Empress of Dorsa Update:
Total words today: 0
Manuscript total: 74,741
I think the book is going to be longer than I thought after re-outlining (surprise, surprise). I’d originally figured on 120,000 words, which I could reach by late October without much fuss or muss, but now I’m thinking more like 150 – 170,000 words, which means finishing the manuscript more like late November, early December. For the moment, that still puts me on track to publish in late 2020/early 2021.
Meanwhile…
I learned glorious, wonderful things last week.
In Adventures in Distance Learning, Part 1, I discussed how much sixth graders loooooove the public chat. They are more likely to answer a question and interact with each other via the chat than to unmute their microphones and answer/talk to each other out-loud.
For the most part, I don’t mind the public chat conversations. I accept that these kiddos have been isolated from their peers for MONTHS and are desperate for some interaction. However, when I’m trying to impart something I actually want them to learn and they’re STILL talking about Fortnite in the public chat… well, then it becomes a problem.
Then my colleague taught me something glorious and wonderful: I can turn off the public chat (and then turn it back on) whenever I like.
Amazing. That was the best thing that happened to me all week.
It is ironic that as much as these kiddos miss seeing one another and want to chat about video games, pets, and knowing each other from elementary school, when I put them into small groups in a breakout room, they stop talking completely. Silence.
So getting kids to talk in breakout rooms will be my next issue to tackle.
And also: questions of karma.
I am super frustrated that, only a couple weeks after ranting about people reading my books for free, I am in the position of having my kids read a novel and posting a free PDF links of the book for them.
Sigh.
It makes me a little banana-pants that we’re doing it — English teachers whose job it is to teach kids not to plagiarize because it is theft of intellectual property, and yet here we are giving them free copyrighted material.
I feel a bit stuck on this. There’s honestly not a lot I can do about it as the new teacher and new kid. I am absolutely not in a situation where I feel comfortable making waves, not in my literal first month on the job. I’ve kept my mouth shut. But it still makes me wince every time I give them the link to free PDF the book, and it reinforces to me why younger generations are so quick to take advantage of everything free on the Internet. Of course they will if even their teachers are giving them copies of free books without batting an eye!
My only consolation is this: The school does actually have paperback class sets for each child. And if we were not in the time of coronavirus, the kids wouldn’t be encouraged to read a free Internet version but handed a paperback copy and asked to read that. So if I look at it that way, the school did pay the author for their work.
From that point of view, it’s kind of like how I use LT’s family membership to go to the YMCA. My name isn’t on the membership card I use to check in, but the membership is being paid for, and it’s not like I use the card sometimes and someone else uses it another time — if I wasn’t using that particular membership card, no one else would be using it. LT tried to change the membership card to carry my name, but YMCA wouldn’t change it, so I just use it anyway with someone else’s name on it. But it’s not as if I stole someone’s membership card and now I can go to the gym but they can’t, and it’s not like it’s a fake account that no one is paying for, either. LT pays for a family membership of four, and I use that fourth card in place of the person who used to use it.
So that’s not theft… right??
You can tell these are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
Anyway, yes, the school did ultimately pay for the books, but I still don’t like the habits we are teaching to the kids with so little self-reflection on the fact that we are doing it. If I had it my way, we would find a way to distribute the books to the kids at the same time we distribute Chromebooks. If we can distribute 844 computers, then for God’s sake, why can’t we find a way to distribute a couple hundred paperback novels?
That’s all I got today, folks. Have a great first week of September.
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