One reason to become a teacher

Posted on August 16, 2011 by José Iriarte

On Friday I was fortunate enough to attend the wedding of one of my former students. Over the years there’ve been way too many funerals, but this was my first alumni wedding.

During the reception, I had the most wonderful conversations with the groom, his parents, and with his best man, who had also been a student of mine. They really overwhelmed me with their kind words; I can’t possibly convey how touched and honored I felt. Marriages are for families and friends; it was a privilege to be numbered among those.

And there’s one of the upsides of teaching: if you stay in the field long enough, you do get to touch a lot of lives. I’m hard pressed to think of another career where you build so many close relationships with people right at the time in their lives when they’re growing the most. They don’t always come back and tell you, but if you’re not some bitter freak who’s skating by on the minimum possible effort, the effect you’re having is a good one–probably better than you realize.

If you can apply the word “blindsided” to a positive experience, then that’s the one I would use here. I felt like I meant more to these young men than I’d really known, and if that was the case, then how many other people’s lives have I influenced in this way?

Photo by Alison Taylor

I also found myself reflecting back on my own amazing wedding, and reliving the experience in my mind as I watched another young couple begin their journey. Beyond the trip down memory lane, though, I listened to the message the officiant shared, and those shared by the bride, the groom, and the bride’s father, and considered how they applied to my own marriage. It made me think that I really don’t get to do this enough; it might do us married folks some good to attend more weddings, re-experience some of that youthful excitement and bliss, and mentally renew our own commitments. Kind of like a romantic booster shot!

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Customers as Vultures

Posted on August 10, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo by Stuart Nisbett

Lisa and I headed out to the Borders in Winter Park today for the second time to see what bargains we could find. In all the talk about how sad it is to lose another brick and mortar bookstore, and all the talk about how Borders was mismanaged into oblivion, there’s been a bit of an awkward (or maybe it just seems that way to me) silence from writers and such about the other side of the liquidation equation–the shoppers snatching up bargains at the liquidation.

I asked on Google+ the other day if anybody knew whether authors would receive royalties for books bought at the liquidation–or whether the numbers would show up on Bookscan–but nobody who knew replied. The whole point of liquidation is to pay off at least some of the chain’s debt, right? Wouldn’t this clearly include its debt to its suppliers, in the form of publishers? (And don’t bookstores generally pay for books up front and then remainder them for a refund if they don’t sell? And if publishers sent books out to Borders without this payment in the hopes that things would get better, isn’t that kind of on them?)

If authors aren’t receiving royalties, then this is clearly an ethical issue for me at least. Absent any clear knowledge on that count, though, there’s some good deals to be had, and when you read as much as my family and I do, that’s not something to sneeze at. Today we picked up a handful of titles each, including, for me, a YA science fiction novel I’d never heard of. So worst case scenario, if it turns out to be good I’ll at least let folks who read this site know about it, and try to repay any karmic debt that way.

There’s one group of people who aren’t being silent when it comes to the shoppers at the liquidation, though: Border’s employees. On Twitter and in various articles I’ve seen floating around I’ve seen comments comparing these folks (including me, I reckon) to vultures, and suggesting that there is some insincerity in their sudden interest in book-buying.

This is asinine on the face of it, but if it’s not as obvious to anybody else as it is to me, I’ll be happy to go into it.

The most recent example I’ve come across is this otherwise fascinating account of the botched decisions that led to the chain’s demise, which was linked to on Robert Bennett’s blog. Some tidbits from this article:

Amanda has been with the company for about a year, and the first day of liquidation was an exhausting experience for her. She says her store topped $50,000 in sales—an average day at the store had been somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,000 to $12,000. As many as 50 customers—none of whom she had ever seen before—were lined up outside before the store opened for the privilege of trashing the place.

A couple paragraphs down:

On the day that the liquidation started, “everyone was a little stressed-out and frustrated by the very rude customers.”

As I said, though, this article is not unique. I’ve seen similar sentiments a handful of times, as though the chain would still be around if these opportunists had ever shown an interest in buying books before now.

Here’s a hint: they did.

Is it really reasonable to think these people lining up to buy sackfuls of books aren’t readers? Paul Constant seems to think so, as even before the liquidation, he describes the transformation in their clientele from book lovers to “slithering, pre-offended armies of bargain hunters.” As if people who aren’t book lovers are hunting for bargains on . . . books. The people who drove that $50,000 in sales when the liquidation began are obviously book lovers; they’re just book lovers who were getting their books from somewhere else.

Constant spends 90% of that article detailing the reasons why that would be the case:

  • front of store displays that went from displaying the books the staff loved and believed in to hocking “mediocre crap” like magnets and such
  • low employee morale as “increasingly bitter” employees felt insulted by the main office
  • dwindling stock diversity
  • management pushing Border’s Plus cards on customers as late as mid-July with the reassurance that even if the chain went under, it would last until Christmas at least (As it happens, today is the last day those cards will be honored.)
  • management that no longer cared about employee hand-selling

In light of all this, why should anybody have been shopping at Borders instead of someplace else?

