A student who had troubling buckling down but was capable, Marge maintained she “can’t stand the quietness and the calmness of a library for more than a minute.”   She admittedly disdains reading, walks “straight to the C.D. and music isle” and refuses to “acknowledge any books” when her brother makes her go to Borders. By the end of the course, after reading Kabul Beauty School, she was still a stubborn reader at best, but she had mellowed a tad, perhaps just to please for a better grade but her testimony suggests limited improvement in attitude. She still claimed to “strongly dislike reading” because “my mind gets overwhelmed with all the words and it makes me exhausted.”  No huge turn-around there.   Marge still became “very aggravated and annoyed” with the pace of reading.  “Why sit through an hour of reading a book,” she questioned, “when the author could have just summarized it in one complete sentence?”  Yet she closed: “Sometimes I think that if there were no books, what kind of education and knowledge would I have?  Probably none.”  The rusty door may have creaked open just slightly, but at least it loosened up.

 7.       When students increase their appreciation for reading, they learn to become better writers.  In a free reading environment, opportunity and growth extend to student essays, where students also choose topic and point.  Personal narrations this summer threaded more one-of-a-kind squares into the quilt. Students opened up and told their stories about anorexia, Serbian pride, and finally attending school at age eleven and having a voice as a female in America.  (I like excitement, but I’m still actively thankful that the female Bosnian by mixed-marriage who immigrated after the war and the proud male Serb born in the suburbs enrolled in different sections.)  What to do when a wilderness adventure goes wrong at the top of the mountain, two reckless bicycle rides, the fear of flying, and going for broke on the streets of Miami, the budding philosopher’s tale, which included statistics from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a good deal of partying and some worthwhile reflections:

I went back to Detroit with no doubts that things would turn around if I make them.  Instead of stirring in my problems like sugar dissolving in water, I picked myself up and made some changes.  I enrolled back into school, moved back home, and got one stable job.  I had so much new found determination and drive.  And it was all because of one seemingly irresponsible poorly thought out decisions [leaving town on borrowed cash].  I went for broke and came out wealthy.

               This constant outpouring of one-of-a-kind student creations is fecund, not sterilized, and would wither if overly restricted. If I didn’t encourage  Tom to be honest about his passions—hating English classes and loving water—he might not have written about the joys of scuba diving told with Mr. Limpet-like day dreams of killing sharks and impressing the ladies.   His second essay on the power of water then grew out of the first and was influenced by the Greek sirens and the horribly tragic drowning death of a high school classmate Memorial Day weekend.   Had I not encouraged individuals to explore their own worlds, Tom’s classmates may have held back about bad parenting, good parenting, alcoholism, how to handle a lemon law vehicle, depression and alienation.

               “I wish I had a black box to put my nightmares in; I’d throw it out the window and never see them again,” Chelsea wrote, to which she added the comic comeback, “I really hate writing about my life because it always turns out sounding like a PSA on the timid and suicidal.”  Don’t worry about Chelsea.  Instead, support her with access to well-funded community colleges, tuition grants, affordable student loans, health care coverage, meaningful internships. “I like to believe,” she dared, “that I am not the kind of teenager that has finally had enough and says to ‘hell with it all’ and plunges myself over the Golden Gate Bridge because to state it simply, I have always thought that those kids just needed a bit of attention and they’d get it by any means necessary, in life or self inflicted death.”  Not incidentally, because writing is psychology, the student, whose brother died when she was young, hopes to pursue a career in forensic medicine.  

               Exhausted?  Wait! There’s much, much, much more!  Even this small taste from one abbreviated semester is nowhere near a satisfactory survey yet.  

               I’ve been hearing about autism a lot lately.  In the fall, one woman was inspired to write due to her young son’s poor health, which she believes was entirely preventable, and in the winter another parent countered with a strong argument for childhood vaccinations.   This summer delivered another variation or two on the topic, along with a disappointing surprise.   In her personal narration “The Perfect Miracle,” Isabel explained, “Sometimes unexpected things happen to our plan making it harder for people to deal. Keeping an open mind and enjoying what we have is what I learned from what happened to our son.”  Later, within her book review of Autism and the God Connection, Isabel had good reason to utilize personal narration.  However, in “Guidebook to Holland,” she plagiarized Emily Perl Kingsley’s poem “Welcome to Holland,” which I didn’t discover until after grades had been given.   During class, I asked the student about the metaphor. She said she borrowed it from an unnamed friend, to whom she gave credit, yet when I later checked the lines presented are without a doubt Perl Kingsley’s.  

