30 Monday Sep 2019
Tags
being yourself, express feelings, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, teacher, words, writing
If you’ve ever heard a student ask why they need to learn to write if they don’t plan on having a job that requires it, this opinion piece might answer that question. If you have an idea that needs conveying writing is an effective way to go.
12 Monday Aug 2019
Draft of my manuscript and notes from a meeting with my latest beta reader.
Apparently my high school superlative award is very important to me! My classmates thought I could eventually get something done so I keep a framed picture of this yearbook drawing near my desk for emotional support. I’d hate to let them down.
They should not be worried though because I don’t seem to be giving up on this project. My latest beta readers have provided feedback after I completed a major restructuring of the story this July. It took a whole year because I read three books on the craft of writing after a Simon and Schuster editor suggested I needed attention to the underlying themes. I took notes on each book then applied those notes to the manuscript, then rewrote and reworked and reconsidered. That editor was quite right and I am forever grateful to her for taking the time to comment. Now I have addressed those themes and my beta readers have noticed.
I paraphrase below what one of my recent readers said.
“You have a phenomenal resolution to the circumstances of your story, showing tremendous strength and courage as you face the dragons and giants of your life and try to connect with them. So many people would benefit from your story because it shows a person can come out of terrible circumstances and rise above them,offering hope while working towards reconciliation.”
So, for all of you high school friends out there who thought I was most likely to succeed, do not give up yet. I’m almost there.
05 Monday Aug 2019
Tags
control, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, security, teacher, words, writing
My sister’s cats sleeping together!
I recently learned of a podcast that is pretty funny and useful for settling down. It is called Sleep With Me (https://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/.) There are hundreds of episodes and it is designed to help people fall asleep by telling really boring stories. These are “bedtime stories to help grown ups fall asleep in the deep dark night.”
The one I listened to was called “Baked Beans: The Adventures of Mr. Triangle and Isosceles.” A town of math-appreciating people will see a show that they must pay for with cans of baked beans, but there is trouble when it is realized that the wagon scheduled to carry all the cans of baked beans cannot stand the load. This story, told by a man who drolls on and on, often stumbling around for words and deftly emphasizing little parts of speech that make you stop and question what you just heard, breaks all the rules of writing by never getting to the point, using mindless dialogue, reiterating points and leaning on cliches.
The other one I heard was called something like “20 Steps to Self-Skin Care” and the first ten minutes were devoted to applying one’s fingertips to the face very deliberately and specifically in order to execute a light massage he called “running through Strawberry Fields.” It’s hilarious and relaxing and soporific.
I am planning on sharing this with the students in the Creative Writing class come Fall because it really drives home the idea that good writing should not put one to sleep.
19 Monday Nov 2018
This year, as before, I attended the Hippocamp Writers Conference in Lancaster, Pa and met some wonderful authors and fellow writers. Lisa Romeo is a workshop leader whose program I was most interested in attending because she spoke about using essays and other short works to create a longer piece such as a novel or memoir. She did not disappoint as she walked us through her method of opening up and stretching out essays to insert more story and create longer and more compelling drama.
We ended up at lunch together and I told her about my job at the high school coaching students on their writing. She invited me to write a guest post for her blog, Lisa Romeo Writes, and it appears today at http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/2018/11/guest-blogger-jane-paffenbarger-butler.html.
Take a look!
31 Friday Aug 2018
This year’s creative nonfiction writer’s conference, Hippocamp 2018, in Lancaster, PA was wonderful. I was particularly delighted with two contacts I made, both offering future collaboration on projects I am thrilled about. This doesn’t even cover the many other writers I met who were fun, inspiring, and helpful, the great speakers, and finding some wonderful books for sale at the book table.
One of the notable speakers was Lisa Romeo, who gave a talk titled, “Reconstruction: Transforming Essays into a Narrative Memoir Manuscript.” I’ve attended her workshops before and always, she had plenty of very useful information to share. This year’s topic, well it is precisely what I need to know right now: how to use what I have already written to recraft the story I want to tell. After the talk I spoke with her further, then ended up at a lunch table with her later in the day. We hit it off so well that she asked me to write a guest blog post for her blog, Lisa Romeo Writes (http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/) about my job as a theme reader at the local high school. I am thrilled to tell people about the cool job I get to do as a writing coach to young people, that also supports my own interest in writing.