(As an aside, I’m not sure that the mid- to late-nineties were any halcyon days either, given Constant’s description of his colleagues as a confederation of hedonists partying all the time and showing up at work hung-over. It sounds like it may have been a wonderful place to work as a twenty-something, but that doesn’t make it a good place to shop.)

I don’t blame folks who had a stake in Border’s livelihood being bitter. But by all accounts, the people to blame are the folks who made bad decision after bad decision in Ann Arbor, not the folks lining up to pick up a few cheap books in this bad economy. Blaming your customers–or your non-customers, as the case may be–is always a loser’s strategy.

As one of the teeming masses over there today, let me tell you why I wasn’t hitting up Borders every day. First and foremost, there wasn’t a Border’s store within an hour’s drive of me. There are two Books-A-Millions and four Barnes and Nobles that are closer (and, for a few years, a Virgin Megastore). Second . . . actually, there is no second. That’s pretty much it. I had been in that store before once in a  while, and certainly never saw any reason to believe that it was better than the other mega-chains or worth the extra drive. I appreciated that they had a slightly different selection, so I went there occasionally just to see what I might find that I couldn’t at the closer stores, but I wouldn’t say they had a better selection.

Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate a good bit of carrion once in a while, of course.

 

Posted in bookish life | 8 Comments

Dear Internet: I’m back!

Posted on August 9, 2011 by José Iriarte

I’ll post more later today, but I was getting tired of the blog not being updated, so I figured I’d let the world know I’m back from Mexico. Did you miss me, internet?

Posted in uncategorized | 2 Comments

Reasons not to become a teacher

Posted on August 5, 2011 by José Iriarte

The other day, a former student of mine who is now in college wrote to me asking me to share with her the “dark side” of being a teacher. There are plenty of sources one can find romanticizing the teaching life, but comparatively few talking about any of the downsides of this career. I’m happy in my job and in my career, but as with any path in life, downsides do exist. A lot of teaching careers burn out early, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because these teachers didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. I think it’s worth going into this career with one’s eyes open, so I took this request seriously. At the risk of alienating some folks, I thought I’d go ahead and share my reply here.

Image by Ru S

There’s a line of thinking among writers that suggests that every budding writer that can be discouraged should be. The idea is that the writing life is a life filled with impossibly high walls to climb, disappointment, rejection, failure, and criticism, and so the only people who should take it on are the people who are so driven to write that they can’t do otherwise, the people who can’t be turned away by any amount of discouragement.

I’m inclined to think the same applies to teaching.

You asked about the downsides of teaching; I’ll try to pull together as many as I can think of and give it to you straight. There are upsides too, and I want to make that point so I don’t come across as some bitter jerk who’s in the wrong line of work. But I’m deliberately not going to talk about them for two reasons. First, that’s not what you asked for. Second, I don’t want to muddy my points here by appearing to be setting up a “point-counterpoint” type of thing. I don’t want to make it seem like a given that the pros outweigh the cons. They might, for you, or they might not. Anybody who doesn’t acknowledge that is peddling something.

If you’d like to talk about the upsides of teaching on a different day, I’d be happy to have that conversation too.

So here are some reasons not to be a teacher:

• You will fail, frequently and continuously

The movies make it seem like if you really really want to get through to kids, you will find a way to reach them, to make what you teach important in their lives. You will inspire the generations and change lives. Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante manages to reach every last gangbanger and teach them all calculus, making them realize their self-worth along the way and giving them all a way out of the barrio.

That’s a bunch of crap.

Every teacher fails. Every one. No matter how desperately you want it to be otherwise. You succeed magnificently with a few kids. You are adequate or perhaps better than adequate with most, maybe. But there will be kids who don’t want to hear your message, won’t believe you’re on their side, or will misinterpret the things you say. If you’re worth anything as a teacher, you won’t give up trying, and so you’ll never stop being dissatisfied. Every last kid you don’t reach, you will blame yourself for. Because, sure, the kid may have had baggage coming in that made him or her hard to reach, but that’s no excuse, because reaching that kid was your job, damnit.

With the kids who succeed, you’ll know that many of them were brilliant, many of them were hard workers, many of them had families supporting them, or tutors coming by. Many of them were going to succeed no matter what you did. You can’t take sole credit for most of them. But the failures are all yours. Failure will be your constant companion until the day you retire or the day you stop giving a damn.

• You will be disliked by the very people you are devoted to helping (or, worse, you will sell your soul to keep that from happening)

Every teacher worth anything got into teaching because he or she loves young people.  (Or adults, if that’s what you end up teaching, but I’m assuming for the moment you’re considering teaching young people.) But as a teacher, you must wield authority. No teacher is gifted enough to make every student want what she wants–see the previous point. No matter how nice you want to be, sooner or later you have to demand of a student what he or she doesn’t want to give. Sooner or later, you will have to let a student deal with the consequences of his or her actions or inactions. (This may not be true of Montessori teaching, but I’m not convinced that Montessori teaching works for all kids beyond the elementary level.)

When people are made to do what they don’t want, when people receive negative feedback or consequences, they generally look for someone to blame. Guess who? You. (And, you know, sometimes they’ll be right.) So you will enter teaching because you really like young people, but some of them will hate–hate–you. It doesn’t matter how much you think this or that teacher you had was beloved–I promise you, a significant number of students hated that person, and that teacher can probably tell you who.

