Yes, Virginia, It is Rocket Science

Doris makes teaching look so easy, doesn't she?

Those of you who follow my blog know I write YA fiction, but you may not also know that I'm a former high school and middle school teacher (15 years), an online instructor, and a teacher trainer. That my other consuming passion is writing lessons for teachers and talking shop with them. I've authored, co-authored, or contributed to four different works on the art of lesson design.

• Teaching Julius Caesar: A Differentiated Approach (NCTE) (30 free pages available to check out)
• Teaching Romeo and Juliet: A Differentiated Approach, with Delia DeCourcy and Robin Follet (NCTE) (more free pages!)
• Macbeth and AP History units in Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 9-12, edited by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Cindy Strickland (ASCD) 
• The Compassionate Classroom: Lessons That Nurture Wisdom and Empathy, with Jane Dalton (Zephyr Imprint, Chicago Review Press)

That's right, I said "art." And let me mix metaphors, in a major way, right now: The art of lesson design is rocket science. An excellent unit of instruction is hard to launch, you have a million variables to consider, and everyone is watching you fail.

Yet there are people who talk about teaching as if they could step in and take a teacher's job tomorrow. These are the same people who would never dare presume to talk about their lawyer, doctor, or plumber's skill with any type of knowledge or dare say, "Excuse me, I could do that!"

But let me reel myself in here: this post is not a rant against those who have done seat time in a classroom, apparently suffered, and then look down their noses the rest of their lives at the teaching profession.

Though I do believe it would be a lot of fun to see those folks take on a full day of teaching and see where they are by 3:00 PM. I'd like to be there to tell them to, "Peel yourself off the floor; keep going. Your day has just begun. You have parent phone calls to make; practice/club/rehearsal to run; papers to grade; meetings to attend. Nope, you're not going home yet, or if you are, please take this bag of stuff, or these gigs of digital work, and please get cracking. And just when you're most exhausted, you need to be designing cutting-edge, differentiated, 21st-century, Common Core State Standards-aligned, engaging, student-centered, blended, and flipped lessons."

If you are not a teacher, I imagine at least a few of the adjectives I used sailed over your head. Ed jargon, some call it. And that's how it should be. A profession worth respecting has a vocabulary--not unlike nanotechnology and neuroscience--cultivated from years of research, experience, and experimentation.

As I work with teachers headed into a new school year, I consider the vast array of knowledge, processes, and new mandates our educators have to juggle when designing lessons, and something in me craves a formula, a distillation of all the complexity in order for our teacher-soldiers to march onward.

So for those of you surrounded by notes, texts, computer, and other resources to plan those units of instruction, I've created a formula for lesson planning. It is not perfectly comprehensive or suited to every teacher's learning style. For example, some of the sequence may not follow the way your brain thinks, but try to take each step as a crucial task and determine how you can approach each one thoroughly.

1. Select a complex text with colleagues.
2. Identify concepts, or Big Ideas.
3. Create Essential Questions, global and local, to be used in every assignment.
4. Select 10 scenes or chapters of the complex text.
5. Identify CCSS goals and subskills, finding at least three readiness levels (ELL or novice, on-target/grade level, and advanced/gifted).
6. Identify "how to read" skills, strategies for independent reading.
7. Develop assessments, formative and summative, with rubrics. 
8. Develop lesson activities.

This may seem like a quick and simple formula to outsiders, but there's lots of knowledge and expectations and standards buried in these. I could do a full-day workshop on each step--and we could spend a whole year perfecting the art of each step in our classrooms.

For those of you who don't teach, please take a moment to take in these steps and appreciate the hard work teachers do to prep one three-week unit of study. For those of you who do teach, you do so much with so little time and resources, and I applaud you. Enjoy this adventure of launching great ideas, thinking, and explorations with our students this year. 

Stay tuned for future blogs with writing prompts for you and your students at the end of each post. And check out the last 4 years of posts; there's probably a concept, a whole set of journal prompts, that might suit a unit you're teaching now. 

What Do You Give Up for Writing?

I know what I gave up for teaching.

Image found here

When I graduated college and chose a teacher education program, it was pretty clear I wasn't headed for prestige. I hadn't chosen management consulting, engineering, medicine, or Microsoft like my classmates. (Not that I wanted those careers or could do them, but kids asked me years later why I went to such a good school and became a teacher. I looked at them and said, "You're not worth it?")

For 14 years I gave up countless Sundays to grade papers and dignity to don wacky costumes or hang from a zip line. And money. It's not just the small salary but the money I paid over the years for classroom supplies, books, pizza, props, and sets. My kids needed stuff and they sure as heck were gonna have it.

I don't need to tell you what I got back. If you know a teacher who loves her job, you know the joy, inspiration, and meaning she gets from her students and her work.

