September 18, 2020 · 4:59 pm

Teaching Reading

I was a middle school English teacher. And part of that job is to build reading skills. But that is a challenging thing. Especially if you work for a poor rural school district with limited budgets and very little ability to buy computers and the necessary software. After all, being a reading teacher in the upper grade levels of public schools is HARD. Can you figure out a child’s reading level with teacher-made Cloze tests? Do you know how to tell a book’s reading level just by sampling the concept density, vocabulary load, and sentence lengths in the beginning, middle, and end of a book? Do you know where to find the readability information in the student’s History and Science textbooks? And did you know there is no formula anywhere to cover how you match up kids to books they will actually read and like without becoming a mind-reading trusted friend of every kid in your class?

Seriously. Even if you are a teacher certified to teach reading, they do not teach you these things below the doctorate level in teacher-training schools. I had to teach myself before I could effectively teach them.

The fact is, life-long readers are made by book-reading parents who read to their children a lot before they ever come to school. Those kids get to school and top the lists of readers no matter what reading or literacy test you give them. They benefit from a reading teacher they can talk to about books, but they don’t need them. They know how to teach themselves. And kids who don’t catch fire in their reading ability thanks to an enthusiastic and gifted kindergarten, first, or second-grade teacher are never going to learn to read for fun, or probably ever read anything not assigned by their boss with job-loss consequences ever again after leaving school. Some kids burdened with dyslexia, ADD, or even mental illness of some sort are never going to read at all… without intervention.

And high-stakes State tests that have been all the rage with Republican governments who want to prove teachers make too much money, don’t even measure reading skills and compare results to see how much kids have gained every single year. They don’t want to give teachers credit if they take it upon themselves to actually teach students to read better. That is not what capitalist economies want to measure. They prefer to see how well students conform to norms and standards… to make an obedient working class that doesn’t cost too much because they think for themselves.

But a good teacher teaches kids to read or read better. They do it in spite of the huge challenge. There are ways to do it.

Pictured in this post are four books that I have read aloud to my classes. And walked them through the stories with word banks, guided-reading worksheets, focused discussions about theme-setting-character and whatnot. I tricked them into caring about what happens to the main characters because you learn to care about them as people (meaning both the characters and the student readers who invest themselves in those characters.)

I have used these books to make students laugh, as when Mr. Sir is shooting at yellow-spotted lizards in Holes. And I have made them cry, as when the family learns how Tom was killed in the Battle of Shiloh in the book Across Five Aprils. And I have horrified them when it is revealed what happens to old people and defective babies in The Giver. You can literally make students love good books if you are willing to share them hard enough.

I have never tried to get students to read books literally naked as my Paffooney might be suggesting. I don’t think the school boards I have worked for would’ve liked that very much. But it is a triumph of teaching when you can get them to figuratively immerse themselves in books to that degree.

But teaching reading is something all schools need to be doing. And I have to tell you, they are not doing nearly enough anywhere in Texas. And maybe not in the rest of the United States either.. Now that I can teach no more… I am left despairing. But not because of lack of belief in kids and good books.

This book of mine is in a free-book promotion this weekend.

Click on the link, get a copy for free.

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Filed under Paffooney, rants, reading, teaching

September 17, 2020 · 4:26 pm

My Favorite Cowboy

When he walked through my classroom door for the first time in August 1988, the start of his seventh grade year, Jorge Navarro was a tiny little third-grader-looking thing. But one of the first things he ever told me in English was that he was a cowboy.

He had two older brothers. Sammy was an eighth grader that year, and Jose was in tenth grade. So, I already knew his brothers. Big strapping lads. They didn’t speak English really well and couldn’t read. But they were smart in a pragmatic, workman-like way. They all three came from a ranch down in Encinal, Texas. Fifteen miles closer to the Mexican border than where I was teaching in Cotulla, Texas. But they were not Mexicans. Their grandparents and parents were born in the USA, and their great grandparents, and possibly further back than that had lived on the same ranch-land all the way back to when everything South of the Nueces River was Mexico. These were Tejanos. Proud Americans from Texas. Hard-working, dedicated to the ranch owners who paid them to do what they loved, getting the most agricultural benefits possible from the dry South-Texas brush country.

