Thanks to @Sara Kay Rupnik, I will list 3 positive things about myself for five days. Day Four: This exercise has actually been a challenge--not just a pretend challenge, and not just a chance to make some jokes. It would be so much easier to list three failings every day for however many days. 1) I am writing fiction again and am bursting with joy just getting to spend time every day with the guy I am when I am writing. Trying to clear space in my office to work, I ran into notes I made for a class I taught in the Vermont College MFA program. Technique is important, yes. But you love your characters into being. If you have a character in your story so you can express your contempt, take that character out and bring in someone you can respect. This is part of the reason I have published so little, but it is still what inspires me to belly up to the keyboard. 2) Most of the qualities other people would say are my positives are things I think of as basic human decency. All the years I was a classroom teacher I tried really hard never to humiliate a student for not having the correct answer to a question. (Most of the questions I asked in class did not have one right answer, but there were clearly wrong answers, and students who have been mis-educated all their lives will reveal those.). The students knew I was passing up lots of opportunities to humiliate them for what they didnt know. They would sometimes do it on purpose to see the lengths I would go to and would burst into laughter when I slid into third base on my belly, Safe. 3) Students at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis pressured administration into creating an award for Student Advocacy By A Faculty Member so they could give it to me. I know I should honor them for being determined to show respect, shouldnt disrespect them by scolding or scoffing, but to me I was being honored for basic human decency, and it made me sad--still makes me sad--that they were so unused to being treated with basic decency that they would go to such lengths to honor such actions. (That award was never given out a second time.) Love, respect, decency.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 18:35:42 +0000
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