Now I write every day and I make different kinds of sacrifices that don't always make sense to others. Do you make the same kinds of choices?

• I give up time with friends and family. Are you screening? Yes. Actually, it's more like, Are you listening for the phone? Not at all. I can't look at the caller ID and not talk to people I love. So I have to go into The Cave, as author Anita Agers-Brooks calls it. People you love come to respect The Cave.
• I give up exercise. The derriere spreads and the midsection sprawls. But the word count grows. 
• I give up fun. Writing takes energy and time that could be spent at the theater, the movies, the art museum, the swing dance--all the things I used to do in spades. I need to find a way to bring these interests back into my life, but if you have two jobs like I do, it is what it is. And I don't think Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and L.M. Montgomery (my writing heroes since childhood) bemoaned the fact they couldn't catch the latest feature film and said, "Woe is me, I gotta write." I do love it, and thank God for Netflix and Showtime in the meantime!
• I give up worrying about the day job. Teachers do not have this luxury; I didn't when the kids' troubles traveled home with me. Now that I don't teach a class every day, I can focus more on writing, which takes a tremendous amount of concentration. But for all the worries I relinquish, I give up incredible moments with amazing kids. Which is why someday, I am going back. 
• I give up sleep and inner peace to write. Writing before 7 AM isn't easy. Facing demons isn't fun, and there are stories where the demons must out.  I hang in there while realizing that this kind of toughing it out is relative. 

Anything we love deeply takes sacrifice. With age and experience, I've gained clarity about what matters. Lately I've embraced some wisdom from a friend. He says we live within and between two circles:

• our Circle of Influence
• our Circle of Concern

The Circle of Influence is a tiny "location"--a spiritual, emotional, and physical place where you can get things done. You're effective, you're accomplished, you're significant. If I am centered and true to myself, then that influence is pure and meaningful. Those of us in care-taking professions, who sometimes care too deeply, need to get real and get humble: the world can march on without us.

The Circle of Concern is a much larger ring, where we remain concerned for our fellow man whom we can't affect. But we can still empathize, sympathize, pray, hope, wish. We may try to lift a finger for those in the Circle of Concern, but we often can't get things done. The way gets blocked because the Universe is saying, "Um, not your job. Back off." 

It's been a lifelong journey to this point where I can say that writing and a small group of folks belong to my Circle of Influence. No, I'm not a very good friend to acquaintances many days. I'm not always the greatest coworker or citizen. I won't win any awards for activism or sainthood. But I hope I send good vibes, as much as possible, to those people in the Circle of Concern.

My friend says there's another circle, a ring beyond of deep, outer space. As he told me, "Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern. Outside of that we'll call, Who Gives a S#@*."

Today, what must you give up so you can give a s#@* about your writing? Isn't that your Circle of Influence? 

Toughing It Out

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 115,027.
Page Count for the Novel: 414 pages. (No changes since last post.)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

-- Douglas Adams

So I just met a major deadline. Yesterday I struggled toward that finish line, 12 hours spent in last efforts to edit a manuscript, the culmination of months of work. I felt so deeply for poor, dedicated me, slogging through the fields of footnotes and the no man’s land of Works Cited. I was such a trooper, soldiering on. I slaved.

Then I looked up the definition of deadline.

It was the name of a fence no prisoner would scale unless he wanted to be shot, that man being a prisoner taken by the Confederacy and kept at Andersonville prison during our Civil War. You would think a light pine fence would be no match for thousands of prisoners, but there were posted sentries ready to shoot any man who broke through. When this stockade famous for introducing “deadline” to our language swelled to 32,000 prisoners, far beyond what the acreage could contain, the story goes that the deadline became a simple white line. That and some guns kept the malnourished men in place, racked by disease and weakened by exposure. By the war’s end, nearly 13,000 men had perished.

Except for my ancestor, John Fairbairn. A Scottish immigrant appalled by the slavery he saw in Georgia, he volunteered for the Union Army. He was captured in Memphis and shipped off to Andersonville, landing right after overcrowding hit its peak. He emerged at the war’s end a mere 98 pounds. He had lost all his teeth. Yet he had the wisdom to make it a slow recovery, refraining from the gorging that killed many of his fellow inmates after release. He had the gumption and hope to become a brick layer and a stone mason, to take a soldier’s homestead, and to get married. He raised six children. Thanks to him, my great-grandfather was born. This is a man who persisted well beyond and despite deadlines.

And I thought I suffered so when it came to those…well…dates on the calendar.