Jorge was, at the start, a little man with a big voice in a small package. He was smarter and could read better than either of his brothers. He could even read and translate Spanish, which, of course, was his native language. And he had strong opinions that you could not argue with him about. He was a cowboy. That was opinion number one. He not only rode horses, he fed them daily, curried them in the morning to loosen the dirt and stimulate the production of natural oils that kept their coats shiny, and he even told me about the times he bottle-fed newborn colts when their mothers were sick.

And he strongly believed that a boss, or a teacher in my case, should never ask someone to do something that he didn’t know how to do himself. That was opinion number two. And he held me to that standard daily.

You should never use bad language in front of a lady… or a teacher, was opinion number three. He had a temper though. So, unlike most of the other boys, on those days when he lost it, he apologized as soon as he was back in control of himself. It made the girls giggle when he apologized to them, but that was an embarrassed reaction. He impressed them. They told me so in private afterwards.

He had a cowboy hat in his locker every day. You never wore a hat inside. Strong opinion number four.

And when he was an eighth-grader, he almost doubled in height. But not in width. He was what they call in Spanish, “Flaco,” skinny as a rail. He was taller than me by the time in mid-year when he started competing like his brothers in rodeos. And he was good. Something about the way his skinny, light frame could bend and twist under stress allowed him to stay on a barebacked horse longer than his brothers, or even the older men. He was pretty good at roping steers too. But it was the bareback bronc riding that won him trophies.

This is not a story about someone overcoming hardships to succeed. It always seemed like Jorge was blessed with it from the beginning. But it was the fact that he did what was needed every single day without fail. You could depend on it. He had a code that he followed.

The drawing that started this story is one that I did for him. I gave him and every member of his class that asked for one a copy made on my little copier at home.

And he taught me far more than I could ever teach him. Jorge Navarro was a cowboy. And you couldn’t argue with him about that.

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September 16, 2020 · 7:53 pm

The Off Day

Today I almost skipped writing a blog post. And why? The air outside in Texas is gray with smoke from fires in California. It makes it hard for people like me to draw breath. I know it is important to practice going without actual air to breath in order to be prepared for the future. But I guess I am too much of an addict to fresh air to go too much longer in a de-regulated future where you have to be born wealthy to afford air.

And COVID still has me down. My son has returned to the job of guarding the prisoners in the jail of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office where he got infected once already, and may be risking re-infection. And my wife is back in the classroom now with students who have no other options than to go back to the brick and mortar school. She has diabetes. They may be infected but have no symptoms. Nothing to worry about, right?

But writing is like breathing. Once you’ve developed a metaphor-making gland in the primitive part of your brain, you have to be able to let it out. If you only breathe in by reading and watching old movies, and never breathe out, your lungs will at some point explode. Or you will drown in your own similes which only writing something can be a ventilator for.

Don’t get me wrong. I live for reading good books and watching good movies. But I don’t feel really alive on days when I don’t write anything.

So, the result is a post like the one for today. It is writing something… but it seems slightly off, slightly askew.

I have been watching a mega-binge of Don Knotts movies, and other old movies that I haven’t seen in some time… some since childhood. I have been pretty much isolated and alone in my bedroom since March. No more Uber driving… ever. No more substitute teaching. Not even taking someone to school in the mornings on school days.

And my father is dying. He is in hospice care, suffering from dementia when he’s awake, the result of Parkinson’s Disease. He is sleeping most of the time now. They don’t know when… but they think it will happen soon. And I will be stuck here in Texas while he’s in Iowa. My sisters in Iowa and Missouri are planning to take care of Mom and most of the arrangements are already done. But it is still going to be very hard.

For right now, things are a little off. My full-color, technicolor life is in black and white for the time being. My computer is crashing once a week. I am having to re-type the letter “o” so often it becomes a habit to type “oooo” and then delete any extra “o”s that may appear. But taking a day off from writing does not seem to be an option.

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September 15, 2020 · 2:43 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 110

Canto 110 – Ship to Ship 

It was the commander on the bridge of the Bregohelma who first spotted it as it came out of jump space.

