Brandon Sanderson and the Power of Delayed Gratification

We live in a culture that demands instant gratification. In a world where we can binge-watch from a selection of thousands of movies or TV shows on our phones, or download and read just about any book with one click on Amazon, we hate to have to wait for payoffs. Ten years ago, I was watching LOST as it aired on TV, and I remember clearly how agonizing even a one week wait could be, between episodes. Yet, there’s something about delayed gratification--about the waiting and the agonizing and the theorizing with friends--that captures the imagination and makes a TV, movie, or book series more meaningful.

Disney and Marvel Studios certainly understand this. One of my summer projects has been to catch up on the MCU movies--no small task, considering that up until a month and a half ago, I had only seen the first Avengers movie. As my wife and I have caught up, one thing that has deeply impressed me is just how patient Disney and Marvel were in delivering payoffs for their epic, overarching story arc. The crossover references started as occasional blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em easter eggs, and the larger infinity gem narrative was indeed a slow-burn, in the best possible way.

A contemporary fantasy author who has tapped into the power of delayed gratification in a similar way is Brandon Sanderson.

Sanderson is an impressive author for a variety of reasons. He has been incredibly prolific over the last decade, juggling multiple separate series of books--Mistborn, The Stormlight Archives, The Wheel of Time, and Skyward, to name a few--and managing to publish at least one book, and sometimes one or more novella each year. While George R.R. Martin’s glacial writing speed may lead a reader to assume that a good fantasy book takes decades to write, Sanderson proves that prolificity need not come at the expense of quality. His books are well-written, his worlds fully realized.

A significant piece of Sanderson’s world-building comes from his knack for crafting engaging and thoroughly thought-out systems of magic in each of his worlds. Sanderson recently wrote an essay in which he discussed the distinction between “soft magic” and “hard magic” in fantasy literature. “Soft magic”, as Sanderson defines it, is magic where the rules are not clearly defined. Sanderson observes that one result of employing a “soft magic” system is that the characters cannot use magic to solve the central conflict of the story--at least, not without the resolution feeling arbitrary and unearned. Instead, in “soft magic” stories, the magic takes on a background role.

By contrast, “hard magic” is magic where the rules are clearly defined and explained, following an internal consistency within the world in the book. Unlike “soft magic”, characters can use “hard magic” to solve significant problems, as doing so requires the characters to develop an understanding and mastery of the magic system, a process which challenges the characters and forces them to grow. Moreover, the obstacles that the characters face are complex and not solvable with a simple wave of the hand. In “hard magic” stories, the magic system is practically a character in its own right.

Sanderson is a skilled “hard magic” writer, and has constructed worlds in which the magic systems function almost as an additional set of natural laws. His magic systems are neither arbitrary nor limitless, and a character’s power is a function of how well they understand the rules of the world’s magic, combined with their inherent skills and personal qualities, and a certain measure of creativity. It was Sanderson’s magic systems--and the edge-of-your-seat action that results from seeing characters use that magic--that first made me a fan of his writing.

What has cemented me as a fan, however, has been the way in which each story works together to form a larger narrative. Sanderson has said in interviews that he is a big fan of sprawling, epic fantasy series, and that he always wanted to write an epic series of his own. However, when he was writing his first books more than 15 years ago, he recognized the risk involved in embarking on an undertaking like that: if the first book in an epic series does not sell very well, the author cannot simply pitch the second book in the series to publishers as a fall-back, and all of the time and effort spent planning out the series would have gone to waste.

Instead, Sanderson began to work on several series that seemed separate from one another, set on different worlds with different magic systems and different characters. That way, if one book did not sell well, he would be able to send something unique to publishers on his next attempt. Yet, attached as he was to the idea of writing an epic series, Sanderson decided to sneak some easter eggs into each book to begin what he called a “hidden epic”, clues that each story and each world had a deeper connection to the others than might have initially met the eye. As his books began to sell and Sanderson gained clout and credibility as a rising fantasy author, he began to make these connections more explicit.

