It's a Mystery

I'm one of millions of readers of mysteries. We don't passively absorb books. We interact actively from the first page. We use nuanced clues to keep changing our hypotheses. At the end we weigh the resolution against alternatives we'd been considering.

It's never surprised me how much the kids up our street like to play soccer, because starting a game is like opening a new mystery. So that's why I'm finding reading Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World odd, because neither in the book nor in Amy Gonzalez's National Writing Project review at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3654 , is game playing compared to mystery reading.

Yet McGonigal's defining features of a game are so characteristic of the experience of mystery reading: a goal which is often redefined as you go, and is enhanced by a good story; limitations (cultural, subplot- or information-based, etc.) imposed on ways the goal can be achieved stimulating you to stretch your thinking; a feedback system that lets you know your progress; and voluntary participation, meaning we agree to the goal, limitations and feedback system we're given.

I wish we could develop a whole set of quality children's mysteries in Sierra Leone.

Why Teaching is Fun

"This is the email Carla sent," I told my beginning-proficiency Workplace English adult class.

Our lesson was about emailing, and attaching, and the various kinds of attachments there can be. The students were not only getting lost in the new vocabulary in Carla's list of documents—a bar chart of stocks in the warehouse, a graph of products for last month—they also had had little experience with computers. One fellow looked particularly bewildered.

I realized that Carla was naming five documents in her email. Impulsively, I took off my necklace and handed it to him. "This is the email Carla sent," I said. "She sent it to Tim just as I am handing this to you."

"The main necklace of handmade glass beads is the email, and you can see the five attachments. Name them for me."

Using the necklace forced the class together to isolate the five items in the text, and to see how they all moved together with the main email to the recipient when they were sent. Using concrete objects is common in ESL classes, but in addition I have learned that I'm not alone among adults in needing concrete objects to make the abstract clear, and this is just one more example. Barbara Tuchman said it very clearly:

History written in abstract terms communicates nothing to me. I cannot comprehend the abstract, and since a writer tends to create the reader in his own image, I assume my reader cannot comprehend it either. No doubt I underestimate him. Certainly many serious thinkers write in the abstract and many people read them with interest and profit and even, I suppose, pleasure. I respect this ability, but I am unable to emulate it.

Tuchman, B. (1982). Practicing History. New York: Ballantine/Random House, p. 37.

When Teachers Learn, Everybody Learns

Professional development is essential! And it's fun. It's great to stop being a teacher and be a student again. I was part of another CODE/PEN workshop this month with Charlie Temple, university professor and children's book writer from the US, and Mohamed Sheriff, president of the Sierra Leone PEN chapter. Our shared interest is the development of children's literature in Sierra Leone.

Sometimes an awakening occurs before the stories inside us can appear. Really good teachers can pass on the strategies that draw out our stories. They connect us. They get us listening to ourselves as we are in other contexts--to our voices in other languages and to other age groups; to our voices in music; to our behaviors as we sing and walk and talk. And somehow by their magic as teachers, they get us putting that language and those behaviors onto paper.

Charlie has a 10-string charango that he brought for us this time, and that literacy lesson really brought it home for me. It's great to take a break from being a teacher, and learn from other teachers again.