Mandatory reading: good or evil? Yes. And—-yes.

In theory, requiring elementary school students to read a certain number of grade-level-rated books addresses the goals for increasing many levels of literacy.

• Reading skills
• Writing skills (by seeing examples)
• Vocabulary expansion
• Cultural IQ

Each child is assigned a certain number of points to attain each quarter. A reward is offered for reaching a goal both individually and for an entire class if every member reaches his or her goal.

Brilliant!

Or…is it?

My eldest child has been an avid reader since she could first gnaw on books with her baby-gums. Reaching her reading goals was a simple matter. She figured out the system fairly quickly and rapidly read through a number of at-her-grade-level books, took the computer tests, scored well on them, and went on with reading what she really wanted to read on her own time.

My youngest reads, but not in a linear fashion, most of the time. She often starts books far above her recommended grade level and makes headway for a few days or weeks and stops and sets them aside. Sometimes she picks them up again and gives the reading another try. My husband reads to the kids as part of the bedtime process (sometimes I am permitted to participate), and Youngest reads her pages and listens as Eldest and Daddy read theirs. 

She decided this quarter to read a more difficult book, hoping to get her entire points-goal accomplished all at once. She stuck to this book, it took her a few weeks. When she took the ten-question test, however, she did not score well enough to receive credit for her work…

And HERE IS THE PROBLEM:

Now she’s reading low-level (at grade recommendation) books to reach the goal.

Not because they are interesting to her,

not because they’re challenging,

but because they are SHORT

so she has a higher probability of getting a higher testing score to meet the goal for the prize.

Are you hearing me?

SHE IS CHOOSING LESS CHALLENGING WORK TO GET THE PRIZE.

I believe in education. I like school for many reasons, and I understand there is a natural need to create goals and assessments and use methods that address a large group with varying abilities. 

BUT IS THIS WHAT WE WANT OUR CHILDREN TO LEARN?

• Don’t try things that are difficult because you will fail
• If you fail, that is bad, because you will make your classmates angry at you and you will not be rewarded
• Do what is designated for you by faceless, nameless authority-figure strangers
• Stay in your place, don’t explore
• The most important assessment of a book is achieved by being able to answer 10 factual questions about the contents
• Reading=find the facts, meet the goal, move to the next book
• Only take on things that interest you if you’re guaranteed success
• Only simple tasks/stories are worth undertaking

Eldest Child figured out the system and beat it by speed-reading and going back to an activity she loved: reading like a real person.

Youngest Child… she’s a risk-taker, so she does bite off more than she can chew.

Yes, this can be problematic, but it is a characteristic of highly creative and very successful innovators and artists. But the pressure of only getting rewarded for taking low risk books to read will change her outlook unless her father and I intervene.

We have to provide new rewards for attempting tougher stuff.

Saturating the educational process with everything being level-determined assessment-friendly results-positive is a grave mistake.

By insisting on basic standards, yes, the notion was to raise the level of expectation and have a basis for improving “failing” schools.

What’s resulted (side effect time) is a LOWERING of expectation to reachable levels, and an emphasis of thinking-style conformity that might very well churn out acceptably educated students who are NOT FUNCTIONAL ADULTS.

These will not be the leaders in the face of a crisis: innovation is not rewarded.

These will not be the artists and visionaries to inspire the world: doing what is measurable is the only measure of success.

The social implications are alarming as well. If we suffer (do not get the pizza party) for those who tried to read more difficult books and failed, or for those who didn’t make the high score on a test because they applied creative thinking to answer questions, we will punish them.

After all: WE WANT PIZZA. YOU WILL CONFORM. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. WE WANT PIZZA!

Not your artwork, not the four chapters you read about mathematics you couldn’t possibly hope to understand. ANSWER THE TEN QUESTIONS from the SHORT BOOK and receive your piece of plastic, your piece of sugar candy, the friendship and admiration of your peers and the relieved smiles of your teachers and the bragging rights for your principal. WE…WANT…PIZZA…

IS BEATING A SYSTEM DESIGNED TO CELEBRATE MEDIOCRITY A GOOD LESSON? 

Yes.

Excuse me, I wasn’t adamant enough.

Hell, yes.

Will it make my children happy?

Yes…and no.

