As I said in the journal entry for Saturday, I watched AB all morning, then took her to meet the rest of the family for lunch at Jason's Deli. She'd had enough fun playing with her daddy that she wasn't too happy when I said, "Okay, put on your shoes. It's time to go."
I finally got her out to the car, though, and as she was climbing into her seat she said, "I want my book!"
For a couple months now she's had a Baby Colors book kicking around the floorboards of my car, and on the rare occasions she'd ridden with me, she has read through it with relish. Sometime in the last week, though, my car go cleaned out. So I had to say, "Sorry, your book isn't out here. You can read the map, though!" I invested some artificial excitement in that and she bought it, so I gave her the Oklahoma State Roadways map, told her the blue lines were rivers, and then we hit the road.
She spent some time looking over the back page of it that was visible, then said, "What do the red lines mean?"
I glanced back and said, "Oh, those are highways. Big roads. And the black lines are regular roads."
She said, "Oh."
I drove about a mile, and she said, "I found letters! There's my name!" She'd turned it over and was looking at the front cover -- MAP in giant block red letters, and the A was what she was calling her name. I chuckled and spelled it out to her, told her the word, and went on driving.
She was quiet a while, then said, "Here's my house! And here's Sophy's house."
I said, "Can you find a path between them? Try to trace the black lines from one to the other...." I could tell that was a little too advanced for her, even as I said it, and she just didn't respond. After a moment, though, I heard the crinkle of her unfolding the map for the first time. And then silence, then another crinkle, and I glanced back to find her staring in fascination at the partly-unfolded map in her lap.
She poked the stiff paper, heard its crinkle, and tilted the still-folded edge to get a good look at it. I could see her thinking. Then she said, "Daddy! I want to show you something!"
While I watched in rearview glances, she unfolded the map all the way, then looked at it for a moment with a critical eye. She folded it back in half, longways, to get a tall rectangle, then held it up in front of her, hiding her face. Then she said, "Now say, 'Annabelle! Annabelle!'"
I did as instructed. All excited, I called, "Annabelle! Annabelle!"
With just her left hand, she bent down the top corner of the map so I could see the mildly exasperated look on her face, and she said, "What is it, Daddy? I'm reading the paper!"
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Journal Entry: September 28, 2009
Wednesday
Wednesday after work we met K-- and N-- at Johnny's Charcoal Broiler -- carrying on a tradition started the first time T-- took AB to church, and we ate there for lunch. The food was delicious, of course, and it was a fun time getting together with friends.
Afterward, everybody but K-- and me walked over to church for Wednesday night classes. K-- came over to my place to help me with T--'s broken computer. He had a hard drive caddy handy, with connections for all manner of hard drive, and in no time at all he had the data from T--'s laptop copied over to mine. That solved the biggest of T--'s fears (lost photos and work documents), but of course the laptop was still broken.
After church the family came back home, and we spent the evening watching TV while I played WoW.
Thursday
Thursday I had to prepare a tutorial/lecture for my students, and I spent a significant chunk of time after work reviewing it and getting it posted to the website. I also spent much of the day (and evening) reviewing the students' submissions for the first document packet, and fielding questions from them (by email, of course).
Karla made us some incredible quesadillas for dinner. D-- came over for that, and to play some WoW with me, but mostly to pick up T--'s dead computer and take it home with him. He spent the evening getting it resurrected (with the help of a spare hard drive he had sitting around, which probably saved me a hundred bucks), and getting the OS back on it.
Apart from that, Thursday night was more TV, and more WoW. We chilled, and caught our breath.
Friday
Friday I met Toby for lunch, and we discussed (among other things) a document conversion project I've got to get done for work. He had volunteered to help with that when they came to visit at the hospital, and this was my first opportunity to provide him with more detailed information. He sounded optimistic that he could get it done, and we made arrangements to meet at his place Sunday evening.
Then in the afternoon I got home from work a little bit early, so I was there when D-- brought T--'s laptop by, and I installed a few more programs for her, and now it's better than new.
D-- had to go back to work, but he agreed to meet us for dinner. Half an hours after he left, Mom and Dad got in from Little Rock. We introduced them to Alexander (or XP, as he'll be known hereabouts in the future), then spent some time socializing while we waited for my sister and her family to come over. A little after five we piled into a bunch of vehicles, and headed over to Mama Roja for dinner.
As we were waiting for our table, T-- turned to me and said with some surprise, "Can you believe it's been nine days since we've been here?" Her Mom rocked our world by pointing out it had actually been two whole weeks. Craziness.
Anyway, it was a crowded, busy table, but we all had delicious food and enjoyed the opportunity to talk. Afterward, T--'s parents left from the restaurant to head home, and everyone else came over to our place.
I took Mom up to Homeland to pick up the necessary supplies, then when we got back to the house I mixed up a pitcher of rum margaritas. They went over pretty well, but T-- and I had a hankering for the real thing, so as soon as the pitcher was empty I filled it up again, with tequila this time, and we had a grand ol' time.
Saturday
Saturday morning T-- and Mom headed up to Edmond (with XP in tow) for pedicures with my sister, and Dad headed to Edmond for a conference at Memorial Road Church of Christ on an educational framework called Journeylands. That left me at home with AB. We played in her room, we spent half an hour or so on my laptop playing the Memory game, we read from her books, and we practiced telling each other stories.
Then T-- called to tell me we were all supposed to meet Dad for lunch at Jason's Deli, so I had AB watch some TV while I got ready, and then we rapidly got her dressed (and I made a humorous attempt at putting her hair in a ponytail), and headed north.
Lunch was awesome, and afterward T-- and Mom took AB with them to go shopping for baby stuff. Dad headed back to his conference, so that left me alone. I ran home, took care of some stuff on my laptop, and then headed back out again for our monthly writer's group at Courtney's.
That probably deserves its own post (as it's gotten in the past), but I'm feeling lazy now and I was sleepy and distracted then, so I couldn't do it justice anyway. Shawn was missing, so it was just the three of us. We started out talking about dreams (and nightmares), and I told the story of my first nightmare (the killer shark in the apartment swimming pool), and my most recent (last week, when T-- walked away from our marriage because I left her to fend for herself when we found ourselves caught in a swamp surrounded by killer snakes and spiders).
Then from there we talked more about our creative influences, how we come up with titles, and how we cope with the constant temptation to jump to new projects -- leaving old ones unfinished. We also talked about another OKC writer's group we might try to crash sometime, and a potential addition to our group, and traditional versus non-traditional publishers. I also dragged the conversation toward magic in the real world for a bit, and we each seized that opportunity to feel a little bit foolish.
Then it was 4:30, and time to split up. I got home just after Dad, and Mom was still there with AB (who was taking a nap). T-- was already up at the church, getting ready for a crop, and she had XP with her.
So it was just me and Mom and Dad, and I took the opportunity to ask them for some advice and analysis on parenting. Specifically, I wanted to know how much change I should expect in AB in the coming years. I feel like we've weathered the differentiation called "the terrible twos" at this point -- we've seen it, we've found ways to address it, and at this point, though her rebellion can be frustrating at times, it isn't baffling. It's predictable, and addressable, and I feel like we both know who she is.
So my question was, how many more major change events are there, in early childhood development? I was relieved when Mom and Dad both agreed there really aren't any. We can reasonably expect AB to be pretty much the person she is now for most of the next nine years. I'm happy with that answer. I like the person she is.
They also had some good information about how to handle the challenges of her differentiation events in her teenage years, but I really didn't enjoy thinking about that. Not that I'm worried about the rebellion or family drama or anything...I just don't like thinking about her being a teenager. It feels far too close, and that's only a handful of years before she's gone. Miserable thought, that.
Anyway, that took up most of an hour, and then I went and woke AB up so she could go to the church with Mom. A few minutes later K-- came over, having dropped his baby off there, too. We ordered a couple pizzas and loaded up Beatles: Rock Band. An hour or so later, my brother-in-law called to ask if he could come join us, and we rocked out for two hours before he and K-- had to go pick up their little ones.
Right around then Mom and my older sister came home with AB, and after she went down to bed the rest of us played some more Rock Band. I mixed up a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris for us, too, and we all had a good time. By the time T-- got home my sister was gone (to stay at my little sister's place), and Mom and Dad were in bed, so it was just me still awake, playing WoW.
I didn't stay up too late, though. I was tired, so I went to bed around 11:30 with no regrets.
Sunday
Sunday morning we had a full house getting ready for church, and all of us running a little bit late, but we managed to get ourselves together somehow and showed up no more than five minutes later for service.
The sermon was on the various social values of hymns in a congregation, and before Rob was done Dad leaned over and said, "I want you to introduce me to your preach after church." Turned out that was a sermon Dad had been wanting to preach for years, and while he'd heard lots of sermons on the topic, he'd never heard anyone express the real benefits and perspective that Rob gave in his sermon.
So we caught Rob after church (after waiting through an impressive line), and Dad got to compliment and thanks Rob for his sermon, and Rob got invite Dad to come give a marriage and family seminar to Britton Road sometime -- something he's been wanting to talk with Dad about for a while. So that's pretty cool.
Then afterward we all went over my sister's place for an Italian-themed lunch of salad, chicken pasta, and cheesecake for dessert. Everyone agreed the food was incredibly good. AB and her older cousin weren't getting along terribly well, though -- probably because they were both in severe need of a nap -- so we split up and went back home to put AB to bed. Mom and Dad decided to head home around the same time, too, so we got them packed up and said our goodbyes.
And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the house was quiet. For the first time in ten days.
T-- watched some Law and Order, I played some WoW, and then AB woke up from her nap and the spell was broken. We grabbed some McDonalds for dinner, and then all too soon it was time for me to head down to Norman for my meeting with Toby.
I didn't want to go. I was tired and worn out, and it's not a short drive, but I had made a commitment. And, after all, Toby was doing a favor for me. I showed up, and found out he had, in fact, finished it. He walked me through the code, teaching me what it did (so I could make little modifications on my own), and it's one of those things where it's fascinating in its simplicity. He did a really fantastic job. And after a quick test run (and double-checking how the output looked in Word), I was able to put the work stuff aside and we had some time to just talk. That was fun. He's in the same boat I am -- having to work with a new baby at home -- but in spite of all the chaos, and petty problems at work, and weird happenings with rent houses in Tulsa...in spite of all that, we're both doing pretty well. It was fun to get to hear that, and say that, and just to talk programming with my programming teacher for an hour or so.
Then I drove back home, in the weary dark, and crawled into bed and said good night to my weekend.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Wednesday after work we met K-- and N-- at Johnny's Charcoal Broiler -- carrying on a tradition started the first time T-- took AB to church, and we ate there for lunch. The food was delicious, of course, and it was a fun time getting together with friends.
Afterward, everybody but K-- and me walked over to church for Wednesday night classes. K-- came over to my place to help me with T--'s broken computer. He had a hard drive caddy handy, with connections for all manner of hard drive, and in no time at all he had the data from T--'s laptop copied over to mine. That solved the biggest of T--'s fears (lost photos and work documents), but of course the laptop was still broken.
After church the family came back home, and we spent the evening watching TV while I played WoW.
Thursday
Thursday I had to prepare a tutorial/lecture for my students, and I spent a significant chunk of time after work reviewing it and getting it posted to the website. I also spent much of the day (and evening) reviewing the students' submissions for the first document packet, and fielding questions from them (by email, of course).
Karla made us some incredible quesadillas for dinner. D-- came over for that, and to play some WoW with me, but mostly to pick up T--'s dead computer and take it home with him. He spent the evening getting it resurrected (with the help of a spare hard drive he had sitting around, which probably saved me a hundred bucks), and getting the OS back on it.
Apart from that, Thursday night was more TV, and more WoW. We chilled, and caught our breath.
Friday
Friday I met Toby for lunch, and we discussed (among other things) a document conversion project I've got to get done for work. He had volunteered to help with that when they came to visit at the hospital, and this was my first opportunity to provide him with more detailed information. He sounded optimistic that he could get it done, and we made arrangements to meet at his place Sunday evening.
Then in the afternoon I got home from work a little bit early, so I was there when D-- brought T--'s laptop by, and I installed a few more programs for her, and now it's better than new.
D-- had to go back to work, but he agreed to meet us for dinner. Half an hours after he left, Mom and Dad got in from Little Rock. We introduced them to Alexander (or XP, as he'll be known hereabouts in the future), then spent some time socializing while we waited for my sister and her family to come over. A little after five we piled into a bunch of vehicles, and headed over to Mama Roja for dinner.
As we were waiting for our table, T-- turned to me and said with some surprise, "Can you believe it's been nine days since we've been here?" Her Mom rocked our world by pointing out it had actually been two whole weeks. Craziness.
Anyway, it was a crowded, busy table, but we all had delicious food and enjoyed the opportunity to talk. Afterward, T--'s parents left from the restaurant to head home, and everyone else came over to our place.
I took Mom up to Homeland to pick up the necessary supplies, then when we got back to the house I mixed up a pitcher of rum margaritas. They went over pretty well, but T-- and I had a hankering for the real thing, so as soon as the pitcher was empty I filled it up again, with tequila this time, and we had a grand ol' time.
Saturday
Saturday morning T-- and Mom headed up to Edmond (with XP in tow) for pedicures with my sister, and Dad headed to Edmond for a conference at Memorial Road Church of Christ on an educational framework called Journeylands. That left me at home with AB. We played in her room, we spent half an hour or so on my laptop playing the Memory game, we read from her books, and we practiced telling each other stories.
Then T-- called to tell me we were all supposed to meet Dad for lunch at Jason's Deli, so I had AB watch some TV while I got ready, and then we rapidly got her dressed (and I made a humorous attempt at putting her hair in a ponytail), and headed north.
Lunch was awesome, and afterward T-- and Mom took AB with them to go shopping for baby stuff. Dad headed back to his conference, so that left me alone. I ran home, took care of some stuff on my laptop, and then headed back out again for our monthly writer's group at Courtney's.
That probably deserves its own post (as it's gotten in the past), but I'm feeling lazy now and I was sleepy and distracted then, so I couldn't do it justice anyway. Shawn was missing, so it was just the three of us. We started out talking about dreams (and nightmares), and I told the story of my first nightmare (the killer shark in the apartment swimming pool), and my most recent (last week, when T-- walked away from our marriage because I left her to fend for herself when we found ourselves caught in a swamp surrounded by killer snakes and spiders).
Then from there we talked more about our creative influences, how we come up with titles, and how we cope with the constant temptation to jump to new projects -- leaving old ones unfinished. We also talked about another OKC writer's group we might try to crash sometime, and a potential addition to our group, and traditional versus non-traditional publishers. I also dragged the conversation toward magic in the real world for a bit, and we each seized that opportunity to feel a little bit foolish.
Then it was 4:30, and time to split up. I got home just after Dad, and Mom was still there with AB (who was taking a nap). T-- was already up at the church, getting ready for a crop, and she had XP with her.
So it was just me and Mom and Dad, and I took the opportunity to ask them for some advice and analysis on parenting. Specifically, I wanted to know how much change I should expect in AB in the coming years. I feel like we've weathered the differentiation called "the terrible twos" at this point -- we've seen it, we've found ways to address it, and at this point, though her rebellion can be frustrating at times, it isn't baffling. It's predictable, and addressable, and I feel like we both know who she is.
So my question was, how many more major change events are there, in early childhood development? I was relieved when Mom and Dad both agreed there really aren't any. We can reasonably expect AB to be pretty much the person she is now for most of the next nine years. I'm happy with that answer. I like the person she is.
They also had some good information about how to handle the challenges of her differentiation events in her teenage years, but I really didn't enjoy thinking about that. Not that I'm worried about the rebellion or family drama or anything...I just don't like thinking about her being a teenager. It feels far too close, and that's only a handful of years before she's gone. Miserable thought, that.
Anyway, that took up most of an hour, and then I went and woke AB up so she could go to the church with Mom. A few minutes later K-- came over, having dropped his baby off there, too. We ordered a couple pizzas and loaded up Beatles: Rock Band. An hour or so later, my brother-in-law called to ask if he could come join us, and we rocked out for two hours before he and K-- had to go pick up their little ones.
Right around then Mom and my older sister came home with AB, and after she went down to bed the rest of us played some more Rock Band. I mixed up a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris for us, too, and we all had a good time. By the time T-- got home my sister was gone (to stay at my little sister's place), and Mom and Dad were in bed, so it was just me still awake, playing WoW.
I didn't stay up too late, though. I was tired, so I went to bed around 11:30 with no regrets.
Sunday
Sunday morning we had a full house getting ready for church, and all of us running a little bit late, but we managed to get ourselves together somehow and showed up no more than five minutes later for service.
The sermon was on the various social values of hymns in a congregation, and before Rob was done Dad leaned over and said, "I want you to introduce me to your preach after church." Turned out that was a sermon Dad had been wanting to preach for years, and while he'd heard lots of sermons on the topic, he'd never heard anyone express the real benefits and perspective that Rob gave in his sermon.
So we caught Rob after church (after waiting through an impressive line), and Dad got to compliment and thanks Rob for his sermon, and Rob got invite Dad to come give a marriage and family seminar to Britton Road sometime -- something he's been wanting to talk with Dad about for a while. So that's pretty cool.
Then afterward we all went over my sister's place for an Italian-themed lunch of salad, chicken pasta, and cheesecake for dessert. Everyone agreed the food was incredibly good. AB and her older cousin weren't getting along terribly well, though -- probably because they were both in severe need of a nap -- so we split up and went back home to put AB to bed. Mom and Dad decided to head home around the same time, too, so we got them packed up and said our goodbyes.