And not just hatred as in personality clash, but as in people believing, with all their fiber, that you are a horrible person, who has harmed them.

And, by the way, the people you failed to reach, or the people who are sure you’re a horrible, petty monster, have a lot more incentive to tell you about it than the people who think you were okay.

Swing by my RateYourTeachers page and see what some angry folks say about me, and consider whether you’re prepared for the hurt that will come when they say those things about you. I promise you, somebody will.

(The irony of being the sellout teacher–you know what I’m talking about, I’m sure–is that even the sellout teacher is despised by somebody. Usually the people who want to learn and be prepared for their later courses. Or by the unpopular kid who doesn’t like the popular kids the sellout panders to.)

• You won’t have as much spare time as you think you will

During the school year, I put in about three hours per school day of my own time. In that time, I grade papers, write assessments, lesson plan, answer questions from students via Moodle, help students after school, communicate with parents, etc. And it’s barely enough. I could possibly do less–not give up my after school time helping students, not answer Moodle questions, grade things on more of a right-wrong level and not give as much feedback as I do. But that brings me back to the first point I made. I am working my butt off because when I fail, I need to believe that I did everything I could to make it be otherwise.

A lot of people go into teaching because they believe that teaching will give them time to pursue some other dream–very commonly it’s writing. 😉 (Since I know you like writing, you might want to check out Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, where he talks about attempting this and just how disastrously it turned out for him. It’s an awesome read anyway, so it’s time well spent.)

For the first ten years or so of my career, I spent most of my summers working as well, preparing for the upcoming year. In recent years this has tapered off some–I’ll take a week or so of inservices, but I no longer try to lesson plan ahead or anything like that, mostly because our shifting expectations when it comes to curriculum has made it, in my experience, wasted effort. And one year I actually wrote a whole year’s worth of sixth-grade lesson plans over the summer, only to be told the week before school started that they wanted to move me to seventh-grade.

Still, I keep hearing how a perk of this job is the easy, easy working hours, and it just ain’t so.

• You won’t get paid what you’re worth

“What you’re worth” is a tricky and potentially offensive phrase, so I’ll just put it this way. Pretty much the only people working jobs that require a bachelors or more who will earn less than you are social workers and the counselors and librarians at your own school. This is not hyperbole–I’ve done the research. Try to find a career requiring as much that pays less. And the summer doesn’t mitigate that–I’m talking per hour. (And I’m not counting all the work on your own time, either.)

Are there jobs that pay less? Sure there are. You won’t be living in poverty. But you could be making a much more comfortable living. It’s easy as a young person, when you’re already accustomed to not having much, to proclaim that you don’t care about money. Years later, when you realize you’ve made that choice not just for yourself but for your spouse and your children as well, you may find you’re a little less blasé.

• Society won’t respect you or what you do

Everyone loves to talk about how much they love and respect teachers, but it’s just talk. You need look no further than how poorly we compensate teachers to know that society doesn’t mean it. Do we love teachers enough to pay an extra penny on our sales tax? Eh, not so much.

But there is clearer evidence these days. Look at what’s happened in Wisconsin and in Florida. Look at the rhetoric being slung around about how so many teachers are lazy and incompetent. You can go to the Daily Show’s website and see a whole lot of it collected in one place–I’m not online right now, but on the front page where they have segments collected by theme, there is at least one about education. I can find a link later if you can’t find it. There you’ll see pundits (mostly on FOX, the country’s most popular news network) talking about how teachers are in fact overpaid, undereducated, and incompetent. Google up the phrase “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” and see how many hits you get. Dig up some Front Porch threads from around the year 2000 (or see if Wayback Machine has archived any of the really racy threads from 34747.org).

• Everybody is sure that education is broken, and everybody has a different idea of how to fix it, and you must satisfy them all

Whether education is in fact “broken” is, first of all, not as clear-cut as most pundits–from the left or the right!–would have you believe. But that’s a topic for a whole other thesis, so I’ll just throw that statement out there for now.

Assuming for the moment that it is broken, experts have been trying to fix it for many, many decades. Every three or four years, some new fix becomes the vogue, and you will be required to invent all sorts of ways to implement this fix. The previous requirements from the last fix, however, are rarely lifted from your shoulders. If you protest, it’s because you don’t care enough about reaching kids, you don’t have the right motivation, you aren’t really a good teacher. And, you know, a lot of the ideas you will run across will actually be good ideas that resonate with you. But you won’t be able to take one good idea and run with it, because you’ll be too busy trying to implement everybody’s pet solution. (It’s worth noting that inventing ways to fix education is a good way to make your name as a pedagogue, as a bureaucrat, or as a politician.)

Well I seem to be running out of steam–or at the very least, I’m running out of batteries on my laptop. 🙂

There are reasons to teach. I’m not planning on leaving the profession any time soon. But I am in no way exaggerating the downsides.

Teaching is not a job; it’s a vocation. The majority of teachers burn out within a few short years of beginning their careers–as I recall, it’s currently at five years, but you might want to confirm that with some research of your own. Those who burn out, I have to think, were unprepared for the hard parts.