               I don’t know why the student chose to lie.   Perhaps my direct question caught her off guard and she panicked.  Perhaps she had used up all her courage already that day dealing with her son.   I believe English was not the woman’s first language.   Her idea was good; she could have used the metaphor fairly by simply giving credit to whom it was due, but integrating outside sources is a concept students don’t necessarily understand especially since very few read newspapers or serious magazines.   Without her name of course (none of the names presented here are real), I may use Isabel’s work and story as an example to help other students more honestly approach their own work without sacrificing creativity—even if the creativity is someone else’s.  

               Teaching means learning for me too.  There is simply no way I could have guessed by looking at this mature individual, who attended nearly every class and listened attentively, though she was quiet, that she would try to pull off an intellectual heist, which she may not have thought was such a big deal, considering her own big picture.   Still, I would never attempt this lesson plan in an online course, which I don’t choose to teach for numerous reasons, for one because other cheaters do drop physical hints and reveal themselves through observable behavior.  From the students’ perspective, however, it’s easy to steal something you don’t respect.  I catch maybe one to five acts of plagiarism of varying degrees each semester and of course don’t know how many I miss.  

               Otherwise, students are innocent until proven guilty. And they write about some very heavy stuff, often with a surprisingly deft touch, such as a young mother’s tale of attempting to make plans but making God laugh instead, a phrase she picked up from her mother—now there’s a trustworthy source, right?— delicately referring to unplanned pregnancy, parenthood and marriage.   But mothers and fathers aren’t automatically trustworthy.  One student wrote about finally learning to stop bailing her mother out of financial quandaries and another didn’t blame her mother for taking off and leaving teenagers to fend for themselves.  

               This time around was not usual.   Student writers shared stories about the death of friend and sexual abuse, but also lighter yarns of first tattoos and perfect days, as well as a smattering of the usual car accident tales of terror.  (Word up: Think before you give your teenager a car.)  Stripping one’s way through college, a decision which the student regrets: “The embarrassment would not be the best thing, because perhaps one of my high school male teachers would walk-in.”  How to survive a stay in jail, romantic rejection, overcoming ESL barriers, dolma, adoption, selling weed to pay for medical bills, learning to smoke pot responsibly, bad decisions, young fatherhood, and choosing a lunch table in high school, influenced by Emily White’s selection in Remix, “High School’s Secret Life.”  

               Ideally, to lead a strong tomorrow, students can benefit from practice today composing original creations.   While personal narration begins the semester, the book review caps it off, putting all our lessons about process to the test.  Uniform book reports, which demand little actual thinking and no originality, are easier, said Tom, the scuba diver.  “It was difficult to add the commentary and personal opinions without using me, I or you in the paper,” he wrote of the book review. “The other assignments seemed to be telling stories and this one seemed to be reviewing someone elses.  I think the first step was the easiest and this one by far the hardest,” he explained, “even after actually reading the book.”  Yet in his review, he competently wrote, “For people wanting to be pilots, Robert Tuck is the type of man anyone could idolize.” Though he didn’t provide detailed documentation or talk about the author of Fly for Your Life: Robert Stanford Tuck, Larry Forrester, the student did build his capacity for analysis and empathy:  “Crashing in midair into another plane would be terrifying.”  

               My course design parallel’s my main writing direction to students:  pick a point and stick to it, beginning, middle and end. The exit essay serves as a final exam.  The directions ask students to return to their initial comparison and re-analyze their personal reading and music listening habits.   For students, it’s a last shot at making a good impression before final grades are calculated.  For me, it’s an opportunity to check for growth in skills and attitude when compared side-by-side with the entrance essay and the rest of the work in a student’s portfolio.   Budding beautifully, Olivia played the role of a writer more comfortably than she had all semester, a difficult one during which her car was stolen from the school parking garage, something that happens once every four years, according to campus police.  Inspired by my mention of Virginia Wolf’s “Death of a Moth,” Olivia wrote, “I watched as the spider just seemed to flow on a tiny web.  It was at that moment that I realized that reading and music most both flow smoothly,” she discovered, meaning they both must be well constructed.  Her final essay reviewed “structure,” the composing process, audience awareness.  “Writers write and then they revise and keep revising again and again until the finished piece is as smooth as the spider coming down the web.    In the end,” she related, “the writing will be something that the readers will want to read.”  Well put.  And good news! Olivia just e-mailed me to say hi, thanks and that her brothers bought her a new used Taurus better than the old one.