And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the house was quiet. For the first time in ten days.
T-- watched some Law and Order, I played some WoW, and then AB woke up from her nap and the spell was broken. We grabbed some McDonalds for dinner, and then all too soon it was time for me to head down to Norman for my meeting with Toby.
I didn't want to go. I was tired and worn out, and it's not a short drive, but I had made a commitment. And, after all, Toby was doing a favor for me. I showed up, and found out he had, in fact, finished it. He walked me through the code, teaching me what it did (so I could make little modifications on my own), and it's one of those things where it's fascinating in its simplicity. He did a really fantastic job. And after a quick test run (and double-checking how the output looked in Word), I was able to put the work stuff aside and we had some time to just talk. That was fun. He's in the same boat I am -- having to work with a new baby at home -- but in spite of all the chaos, and petty problems at work, and weird happenings with rent houses in Tulsa...in spite of all that, we're both doing pretty well. It was fun to get to hear that, and say that, and just to talk programming with my programming teacher for an hour or so.
Then I drove back home, in the weary dark, and crawled into bed and said good night to my weekend.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
September Seventeen (a poem)
You're Alexander, son.
You're born, you're named, you're blessed to be a king.
It's up to you to choose where you end up,
But already you've conquered hearts, and bent some lives to you--
At two weeks old.
You're Alexander, son.
You're stronger than you ought to be, but only just begun.
There's power in your name and mighty destiny bestowed,
And world enough for you to shape your dreams
And make them real.
You're Alexander, son.
I've known your name for decades. Since I was a boy myself
I've known I'd shake your hand, and look you in the eye
And teach you how to cope, or hope -- to break or make the world,
And trust in God.
You're Alexander, son.
With riches already in store, the wealth of nations at your hand
In all the loving wisdom of your friends -- a hundred friends
All waiting, all breathless, on that first day when you were born.
Yours to the end.
You're Alexander, son.
And you could conquer states, or you could light unrighteous dark,
Could tame some scary wilderness we don't yet know exists,
Or live a quiet, happy life at home. It matters not.
We will love you.
You're born, you're named, you're blessed to be a king.
It's up to you to choose where you end up,
But already you've conquered hearts, and bent some lives to you--
At two weeks old.
You're Alexander, son.
You're stronger than you ought to be, but only just begun.
There's power in your name and mighty destiny bestowed,
And world enough for you to shape your dreams
And make them real.
You're Alexander, son.
I've known your name for decades. Since I was a boy myself
I've known I'd shake your hand, and look you in the eye
And teach you how to cope, or hope -- to break or make the world,
And trust in God.
You're Alexander, son.
With riches already in store, the wealth of nations at your hand
In all the loving wisdom of your friends -- a hundred friends
All waiting, all breathless, on that first day when you were born.
Yours to the end.
You're Alexander, son.
And you could conquer states, or you could light unrighteous dark,
Could tame some scary wilderness we don't yet know exists,
Or live a quiet, happy life at home. It matters not.
We will love you.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
My Tens of Thousands
I'm an observant person. I'm introspective and extrapolative. I spend a lot of time thinking about how the world really is, and how that information should affect my decisions. I call this careful consideration my "governing intellect" -- not that it does a ton of governing. It ends up being more a source of guilt (that I don't follow my reason) than a helpful tutor. But still, I sometimes heed its advice -- and sometimes to my own detriment.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side." I'm not a proud man. I went and I sat. The man had some interesting things to say.
I have always lived a charmed life. This has manifested in mundane ways (a happy, prosperous family environment, an upbringing with a strong emphasis on education, and an inborn talent with the written word), and in ways mystical (I've never lost real money in a game of poker).
I've long recognized this effect in my life, and rarely taken it for granted. I remember reading the Odyssey early in high school and recognizing an easy familiarity with Odysseus, beloved of Athene. He was clever and careful, but even so, he had help. Things ever fell his way. So also with me.
In our own lore there's another like him, and I've also often compared myself to King David. Chosen and blessed, set apart to do great things, I had nothing to fear from even the mightiest of enemies. That became my refrain. I can't count the times I've whispered under my breath, "Lord, let me pass unseen through the camp of my enemies."
He took me aside recently, though, and reprimanded me. That has been too much my attitude. When a university-level teaching job fell into my lap -- money we sorely needed and an opportunity many people invest years of their lives just to apply for -- I spent days and weeks and months just worrying, just hoping that I could survive. I just wanted to get through it, hopefully without drawing any attention to myself, and make it to December in one piece.
Oh humble yes, he said, but humble son of God!
There is so much more to David than the slinking thief, discreetly hemming his king's old cape. An heir is made not just to survive, but to reign. I've spent years hiding in my dirty cave, with nary an adversary on the plains below. Anointed and appointed, spending all my gracious charms on nervous getting by, when my role is so much greater. I should be capturing cities to swell my empire. I should be conquering to preserve my name, and to lift up the names of my sons. I've spent long enough as a shepherd, I should long since have become a king.
That failing is on me. The opportunities to rise up are always there -- served up to me on royal finery, and squandered in my timidity even as I proclaim that I'm trembling in fear of the Parable of the Talents. The Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side, and we'll make cautious reason our footstool, because there are far more interesting things going on than your boring old reality."
I can't wait to see my Jerusalem.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side." I'm not a proud man. I went and I sat. The man had some interesting things to say.
I have always lived a charmed life. This has manifested in mundane ways (a happy, prosperous family environment, an upbringing with a strong emphasis on education, and an inborn talent with the written word), and in ways mystical (I've never lost real money in a game of poker).
I've long recognized this effect in my life, and rarely taken it for granted. I remember reading the Odyssey early in high school and recognizing an easy familiarity with Odysseus, beloved of Athene. He was clever and careful, but even so, he had help. Things ever fell his way. So also with me.
In our own lore there's another like him, and I've also often compared myself to King David. Chosen and blessed, set apart to do great things, I had nothing to fear from even the mightiest of enemies. That became my refrain. I can't count the times I've whispered under my breath, "Lord, let me pass unseen through the camp of my enemies."
He took me aside recently, though, and reprimanded me. That has been too much my attitude. When a university-level teaching job fell into my lap -- money we sorely needed and an opportunity many people invest years of their lives just to apply for -- I spent days and weeks and months just worrying, just hoping that I could survive. I just wanted to get through it, hopefully without drawing any attention to myself, and make it to December in one piece.
Oh humble yes, he said, but humble son of God!
There is so much more to David than the slinking thief, discreetly hemming his king's old cape. An heir is made not just to survive, but to reign. I've spent years hiding in my dirty cave, with nary an adversary on the plains below. Anointed and appointed, spending all my gracious charms on nervous getting by, when my role is so much greater. I should be capturing cities to swell my empire. I should be conquering to preserve my name, and to lift up the names of my sons. I've spent long enough as a shepherd, I should long since have become a king.
That failing is on me. The opportunities to rise up are always there -- served up to me on royal finery, and squandered in my timidity even as I proclaim that I'm trembling in fear of the Parable of the Talents. The Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side, and we'll make cautious reason our footstool, because there are far more interesting things going on than your boring old reality."
I can't wait to see my Jerusalem.
Journal Entry: September 23, 2009
On Monday I told a lot of people, "Oh, it's so much easier with the second baby. With Annabelle we were up all night, every night, startling awake at every tiny sound. With Alexander, we're a lot more relaxed. I'm actually getting a lot of sleep."
On Monday night, he proved me a liar. Bigtime.
So, as a result, I woke up late yesterday and I was dragging. I went in to work anyway, and stumbled through the morning's responsibilities, and then spent my lunch break grading papers, and then darted out to OC for my fourth week of class. I will, of course, tell that tale elsewhere.
I had several students hang around after class to talk with me, as I'll mention in my recap. That was awesome, in the sense of making a connection with my students, but it was draining in the sense described in detail in last week's link, Caring for Your Introvert. On top of that, everyone I interacted with at work all day wanted to talk about the baby (and, frankly, I did too...but it's still tiring). Then I got home to a full house -- T--, two babies, and two in-laws.
It's nothing but whining about blessings, but all that interaction got to me yesterday. After three weeks of getting crippled before my classes by anxiety -- for days on end -- I managed to get away with fewer than three hours of anxiety problems this week, and they could be gone altogether by the next time we meet for class. But my night was still shot just from interaction exhaustion.
T-- let me hold Alexander as soon as I got home, and I took him to the couch and AB came running up to see him, and I asked her all about her day. At the same time, T--'s mom and dad got home from some shopping they asked me all about my day, and it was all perfectly nice but for some reason I just wanted to cry.
So I handed the baby off to his Papa, and then when no one was looking I slipped off to the bedroom to hide in the dark.
Karla and John naturally picked up that something was wrong, and they know me well enough that they were able to guess what, and they said they'd be willing to head home early if I needed a little alone time before my family showed up this weekend. I replied to that with an emphatic no, because they're doing so much to make our lives easier. I really, really appreciate all their help. I've just got my own crazies, and the demands of the situation don't really allow for any good outlets. It's a pretty short-term problem, though, and one I've weathered countless times before. I'm not going to go turning away good help just because I'm feeling a little uncomfortable.
Anyway, there was bacon on the griddle and brisket in the crockpot, so I didn't stay in hiding for too terribly long. I came out for dinner and then took sanctuary behind my laptop for the rest of the evening hours, while we watched Word World and Lie to Me. Then, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, I stayed up a little longer in the still silence and finished off Newsradio. Such a great show.
Ah. I did have one actual problem yesterday. T--'s laptop is dying. It takes forever to boot into Windows (if it does at all, before locking up), and then when it loads it gives a complaint about accessing the user profile and loads a temporary profile instead. It seems pretty clear that it's a hard drive problem -- probably from AB knocking the laptop off an end-table last week while she was watching videos -- but there's a lot of photos and T--'s work stuff on that hard drive that we're going to be incredibly frustrated to lose. And, y'know, no laptop. I don't cherish the idea of sharing mine with T-- and AB. We all have very different ideas about what a computer should be doing, and how it should be handled.
So, y'know, that's going to be a mess. Probably an expensive one, but sometimes we're saved by hand-me-downs and free IT services from friends we're all-too-happy to take advantage of. So I'll let you know how that turns out.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
On Monday night, he proved me a liar. Bigtime.
So, as a result, I woke up late yesterday and I was dragging. I went in to work anyway, and stumbled through the morning's responsibilities, and then spent my lunch break grading papers, and then darted out to OC for my fourth week of class. I will, of course, tell that tale elsewhere.
I had several students hang around after class to talk with me, as I'll mention in my recap. That was awesome, in the sense of making a connection with my students, but it was draining in the sense described in detail in last week's link, Caring for Your Introvert. On top of that, everyone I interacted with at work all day wanted to talk about the baby (and, frankly, I did too...but it's still tiring). Then I got home to a full house -- T--, two babies, and two in-laws.
It's nothing but whining about blessings, but all that interaction got to me yesterday. After three weeks of getting crippled before my classes by anxiety -- for days on end -- I managed to get away with fewer than three hours of anxiety problems this week, and they could be gone altogether by the next time we meet for class. But my night was still shot just from interaction exhaustion.
T-- let me hold Alexander as soon as I got home, and I took him to the couch and AB came running up to see him, and I asked her all about her day. At the same time, T--'s mom and dad got home from some shopping they asked me all about my day, and it was all perfectly nice but for some reason I just wanted to cry.
So I handed the baby off to his Papa, and then when no one was looking I slipped off to the bedroom to hide in the dark.
Karla and John naturally picked up that something was wrong, and they know me well enough that they were able to guess what, and they said they'd be willing to head home early if I needed a little alone time before my family showed up this weekend. I replied to that with an emphatic no, because they're doing so much to make our lives easier. I really, really appreciate all their help. I've just got my own crazies, and the demands of the situation don't really allow for any good outlets. It's a pretty short-term problem, though, and one I've weathered countless times before. I'm not going to go turning away good help just because I'm feeling a little uncomfortable.
Anyway, there was bacon on the griddle and brisket in the crockpot, so I didn't stay in hiding for too terribly long. I came out for dinner and then took sanctuary behind my laptop for the rest of the evening hours, while we watched Word World and Lie to Me. Then, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, I stayed up a little longer in the still silence and finished off Newsradio. Such a great show.
Ah. I did have one actual problem yesterday. T--'s laptop is dying. It takes forever to boot into Windows (if it does at all, before locking up), and then when it loads it gives a complaint about accessing the user profile and loads a temporary profile instead. It seems pretty clear that it's a hard drive problem -- probably from AB knocking the laptop off an end-table last week while she was watching videos -- but there's a lot of photos and T--'s work stuff on that hard drive that we're going to be incredibly frustrated to lose. And, y'know, no laptop. I don't cherish the idea of sharing mine with T-- and AB. We all have very different ideas about what a computer should be doing, and how it should be handled.
So, y'know, that's going to be a mess. Probably an expensive one, but sometimes we're saved by hand-me-downs and free IT services from friends we're all-too-happy to take advantage of. So I'll let you know how that turns out.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The OC (Week 4)
This post is part of an ongoing series.
Technical Difficulties
I had 13 of my 16 students at 1:00. I waited a couple minutes and a couple more showed up, but the rest were in full chatterbox mode by then. I'd spent the last ten minutes at the podium, getting my visual aids ready for the day's discussion, but I figured if I waited too long, things would get out of hand.
So around 1:02 I stepped to the center of the room and said harshly, "Okay, okay, okay! Enough chit chat. It's time to stop gossiping and talking about your other classes, and focus on this class! I'm going to start the lecture now."
Then I stepped behind my laptop, and plugged in the cable to project my monitor onto the overhead. Nothing happened. I had my visuals all ready, but the screen kept displaying a blank screen. Some wiseguy in the back row said, "He probably just wants to show us pictures of his baby." I unplugged it and plugged it back in. I punched buttons.
Finally I sighed and said, "Well, yes, that was the whole joke. But this thing won't work."
Just as I said it, half the class (I'll let you guess which half) went, "Awwwwww!'
My first visual aid was this:
Someone immediately said, "Wow, she was born big."
I smiled, let the laughter die down, and said, "This is a picture of my beautiful, happy family about a week ago. I call it 'Before.'" Then I showed a couple I'd tacked together in Photoshop.
And I said, "And here's a picture of my beautiful but oh-so-tired family now." And then I said, "Of course, you can see the baby in both those pictures, but in case that's not quite enough....
Schedule Changes
I've had three real classes so far (not counting day one, when we just went over the syllabus and the class schedule), and in each of those classes I've had to dedicate some portion of the lecture to changes to the class schedule. This week, no surprise, was no different.
I moved straight from the baby photos to business. I pulled up the revised syllabus, and explained that I had rearranged the schedule so I could talk to them about their Semester Project today and then give them a work period next week. In the process, we lost the Promotional Brochure (something Gail had already cut in between the time I took the class and the last time she taught it, but I'd added it back in). Now, instead, I think I'm going to use it as an in-class activity on the day we talk about templates.
Anyway, their job is now to come up with a proposal for their Semester Project, and then once that's done we'll move on to the Employment Packet.
Subject Matter Experts
From there, I transitioned (weakly) (deliberately) to a mini-lecture on the topic of Subject Matter Experts -- a phrase (I explained) that they would encounter much in the business world. It's a vague sort of title, but refers to the person you'd go to for clarification on any given topic. Here at the FAA, I explained, we all work on radars, but if I need to talk to somebody about the antenna sail for the ARSR-3, there's one engineer I'd go to. He's the expert on that subject matter. I'd go to someone else if I needed information on the air conditioner, and someone else still for details on the speed controller.
And I explained that there's not really a scale to these things. For any given topic, someone either is a Subject Matter Expert, or he's not. The interesting thing about Technical Writers, though, is that they almost always start out not, and end up Subject Matter Experts. It's just part of the job.
By way of illustration, I pointed out some specific topics for which I've gone through that process:
I took a moment to point out some of the distinctions -- how some of those might look like they overlap, but there's a big difference between understanding how GPS satellites and receivers know where you are, and understanding how to operate the menus and screens of a particular type of GPS receiver.
I had another, similar list for my work at the FAA (8 items), and then listed three topics on which I've become a Subject Matter Expert in my free time: Novel-writing, Python programming for XBMC (I just rattled off that phrase and then held up a finger and said, "More on that later"), and Technical Writing (for this class).
Learn by Teaching
I said I knew they'd all heard, somewhere along the way, that teaching a topic is the best way to learn about it. I've certainly experienced that in preparing this class. I pulled up one of their weekly document-writing tutorials on the overhead and pointed it out as an example. I said that my group at work has to prepare a specific type of memo for every single project we release (the Safety Risk Management Decision Memo), and that we deal with lots of memos regularly. So when I wrote up my tutorial "How to Write Memos and Emails," I shared it with my boss -- Irene, our Documentation Team Lead -- and asked her for feedback, knowing she was familiar with the topic.
She responded to say she was amazed how much she learned about memos from it, even though she deals with them everyday. I stressed her job title when relaying that to the students, and they were suitably impressed with the comment.
Python Programming for XBMC
As a better example, I told them about Python Programming for XBMC. I had to start out by explaining to them what XBMC was, although I had one student raise his hand to interject that his XBox had it on there. Anyway, I have a pretty technical group, so it didn't take much to explain what XBMC was.