Don’t be one of those teachers who burns out in five years. Don’t go into teaching on a lark; this is not something you back into. If you find that you are so drawn to teaching, that it’s the only job that will satisfy you, even with all the downsides, then maybe you were born to be a teacher. Maybe it’s the career for you. But hopefully you’ll go into it with your eyes open, and not be surprised by harsh reality.

 

Posted in teaching | 5 Comments

Google’s Anonymity Fail

Posted on August 3, 2011 by José Iriarte

If you’ve been following the nerdverse’s ongoing conversation about Google+, you probably know of the debate over their “real name” policy. Basically, Google wants you to have one account, and for that account to be recognizably you. So you OSC fans can’t call yourselves Locke or Demosthenes and start rabble rousing or anything like that; you’ll have to rouse the rabble under your own name.

A writer I admire a great deal (who writes under a pen name) posted a link to my name is me, an online group advocating for social networking sites to adopt a policy allowing people to develop their online presence anonymously or pseudonymously if they wish. They’re collecting stories from some of the people who have made the choice to be outspoken and yet private, and if you go browse their stories, you’ll find it’s time well spent. Although my name is [currently] on the banner of this blog, I have been close to situations where people needed to make things public while protecting their identities, and I may someday (for entirely different) reasons, choose to publish under a pen name. I’m not well known enough for my testimonial to have much value on their site, though, so I figured I’d post about the issue here instead.

This is a surprising hill for Google to choose to die on. It shows a pretty thorough misunderstanding of who the early adopters who have chosen to stake out some ground on their platform are. Right now most of the people I know who have jumped onboard with Google+ are specifically people who are unhappy with Facebook’s cavalier disregard for personal privacy. So while most people out there won’t care about this policy, and some will openly applaud it, the folks who have given Google+ its first legs are the very folks who will find it most offensive. (Also, shutting down William F. Shatner’s profile because you can’t believe it’s really him just makes you look stupid.)

The smartest policy for Google to adopt would be Twitter’s: have whatever name you choose, as long as the name is not abusive and as long as you’re not impersonating anybody.

But mostly I don’t care what Google+ does. On their site as on this one, I’m already going by the name everybody already calls me. What I’m more interested in addressing is the growing trend I see to make a fetish out of using one’s real name online. I’ve seen this come up long before this latest discussion, on forums and such, with people who prefer to use their real name making a big deal out of it, as if somehow they’re more trustworthy. And in some cases, I’m surprised by the people who would choose to take this stance.

Because in the really important things, doing away with anonymity is the tool of the powerful.

Photo by Saïvann (Possibly not his real name.)

If you believe everybody has equal freedom of speech in this country, you’re mistaken. Because even if you’re free from legal prosecution for what you say, speech has consequences, and those consequences are more easily borne by people with more resources. And conversely, those consequences are often heavier for little people, when a big company wants to play hardball.†

Teachers often find themselves in that situation. When you’re a teacher, often there is but a single legitimate employer in your county. Leaving an abusive work situation isn’t so easy when the alternative is to drive an hour or more every day or chuck your seniority out the window for a new career. There are other legitimate reasons for teachers to value their ability to speak out anonymously, though. What if I decided I wanted to start publishing erotica? What if it was gay or fetish erotica? How long would I last in my Bible-belt county? What if I wanted to discuss issues I face as an Adult Survivor without scrutiny or judgment from people I know?

I’ve seen people online say that they don’t find posts written by anonymous people credible. (They only say it when the anonymous person is someone presenting an opposing viewpoint, oddly enough.) When I’ve seen it happen, the folks saying this are frequently business owners or wealthy people who don’t have to worry about the consequences of what they say. What surprises me, though, are the exceptions. People who are usually on the side of the little guy, who don’t seem to realize that the value they’re espousing here can hurt that little guy.

Privacy is important to me. People’s ability to speak out anonymously is a fundamental part of that.

† For an example of a company playing hardball, look at the RIAA lawsuits over illegal music downloads. I’m not taking a position on illegally downloading music here, but I think even people who oppose the practice can agree that the RIAA has been heavy-handed. But people have been forced to settle out of court–potentially even people who were innocent of wrongdoing–on the RIAA’s terms because the RIAA can more easily afford a lawsuit than you or I can. Or look at the harassment that critics of Scientology have experienced. This imbalance of power is what I’m talking about here.

Posted in tech geek | 2 Comments

Literary Language or Stock Clichés?

Posted on August 2, 2011 by José Iriarte

A few days ago one of my friends linked to this article via Google+. I think it’s an interesting article, and, at the very least, it’s a good warning to writers to stay away from stock clichés. I searched through Vanishing Act, the novel I’m currently revising, and was pleased to see I don’t use “bolted upright” or any equivalent form anywhere in the manuscript. I do have one instance of a character “drawing” his breath, though, and a large count of other breath-related phrases (usually the protagonist holding his breath until a danger passes).

I know that I have a bunch of other personal clichés, though, and I wrote about my use of Control-F to mitigate the tendency in my old blog. I use software that essentially creates my own mini “corpus,” looking for those “collocations” in my own writing–though these terms are new to me. [If you’re curious, I subscribe to autocrit.com, a service that has proven extremely valuable in helping me polish my writing.]