No, because we humans like to be liked. We like our plastic and our treats. We don’t enjoy struggle all that much. We don’t like being called names, and maybe not having anything to show for all of our work for long periods of time.

But in the end…yes. Because we humans were not designed to be pleased with conformity. It seems tempting, and there are times where a homogenous monotony is appealing. But we don’t manage it well for long.

Eldest child’s strategy worked. She’s moving through school with her goals met, and her love of reading continues.

Youngest child will, with encouragement, find her way through the dumbing-down maze, and arrive with her creativity and sense of curiosity intact. She will be rewarded for stretching the boundaries.

Even if we have to buy pizza for the whole class to do it.

CHARGE!

Elizabeth Ellen Everson

What if “pop up” ads start taking place in real life?

Walking on a nature path, glance at a flock of birds…

BAM! Someone is in your face shouting at you about buying mattresses.

DOUBLE BAM! A hula-hooping woman sings to you about “one weird trick to save money on car insurance”.

Words scroll like snakes across your feet. THESE PRICES WILL NOT LAST TAKE ADVANTAGE NOW

The DOW Jones Industrial Average drapes tendrils through the sky. 

A lazy flock of “lose weight using this one trick” balloons is caught in a tree…

And then they freeze, unblinking. Unmoving.

You have to hurl stones and strike the “X” hovering in the air nearby to get past each one. If you hit the right spot, just like that, they’re gone.

Yes, I foresee commercial applications for magical spells. 

Evil, evil applications.

*shudders*

(morning thought)

Elizabeth Ellen Everson

“Look, I don’t have long. The, well, they are just outside the, um, the office door. It’s just this wooden thing. The door, I mean. They’ll be in here soon. 

So let me focus, tell you what I have to tell you, what you need  to know…”

Urgency.

What’s lacking in many of my writing scenes is a sense of the absolute compelling need driving the moment forward.

This isn’t just about sheer panic, mind you.

Panic scenes are easy. The monsters are coming, the boulder’s falling from atop the cliff, is it cut the red wire or the blue?

But there has to be a sense of importance driving every scene. Some people term it the “change”, that there’s no scene unless something alters. Others call it “momentum”. “Tension”. Whatever.

Unless your story is a leisurely stroll around picturesque gardens, or tea parties described in excruciating detail—-wait. No. Even in these, there has to be the sense that all of it’s about to change. There are aphids on the roses, arsenic in the tea, cracks in the foundation that will leave society or the characters in some way sprawling.

Ur-gen-cy.

Watching a film director share his eighteen minutes on TED, I was fascinated as he described researching, studying, examining the script. But when the moment came to film a scene, he cast all of this aside and put himself in a frantic state, telling the actors to plunge into the moment themselves. He did this to allow the momentum to evolve, develop, the full impact of emotion to fill up the screen. New camera angles might be risked, changing points of view allowed, to touch the chaos that is also part of creativity.

Yeah. Breathtaking.

I freaking plan too much. Logical, sequential, has-to-make-sense: that’s me. But in my creative work, particularly in first-drafts, I have to LET GO. Let the emotion take me. Let the words pour on to the page.

Urgency= risk. Urgency is dangerous. It’s riding the rapids in whitewater without a paddle. It’s racing downhill in a wagon that has no brakes and very little in the way of steering. It has to end in disaster and the emergency-room sometimes.

An entire scene changes when written from an emotional has-to-get-done-now standpoint. The characters change. New elements are revealed. My carefully laid-out structures melt like icicles in the presence of a blowtorch. 

But it’s better work.

Looking at those chapters even months later I can feel my heart fluttering, and the pages are turning.

And I’ve become a picky reader. If a scene doesn’t really absolutely have to be there——why the hell is it there? Even unrelated materials have to apply to the focus of the piece, the flow of the energy, even if their purpose is comic relief.

 If a writer must drag down the action, it had better be purposeful and intentional, not another fact-vomitation session inserted due to ego or because someone told you it was expected. Who wants to write everything that’s “expected”?

Who wants to read an entire book full of “what’s expected”? (If someone does, I recommend the Telephone Directory, not fiction).

The pacing problems in my story are being resolved with attention to NEED, DESIRE, and FEAR.