Sanderson’s world-building ability goes well beyond his skill at creating compelling magic systems. Indeed, he has created an entire universe--called the “Cosmere”--in which many of his series take place, a universe whose history, complexities, and conflicts he is gradually revealing with each new book. Sanderson’s books all hold up on their own merits, but the reward for reading everything is the larger “hidden” epic unfolding in the background across his works. It is, in a sense, his “infinity gem” narrative. Perhaps the most notable point of connection shared by all of the books is a mysterious character who appears in every book, sometimes only briefly, and often wearing a disguise. This mysterious character has taken on a more significant role in more recent books, and has undoubtedly inspired many readers to reread the earlier books in an attempt to try and spot each appearance.

Here is a quick overview of the main books and series set in the Cosmere, in what I would recommend as a reading order:

Mistborn Era One
This was where I started, on a friend’s recommendation, and it is where I would recommend others to start as well. Mistborn takes place on the world of Scadrial, a medieval world shrouded in a constant rain of volcanic ash and where an ominous mist settles each night, keeping people indoors. Scadrial has been ruled for one thousand years by the mysterious tyrant, The Lord Ruler, who has stratified society into a nobility class, and a slave class, known as the “skaa”. In the midst of these circumstances, a street urchin named Vin discovers that she has magical powers derived from metallic dust as she is recruited into the most dangerous heist that Scadrial has ever seen.

• Mistborn: The Final Empire (2006)
• Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (2007)
• Mistborn: The Hero of Ages (2008)

Mistborn Era Two (AKA “Wax and Wayne”)
This series is set centuries after the first three Mistborn books, at a time when Vin and her friends have become the stuff of legends. By this point, Scadrial has developed to a mid-1800s level of technology, and this series reads as much like wild west fiction (with pistol duels, saloons, and train-top showdowns) as it does fantasy. This series follows the adventures of Wax, a lawman from the Roughs, and his deputy/best bud Wayne, as they investigate increasingly severe disturbances in Scadrial’s big cities. While I thoroughly enjoyed the first three Mistborn books, the first few pages of Alloy of Law were the point where I decided that I wanted to read everything that Sanderson had written. The tone and style are so vastly different from the first series that, as a writer, I could not help but be impressed with Sanderson’s versatility. I should note that Sanderson plans to write two additional Mistborn series in the future, an “Era Three” set in a Scadrial with 1980s-level technology, and an “Era Four”, which he has described as a futuristic space opera.

• The Alloy of Law (2011)
• The Shadows of Self (2015)
• The Bands of Mourning (2016)

• Elantris (2005)

This was Sanderson’s first published novel. While it was released to critical acclaim, it does read a little bit rough compared to nearly everything Sanderson has written since, with the characters not quite as well developed, and the writing not quite as polished as his later works. It is by no means poorly written, but Mistborn is a far better sample of what Sanderson is capable of as a writer, and much more likely to hook new readers for the long-haul. Elantris is set on the world of Sel, a world where people would sometimes, seemingly randomly, wake up as Elantrians--superhuman angelic beings--and relocate to the magical city of Elantris. That is, until a cataclysmic event causes people to no longer transform into angelic beings, but rather disfigured and undead beings who are imprisoned in the city of Elantris. Elantris tells the story of a young woman named Sarene, a princess who has just arrived in a new kingdom to be married to its prince, only to discover that the prince has suddenly, and perhaps suspiciously, passed away. The book follows Sarene’s adjustment to life in her new home, and her attempts to crack the mysteries of the neighboring city of Elantris.

• Warbreaker (2009)

Set on the world of Nalthis, where people derive power from color, Warbreaker tells the story of Siri, a headstrong princess who is suddenly sent to marry the mysterious God-King of an enemy kingdom in the place of her older sister Vivenna, who has spent her life preparing for the betrothal, and Vivenna, who travels into enemy territory in pursuit of her sister.



The Stormlight Archive:
This is Sanderson’s series with the most epic scope. I read it immediately after finishing Bands of Mourning, and while I really enjoyed it, I would definitely recommend holding off on this series until after reading Elantris and Warbreaker, as the background from those two books will enrich one’s reading of Stormlight and make many easter eggs that I completely missed the first time through much easier to spot. Sanderson’s plan is for The Stormlight Archive to be a ten-book series, with each book weighing in at 1000+ pages, each book focusing on a different character. The Stormlight Archive is set on the world of Roshar where weapons and armor are charged with special power by the violent storms that regularly sweep the landscape. The first book opens with the murder of King Gavilar by a mysterious, gravity-defying assassin dressed in white, and the series follows Gavilar’s brother, the renowned warrior Dalinar, Gavilar’s son Elhokar, who takes the throne after his father’s death, Gavilar’s daughter Jasnah, a brilliant scholar who has been accused of heresy, Dalinar’s sons Adolin, a skilled duelist and eligible bachelor, and Renarin, a sickly youth who lives in the shadow of his father and brother, a young soldier-turned-slave named Kaladin, a young artist named Shallan who wishes to be tutored by Jasnah… the list could go on.