“What the hell is that?” he complained in a nasally voice while looking out of a face that was not the face of a weasel, but that only obvious because DNA scans had proved he was human and he didn’t have a tail.  He looked around the bridge for someone to give him an answer to his question.  But almost everyone on bridge duty at that moment was an undead rot-warrior, a skeletal dead body reanimated with electronics and controlled by a computerized brain.  And all of them, at that moment were still trying to compute how to get the answer out of “Hell” since that was where the commander had requested it from.

“That looks like a… dinosaur,” said Wormheart Toadsucker, who was only slightly less dead-looking and probably less intelligent than the rot warriors.  “You know, like the ones on the planet Dionysus.”

“It can’t be one of those.  It’s in space.  It just appeared in far orbit around the planet.”

“You should have one of the smart ones scan it,” said Wormheart.  “I need to go alert Admiral Tang.

“Okay, which of these mud-brains is a smart one?”   The commander looked at every vacant-eyed face on the bridge and then started scanning himself.   Amazing things began popping up on the scanner-screen report.

The red-armored admiral appeared on the bridge moments later with the boot-licker Wormheart groveling along behind him.

“So, what does it appear to be?” asked the admiral in his ultra-creepy modulated voice.

“Well, it’s a kind of starship like I have never seen before.  The scanner computer can’t completely identify it.  It seems to be some sort of alien artifact from the time of the Ancients.”

“Ah, that might explain the weird dinosaur shape.  The Ancients were of so much higher a tech level than we are now that many of their relics seem totally inexplicable to us.”

“Yes, but this one has a primarily human crew.  They are not even mostly Galtorrian/human fusions like you might expect.  Just plain Earther types.”

“And it is coming towards us under power.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Are the shields up?”

“Um… they are now.”  The commander quickly corrected his oversight.

“Find out what they want.”

As soon as the admiral commanded it, a visual appeared on the commo-screen.  The Lizard Lady herself appeared in the middle of a bridge full of oddly-dressed human crewmen.

“Are you not an Imperial spy, Captain?”  Admiral Tang asked, lowering his voice to basement levels of creepiness.

“I am.  And I have stolen a flagship of the new fleet you will face if you try to invade the Outpost system of Tron Blastarr.”

“That is remarkable good work, um… what is your name?”

“I am an original Galtorrian, simply called Lizard Lady.”

“You will be remembered as a hero to the Imperium, Lizard Lady.”

“Ah, but the mission is not yet fully complete.  We need to pull up to your ship and dock.  This is Ancient technology, and we will need your brilliance to fully control it.”

“Very well… we should be able to…”

Suddenly another sleek spaceship of Ancient designed popped out of jump space directly beside the dinosaur-shaped ship.  After a few moments in which no one had time to do another scan, the new, sleek ship disappeared once again.

“We are moving in to dock with you now, Admiral,” said the Lizard Lady as she gave orders quietly to her pilots and then swiftly left the bridge before Tang could ask her anything.

The dinosaur ship lurched forward and was approaching at an impossible docking speed.

“Shields on maximum!  Back away from them fast,” ordered Tang, obviously sensing a trick.  “Fire everything at that ship now!”

Lasers, plasma cannons, nuclear missiles, and Gauss cannons all fired at the incoming ship.  It did not fire back.  Instead it ignited and blew up in what would have been a spectacular fireball if it had blown up in an oxygen or hydrogen-rich atmosphere.  The shock-wave nearly obliterated the Bregohelma as it was, but apparently it was too far distant for the resolution of the mission that the Lizard Lady had planned.

                                    *****

Dr. Hooey’s time ship, the Star Wars, materialized in the Bregohelma’s cargo bay.

The door of the phone-booth-like thing opened and the Lizard Lady stepped out to confirm her present location.

“Is it the proper cargo bay?” asked Dr. Hooey from inside the time ship.

“It is,” she answered.  “Now that we are in the proper place, we only need to move to the proper time.

“Very well.  The time according to which of the prophecies?”

“Yes, according to all of them.” She stepped back into the time ship.  It made its normal grinding sound, and promptly disappeared into the near future.