So then I told them how I'd first installed XBMC wanting to use it to stream media to my TV, but I was excited to learn it could run Python scripts -- simple add-ons written in a programming language I was already learning. I went online to find out how to do that, and everyone pointed me to this one resource -- a tutorial written by a French Canadian (that got a laugh), with no formatting whatsoever, and a lame attempt at humor (that got a laugh). So, in order to learn what I needed to know, I had to take this tutorial and translate it from English into English. (That got a big laugh.)
And I was only six months out from taking my own Technical Writing class at the time, so I decided that while I was doing the mental conversion anyway, I might as well fix the document for everyone else. And I had it up on the overhead so I was able to point out the specific formatting elements I'd used that I had already taught them in class (just last week).
Then I stepped away, and said, "I know it's a pretty niche community, but if you go to Google and search for 'XBMC Python,' you'll get my website." That got some impressed nods. "Because of this document," I explained. "It's not great technical writing...it's not even accurate anymore, because I haven't touched it in six years. But it's still the number-one-recommended, go-to source for information on this topic. Because of the research I did."
That's a certain kind of celebrity. It's not a huge deal and (I pointed out) it's not the biggest reward for doing this. The big reward is that, in the process of fixing that document, I learned what I wanted to know. I learned how to do everything with XBMC Python programming that I wanted to know.
Because I had to fully understand the material the original author was using, in order to translate it correctly -- from English to English (that got a laugh again). Not only that, but when I took the time to format it properly, to set the information in a structured framework, it became clear what was missing, what was underrepresented, what was excess. I was able to see what extra information was needed, and research that on my own.
The NMEA Bible
Then I brought up a third example -- the "nautical vessel data network" mentioned in my list of topics above. When I was working at Lowrance, big news came down from the head honcho that all of our products were going to become NMEA 2000 compatible. (It's pronounced "nee-muh," and don't ask me to defend that. Actually, I said the same to the class and followed up with, "The pronunciation was picked by boat people," no real emphasis, and it got a laugh.) But, yeah, our products were going to be NMEA 2000 compatible, and we needed a blurb in the front of each of our manuals expressing that and pointing the customer toward the sales department for more information.
We didn't have the first clue how to word that, though, because the whole phrase was nonsense to us (the tech writers). Turns out NMEA 2000 was a hardware standard that created an information bus for boats. I asked what that meant and I was told it was "like a LAN for a boat." Except that it had nothing to do with computers. After much investigation, I learned that it was used to connect sensors and monitors on a boat, so you could get a GPS signal at the front of the boat and share it to GPS monitors in three different places, or copy fish echoes from one transducer to multiple depthfinders -- that sort of thing.
But it was more complicated than that, because the network cable could be split and coupled and daisychained and all manner of nonsense, and you had to have exactly the right cable for each device that you wanted to attach for each possible configuration of what you had on your boat.
So I went to the Subject Matter Expert -- the one engineer in our company who really understood NMEA 2000 -- and asked him to explain it briefly so we could come up with this one-paragraph blurb.
Three hours later we left his office so we could move to a conference room with a whiteboard. Three weeks later, I finally understood it well enough to write that one paragraph.
But, while I was at it, I wrote down everything he'd explained to me in a way that I could still comprehend six months after our conversations. I went ahead and put it into our manual format, because that was what I was familiar with. When I was done, it came to around eight to ten pages, all formatted and illustrated, and it explained exactly what a NMEA 2000 network was, and how to configure one. I saved a copy on my desktop, printed off a copy for Mark, and went on with my life.
Then six months later there was a big meeting going on, that involved all the senior engineers and the CEO of the company, and they were arguing about something in design and two of our senior engineers couldn't agree on exactly how it was supposed to work, so somebody said, "Wait. Where's the NMEA Bible?"
And somebody else pulled out a copy of my pamphlet. The NMEA Bible. That had become the in-house nickname for my personal cheat sheet. The engineers -- the people who were designing these systems every day for years -- were going to my little pamphlet for reference.
And that was my point. I started out as someone who knew nothing about the system, and in the process of filling out my document, I became the reference. I took the information that one person had, and translated it from English to English, and made it available to all the people who needed it. That's what Technical Writing does.
The Semester Project
From there, I moved on to discuss their Semester Project. After all, I said, the purpose of the project was to take them through the same process I'd been through in each of those cases, and turn them into Subject Matter Experts through the process of documentation. I'd asked them last week (after the baby was born) to scrap their earlier assignment and instead read over a brief description of the Semester Project, and come to class with three possible topics that they could work on.
So after my mini-lecture, I said, "How many of you read the assignment?" and got all hands. Then, "How many of you understood it?" and got significantly fewer. "How many of you had trouble coming up with three topics?" got pretty much everyone. I paused a moment and said, "How many of you had trouble coming up with one?" That got more than I was hoping for.
Still, it was anticipated. I moved to the center of the room, and said, "The goal of this project is for you to make something of real-world use. That's actually a requirement. So, to make that possible, I have to leave it a little bit vague. You don't have a solid minimum or maximum word count, you don't have a specific document type (although I want some sort of long-form document). You don't even have a specified audience. You have to find an audience and then convince me they're legitimate."
I nodded, and said, "I understand all that. And I understand that's not fair to you. The solution is for you to talk with me. Ask questions when you're unsure, schedule an appointment if you need more time, email me, call me. Whatever. I'm deliberately leaving room in the schedule for you to request clarification, because you're going to need it. And that's what the rest of today is."
Q and A
That was at 1:40. Frankly, I'd expected 1:30. Still, they could have gotten up and walked out, but I guess there was enough uncertainty that I had them scared. I said, "So...any questions?"
Five hands went up, and I turned to the first girl on my right. She said, "Umm...what are we supposed to do?" That was not a positive start. Before I could formulate an answer, she said, "I mean, what are we supposed to write about? I get the feeling it's supposed to be technical, but I am so not a technical person."
So I asked her, "What are you interested in?"
"Books," she said, right away, and I froze. My mind started working frantically, trying to come up with something associated with books that could have a real client, and really match the framework of the document. Before I came up with anything remotely close, she said, "Oh, and baking."
And I lit up at that. So much easier, because baking is a technical process. As soon as she said it, I thought cookbook. After a little discussion, I suggested she could find a ladies' group for an area church that wanted to put together a cookbook for a fundraiser. That's a pretty common thing. Her client could be the woman organizing the effort, her research could be the gathering of recipes (and any follow-up necessary to translate scribbled notecards into useable information). She'd have less writing to do than some other possible projects, but she'd have a whole lot more formatting than some projects would require.
She was perfectly happy with that. She loved the idea, and it gave the rest of the class some idea of what I was looking for.
Musicians
Another girl in the back corner raised her hand to ask, "Can it be something for a musician?" I must have looked pretty blank at the question, because she clarified before I could ask her to. "I mean, like maybe a musician could use some sort of promotional material or something...."
I figured she was talking about a classmate or a roommate, some music major looking to strike it big, but that didn't worry me. I ducked my head and said, "The problem you're going to run into there is that promotional material is usually shorter, bite-sized. I want something that will generate a single, long-form document. That said," and I addressed this more generally to the class, "you can always ask what they actually need. Because everyone has some technical writing that they need done, and there's a chance you'll find something that will work. I assume you can talk to...him?"
She shrugged, a little uncomfortable, and said, "Well...it's Hanson. So I thought maybe--"
She didn't get to finish her comment because someone across the room shouted, "You know Hanson? Like, Hanson?"
She nodded and said, "I grew up with them."
(They're a boy band from five to ten years ago who you may remember as the perpetrators of "Mmm Bop." They're also Tulsa natives if I remember right, so there's no huge surprise there. Still, she got a moment of celebrity there in the class.)
I said, "I can't give you an A for cool factor alone, but I'd be interested to see what you could come up with for them."
Plenty of Need
One of the grading criteria for the project, though, is that it meets a real need. I could tell that was bothering some of them, so I went back to that point. I said, "If you're having trouble coming up with something to work on, find someone who could be a client and just ask them what they need. There's always work to be done, and nobody wants to do it. Talk to your boss, if you have one. Talk to your church secretary."
The problem with talking to your church secretary, I said, is that she's going to have a list eighty items long of things she needs done, and most of them aren't going to fit the shape of this semester's project. Then I hesitated as a thought struck me, and I said ruefully, "Well, no, the real problem of talking to your church secretary is that once you do -- especially if you do a good job -- she is never going to stop talking to you." That got a little chuckle, and I shrugged and said, "And...well, that's your service to God." That got a big laugh.
For those who just can't come up with anything -- or those who want to do something genuinely helpful -- I pointed out that I have some extra options. This class has been doing this assignment for so long, that most of the churches and charitable organizations in town know about it. As a result, the school pretty regularly gets requests for student assistance with documentation projects, and those are now getting passed along to me. I let the students know about that, but I didn't push it too hard. It's enough of a challenge to put together a big document, I would prefer for them to work on topics they're already interested in.
Although, to the girl who asked about promotional material for a musician (before she named the band), I did point out that once they'd finished this class, all of the students would be qualified and able to prepare and clean up documents -- promotional material, resumes, business letters, whatever -- even when it wasn't for a class assignment. They could do it as a favor, or as a hobby (like I did with the XBMC Python tutorial).
Hangers On
There were a few more questions, mostly looking for clarification on the project -- and a lot of them sort of unanswerable without specifics. I stressed again and again the need for them to maintain a line of communication with me, and I've already gotten a couple of emails from them since class on the topic.
Still, the questions trailed off around 2:00, and I dismissed them then. While they were packing up their stuff I distributed their graded memos from last week, and then went and sat down at my desk again, so I could address any last-minute discussion or help anyone who wanted to ask something face-to-face.
Turned out, there were a lot of them. Out of a class of fourteen (two never did show up), I had six or seven linger. Each of them had at least one question for me, but for the most part they stuck around and chatted even after their questions were answered. That caught me off-guard. I mentioned back in Week One that when I was panicking over time passing too quickly, all the veteran teachers I spoke with said that would get a lot easier once I had the students actually talking to me. They also all said that would probably happen sometime in November. I figured that was sort of an exaggeration, but I didn't expect to be hosting a salon by the end of the fourth week.
Of those six or seven that hung around after 2:00, four of them were still there at 2:30 when my real life demands forced me to leave. That was pretty cool.
Real Progress
While I was packing up, one of those four (who had already chosen his own project topic), asked in idle curiosity, "What are some of the coolest projects people have done before?"
And I hesitated (mind racing again), trying to decide whether to admit to my inexperience. I decided relatively quickly, shrugged, and said, "Actually, this is the first time I've taught the class, so I couldn't tell you."
His eyes shot wide, and he said, "Oh really?" Genuine surprise. That caught me off-guard.
I can only really think of one other time in my life when two words meant so much to me. I said out loud, "Yay!" Four weeks ago I was standing in front of them, paralyzed with fear, and today they're telling me I'm unrecognizable from a real professor. I call that real progress.
More next week.
Technical Difficulties
I had 13 of my 16 students at 1:00. I waited a couple minutes and a couple more showed up, but the rest were in full chatterbox mode by then. I'd spent the last ten minutes at the podium, getting my visual aids ready for the day's discussion, but I figured if I waited too long, things would get out of hand.
So around 1:02 I stepped to the center of the room and said harshly, "Okay, okay, okay! Enough chit chat. It's time to stop gossiping and talking about your other classes, and focus on this class! I'm going to start the lecture now."
Then I stepped behind my laptop, and plugged in the cable to project my monitor onto the overhead. Nothing happened. I had my visuals all ready, but the screen kept displaying a blank screen. Some wiseguy in the back row said, "He probably just wants to show us pictures of his baby." I unplugged it and plugged it back in. I punched buttons.
Finally I sighed and said, "Well, yes, that was the whole joke. But this thing won't work."
Just as I said it, half the class (I'll let you guess which half) went, "Awwwwww!'
My first visual aid was this:
Someone immediately said, "Wow, she was born big."
I smiled, let the laughter die down, and said, "This is a picture of my beautiful, happy family about a week ago. I call it 'Before.'" Then I showed a couple I'd tacked together in Photoshop.
And I said, "And here's a picture of my beautiful but oh-so-tired family now." And then I said, "Of course, you can see the baby in both those pictures, but in case that's not quite enough....
Schedule Changes
I've had three real classes so far (not counting day one, when we just went over the syllabus and the class schedule), and in each of those classes I've had to dedicate some portion of the lecture to changes to the class schedule. This week, no surprise, was no different.
I moved straight from the baby photos to business. I pulled up the revised syllabus, and explained that I had rearranged the schedule so I could talk to them about their Semester Project today and then give them a work period next week. In the process, we lost the Promotional Brochure (something Gail had already cut in between the time I took the class and the last time she taught it, but I'd added it back in). Now, instead, I think I'm going to use it as an in-class activity on the day we talk about templates.
Anyway, their job is now to come up with a proposal for their Semester Project, and then once that's done we'll move on to the Employment Packet.
Subject Matter Experts
From there, I transitioned (weakly) (deliberately) to a mini-lecture on the topic of Subject Matter Experts -- a phrase (I explained) that they would encounter much in the business world. It's a vague sort of title, but refers to the person you'd go to for clarification on any given topic. Here at the FAA, I explained, we all work on radars, but if I need to talk to somebody about the antenna sail for the ARSR-3, there's one engineer I'd go to. He's the expert on that subject matter. I'd go to someone else if I needed information on the air conditioner, and someone else still for details on the speed controller.
And I explained that there's not really a scale to these things. For any given topic, someone either is a Subject Matter Expert, or he's not. The interesting thing about Technical Writers, though, is that they almost always start out not, and end up Subject Matter Experts. It's just part of the job.
By way of illustration, I pointed out some specific topics for which I've gone through that process:
- Industrial depthfinders
- Commercial fishfinders
- All manner of nautical and aviation sensors and gauges
- GPS satnav (straight-line navigation)
- Hiking and hunting personal GPS receivers
- Nautical GPS receivers
- Aviation GPS receivers
- Nautical vessel data networks (more on that later)
- Turn-by-turn navigation (driving directions)
- Automotive GPS receivers
- Automotive mp3 players (and audio interfaces)
I took a moment to point out some of the distinctions -- how some of those might look like they overlap, but there's a big difference between understanding how GPS satellites and receivers know where you are, and understanding how to operate the menus and screens of a particular type of GPS receiver.
I had another, similar list for my work at the FAA (8 items), and then listed three topics on which I've become a Subject Matter Expert in my free time: Novel-writing, Python programming for XBMC (I just rattled off that phrase and then held up a finger and said, "More on that later"), and Technical Writing (for this class).
Learn by Teaching
I said I knew they'd all heard, somewhere along the way, that teaching a topic is the best way to learn about it. I've certainly experienced that in preparing this class. I pulled up one of their weekly document-writing tutorials on the overhead and pointed it out as an example. I said that my group at work has to prepare a specific type of memo for every single project we release (the Safety Risk Management Decision Memo), and that we deal with lots of memos regularly. So when I wrote up my tutorial "How to Write Memos and Emails," I shared it with my boss -- Irene, our Documentation Team Lead -- and asked her for feedback, knowing she was familiar with the topic.
She responded to say she was amazed how much she learned about memos from it, even though she deals with them everyday. I stressed her job title when relaying that to the students, and they were suitably impressed with the comment.
Python Programming for XBMC
As a better example, I told them about Python Programming for XBMC. I had to start out by explaining to them what XBMC was, although I had one student raise his hand to interject that his XBox had it on there. Anyway, I have a pretty technical group, so it didn't take much to explain what XBMC was.
So then I told them how I'd first installed XBMC wanting to use it to stream media to my TV, but I was excited to learn it could run Python scripts -- simple add-ons written in a programming language I was already learning. I went online to find out how to do that, and everyone pointed me to this one resource -- a tutorial written by a French Canadian (that got a laugh), with no formatting whatsoever, and a lame attempt at humor (that got a laugh). So, in order to learn what I needed to know, I had to take this tutorial and translate it from English into English. (That got a big laugh.)
And I was only six months out from taking my own Technical Writing class at the time, so I decided that while I was doing the mental conversion anyway, I might as well fix the document for everyone else. And I had it up on the overhead so I was able to point out the specific formatting elements I'd used that I had already taught them in class (just last week).
Then I stepped away, and said, "I know it's a pretty niche community, but if you go to Google and search for 'XBMC Python,' you'll get my website." That got some impressed nods. "Because of this document," I explained. "It's not great technical writing...it's not even accurate anymore, because I haven't touched it in six years. But it's still the number-one-recommended, go-to source for information on this topic. Because of the research I did."
That's a certain kind of celebrity. It's not a huge deal and (I pointed out) it's not the biggest reward for doing this. The big reward is that, in the process of fixing that document, I learned what I wanted to know. I learned how to do everything with XBMC Python programming that I wanted to know.
Because I had to fully understand the material the original author was using, in order to translate it correctly -- from English to English (that got a laugh again). Not only that, but when I took the time to format it properly, to set the information in a structured framework, it became clear what was missing, what was underrepresented, what was excess. I was able to see what extra information was needed, and research that on my own.
The NMEA Bible
Then I brought up a third example -- the "nautical vessel data network" mentioned in my list of topics above. When I was working at Lowrance, big news came down from the head honcho that all of our products were going to become NMEA 2000 compatible. (It's pronounced "nee-muh," and don't ask me to defend that. Actually, I said the same to the class and followed up with, "The pronunciation was picked by boat people," no real emphasis, and it got a laugh.) But, yeah, our products were going to be NMEA 2000 compatible, and we needed a blurb in the front of each of our manuals expressing that and pointing the customer toward the sales department for more information.