Although each book features chapters from the perspective of each main character, each book focuses on one character with flashback chapters mixed in. For example, The Way of Kings features Kaladin’s flashbacks. I’ll stop there as even revealing whose flashbacks feature in a given book would be a minor spoiler. I will warn readers that The Way of Kings takes a while to get into, and with good reason: it is essentially a 1000-page prologue to the series, and Sanderson spends most of the book laying essential groundwork that will pay off dividends in Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, which are my two favorite books by Brandon Sanderson, hands-down. Character development in this series is hard-earned, and Sanderson never cuts corners. Characters grow through grueling setbacks, pain and suffering, and Way of Kings features its share of such growth in order to place the characters where they need to be at the start of Words of Radiance. This is delayed gratification in action!

• The Way of Kings (2010)
• Words of Radiance (2014)
• Oathbringer (2017)

Honorable mention:

• The Emperor’s Soul (2012)

This is a novella and not a full novel, but it is an excellent sampling of Sanderson’s style and a good alternative entry point to Sanderson’s writing, particularly for anyone who does not consider themselves a fantasy reader, or for anyone who feels like starting a full novel or series is too much of a commitment. Set on Sel (the same world as Elantris, but in a completely separate country), The Emperor’s Soul tells the story of Shai, a thief and magical forger who is tasked with forging a new soul for the emperor after an assassination attempt leaves him brain-dead.


There are a number of other short stories and novellas that contribute to Cosmere lore, but I will leave those to the reader to find and read if they so choose. Bear in mind that each book or series (even the mammoth Stormlight Archive) can be read and enjoyed on its own, without any knowledge or awareness of the greater lore, and in fact, I did not start to recognize that greater lore until I was seven books in. That said, if you have the time and patience to read everything, you are in for a real treat. Sanderson’s hidden epic is nearly 15 years in the making, and he is not even halfway finished telling this larger story. If you want instant gratification--if you need answers and you need them now, these books are not for you. However, if you revel in the mystery, the agonizing, the theorizing, and the waiting, pick up Mistborn or The Emperor’s Soul. You will not regret it.

Expecting Catastophe

My heart raced.
Sweat poured.
Every nerve in my legs screamed in pain.

This is it, I thought.  This is how I die, here and now.

"Here" was Victoria's Peak in Hong Kong; "Now" was 1:00pm, March 26, 2009.

I staggered to a payphone and dumped a handful of change into the coin-slot.  I was not sure how much money I put in, but I knew it was the most expensive phone call of my life.  It didn't matter.  Money and materials do not matter when you're dying.

My mom picked up the phone in Washington State at 10:00pm March 25.  Thank God--I wouldn't have to break the news to my parents through voicemail or a Facebook post.

"It's me.  I'm sure I'm having a heart attack.  I'm freaking out."

My mom, who walks a perpetual tightrope between her role as a mother and her role as a doctor, offered a quick diagnosis:

"You do not sound like someone who is having a heart attack."

Geez, I need a second opinion.  If I even have time for a second opinion, that is. 

"I really think I'm dying.  My heart won't stop racing, and I'm getting shooting pain in my legs."

"Are you at your hotel room right now?"

"I'm calling from a payphone at the top of Victoria's Peak."

"Have you eaten lunch yet?"

I had eaten lunch, as a matter of fact.  I was in Hong Kong for a 3-day trip to reset the tourist visa that was allowing me to volunteer at the Christian Academy in Japan.  I had always wanted to go to Hong Kong, and particularly Victoria's Peak, ever since seeing a picture of the cityscape in a special Places of the World edition of TIME Magazine as a kid.  So, that morning, I had made my way by foot from my hotel to the trolley that would take me to Victoria's Peak.  I had walked for more than three hours, only to find that the fog had rolled in, completely obscuring the view of the city.