It’s not about whether I make the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award deadline (I didn’t) or the NCTE deadline for Teaching Julius Caesar (I did). I am not the sum total of those accomplishments, no matter how much I define myself by them. And I am certainly no martyr for the cause. All that matters after I choose such challenges is whether I walk with gratitude through all the comforts and conveniences of my modern day -- into that hot shower, toward that sofa to watch the Super Bowl, along with family and friends who, like me, haven’t known hunger. That was the aftermath of my deadline. John Fairbairn’s life was about surviving a prison that became a concentration camp, and then about keeping the hope and faith to build a new life. I can look back to him and say, as Marc Antony does of Brutus, “This was a man!”

In his Inaugural Address, President Obama told us that “…our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America…For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.”

In the spirit of my ancestor who knew the value of tenacity, hard work, and a dollar, I vow an end to begrudging or bemoaning these deadlines. They are a fact of life, and I should be so lucky that the only kind that threaten me are numerical, calendar sort. In the spirit of my grandparents who struggled to feed a large family after the crash of ’29 and who rationed stockings and butter and anything that would support the war…in the spirit of all those ancestors with gumption, a word the Scots coined as a way of calling out courage, spunk, and guts…. I will get a perspective, a clue, and a clean attitude about just how hard my life is. If I were to listen to the 24-hour news cycle, I might otherwise think I’m at death’s door.

Nope. Just nearing a deadline is all, one of those lines we all have to cross, and not even one written in dirt. Just a phantom fence of this modern life I’m breezing through, carried on a gentle wind I only hope my ancestors sometimes felt.

Much love and thanks to my father, Stephen Fairchild, who hails from this long line of Fairbairns, call them fair-bearers of the tough tasks. He keeps our history alive.

Today's Writing Goal: Begin on page 414 and keep going. Stay under 530 pages. Send off that stopgap short story waiting in the wings.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others. © Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author. Elementary Tougher Than the RestWho do you know who is “tough”? By tough, we mean someone who is strong inside and out. They have what is called character. They can stand strong when difficulty strikes. They can pick themselves up when things are really unpleasant. For example: a person who loses their job and works hard to find another, or a person who is injured and keeps a good attitude in spite of all the pain.

Write a poem of admiration to the person who you see as a strong role model. You can spell out their name and write a name poem, one line for every letter in their name. You can list several examples of all the ways that this person shows toughness and strength. Or you can tell about one time when you saw this person show great toughness.

Thanks to My Family

Think about people in your family (and by family, it can be people you live with, friends, or any way you think of family) who have given you a lot of help in your life. Who’s been a really big help?

Maybe it was the person who taught you a sport or how to sing a song. Maybe it was the person who helped you up when you got hurt. It could be a person who made great sacrifices in order for you to have things you enjoy. Think of someone who has given a lot to you and who you appreciate.

Write an inscription for a thank you card. This should be a special thank you card, the kind you can’t find in a store. That’s because you will make this card very personal. Write the person an inscription that is one of two kinds:

A Complimentary List.

Title this card, The Top Ten Things I Like About You , and inside write your list, or

Metaphor Magic.

You are a/the _______________. Compare this person to something strong, beautiful, or impressive in nature (such as mountain, flower, sun, ocean, stars). List all the ways that this person is like this beautiful part of nature.

Telling Time

Are you usually on time? Or do you tend to run late? How do you and time get along?

Imagine that Time and you are having a conversation. Tell Time all about how easy or hard it is for you to be on time, and while you’re talking, let Time know anything else on your mind: whether you like having a clock or watch in your life, and if Time is going to change anything, you would recommend that s/he or it change ___________ first….


Secondary and Adult

A Time for Toughness
You have survived many different periods of your life. There were, as Charles Dickens writes, the best of times and the worst of times. Consider one of the worst of these moments in your history. What got you through it?

Write about the toughness in you that helped you survive it. You might not have thought yourself tough at the time, but you’re still here, aren’t you? What was the challenge, and how did you face it? Return to a moment where your toughness manifested.

Grandpa’s Gumption

Who is an ancestor you admire deeply or an older role model in your life, representing a particular kind of courage?

Define gumption as you have seen it in those you admire. Gumption – guts, spunk, courage – is the stuff of survival. Some also define it as shrewdness. Think how gumption has shown itself in those you respect.

Tell an anecdote that is one you could tell for many years and to future generations. Record a bit of history for posterity.

Deadlines and Me

What is your relationship with deadlines? Are they friend or foe? How often do you meet them?

Write a dialogue with Deadlines. Deadlines is the thing, entity, person, or whatever you wish it to be, as long as you have a conversation with it, and your only job is to have a conversation. The only rule is that Deadlines gets the last word.

Bonus Prompt: Tougher Than the Rest

Read the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest,” and if you can, listen to his singing or a cover of this song.

What kind of a character does Springsteen paint for us? What does “tough” mean in this context?

Write the lyrics of a new version of “Tougher Than the Rest.” Take the first-person point of view of someone or something that believes s/he’s tougher than the rest.