We didn't have the first clue how to word that, though, because the whole phrase was nonsense to us (the tech writers). Turns out NMEA 2000 was a hardware standard that created an information bus for boats. I asked what that meant and I was told it was "like a LAN for a boat." Except that it had nothing to do with computers. After much investigation, I learned that it was used to connect sensors and monitors on a boat, so you could get a GPS signal at the front of the boat and share it to GPS monitors in three different places, or copy fish echoes from one transducer to multiple depthfinders -- that sort of thing.
But it was more complicated than that, because the network cable could be split and coupled and daisychained and all manner of nonsense, and you had to have exactly the right cable for each device that you wanted to attach for each possible configuration of what you had on your boat.
So I went to the Subject Matter Expert -- the one engineer in our company who really understood NMEA 2000 -- and asked him to explain it briefly so we could come up with this one-paragraph blurb.
Three hours later we left his office so we could move to a conference room with a whiteboard. Three weeks later, I finally understood it well enough to write that one paragraph.
But, while I was at it, I wrote down everything he'd explained to me in a way that I could still comprehend six months after our conversations. I went ahead and put it into our manual format, because that was what I was familiar with. When I was done, it came to around eight to ten pages, all formatted and illustrated, and it explained exactly what a NMEA 2000 network was, and how to configure one. I saved a copy on my desktop, printed off a copy for Mark, and went on with my life.
Then six months later there was a big meeting going on, that involved all the senior engineers and the CEO of the company, and they were arguing about something in design and two of our senior engineers couldn't agree on exactly how it was supposed to work, so somebody said, "Wait. Where's the NMEA Bible?"
And somebody else pulled out a copy of my pamphlet. The NMEA Bible. That had become the in-house nickname for my personal cheat sheet. The engineers -- the people who were designing these systems every day for years -- were going to my little pamphlet for reference.
And that was my point. I started out as someone who knew nothing about the system, and in the process of filling out my document, I became the reference. I took the information that one person had, and translated it from English to English, and made it available to all the people who needed it. That's what Technical Writing does.
The Semester Project
From there, I moved on to discuss their Semester Project. After all, I said, the purpose of the project was to take them through the same process I'd been through in each of those cases, and turn them into Subject Matter Experts through the process of documentation. I'd asked them last week (after the baby was born) to scrap their earlier assignment and instead read over a brief description of the Semester Project, and come to class with three possible topics that they could work on.
So after my mini-lecture, I said, "How many of you read the assignment?" and got all hands. Then, "How many of you understood it?" and got significantly fewer. "How many of you had trouble coming up with three topics?" got pretty much everyone. I paused a moment and said, "How many of you had trouble coming up with one?" That got more than I was hoping for.
Still, it was anticipated. I moved to the center of the room, and said, "The goal of this project is for you to make something of real-world use. That's actually a requirement. So, to make that possible, I have to leave it a little bit vague. You don't have a solid minimum or maximum word count, you don't have a specific document type (although I want some sort of long-form document). You don't even have a specified audience. You have to find an audience and then convince me they're legitimate."
I nodded, and said, "I understand all that. And I understand that's not fair to you. The solution is for you to talk with me. Ask questions when you're unsure, schedule an appointment if you need more time, email me, call me. Whatever. I'm deliberately leaving room in the schedule for you to request clarification, because you're going to need it. And that's what the rest of today is."
Q and A
That was at 1:40. Frankly, I'd expected 1:30. Still, they could have gotten up and walked out, but I guess there was enough uncertainty that I had them scared. I said, "So...any questions?"
Five hands went up, and I turned to the first girl on my right. She said, "Umm...what are we supposed to do?" That was not a positive start. Before I could formulate an answer, she said, "I mean, what are we supposed to write about? I get the feeling it's supposed to be technical, but I am so not a technical person."
So I asked her, "What are you interested in?"
"Books," she said, right away, and I froze. My mind started working frantically, trying to come up with something associated with books that could have a real client, and really match the framework of the document. Before I came up with anything remotely close, she said, "Oh, and baking."
And I lit up at that. So much easier, because baking is a technical process. As soon as she said it, I thought cookbook. After a little discussion, I suggested she could find a ladies' group for an area church that wanted to put together a cookbook for a fundraiser. That's a pretty common thing. Her client could be the woman organizing the effort, her research could be the gathering of recipes (and any follow-up necessary to translate scribbled notecards into useable information). She'd have less writing to do than some other possible projects, but she'd have a whole lot more formatting than some projects would require.
She was perfectly happy with that. She loved the idea, and it gave the rest of the class some idea of what I was looking for.
Musicians
Another girl in the back corner raised her hand to ask, "Can it be something for a musician?" I must have looked pretty blank at the question, because she clarified before I could ask her to. "I mean, like maybe a musician could use some sort of promotional material or something...."
I figured she was talking about a classmate or a roommate, some music major looking to strike it big, but that didn't worry me. I ducked my head and said, "The problem you're going to run into there is that promotional material is usually shorter, bite-sized. I want something that will generate a single, long-form document. That said," and I addressed this more generally to the class, "you can always ask what they actually need. Because everyone has some technical writing that they need done, and there's a chance you'll find something that will work. I assume you can talk to...him?"
She shrugged, a little uncomfortable, and said, "Well...it's Hanson. So I thought maybe--"
She didn't get to finish her comment because someone across the room shouted, "You know Hanson? Like, Hanson?"
She nodded and said, "I grew up with them."
(They're a boy band from five to ten years ago who you may remember as the perpetrators of "Mmm Bop." They're also Tulsa natives if I remember right, so there's no huge surprise there. Still, she got a moment of celebrity there in the class.)
I said, "I can't give you an A for cool factor alone, but I'd be interested to see what you could come up with for them."
Plenty of Need
One of the grading criteria for the project, though, is that it meets a real need. I could tell that was bothering some of them, so I went back to that point. I said, "If you're having trouble coming up with something to work on, find someone who could be a client and just ask them what they need. There's always work to be done, and nobody wants to do it. Talk to your boss, if you have one. Talk to your church secretary."
The problem with talking to your church secretary, I said, is that she's going to have a list eighty items long of things she needs done, and most of them aren't going to fit the shape of this semester's project. Then I hesitated as a thought struck me, and I said ruefully, "Well, no, the real problem of talking to your church secretary is that once you do -- especially if you do a good job -- she is never going to stop talking to you." That got a little chuckle, and I shrugged and said, "And...well, that's your service to God." That got a big laugh.
For those who just can't come up with anything -- or those who want to do something genuinely helpful -- I pointed out that I have some extra options. This class has been doing this assignment for so long, that most of the churches and charitable organizations in town know about it. As a result, the school pretty regularly gets requests for student assistance with documentation projects, and those are now getting passed along to me. I let the students know about that, but I didn't push it too hard. It's enough of a challenge to put together a big document, I would prefer for them to work on topics they're already interested in.
Although, to the girl who asked about promotional material for a musician (before she named the band), I did point out that once they'd finished this class, all of the students would be qualified and able to prepare and clean up documents -- promotional material, resumes, business letters, whatever -- even when it wasn't for a class assignment. They could do it as a favor, or as a hobby (like I did with the XBMC Python tutorial).
Hangers On
There were a few more questions, mostly looking for clarification on the project -- and a lot of them sort of unanswerable without specifics. I stressed again and again the need for them to maintain a line of communication with me, and I've already gotten a couple of emails from them since class on the topic.
Still, the questions trailed off around 2:00, and I dismissed them then. While they were packing up their stuff I distributed their graded memos from last week, and then went and sat down at my desk again, so I could address any last-minute discussion or help anyone who wanted to ask something face-to-face.
Turned out, there were a lot of them. Out of a class of fourteen (two never did show up), I had six or seven linger. Each of them had at least one question for me, but for the most part they stuck around and chatted even after their questions were answered. That caught me off-guard. I mentioned back in Week One that when I was panicking over time passing too quickly, all the veteran teachers I spoke with said that would get a lot easier once I had the students actually talking to me. They also all said that would probably happen sometime in November. I figured that was sort of an exaggeration, but I didn't expect to be hosting a salon by the end of the fourth week.
Of those six or seven that hung around after 2:00, four of them were still there at 2:30 when my real life demands forced me to leave. That was pretty cool.
Real Progress
While I was packing up, one of those four (who had already chosen his own project topic), asked in idle curiosity, "What are some of the coolest projects people have done before?"
And I hesitated (mind racing again), trying to decide whether to admit to my inexperience. I decided relatively quickly, shrugged, and said, "Actually, this is the first time I've taught the class, so I couldn't tell you."
His eyes shot wide, and he said, "Oh really?" Genuine surprise. That caught me off-guard.
I can only really think of one other time in my life when two words meant so much to me. I said out loud, "Yay!" Four weeks ago I was standing in front of them, paralyzed with fear, and today they're telling me I'm unrecognizable from a real professor. I call that real progress.
More next week.
Annabelle
Two short stories. Here's the first.
Sunday night, as kickoff time for the (highly disappointing) Cowboys game approached, T--'s mom was trying to get AB psyched up for the game. (She needn't have bothered -- as soon as the pregame footage started and they showed a quick pan past Romo, AB screamed at the top of her lungs, in sheer excitement, "That's Tony!") Anyway, Karla offered to teach AB a football cheer. AB accepted the offer with bemused enthusiasm.And here's the second.
So Karla said, with appropriate vigor, "Move to the left! Move to the right! Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!"
AB cocked her head to the side for a moment, thinking, then brightened and said, "You wanna fight me?"
It caught us off-guard, but it shouldn't have. She'd been saying that all weekend to her Papa. Seemingly every time he stood up she'd back to the far end of the room (right in front of the TV), stand facing him, stomp each of her feet once, and say, "Hey Papa! You wanna fight? I'm gonna knock you down!" It was entirely adorable.
She did that again Monday morning while I was getting ready for work, and I looked at her and said, "Annabelle, where did you learn about knocking people down? Was that on Word World or Dinosaur Train?" Those are two of her favorite shows, and most of the time when she comes up with something outlandish, it's something she picked up from one of her shows (like this weird interest in eating celery).
Karla imagined that AB was about to lose some of her TV privileges, so she said ominously, "You better think carefully before you answer that question."
But AB just shook her head, confused by the question. I thought about it some more as I continued getting ready, then at some point I stepped into the living room, my eyes fell on my laptop, and I said, "Oh."
See...AB likes to watch me play WoW. It's a game where I spend hours at a time slaughtering people and monsters of all shapes and sizes -- many of them recognizable. There are these undead spider monsters that AB always recognizes as needing an exterminating, so she cheers when I knock them down. She gets a little frustrated when she catches me knocking down the polar bears, though. She likes polar bears.
That's the expression we use when she's watching, though. When she asks why I'm running quests, I tell her I'm doing a favor for that guy over there. When she asks what I'm doing now, I tell her these monsters scared somebody so I'm knocking them down so they'll go away. We fight, I knock them down, and that's pretty much the whole game.
So she adopted that. She wanted to play it in real life with her Papa. Once I knew what she was thinking of, I agreed to play it with her for a little while. We fought, and I knocked her down a time or two. Then she said, "Okay, now I get to knock you down." So we fought again, I took a dive, and she jumped up, hands high in the air, and shouted, "I did it! I did it! I won!" Three or four takedowns later, she was still just as exuberant about it.
Then I took a moment to talk with her about the difference between pretend fighting, and expressed that it's only okay to knock people down when they're willing participants. I think she got it. I've never seen her actually pick a fight, just ask her Papa to play in one. Still, she's got to be careful who she issues that challenge to, because it's not at all meek. "Hey, you wanna fight? I'm gonna knock you down!"
We had a long night last night, with baby Alexander waking up several times and screaming before, during, and after his feeding. Naturally T-- caught the worst of that, but I didn't get a lot of sleep, either. At one point (around 2:30), T-- was feeding him when AB started yelling from the other room, so I went and took care of her before crawling miserably back into bed.
Then at 7:00 the alarm went off, unconcerned with our pathetic night's sleep, so I crawled miserably out of bed and got ready for work. Before I left, though, T-- was feeding Alexander again, and we heard AB yelling from her room.
She's got a childproof lock on her bedroom door so she can't get out in the morning. These days she doesn't even try -- she just sits in the middle of her bed and yells until someone comes and gets her. I knew T-- would be tied up for a while, so I went to talk with AB before leaving for work.
As soon as I walked in the door she pointed to the window, where a tiny gap in the blinds gave view to the gray dawn outside, and said, "It's not dark anymore, Daddy. It's not dark anymore."
We taught her that she has to go to sleep when it's dark outside, so she takes the reverse of that as a solid, legal defense. I came and sat down on the edge of the bed with her and after a few failed attempts to convince her she was still tired, I said, "Annabelle, I know you want to get up, but there's nobody to watch you right now, so it's not safe for you to leave your room. If you want, I can turn on the light and you can play with your toys in here, or you can read some of your books, but you can't go in the other room."
That's not the first time we've had that conversation. I waited patiently for her answer, and after a moment she shook her head. "But I want to watch something on Mommy's computer."
Half of the shows she watches are on the TiVo, and the other half are free videos on the Nick Jr. website. We usually keep T--'s laptop over in one corner of the living room, and when T-- isn't using it (or we need the TV), we'll often set AB up in front of the laptop and let her watch those videos.
I let my head fall back against the wall. I was exhausted, and just didn't have the energy to fight with her. I stood up, took a step toward the bedroom door, then sank back down at the foot of her bed -- trying to decide between making my daughter scream with frustration, and being a little bit late for work.
AB looked at me there on the foot of her bed, and she pointed past me. "You need to get the brown chair."
I looked, and she has a little wooden chair that's usually over by her bedside table, where she sits when she's reading or playing tea party. I smiled and shook my head. "That's too little for me." She just looked confused.
After another moment's hesitation, I decided to just be late for work. I stood up and headed toward the bedroom door, expecting her to follow right on my heels. She didn't. She stayed in bed, but as I got out the door she yelled, all frantic, "Daddy, wait!"
I went back, and as I stepped into her room she climbed down out of bed and pushed a bunch of the toys on her table out of the way, clearing a space. Then she looked back over her shoulder at me, and said, "You have to get the brown chair first."
She wanted a space at her table, so I could bring T--'s laptop in there. She was willing to stay in her room, she just wanted to watch videos while she did it. A perfect compromise. We'd done that once before, months ago, but I'd forgotten all about it.
She's an amazing little girl.
Alexander
We need a web nickname for him. AB is AB, but really only in writing. I don't know anyone who calls her that out loud.
I think X would be legitimate, since we don't know anybody sporting an X in their names, but it needs widespread usage before it makes any sense, and I don't have the energy for a big branding campaign.
I guess we could go with X&r....
I think X would be legitimate, since we don't know anybody sporting an X in their names, but it needs widespread usage before it makes any sense, and I don't have the energy for a big branding campaign.
I guess we could go with X&r....
Journal Entry: September 22, 2009
Yesterday evening I left a rain-soaked work and headed home to find it sunny and dry. I found the womenfolk out back, watching AB play and letting Alexander get some sun (following a "mildly jaundiced" prognosis from his doctor). AB and I played kickball for a little while, then I left her in the care of her Nana and went inside to collapse on the couch. Outside is exhausting.
We had a delicious lasagna for dinner, courtesy B-- and E--, and then watched Lie to Me and Dinosaur Train and some more Lie to Me while I played WoW.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
We had a delicious lasagna for dinner, courtesy B-- and E--, and then watched Lie to Me and Dinosaur Train and some more Lie to Me while I played WoW.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Journal Entry: September 21, 2009
I've gotten a little behind. Sorry about that.
Wednesday
Last Wednesday after work we got together with D--, K-- and N--, and my sister's family at Senor Tequila up in Edmond. I'm sure I've been to one before (the name is really familiar), but I don't remember when. The food was really good, though (especially the salsa), and of course the fellowship was exceptional.
While we were there, I told a little story about two startlingly dramatic events in the lives of my students that have (in small ways) disrupted each of my last two classes. We wondered idly what would happen to disrupt my next class. We didn't come up with anything.
After dinner T-- took AB to church, and I went home to finish up some prep work for the Formatting Tutorial I needed to write for my students on Thursday. Got it outlined, got all my stuff together, and then spent the rest of the evening playing WoW.
Thursday
Thursday morning I woke up early, got ready for work, then asked T-- how she was doing before I headed out the door. Turned out, she was having a baby. So I spent a couple hours coaching her through contractions, making preparations, and alerting the internets that we were having a baby.
It turned out to be true. I've written up a detailed account of how the day went, but I feel like T-- should get some of that attention, so I've given it to her. Watch her blog for more details.
Needless to say, though, we had a busy day. Alexander Lewis Pogue was born at 12:03 PM, and we all three spent the rest of the day recovering. We had a ton of visitors Thursday afternoon and evening, and every one of them asked, "Do you need us to bring anything?" before showing up. We were well taken care of.
Just like last time, I had my laptop and WoW to get me through the long, quiet hours at the hospital. So don't feel too sorry for me. T--, of course, had a baby to serve the same purpose.
Friday
Friday morning I realized I had a bunch of unfinished work at work, so I slipped away around ten in the morning, when T-- had a sister-in-law there to help her out and friends and parents on their way. I ran home to grab a shower and get cleaned up, then headed to work. I was only there for about an hour, but I got what I needed (to work on at home), signed my timesheet, and told Irene and Laveta a little bit about the baby.