By then, it was lunch time, and I had settled at a window-side booth in an Indian restaurant that probably had a panoramic view of the city, most of the time.  I had only recently been introduced to Indian curry for the first time, and was feeling adventurous that day.  The last curry on the menu, advertised only as "very spicy", came with a health advisory notice, cautioning pregnant women and people with heart conditions against ordering it.  How spicy could it be? I thought to myself.  I decided to give it a try.

About halfway through the meal, I swore off spicy foods for the rest of my life.  I don't feel that any adjective I throw out could adequately capture just how spicy this curry was.  Suffice it to say that at one point, I felt like I could not only see--but understand--the concept of eternity.  I had ordered an iced tea with my curry and one refill quickly became half a dozen or more.  Soon enough, I had put out the fire, but left some burning embers behind.

As I was new to overseas travel and restaurant etiquette in different countries, I was shocked to learn that there was no such thing as "free refills" at this restaurant, and that I had spent the equivalent of $15USD on my iced tea alone.

It was about five minutes after leaving the restaurant that I had started sweating and my heart had started racing, and I knew with all certainty that I was going to die then and there.

My mom listened to my story as she would have listened to a patient history.  Then,

"Yep, that curry was probably a mistake.  Doubt you'll do that to yourself again, given how easily you get heartburn."

"But it's not just heartburn, my heart is racing--"

"Because you drank eight tall glasses of iced tea.  I'm assuming it wasn't herbal tea."

"But my legs--"

"You spent the entire morning walking, probably on concrete for most of the time.  You don't usually get this much exercise, so I'm not surprised you're feeling sore."

After the conversation had ended, I made my way back to the hotel in a stupor.  So I wasn't dying, after all.  Physically, I still felt miserable, but I felt like I had been snatched from the jaws of death.

After a nap back at the hotel, I made my way up to Victoria's Peak again that evening.  Second chances are a wonderful thing, and on this second trip, I found that the fog had cleared, giving me a beautiful view of the city lights.

I do not consider myself a pessimist, but over time, I have learned that I am a pro at expecting catastrophe.  Unbidden, I find myself leaping to the worst conclusions or envisioning the most dire scenarios based on little to no evidence.

It's all too easy to let my mind imagine the worst and then look for any reason to confirm those fears.  Disaster lurks around every corner; malice hides in every pleasantry; death awaits in each ache and pain.  Soon enough, I'm having a heart attack and wondering whether I'll die on Victoria's Peak itself, or in the ambulance.

Bracing myself for the worst, I forget the truth: that more often than not, it's just spicy curry and too much iced tea.

Ocarina of Time, 20 years on

Sometimes, I regret that I spent so much of my childhood playing video games; that I did not discover reading for fun until I caved in and finally read the Harry Potter series (5 books at that time) the summer after I graduated from high school.

That said, video games have always had a way of capturing rather than dulling my imagination.  Case in point, when I was little, my imaginary friends were all Nintendo characters, and I would have pretend adventures with them outside in the fields, woods and barns on our family farm; the adventures just happened to have a Nintendo theme to them.  So it is that the accusation of video games turning children into unimaginative couch potatoes never rang true with me--I managed to play outdoors and cultivate my imagination in tandem with--not in spite of--the video games I loved to play.

And even to this day, there are still some games that hold a special place in my heart.  Perhaps it is a different place than a beloved book holds, but it is still a special place nonetheless.

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of one such game.

In 1998, I was in 7th grade.  I had been late to the party with the Game Boy and the Super Nintendo, and had never known what it was like to look forward to the release of an upcoming video game.  By 7th grade, however, I was the proud owner of a Nintendo 64, which I'd gotten for my birthday the previous year.  It was the current generation of console in 1998, and so I subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine and began to search online for any morsel of information that I could on new games.

I'll never forget the first trailer I saw for Ocarina of Time.  It took an hour to load on our dial-up Internet, and was maybe 30 seconds long, but the image of a 3-D Link wielding a 3-D Master Sword against a 3-D Stalfos is forever etched in my mind.

After that, I began to count down the days until November 21, even talking my mom into reserving a copy ahead of time at Electronics Boutique.

I remember poring over preview screenshots in Nintendo Power with friends, and speculating on what the game would be like during lunch break at school.

Then, one gray November afternoon, we picked up the game, and my brother and I huddled around the instruction manual on the 20-minute ride home from Electronics Boutique.

Since I was older, my brother gave me (or more likely I demanded) first dibs.