The article itself, however, suggests a conclusion that I find questionable:

We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were used in prose,” Bridgman wrote, “in the 20th century the vernacular had virtually become standard.” Thanks to such pioneers as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the story goes, ornate classicism was replaced by a straight-talking vox populi.

Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman’s theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?

Zimmer answers his own question in the article’s last paragraph:

While Twain, Hemingway and the rest of the vernacularizers may have introduced more “natural” or “authentic” styles of writing, literature did not suddenly become unliterary simply because the prose was no longer so high-flying. Rather, the textual hints of literariness continue to wash over us unannounced, even as a new kind of brainpower, the computational kind, can help identify exactly what those hints are and how they function.

It’s not clear if the thesis here is Davies’s as well, or Zimmer’s alone. In any case, I don’t have the academic credentials to match wits with either of these guys. But I am a fiction writer, and neither of these folks seems to be, based on their Wikipedia articles. As a writer, I look at the data and reach a different conclusion.

Image courtesy of Vadlo.com

One of the things that surprised me, as I was on the steepest part of my learning curve, was realizing that it was not, in fact, possible to express everything in words. Sometimes I’d be struggling to get a scene on the page–I could visualize the situation in glorious clairvoyant Technicolor, with every possible nuance and subtlety one could hope for, and yet find myself struggling to find the right words. Now heck, I have a larger than average vocabulary; that wasn’t the source of my difficulties. So I’d tell myself, Just write the damn words. You know what happens; you know a bunch of words. Go do it!

Yeah, not quite so easy, as it turns out. And I’d ask other folks, to see if maybe my vocabulary really was what was lacking. I’d gesture a certain way or do something with my face and ask, “How would you describe this action?” And none of us would be able to come up with something that would accurately convey the action to a third party that wasn’t present to see the original. We could get awkwardly specific, and kill the scene, but even if we did it wouldn’t convey what we wanted it to. (You’re free to assume that’s all lack of skill on our part, but I suspect more successful authors will back me on this one.)

So while there are countless things you can see or visualize, we writers have a much more limited selection of actions that we can express with little ambiguity. A character can roll her eyes, or raise an eyebrow. She can run her fingers through her hair, or scratch, or rub her chin. She can bite her lip, or knit her brows. (And several of those are troublesome because they’ll get flagged as clichés or as goofy metaphors, a lá “her eyes flashed,” or “her eyes fell.” I maintain that you can’t write teenagers who don’t roll their eyes, though. There ain’t no such thing.)

And yes, we’re encouraged in this era to show and not tell. This is another oft-repeated expression that took me years to really get–assuming, of course, that I really get it now. As noted in the article, the modern sensibility frowns on stating that a character is angry or sad or what have you, so instead we learn to use these expressions as a kind of shorthand for the emotions these actions often signify. (We do have other options, of course. In tight third person you can go ahead and give the POV character’s thoughts to show how she feels. But if you’re in tight, limited third, you still need to use more subtle cues if you want to hint at the emotions of non-POV characters.)

Zimmer notes this in the article:

When we see a character in contemporary fiction “bolt upright” or “draw a breath,” we join in this silent game, picking up the subtle cues . . . The game works best when the writer’s idiomatic English does not scream “This is a novel!” but instead provides a kind of comfortable linguistic furniture to settle into as we read a novel or short story.

I don’t disagree with that (at least not with my ellipses safely in place). Nor do I disagree with the analysis in the discussion of authors’ literary tics, such as Dan Brown’s apparent eyebrow obsession. (Fantasy fans would add Jordan’s hair-tugging. 🙂 )

What I’m inclined to disagree with is the notion that these tics are qualitatively the same as the nineteenth century un-vernacular, un-colloquial style noted by Bridgman in the article’s opening quote. Mark Twain undoubtedly had his own verbal tics, but if we contrast his style with that of, say, Edith Wharton I think we can see the distinction Bridgman was driving at. The existence of clichés, both personal and popular, doesn’t diminish that distinction.

And I don’t think that a phrase having a greater frequency of use in fiction than it does in other types of writing makes it, ipso facto, “unvernacular.” This presupposes that nonfiction writing is the vernacular. I would argue, instead, that a nonfiction writer is going to have little need to refer to anybody bolting anywhere, or to focus on inhaling or on eyebrows.

Actually, now I’ll switch hats for a moment and approach this like a math teacher. You can’t draw a valid conclusion from a single data point. The article links to Davies’s Corpus of Contemporary American English, but he also has a Corpus of Historical American English. Assuming we grant for the moment that nonfiction writing is equivalent to the vernacular, has a similar comparison been done between nineteenth century novels and nineteenth century nonfiction? Has any attempt been made to quantify the presence of collocations unique to fiction in both centuries, and compare the two? If one really intended to “put Bridgman’s theory to the test,” I’d think that would be a necessary comparison to make.

