The end is not yet in sight...

(I live in the same nation, only without the couch.)

So, I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Essentially I need 50,000 words by November 30th of a new novel. I did this for a couple of reasons not the least of which is that I ended up falling out of "writing mode" when I got bogged down in preparing presentations for AP Biology proposals which, if decisions are made in my favor, would make life infinitely easier for me next year. So anyway, yes these were important presentations but they did sidetrack me from my goal of writing a book. I've also found that I could tinker away at this novel for a year and still not have the basic story down on paper. Enter NaNoWriMo.

I now have a goal, a very pressing goal to work towards. I am currently at 35,000 words and some change. For those of you who love to quantify things, 30,000 words is roughly 100 pages. It was for me, at least. There are a lot of people who criticize NaNoWriMo because it presses people to write too quickly and at the end of the month they may very well have an awful novel. My novel is awful. It is currently twisted and off-kilter in many areas. It's written badly and rambles in a few spots. I've even changed the plot line as I was writing and didn't bother to fix the parts that now don't make sense. Why? Editing is for December. At least that's what NaNoWriMo says. I agree.

I have no illusions that I'm going to be able to do one re-write of this book and have it publishable. It's too much of a mess for that. I do, however, believe that once I rewrite it, then I'll just need to do some more editing and it might be readable. You know, something I might give to my best friend and my sister and see what they have to say. I'll take their constructive criticism and run with it. Then, maybe then, will I send my book off to a publisher. So, don't think I don't realize how much more work lies in front of me once I accomplish this first draft.

The problem is that I don't write on a daily basis. Some days nothing comes. Some days only about 400 words leak out of my brain and onto the paper. I'm also a more effective writer when I write it out on paper, by hand. It's agonizing, but the stuff I write is much better in that form. So as I sit here with six days left and roughly 2500 words a day to write and Thanksgiving being a busy day and the Saturday after Thanksgiving also being thrown out the window I am suddenly hopeful.

Why?

I work best under pressure and baby, I am about to feel some pressure. I've cranked out 8 pages in a day before (That's 2500 words). I can crank out 16 in a day if I get inspired. I can write in every spare minute I have. I can get this story done. All I have left is a connecting bit and the end. I can do this. I will do this. Even if I'm currently procrastinating by writing on this stupid blog!

The Week In Review

I can hardly believe the week is over. I have been so absorbed in my writing that I haven't really been aware of much else in the world, as stupid as that can be. As far as the writing goes, yesterday I fell short of my goal of 2000 words. I only managed to get about 800 words written yesterday and I'm having a hard time feeling poorly about it. I started off this week with an incredible push and managed to write about 10,000 words by Wednesday. That is a huge amount. I'm not certain if I'll meet the 50k goal by November 30, but I have every intention of trying like mad. I have never written 100 pages of anything before and so I'm really kind of pumped about reaching the 100 page mark. This by no means indicates that what I'm writing is actually any good. In fact, I have this process in my head that I fully intend to follow. It will require me to finish my rough draft of the book, wait a few months and then revisit it. When I revisit, I fully intend to give it a complete rewrite and then I'll edit that. It seems like a lot of work, but I figure if writing were easy, then everyone would do it.

Dean has been working insane hours and so all this writing has been possible, if he had been home more often, I'm sure I'd have been watching television which is exactly what I was doing last night when I fell 1200 words short of my goal. I'm not too concerned because, when I get on a roll, I can crank out a good 8 pages a day. Not too shabby considering I also have a full time job.

Due to Dean's crazy hours and my obsession with writing, I also managed to drop the ball on Thanksgiving. I'm hosting for the Fruit side and while I had told my mother in law what day and time, I neglected to tell the rest of the family. Dean and I made quite a few apologetic and frantic phone calls last night. I'm sure this will count against me for a while and I probably deserve it. I know how hectic things can get around the holidays and here I am just lollygagging around and figuring everyone will be available when I want them to be. ha!

Work is actually on the downhill slide into final exams. I'm still finishing up a bit of stuff with the AP Biology class and crossing my fingers that everything is going to go as planned with that. I've been slacking off a bit with it lately because I took an entire month off writing because I was constantly slaving away with AP Bio and I figured it was time for me to chill out a bit. No one is looking for anything major from me for a while and I figure I've earned a bit of a break from it.

That's it. That's been my life this week. Writing, work and preparing for semester exams. Yippee.

Two Sides

(This right here is how most of the public seems to view teachers.)

At the faculty meeting last night there was an issue brought up of an institute day that somehow got left off of the official school calendar. Now, the administration was apparently going to make the teachers come in extra hours here and there to add up to the eight hour day. Personally, I hadn't heard of any of this until last night and I think I'm lucky I hadn't or I'd have been drug into the whole thing. There was a wave of teacher protest in the form of petitions and angry emails to our superintendent and I'm certain the union was involved which means it was an absolute miracle I wasn't contacted about it.

