Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

students

Where the crossroads of writing and teaching meet

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Why one brown chair? And there’s an escape route.

Sometimes teaching is like writing and other days, not even close.

I stand before my students and do all that I can to hold their attention. I don’t know how to tap dance or tell good jokes, but sometimes I feel they would be good skills to have, so I can get a tight grip on my audience (yup, it is exactly like being a comic trying to make a cold room laugh) because sometimes writing is like teaching to a sleepy class of students.  Wait, usually they are a sleepy class of students. One will occasionally, actually nod off, but they are always apologetic and make an effort to remain awake. I am that soft spoken teacher who gently lays a hand on the student’s arm and says, “You need to stay awake or else you are going to miss something important, and I hate to repeat myself which means you will have to depend on your friends, and you know what that will get you.” I really need to learn how to tell jokes.

When I am trying to write the novel that is what the paying customer is out there searching the book shelves for, it gets like that disinterested class of students.  So a writer might get caught up in looking for the current flash in the pan idea that is getting all the cash flow. It’s been werewolves and vampires, and dystopian warriors (my students now know what a dystopia is. I used to have to teach this, several times each year, but now they ask me if I read dystopian novels. I teach 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but neither of these novels have beautiful girls jumping off tall buildings or fighting in coliseums.) Flash in the pan.  Wizards, remember those years? How about the scary (not scary) books of R. L. Stein or Little House on the Prairie or the juvenile detective series?

Teaching is like that. What is the current philosophy? Podcasts (never went that route, but teachers I know did), and interactive sensory experience to match the subject matter: burning hair to go with Wiesel’s Night. I didn’t do that one either, but a teacher I knew did. Now its the YouTube video. Okay, I do use that one now and then. My new mantra is if you don’t know how, search for a video on YouTube; however, as a gambit for reaching the nodding off student, it is losing its bright shiny finish as well.  Rote memorization, group work, project-based assessments (one of my favorites), crossword puzzles, word searches (hated both of those and I wasn’t even using them, but my daughter’s teacher was. Can’t tell you how many times I had to promise my daughter that the word was in fact in the torturous maze of letters she had searched for the last hour (after I had searched to frustration to find the word and finally did). I don’t know what word searches teach, patience perhaps, determination, stress management.

Recently, my teaching cadre was told that we need to be more like what is holding the students’  attention according to a YouTube video: two minutes of intense trivia, challenging group competition and ringing bells, chasing gummies across a screen. I’m still not sold because colleges are not doing this and neither are companies that make widgets nor window and door plants or Virgin Galactic and SpaceX. They expect their employees to come to work, get busy, follow directions, produce what is requested, think it through and be respectful.

So this is about writing and how teaching is sometimes the same and sometimes not. Here’s my big point: Teach what works and gets the results that will be useful to students who need to go out into the world prepared. And write, write what comes out of you naturally. If it’s currently a dystopia, well bless your heart, you stand a chance. Or be like me and write time travel because that is what you like to write and what you like to read whether or not anybody else is reading it or writing it and selling it. But if you believe in it, they will listen (yes, back to students for a moment). There is someone out there whose arm you will touch and startle awake, who will apologize for not paying attention and will turn the page and by gosh learn something.

PS (Okay, so that the metaphor worked in this discussion of writing and teaching, I did fudge a bit. My students never fall asleep. Hmm. Okay, about once a month a student was up late and will want to nod off but won’t. Hmm. Well, I do have one student who I regularly wake up, but they are the exception, not the norm. It was the metaphor that was important, so I had students falling asleep to make it work. And I do not “protest too much.”)

#writing
#teaching

Though we seek perfection, we must recognize the value in a good flaw, the unintended potential it grants

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Flawed yet potentially beautiful.

We all face demands that require near perfection, sometimes even perfection.  Those of us naturally conscientious try hard to meet them.  In fact, we often demand them of ourselves, without an outside force motivating us.  I am a perfectionist, so I can certainly sympathize with those who demand it of themselves and others.  But the writing of a draft should never fall victim to this expectation.

To avoid binding myself by those unreasonable demands, I remind myself that humanity is strong because of its imperfections.  Flaws offer opportunity, diversity and adaptability which is a necessary ingredient for survival and for an author’s creativity.  I cannot possibly count the times a flaw in my writing or a student’s has opened up a new aspect of a story’s conflict, a character’s motivation or an image that adds new light to the matrix that makes up a story or poem.

I love to tell my students of one of my long-graduated, creative writing students who had not made much effort in her regular English classes to gain skills in punctuation and diction.  She wrote several poems and submitted them for our first workshop.  Of course, as her teacher, I was familiar with her faults having combated them for years.   But her peers were not.

The first day we reviewed her work was comical.  Several diction issues cropped up.  Her peers, whose feedback was provided before I wrapped up the review, took her diction choices at face value and tried to make sense of them.  They offered advice on how to tighten the images she was casting.  They suggested ways to connect these unusually phrased constructs creatively together.  I watched in my silence her increasing concern.  As a student receiving feedback, she was not allowed to defend or explain her choices.  I knew she was trying to figure out if she should admit that spelling and comma placement had made a mess of her original intents for the poems.

It was a definite struggle as her peers had found complexities in the writing that had not naturally been there.  They had offered valuable advice based on misunderstandings that had come out of her word choice (and the unfortunate assistance of Word’s spellchecker).  Honesty and the intrinsic humor of the student won out, and she admitted the confusion her writing had created.  She had a good laugh at herself, but she also could not help looking at her poetry in their new light.  The conscientious notes her peers had made on her workshop copies could not disappear, and they were hers to take home, review and consider.

It took another two similarly confused but still highly useful workshops (much of it spent laughing as her fellow writers were more knowing now and found making her strangled diction work as much a game as an effort to bring clarity to rough drafts) to motivate her to make change.  When she graduated, after two years of creative writing class, she told her story to the  students new to the class and those considering taking it.  She admonished them to learn the tools of the trade and not be proud of their lack.   And she laughed at how she learned to find deeper complexity in her work through playing purposely with word choice.

Imperfection at its best and received for its potential can lead to tremendous growth, not just in the work but also in the writer.  Certainly, one should write with the intent to provide text worthy of growth and must start with the best of production, recognizing that the effort will not bring perfect production.

I sit down determined to move what I imagine before my internal eye into words on the screen before me.  Later in the shower, on the treadmill, sitting in the passenger seat on the way to work, the missing bits that develop scenes, dialogues, and crucial interactions between characters slip forward now that room has been made for them.  In my imperfect prose, I can make my way toward perfection, just as my students do daily.  Each flaw offers a moment for consideration of alternatives and growth for the work and the writer.

So write your flawed constructions, traction your prose with the early confusion of imperfect muses, then with patience and consideration, and a good dose of humor, find its near perfection.