The second wonderful encounter I had was with Alexander Monelli who held a session titled, “Call the Doc: How Documentary Filmaking Can Help Creative Writing.” Well, I love documentaries, so sitting in a class where we discussed their structure was fascinating. It was actually a bit frustrating, though, because the instructor kept stopping the video to make a point about how the narrative was developed just as the story was most compelling! Got to watch those online to see how they end up! (https://www.monellifilms.com/) During the course of a Q&A I realized he might be the perfect person to talk to about producing a short book trailer for my memoir. My book proposal, which goes to various editors, promises that I will put a book trailer on my website once the book is published. Yikes! What was I thinking! No problem, Alex told me, he’d be willing to work with me to put it together. Yay! This story will be continued…
10 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in Being Yourself, English Class in the High School
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I am mighty frustrated today by my interactions with my Goth student friend in second period at the high school. My charge today, from the teacher I work with, was to help this gentleman get his essay accomplished since he’d missed a lot of school due to a suspension he fulfilled much of last week.
He wasn’t having it though. No, no interest in working on the essay. His preference, which is the case most days, is to sleep during class. The three adults in the room often, in turn, urge him to wake up. We hand him pens to write with, a book to read, the outline of the essay that was due last week. The other students are working independently, revising their essays, reading the next text or completing a study guide. I offer my help to them, too.
But when I suggest to my Goth student that he and I work on the essay, he says he’d rather read. I say I’d rather write. He says he’d rather read. Okay, I say, read it is. But I feel the pressure from the teacher who asked me to help him get the essay accomplished. I feel the pressure from the student who legitimately chooses to read instead. After all, the entire class is given the same choice, do one of the three tasks at hand: essay, read, study guide.
And he did read, a bit. He read and he dozed, and he read some more.
It’s never a good idea to get in a battle of wills with a student. It is his choice to fail the class. I cannot make him do anything, I can only offer my support. When class is done the teacher, the aide, and me, despite our frustration, appreciate that he did some reading today.
In the end, I gather the spirit of what is supposed to happen here and tell him that maybe tomorrow we can work on the essay together.
He says, yeah, maybe tomorrow.
11 Saturday Jan 2014
Funny thing happened today in English class. My Goth friend, who earlier this week literally needed to be woken up from a sound sleep, suddenly was acting oddly interested. I hadn’t planned on it but I told him I’d been thinking about him outside of class. I’d been talking about him to a friend, I told him, for no reason other than that he is a standout in class for having fallen asleep so often.
Now normally all I’ve ever seen of this guy is the crown of his head, and a glimpse of his pale skin glancing past his long black hair. He’s usually hunched over and usually withdrawn, and usually doesn’t talk,
I guess I felt so encouraged with him looking directly at me, in response to the revelation that I’d been thinking about him out of class, that I just kept going. I told him the whole story of my friend, the person I’d told about my sleeping Goth student. I guess I told them both about each other, actually. And I didn’t hold back. My friend, I told my student, surprised me by telling me about how he too once was an army boot and flak jacket wearing teen who was headed down the wrong path, getting arrested and doing drugs, not that I presumed to know what my Goth friend did outside of class. But this had in hindsight been a kind of reaction to the long slow painful dismantling of his family over the course of many years. Turns out his dad left the family and his mom was so deeply grief-stricken as to appear mentally ill, and it dragged out for ten years before it felt like it ended.
Checking out, getting into trouble, these were ways to carry on in the face of disaster. My friend said he landed in a foster care situation and then his father did something unusual for fathers who leave their kids, he came back and got his wayward son into boarding school. From there he made it to college and onto a path that was healthier. I told all this to my student in a long exposition I hadn’t planned, and so I laughed at how us adults, this friend of mine and me too, project our experiences and understanding onto others. How he had suggested that maybe my Goth student was like him, reacting to issues at home. I had said, who knows, maybe.
