A few random thoughts on school now that I am back in action…

–They should plan for a vakay after a person’s vakay so that folks like us can have some time to rest up after having taken a vakay. Recovering from hard work is tiring.

–How come the kids that were the talkers in class before Spring Break return to school as, yep, you guessed it, the talkers in class but the kids who were the motivated and diligent students before the break return to school looking as if they just want to lay their head down on a desk and take a nap?

–Why do so many kids clamor for vacation before it hits yet complain about how boring their Spring Break was once they return?

–Lots of teacher smiles and “Hello there, good to see you,” salutations between faculty members in the halls today. By day 3 this week — after a good staff meeting and a few memos from admin — I wonder how well these pleasantries will hold up.

–A recent article says that 84% of teachers in the state of California hold unfavorable attitudes towards NCLB. 84%? I am shocked. Who the heck are the 16%… that’s what I want to know?

– During the holiday, I enjoy the taste of coffee. When school is in session, I survive off its caffeine.

I am asked all the time about how to become a published author… so here’s some advice for aspiring writers.

Lots of people, it appears, have the desire to write a book one day. My thoughts: just do it.

Spring Break is here and summer is coming up. At some point in all our lives we must step up to do those things we one day had always hoped to accomplish so if there is a book living inside of you waiting to be born, you gotta ask yourself, “If not now, when?”

I say, do it!

And then do it and do it and do it some more. Will it be hard and aggravating and gut-wrenching and rough? Of course. But will it also be fulfilling, exciting, adventurous and rewarding? Most probably so. (I can’t promise, but it is for me.)

In my experience, the people who are most frustrated as writers are either 1) people who swear they are going to write a book but never actually do write a book or 2) people who do ultimately write a book and then come to believe that the world has failed to recognize their literary brilliance when they don’t sell as many copies as John Grisham while at the same time garnering the same critical reviews as Oscar Wilde.

Hogwash.

Real writers write because they can’t not write. If that is you, write, continue to write, continue to read and and continue to keep learning and learning about the craft of writing. Your publishing break will eventually come (mine took more than a decade) and when it does, it’s only going to mean that more writing will be expected of you one day.

This is a profession for lifers. The first ten years are school, the next ten years are learning the business behind the business. Write an average of 10 pages a week for 50 weeks a year (that’s 500 pages) for 20 years (that’s 10,000 pages) and then talk to me then about how no one wants to publish you. Cause you know what? You do that and I can almost guarantee, you will be published.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks about the 10,000 hour rule. (i.e. it’s takes a ton of time to get really good at something.) Me, I kinda think there is some wisdom in this.

Now sure, you hear stories all the time about first time-authors who just got paid $750,000 for their debut novel… and maybe that will be you. (You’ll never know unless you actually write your book.) However, if you are looking for a quick score, a lottery ticket, I am not sure book writing is the best path.

But if you are looking to write a book for another reason, such as possibly believing that you actually MUST write this book (even if only your mom will ever buy a copy; but don’t worry, my mom bought 16 of my first book thinking she was going to propel it to the bestseller lists all by herself. BTW, nowadays, she waits for me to send her a free one. Sheesh, times have changed.) then do it.

More about the writing process is gonna come next week. But in the meantime, think about tapping at the keyboard. The page is blank for all of us when the sun comes up in the morning. The only question is, are you going to fill it?

The Two Minds of a Teacher When it Comes to Spring Break.

With school on break for a couple of weeks I get a chance to wear but one hat and be a writer for a wee bit. I love it!

And with three books coming out for me in the next 18 months (2 of them already written, one due by the end of next summer to be released a year later) this is really the time to “get ahead while the gettin’s good”.

However, part of being an author is understanding that so much of the work you do will not see the light of day til well over a year after you actually write it. In some cases it’s closer to two years.

That’s just the way the world of book publishing works.

Between manufacturing, marketing, copy-editing, cover design, and so forth, there are scores of people that work for extremely long periods of time to get a book from my computer to the nation’s bookshelves… and the process ain’t a quick one.