Then I grabbed some lunch at Subway, picked up 17 Again so T-- would have some entertainment for the afternoon, and headed back to the hospital. I spent some time in the afternoon writing up my account of Thursday for T-- (see above), and then some more time agonizing over how to handle my class.
I'd told T-- on Tuesday, "You have to wait at least two weeks before you have the baby." The reason for that was a particular lecture I had scheduled for Tuesday, September 24: "Technical Writers as Subject Matter Experts." The plan was to briefly lecture on the topic, then spend the rest of the class discussing their Semester Projects (which will require them to become Subject Matter Experts, but I'll discuss that more tomorrow). Anyway, I'd always intended to have a work day sometime after the baby was born, so I could skip class and they could work on their projects. That doesn't work if they don't know anything about the project yet.
So I sent out a harried email Thursday afternoon warning them to expect a change to the schedule, then I sent out a new email Friday afternoon telling them to disregard their assignment for the week and instead read over a brief overview of the Semester Project assignment, and come to class Tuesday with three possible project topics.
I'm moving the S. M. E. speech up to tomorrow, and I'll give them next Tuesday off. But, as I said, more on that tomorrow.
Friday evening was more like Thursday evening. My sister brought me Taco Bell for dinner, and John and Karla brought AB up to visit us. She'd spent twenty-four hours with her Nana and Papa, and she was sorely missing her Mommy and Daddy, so we kept her for a few hours, then I took her home at nine so we could go through her regular bedtime routine. I think that went pretty well.
And then I was back up at the hospital, and it was another night of talk shows and commercials and the gentle, soothing glow of WoW.
Saturday
Saturday morning we got up early and got ready, then cooled our heels for hours and hours. Nurses and pediatricians made their visits, approving us to leave. They brought all manner of forms for us to sign, and lectured us on all sorts of terrors that could befall our baby, and then took him away for a discreet procedure that seemed to take forever. He seems to have come through it well, though.
Then, at last, around ten our nurse came by to discharge us. Except, she said that she wanted us to hang around another forty-five minutes after his procedure to make sure everything was okay. Forty-five minutes later she dropped by to say she was sorry, but another family needed to discharge too, and the father had tickets for the OU game, and he was frantic to get out. So we gave her permission to go take care of him, and waited some more.
I spent a lot of that waiting time moving all of our possessions out to the car. It took six or seven trips, not counting the one with the baby. When I wasn't doing that, I was playing WoW while T-- watched Food TV.
Then, at last, a little before noon our nurse came by to discharge us, and actually did. We got home to the delicious smells of a fresh-baked pizza, and with many helping hands got the car unloaded much, much faster than it was loaded. Then AB helped me put some stuff away (and got tickled for her efforts), and then we finally settled down to the serious business of lunch.
In the afternoon AB went down for a nap, and I settled down to get back to my real life -- playing WoW -- and turned on the OU game around three. Unfortunately, though my TiVo claimed to have access to the game, our cable package doesn't actually include the channel it was on, so all I had was four hours of solid-black screen. In HD.
I didn't feel like leaving the house, though, so I abandoned all hope of watching the game. Instead we turned on an episode of Lie to Me. A little while later AB woke up from her nap, and then T--, AB, Karla, and John all went for a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. Alexander was forbidden from going by his pediatrician, so I had the arduous task of watching him sleep while I played WoW. He was delightful.
Karla made us dinner, and we spent the evening watching TV and (me) playing WoW. The only difference from last weekend was the squeaky little baby in the room, and T-- complaining less. It was a pretty pleasant day.
Overnight, the baby woke up a few times for feedings, and T-- (of course) woke up with him, but the experience was radically different from our first night home with AB. Then we'd both been wide awake, all the lights on, frantically checking to make sure she was okay, any time she made the smallest noise in the night. This time T-- waited until he was actually ready to eat, fed him, then put him back to bed and went back to sleep. Most of the time she didn't even wake me up when that happened. It was, altogether, significantly less stressful.
Sunday
Even so, at pretty much everyone's recommendation, we skipped church on Sunday. John and Karla took AB, so T-- and I had a pretty quiet morning at home. Then the in-laws brought us lunch from Taco Cabana, and afterward we watched an episode of Dinosaur Train with AB before her nap. Once she was down, we switched the TV to the Vikings game, which was awesome.
Then around 4:30 we had an accidental repeat of Saturday. AB got up from her nap, then went with T-- and her parents up to the mall to do some shopping, leaving me home with the baby. I got a visit from B-- (generously bringing us a lasagna to dine on sometime this week), and called up K-- and N-- to see if they could join us for the Cowboys game at eight.
When T-- et alia got home, we had some incredible stew for dinner (beef broth, carrot, potatoes, and cubed brisket leftover from last weekend's birthday party). I had a little bit of an argument with AB over that, because she didn't want to sit in her chair -- she wanted to sit on the floor and stare at Baby Alexander. After much discussion, we reached a compromise that essentially consisted of her sitting on the floor and staring at Baby Alexander. She's a very persuasive orator.
Then we had guests, and we watched the disappointing first half of what turned out to be an even more disappointing football game. It was fun to have K-- and N-- over, though. We also made a start on a cheesecake and pumpkin pie that had come into our possession, but there is still much more work to be done on that front. So give us a call, and drop by for a visit. You won't leave disappointed.
I went to bed pretty quickly after the game was over, though, because I had work in the morning.
More on that tomorrow. Everything's going well, though. Mother and baby are both happy and healthy, and the rest of the family is ticking along nicely.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Wednesday
Last Wednesday after work we got together with D--, K-- and N--, and my sister's family at Senor Tequila up in Edmond. I'm sure I've been to one before (the name is really familiar), but I don't remember when. The food was really good, though (especially the salsa), and of course the fellowship was exceptional.
While we were there, I told a little story about two startlingly dramatic events in the lives of my students that have (in small ways) disrupted each of my last two classes. We wondered idly what would happen to disrupt my next class. We didn't come up with anything.
After dinner T-- took AB to church, and I went home to finish up some prep work for the Formatting Tutorial I needed to write for my students on Thursday. Got it outlined, got all my stuff together, and then spent the rest of the evening playing WoW.
Thursday
Thursday morning I woke up early, got ready for work, then asked T-- how she was doing before I headed out the door. Turned out, she was having a baby. So I spent a couple hours coaching her through contractions, making preparations, and alerting the internets that we were having a baby.
It turned out to be true. I've written up a detailed account of how the day went, but I feel like T-- should get some of that attention, so I've given it to her. Watch her blog for more details.
Needless to say, though, we had a busy day. Alexander Lewis Pogue was born at 12:03 PM, and we all three spent the rest of the day recovering. We had a ton of visitors Thursday afternoon and evening, and every one of them asked, "Do you need us to bring anything?" before showing up. We were well taken care of.
Just like last time, I had my laptop and WoW to get me through the long, quiet hours at the hospital. So don't feel too sorry for me. T--, of course, had a baby to serve the same purpose.
Friday
Friday morning I realized I had a bunch of unfinished work at work, so I slipped away around ten in the morning, when T-- had a sister-in-law there to help her out and friends and parents on their way. I ran home to grab a shower and get cleaned up, then headed to work. I was only there for about an hour, but I got what I needed (to work on at home), signed my timesheet, and told Irene and Laveta a little bit about the baby.
Then I grabbed some lunch at Subway, picked up 17 Again so T-- would have some entertainment for the afternoon, and headed back to the hospital. I spent some time in the afternoon writing up my account of Thursday for T-- (see above), and then some more time agonizing over how to handle my class.
I'd told T-- on Tuesday, "You have to wait at least two weeks before you have the baby." The reason for that was a particular lecture I had scheduled for Tuesday, September 24: "Technical Writers as Subject Matter Experts." The plan was to briefly lecture on the topic, then spend the rest of the class discussing their Semester Projects (which will require them to become Subject Matter Experts, but I'll discuss that more tomorrow). Anyway, I'd always intended to have a work day sometime after the baby was born, so I could skip class and they could work on their projects. That doesn't work if they don't know anything about the project yet.
So I sent out a harried email Thursday afternoon warning them to expect a change to the schedule, then I sent out a new email Friday afternoon telling them to disregard their assignment for the week and instead read over a brief overview of the Semester Project assignment, and come to class Tuesday with three possible project topics.
I'm moving the S. M. E. speech up to tomorrow, and I'll give them next Tuesday off. But, as I said, more on that tomorrow.
Friday evening was more like Thursday evening. My sister brought me Taco Bell for dinner, and John and Karla brought AB up to visit us. She'd spent twenty-four hours with her Nana and Papa, and she was sorely missing her Mommy and Daddy, so we kept her for a few hours, then I took her home at nine so we could go through her regular bedtime routine. I think that went pretty well.
And then I was back up at the hospital, and it was another night of talk shows and commercials and the gentle, soothing glow of WoW.
Saturday
Saturday morning we got up early and got ready, then cooled our heels for hours and hours. Nurses and pediatricians made their visits, approving us to leave. They brought all manner of forms for us to sign, and lectured us on all sorts of terrors that could befall our baby, and then took him away for a discreet procedure that seemed to take forever. He seems to have come through it well, though.
Then, at last, around ten our nurse came by to discharge us. Except, she said that she wanted us to hang around another forty-five minutes after his procedure to make sure everything was okay. Forty-five minutes later she dropped by to say she was sorry, but another family needed to discharge too, and the father had tickets for the OU game, and he was frantic to get out. So we gave her permission to go take care of him, and waited some more.
I spent a lot of that waiting time moving all of our possessions out to the car. It took six or seven trips, not counting the one with the baby. When I wasn't doing that, I was playing WoW while T-- watched Food TV.
Then, at last, a little before noon our nurse came by to discharge us, and actually did. We got home to the delicious smells of a fresh-baked pizza, and with many helping hands got the car unloaded much, much faster than it was loaded. Then AB helped me put some stuff away (and got tickled for her efforts), and then we finally settled down to the serious business of lunch.
In the afternoon AB went down for a nap, and I settled down to get back to my real life -- playing WoW -- and turned on the OU game around three. Unfortunately, though my TiVo claimed to have access to the game, our cable package doesn't actually include the channel it was on, so all I had was four hours of solid-black screen. In HD.
I didn't feel like leaving the house, though, so I abandoned all hope of watching the game. Instead we turned on an episode of Lie to Me. A little while later AB woke up from her nap, and then T--, AB, Karla, and John all went for a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. Alexander was forbidden from going by his pediatrician, so I had the arduous task of watching him sleep while I played WoW. He was delightful.
Karla made us dinner, and we spent the evening watching TV and (me) playing WoW. The only difference from last weekend was the squeaky little baby in the room, and T-- complaining less. It was a pretty pleasant day.
Overnight, the baby woke up a few times for feedings, and T-- (of course) woke up with him, but the experience was radically different from our first night home with AB. Then we'd both been wide awake, all the lights on, frantically checking to make sure she was okay, any time she made the smallest noise in the night. This time T-- waited until he was actually ready to eat, fed him, then put him back to bed and went back to sleep. Most of the time she didn't even wake me up when that happened. It was, altogether, significantly less stressful.
Sunday
Even so, at pretty much everyone's recommendation, we skipped church on Sunday. John and Karla took AB, so T-- and I had a pretty quiet morning at home. Then the in-laws brought us lunch from Taco Cabana, and afterward we watched an episode of Dinosaur Train with AB before her nap. Once she was down, we switched the TV to the Vikings game, which was awesome.
Then around 4:30 we had an accidental repeat of Saturday. AB got up from her nap, then went with T-- and her parents up to the mall to do some shopping, leaving me home with the baby. I got a visit from B-- (generously bringing us a lasagna to dine on sometime this week), and called up K-- and N-- to see if they could join us for the Cowboys game at eight.
When T-- et alia got home, we had some incredible stew for dinner (beef broth, carrot, potatoes, and cubed brisket leftover from last weekend's birthday party). I had a little bit of an argument with AB over that, because she didn't want to sit in her chair -- she wanted to sit on the floor and stare at Baby Alexander. After much discussion, we reached a compromise that essentially consisted of her sitting on the floor and staring at Baby Alexander. She's a very persuasive orator.
Then we had guests, and we watched the disappointing first half of what turned out to be an even more disappointing football game. It was fun to have K-- and N-- over, though. We also made a start on a cheesecake and pumpkin pie that had come into our possession, but there is still much more work to be done on that front. So give us a call, and drop by for a visit. You won't leave disappointed.
I went to bed pretty quickly after the game was over, though, because I had work in the morning.
More on that tomorrow. Everything's going well, though. Mother and baby are both happy and healthy, and the rest of the family is ticking along nicely.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
News Alert!
We are preparing to make a surprise trip to the hospital!
That means you should be preparing to do some surprise babysitting!
More later.
That means you should be preparing to do some surprise babysitting!
More later.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Caring for Your Introvert
I found this article amusing, but it probably comes across as combative and haughty. Still, there's good information in there.
Journal Entry: September 16, 2009
I tipped my hand a little bit, with yesterday's blog posts, but I wanted to get the information out. But, yeah, I had a late start on the day, came to work for a few hours, then headed to OC to teach my class. I decided to skip lunch (because I never have any appetite for hours leading up to my class), but then I got to Edmond too early so I stopped at Taco Bell for a quesadilla. How offensive could a quesadilla be?
I never got to find out. The kind folks at Taco Bell resolved my excess time problem by backing up the drive-through line long enough that I eventually bailed and headed to school, entirely unfooded.
Then, as I said yesterday, class went really well. My activity was awesome, and the students expressed that. Yay.
And after class, for the first time, I actually returned to work. I did debate whether I was actually up to it because even after a successful class I still have to deal with the physiological crash that follows any high stress episode. But, y'know, after both of my last two classes (which both left me crashing hard), T-- had me babysit AB while she went grocery shopping. And I survived that somehow. Going back to work, by comparison, was restful.
So I put in a few more hours, got home around six, and T-- made us street tacos using some of the brisket. They were incredible. Such a good dinner. I want more.
Then after that I got my laptop, sat on the couch, and played WoW. It was a good night.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
I never got to find out. The kind folks at Taco Bell resolved my excess time problem by backing up the drive-through line long enough that I eventually bailed and headed to school, entirely unfooded.
Then, as I said yesterday, class went really well. My activity was awesome, and the students expressed that. Yay.
And after class, for the first time, I actually returned to work. I did debate whether I was actually up to it because even after a successful class I still have to deal with the physiological crash that follows any high stress episode. But, y'know, after both of my last two classes (which both left me crashing hard), T-- had me babysit AB while she went grocery shopping. And I survived that somehow. Going back to work, by comparison, was restful.
So I put in a few more hours, got home around six, and T-- made us street tacos using some of the brisket. They were incredible. Such a good dinner. I want more.
Then after that I got my laptop, sat on the couch, and played WoW. It was a good night.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
A Present for the Baby
In case you weren't able to make it to the baby shower, or just want to get something nice for little Alexander, I recommend picking up this.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The OC (Week 3)
This post is part of an ongoing series.
Video Lectures
I got to class about ten minutes early today, and spent that time setting up my laptop while the students filed in. I turned on the projector and got it ready to go, but I didn't hook anything up yet because I didn't want the distraction.
While I was getting that ready, though, one of my students spoke up from the back of the room and said, "Oh, hey, I tried to watch your video lecture online, but it wouldn't work on my computer." It's a class full of Computer Science and Information Science majors, so of course suggestions were offered back and forth, but in the end I told him I'd been having trouble with it, too, so I'd keep looking into it and get back to him.
He said, "Well, anyway, it's a good thing you also provided the written transcript. Keep doing that. Because that was really helpful."
And I said, "Umm...I'm a Technical Writer. That's my job. So, yes, I will."
Opening Questions
Five minutes later I had all the students I was going to have (two shy of a full roster), so I turned to my outline. The first item on it was, "Video lecture vs. written tutorial." Half of the class had already heard the conversation, but I went ahead and revisited it, bringing the other half in. Turned out only two or three students had tried to use the video lecture, and only one of them had gotten it to work (and that one happens to work for the North Institute which is the non-profit group that designed and maintains the software all the rest of us are having trouble with). I promised the students I'd keep working on it, and let them know what I learned, and reiterated that the text tutorials will be available, and will be higher quality than my narrated slideshows anyway.
Partway through that, my helpful inside man piped up to tell me how to workaround the problems the others were having, and I made notes to myself to send out more detailed, step-by-step instructions later in the week. So my video lectures problem might be solved. We'll see.
Syllabus Issues
I moved on from there to a discussion of the syllabus, which I opened up on the projector. We'd gone over it on the first day, briefly, but when we talked last week about due dates, I realized it was completely messed up. So I told them the new dates were available on the version of the syllabus online (and went over them in class).
I'd also forgotten to give them Fall Break -- a fact which came to my attention while rearranging due dates, so I told them, "Oh. I've also graciously decided to let you to take Fall Break along with your fellow students." That got a bigger laugh than it probably deserved, and then spawned some contention over one of the new due dates falling on Fall Break. Apparently they're not happy with just getting out of a lecture and assignment. I told them I'd consider the issue and render my verdict next week.
Stand-up
One unexpected development in today's class is that I stood up for most of my lecture(s). I'd decided after my first week that standing in front of the class was causing me anxiety issues (and then later Dad explained to me what was really causing it, but I didn't think to correct my earlier assumption). Anyway, after that I decided to just sit at the teacher's desk -- front and center in the class -- and deliver my lectures on eye-level with all my students.