               When students take both Comp I and Comp II within this free learning environment, the opportunity for growth expands.  Comp I’s continuation, Composition II- ENG 1520, is all about research and writing argumentatively.  At this level, the nonfiction book assignment ideally helps students write a research paper.  The book and book review supplement research and provide additional, authentic Works Cited page listings.  Though my nonfiction book review’s design has grown over the years into a successful centerpiece, it remains fluid.  I made a note recently: “If your author is being held captive in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, make sure to mention that fact is your book review.”  Winter semester, in Comp II Marguerite did mention Ingrid Bettancourt’s capture while reviewing her memoirs, but the student could have stressed the politician’s ongoing ordeal more prominently.  Maybe if she had more time and fewer responsibilities as a parent, she might have realized this shortcoming.   Not helping matters, I read one line out of zillion too quickly in the first draft of Marguerite’s paper and thereby missed a teaching and learning opportunity.   As is, despite my shortcomings, the student writer did many things very well, like integrate news and opinion from The New York Times.  She simply showed room for further growth surrounding the inclusion of closely related news events, which is natural, especially during the span of a single semester.  Like musicians and athletes, writers need practice and time in order to develop.  

SEEKING THAT CONNECTION.  Students need direct engagement; literacy must be presented as a way of life. The goal is to find books and authors one loves, what I refer to as building a stable of authors.   After finding and holding true love, putting up with more mundane reading becomes easier.   But to reach that point, individuals need guided opportunities for discovering their own passions.  Liam eloquently described his yearning for a literary connection:

As a reader I have never been able to truly connect with an author.  Most people, when they are really reading a book, they zone in on the story. I always picture reading like jumping into warp speed in star trek, the words get bigger as they rush at your face with a blur of lines until, wham!  You’re stuck in the story.  Feeling as though you’ve just been dropped onto a new planet, I picture myself looking around, getting my bearing and then moving into scene like a camera man recording a movie, there, but not interrupting.  I’ve never experienced that feeling; never seen the lines blur and hit me right in the face.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read my fair share of books.  In school , I floated through the classics [at a very exclusive prep academy]  like, Beloved, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, all of these stories that I’ve read, and enjoyed, but I never really felt like I was experiencing the story.  People like the experience, good readers, and people who do it often, can look at a story and really see it.  I was in an Avis car rental shop about two weeks ago, and while I was standing in line, waiting, I noticed a woman reading her book in the corner. Sitting all alone, she had no idea of the world around her, and as I’m watching her frivolously turn the pages, while trying to focus my eyes on the title of her story to get a glimpse into her imagination, she burst into tears.  In the middle of this overly public building, in front of an entire line of people, she just stated sobbing as if no one else was around.  That is the type of emotion that people who really read want, it’s the connection that they are looking for.  

The student was likely influenced by an interview with Chuck Palahniuk that I play in class, thanks to NPR, in which the author makes clear the reason for his success.  In books like Fight Club, he moves people to feel something extreme, even if it’s shock or repulsion.  Otherwise, without that excitement, “Reading is something I do for school,” Liam resigned. “I plow through the words and try to focus on every little detail in hopes of finding that connection.  It hasn’t come yet, but I’m sure it will, one day I’ll find that connection, and who knows, maybe I’ll turn off my stereo.”  

               To address educational shortcomings, why don’t we listen to students more?  Where are the books, articles, documentaries, investigative reports and even reality television shows revealing what students think about the state education?  They have so much to tell and teach me quite a bit.   For those inside the profession who prefer data collection, why not look at actual reading rates and track student attitudes within English classes?

               Encourage students to exercise self agency and they will learn to teach themselves.  Not drastically, she cautioned, but Molly’s outlook about reading changed for the better—even though the Summer I semester is condensed into two demanding months—because she couldn’t stop reading Lucky.  “Relate” is again the key word, repeatedly used by students.  Part of an unsettled group reminiscent of The Breakfast Club, Molly explained, “I can relate” to Sebold’s story “because I too had been sexually abused and I know exactly how she was feeling.” After including U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics from the 2000 report “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident and Offender Characteristics” in her book review, Molly analyzed:

When I was sexually abused, I was a teenager.  I would have been part of that statistic [of young people who are afraid to speak out].  I believe that the majority of teenagers don’t say or do anything because people rarely believe them and then start to look at you differently.  Sebold was also a teenager, but unlike myself and the majority of other rape victims she did prosecute.  