This is one reason why I adore blogging: the immediacy. I write. People read. People respond. I respond back. Tomorrow is a new day and the blogging process begins anew. Just as actors talk about how much they love live theater performance over film and television because of the immediacy of the audience, so too do I find blogging to share the same benefit for me as a writer.

And funny enough, I was going to take a blogging break for the holidays. Just sort of shut it down and resume again in January once school is back in session.

But then I realized that I blog for the same reason I write books — I just love it. It’s not a chore to me. It’s not “work”. I don’t wake up and think, “Ah jeez, and today I have to blog.”

I mean my holiday should be spent doing the things I enjoy doing — the things that recharge my batteries and make me feel good about the world.

Family
Friends
Sleep
Exercise
Read
See movies
Laugh
… and write.

Yep, write. See, writing — both books and blogs — they “do it” for me. They fill my inner well. And as a teacher, I know that if I do not actively seek to fill my own inner well – especially during my breaks from class – my school will suck it dry… for no matter what I do as a teacher, it’s never enough. By that I mean there’s always more. Always more kids to help, parents to contact, fellow teachers to support and on and on and on.

We must be our own well-fillers. Thus I write — with great excitement that I get to do it while only wearing my favorite pair of neon green speedo undies, nipple tassles and pilot goggles.

What, you think I don’t have peccadilloes?

LOL!!

What do you do to fill your inner well? And whatever it is, make sure to do it these next few weeks. January will be here soon enough.

As much as I want to just chill on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I know that it really is in the best interests of my students to dedicate at least 45-90 minutes to school.

Why?

Because I need to make sure that the month of December ROCKS!

See, classroom minutes are precious and the fact of the matter is, it’s way too easy to allow December to slip away into a “we are almost at the Holiday Break” mode… and class can all-too-easily devolve into a space where we are somewhat just biding our time until Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer comes to town. I don’t want that. It’s bad for my kids. It’s bad for my classroom aspirations. It’s bad for our school and for our society. December represents an excellent opportunity to turn UP the heat (not to lighten up) — to bring our A game, to intellectually work at a double-time pace so that we squeeze whatever juice there is left in the fruit of 2009 to the max. It’s a mentality more of us ought to have. (New teachers, are you listening? You might have some terrible role models on campus who will give you the “countdown til they are “free” every day for the next month but don’t listen to them!).

I want my kids to end on a BANG! not on a “slide away”. Most solid teachers do.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is thus where I take stock and devise this “plan” to succeed. (Cause without a plan the chances of actually accomplishing this are small.

It’s funny, too, because I remember my first year as a teacher how I scheduled a big test for the day right before the holiday break — a HUGE test, one that would follow through on my belief that school is not over until it’s over — and everything I did in the month of December pointed directly to that one final Ka-Boom!

And then only about 43% of the class showed up the day before the break and it was 3 weeks before I could sort out what the heck had happened.

So now I know. December 18 (and 17th and even 16th) at my school is going to have low attendance. This means that out of 14 teaching days in the entire month, I really will only have about 11 or 12 instructional days before they are gone-zo for 2 1/2 weeks.

How will I make the most of these days?

With the plan I craft on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Though it’s nice to have the day off, it’s nicer to know that when I get back, we are gonna bring some heat before the big break.

Today is my first day of summer vacation. My school was one of the last to close in the state of California which means that I am fried, frazzled and freakin’ spent.

On one hand that’s good because to me it means I left it all on the table. I gave sweat, blood and tears this year. I also laughed a lot. And as I reflect upon my recent blog posts, I realize far too much of the joy of what I do day in and day out is NOT evident in my writing.

That’s sad. Therefore, I decided to insert a fart joke right here.

Fart joke.

See, they always work. (I really shouldn’t be giving away the keys to my writing techniques but hey, I have more… like booger picking references and belly button lint allusions.)