Posted in tech geek, writing | 3 Comments

About a Town

Posted on August 1, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik, CC BY 2.0

The town I live in has gotten a fair amount of notoriety over the years. It’s had more than its share of articles and even books written about it–even a disparaging song by one clever rock band–and lots of people who’ve never visited feel entitled to an expert opinion on what it’s like to live here, and on what kind of people would choose to. Living here has given me a good education how even people who claim to be educated really just repeat uncritically the talking points they read somewhere. Something I’m doubtless guilty of myself in a different context. I should try to keep it in mind when I feel certain I know what’s going on with the budget crisis, or why one particular party does the things it does.

I live in Celebration, Florida, a town originally designed and built by Disney. For some reason, as soon as people find this out about me, most people feel perfectly free to share all the disparaging stereotypes they’ve heard. I suppose it’s all they’ve got, and their only entry point into anything resembling a conversation. Just yesterday a total stranger on Google+ asked me how I could live there, made a Stepford Wives reference, and called it creepy. At WorldCon one year, a fat mustachioed woman in a Starfleet uniform mocked me when she noted the town listed on my badge. At Disneyland–Disneyland!–a cast member shared with us her expert knowledge about our town and its “cookie-cutter” homes.

If you are also an expert who has never spent a day in my town, but has read a couple articles online, then maybe I should dispel a few myths before I go further:

  • Celebration is not a gated community. I see the phrase “gated community” used as almost a throwaway descriptive all the time, but it’s simply not.
  • Celebration is not owned or run by Disney. Disney did not build the houses, either. Disney owned the land and developed a “master plan” for the community–as in, where the roads would be laid, where parks would be, that sort of thing. Like any developer of any subdivision would do. For a few years, Disney was the landlord for the downtown commercial area, but they sold off that interest nearly a decade ago. Disney does have a few office buildings on the periphery of town, but that’s the extent of their presence here.
  • Celebration is technically more of a subdivision than a town. It has a “town-like” atmosphere, in that there is a downtown area and a strong civic sense, and there are many people who want to incorporate, but so far it hasn’t happened.
  • Celebration has an HOA, it’s true. I’m not crazy about HOA’s–in fact, I’m opposed to them on philosophical grounds. But Celebration is not unique in having one. I don’t know about where you live, but in my experience in Florida, any suburban subdivision built in the last twenty to thirty years has one. If you want to avoid having one in Florida, your only choices are to build your own house on your own land in the country somewhere, or to buy a much older house. Celebration’s HOA, however, is no more onerous than any other HOA I’ve encountered. Nobody’s policing the color of your curtains, which is one of the things I’ve actually learned about my town only online.
  • There are many, many communities in Central Florida filled with “cookie-cutter” homes, but Celebration is not one of them. Homes in Celebration were built by more than a half-dozen different builders, each with their own models. If all the buyers had hired architects to design their homes individually, we’d have more diversity than we do, sure. But for a subdivision, which again, is what this is, we actually have far more diversity than is typical.
  • Disney does not pay actors to walk dogs around town, pretending to be residents. Yes, this actually something I’ve read about my town online.
  • People who live in Celebration do, contrary to published information about us, actually own books. In fact, we have more than our share of published authors living in town.
  • People who live in Celebration are not delusional Disneyphiles who believe they’ve moved into Main Street USA, and who think they’re free from “real-world” problems. In fact, I’d say a substantial fraction of the people who live here actively dislike Disney, but knew a good real-estate investment when they saw one.
  • People who live in Celebration are generally less conformist than other people I’ve encountered. It takes a certain off-beat sensibility to overlook this town’s Disney roots, and to knowingly sign up for the condescension you will receive from all quarters when you live here.

Celebration was not Disney’s first foray into real estate. Back in the eighties, Disney was part owner of the development company Arvida, who built many attractive middle- to upper-middle-class subdivisions throughout Florida. I’ve not seen any of the mockery that Celebration gets directed at people who bought homes in Arvida developments; I suppose it’s because the Disney connection is less conspicuous there, and internet experts are more about superficial appearances than they are about facts.

Photo by Wellington Corp, CC BY-SA 2.0

The biggest difference I see between Celebration and the Arvida developments is that Celebration was designed to look and feel like a town. It’s not just a bunch of houses and a community center or two, but rather it has a “downtown” area. Celebration was built roughly according to New Urbanist ideals–“roughly” as in it fails to live up to those ideals on a few fronts. In this day and age when so many intellectuals decry the sprawl of suburban living, New Urbanism is an attempt to reverse the trend. New Urbanist principles are all about designing a town around pedestrians instead of around cars: the bulk of a home’s frontage is not taken up by a garage, homes are close together and feature porches to encourage socializing with your neighbors, all streets have sidewalks, all homes are [arguably] within walking distance of downtown, parking areas downtown are in the middle of the block, with businesses directly on the street instead of isolated by acres and acres of parking lots.

Celebration is not the first New Urbanist town–not even the first one in Florida.

When somebody mocks Celebration to me, they almost invariably make one of two comparisons. Always! If it’s a man, he’ll reference Pleasantville. If it’s a woman, she’ll reference Stepford Wives. Always! The implication, I guess, is that we Celebration residents are all in lockstep conformity, and that the key virtue in our town is phoniness. Of course, you’re so much more of a nonconformist when you make the exact same snide reference that everybody else makes–a comparison that you first read on a website somewhere.