Directions regarding the book review purposefully adapt to circumstance. Most students are cautioned against appearing in their own essays, unless they have a good reason for doing so. Molly explained in hers:

After reading this book, I decided that I want to fight my rapist because maybe in doing so I will move past all my pain and problems.  This book also helped me get some ideas of how I can deal with all of my thoughts and feelings.  I did end up starting a journal after reading this book and I finally told my parents and I am taking a course of action to fight my abuse.  I believe that if I would not have read this book, I wouldn’t have had the courage to tell my parents about what I had gone through.  But, I also wouldn’t have had the bravery to file reports against the rapist either. So I believe that this book really does help the readers get by after they have been raped.

               Learning often involves discomfort, if not some pain, but also brings satisfaction and joy.  However, risks exist.  Once students open up, they may come undone.  Although I’m not a trained counselor, I sometimes feel compelled by a sense of responsibility to ask someone if they are suicidal or if they have been sexually abused.   Community college students live complicated lives and sometimes worry me but most show resilience.  Early in the semester, Chelsea’s resolve and writing were less developed, when she cared about “what is going on in others heads” and spent “the better part of my time wondering just that.”  At the end of the semester, in her practice journal she revisited these thoughts and revised them, exhibiting much greater self-confidence.  Although she finds her life depressing, she clearly stated that she does not contemplate suicide: “I don’t think that way, I have this life for a reason.  That reason is unclear to me rite now but I wont let anybody else define me while I try to figure it out.”  

               Although laziness is one by-product of our push-button society, students still appreciate a challenge and fresh learning methods. With steady command, Chelsea called Stiff “greatly disgusting and not for the squeamish.”  Perhaps explicating herself and the world, she wrote that the book “gives readers a cynical way of looking at the morbid inevitable fate for all that is death.”  Likewise, John, the young person trying to turn his life around— a colorful young man with much energy to burn— used metaphor in his exit essay like a pro. Like many of his peers, he improved his attitude, if only a little, and believed that reading might fit better into his life when he gets older.

Music is my wife and books moved up from being by my ex girlfriend from middle school to being my ex girlfriend from high school.  The like for books has increased and I feel that with time my like for books will turn into a love.  But for now bump that music.

Rather than relying on an outside source, the student refueled himself. “I did read my book,” he replied, later adding, “Hunter S. Thompson is one of my heroes so I felt it was my job to give him a good paper.���

               I don’t know for sure that students are being honest, but they sound earnest.  Peter and I didn’t really hit it off, nor did he feel comfortable among the students in his group.   During pre-class chit-chat, he and I had a tussle over politics, which became so lively we each had to take a time out.   However, to the student’s credit, he took our full exchange to heart, thought about things wisely, decided to go to work and accomplished much.   He expounded, taking on a professional tone:

As I sit here typing my last essay for English 1510, I can look back and the growth of not only me but my reading selection.  I do not have a lot of free time but if I did I am sure that I would read books outside of my college courses more often.  I see reading as a vital aspect to becoming a great historian. Being able to bridge the generation gap through writing might be the most important tool in education.  . . . Writing and reading are necessary tools to communicate not only with the present but also the future.  Without books we would not know where we have been, yet most important we would not know where we are going.  

               Highlighting the connection between music and reading, and ‘keeping things real,’ as one student commented years ago, works.  If a person loves favorite song lyrics, he or she can learn to love the written word.   Sitting among his peers at the top of the class, Peter’s writing is impressive and supportive from where I sit.  

The valuable lesson that I will take with me from this class about reading is that simply by reading anyone can draw new conclusions and look at different aspects of life that they may have never thought of before.  This is a valuable lesson for me because I am studying to be a history teacher.  Historians have to keep an open mind about other peoples perspectives .  .  . Now for the first time in my life I actually see the connection between my love for books and music.

The difference?  Peter explained, “Unlike my classes at Western, I had the opportunity to actually read a book of my choosing and not just skim through a random book and look for answers to my questions for my research papers.”  The implication is clear: skimming doesn’t allow for meaningful absorption of the material.

               Teachers make mistakes.  I am very confident but realize my classroom isn’t perfect.  As a teacher, I know that I’ve inflicted some damage and probably more than I realize, regrettably, since my motto mimics the Hippocratic oath.  