It’s a game of employing seething subtleties in non-action scenes that’s helping me the most. Teacups so delicate they shatter if set down harshly, so everyone’s hands tremble as they try to hold polite conversation. A room where every surface is so highly polished a fingerprint becomes a gross smudge,but guess what’s in the armoire? Tripping over a worthless-looking box straightjacketed with strapping tape layers thick and one corner torn open from the inside…

Yeah. Better and better. 

Raising the level of tension has to do with theme.

• In “lies destroy lives”, fragile teacups employed amid an otherwise mundane scene aren’t just teacups, are they? 
• “People who appear to be too perfect, aren’t”=polished outsides, scary closets. So the scene-setting isn’t a quiet exercise in Edwardian furniture styles any more.
• “Secrets always come out” makes the boring housekeeping an exercise in foreshadowing when that box shows up.

Urgency. 

Now.

Go, make it so.

“The doorknob’s turning, they’ve figured a way inside.

 That earsplitting screech, it tears me into pieces. I crawl into my hiding place, but they’re following me.

I can hear one breathing.

I-it’s coming around the edge of the filing cabinet…”

*leaves computer to assume “mommy persona” and help hungry invading children make lunch*

Elizabeth Ellen Everson

“Before you would judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes” —source unknown

How about walking a mile in someone, or something’s FEET?

I was watching one of the fascinating TED talks dealing with the creation of the “foot” for robotics (Robert Full). The foot of a gecko was shown in spectacular slow motion, and—-wow! When it clings to surfaces and moves, it peels its toes backward, then places them down again, creating some kind of suction-adhesion property with the surface so it can climb. 

(Above you see my not-so-skillful artwork, but you can look up a photo if you like, just search “lizard feet” and check out the images.)

I love thinking about properties of magical creatures, but it’s authentic styled details that really makes them come alive. Whether we’re talking creatures in a book or on film, they cannot simply be proto-humans painted funny colors any more. 

So I watch nature programs and I follow blogs, sensitive to what already exists on the earth, so I can imagine walking a mile with other kinds of appendages, skin, and so forth.

Toes peeling up backward? Interesting. Now—-

• If a creature tried to wear footcovering, what would that look like?
• How would the movement of its legs become recognizable at a distance?
• Would the knees bend in a different direction?
• What would the footfalls of such a creature sound like on a marble floor?
• What kind of fashion might a human-sized creature inspire from its uniqueness?
• If its fingers were also acting in this manner, it might slap as a fighting style, rather than striking with a fist. Perhaps it would gravitate toward a mace or flail rather than a sword?

Part of the analysis covered cockroach feet, which have spines that help it cling. Imagine this on a creature as large as a great ape. Would they still be hair-sized fibers, or larger and spikier? I bet that’d make some nice ripping noises on carpet as it moved, and I can only imagine the welt pattern someone might get if slapped by it. Talk about “road rash”.

The deer in my neighborhood have odd little feet, a cloven hoof with a “grabby” center they use to help handle rougher terrain. This doesn’t work gracefully when they have to cross asphalt-cover roadways, so they are awkward when they traverse intersections, but they look fabulous when prancing away over rocky hillsides.

The energy it takes to move with different kinds of feet has to be accounted for as well. Have some fun, like I do:

• Try wearing hiking boots through an ordinary work day; no matter how lightweight they are, the tread dragging on carpets gets frustrating very quickly, and your entire walking style will change from a sweeping motion to a stomp.
• Put on a pair of slick stiletto-heeled pumps and try to negotiate your way down a slope gravel-covered driveway or an ice-covered walkway.

Here’s an interesting thought:

Shoes were not made with a differentiation for Right and Left until the 1800s. For some people, that’s not a big deal, but for those with stronger right/left differences, what a huge problem! My uncle used to participate in civil war reenactments, but had to order special boots because the historical ones were murder on his fallen-arch flat feet.

 Sticky feet,

Picky feet,

Feet with arches high…

Hairy feet,

Fairy feet,

Shoes in every size.

So I walk a mile or two, or more, in wet weather, on gravel or pavement, borrow the “feet” of my creations as much as I can, because building starts from the “foundation” up, and changes so much about everything else that follows.

I wonder if I spray-adhesived the soles I could mimic fly feet? 

Bzz-bzz

Elizabeth Ellen Everson