The World is Full of Time Machines (on "Breakfast on Mars", edited by Rebecca Stern & Brad Wolfe)

Breakfast on Mars: Your Favorite Authors Take a Stab at the Dreaded Essay Assignment

This collection of essays begins with a foreword from Margaret Cho, who admonishes teachers who have used writing as a form of punishment. She tells a story about how she first realized that words had power and introduces the anthology by saying that it's "a collection of essays by authors who understand that writing about ideas should be fun and real, not a drill. The authors in this book get that essays don't have to follow the same rules that someone made up forever ago."

I wish I could run out and buy 30 copies of this book for my classroom. The short, focused essays are excellent models for a writing workshop. (The editors have included a related prompt for each essay, which makes the collection more accessible for teachers revising their curriculum because their state has adopted the Common Core State Standards.)

REASONS I LIKED THIS BOOK:

1.) The opening of "Creative Boot Camp" by Joshua Mohr (186-190):

Sometimes we forget to celebrate our imaginations. We take them for granted. We slack and never muster the energy to walk them. We fail to make sure they're eating quality calories. They get lazy and bored.
Neglected, our imaginations lie on the couch, eating Doritos and wearing dirty clothes. Our imaginations spend hours on Facebook stalking our boyfriend's ex-girlfriends or our ex-girlfriend's last boyfriend or our old BFF who we now completely hate or the strange cousin we met at Aunt Martha's crab-feed in July.
We look at our imaginations, sadly curled on the sofa, and we scream at them, "Get up!"

For the record, this essay ends with the imagination and "you" walking off into the distance together as artist and best friend, which is adorable and perfect.


2.) The close of my very favorite essay in the anthology: 
 
"The world is full of time machines. You can fight that truth. Or you can ride." (31)
 -Steve Almond in "The World is Full of Time Machines" 

3.) The first line of another great essay in the anthology:

"I confess that I have always wanted a tail for personal reasons." (99)
 -Ned Vizzini in "Why We Need Tails"

4.) An excellent argument in favor of pictures in essays and books:

"...how did we get from a world where illustrations were plentiful, and where illustrators could be powerful partners in creation, to our modern-day world, where there are hardly any pictures in novels at all?" (20)
-Scott Westerfeld in "Warning: This Essay Does Not Contain Pictures"

A Good Dentist is Hard to Find

I feel like I'm not very picky with dentists. I only ask that they are pleasant and understanding of me, a person with a deep sense of guilt about the inevitable effects of Diet Coke consumption on my teeth coupled with a rational fear of needles, drills, and shrill noises.

I've had one good dentist. He had a rare sense of humor and tolerated my crazy fear of dental procedures.  I don't expect to ever find this again. I'm trying. It takes trust to let someone work on your teeth.

If you have had a good dentist in your life, do a good deed and review that good dentist somewhere online.

When We're Left to Our Own Devices

Two and a half years ago, I'd never heard the term Web 2.0 (since outdated) and I thought that regular, consistent access to laptops would make my students better at what they do. Well, two years at a 1:1 laptop school with 7E, 7/8A, 7/8B, 8A, 8B, 7B has taught me that students are NOT inherently good with technology, that when left to their own devices, most students will watch useless YouTube videos or use Google Chat when it is not disabled. Students will watch meaningful YouTube videos on their own, but they won't know it, and when directed to watch meaningful YouTube videos on their own, they will mostly just be inspired by the Harlem Shake.

Students with computers at their fingertips need to know what information is valuable, what information is useless, and where the rest of that information falls on the spectrum between valuable and useless.

This is too much for me, too much for all of us alone. It's something we have to do together.

If I could choose again and do-over my college major (English, Education, a minor in journalism), my subsequent experience (MFA program, teaching), and my career choice as dictated by my financial situation at the time I made my initial decision (early 20's, eating hot dogs for lunch and dinner every day of the week but Friday), I'd still teach the same grade level (7, mostly 8) and the same subject if I knew what I know now about myself. Which is nothing, which is a lot more than I thought I knew when I was 12 or 13 like my students (everything).