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September 14, 2020 · 6:39 pm

A Simple Matter of Character (Part 2)

Some characters need to have their story told for reasons that are buried deep in the author’s personal history and damaged psyche. For me, Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf, was that kind of character.

The book, The Baby Werewolf, is a different kind of horror story. The central question of the book is this, “Am I a monster? And do I know why or why not?” And Torrie has to answer that question because he was born with a rare genetic disorder called hypertrichosis. It is the “werewolf-hair disease” where hair growth happens in unusual places on the body and in Torrie’s case, everywhere but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He is a perfectly normal boy who really only looks like a monster. But how you look can have a profound impact on how people treat you.

And the character of the boy who looks like a werewolf and thinks he is a monster is based entirely on me. Unlike Valerie Clarke whose origins I can pinpoint, I have to honestly admit the way Torrie thinks and feels and acts are all based solely on me and me alone.

You see, when I was a boy of ten I went through a horrible traumatic experience that threw my whole life into darkness. And I kept it secret from everybody. In fact, for a few years, I kept it a secret even from myself.

It is not that I really didn’t remember I had been sexually assaulted by an older boy. The nightmares and remembered pain were a constant even when I couldn’t admit to myself what had happened. I defended myself from it all by burying the knowledge deep, and worrying about things that only sexual-assault victims worried about. I embarrassed myself twice in seventh grade by wetting my pants in class, all because I couldn’t go into the boys’ bathroom at school. Whenever I would have sexual urges of any kind, I would lie down or sit on the heating grate at home, burning scars into my lower back and the back of my lower legs. I fretted about how to fight monsters. And I knew from the movies that if a vampire bit you, you could become a vampire. And if a werewolf bit you, you could become a werewolf. So, if a sexual predator bites you, do you not become a…??

In all honesty I probably became a teacher at least in part to protect other kids from the same kind of thing that happened to me. And I had to write this book to tell the story of how not to be a monster.

The true monster in this monster-movie tale is actually Torrie’s uncle, the person who actually psychologically abuses him. And the villain proves himself to be a sexual deviant, trying to create kiddie porn in his photography studio.

I suppose I just spoiled the whole whodunnit part of the book. But the murder mystery was never the point of the novel. The message of this novel is that no child is ever a monster unless he actually chooses to become one.

And that is the kind of character Torrie Brownfield is. The autobiographical kind. The kind that brings the author’s worst fears about himself to light, and tries to answer the question with… “No, I am not a monster.”

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Filed under autobiography, characters, horror writing, monsters, novel writing, Paffooney

September 13, 2020 · 6:32 pm

A Simple Matter of Character (Part 1)

No man is really fit to judge his own character. You can’t see it objectively from the inside. But one of the benefits of being a fiction author is that you don’t have to judge yourself. You can get away with judging everybody else around you. And they don’t even need to realize that that is what you are doing.

I am going to dissect three examples from my own fiction.

The first, as you have probably already guessed, is Valerie Clarke, the heroine of Snow Babies, When the Captain Came Calling, and Sing Sad Songs.

Valerie is named after the prettiest girl I went to school with, the one in my class that was in school with me from kindergarten to twelfth grade. The one who used to politely laugh at my jokes and smile at me a lot when I needed someone to look at me and not scowl. She is a very lovely lady now with grandchildren and a good life in Iowa. And besides the name and the beauty, that’s about as far as the real Valerie goes in the make-up of this crucial main character.

The spirit and the personal history of this character come from a very composed and determined young lady that I taught as both a seventh and an eighth-grader. I have referred to her before in this blog as Sasha. But that’s not her real name. And I am not going to ever give you her real name because she’s entitled to the secrets I may have revealed about her in creating this character, as well as entitled not to be burdened with the things in my stories about her that she never did in real life.

In the course of the novels I write, I dramatized the loss of her father, writing a scene in which she comes home to find him after he has committed suicide over the loss of his part of the family farm that he co-inherited with his older brother. Kyle Clarke’s suicide is the single most devastating scene I have ever written up until now. It stopped the novel in the middle. I had to write two other whole novels before I could pick it up and continue. But Sasha’s missing father in real life did not commit suicide. The love that develops between Valerie and Tommy in Snow Babies and the love she finds with Francois in Sing Sad Songs are also facts that do not belong in real life to Sasha.