Today, though, I was using my laptop on the overhead projector, which means I had to set it on the raised lectern off to the side, and I had to stand behind it to control the screen. I had been doing that while we discussed the syllabus -- effectively hiding behind my laptop, which is precisely how I handle the anxiety at most family functions -- but when I moved on to the mini-lecture I didn't have any overhead material to back it up (at first).
So, without thinking about it, I stepped away from the computer, halfway between the lectern and my desk, and started talking to my students. It didn't make sense to cross all the way to my desk, sit down and talk to them, just to jump up again two bullet points down so I could bring up my illustrations.
About midway between the first and second bullet point I noticed that I was standing up and lecturing, but I didn't let myself dwell on it. When it came time for the big ugly main lecture at the end of the class period, though, I did the same thing deliberately, and I had no trouble with it. At least, not with the standing up part.
The Mini-Lecture
As I may have mentioned before, the course consists of Tuesday lectures on Topics in Tech Writing, and then Thursday tutorials and assignments that require the students to prepare specific document types (business letter, memo, resume, that sort of thing).
So today I brought that up -- brought up that we'd been talking for two weeks about "document types," and I said the reason that matters is because certain document types have an impact just by being that document type. In fact, I'd hinted at that in the tutorials for each of the documents types they'd done so far. Formatting a business communique as a recognizable Business Letter creates a certain expectation and context for your reader, before you ever convey the first word of your content. The same goes for a memo. I told them a good way to think of document types is by their "shape" -- that is, the visual impact of a document that matches a particular style, and the response that style creates in a reader.
Haiku?
By way of illustration, I put some words up on the projector. It was a text document, in Notepad, so there was no formatting whatsoever. I'd even reduced everything to lower-case, at great personal pain. The first document looked like this:
One of my Computer Science majors said, "A haiku?" I almost laughed at that. I'd actually had, "Gibberish? A poem?" in my own notes for possible student guesses.
I just said, "What about this?" and opened the second document.
Somebody said, "An advertisement, maybe?" I heard whispery voices treading dangerously close to the right guess, so I went ahead and put up the third document.
"So," I said, "what you can see here is that the words that go on a band flyer are totally meaningless until you put them in the shape of a band flyer." And I hesitated for a beat, and smiled, and said, "So you're going to put them in the shape of band flyer."
The Band Flyer
I told them to divide into three groups -- that I wasn't playing the elementary school counting game this week -- and none of them apparently learned from that last week because they opted to just stay divided up by their tables. So group one consisted of three English majors and a couple technical people, and then groups two and three were entirely technical people. It was incredibly lopsided, but it made for good teaching in the end.
I told them they could probably find the original flyer if they looked hard enough online, but that I didn't want them to recreate the original. I wanted them to make their own. Each group quickly picked which software they were going to use to design the document (Picnic, Paint, and Word, respectively), and then selected one designer to actually build it.
Groups two and three mostly left their designers to do the design work single-handedly, while they went searching online -- first for suitable background art, and then (out of sheer, perverse curiosity) for sordid details about the band Eyes Like Headlights (which, in case you're curious, is one of Carlos's old bands).
Time Management
I probably should have obfuscated my information before presenting it to the students. Some of the antics and lyrics associated with Eyes Like Headlights probably isn't something I should be sharing with my students -- at least from the Dean of Students's point of view. They certainly didn't mind. They found it hilarious.
I gave them twenty minutes, and group two dashed something off in Paint and were done in fifteen minutes (and that was just the designer -- most of the rest of his group had tuned out around seven to eight minutes in, when they were confident in his work). Group three's designer had a little more artistic input, and they took right up until the twenty-minute mark to submit their design. Group one, which boasted fully four designers overflowing with artistic vision, took most of thirty minutes to get their document submitted.
Sometime around minute twenty-seven, one of the girls looked up and said, "Wait, what kind of band are they?"
Everyone else already knew, because they'd been listening to tracks on myspace, but I looked at my cherished English major and said, "They're progressive death metal."
Her eyes shot wide, and she said, "Umm...well, we're pretending that they're Folk, for ours. Okay?"
Presentation and Discussion
So we finally got all three flyers in, and I put them up on the projector in order. Everyone was really impressed with group one's heavily designed document, and no amount of prompting could get them to express what was wrong with it (apart from a couple elements that they'd forgotten). I had to point out that they got the band wrong. That, while they'd been determinedly working on the good design, good layout, good formatting that group two had just casually dashed off, group two had actually (goofing off) figured out what style the document should be. That's research, and that's a real, important part of Technical Writing.
Of course, the other groups caught on that group one's flyer was beautifully designed. Ultimately, we decided group three had the best one for the band in question.
Object Lesson
One of the best lessons learned, though, came from a specific mistake the hasty group two had made. One of the lines on the poster, "with left on northwood and rettig," referred to a couple other bands that were performing at the same show. Group two mistook that "left on northwood" bit as directions, and threw that line in the upper left corner with the address and the name of the venue. Same font, same style, and as soon as I put the flyer up on the overhead, someone from group three pointed out their mistake.
Honestly, when we got into the discussion stage, the designer for group two started looking a little sheepish, and I felt a little bad about that. Then we finished up the discussion and I launched into my big ugly lecture, where I was just trying to dump specific formatting rules on them.
One of the first points I made was that technical documents generally contain several discrete chunks of information, bundled together, and part of the purpose of formatting is to create a recognizable hierarchy to help readers quickly and accurately figure out which information belongs to which bundle, and to locate the bundle the reader actually needs.
And I'd said some words on the topic, then I pulled that group two flyer back up, and darted over to the screen, and said, "That's what we saw right here. That's what the flyers do, grouping all these individual sentences into sections, formatting them to show what is related, and how. And we saw that on this flyer. We all knew instantly that group two had gotten this wrong -- had mistaken these two other bands for driving directions -- because of nothing but the font and the position on the page. He grouped this line with these other lines, and that told us what he thought it meant."
That was an excellent object lesson, that I could never have made up on my own. Even more importantly, though, the guy who had designed that document, who had been looking sheepish through all the ribbing over it, was nodding right along to my point. He got it, and that was awesome.
The Big Ugly Lecture
Dad told me not to do lectures -- to focus on mini-lectures instead -- and Gail said I'd done really well in the first week to focus on stories because students really connect to stories (and that's great news, because I'm naturally a storyteller).
But in today's class I needed to do an infodump. I needed to deliver certain rules, certain information, for them to use in all future classes. So after we'd finished our discussion of the class activity (which, I think, they really enjoyed), I stepped away from the lectern, turned to my notes, and told them how to format documents.
It was twenty minutes long, and I used their tutorial from last week for examples of every point I had to make. Apart from that one example harking back to their activity, though, I lost them for the lecture. They zoned out, and I could see it happen. I didn't get panicky or anything -- and I certainly didn't get offended or deeply disappointed -- but it was a little sad to see that happen when I'd spent so much of the last two class periods engaging them.
Still, lesson learned. I'm not exactly sure how I'll address it in the future, but at the very worst, it was just a lecture. The sort of boring lecture every one of them has been through hundreds of times, in dozens of other classes. That's not something I'm going to beat myself up over.
Names
I ended the lecture at 2:12, and started to dismiss them before I realized I hadn't returned their marked-up assignments from last week. Then I said, "Look, I'm terrible with names. I've tried to learn all of yours, but just in case, I'm going to call them out as I hand out your letters." And I did, and they dutifully raised their hands, but I realized pretty quickly I needn't have done that. I knew them all. That's something I'd been worried about, and I managed to get them all down with about ten minutes' effort today, using their student ID photos and the Introduction Letters they'd turned in as their assignments last week.
So that was a positive experience. Really, the whole class was. Another great week. And, not only that, but a source of real confidence. Because now I know last week's success wasn't because of the material, or because of the activity, but because of the method. I repeated the same method to design my class this week, and it went pretty much the same way. That's good news for future efforts.
Awesome. Awesome.
More next week.
Video Lectures
I got to class about ten minutes early today, and spent that time setting up my laptop while the students filed in. I turned on the projector and got it ready to go, but I didn't hook anything up yet because I didn't want the distraction.
While I was getting that ready, though, one of my students spoke up from the back of the room and said, "Oh, hey, I tried to watch your video lecture online, but it wouldn't work on my computer." It's a class full of Computer Science and Information Science majors, so of course suggestions were offered back and forth, but in the end I told him I'd been having trouble with it, too, so I'd keep looking into it and get back to him.
He said, "Well, anyway, it's a good thing you also provided the written transcript. Keep doing that. Because that was really helpful."
And I said, "Umm...I'm a Technical Writer. That's my job. So, yes, I will."
Opening Questions
Five minutes later I had all the students I was going to have (two shy of a full roster), so I turned to my outline. The first item on it was, "Video lecture vs. written tutorial." Half of the class had already heard the conversation, but I went ahead and revisited it, bringing the other half in. Turned out only two or three students had tried to use the video lecture, and only one of them had gotten it to work (and that one happens to work for the North Institute which is the non-profit group that designed and maintains the software all the rest of us are having trouble with). I promised the students I'd keep working on it, and let them know what I learned, and reiterated that the text tutorials will be available, and will be higher quality than my narrated slideshows anyway.
Partway through that, my helpful inside man piped up to tell me how to workaround the problems the others were having, and I made notes to myself to send out more detailed, step-by-step instructions later in the week. So my video lectures problem might be solved. We'll see.
Syllabus Issues
I moved on from there to a discussion of the syllabus, which I opened up on the projector. We'd gone over it on the first day, briefly, but when we talked last week about due dates, I realized it was completely messed up. So I told them the new dates were available on the version of the syllabus online (and went over them in class).
I'd also forgotten to give them Fall Break -- a fact which came to my attention while rearranging due dates, so I told them, "Oh. I've also graciously decided to let you to take Fall Break along with your fellow students." That got a bigger laugh than it probably deserved, and then spawned some contention over one of the new due dates falling on Fall Break. Apparently they're not happy with just getting out of a lecture and assignment. I told them I'd consider the issue and render my verdict next week.
Stand-up
One unexpected development in today's class is that I stood up for most of my lecture(s). I'd decided after my first week that standing in front of the class was causing me anxiety issues (and then later Dad explained to me what was really causing it, but I didn't think to correct my earlier assumption). Anyway, after that I decided to just sit at the teacher's desk -- front and center in the class -- and deliver my lectures on eye-level with all my students.
Today, though, I was using my laptop on the overhead projector, which means I had to set it on the raised lectern off to the side, and I had to stand behind it to control the screen. I had been doing that while we discussed the syllabus -- effectively hiding behind my laptop, which is precisely how I handle the anxiety at most family functions -- but when I moved on to the mini-lecture I didn't have any overhead material to back it up (at first).
So, without thinking about it, I stepped away from the computer, halfway between the lectern and my desk, and started talking to my students. It didn't make sense to cross all the way to my desk, sit down and talk to them, just to jump up again two bullet points down so I could bring up my illustrations.
About midway between the first and second bullet point I noticed that I was standing up and lecturing, but I didn't let myself dwell on it. When it came time for the big ugly main lecture at the end of the class period, though, I did the same thing deliberately, and I had no trouble with it. At least, not with the standing up part.
The Mini-Lecture
As I may have mentioned before, the course consists of Tuesday lectures on Topics in Tech Writing, and then Thursday tutorials and assignments that require the students to prepare specific document types (business letter, memo, resume, that sort of thing).
So today I brought that up -- brought up that we'd been talking for two weeks about "document types," and I said the reason that matters is because certain document types have an impact just by being that document type. In fact, I'd hinted at that in the tutorials for each of the documents types they'd done so far. Formatting a business communique as a recognizable Business Letter creates a certain expectation and context for your reader, before you ever convey the first word of your content. The same goes for a memo. I told them a good way to think of document types is by their "shape" -- that is, the visual impact of a document that matches a particular style, and the response that style creates in a reader.
Haiku?
By way of illustration, I put some words up on the projector. It was a text document, in Notepad, so there was no formatting whatsoever. I'd even reduced everything to lower-case, at great personal pain. The first document looked like this:
schumann's resonanceI said, "Anyone know what this is?"
headgear for grasshoppers
eyes like headlights
friday
october 5
9:00 pm
p. j.'s
manhattan
One of my Computer Science majors said, "A haiku?" I almost laughed at that. I'd actually had, "Gibberish? A poem?" in my own notes for possible student guesses.
I just said, "What about this?" and opened the second document.
the jackpot
10:00 pm
$5.00
eyes like headlights
daleria
the remember
january 5, 2008
Somebody said, "An advertisement, maybe?" I heard whispery voices treading dangerously close to the right guess, so I went ahead and put up the third document.
www.myspace.com/eyeslikeheadlightsThat third line gave it away, and I said, "What I've got here is the text from a bunch of band flyers. That first one looked like complete nonsense when I showed you just the unformatted words, but you'd recognize the information instantly if I showed you this."
eyes like headlights
cd release party
debut album
there's no us in evolution
5909 johnson drive
mission, kansas
with left on northwood and rettig
friday, october 26
the mission theatre
all ages 21 to drink
"So," I said, "what you can see here is that the words that go on a band flyer are totally meaningless until you put them in the shape of a band flyer." And I hesitated for a beat, and smiled, and said, "So you're going to put them in the shape of band flyer."The Band Flyer
I told them to divide into three groups -- that I wasn't playing the elementary school counting game this week -- and none of them apparently learned from that last week because they opted to just stay divided up by their tables. So group one consisted of three English majors and a couple technical people, and then groups two and three were entirely technical people. It was incredibly lopsided, but it made for good teaching in the end.
I told them they could probably find the original flyer if they looked hard enough online, but that I didn't want them to recreate the original. I wanted them to make their own. Each group quickly picked which software they were going to use to design the document (Picnic, Paint, and Word, respectively), and then selected one designer to actually build it.
Groups two and three mostly left their designers to do the design work single-handedly, while they went searching online -- first for suitable background art, and then (out of sheer, perverse curiosity) for sordid details about the band Eyes Like Headlights (which, in case you're curious, is one of Carlos's old bands).
Time Management
I probably should have obfuscated my information before presenting it to the students. Some of the antics and lyrics associated with Eyes Like Headlights probably isn't something I should be sharing with my students -- at least from the Dean of Students's point of view. They certainly didn't mind. They found it hilarious.
I gave them twenty minutes, and group two dashed something off in Paint and were done in fifteen minutes (and that was just the designer -- most of the rest of his group had tuned out around seven to eight minutes in, when they were confident in his work). Group three's designer had a little more artistic input, and they took right up until the twenty-minute mark to submit their design. Group one, which boasted fully four designers overflowing with artistic vision, took most of thirty minutes to get their document submitted.
Sometime around minute twenty-seven, one of the girls looked up and said, "Wait, what kind of band are they?"
Everyone else already knew, because they'd been listening to tracks on myspace, but I looked at my cherished English major and said, "They're progressive death metal."
Her eyes shot wide, and she said, "Umm...well, we're pretending that they're Folk, for ours. Okay?"
Presentation and Discussion
So we finally got all three flyers in, and I put them up on the projector in order. Everyone was really impressed with group one's heavily designed document, and no amount of prompting could get them to express what was wrong with it (apart from a couple elements that they'd forgotten). I had to point out that they got the band wrong. That, while they'd been determinedly working on the good design, good layout, good formatting that group two had just casually dashed off, group two had actually (goofing off) figured out what style the document should be. That's research, and that's a real, important part of Technical Writing.
Of course, the other groups caught on that group one's flyer was beautifully designed. Ultimately, we decided group three had the best one for the band in question.
Object Lesson
One of the best lessons learned, though, came from a specific mistake the hasty group two had made. One of the lines on the poster, "with left on northwood and rettig," referred to a couple other bands that were performing at the same show. Group two mistook that "left on northwood" bit as directions, and threw that line in the upper left corner with the address and the name of the venue. Same font, same style, and as soon as I put the flyer up on the overhead, someone from group three pointed out their mistake.
Honestly, when we got into the discussion stage, the designer for group two started looking a little sheepish, and I felt a little bad about that. Then we finished up the discussion and I launched into my big ugly lecture, where I was just trying to dump specific formatting rules on them.
One of the first points I made was that technical documents generally contain several discrete chunks of information, bundled together, and part of the purpose of formatting is to create a recognizable hierarchy to help readers quickly and accurately figure out which information belongs to which bundle, and to locate the bundle the reader actually needs.
And I'd said some words on the topic, then I pulled that group two flyer back up, and darted over to the screen, and said, "That's what we saw right here. That's what the flyers do, grouping all these individual sentences into sections, formatting them to show what is related, and how. And we saw that on this flyer. We all knew instantly that group two had gotten this wrong -- had mistaken these two other bands for driving directions -- because of nothing but the font and the position on the page. He grouped this line with these other lines, and that told us what he thought it meant."
That was an excellent object lesson, that I could never have made up on my own. Even more importantly, though, the guy who had designed that document, who had been looking sheepish through all the ribbing over it, was nodding right along to my point. He got it, and that was awesome.
The Big Ugly Lecture
Dad told me not to do lectures -- to focus on mini-lectures instead -- and Gail said I'd done really well in the first week to focus on stories because students really connect to stories (and that's great news, because I'm naturally a storyteller).
But in today's class I needed to do an infodump. I needed to deliver certain rules, certain information, for them to use in all future classes. So after we'd finished our discussion of the class activity (which, I think, they really enjoyed), I stepped away from the lectern, turned to my notes, and told them how to format documents.