Reboot

It starts at this new school with 7E in 2011. I’m in this weird-smelling classroom with no cabinets or bookshelves or anything except a desk. (Everything else I salvage at the community sale at the end of August because of good advice.) I don’t know the names of any of the school holidays, and worse, I don’t know any of the unspoken traditions. My almost-future students back at the first school I could call mine are just now discovering that the future they expected has shifted.

Cause - Effect.

I’ve already stole out of town in my covered wagon (UHaul with attached UHaul trailer). I said goodbye to the postmaster, only because I had to in order to forward my mail, and few things are as important to me as mail. I left in the middle of the night. It was more dramatic that way.

Someone at the public library I frequented every day in Town #1 cancels my library card the week I move to Town #2, which only exists on the map and the sign of a lone gas station, crippling my access to the resources of Badgerlink.

Begin again. Restart. 

Angles

I'm drawn to trains, but mostly to places of their intersection. This time, this place, is somehow inevitable (a combination of angles and conditions).

A Fortunate Occasion

On the day that Kanye & Kim had a daughter (definitely more exciting than the royal couple birth will be in x weeks),  I:

talked about Lebron James with the girlfriend of a Cirque de Soleil performer
(she was a stranger, but went to Beloit when I did),
cleaned my entire classroom (on the surface, which took over five hours),
ate my second Bacon & Chicken Wrap at McDonald's
(after the high schoolers who can't drive were kicked out),
 thought way too much about Fukushima (obviously I am eating radioactive strawberries from California), failed to kick strep (clearly dying),
and then debated if a decade was a long time
(a decade is the first SIGNIFICANT amount of time in years).

Are Kanye and Kim aware that their child's name just can't start with K?

I feel like everyone has at least one smart friend, but we'll see.

Obviously you'll know when I don't.

Help Me To Make It

I don't listen to music the way I used to, but I don't regret listening to music the way I used to now when I allow myself the time.

When I first heard Myth last year, I heard the soaring strings, the dramatic tension of spring. It's definitely a better song, one year later, after it's already become part of my memory.

Tornados Aren't Dreams

Tornadoes are the only dreams I remember and just understand right now there's some correlation between their energy and mine that I can't explain. Scotch Grove, Iowa. Detasseling the summer between eighth and ninth grade.

Very Important Business

If there's no reason to impress and I don't find intrinsic value in a task, I will do nothing.I will do nothing all day and easily convince myself that I am doing something. When I know I'm doing something important, it convinces others that I am dealing with important business. I mean, I'd enter numbers into columns all day long if it meant that I could zone out in my head wondering about how dust happens or why people are careless with words. (It'll make it easier to write those same exact numbers down on an index card some day in the future). I'll watch my cat groom on the windowsill. I'd go back to junior high and run the pacer. I'll choose not to take action and convince myself I'm doing something important the entire time. I'm not saying it's a bad way to live, though.

Omniscient

Maybe only the most complicated of all stories are allowed to be author-omniscient. "I don't understand what you mean by omniscient," says one of my students. All-knowing, I say. "But who's all knowing?" someone points out. Exactly, I move on.

Some students click the links on their screens. (Some of them read the information, some of them look at the pictures, some of them know how to scan like I do, some of them will know more than I do very soon).

Some of them read Yahoo! news out loud everyday; I guess that's better than nothing.

I'll teach better as quickly as possible. But if we're in the throes of exponential change, I will always be behind.

I will always know nothing, but Internet, you are the closest I get to omniscient.

8D is a Flood Plain

Some of you think tangelos are basketballs. Some of you think pencils were made to bend and be broken. Your fingers betray the games you play in the tabs you know the shortcuts to close before I see the screen, but I pay attention, I know the act.

Some of you truly forget that you leave wrappers at the foot of your desk and the husks of the sunflower seeds you sneak out your pocket. But those of you who notice things too, at least sometimes, will stop a second to clean up someone else’s mess and then I am nice to everyone for the rest of the day.