But the part of Valerie Clarke that really is Sasha is her indomitable will, the way she simply cannot be stopped when she makes up her mind to accomplish something. And that smile that melts your defenses and forces you to accept everything she is about change in your life for the better, whether it is painful or not. The bravery that Valerie shows when she loses someone or something that is important to her is also Sasha. Overcoming disappointment and how one manages to do it is a real key to someone’s character. It helps you decide whether that character is right to be the heroine or is a better fit to be the villain of a story. And Sasha could never have been a villain.

And finally, there’s the thing about the character of Valerie Clarke that has attached itself to my own daughter, the Princess, whose real name I also never use in this blog. She was roughly the same age as the character of Valerie as I was actually putting the story of Snow Babies down in sentences, paragraphs, and Cantos. Some of the more private details about Valerie come from her, things I could never have learned about the first Valerie or Sasha because I never lived in the same house with them. And these more private details are probably the reason that my own daughter has not read a story with Valerie Clarke in it.

So, now I have revealed the basic anatomy of the character creation of one of three promised characters that I am proudest to have created in my fiction.

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Filed under autobiography, characters, daughters, humor, novel writing, Paffooney, writing teacher

September 12, 2020 · 4:31 pm

School Daze Art Day

A lot of my artwork has to do with students and teachers, and of course, the schools they attend. I wonder where this obsession came from?

The Psionic Ninja Class from AeroQuest.

There’s a lot of science fiction elements in school. After all, we are preparing students for the future.

Schools of the past fascinate me too. This is Chiron the Centaur teaching Hercules, Jason, Achilles, and other demigods and heroes.

It is hard to tell just by looking whether this school is in the past or in the future. The secret is, this illustrates a science fiction novel I haven’t written yet. It is on another planet three thousand years in the future.

This picture of one of my last high school ESL classes is not realistic. Students are far more cartoonish than they are pictured here.

Of course, school is not about the teachers. It is about the students.

These two are Blueberry Bates and Mike Murphy.

They are fictional people.

But they are based on three different seventh grade couples I taught in Texas.

One set actually grew up and married each other.

You know how you can tell that this school is from science fiction? The student in the picture is actually a robot who looks human.

Here’s another picture of Mike and Blue.

Ah, school! How I miss it.

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September 11, 2020 · 5:46 pm

Recovery

My son has recovered. His COVID test came back negative. He is feeling much better, and he plans to go back to work tonight.

I wish getting back to normal was as easy for those of us who are old, tired, weak, and still devastated. There are a number of long-term things that have to recover.

The climate is the biggest thing. In twelve years we have to go from degrading our atmosphere at record levels of toxic crap expellations and Western States going up in flames to helping the the biosphere heal itself.

It may already be too late. We may have already irreversibly exterminated all life on Earth.

But there is reason to believe that human creativity will invent drastic solutions that we can actually be forced to implement, those of us who don’t lose our lives before that spark of genius becomes a wildfire.

But we also have to recover from a world where selfishness and hatred have grown to a point that many of us can no longer function as a part of the world. The economy is broken. Almost all of the wealth in this world flows into the pocketbooks of less than one percent of the entire world’s population. And they don’t use their wealth to benefit the rest of us, like they were forced to do back in the Eisenhower administration. They become more and more hate-filled and more greedy. They hoard their wealth, pouring it into stock buy-backs and further acquisitions, puffing up their bank accounts. And then they blame the working poor for being too lazy to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (a magic trick that defies gravity, and I have never seen actually working.) People label each other as “the other” and begin seriously hating each other on the basis of skin color, religion, or party affiliation. If all of mankind shared only one body, it would be severely infected and probably terminally ill. Its critical organs fight against each other.

We will not save ourselves from climate change without first solving the “Me-first!” crisis.

I illustrated today’s rant with an oil painting I did with peacefulness in mind. The Native American child and the stag on a starry night are supposed to symbolize peace, harmony, spirituality, and hope, all of which we desperately need to heal ourselves. There is not enough of that going around in the non-oil-paint world.

