Last week was a modified writers workshop: Complete your outline, get it approved by a teacher, then use it to write a paragraph. Traditionally a writers workshop is a more free-form affair, but we have a stricter curriculum this year. The task is so targeted that they call it a Target Task. On Day 2, I sat down with a few kids one-on-one, but I spent more of the time fielding questions from anxious sixth graders. Anxiety was high and the questions came fast and furious. Mr. Tobin? Mr. Tobin? Okay, who’s Mr. Tobining me now?
I try to teach them to wait their turn, but most kids who see me in conversation and just walk up to the side and start talking. Writing is chaotic. I walk around and hear kids calling me, asking for guidance. Most questions are easily solved. I’m stuck or I don’t know how to start. I used to point to the sign with the Robert Frost quote, “The best way out is always through.” Now I have them tell me the answer, which they often know, and just say to write that. Sometimes I refer them back to the book. A thousand decisions.
Teaching writing is hard when everyone writes at a different pace, but that’s the challenge of the heterogenous classroom in general. I love working with kids individually, it’s the purest teaching there is, and you can make great strides, build relationship. But I feel like I’m at my best going a mile wide and an inch deep, fielding the questions that come nonstop. I love letting the sixth graders Mr. Tobin the daylights out of me.
And another thing
Fifteen years ago, I heard tales of concessions that sent my imagination afire: Fried Twinkies! Fried Oreos! I could not conceive of such delights, and it became a mainstay of my small-talk Didjaknows for a while. A decade and a half later, we hit the Topsfield Fair and I achieved a bucket list item (or two if you count the fair). As seen above, four Oreos on a stick are covered it in fried dough batter, infused with oil. The cookie gets soft and I understood why people who eat them are nonplussed. It was fine.
The fair as a whole was fantastic. I saw multiple 2000+ pound pumpkins, a dwarf goat judging, cows of many colors, and the Awesome Wife won herself a big stuffed dog that people assumed I’d attained. Nope! Sassafrass (named for a cow in another tent) was all her doing. That dog will always make me think of the long-anticipated fried Oreo mediocrity.
The Urban Blah
Back in 2009-11 I collaborated with the brilliant Vee to make a webcomic that failed to become syndicated across the globe. I am pro-recycling.
Based on a true story, from an exchange over email, minus the Onion’s snappy self-deprecating closer. I think Orlando is missing an opportunity, though. Like, their mascot could be a woman who’s been cut in half, David Blaine could do the half-time show, players could trash-talk opposing teams as “a bunch of muggles.” Let’s make the Magic magic!
Also, Vee has a substack, you should subscribe!
Jam of the Week
Carsick Cars is my all-time favorite Chinese indie rock band. Also my least favorite because I know one. But their 2007 debut album is allegedly a milestone in Chinese indie rock, and I can report that it’s a lot of fun. Every song is a shoegaze anthem, lo-fi guitar rock noisy pop, my favorite. “Zhong Non Hai” is a burner.
Also, my friend, band-mate, and home room co-advisor for the past five years Jamal Fairbanks dropped an EP, available on Spotify, Apple Music, and in this spiffy music video. Check it oot! [sic]
My Back Pages
I’ve done four summer institutes with the Boston Writing Project, and it’s given me treasures like Writing into the Day, five minutes of writing to start class. For year’s it’s been the most popular part of my English class, and it’s so thoroughly BWP that a recent memorial service for one of the org’s lions began with attendees writing into the day. There we had a topic, but my first summer institute was the same as my sixth grade classroom: Write about anything! From my own Writing into the day during a fall followup meeting, Oct 4, 2014:
It seemed so much easier over the summer, deciding what about writing I was going to bring to my classroom… But now that I’m on the ground, with real live actual kids in front of me, with habits and skills and ed plans, now that I’m working toward developing our paragraphs showing our understanding of the elements of fiction, now I don’t quite know what to do with the writing process. Now I’m a little stumped how to go about it. Katie said that what I’m talking about is effecting a change in mindset, and that’s major! Sixth graders are malleable. But can I be the one to shape them?
Given how prescribed my current curriculum is, it’s crazy to think that when I was first hired it was, Here, go teach sixth grade, let us know how it turns out. It used to be a different job.
Why am I the only one on a computer? What happened, the school year started so we’re all pen and notebook? I continue to think better with a keyboard in front of me. Handwriting is too slow, thumbing on my phone too clumsy. The brilliance just comes POURING OUT OF ME SO FAST, twiddling my fingers is the closest I can come to capturing the RAW STREAM OF INCREDIBLE BRILLIANCE that issues forth. I’ve tried dictating it to Siri, but I like seeing the words too much. I like viewing them, picturing them, thinking about them.
I’ve come around on voice typing, especially when the alternative is my idiot thumbs. . I ruminated on re-learning that my writing is better written down then out loud. And I let my arrogance to some bad places.
That was a big part of my problem in Hollywood – I was convinced that I was smarter and a better writer than most people I met.
Sure, [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] were joke monsters, and [REDACTED] clearly had skills. I met a lot of good joke folk, and a few who could put words together. But I always believed that I had an advantage over them. I was better. I had a degree in English from Tufts, I had a background in journalism, I was striving for art, not just a laugh from the studio audience.
Speaking hard truths. I worked on laugh-track sitcoms because it was the best available job, not because I maintained a love of them post-Sam Malone.
I had no respect for the art form. I always thought it was junk, beneath me, just a tool to let me rise above it and ascend to the magical Hollywood heights I knew were within reach if someone would just give me the chance. Think of all the amazing stuff I’ll write one day! All the great stuff I know I’m going to eventually write – not now, but someday, later, After.
After what? After after. It was the same story as always.
Never really understanding that writers write. And that if you have a story to tell, you tell it. And if you don’t, and you just are good at putting some words together, then you need someone else to tell you what to write. And sometimes that would happen in journalism, but half of that is about finding the story. Look at Meaghan — sure, she’s great at putting the words together, but people want to read her stuff because it’s about ziplining pigs and potatoes up your hoo-hah.
The Awesome Wife was not excited about this framing of her decades lifestyle journalism writing, and she makes a good point. But the joke! She thougt those “examples” were twisted from actual events — a chance to zipline at a pig farm, or a yam-based body scrub. Yeah, sorry about that. It was meant to be jokes I left for myself. Like when I log onto Verizon and it says, Welcome, King Hippo.