I remember plugging the cartridge into the 64.  I remember the opening chords as Epona galloped across the field on the title screen.  I remember the breathtaking cinematic opening, with Navi flying from the Deku tree to Link's house.  I remember learning to roll, sidestep, lunge and backflip, all while collecting rupees to buy a shield.  I remember crawling too quickly through the crawlspace that led to the Kokiri sword and getting bowled over by a giant boulder.  I remember the moody atmospheric feel of the Deku Tree temple.  I remember the intensity of the boss fight with Gohma.  I remember the vast, unending feel of Hyrule field.

I could go on.  We played for hours that first evening, and made it up to Dodongo's Cavern.  It was like no game I had played before: it was immersive, like being in a movie.  The game's camera was much more cooperative and natural than the finicky camera in Super Mario 64, and the new Z-targeting mechanic was so intuitive that it felt like second nature by the end of that first evening.  The graphics were unparalleled, and Koji Kondo had outdone himself with a soundtrack that surpassed even that of A Link to the Past.

As luck would have it, Thanksgiving vacation was the following week, and Christmas vacation was not long after.  In those days and weeks, I enjoyed the feeling of experiencing something truly groundbreaking for the very first time.  I now know how rare that feeling is.  Few things, whether books, movies, TV shows or video games, become instant classics, and rarely do things that feel like they could be, actually end up becoming instant classics.

Did I know at the time that I was playing a game that would, twenty years later, still be considered by many to be the best video game of all time?

Maybe not in so many words, but even then, I had a feeling that this game was something special, which manifested itself in the shock at stepping out of the Temple of Time as Adult Link for the first time, and seeing the ring of fire around the peak of Death Mountain; in the haunting feeling of exploring the Forest Temple (still my favorite dungeon, by the way); in the cutscene of Kakariko Village burning, under attack by some invisible monster; in the mind-bending time travel mechanics of the Spirit Temple; in the harrowing escape from Ganon's castle, and of course, the final battle with Ganon himself.

Last year, I had the privilege to relive this excitement to some degree as I played through Ocarina of Time on my 2DS.  Sure, bigger games with better graphics and more features have come out in the years since, but they all in some way owe a debt to Ocarina of Time.

1978, two decades before Ocarina of Time came out, was a big year for video games with a wave of early classics hitting the arcades.  In 2018, two decades on, video games continue to evolve, and in some ways seem to have come full circle as VR arcades are beginning to gain traction.  Two decades from now, who knows what the video game industry will look like?  However, allow me to make one safe prediction: the 40th anniversary of Ocarina of Time will be a big deal.

Image taken from https://imgur.com/gallery/otLQ9

Figuring out AP English

Figuring out how to best teach AP English has been one of the greatest puzzles of my teaching career.  Some of this has been logistical: due to scheduling quirks, including the fact that I teach 11th grade English as a Humanities blend along with U.S. History, I've never taught a distinct AP English class.  Rather, in a Humanities section of 20+ students, there have always been a handful of students taking AP English as a supplement to our regular Humanities curriculum, sitting in class alongside non-AP classmates.

For the first two years, I attempted to use Humanities class-time once or twice a week to work with the AP students by setting the non-AP students on a different task while I met with the AP students.  This proved to be too cumbersome, and in 2012, I opted to start weekly AP sessions outside of our regular class-time, before or after school, or during lunch.  This ended up being burdensome, too, as I was having three or four AP meetings a week at different times.  Two years ago, I decided to offer sessions on Thursday lunch and Friday lunch, allowing students to choose between one or the other.  This has worked quite well, and students who are unable to attend on a given week have been diligent about letting me know ahead of time and figuring out what they will need to catch up on.

The challenge with weekly meetings, then, became how to sufficiently teach the AP curriculum in 40 minute meetings once a week.  The short answer is that it's impossible.

This has forced me to be more intentional in how I structure the skill-building in my regular Humanities course so that I am truly laying a foundation that the AP English students can build on through their outside assignments and our weekly lunch meetings.  My Humanities course is by no means an AP-level course--every year, I have students who have only been learning English for a few years, and I simply cannot hit them with the intensity of College Board's expectations, particularly the high level of critical reading and the strict time limits on both the reading test and the essays.