So, my family is recovering from the darkness where we’ve recently been. But we will never be recovered until, as a world, we all help in the recovery.

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September 10, 2020 · 6:15 pm

Promises Unbroken

Life is a Merry-Go-Round…

Up and Down,

Round and Round,

A Merry-Go-Round.

And if you can’t handle

The horse you are riding

Tame and gentle as he is,

Then take a quick shift

To the horse right behind you

As the circle continues to whiz.

I promised I wasn’t going to talk about him anymore. He befouls my dreams and makes my life harder, but noticing him, even with a heart full of scorn, is what he wants me to do. Even negative attention gives his little black Grinch-heart joy.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. His life and his works are complete. But he is still with me, the creator’s eyes and ears are still here.

Salvador Dali is dead. His life and his works are complete. But he is still with me. Clocks still melt to his timetable.

…

…

…

;;;

Judy Garland is dead. Her life and her works are complete. But she is definitely still with me as I sing her signature song to myself, wishing to be beyond the rainbow.

Michael Beyer is not dead. His life and his works not yet complete. But he is still working, and writing, and more, And the sugar in his heart is still sweet.

Yes, I am quite unhappy with the world the way it is. He has done terrible things, and yet they let him stay where he is. There is no excuse for it. The evidence is there for anyone not looking with their eyes closed.

But even though his promises are lies, I shall keep mine. Notice, I have not mentioned his name. But you still know who I mean and what he has done.

And I have never spoken of him as the “P-word” of the United States. So, my promises are unbroken, even though I can’t ignore him. I will vote against him, if God allows me to live that much longer.

He no longer makes me upset.

Now he just makes me poetic.

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September 9, 2020 · 6:25 pm

Silly Names

Meet Harker Dawes. He’s a ne’er-do-well businessman, a fool, a bungler, a clown, and his job is comedy relief as a support player in multiple novels of my Hometown Novels Series. I would contend that he is the kind of character I can’t write a good story without. And why does he have a name like Harker? Well, it’s Charles Dickens’ fault.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you’ve never read a novel by Charles Dickens… Why the heck not? I mean seriously… A Tale of Two Cities is one of the best novels ever written by anyone. The history, themes, and tightly woven plot threads of that novel… pale in comparison to some of the funny names Dickens uses to tell that tale. Jerry Cruncher, porter for Tellson’s Bank, is also a grave-robber in his spare nights. He is constantly losing his temper with Mrs. Cruncher for “flopping against him” (which is how he characterizes how she prays for him). He is an essential clown in that narrative. Prim and proper Miss Pross is Lucie Manette’s hand maiden who is so fiercely loyal she ends up taking out the vengeful villain of the tale, Madame Defarge, for threatening her precious Miss Lucie.

And that notation is just the beginning of the long list of silly names used for critical supporting characters in his books. There is a wealth of them in every book you pick up; Uncle Pumblechook, Herbert Pocket, Abel Magwitch, and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations… certainly not leaving out Philip Pirrip (Pip) the narrator and main character of the tale.

Wackford Squeers is the perfect name for the abusive headmaster of Dotheboy’s Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.

A Christmas Carol not only contains Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim Cratchit, but also Old Fezziwig, a former boss who loves to dance at the Christmas parties he throws.

David Copperfield has wonderful character names like Edward Murdstone the evil stepfather, Wilkins Micawber the ne’er-do-well surrogate father figure (based on Dickens’s real father), jovial Mr. Dick, and the slimy, villainous Uriah Heep.

The multi-syllabic names he uses are not only comical or sinister or both, but uniquely descriptive of the characters themselves, defining for us in nonsense syllables what those characters seem to be all about.

So, that is why his name is Harker Dawes. It stands in for, “Hark, there will be guffaws.” The perfect moniker for a very imperfect man.

In the same book as Harker, you can find heroic Agnes Brikkleputti the social worker who chases four orphan runaways from Chicago to Norwall, Iowa and risks death in a blizzard to bring the orphans their medications. She is the putty that holds those four bricks together.

So, you should not be surprised if you read something Mickey has written and you run across a silly name. It is evidence that he might be Dickens reincarnated.

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