Tag Archives: entertainment

General Posts

Tuesday Morning Ramblings

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I don’t know if I can find the proper words to describe what’s happened to education, but every single day the system gets a little worse. The bureaucrats have transposed manufacturing principles onto instruction, expecting to increase productivity by implementing lean production measures. But teaching a human being how to read, write, calculate, and think is not the same process as bolting together two components. Everyone learns a little differently, and skilled teachers adapt their methods to individuals. Today, the bureaucrats want a one-size-fits-all homogeneous model that only skims rote memory. It cannot and will not produce practical application of skills.

For most of us who teach, morale has never been lower. We are grossly overworked, grossly underpaid, and grossly frustrated by political forces that on one hand blame us for the failures of their system while on the other accuse us of causing economic turmoil with our luxurious pay and benefits. Most of us are quite literally at our breaking points, emotionally and financially. We have been placed in an impossible situation, asked to do an impossible job, stripped of nearly all authority, and then blamed for poor student performance. Meanwhile, we’re competing for the students’ attention with Twitter and YouTube. It’s nearly impossible to pry them away from their smartphones and laptops, but then, we’re blamed for not “engaging” them properly.

Our only hope for fixing this situation is for enough people to come forward and demand change. We need lower student-teacher ratios, higher pay, less standardized testing, more focus on application, less bureaucracy, and more autonomy in the classroom. We have to shift accountability back onto the students themselves. We have to halt this trend towards homogeneous curriculum and focus on personalized instruction that fosters skills application. We have to find some way to teach the next generation that not everything is supposed to be entertaining, and instead of catering to their deficits by adding flashing lights and buzzers to curriculum, teach them how to focus for more than thirty seconds. I say the next generation because I’m afraid this one is already damaged beyond repair.

Please, heed my warning: This country is about to lose an entire generation of educators. Once we are gone, whether it be from burnout, breakdown, or disgust, a wealth of knowledge will be lost from the system. Once we are gone, I fear what the system will become and what it will produce. Once thing I see for certain, we as a country are losing our ability to compete with other developed nations. We are falling woefully behind and more closely resemble a developing or third world country than the greatest nation on the planet.

General Posts

Saturday Night Ramblings

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I feel a cultural movement brewing.  For a few decades now, all of our music, books, and movies have been controlled by corporations more concerned with marketing and bottom-line profits than quality.  Much of my generation was locked out, not because we didn’t have the talent but because we didn’t fit into tidy marketing pigeonholes, and we languished for years, wondering if we’d ever get our shot.  Meanwhile, a new generation moved onto the scene, and many of us felt as if our moment had passed.  All our study, all our hours of practice, all of our passion, all of our dreams seemed wasted.  Some grew bitter and drifted away.  Some became consumed by demons and succumbed to addictions.  Some trudged onward.  Some of us did all of the above.

But something amazing happened with the burgeoning of the internet and computers.  Suddenly, we no longer needed New York and LA to pursue our dreams.  Suddenly, the corporations could no longer lock us out because as long as we had internet access we had a potential audience of millions, so many of us started our own labels, presses, and production companies.  Sure, at first we struggled.  As we wobbled on unsure legs, our early efforts might have seemed like bad parodies, but we learned from our mistakes and pressed onward.  We polished our chops, grew our networks, and expanded our base.  We survived our early stumbles and the Great Recession.  We banded together.  On our own, we created new channels to reach more people and studied online marketing trends.  We learned and grew and shared information and encouraged each other.  Most of all, we survived.

Today, the movement of independents gathers momentum every day.  We’ve gained market share and established our reputations as serious artists in our given fields.  Through efforts of arduous determination, we’ve moved the mountain enough to be noticed by major media outlets as a legitimate force.  The amazing thing about this movement is that most of us are over the age of 35, and we’ve done this while juggling jobs and families and lives.  We’ve endured sacrifices corporate executives can never fathom, just to pursue our passion, just to chase our dream, and while we may not be there yet, we’re making great strides to that destination.

The cultural movement of the independents is upon us, and we’re here for the long-haul.

General Posts

Tuesday Morning Ramblings

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This is my opinion and nothing more.  I don’t typically write advice to other writers or aspiring writers because it feels too pretentious on my part.  Also, the world is already full of authorities who spend the majority of their time and energy telling others how to write, but this particular topic is rather important to me, so here goes:

Writing at its essence is a solitary endeavor, one of the most intimately solitary activities a person can do.  If you need applause and cheers to motivate you to create, you should be a musician or a stage actor, not a writer.  Live performers have live audiences.  Writers spend the vast majority of their creative time alone staring at a computer screen or notepad, allowing ideas to flow through them onto their medium, with virtually no feedback from anyone until after the project is complete.  This solitude can lasts weeks, sometimes even months or years, before an author gets feedback on their project, and usually that first round of feedback is from an editor or first reader who points out most of your mistakes.  It can take literally years before your work reaches its intended audience, if it ever does.

If you need instant gratification, prose writing is not the creative endeavor for you.

That’s not meant to be harsh or put anyone off from attempting to write.  However, it’s a basic reality all serious writers must accept.  You will create alone in a vacuum with no promise of your work ever being read by the people you want to reach.  If that seems too daunting, do something else with your time and save yourself a lifetime of frustration.  Writing is not a glamorous profession.  It’s not hip or cool or sexy.  It’s damned hard work that requires a level of commitment and personal sacrifice that can crack the souls of even the most ambitious and talented who attempt it.

I’m a writer.  At the core of my soul, that’s who I am.  For twenty-two years, I’ve dedicated my life to learning my craft, honing my skills, practicing, failing, getting up, failing again, trying harder, failing again, absorbing criticism, learning, growing, failing even more, and scratching out a meager existence.  A smarter person would’ve given up years ago, but my Scots-Irish obstinate nature won’t allow me to quit.  I’m proud of each and every small victory of my career, but those are not what motivate me to write.  I do it because I must, because the story and the characters demand to be shared.

As I wrote book four this summer, I posted updates each night on Facebook and Twitter to let my friends and readers know how the book was coming.  I did this not because I needed their “likes” and words of encouragement but because, after the years of delays that plagued books two and three, I wanted to assure them that I was working as hard as I could to make certain book four was completed on time.  While their feedback was appreciated, it wasn’t needed for motivation.  The only sustainable motivation is that which comes from within.  External motivators are temporary bandages that can never bolster long-term success.

All that said, if you want to write and need writers’ groups or NaNoWriMo or any other social network to prop up your self-esteem to get you through the draft, then, by all means, use whatever helps you.  If you need to dream of instant riches and overnight arrival to keep you focused, then dream of those things.  You may be that one-in-a-million who gets lucky and has sudden success, but in my experience and after a lifetime of studying the careers of other writers, I know the odds say you will be disappointed.  As for me, I’ll write because I have to.  I’ll follow my personal process for self-discipline.  I’ll edit and spit and polish until I’m tired of looking at the words.  And then, I’ll do it one more time just for good measure.  After I’m happy with the manuscript, I’ll send my baby out into the world to be enjoyed, criticized, praised, ripped apart, lauded, and laughed at.  I will do all of this with no expectations of monetary reward or literary awards or delusions of immortality.  I’ll do it simply because it’s who I am.  I’ll do it because I’m a writer.