Instead, I have sought to help all of my students develop the foundations of critical reading: being able to identify the relationship between speaker, occasion, audience and purpose; being able to pick up on the tone; being able to analyze how the speaker uses rhetorical strategies to accomplish their purpose.  This year, I developed lessons on logic to help students better recognize the structure of an argument.  This helped our later study of rhetorical fallacies to have more of an impact, as the students had a stronger grounding in basic logic than any previous group ever had.  Through our unit essays, we practice synthesis skills, and through our debates, we practice research and argumentation skills.  Each year, I learn how to teach, assess, and provide feedback on these skills more effectively.

This frees me up to assign essays to the AP students as extra assignments during the week, and to use the weekly lunch sessions as opportunities to workshop writing skills, discuss together, and provide direct feedback.  During the first semester, we focus on how to write the three different essay prompts on the AP exam--synthesis, rhetorical analysis and argumentative--one at a time, with the opportunity to revise and submit a second draft for each.

During the second semester, we practice writing each essay by hand within a time limit.  In the past, I struggled to know how to keep up with the grading: I learned very quickly that it would be impossible for me grade a full set of AP essays every week, in addition to my regular Humanities grading.  My instinctive alternative, asking the students to peer-edit each essay for each other, was equally impossible to manage and assess.  Finally, this year, I devised a rotating schedule that worked almost perfectly for me: the students would submit three full sets of timed essays throughout the Spring: one set in January, one set in March, and one set in April.  I would spend time grading these sets and providing feedback.  On the "off-weeks", students would write individual timed essays (rhetorical analysis in January; synthesis in February; argumentative in March) to be discussed and workshopped during our weekly sessions, and which I would check for a completion grade.  The week after each timed essay set was due, I gave a full multiple choice test after school in lieu of a lunch meeting to ensure that students had ongoing opportunities to apply critical reading skills and practice pacing under test conditions.

On Monday, April 30, I gave a full practice exam after school, both multiple choice and essay sections, which I made a point of grading and returning to the students within the week.

I've offered a full practice exam since 2012, and for years, that was the only piece of useful data that I had in predicting how the students might perform on the actual exam.  This year, I was able to collect valuable data points--at least four multiple choice test scores and four sets of timed essay scores--to track the students' performance, growth, strengths and struggles.  I created a profile for each student to share this data, as well as ongoing feedback.  After grading the full practice exam last week, I presented the numbers in a few different ways to help the students see how they might do on test day.

These are screenshots of a sample profile I made up to show the type of data I collected.

Collecting and working with this data took time on top of grading and giving feedback, but it was worth it.  As I told the students when I shared the data with them, the data tells them--and me--a more complete story than a single score from exam day ever could.  While a lower score than they hope for on the actual exam might sting in the moment, it cannot cancel out the growth and capability they have demonstrated throughout the entire year.

I feel like I can predict with reasonable certainty how my students will do on the exam next week.  There will be some surprises of course, both good and bad, but I know where each student is at now.  More importantly, I know where they have come from.  Not every student will pass the AP exam, but regardless, I am proud of the hard work they have invested, and their growth through struggle.

For the first time, I feel like I have a system that works as an AP English teacher who teaches AP as a supplement to a non-AP curriculum.  In fact, I can safely say that I wouldn't do this any other way--I'm looking forward to refining this in the future!

For Emma

To my Emma-Jemma,

Was this the fastest year of my life?

It hardly seems possible that an entire year has passed since your mama and I welcomed you into our lives, but at the same time, I cannot clearly remember what life was like before you arrived--those days feel hazy, as though they happened to somebody else, a lifetime ago.

I’ll be honest: I was never much of a baby person. If someone I knew was showing off their baby, I would intentionally keep my distance so that nobody would try to pass the baby to me. Holding a baby or even being in the same room as a baby always made me feel uncomfortable.

When I met you, though, I couldn’t stay away, and I didn’t want to let you go. I still don’t think of myself as a baby person, but you were never just a baby; you were my baby, and for some reason, that made all the difference in the world.

What I remember most clearly from those first days after you were born is counting down the minutes until I could see you and hold you again. You couldn’t do much more than yawn or sleep at that time, but I was still enchanted all the same.

Then, not long after you turned one month old, you started smiling at me. Giggles and games of peek-a-boo were not far behind.