It was twenty minutes long, and I used their tutorial from last week for examples of every point I had to make. Apart from that one example harking back to their activity, though, I lost them for the lecture. They zoned out, and I could see it happen. I didn't get panicky or anything -- and I certainly didn't get offended or deeply disappointed -- but it was a little sad to see that happen when I'd spent so much of the last two class periods engaging them.
Still, lesson learned. I'm not exactly sure how I'll address it in the future, but at the very worst, it was just a lecture. The sort of boring lecture every one of them has been through hundreds of times, in dozens of other classes. That's not something I'm going to beat myself up over.
Names
I ended the lecture at 2:12, and started to dismiss them before I realized I hadn't returned their marked-up assignments from last week. Then I said, "Look, I'm terrible with names. I've tried to learn all of yours, but just in case, I'm going to call them out as I hand out your letters." And I did, and they dutifully raised their hands, but I realized pretty quickly I needn't have done that. I knew them all. That's something I'd been worried about, and I managed to get them all down with about ten minutes' effort today, using their student ID photos and the Introduction Letters they'd turned in as their assignments last week.
So that was a positive experience. Really, the whole class was. Another great week. And, not only that, but a source of real confidence. Because now I know last week's success wasn't because of the material, or because of the activity, but because of the method. I repeated the same method to design my class this week, and it went pretty much the same way. That's good news for future efforts.
Awesome. Awesome.
More next week.
Journal Entry: September 15, 2009
Yesterday sucked.
I mean, actually, I had a pretty pleasant chat with Julie, and one with N--, too. That was nice. And I got a call from B-- that was news-packed, and at least half of it was good! That was nice.
But really I wasted most of the day (and significant parts of each of those conversations) feeling sick about my class today. I've got to get over that.
On the drive home from work, I cranked up some inspirational music, and made plans to work out when I got home. AB wanted to play with her daddy, though, and that wasn't something I could turn down. So we talked and read a book and watched TV for a while.
Then D-- brought over leftover brisket from last Saturday's birthday party. T-- made up some homemade mashed potatoes for a side, and it was a phenomenal dinner. After that I moved to the couch and played WoW for three hours, hoping to distract myself. It didn't really work, but I got a lot done in WoW. We also watched a new Leverage and a new Psych, both of which were great.
Then around ten D-- went home, and I went to the office to do a little more prep work for my class. I spent about half an hour on that, then headed to bed.
And lay there. And did not fall asleep. My mind was racing, fixated on class and everything that could go wrong.
So after about half an hour of that I jumped up and went back to the office. I read through all my students' business letters again, I watched Gail Nash's online lecture on document layout and design again, I reworked my class notes extensively, and I prepped some exercise materials for class today. All told, it was well after midnight when I went back to bed.
And lay there. And did not fall asleep. I wasn't really worried by that point -- over the course of that last hour in the office, I'd completely worked through every minute of today's class, and I knew I was thoroughly prepared. I'd go so far as to say scripted. But I couldn't stop thinking about it -- about which words to put with certain ideas, which ideas to cut if I ran out of time, and which ones to abbreviate, what sections of the discussion could (and should) be moved around and where, whether I'd captured all the necessary changes to the syllabus, and how to get that information across clearly.
Not just that, but I also found myself cutting material from today's lecture and moving it forward to future lectures, and when I was working on how to adapt that material to the other lecture's topic, I started working on those lectures, building them up. It was all useful work, but not at one thirty in the morning.
By that point, I wasn't worrying about today's class anymore. I was just wishing I could go ahead and give the class so I could get on with my life. Instead, I kept on obsessing.
I knew it, too. I kept trying to put it away, to stop thinking about it, and I kept failing at that. At two o'clock, AB cried out in her sleep and I went to check on her, thinking she'd woken up. At three, frustrated, I sat up in bed just to see how late it really was, and then lay back down. My alarm went off at seven, and I was already awake, but I got up and turned it off and went back to bed. Not to sleep, just to get a few more minutes of rest. Soon enough AB came to jump on the bed, and T-- was getting ready to leave for a doctor's appointment, and I was late enough for work that I couldn't justify waiting any longer. So I got up, and I went to work.
I'll let you guess what I've been thinking about all morning.
Other than that, though, it's just things and stuff.
I mean, actually, I had a pretty pleasant chat with Julie, and one with N--, too. That was nice. And I got a call from B-- that was news-packed, and at least half of it was good! That was nice.
But really I wasted most of the day (and significant parts of each of those conversations) feeling sick about my class today. I've got to get over that.
On the drive home from work, I cranked up some inspirational music, and made plans to work out when I got home. AB wanted to play with her daddy, though, and that wasn't something I could turn down. So we talked and read a book and watched TV for a while.
Then D-- brought over leftover brisket from last Saturday's birthday party. T-- made up some homemade mashed potatoes for a side, and it was a phenomenal dinner. After that I moved to the couch and played WoW for three hours, hoping to distract myself. It didn't really work, but I got a lot done in WoW. We also watched a new Leverage and a new Psych, both of which were great.
Then around ten D-- went home, and I went to the office to do a little more prep work for my class. I spent about half an hour on that, then headed to bed.
And lay there. And did not fall asleep. My mind was racing, fixated on class and everything that could go wrong.
So after about half an hour of that I jumped up and went back to the office. I read through all my students' business letters again, I watched Gail Nash's online lecture on document layout and design again, I reworked my class notes extensively, and I prepped some exercise materials for class today. All told, it was well after midnight when I went back to bed.
And lay there. And did not fall asleep. I wasn't really worried by that point -- over the course of that last hour in the office, I'd completely worked through every minute of today's class, and I knew I was thoroughly prepared. I'd go so far as to say scripted. But I couldn't stop thinking about it -- about which words to put with certain ideas, which ideas to cut if I ran out of time, and which ones to abbreviate, what sections of the discussion could (and should) be moved around and where, whether I'd captured all the necessary changes to the syllabus, and how to get that information across clearly.
Not just that, but I also found myself cutting material from today's lecture and moving it forward to future lectures, and when I was working on how to adapt that material to the other lecture's topic, I started working on those lectures, building them up. It was all useful work, but not at one thirty in the morning.
By that point, I wasn't worrying about today's class anymore. I was just wishing I could go ahead and give the class so I could get on with my life. Instead, I kept on obsessing.
I knew it, too. I kept trying to put it away, to stop thinking about it, and I kept failing at that. At two o'clock, AB cried out in her sleep and I went to check on her, thinking she'd woken up. At three, frustrated, I sat up in bed just to see how late it really was, and then lay back down. My alarm went off at seven, and I was already awake, but I got up and turned it off and went back to bed. Not to sleep, just to get a few more minutes of rest. Soon enough AB came to jump on the bed, and T-- was getting ready to leave for a doctor's appointment, and I was late enough for work that I couldn't justify waiting any longer. So I got up, and I went to work.
I'll let you guess what I've been thinking about all morning.
Other than that, though, it's just things and stuff.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Journal Entry: September 14, 2009
Friday
Friday night T--'s parents came in from Wichita, and after unloading the newly refurbished dining table and chairs that John had brought down, we took them out to dinner at Mama Roja (of course). It was delicious. Other than that, it was just WoW.
Saturday
Saturday around noon we went to Mayfair Church of Christ for D--'s grandma's birthday party. It was about forty people, mostly D--'s family, and only a couple people I knew, but for some reason (and completely unexpectedly) that place hit my social anxiety something awful. We were there for two hours. The brisket was good.
Afterward we went home, and brought my niece Lola with us. We watched her for a couple hours, then when my sister came to pick her up, T-- and her family went up to Hobby Lobby for some fabric shopping.
John and I had talked about going out to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner to catch the OU game (since it was only showing on pay per view), but I still felt bad from the afternoon's activity so I stayed home and made us all chili instead. Then I played WoW for the rest of the night while John watched the race and the rest of us watched an episode of Lie to Me.
Sunday
Sunday morning I skipped church, and spent some time coming up with a list of adjectives to describe little Alexander. That...didn't turn out to be useful. I had fun with it, though.
T-- made barbecue sandwiches for lunch, then she and her parents headed to my sister's place for a baby shower while my brother-in-law brought his two girls over to play. They watched Word World with AB while Jeff and I talked for an hour or so. Then I took AB up to the shower.
Now, T-- had told me she wasn't expecting much of a turnout at the shower, since all of my family had all canceled and several of the ladies from church had said they wouldn't be there. So I was somewhat astonished to walk into my sister's house and find it packed full of people.
They had brought so many gifts, and while I was there the guests read out blessings for Alexander and T-- and me, that they'd written earlier. That was precious.
Afterward, we came home and said goodbyes to T--'s parents, then I played WoW and waited for D-- to become available. He called around six, and we both headed up to Edmond to watch the Cowboys game with K-- and N--.
It was an excellent game. I left at half time so I could watch some of the game with T-- (who'd been too exhausted to go with me). We enjoyed that so much that we watched the end of the Bears / Packers game, too.
Sort of an erratic weekend, and exhausting, but a lot of fun. And, y'know, the Cowboys won. Awesome.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Friday night T--'s parents came in from Wichita, and after unloading the newly refurbished dining table and chairs that John had brought down, we took them out to dinner at Mama Roja (of course). It was delicious. Other than that, it was just WoW.
Saturday
Saturday around noon we went to Mayfair Church of Christ for D--'s grandma's birthday party. It was about forty people, mostly D--'s family, and only a couple people I knew, but for some reason (and completely unexpectedly) that place hit my social anxiety something awful. We were there for two hours. The brisket was good.
Afterward we went home, and brought my niece Lola with us. We watched her for a couple hours, then when my sister came to pick her up, T-- and her family went up to Hobby Lobby for some fabric shopping.
John and I had talked about going out to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner to catch the OU game (since it was only showing on pay per view), but I still felt bad from the afternoon's activity so I stayed home and made us all chili instead. Then I played WoW for the rest of the night while John watched the race and the rest of us watched an episode of Lie to Me.
Sunday
Sunday morning I skipped church, and spent some time coming up with a list of adjectives to describe little Alexander. That...didn't turn out to be useful. I had fun with it, though.
T-- made barbecue sandwiches for lunch, then she and her parents headed to my sister's place for a baby shower while my brother-in-law brought his two girls over to play. They watched Word World with AB while Jeff and I talked for an hour or so. Then I took AB up to the shower.
Now, T-- had told me she wasn't expecting much of a turnout at the shower, since all of my family had all canceled and several of the ladies from church had said they wouldn't be there. So I was somewhat astonished to walk into my sister's house and find it packed full of people.
They had brought so many gifts, and while I was there the guests read out blessings for Alexander and T-- and me, that they'd written earlier. That was precious.
Afterward, we came home and said goodbyes to T--'s parents, then I played WoW and waited for D-- to become available. He called around six, and we both headed up to Edmond to watch the Cowboys game with K-- and N--.
It was an excellent game. I left at half time so I could watch some of the game with T-- (who'd been too exhausted to go with me). We enjoyed that so much that we watched the end of the Bears / Packers game, too.
Sort of an erratic weekend, and exhausting, but a lot of fun. And, y'know, the Cowboys won. Awesome.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Journal Entry: September 11, 2009
Yesterday morning we woke up to a little scare. T-- was having trouble with her stomach and pain in her lower back, and at bleary-eyed seven in the morning, it seemed a little too much like labor pains. So she curled up on the bed trying to find a comfortable position, and I called my boss and told him I'd be out for a while -- a couple of hours or a couple of days, depending how things turned out.
Things turned out to be a stomach bug, but it incapacitated T-- pretty bad for the day. I hung around the house long enough to see her feeling a little better, and then drove AB out to the babysitter's so T-- could take the day off. Then I went from there to work, and shortly after I got in, I got a call from T-- saying she was really starting to feel better. By noon, we were sure there was nothing to worry about.
Still, a tense morning.
Then in the afternoon I got home from work and locked myself in the office to put finishing touches on my class lecture. I'm still wrestling with technical issues, since last week, but I got the podcast recorded and saved, at least, and I'll post it to the website sometime this afternoon. I was able to get them a text tutorial on time, though, and I've already had a couple students finish and submit their assignment (due next Tuesday) based off the material there.
I gave up on the podcast at 6:30, because I had social writing plans for the evening, and I hadn't eaten dinner yet. I gulped down some chicken fried rice that T-- made (which was delicious), and finished it just before D-- showed up to give me a ride to Full Circle.
When we got there, we found the coffee shop packed. At first we assumed it was a book signing, but several people were wearing name tags, and as we lingered in the other room we heard frequent bursts of applause. That doesn't sound like any book signing I've been to. Probably some sort of...I don't know, corporate event.
Anyway, it was a nuisance, but we found reading chairs elsewhere in the bookstore, and D-- spent his time working on a project for the weekend, and I spent mine working on Ghost Targets: Restraint. In the first fifteen minutes I filled two pages of my scribblebook (or about 500 words), and I turned to D-- and said, "I just doubled my word count for the week." That was more a sad commentary on my week than a boast about my productivity.
Before the night was over, though, I had two thousand words, and was well into chapter eight. That's a boast. It was a great night, and I'm climbing into the part of the novel that I'm really excited about, so I expect it to get a little easier from here on out.
We got back to the house at 10:00, and T-- had the Steelers game on, so D-- hung around to see how that turned out. It was a tense game (and just fun to be watching real NFL football again, even if it wasn't one of my teams). Definitely a good time.
That took us past eleven o'clock, though, and then when I stopped in the office to check my email before bed, I had a message about my podcast and realized what I'd done wrong earlier in the afternoon. So I stayed up for another hour wrestling with that, fixed my earlier error (re-recording the whole lecture in the process), and then discovered I still didn't know how to make it available to my students.
So, as I said earlier, that remains unresolved. And I was up late last night, and the RDO I should've had today got split so I could have time off for my Tuesday classes. So I'm at work, and tired, and ready to be home.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Things turned out to be a stomach bug, but it incapacitated T-- pretty bad for the day. I hung around the house long enough to see her feeling a little better, and then drove AB out to the babysitter's so T-- could take the day off. Then I went from there to work, and shortly after I got in, I got a call from T-- saying she was really starting to feel better. By noon, we were sure there was nothing to worry about.
Still, a tense morning.
Then in the afternoon I got home from work and locked myself in the office to put finishing touches on my class lecture. I'm still wrestling with technical issues, since last week, but I got the podcast recorded and saved, at least, and I'll post it to the website sometime this afternoon. I was able to get them a text tutorial on time, though, and I've already had a couple students finish and submit their assignment (due next Tuesday) based off the material there.
I gave up on the podcast at 6:30, because I had social writing plans for the evening, and I hadn't eaten dinner yet. I gulped down some chicken fried rice that T-- made (which was delicious), and finished it just before D-- showed up to give me a ride to Full Circle.
When we got there, we found the coffee shop packed. At first we assumed it was a book signing, but several people were wearing name tags, and as we lingered in the other room we heard frequent bursts of applause. That doesn't sound like any book signing I've been to. Probably some sort of...I don't know, corporate event.
Anyway, it was a nuisance, but we found reading chairs elsewhere in the bookstore, and D-- spent his time working on a project for the weekend, and I spent mine working on Ghost Targets: Restraint. In the first fifteen minutes I filled two pages of my scribblebook (or about 500 words), and I turned to D-- and said, "I just doubled my word count for the week." That was more a sad commentary on my week than a boast about my productivity.
Before the night was over, though, I had two thousand words, and was well into chapter eight. That's a boast. It was a great night, and I'm climbing into the part of the novel that I'm really excited about, so I expect it to get a little easier from here on out.
We got back to the house at 10:00, and T-- had the Steelers game on, so D-- hung around to see how that turned out. It was a tense game (and just fun to be watching real NFL football again, even if it wasn't one of my teams). Definitely a good time.
That took us past eleven o'clock, though, and then when I stopped in the office to check my email before bed, I had a message about my podcast and realized what I'd done wrong earlier in the afternoon. So I stayed up for another hour wrestling with that, fixed my earlier error (re-recording the whole lecture in the process), and then discovered I still didn't know how to make it available to my students.
So, as I said earlier, that remains unresolved. And I was up late last night, and the RDO I should've had today got split so I could have time off for my Tuesday classes. So I'm at work, and tired, and ready to be home.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Journal Entry: September 10, 2009
Yesterday was relatively quiet -- at least, the way my life goes now. A year ago, yesterday's events would have seemed positively newsworthy.
Anyway, I had a busy day at work, I wrote 600 words on Restraint over my lunch break, I got a call from my mom and we talked about teaching, I wrote a detailed blog post about Tuesday's experience, I played some WoW, and then I mixed up some of my famous salsa to go with the fantastic quesadillas T-- made for dinner.
And all of that was before D-- showed up with his own copy of the new The Beatles: Rock Band. We got the instruments set up, figured out how T-- and D-- could both do vocals (and me playing Ringo front and center), and then we played that for two hours. Then AB went to bed to sleep, T-- went to bed to read, and D-- sang all his favorite songs while I logged back into WoW to play a couple battlegrounds before bed.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Anyway, I had a busy day at work, I wrote 600 words on Restraint over my lunch break, I got a call from my mom and we talked about teaching, I wrote a detailed blog post about Tuesday's experience, I played some WoW, and then I mixed up some of my famous salsa to go with the fantastic quesadillas T-- made for dinner.
And all of that was before D-- showed up with his own copy of the new The Beatles: Rock Band. We got the instruments set up, figured out how T-- and D-- could both do vocals (and me playing Ringo front and center), and then we played that for two hours. Then AB went to bed to sleep, T-- went to bed to read, and D-- sang all his favorite songs while I logged back into WoW to play a couple battlegrounds before bed.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The OC (Week 2)
Someday, one of my students is going to call me "Professor Pogue" (or maybe someone who really hasn't been paying attention will even call me "Doctor Pogue"), and I'll say, "No, please, call me Mister Pogue. Professor Pogue is my father."