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik, CC BY 2.0People who move to this town aren’t trying to fake anything. Are we trying to “create” a life? Well let me ask you: who the heck isn’t? When you consider buying a house anywhere, don’t you try to imagine yourself living there, and don’t you try to imagine yourself making the time for all sorts of things you maybe haven’t had time for before? Oh hey, a breakfast nook. I can just see myself sitting down for a real breakfast every day instead of a pop-tart and a coffee. With a space like this, I’ll want to make time. I’ll fill this other room with workout equipment, so I can finally get in shape. Ooh, that recreation area is lovely; I’ll come swim in the pool every week!

The thing that sets Celebration residents apart is that most people here, when visualizing the kind of life they want to live, rank community high on the list of things they’re looking for. People who move here want to know their neighbors; they want to be active in the town. They want to stroll downtown, eat in an outdoor cafe, and then sit by the lake and shoot the breeze with whoever wanders by. Some people actually live that way more than others, just like some people will use their home workout equipment more than others, but that’s the big difference between those creepy weirdos in Celebration and folks elsewhere–wanting to build a community.

It’s not a perfect place. We have crime, dysfunctional families, nosy people, and people who are just plain jerks. Just like every other place does. It’s also not for everybody, and that’s cool.

As for anything else you may think you know . . . well, there’s a word for people who judge folks they don’t know, repeating stereotypes they’ve heard elsewhere, without bothering to find out if their assumptions are true.

Posted in rants | 5 Comments

Way more competitive than YOU are

Posted on July 29, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo by Stephen Hyun

It took me five or six years to figure out that other couples don’t play games the way my wife and I do. We’ve got a massive collection of pretty much every game either of us has ever owned, and when we get together with another couple, reaching for one of them is still one of our favorite things to do. But over the years we’ve noticed that with some of our friends, one partner will like to play games and the other won’t. Sometimes we’ve noticed something even weirder:

Couples that play nice.

We don’t play nice. We’re nice to each other, mind you, in the sense of not (generally) being disrespectful or anything like that. And we’re not making strategically poor choices just to mess each other up or anything like that.

But we each play to win. If one of us is on a winning streak of several games, we don’t hold back to spare the other’s feelings. If you want to feel better about yourself, play better. We don’t hold back when we play with the kids either. We might play with a handicap, but then we still do our damnedest to win. If you beat either of us at anything, you know you really beat us.

I think both of us figure that to give anything less than your best in a friendly competition is to disrespect the other. My wife’s better than I am at Scrabble, but I win my fair share of games. Those wins would feel empty if I thought she was holding back.

What was that notion that got all the buzz in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers a couple years ago? To become world class at something, you need to put in the time, with 10,000 hours or more of practice. But specifically you need focused practice, geared toward getting better. I’ve gotten better at Scrabble since I’ve known Lisa, because nothing less than my best is enough for me to win a game.

It applies to writing, too. We’ve both harbored dreams of becoming published writers for years, but one of the things that has kept us motivated is each of us seeing the other chasing that dream. How many words are you up to? You’ve got fifty thousand now? Crap. Guess I better get the laptop out.

There are tons of blog posts out there on how very destructive it is as a writer to be competitive, to be looking at what kind of deal someone else got, or how someone else’s book is selling. And I don’t disagree that there’s a lot of truth in that sentiment. But I think there’s good competitive and there’s bad competitive.

And there’s being a sore loser, which is an entirely different thing.

I’m not a big fan of that T-shirt that says “Second place is the first loser.” It’s a cute phrase, but ultimately it’s a destructive sentiment. Trying to win doesn’t preclude being gracious in defeat as in victory, and winning is not so important that it’s worth achieving at the cost of being dishonest–or rather, winning dishonestly is not actually winning at all.

I guess good competitive is when seeing what someone else can achieve makes you aware of what it’s possible to achieve, and makes you try harder to get better.

Posted in assorted nerdom, writing | 6 Comments

7th Sigma

Posted on July 29, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo shamelessly stolen from eatourbrains.com/steve

Steven Gould has long been one of my favorite writers, with Jumper and Helm in particular being books of his I’ve loved enough to reread. As a matter of fact, I haven’t made much of a secret of the fact that Vanishing Act draws inspiration from Jumper.

As much as I didn’t care for the movie adaptation of Jumper, I was grateful that it paved the way for more novels from Gould. This month, Tor released 7th Sigma, his first book not tied to the Jumper series in more than a decade–unless I’ve missed one somehow.

7th Sigma is a retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (which I haven’t read). I suspect this is why it felt to me like a more old-fashioned kind of story. I know I’ve read stories like this before–in which we see a character’s development from childhood until he comes into his own, as more of a series of episodes than a story arc. The arc is present, but it’s really the character arc. There isn’t one antagonist or one tangible goal that runs from the beginning of the novel to the end. Think of this as something that could have easily been published serially. More than anything else, it reminded me of Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.