               It’s a rare student that says something strongly pro-reading outright in her entrance essay like, “Music cannot grab a hold of my attention the way books do.”  To Patty, a fan of Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, at the beginning of the course music was no more than the “flavor of the month.”  Unfortunately, Patty’s exit exam revealed regression, at least within the confines of the semester. By the end of class, she wasn’t “overly enthusiastic about either” reading or music.  Unlike Brittany, she didn’t like Girl, Interrupted, preferred the film version, and titled her book review “Girl Idiotic.”  Between my class and Kaysen’s book, together we deflated the student’s enthusiasm.   Kaysen’s memoir “could have been greatly improved,” Patty criticized forcefully, “if it had been written from an adult’s perspective that is aware of the writing process, rather than an adolescent, who is still learning,” which sounds close to an idea we discussed in class, about the need to reflect and analyze one’s own story for the benefit of readers.  She called the book “difficult to follow” and cites similar views from Entertainment Weekly and Time.  Her criticism went into overdrive, particularly in her final revision, where she labeled the book a “waste of time” and gave it an “F.”  Patty hated Girl, Interrupted so much, she read the book twice just to make sure.  

               Students spend so much time in school.  Why repeat the same lesson over and over?  Listen, repeat.  Listen, repeat.  Listen to what I say, all of you repeat.  Reminds me of step aerobics, which I detest.  No matter the variation, it’s just step up, step down, step up, step down, step up, step down, over and over.  There’s no way to get ahead, no new territory to conquer.

               Fresh out of high school, quiet but committed, Julie is a rare student to name a piece of canonical literature in her writing, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.   For her nonfiction book, Juile chose a biography of Audrey Hepburn, Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto.  “I actually read my nonfiction book selection,” she stated like most others, but what started out as an easy read soon reached rocky ground.  “Then it hit me,” she remembered, “the boring middle section of the book.  I literally had to force myself to continue reading the book at this point.”  Through trial and error, Julie learned about the shortcomings of an impersonal biography.   As a fan (and an engineering major), she pledged to check out Hepburn’s autobiography, a move she couldn’t see at the start of the project.  Still, she held no grudges, calling the book review assignment “more enjoyable than others” due to choice: “It was my choice and my fault the book wasn’t great.”  In class, we discussed vetting, but Julie was hard on herself.   She added that it was “nice not having to answer questions or do a worksheet after every chapter, as was the case in all my high school English classes.”  Despite the boring middle section, she claimed, “This experience reading was one of my better experiences.”  

               Julie is a success story.  For her, reading is “thrilling” and “fresh.”   Making good sense of Comp I, she analyzed, “People who lack the time to indulge in a novel look to music to fulfill their emotional satisfaction.” She elaborated about her first college semester, “The only problem I came across is that college textbooks take up most of my reading time. Although, I take pleasure in learning new material from textbooks, they provide facts, and no personal insights.” Calling herself an “avid textbook reader,” the student named one in her writing (perhaps the first to do so that I’ve witnessed), The Biology of Life by Peter Raven. Of it she said, “Since reading the book I can explain anything about the life cycles of any types of plants including angiosperms, gymnosperms, tracheophytes, seedless tracheophytes, bryophytes, hepatophytes, lycophytes, and psilphytes.  I can also inform anyone on all the types of animal phylums including, but not limited to, cnidaria, arthropoda, nematode, annelid, and chordate. This information on the essence of human life came from reading a textbook.”  Trust no other truth: the joy of reading is local.  

               The one-book-fits-all tradition has dominated for too long.   The common book approach, practiced by well-meaning teachers and organizations across the country, including the NEA and its version, “The Big Read,” is far too limited in scope to be successful in a plural society, like a one industry town lacks diversity and therefore strength.  (“Imagine everyone in Michigan foreclosing on their homes.  At the same time.”)  The Michigan Humanities Council event, The Great Michigan Read, looks like a good idea on the cover—whatever gets people reading more is perhaps worth a try—but covers can be deceiving.          

               Writers Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and Richard Ford appeared together for a chat to close The Great Michigan Read July 10 at Michigan State University, where they all spent time.  The evening filled with anecdotes and an over-capacity crowd marked a truly great day for reading.   However, none of the lauded guests warmed to a question posed to each about favorite books, and for obvious reasons.  All this emphasis on ONE AUTHOR AT A TIME means two of the three would have to go, sort of a battle of the scribes, who in this case are otherwise friendly.  Ford responded that he didn’t have one favorite.  McGuane quickly produced a long list beginning with Don Quixote and said he had “lots” of favorites.  Book tastes change in a person over time, Harrison explained.   Finnegan’s Wake moved him when he was younger and impressionable, but now he has difficulty with James Joyce’s language.  