I'll be the only one who laughs at that, but I will find it hilarious.
Seventy-five Minutes
As I mentioned before, my first week of classes probably felt like a wild success to my students, but I came out of there shocked and terrified about how I was going to fill seventy-five minutes with lecture every week.
And, of course, the answer I got repeatedly from seasoned professionals was, "Don't." Gail Nash recommended a short twenty-minute lecture to start the class, a half-hour in-class assignment, and then another twenty minutes at the end of class to discuss it. Dad recommended mini-lectures, no longer than fifteen minutes each, broken up with other activities and discussions.
One thing everyone told me, when I was panicking about how poorly that first class went, was that it would get easier once I got the students talking back to me. The problem I was running into was lecturing. It's always difficult to deliver a message to a silent, unresponsive crowd, and especially so for somebody with no experience in public speaking whatsoever. One and all, they told me that if I could get the students to talk to me, it would be a breeze.
Getting Them Talking
Dad even told me how. Drawing on years of experience and a nuanced understanding of the student psyche, he said to start off your class by asking, "Okay, how do you guys feel about last week's assignment (or lecture)? What didn't you like about it?" That gets them talking, because everyone is more interested in complaining about something than in praising it. Give them a chance to vent (and provide what will be useful feedback to you as the teacher), and then follow up with, "Okay, and what did you like about it?" Then the students who had a positive experience with the assignment (or lecture) but otherwise would have remained quiet will chime in, partly because they've spent the last however many minutes listening to their classmates bash on it, and they feel a need to defend it. By that point, though, you've got everyone in your class talking, and comfortable with each other, and you can launch into new material and get good responses.
That advice struck me as so sound that it directly increased my confidence going into that class. I bragged about my dad's genius to several people, for days before the class started. Then I showed up, put it into practice, and got...nothing. Not a word. No complaint, no praise. Nothing.
So I looked around the room, shook my head sadly, and said, "Guys, you're going to have to talk to me. Otherwise it's just me sitting up here at the front of the class, lecturing you about writing for seventy-five minutes. And you don't want that. You know why? [Brief pause.] Because it's seventy-five minutes." That got a laugh, and it worked. After that, I got answers when I asked questions.
Business Letters
For their first assignment, they were to write me a Letter of Introduction, telling me a little bit about themselves and following the standard business letter format. To facilitate that, I prepared an online lecture (that ended up being just an illustrated tutorial, for technical reasons) going into detail on how to design a business letter.
So I started out the class lecture by talking to them about business letters, and why they're useful. One of the things I discovered last week is that none of my students (not a one) has any intention of becoming a professional tech writer. That doesn't bother me, but it means I've got to spend the semester demonstrating to them why this material matters to them.
For a first stab at that, I led off with three short stories, from my personal experience. I told them about the time I bought my first house, and along with it came the high pressure sales pitch to renew the security system that the previous owners had used. We'd initially agreed, but when we looked at our budget and saw how much they actually wanted per month, we called up to cancel it. The person on the other end of the line said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."
So I wrote a business letter.
Then, a few months after we moved to Tulsa, someone stole a bill for our Best Buy credit card out of our mail, and used it to ring up several thousand dollars in fraudulent claims. Freaking out, we called up Best Buy's customer service and said, "Hey, someone's stealing your stuff and trying to charge it to us, and you've got put a stop to it!" and the guy on the phone said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."
Then I told the students a little bit about the writing experience, the process of trying to make it as a novelist, and the unending string of query letters -- every one an invitation for rejection. I told them about the importance of presenting the richness and beauty of a lovingly-crafted work of art in a sterile, one-page business letter. And then I told them how I'd finally landed a literary agent, and then had to fire her a year later, and when I contacted her to let her know I was no longer interested in working with her, she said, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to need that in writing."
That got a big laugh. I really think it got my point across well, too. I told them that in each of those situations, in different ways, I was stressed out, and needed to communicate specific information clearly and quickly. And already having a set format, an easy template that just required me to fill in the blanks, made it far easier for me to do exactly that, and save my energy for the other things I needed to be worrying about.
Due Dates
We talked briefly about our class schedule -- my plans for Thursdays and Tuesdays, and how the individual documents they're producing fit into the document packets that I'm going to be grading. In the process of that, I discovered my timetable doesn't work at all. I stumbled over that a little bit, thinking out loud, and that got some laughs. I think that's a good thing. I do need to get the details worked out before next class, though....
Group Work
Next we moved into the in-class assignment. I said, "Okay, we're going to work in groups now, and to divide up, I think we'll use a method that I found to be very effective in grade school." That got groans and chuckles, but they obediently counted off in threes, and then divided up into three groups per my instructions. Then I had everyone (for the first time) introduce themselves with name and major. Then I admitted why I'd had them count off in three -- because my three English majors were all sitting right next to each other. As a result, I had three groups with each one consisting of four Computer Science or Information Science majors, and one English major. Or, in other words, four technical people and one writer person.
Not entirely fair to the English majors, but that's how technical writing goes. I don't think I've ever worked with another English major. I told them as much, and paused to double-check myself, and then nodded and said, "I've worked with a Journalism major, but never an English major. Don't work with a Journalism major!" That got a laugh.
Technical Writing
Their assignment was deliberately vague. Every student at OC is issued a laptop, so I told them, "You've got twenty minutes. I want you to write me step-by-step instructions for how to do something useful on your student laptops."
Then something amazing happened. I'd guess that half of my students probably work with OC IT, and most of the rest of them are computer people. So in each of the three groups I heard the computer people tossing ideas out. "We could do this." "We could do that." And in each group, I heard the English major say, "Wait, what? What is that?" And then the computer people explained it to them.
And then the English majors wrote it down.
Or, in other words, Tech Writing happened. It was a thing of beauty.
Graded by the Ridicule of Their Peers
I did warn them, just after they'd divided up into groups, "We're going to go over these once you're done, so you'll be graded by the ridicule of your peers." That got a laugh (which was a very good thing), but we all followed through on it. As they finished, they emailed their tutorials to me, and I put them up on the overhead.
We briefly analyzed each one, pointing out what was done well, and what needed work. I talked a little bit about audiences, and I told them about Mark at my first job starting off every software manual with a section explaining how to use a mouse and what "click" and "double-click" meant. That got astonished, disbelieving stares, and I think I was able to make a good point there.
Out of Time
I had a lot more to say about the usefulness of written tutorials, with some heavy emphasis on all these computer people who had to give family and friends instructions on simple tasks all the time. By the time we were done critiquing, though, I was down to five minutes left in class, so I rushed through that material and let them go.
What I didn't get to was another personal anecdote, a story demonstrating the popularity and usefulness of tutorials, especially online. I was all prepared to tell them how I achieved some level of fame because of a short tutorial online. (If you search Google for "Alexpoet," my onetime web moniker, my website is the top of the list because of a tutorial I wrote for XBMC Python scripting -- which is another phrase that points directly to my page on Google.) I didn't get to that, but next week's class is about formatting technical documents, and most of what I did with that tutorial was take a flat text tutorial some Canadian dude had written, clean up the English, and apply the formatting rules I'd learned in my Tech Writing class. So, in other words, the material I didn't get to this week becomes the object lesson next week.
The Teaching Experience
When I talked to Dad about my rough experience last week, one of the things he pointed out was that my sheer terror when I stepped up to the podium was caused by an acute awareness of myself. He said that would happen to anybody -- even the most experienced public speaker, the most outgoing teacher -- if he stepped in front of a crowd and spent the whole time paying close attention to what he was doing right or wrong and analyzing it. We're too good at recognizing our own faults, we blow them out of proportion, and if that's what you're thinking about, you're going to shut yourself down.
Dad said everything I described about my first experience fell perfectly into that condition, and I couldn't argue with him. He said the way to fix it is to think about the students instead. Think about what they need to know, what I can tell them to make their lives better, and focus on their responses. I had my doubts about how easy it would be to follow through on that, but I spent the whole class trying to put it into practice, and it worked.
And I think it worked for everyone, not just for me. I mentioned the laughs I got, as often as I could, because they weren't nervous laughter. I can be a funny guy, and when I made a sarcastic comment and the students laughed at it, I could tell they were at their ease. I think that happened as a direct result of my being more at ease, and it built on itself, so by the end of the class we really were just talking back and forth. I spent two days before the class wrestling with intense anxiety, and it was brutal right up until I cleared my throat and stammered awkwardly, "Umm, okay, I guess we should get started." Then I took a breath, started with Dad's question, "What didn't you like about last week's lecture?" and instead of feeling nervous that I'd asked a question they couldn't answer, I just got irritated at them for not speaking up.
And from there on, I was fine. It was a great class period, and I think the lives of everyone involved are better for it.
More next week.
I'll be the only one who laughs at that, but I will find it hilarious.
Seventy-five Minutes
As I mentioned before, my first week of classes probably felt like a wild success to my students, but I came out of there shocked and terrified about how I was going to fill seventy-five minutes with lecture every week.
And, of course, the answer I got repeatedly from seasoned professionals was, "Don't." Gail Nash recommended a short twenty-minute lecture to start the class, a half-hour in-class assignment, and then another twenty minutes at the end of class to discuss it. Dad recommended mini-lectures, no longer than fifteen minutes each, broken up with other activities and discussions.
One thing everyone told me, when I was panicking about how poorly that first class went, was that it would get easier once I got the students talking back to me. The problem I was running into was lecturing. It's always difficult to deliver a message to a silent, unresponsive crowd, and especially so for somebody with no experience in public speaking whatsoever. One and all, they told me that if I could get the students to talk to me, it would be a breeze.
Getting Them Talking
Dad even told me how. Drawing on years of experience and a nuanced understanding of the student psyche, he said to start off your class by asking, "Okay, how do you guys feel about last week's assignment (or lecture)? What didn't you like about it?" That gets them talking, because everyone is more interested in complaining about something than in praising it. Give them a chance to vent (and provide what will be useful feedback to you as the teacher), and then follow up with, "Okay, and what did you like about it?" Then the students who had a positive experience with the assignment (or lecture) but otherwise would have remained quiet will chime in, partly because they've spent the last however many minutes listening to their classmates bash on it, and they feel a need to defend it. By that point, though, you've got everyone in your class talking, and comfortable with each other, and you can launch into new material and get good responses.
That advice struck me as so sound that it directly increased my confidence going into that class. I bragged about my dad's genius to several people, for days before the class started. Then I showed up, put it into practice, and got...nothing. Not a word. No complaint, no praise. Nothing.
So I looked around the room, shook my head sadly, and said, "Guys, you're going to have to talk to me. Otherwise it's just me sitting up here at the front of the class, lecturing you about writing for seventy-five minutes. And you don't want that. You know why? [Brief pause.] Because it's seventy-five minutes." That got a laugh, and it worked. After that, I got answers when I asked questions.
Business Letters
For their first assignment, they were to write me a Letter of Introduction, telling me a little bit about themselves and following the standard business letter format. To facilitate that, I prepared an online lecture (that ended up being just an illustrated tutorial, for technical reasons) going into detail on how to design a business letter.
So I started out the class lecture by talking to them about business letters, and why they're useful. One of the things I discovered last week is that none of my students (not a one) has any intention of becoming a professional tech writer. That doesn't bother me, but it means I've got to spend the semester demonstrating to them why this material matters to them.
For a first stab at that, I led off with three short stories, from my personal experience. I told them about the time I bought my first house, and along with it came the high pressure sales pitch to renew the security system that the previous owners had used. We'd initially agreed, but when we looked at our budget and saw how much they actually wanted per month, we called up to cancel it. The person on the other end of the line said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."
So I wrote a business letter.
Then, a few months after we moved to Tulsa, someone stole a bill for our Best Buy credit card out of our mail, and used it to ring up several thousand dollars in fraudulent claims. Freaking out, we called up Best Buy's customer service and said, "Hey, someone's stealing your stuff and trying to charge it to us, and you've got put a stop to it!" and the guy on the phone said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."
Then I told the students a little bit about the writing experience, the process of trying to make it as a novelist, and the unending string of query letters -- every one an invitation for rejection. I told them about the importance of presenting the richness and beauty of a lovingly-crafted work of art in a sterile, one-page business letter. And then I told them how I'd finally landed a literary agent, and then had to fire her a year later, and when I contacted her to let her know I was no longer interested in working with her, she said, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to need that in writing."
That got a big laugh. I really think it got my point across well, too. I told them that in each of those situations, in different ways, I was stressed out, and needed to communicate specific information clearly and quickly. And already having a set format, an easy template that just required me to fill in the blanks, made it far easier for me to do exactly that, and save my energy for the other things I needed to be worrying about.
Due Dates
We talked briefly about our class schedule -- my plans for Thursdays and Tuesdays, and how the individual documents they're producing fit into the document packets that I'm going to be grading. In the process of that, I discovered my timetable doesn't work at all. I stumbled over that a little bit, thinking out loud, and that got some laughs. I think that's a good thing. I do need to get the details worked out before next class, though....
Group Work
Next we moved into the in-class assignment. I said, "Okay, we're going to work in groups now, and to divide up, I think we'll use a method that I found to be very effective in grade school." That got groans and chuckles, but they obediently counted off in threes, and then divided up into three groups per my instructions. Then I had everyone (for the first time) introduce themselves with name and major. Then I admitted why I'd had them count off in three -- because my three English majors were all sitting right next to each other. As a result, I had three groups with each one consisting of four Computer Science or Information Science majors, and one English major. Or, in other words, four technical people and one writer person.
Not entirely fair to the English majors, but that's how technical writing goes. I don't think I've ever worked with another English major. I told them as much, and paused to double-check myself, and then nodded and said, "I've worked with a Journalism major, but never an English major. Don't work with a Journalism major!" That got a laugh.
Technical Writing
Their assignment was deliberately vague. Every student at OC is issued a laptop, so I told them, "You've got twenty minutes. I want you to write me step-by-step instructions for how to do something useful on your student laptops."
Then something amazing happened. I'd guess that half of my students probably work with OC IT, and most of the rest of them are computer people. So in each of the three groups I heard the computer people tossing ideas out. "We could do this." "We could do that." And in each group, I heard the English major say, "Wait, what? What is that?" And then the computer people explained it to them.
And then the English majors wrote it down.
Or, in other words, Tech Writing happened. It was a thing of beauty.
Graded by the Ridicule of Their Peers
I did warn them, just after they'd divided up into groups, "We're going to go over these once you're done, so you'll be graded by the ridicule of your peers." That got a laugh (which was a very good thing), but we all followed through on it. As they finished, they emailed their tutorials to me, and I put them up on the overhead.
We briefly analyzed each one, pointing out what was done well, and what needed work. I talked a little bit about audiences, and I told them about Mark at my first job starting off every software manual with a section explaining how to use a mouse and what "click" and "double-click" meant. That got astonished, disbelieving stares, and I think I was able to make a good point there.
Out of Time
I had a lot more to say about the usefulness of written tutorials, with some heavy emphasis on all these computer people who had to give family and friends instructions on simple tasks all the time. By the time we were done critiquing, though, I was down to five minutes left in class, so I rushed through that material and let them go.
What I didn't get to was another personal anecdote, a story demonstrating the popularity and usefulness of tutorials, especially online. I was all prepared to tell them how I achieved some level of fame because of a short tutorial online. (If you search Google for "Alexpoet," my onetime web moniker, my website is the top of the list because of a tutorial I wrote for XBMC Python scripting -- which is another phrase that points directly to my page on Google.) I didn't get to that, but next week's class is about formatting technical documents, and most of what I did with that tutorial was take a flat text tutorial some Canadian dude had written, clean up the English, and apply the formatting rules I'd learned in my Tech Writing class. So, in other words, the material I didn't get to this week becomes the object lesson next week.
The Teaching Experience
When I talked to Dad about my rough experience last week, one of the things he pointed out was that my sheer terror when I stepped up to the podium was caused by an acute awareness of myself. He said that would happen to anybody -- even the most experienced public speaker, the most outgoing teacher -- if he stepped in front of a crowd and spent the whole time paying close attention to what he was doing right or wrong and analyzing it. We're too good at recognizing our own faults, we blow them out of proportion, and if that's what you're thinking about, you're going to shut yourself down.
Dad said everything I described about my first experience fell perfectly into that condition, and I couldn't argue with him. He said the way to fix it is to think about the students instead. Think about what they need to know, what I can tell them to make their lives better, and focus on their responses. I had my doubts about how easy it would be to follow through on that, but I spent the whole class trying to put it into practice, and it worked.
And I think it worked for everyone, not just for me. I mentioned the laughs I got, as often as I could, because they weren't nervous laughter. I can be a funny guy, and when I made a sarcastic comment and the students laughed at it, I could tell they were at their ease. I think that happened as a direct result of my being more at ease, and it built on itself, so by the end of the class we really were just talking back and forth. I spent two days before the class wrestling with intense anxiety, and it was brutal right up until I cleared my throat and stammered awkwardly, "Umm, okay, I guess we should get started." Then I took a breath, started with Dad's question, "What didn't you like about last week's lecture?" and instead of feeling nervous that I'd asked a question they couldn't answer, I just got irritated at them for not speaking up.
And from there on, I was fine. It was a great class period, and I think the lives of everyone involved are better for it.
More next week.
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