Day 1 of a D&D 3-Shot

In the last few years, my wife and I find ourselves with less free time in general and less free time in common with our friends than we had in college and soon after. Gone (or at least, hard to obtain) are the days when we could bust out the Dungeons and Dragons books, roll up some characters, plan to meet twice a week, and play giant, open-ended campaigns that took years to complete. The all-night play sessions are out as well. We just can't pull any of that off anymore, but we still like the game and the time spent with friends.

The cool thing about those play sessions was the characters. Bringing a wizard from first to twelfth level gives you a deep understanding of who they are, and what makes them tick. You get this organically from repeated experiences. Whole sessions can go by without important plot advancement, just characters practicing being themselves. This is much of what makes roleplaying games cool. You have time to get really invested in the progress of a character.

I am still part of a friend group that get together for roleplaying games, but the play sessions tend to be false starts and one-shots (game sessions where you play disposable characters through a short string of fights agains monsters and then never play with them again after that one time). These are fun, but only in that we are hanging out and drinking beer. You can't get into the characters all that much, and the action has no real purpose. It's something to do, but it doesn't get to the core fun of what keeps me buying Dungeons and Dragons books well into my adult life. I can't swing full campaigns, and one-shot just don't satisfy.

Two days ago my wife and I sent out text messages to a bunch of friends. "Show up @ our place @ noon. D&D 3-shot". About half of the people who we invited showed up and got down to making characters. We agreed to play three times only with this group, and that this campaign would have a closed ending. This was going to be a campaign about plot. The characters would stick around for a little while, so there was some investment in them, but we couldn't spend hours just developing them. They had something to do and they had to get it done quickly. And therein we have the advantage of finite campaigns, they don't have the time for sidetracking or developing characters more than needed. They're satisfying the way that video roleplaying games are. The players get to complete the quest. They don't have to get it done in one night, but they need to get it done.

Afte one session, I'm really excited about where this is going. We have four characters who, while not fully developed, are at least united by a common goal. They have already found some pretty exciting success in moving towards that goal, and, since they are already one third of the way through the plot, they can already see a little bit of what reaching that goal will entail. When the evening ended we knew we'd be coming back for more in a few weeks, so there'll be some anticipation for next time, with the added bonus that next time has to be important. We get to care a little about these characters without having to block out every Thursday evening from not until a billion years from now. I like this 3-shot thing.

Gahhhh! Summer! Ugh!

I have been on summer vacation for three days now and have already heard four different people tell me that the three months that take place during the hottest part of the year are the part of the teaching profession that they envy most. Whenever anyone realizes that I am somewhere close to the beginning of this long, forced vacation (at some jobs the call it a furlough) they start demanding that I provide a list of exciting things that I have planned to fill the empty hours. When I say, "No plans," they fix me with accusing gazes and wax poetic about how nice it must be. I'm sorry, people, they don't make summer camp for adults. When I was a kid my friends had summer break with me. Now my friends work and fix me with withering gazes. One day I'll have children and then I'll be back to having plans that other people think are exciting.

So here, this is what I mean when I say, "No plans."

This summer, like every summer, I'm going to read as many books as I can. I'm going to play my way through a couple of video games that I never got to beat. I'm going to finish recording the demos for the two bands in which I play (then I'll use those demos to get to play more local shows in bars and warehouses and people's basements). I'm going to watch as many horror movies as I can stomach. I'm going to putter around my house, painting here, fixing there, tidying as much as I can. I'm going to cook my wife dinner as often as she wants. I'm going to get together with some friends and play Dungeons and Dragons at last once. I might do some yoga. I might do some pushups. I might drink some beers. My step-brother died a few days ago, so I'm going to continue being sad and angry about that for a while. Then I'll move on and just have nice memories. I'm going to go over the curriculum plans for the classes I teach and make them more effective at meeting important educational goals and more engaging for my students. Lastly I'm going to do my damnedest to keep as much loud, angry music blaring from as many speakers in my house at a time as I can.

It's not a bad way to spend three months with no plans.

Quick post on upcoming podcasts!

About half of my Contemporary Literature class have recorded podcasts of their short memoirs! So far the process has been very valuable, at least to me as a teacher. I like having the one-on-one time with students, explaining a novel process to them, and helping them to tell their stories (or at least part of their stories) in a way that feels more natural to them than writing. Not all of the podcasts have gone as well as I've expected. I am particularly disappointed with one student's lack of effort, but was surprised with the quality of three other students' recordings. I am not yet fully happy with the process, but we ex-Catholics are good at being self-critical and obsessively trying to be all perfect and stuff. The Moth is a wonderful resource that I have found invaluable for examples. Those guys kick ass, and you should listen to them and give them a little bit of your money.

I am still having trouble finding a reliably available blogging tool for my students (my school is going through some technology growing pains that will hopefully settle down next year) so they will not be creating the blogs that I had hoped they might this semester. If the powers that be let me teach the class next year, this will be the first addition that I will make. No blogs for the kids means that they do not all have a good place to post their podcasts. My plan is to, once all are recorded, ask for permission to post them here. I will not be censoring or selecting them in any way. Whoever wants theirs up will see theirs go up. Updates will follow.