               I hope the Michigan Humanities Council event was recorded.  Students need to hear writers talking about a world of reading.  Realizing that English teachers and other professionals prefer and dislike various literary styles makes students feel more comfortable with their own preferences and dislikes.   Confession: I recently realized that I brought home a third copy of Wuthering Heights, which I have tried but cannot seem to read.                

               What’s important is not some mistaken notion of the one “best” book for all students, but rather finding an array of books that will form a field of personal favorites over a lifetime.  The goal is to find multiple books that will affect us each individually, to ideally make us all better humans together.

~*~

               Disclaimer:  Yes, for personal as well as professional reasons I have always adored the Steeley Dan song about never going back to my old school.  I’ve got an attitude and lots of stories.  There’s a post it note on my desk at home, somewhere in the pile, reminding me to kick off the semester with Pink Floyd’s The Wall:

We don't need no education   We don’t need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone

                Some ideas are better left alone, but my lesson plans are always in a state of slow growth, since one person multi-media events take much more time to create than old-fashioned lectures.  Mine are prone to constant fine-tuning and pruning.  The presentation currently includes, thanks to Youtube, Aretha Franklin singing “Think!” from The Blues Brothers and Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarf (“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go!”).  As well, in Comp II the first act of Crash, which is excellent for introducing the concept of stereotypes and logical fallacies, among others.   To get rid of any dead weight, including scam artists, for the betterment of the whole about a third of the way through entry level courses, I like to run what I refer to as the “community college” scene from the film version of Fight Club, accompanied by a reading, which definitely constitutes “dark sarcasm.”  

               To create my lesson plans, I’ve pretty much had to ignore just about every traditional approach I was raised on including mandatory midterms, multiple choice tests, and long lectures.  Thanks to Professor Stewart at California State University Northridge, as an English instructor I’ve kept reading a loud together and the injection of my own passion for reading as instructor.   From The Boston School of Adult Education and Cathy Slater Spence (I hope I’ve recalled her name correctly), as well Jim Krusoe at Santa Monica Community College before her (both costing just  50 bucks a class), I learned more about writing and teaching writing than I did in any of my graduate school seminars (which cost a whopping 900 bucks a class).   There are many reasons for this imbalance, including my own shortcomings.  Education is an art and a daily grind.  But I learned the basics of writing and research no better than I did in seventh grade, thanks very much to Mrs. Gardella at St. Mike’s, who didn’t get mad when future English teacher Barb Johnston and I respectfully called her Mrs. Gorilla because we liked the word play and she didn’t want to squelch our interest.  She actually looked more like a tropical bird.

               Reviewing my own education, as a writing teacher and a writer what stands out most is the glaring absence of instruction regarding how tos, particularly how to actually write that damn paper and how to become a life-long reader, so I try to provide my students all the things I didn’t get, just like a hopeful parent.   As I write this essay, an old student’s new girlfriend, who I met at dinner at the yummy thai food place across the street from campus, is e-mailing me for direction about her summer writing class at the community college closest to MSU.  She says, repeatedly, the teacher is only talking about himself and handing out low grades.  I simply report these details, which sound perfectly familiar.

               Forgive me if I sound pedantic, impatient or obnoxiously impassioned.  I do realize that most teachers are good people who try and that institutions change slowly, but one-size fits all reading assignments and the worse culprit of all, mindless regurgitation, must be dethroned.   “I learned that writing is whatever you make it,” one student commented anonymously, coining her own term, probably without realizing she did so, but maybe not. “Writing isn’t just a recitement and regurgitated answer to what a teacher wants you to think, feel, and believe. Personal analysis is everything.” Over-adherence to the one book method kicks students out of the learning process, which is not good.

               In the near future, thanks to academic freedom, I plan to adapt my methods.  I may use my E.B White lesson plan in a contemporary lit course as a means to catapult students into the world of fiction.  Showing a collage of old film footage with people taking lake vacations—before the motor car, during world wars, after we dropped the bomb, in Technicolor, wearing funny clothes—looking through the years basically just like those of us in class, though we would laugh anyway.   Like sound, images help tremendously.   Not incidentally, I went once more to the lake just last week.   Born and raised in the area, somewhere there’s some incredibly embarrassing sixteen millimeter footage restored on video tape that Eric in the Media department can probably transfer to DVD for me to use in the classroom, featuring a still chubby much younger me jumping in a lake and running up sand dunes.  

               But no matter how riveting a visual and auditory presentation I put on, eventually I must ask students to “take out their books and open to page . . .”  Afterwards, though, after reading and talking our way through a required essay or short story together,  I can free bored minds, instructing them to strike out on their own.