By now my Goth student was quite present with me. I wrapped up my monologue and explained about the power of words and why we bother with the writing assignment before us. About how it’s hard to let kids know the value of learning, and how to communicate through writing, but this assignment is, unfortunately, how we do it. I told him no matter how crappy life is or what you do or do not have, communicating with words can get you all kinds of chances – jobs, college entrance, scholarships, girls, apologies, everything. So let’s humor the system, I proposed, and work on this essay together.
That’s when all of a sudden, he started talking, stringing whole sentences together, and looking right at me.
15 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in English Class in the High School
Yesterday in writing class, eleventh grade AP level that is, the students got distracted after a TED talk we watched of Malcolm Gladwell discussing happiness and spaghetti sauce, by the animated scene of a wrecking ball smashing in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. The spaghetti sauce talk was engaging, but this other scene was pretty cool too. Our teacher, who was beginning a discussion on the arguments Gladwell uses to make his point, didn’t realize he’d left the computer on and that what amounted to commercials were running after the TED talk. The kids were too interested in the wrecking ball scene to hear the teacher’s introduction to the discussion and he had to stop to find out what the ruckus was about. One of the students explained that behind the teacher’s back were pictures of a ‘building being destroyed’.
“That’s no building”, I told him, “that is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water”.
I have been to Falling Water and it is magnificent. It is a place I think about often. Really. It made an impression on me as a monument to following your intuition, and of the power of creative thinking, and of the ability to integrate nature and man’s ideas and needs and physical structures, and so many other things. I bought a lily pad shaped soap dish there that I use every day when I wash my face. So to see a wrecking ball, even an animated one, tear it all down was provocative. I was interested in the scene, too!
My student friend sitting next to me had no idea what Falling Water was, and to him it was just a building and it was just fun to see it brought down by a wrecking ball. But it served to show me the funny way life is. How over time I have gathered a collection of experiences that inform me as an inhabitant of our society in a completely different way than this young person, here only a few years, relatively speaking, since I am 55 and he is 16. So much has passed before my eyes and heart since I was 16 that I have gathered a perspective on life that he has yet to gain.
His view of the world is different and fresh and wonderful, and so is mine.
31 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in English Class in the High School
Tags
In English class this week the kids have been tough to engage. They politely but temporarily put away their cellphone games or tentatively take out just one earphone of their iPods when I seem to want to talk to them, or directly ask if they’d be up for working with me undistracted, but really that is a lot to expect of me since I need to know English, too, not just child psychology. One young man barely speaks when I meet with him, and he keeps his Goth persona, grunting and avoiding eye contact consistently. He’s always tired because of the job he works late at night, but I can’t make exceptions, we have to do the work.
Not too long ago I sent my daughter into the QuickShop to pick up two gallons of milk for our household. She came back with the milk and exactly two dollars which I knew wasn’t the correct change. I’d nearly missed it myself recently when one of those change contraptions that has a chute directly off of the cash register delivered precisely the correct coinage while the cashier handed over the bills after my purchase. I told my girl that the only reason I knew about all this was because I’d heard the clinking of coins cleverly hidden between the gum displays and the latest candy trends on the counter top and realized it was for me. Cool, but so easily overlooked.
So today just after buying my two gallons of milk I looked over and was surprised to see my Goth friend standing at the counter making his own purchase. I heard his coins clattering down the chute to the cup. “Don’t forget your change,” I called pointing at the coins as I headed out the door.
I guess I caught him off guard or was out of context or something because he broke character, looked right at me and smiled, and seemed surprised and glad about finding his money.
31 Sunday Mar 2013
English class was hard last week. Somehow I’d lost my good humor about the “Bring Your Own Device to School” policy the district enacted this school year, allowing kids to bring in cell phones and computers and other devices to aid their learning. It is a fine idea and the devices were coming in anyway. It’s just that witnessing kids exercise the authority to sit with what amounts to a television set at their desks and watch skateboarding videos and youtube.com phenomena rather than prove a point with arguments made in each paragraph of a wildly less interesting writing assignment, is disheartening.
Oh sure, some days I have what it takes to inspire kids to put away the toys and then trick them into accidentally creating thesis statements just by answering simple questions about their intentions, but some days I cannot believe the wayward state of our children, and I don’t want to try teaching anything.
Some kids seem so jaded that the free education we offer is apparently not worth the effort to accept.
And that is a slippery slope.
My Own Personal Sky 