Now you’re almost twice as tall as you were when you were born, and more than twice as heavy. You can crawl, and I’ll bet walking is only weeks away. Smiles, giggles and games are all highlights of my day. How many times have I read Jamberry to you? It’s easily in the hundreds. You haven’t gotten tired of it yet, and neither have I.

I actually got teary-eyed this evening when I picked you up to bring you to bed because I know that in the blink of an eye, you’ll be too big for me to cradle in my arms. I think I’m wired to always look forward to whatever’s next, to live in the future rather than in the present, but these moments are so precious, and I’m learning to cherish them.

Emma, the world is a beautiful place, filled with ducks and plum blossoms and tropical fish and everything else that has captured your imagination in your short time on the earth so far. But it’s also a broken place, and I think I worry about that more now that I’m a father. There’s so much that I cannot control, no matter how much I want to protect you from the world’s hurts.

Know this, though: you are loved deeply and unconditionally. You have a big family, biological and honorary alike, that spans the globe, who loves you. Your mama and your daddy love you. Most importantly, your heavenly Father loves you. This is nothing less than who you are.

Happy first birthday, my child--it has been a year of blessings, not the least of which has been the blessing that you are to us. I’m looking forward to life and learning with you in your second year!

Love,
Daddy

News Circles 2.0

This is my first post in nearly three months; a few days after my last post, my family got caught in what I'm now calling the "feedback loop of illness" in which my daughter would get sick, then me, and then my wife, and by the time one bug had finally worked its way through our family, my daughter would get sick with something new and the process would repeat itself.

So far we've managed to make it through flu season unscathed, and are finally feeling collectively healthy again for the first time in a long time.
On top of that, with the debate season over, I finally felt like I had the time and capacity to blog again this week!

In September, I wrote a post about News Circles, a new routine for the beginning of class in which several students would share news from an assigned region of the world.

My intention from the beginning was to eventually hand over the reins to the students, an intention which I publicly announced in December.  I invited students who were interested in re-tooling the News Circles assignment to form a committee.  Ten students responded, and I met with them at a lunch meeting before Christmas break to remind them of the parameters:
-News Circle time should take five to ten minutes at the beginning of class, Tuesday to Friday.
-The organization should lend itself to a variety of topics, as well as a global perspective (i.e. not only news from Japan, or news from North America).
-Students should read at least two sources before sharing their news story and consider what differences, if any, they noticed between the sources.

Other than that, literally everything else could be reorganized.

The News Circle Committee rose to the occasion and came up with a far more interesting and workable system than the one I had in place first semester:

Instead of being assigned to one of seven regions, the committee opted instead to assign three or four students to particular days of the week, on a two-week rotation.  One of the issues in my set-up from first semester was that students could easily forget when they were supposed to bring a news story to share, as it was on a different day of the week each time.

Now, the students are assigned to Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and either to 'A'-week or 'B'-week.  In other words, if a student is assigned to Tuesday A, they will share on Tuesday every other week, with those assigned to Tuesday B sharing on the other Tuesdays.  This has been much more intuitive, and easy for the students to remember.  While students here and there still occasionally forget, that number has gone down dramatically.

To ensure a variety of topics, the committee created a rotating topic system:
-Politics
-Sports & entertainment
-Crime
-Science & health
-Environment

Because there are five topics and six days of news stories in each cycle, the topics rotate, and the students will share on a different topic each time they present.  Within this, the committee asked that the students assigned to a given day communicate ahead of time to ensure that they are reporting on stories from different parts of the world.

The committee chose to set aside Friday as a discussion day, to either talk in greater depth about a particular story somebody shared that week, or to address breaking news that nobody had the chance to report on.  Although some weeks have been "slow news weeks", and the resulting Friday discussions cursory or quiet, we have also had engaging class discussions on such topics as North Korea's involvement in the Winter Olympics and gun violence.

The News Circle Committee has created and maintained a calendar of the daily topics, and with my encouragement, has even taken responsibility for getting class started on Tuesdays through Fridays. I told them that because the new and improved News Circles (News Circles 2.0, as we call it) are their baby and not mine, they should be the ones to initiate it each day.  This means that I am sitting quietly at my desk when the students come into class, and that without any prompting from me, they begin the News Circles for that day when the bell rings.  The News Circle Committee members have even started to ask the students sharing on a given day to kick things off so that the committee members do not always need to do it themselves.