But alas, I digress.

It’s SO HARD to keep a sense of joy about things these days when so much of the news about schools is so raw and salty. Though I am still pretty young (I graduated high school in 1985… you do the math) I have never seen the mood so dour. And it’s cause of our finances.

The economic meltdown has come to town. I mean no one has ever really held up the city of Los Angeles as a pillar of educational excellence (pockets, yes — on a large scale, no.) But when I see headlines like these in the L.A. Times, I just want to bury my head under the covers and pretend that the implications of this decimation to our school funding isn’t going to screw over tens of thousands of kids in the next few years. Not just a few, but tens of thousands of students are going to be negatively impacted in a very direct, very severe manner.

So trying to put a smile on my face — and the face of others — feels a little Pollyannish.

On the other hand, I am supremely optimistic because our schools are long overdue for immense change and I think that this destruction of the dysfunctional status quo can be the impetus to bringing in a host of new ideas, new energy and new opportunities. People are going to be forced to do things differently — and that excites me. And there are very few sacred cows right now that aren’t being severely scrutinized. From the Dept. of Ed having a “rename NCLB” contest because of its abject failure in so many regards to the Governator showing the hangman’s noose to the dead tree textbook publishers to unions having their feet held to the fire for trying so hard to protest the weakest links in the teaching chain at the expense of the professional reputation of the rest of us, so much good stuff is happening under foot right now.

And so, summer begins. Maybe I’ll take a break. A break from blogging. A break from writing new books. A break from developing new curriculum materials to help reinvent some of the fossilized, static, outdated materials currently being peddled to us in our modern-day classrooms. Maybe I’ll take a break from thinking of ways I can be of service to this field I so dearly love.

Then again, maybe not. When you avocation and your vocation are the same thing, you’re a lucky son of a gun.

And that’s why I have no problem making — and smiling at — fart jokes. We need them, now more than ever.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppp!

Spring Break is here — and goodness am I feeling twisted. (Thus the picture.) But isn’t my mental exhaustion, physical wretchedness, and gross inattention to the mundane elements of life like the dry cleaning, the cable bill, the tax man (D’oh!) and so forth really just a sign of a healthy, productive classroom? I mean, I should be spent, worn-out and needing a break right now. It means I’ve been working my tail off.

And that’s a good thing!

Hard work is, to go all puritanical pilgrim on you for a sec — good for the soul. I don’t want to end this segment of the school year with gas in the tank. I want to end this section of the school year knowing I pushed myself and my students hard. I mean, the fact is, there is simply not enough time to do all the things we aspire/need/hope/want to do in the course of a single school year anyway so with the time I have, I should feel wrecked right now. It may look and feel ugly to an outsider but on the inside I know, it’s a sign of productivity.

Yes, when you burn the candle at both ends, like I do, it catches up to you. But when you play it safe, lay-low, save some reserves and tip-toe to the finish line, you may have saved some wear-n-tear on yourself but sadly, the kids will have gotten much less. That’s an inescapable trade-off. I mean I have 10 days off from Lynwood High School starting tonight. Isn’t the implicit agreement that I’ll get 10 days off for Spring Break because I’ll need 10 days off because I work so damn hard when I am on?

(BTW, yes, I am under contract for some writing due to my publishers but that’s a separate issue — I’m a freak sucking the marrow out of my career while there’s still breath in my bones. It’s a personal choice to make hay while I can because well, ya never know, right? Besides, I have a tendency to be a derelict when I am not being productive, calling big wigs in State Departments buffoons and things like that. Better to be cranking out a few thousand words a day on the Mac for a publisher, right?)

And so, Good Friday is here, thus kicking off a no-alarm stretch of time in a regular ol’ schoolteacher’s life. T.S. Elliot was wrong when he said April is the cruelest month. Not when I am going to wake up and get a chance to tickle my daughter, it’s not.

Happy Passover!
Happy Good Friday!
Happy Easter!
Happy Teacher!!!