So anyway, my principal is explaining what is going to happen with this "lost contractual day" and he's showing his irritation at the whole thing and I know just from dealing with him before that he is annoyed with the teachers on this one. At the same time he's barely veiling his annoyance, the teacher next to me is telling me that she signed one of the petitions since "We all put in so much extra time as it is, it's completely ridiculous for them to make us come in for one extra day... as if we don't put in enough over time as it is!"

Oh right. So there are two sides to every coin and I have to admit that I see both sides of this one. Now normally, teacher institute days are staff development days and we do things other than lesson planning and grading papers so these days aren't exactly equivalent to those extra hours that we spend. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that instead of having us all come in for an extra day at the end of the year (which would be pointless), they were just going to have us stay for an hour here and there after school.... something we ALREADY do. Telling us we must do this and account for our time IS a bit of an insult. For example, I am here every morning at 6:45 am. That is an hour before school starts. I am also occasionally here after work as well although I prefer to do extra work in the morning. For the administration to tell me I suddenly have to write down what I do every morning until I fill eight hours just seems to be nitpicky.

The letter we got from the superintendent stated he hated to lose a staff development day. I agree with him on that... however, the way in which they were going to have us make up for this day wasn't going to be productive and I understand why so many teachers got upset. What I don't understand is why the administration and seemingly a lot of the general public seems so eager to take our offense in the wrong way. I almost guarantee my principal saw it as us being lazy. I almost guarantee most of the administration saw it that way. I just don't understand this perception. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions to the rule but most of us work our butts off day in and day out and on weekends too. We care too much to do a poor job. Not only do we teach these kids and try to make the lessons engaging and entertaining, but we try to ensure each child gets individual attention. But wait, there is more. Each time we give a homework assignment, we give ourselves more work because we grade each one and give personal feedback so that too can be a learning experience. I work with teenagers and I have 135 students this year. That is 135 teenagers I have a personal relationship with. When is the last time you dealt with 135 teenagers and tried to cater to their interests and understood when they were having a bad day and asking about their lives so they know you care and are invested in them? It's tiring.

We are not lazy. We are not trying to cheat the system. We just want to be treated like the professionals we are.... which is something we just don't get.

Mini-Me

Anyone who has spent time amongst teenagers knows it takes a great deal of compassion and patience to work with these individuals. When I decided to get my teaching certificate I wasn't certain I had the compassion and patience. It isn't that I'm not a compassionate person, but it isn't in my nature to be outwardly so and I fully anticipated this to be a problem in my teaching career. Imagine my surprise when it wasn't a problem.

I have often said that having children is seeing your faults magnified and personified. Your children seem to mimic your worst features and play them back for you when they are young and I've watched my sister's children do this very thing to her. It makes me laugh and makes me shudder as I wonder what my own children will be like. My niece and nephew are still very young though and there is a seriousness to my pondering as I watch them grow older.

I have taught over one thousand students. That's one thousand teenagers with one thousand different personalities and well over ten thousand different issues and struggles. We teachers have a saying "meet the parent and you'll forgive the student" and it's the truth. So often our worst students have the most awful home life and it's not even the way you'd think. The children who are suffering from abuse and/or neglect are easy to spot. It's the children who are getting pressure at home to be perfect, the children whose parents try to be their friend rather than their parent, the children whose mother is sleeping with half the men in town that are the frightening ones. The actions of their parents manifest themselves in the strangest of ways and often it's not obvious. We literally must meet the parent to understand why the child is acting the way they are. It is then when the question becomes "can we teach them to rise above this influence?"

As our society has changed, the job of teaching has changed as well. It used to be that the community and the parents raised the children. Now, community means little as no one can really trust their neighbor and clubs and organizations that once were overrun with children now have difficulties pulling kids away from their video games, ipods and myspace pages. Our children have very few role models to choose from when they decide to model their behavior. As teachers, we've had to begin by starting to show them who and what they can be, give them the positive reinforcement they crave and the order and discipline they also crave. It may be hard to believe, a teenager desperately seeking order and discipline, but they do crave it. We teach them how to rise above their challenges, how to be good citizens, respect those who respect them and to somehow find out who they are in this crazy world. What bothers me is that parents have come to expect us to teach their children these lessons. I met with several parents today and with each set of parents I found a new and profound respect for their child. No wonder student A is struggling when her mother is so quick to agree that she's not smart enough to do well in science. No wonder student B has a lack of respect for me when his mother admits to me that she is often gone for days at a time because of her new boyfriend... won't I too just invest a bit of time in him and then be out of his life at the end of the school year?

Each year I begin by calling them my students and sometime during the school year I begin calling them my kids. I don't know when it happens and it's not a conscious decision. I wouldn't trade a single day of working with these teenagers, they are precious and have so much potential. It does however, frighten me when I think of having children of my own. What faults and insecurities will I give to my own children and will I recognize them as they manifest? Will I be one of these parents who expects something out of my child they are not capable of producing or will I expect too little of them? Will I, like so many other working moms out there forget to teach my own children how to be a good person? Or, through the gifts of this job I somehow chose to do, will I be able to have the presence of mind to raise them and nurture them as they will truly deserve?