This has become such an ingrained part of the routine that when I was absent for the debate tournament last Friday, my sub reported to me that the students started their discussion of the week's news like clockwork and that she had enjoyed listening to a lively, engaging discussion before taking attendance.

This has been a good reminder of the power of giving students ownership and agency in their learning.  I am already starting to think about other ways to give students more ownership in other areas of class in the future!

Word-sense

I’ve never been much of a basketball player. In spite of this--or more likely, because of this--I have a profound admiration for talented basketball players. A skilled player knows precisely where to be on the court, and when. They can think ten steps ahead and see a clear path to the basket even when an inexperienced spectator like me cannot. When they pass the ball, they know where to pass it without needing to stop and look around first. To my eyes, this almost looks like magic, but the technical term is court sense. Players with court sense may have been particularly quick or coordinated to begin with, but they have also put in countless hours of practice over the course of years, often starting with pick-up games when they were children. As they played, mastering the basics, learning the rules of the game, and improving their form, they also developed an awareness of the court and the players on it that has essentially become instinctive.

While writing and reading may seem incomparable to the game of basketball, I believe that word sense exists in much the same way that court sense does. Writers with word sense express complex ideas in a way that illuminates rather than obscures. Their diction dances and their sentences sing. Their paragraphs pulse with dynamism, every word, every clause, every sentence purposefully developing the main idea. They know precisely when to pause, when to pivot, when to drive forward. And then, like players on defense, readers with word sense pick up on nuance and subtleties to determine exactly where the author is going. They quickly ascertain the author’s purpose and detect the strategies the author will use to achieve that purpose. They spot the relationship between the words and phrases on the page and know when the author is pausing, pivoting or driving the point forward. They keep up a constant inner dialogue with the author, agreeing, disagreeing, questioning, critiquing.

 
Here we come to the crux of the matter: just as court sense is not built overnight, neither is word sense. Basketball players develop court sense through years of practice, shooting hoops with friends, learning the rules of the game, watching professional players, mastering the basics before trying more complex maneuvers and plays. Court sense is not a formulaic sum of all of these elements, but rather the organic byproduct of years dedicated to working on them.

Readers and writers, likewise, develop word sense through years of practice, writing for fun, actively acquiring vocabulary and grammar, reading voraciously, and trying out styles, words and phrases that they’ve picked up from their reading. I know that I as an 11th grade teacher cannot take credit for my students with word sense. That credit must be shared among the students’ other teachers starting as early as elementary school, the students’ parents, and most of all, the students themselves.

These are the students who will ace reading comprehension tests, who will pick up on argument analysis the first time around, who will get A’s on the essays I assign, who will receive 4s or 5s on the AP exam. I’m adding a square to the mosaic of their word sense, but I did not magically make them into exemplary writers or readers over the course of one school-year.

This has implications for the students who have not developed word sense, as well. It means that they should not expect A-grades if they have not invested the years into developing word sense that a handful of their classmates have. For me to give out A’s for work that is simply competent or basic would be unfair to those whose work is truly exemplary, tantamount to comparing a player who has finally figured out dribbling, passing and shooting with a player who mastered the basics long ago. I’ve been guilty of this in the past--it has resulted in grade inflation, where an ‘A’ in my class did not mean what it should have meant. This year, I’m consciously fighting that. This means that students need to adjust how they view the grades we as teachers give. A ‘B’ is not a bad grade for students who have finally gotten the basics. In my mind, ‘B’ shows that the students are competent, that they have met the standard, but are perhaps not quite ready to go beyond it. I will do whatever it takes to help my students grow as readers and writers, but I also recognize that my first priority is to help them become competent, and then to find ways to push them beyond mere competency--not necessarily to get them to an ‘A’ level. I want my students to look beyond the nine months they will spend in my class to the future. For those who have a vibrant word sense, how can they use that in whatever calling they pursue? For those who have not developed that word sense, is that something they want to develop? If so, what will that goal require of them in the coming years?

Not all of my students will attain word sense during their lifetime, and perhaps even the majority will not. However, I hope that my students, regardless of their writing or reading abilities, will come away with an admiration for word sense as I have an admiration for court sense. I want them to recognize the hours, months and years of engagement and investment that goes into truly exemplary writing or perceptive reading. And, I want them to realize that if they genuinely want to develop word sense, it’s never too late to start trying.