The SFnal premise of 7th Sigma is–to me, anyway–ridiculously cool and different. Self-replicating robotic bugs that will bore through almost anything to consume metal have settled into the American Southwest, throwing the region into a technological state reminiscent of the wild west–except with all kinds of cool ceramic, epoxy, or composite high-tech gizmos–while life goes on more or less as usual in the rest of the world. Many pioneering types have decided to brave the region instead of moving out, including our protagonist, Kimble.

Kimble is a fun character, because even at the beginning, when he’s just a youngster, you can see that he’s got lightning reflexes and a fundamentally good nature. As he matures, he takes on progressively eviler (Firefox says that’s a real word; well I’ll be!) villains without losing his humble charm. The relationship between him and Ruth, his sensei, is a poignant one. I love how Gould tells the story in tight third and yet manages to make us aware of how attached Ruth has gotten while Kimble manages to miss all the signs.

As always, Gould’s prose is compulsively engaging, making this book hard to put down.

I’m not sure why this novel isn’t marketed more toward teens, beyond the fact that Gould already has an established following of older readers. Folks of any age who like near-future, Earth-based science fiction will like it, but with a young protagonist, I think it has a lot of teen appeal as well.

I kind of suspect we’re about to see Gould become a whole lot more prolific, and I’m looking forward to lots of new books from him.

 

Posted in books you might enjoy | 2 Comments

I’m Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader, But I Want To Be a Millionaire

Posted on July 28, 2011 by José Iriarte

If you ever got the chance to visit the tragically defunct Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: Play It! attraction at either Disney MGM Studios or Disney’s California Adventure, then you probably recognize what’s in the picture. The fact that I own it should tell you how much I am (or have been, anyway) into this game show.

Enough to want souvenirs†.

From 2001 until 2006, my wife and I returned to the park attraction every single month–as soon as our thirty day eligibility blackout lifted–and took our best shot at getting to the million point question and answering it correctly. Over the years, we won close to a thousand Disney pins (that’s not hyperbole, actually), about five dozen hats, maybe fifty polo shirts, around a dozen Star Wars collectibles, one pewter Tie-Fighter, a leather jacket, a medallion, and, oh yeah, a couple cruises on the Disney Cruise Line. We even went out to California a couple times and competed in the attraction there. I was the second to last person to ever get to the million point question there, and if I’d gotten it right, I would have been their last winner ever. In Florida, I was one of the last two or three winners before the attraction shut down.

You can find community in the oddest places. Out in California, all the “regulars” knew each other. When Lisa and I went out for the closing of the attraction, we were welcomed by people we’d never met as though we were distant relations. They took us around the California parks and showed us the ins and outs, and we swapped stories and boasts about the game. We didn’t feel like there was the same community in Florida, and yet when our attraction shut down and folks came in to be there for those last few shows, we were surprised to see just how many of the regulars we had come to know over the years.

Weird, huh?

We tried to get on the real show too. Back when Regis Philbin was hosting, we called their phone audition line whenever it was open, and then risked keeping our cell phones on at school the next day. When the Meredith Vieira show filmed at Disney World, we showed up at the park at ridiculous o’clock hoping to be chosen to play. One year I made it into the contestant pool that way and was basically sequestered for a full day, attending taping after taping and hoping (futilely, alas) to hear my name called to be the next contestant. We’ve traveled to audition for the show in New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Tampa.

The way the audition process works now is you take a thirty question test–in ten minutes–and if you pass the secret undisclosed cutoff of 27 correct answers they pull you aside and interview you. Then you find out, via postcard, if you’ve been placed in the contestant pool for the season or not. Once you’re in the pool, you may or may not actually be selected to appear. I’ve repeatedly passed the multiple choice test, only to get the postcard telling me I’m not in the contestant pool. The only message I can take away from that is that I’m smart enough to be on the show, but apparently I’m not interesting enough. 🙁

I’m not sure what it is about this show that has captured Lisa’s and my interest. Why not Jeopardy or some other quiz show? I think the appeal is in how attainable it seems. (I’m talking about the original rules here.) In Jeopardy the questions are harder, on average, and, unless you’re Ken Jennings, your potential for winning seems lower. On Millionaire you just have fifteen questions, nobody competing against you, and at the beginning of the game they’re ridiculously easy. The attainability is deceptive, of course, because on Jeopardy answering one question wrong doesn’t boot you off the show, but it just seems easier to dream about big money with Millionaire. As for Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, last I checked they don’t use a test at all. So they don’t actually care whether you have any brains at all, just how entertaining they find you.

If you’re wondering why I’m going on about this now, it’s because today* the Millionaire crew was in Tampa for another round of road auditions. I was a lot less enthusiastic about this audition than I have been in past years, to tell you the truth. Repeatedly not making the guest pool will do that to a guy. The point was moot, though, because I got killed on the test. Surprisingly enough, I don’t know everything.

Some things I didn’t know:

  • Which game’s championship offers a prize of $20,580? (Totally should’ve known this one.)
  • What was the original flavor of Pez?
  • Michelle Obama was the first First Lady to plant a vegetable garden since whom?
  • What kind of background does a Burberry bag have? (Another one I should have gotten. I got thrown by one of the distractor answers.)
  • What common English word is also the German word for an exclusive high school?

† No, it’s not stolen.

Posted in assorted nerdom | 3 Comments