My Hero

My sister is a teacher in a very, VERY tough school. She teaches eighth-grade high school English. She has kids who do not know the name of the street they live on, let alone how to spell it. Kids are hungry. Every day. Hungry. They don't have pens. Pencils. Someone broke into the school and shot out the aquarium and stole all the textbooks this summer. This week, a student threated to "snap" her neck. He got a police escort out of the building. She comes home exhuasted. And she comes home emotionally exhausted because she is there for 8 hours, but these kids live it 24/7.

I call her every day to try to remind her what she does is heroic. Don't even get me STARTED on how much I hate how the word heroic is overused in our culture. A football player who makes a catch in a Hail Mary pass . . . who is getting paid $30 MILLION dollars per year (while kids go hungry in America) is not a "hero." He may be a good athlete. But he isn't heroic.

So today . . . my sister has a day off. And I thought I would ask my blog readers this weekend to post ONE story about a teacher in your life who made a difference. Maybe a teacher who has NO IDEA he or she made a difference.

Make my sister's day. Make mine. Tell me about a hero.

P.S. And if you would like to mail YA or MG books, bookmarks, pens, pencils, black and white composition notebooks to my sister, email me at erica@ericaorloff.com and I will send you her address.

What My English Teacher Never Taught Me

I was fortunate in that all my favorite teachers were my English teachers--I always had great ones for my favorite subject. I looked forward to English class, to spending an entire period talking about books--even when we had to do grammar, I liked it (well, not as much . . . ).

When I got to college, I declared an English major pretty quickly. I used to sit with the spring and fall schedules and read through the English department's course offerings like a kid in a candy shop. I took African literature, and I took an entire semester on Milton. I was in heaven. My university had a wonderful English department and except for one odd-duck of a professor, I attended exciting lectures that I truly enjoyed.

But they can't teach you everything.

So often on this blog, we say being a writer is about learning your craft over a period of years. And in thinking about it, even though I had a minor in creative writing, and even though I attended graduate school briefly at NYU for English/Creative Writing, before running out of money, I learned 90% of what I know about writing AFTER college . . . over the last 15 years.

So I started thinking about some of the things I've learned that either directly contradicted my English teachers or that somehow just could not have been learned in a classroom. Here are a few of mine . . . feel free to add yours in the Comments section.

• I learned you really CAN start a sentence with "and" or "because." In one English class, starting a sentence with "because" was grounds for an automatic D on your paper. I start sentences with those words all the time. Just. Because.
• I learned there's something called PACING. Who knew? When you spend four years of college maxing out on 15- to 20-page short stories, pacing is less of an issue. You can just stick all the best stuff in there, focus on ONE major event (no subplots). And though the short story is sadly fading as an art form in this country for lack of places to publish them, a short story won't teach you about pacing the same way a much longer work will.
• I learned there is such a thing as too many adjectives and overuse of adverbs. My teachers used to call adjectives and adverbs adding in the "details." Now I firmly believe less is more.

So how about you? What do you know about writing that your English teachers never told you?

Scout

So last night, I met Older Son's teachers at back-to-school night. All very nice this year. But . . . his English teacher? Not only is he lucky to be in this woman's class . . . but she is the type of teacher you would be blessed to get once in a lifetime. Yeah. That good.

First, aside from her clear enthusiasm for teaching, she actually has already assessed all the kids in the class for their learning styles. Do they learn best by hearing? Seeing? Touching? What? As an aside . . . I've blogged before that I only learned to use the coffeemaker a year ago. Yup. One year ago. Prior to that, I would drive to McDonald's, buy six jumbo coffees, and reheat them in the microwave as necessary. READING how to run the coffeemaker would be pointless for me. No maps or diagrams or steb-by-step instructions for me, in life (odd, since I am a writer). I have to HEAR it (near-perfect recall for anything I hear once), and then I have to DO it once or twice. As a further aside . . . I can HEAR it, but then will STILL call Significant Other to ask again. Because I have to DO it. At least once. Which is why I get lost. All the time. If I go someplace new, in general Oldest Daughter or Significant Other must be home to Mapquest me and tell me what to do and where I am. Yet I read physics and mathematical texts for "fun" and light reading. (Reading about Gauss right now.) And I've written 25+ books. So I'm not totally dumb. Just can't run a coffeemaker without instructional training. So, that little digression is to say I was very impressed that this woman gets to know each child individually and embraces that, and then teaches them how to learn on their plane of knowledge and skills.

Which brings me to teachers in general. I have blogged before about Mrs. Ruthless. The REAL Mrs. Ruthless from High School Bites. How she seemed to thrive on humiliating students. Burned out, unkind, condescending. Even with the wisdom and distance of hindsight and adulthood, she was THAT bad and worse. And it, in some sense, stayed with me for a long, long time. Because being in her class meant being BULLIED day after day for an ENTIRE year, and I am only gratified that she surely has retired by now and is no longer interacting with middle school students on a regular basis. And after her class, I hated math, and it was only when I started reading about numbers theory that I learned math was beautiful. It was elegant. Magical, even.

The polar opposite of Mrs. Ruthless was the English teacher who introduced me to To Kill a Mockingbird. Symbolism . . . [nodding to SpyScribbler] and just the powerful story and the way in which this teacher made it come alive cemented a lifelong love of reading that had been started by my parents, and I can honestly say that hers was the class I decided, for sure, I wanted to be a writer. The gift this woman gave me is hard to put into words. I wanted to write. More, I wanted to be Scout. Don't get me wrong, I love my dad, and all the lessons he's taught me ("A day without larceny is like a day without sunshine.") but Scout's dad was someone so different from my own experience. He was wise in a near Biblical sense, and decent and honorable. My dad was streetsmart--and then some. My dad was polically astute. But Scout's dad was sort of like my English teacher. Wise enough to think carefully before speaking. An air of humanity and compassion about him. I got lost in that book. And I guess, in some ways, I found myself in that class.

Many, many teachers are excellent. But once in a while, you get one that has the ability to affect your life, to open windows and doors in your mind that hopefully never shut again. I think my son has that chance this year. And it may be, because he actually prefers mathematics, that it's his math teacher that lights up his mind (she was a great, funny teacher last night, too). And that's okay. But it warms my heart to know there are committed educators out there.

So do you have a teacher that opened up the world of books and writing to you?

Peace,
E