I guess only time will tell.

It's a Lot Like Being on Star Trek

(You see this space ship right here? It's located somewhere in Wisconsin.)

"To seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

My husband and I are well aware of our country upbringing. I'm sure many from urban regions would find us backwards in a variety of ways just as our families sometimes find us to be, as they like to put it, "citified." We most likely are not the only people in America in such a situation but I wonder if others merely cringe in horror while we seem to find humor in every single situation.

Take, for example, the funeral of my husband's grandmother. Now this is not normally a situation I'd make light of but it was the first time in a long time that I'd felt as though I had stepped onto another planet. At the visitation, my husband and I stepped outside to retrieve something from our car and found his aunt and uncle drinking beer out of the back of their pickup truck. I stood frozen in sheer horror as the scene sunk in. This woman's mother was inside in a casket and here she stood, drinking a beer in the parking lot. Of course, inside his uncle was standing right next to the casket in the receiving line wearing his very best Harley Davdison shirt. Probably not the nicest thing to pick on, but it did match very well with his mullet.

Of course, the real treat was the next day. His twenty year old cousin from California, who has lived in California since she was five.... brought a date. Not her boyfriend, not someone she's known for a while... but an actual date. She had met him two days earlier.

I was on another planet. I wouldn't say I was on another planet boldly going anywhere though.... my quiet snide remarks to myself were more cowardly and petty than bold and I admit it. Seriously though... you'd have been thinking it too!

Pennies from Heaven

(Can they look any more bizarre?)

"Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven..."

I've found quite often, that life is a matter of perspective. Laugh if you will, but over the course of my 30 years (and I'm beginning to be able to see that number as young), I've noticed that the good and the bad parts of life ebb and flow in a sort of pattern. Life will be good for a while, overwhelmingly good sometimes giving you the feeling that you've conquered your demons and are at the very least treading the water of life. The good dies out though as a string of bad inevitably takes it place. The bad stuff lingers, building upon itself making us all say "when it rains, it pours" as though we understand the ancient wisdom behind our string of bad luck.

So recently, I've felt as though I cannot catch a break. The myriad of things gone wrong lately has, at times, had me feeling quite blue. My lowest point would have to be just yesterday when I quite literally could have come home and pulled the covers up over my head and shut out the world. It was in the car on my drive home that something occurred to me. Even at the low point I had found myself; even when all I desired to do was escape from reality for a time... even then I knew my bad luck was temporary. I had caught myself thinking "man, I just need to ride this one out and then things can get back to normal around here."

There are a couple of things here. First, I know my bad luck is temporary. Life gives you ups and downs and it's amazing what you can get used to if you're willing to overlook the small things and focus on what you really have. Secondly, and most importantly.... what if life isn't supposed to "get back to normal?" What if I've been overlooking the obvious? Life gives us lessons, we learn from them (hopefully) and then move on, a little older and a little wiser. What if treading water until my life can go back to the way it was just isn't good enough?

I've been wishing for an umbrella to shelter me from this downpour of bad luck. Perhaps I should have been wishing for one so I could turn it upside down and catch the pennies. Negative experiences are a chance for growth and it is far too easy to forget that. So, I'll sit back and examine my life and maybe.... just maybe... I'll be smart enough to catch the lessons that need to be learned.

Tupperware

Dean's grandmother passed away Saturday evening. It was something we were anticipating, she's been in hospice care for a couple of weeks now. What I wasn't anticipating was the rush of emotions that hit me like a train traveling 100mph. I can't remember the last time my throat closed up like that, my chest felt that heavy, or I was that emotionally out of control. Adding insult to injury is that I wasn't upset about his grandmother, I barely knew the woman. I was upset about my own grandmother.
Five and a half years ago my own grandmother died of cancer. Until then, the woman had been the rock of my life, the only decent parent I've ever known. Her transition from this world to the next took place at home, over the course of 30 days while I attended to her with the help of hospice. Without those 30 days to say goodbye, I doubt I would have been able to function after her death. It's a silly thing, really. It's been five years and there is little reason for the flood of emotion I had last night but it did remind me of something.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine lost her sister in a tragic car accident and I remember her telling me "they say it takes seven years to get over the loss of someone close to you." At the time I'd never lost anyone close and seven years seemed an impossibly long time. Couldn't you be fine after a year? Most people seemed fine after six months. How could it possibly take seven years? I guess I've got a better idea of that now and my mind struggles to understand it even today as I feel as though my heart was broken anew.
Last night, it was as if someone had opened the lid on some tightly sealed container I had in the back of my heart. It's the container we all have, the one we shove the bad stuff into, the things we need to shove away to retain our sanity and be able to move on with our lives. At the moment we shove things into that container we mentally tell ourselves we will be back, we will deal with it in a little while after we've had a chance to breathe. Do we ever really go back on our own? Five years after my grandmother's death I've only had that container opened a few times and each time it has hit me so strongly that I'm left to wonder if that container is the right choice. If I take it out and air it, will the wound heal?
I don't know.
All I know is I wish I could get the lid back on it.