How I spent Columbus Day 2010

Let me just say that Columbus sucked. Maybe not quite as badly as we remember him, but dude's published journals are woefully inaccurate and contain some pathetic attempts at keeping posterity from remembering him as a drunkard and a failed politician. My school generally does not get Columbus Day off, and I fully support this policy.

This year, however, a strange twist of calendar-fate has landed me at home on this most ignominious of holidays. How am I spending it? By working my way through an amazing music blog! The Day After The Sabbath makes me nothing but giddy with 70s heavy metal joy. My poor neighbors.

A Hypothetical, Unedited Mixtape for My Students

Mp3s may have killed the mixtape, but they do make it so I can just publish a list of songs and let everyone else break copyright laws. My students only actually get to hear some of this stuff. I'd actually make this mix, but I'm a wimp and am worried that my musical tastes are too offensive to share in their entirety.

Here we go, my hypothetical, unedited mixtape for my students that I am too wimpy to actually make (OK, maybe one day . . . ):

1. "Love in Vein" - Skinny Puppy - The best opening track in recorded music. I could never make a mixtape without Skinny Puppy. Just ask my poor wife.

2. "In Bloom" - Nirvana - Grunge! I want everyone to love this song as much as I do.

3. "Time Does Not Heal" - Dark Angel - Thrash metal. Your life does not improve without your action.

4. "Man the Ramparts" - Botch - Hardcore! The world may very well not be on your side, and that is just fine.

5. "Bring Back the Apocalypse" - Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Art metal. You may very well not be on the world's side, and that is just fine.

6. "Mind's Mirrors" - Meshuggah - Tech-metal. "The struggle to free yourself from restraints / becomes the very shackles"

7. "Wanderlust King" - Gogol Bordello - Joyous, rollicking punk. Everything that everyone does is awesome all the time.

8. "Doin' It" - Herbie Hancock - Did Herbie invent funk? Does it matter? Keep on truckin' kiddies!

9. "Draconian Crackdown" - Rasputina - Cello rock? - Fight the power!

10. "No Quarter" - Led Zeppelin - Rock'n'Roll! The approach I would like my students to take towards life

11. "Swollen Tongue Bums" - Dalek - Angry, noisy hip-hop! You cannot run from your human responsibility.

12. "Watchfire" - Neurosis - Face-melting post-metal. Humanity cannot escape you or your influence.

13. "Death Is Not the End" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Folk rock! Nothing is ever actually over.

Son of Contemporary Lit

A week-and-a-half in and I am starting to get a pretty good sense of where these kids are ability-wise. My ESL kids speak and write well, and struggle mostly with English idioms and figurative language in general. The students who receive special education services are pretty well all over the place. I sprung the first longer writing assignment on a bit too early. I would like for them to write a short memoir-style piece, but we began before I did any mini-writing activities. Scaffolding FAIL!!! I'm currently trying to work out the best way of backpedaling out of the assignment.

Yesterday we read Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own and I had the students use it as a model to express their desires for the future. They shocked me first by really enjoying the short poem and then by really working on the modeling activity. I saw teenagers smiling proudly over their writing and really struggling to get the words right on the paper. I almost never get to see that. In a few days I'm going to try a similar short writing activity with students sharing their writing in small groups and talk with them about ways to read their own writing out loud. I want to know what they like about the assignments and see about doing it more with longer assignments later in the semester. We're getting to the bottom of this "Mister, I like this writing thing" thing.

Contemporary Literature: The Saga Begins

Each year I teach the only section of a Junior/Senior class that started out being called "Science-Fiction Survey." The idea was that there were a handfull of students at our school that were not fully served by regular English classes. They were not intrinsically motivated enough to do well in their regular senior year English class and were not students for whom special education classes were appropriate. So well pulled together some resources for teaching a class with higher interest reading materials, doing more hands-on work, but still getting at the skills needed for senior English. This plan began to erode almost immediately.

My first group contained some students who were also taking the regular senior English class. They were doing fine in this class and did not need any extra services. The second year's group also contained some students who were additionally taking special educational English classes. The third year, many of the students signed up for the class without meeting any of the stated prerequisites at all. All three years over half of each class had no interest in science-fiction in the least. So, like any good adult presented with an impossible task, I did my best to change my goals.

The class is now called "Contemporary Literature" and the oldest piece of writing that I am teaching is Stephen King's The Shining. We will read at least one graphic novel as a class. My textbook is the last few year's The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. We are going to read investigative journalism and listen to The Moth podcasts. When we are done they will recognize Frank McCourt, Nikki Giovanni, and Billy Collins as the badasses that they are. They are going to creative write their backsides off. I am friggin' terrified.

This year I am looking at a roster of incredibly disperate students. They are all either high school Juniors or Seniors. There are nineteen of them. About five receive special education services. One has never taken a single mainstreamed English course. I know that at least two are listed as English Language Learners. Two of them I have had previously in an honors level class that I also teach. Five have been suggested for honors level classes. Seven have not met the prerequisites for the class. This is going to be a hard group.

We are two days away from starting class. I'm still reading through a book on developing effective group work strategies because I know that pulling these kids together as a cohesive social whole is the only way this class is going to not crash and burn. I'll spend this semester trying to post at least weekly about how things are going.