Bad Kids in the News

Bad kids get all the attention.

When I was a teenager, I used to cringe at the evening news. Undoubtedly, there would be some report about a kid who snuck a knife into school or who beat up a cop or made an ass of himself drinking in public or, in one terrible example, a kid who killed a classmate.

Sadly, not much has changed.

I’ve spent two weeks trying to get press attention for my little writers, to no avail. I tried last summer, too. I have a room full of teenagers who, of their own accord, have decided to spend their hard-earned breaks dong something really cool, really positive, and really unusual. Call me crazy, but I think its newsworthy.

Unfortunately, the media doesn’t think it’s such a big deal. Why should we waste our time lavishing praise on kids who go above and beyond their summer reading lists to create their own novels when there are perfectly good stories of young people running amok?

I’ll tell you exactly why: fear sells.

America could be a place where the most industrious among us are showered with attention. Instead, it’s easier to scare the crap out of people in order to convince them to watch your tv show, buy your product, or like you. In fact, this blog will get more hits because of the negative title than it would have if I’d named it, “Why America Should Care About High-Achievers.”

And I don’t say this half-cocked from some anecdotal place of naivety. In a former life, I was a news producer at WKRN News 2 in Nashville. I spent my working hours reading the AP wire, listening to the police scanner, and deciding which news was worthy enough for broadcast. Every day, I overlooked interesting, motivational, and truly amazing stories in favor of one-alarm fires that were easily contained, nearly harmful assaults, and other non-news. I’m lucky to live in a relatively safe city, but safety doesn’t make for thrilling promotional bumps.

Based on the following promos, which newscast would you be more inclined to watch: “A man is rushed to the emergency room after a neighbor’s dog escapes, tonight at 10,” or, “Forty teenagers aren’t just reading books this summer, they’re writing them!”

You may be thinking, “Oh, man, I wonder if they’ll show pictures of a dog attack?” or you’re wondering if the escaped dog is a poodle or a Pitt-bull. Or if the two events – the emergency room visit and the missing mutt – are even related.

Or, if you’re like me, you may think, “who cares about someone’s minor injury? If it was major, they would have said “Dog kills local man, tonight after our latest irrelevant reality show.”

Tell me about these kids who live right here in my town and who are doing something to change the world. Give me something I can aspire to myself, teach me how to be a better version of myself, and give me a reason to keep on improving.

And don’t tell me inspiration doesn’t sell. Don’t we watch American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and Project Runway in record numbers?

If one of my students leapt out of her seat right now and threatened to stab me with her mechanical pencil, that would make the news for sure. Maybe the solution is staring me in the face. Perhaps I should unleash my students’ brilliantly creative minds on the problem and see what they propose!

And we wonder why kids feel ignored. At some point, our culture has to agree that there are better ways to get attention than being drunk and from New Jersey, or being rich, married, and staying home in Atlanta. We need to stop paying lip-service to education, and start paying attention to kids who are actually using their brains to some productive end.

Anxiety: The American Crisis

ANI Authors Olivia Laskowski and Blake Bouza with novels written by ANI students in 2011.

I’ve been out of commission lately as an educator and a writer.  Life took over with a tough pregnancy and an early baby, and some delayed marketing efforts made my summer teaching load a lot smaller than I had hoped it would be.  And generally, all this upheaval and disarray would lead me to a state of unequivocal anxiety, set to reach a fevered pitch about a week before my July classes begin.  I know this because I know myself, and I know how I operate.

But I’m not anxious.  I’m shockingly calm.  Almost zen about the situation in fact.  Call it new-mama-bliss or the confidence of finally knowing what I’m doing with my life, but I’m not on a path to self-destruction.

This morning, however, I was met with two  major challenges of the anxious type.  The first was an email from a dear and precious student of mine who was struggling with his own self-effacing guilt over being plagued with writer’s block.  He was ashamed of himself, felt boxed in by his lack of ideas, and was generally desperate for relief.  The second was a phone call from a mother whose son, new to ANI, was facing a similar roadblock.  He was so wrapped up in creating the perfect character that he hadn’t written a word.  He was worried that he had let me down, that I would be angry with him, and the paralyzing fear kept him from being able to break free from his anxiety.

When I got to school this morning, neither boy had arrived yet.  And I thought about those anxious years of my life – indeed, most of my life – and what managed to help.  The only thing – besides writing furiously – that ever pushed the anxiety from my body was a complete and total meltdown.  And I sure didn’t want that to happen.

When my anxious alumni showed up, he was already calmed down.  He’d stayed up until 2:30 writing like a maniac and had over 6,000 words to show for it.  He plugged in his computer and got right to work, banging out another 1,200 words before he took a break.

Shortly thereafter, my anxious newbie arrived.  He was literally knotted with anxiety.  His brow furrowed and he was shaking tapping his pen against his leg while he paced outside the classroom door.  He didn’t show any signs of coming in and sitting down next to the others who were happily typing away at tables and in corners of the room.  Lucky for me, Abintra’s campus has acres of gardens and walking trails. I grabbed my water bottle and went for a little walk with him.

I talked and he listened but his body language didn’t change.  I stopped to smell a particularly impressive rose bush, and he paced back and forth waiting for me.  Twenty minutes later he was still wound just as tightly.  Even introducing him to my alumnus didn’t help.

And then, I thought perhaps a task would do the trick.  “Okay, who’s ready for a word-count challenge?” Many hands shot into the air, but he hid  his face in his crossed arms.  “Okay, everybody decide what your character’s favorite color is.  Got it?  Okay, now he or she sees something that color.  Describe it.  Write 350 words in 20 minutes.  Go!”

And I guess that’s what he needed.  Because for twenty precious minutes he let go and he wrote.  He left the apprehension and guilt and self-doubt in the dust and he embraced the excitement of a new story, a new person, a new discovery.  He allowed himself to escape himself, and in the process, he stopped fretting.

But after 20 minutes was up and he’d finished the challenge, I saw the worry start to creep in again.  He sat quietly by himself and ate a turkey sandwich and looked at the clock while he folded his arms and shook his foot.  His character had hit a quiet place.  And he didn’t know what would happen next.

And that’s the crisis I see in my students and in Americans in general.  The biggest problem they face isn’t the writing or the imagining – all children have creativity in spades – it’s being alone with themselves.  They’re so used to being entertained, posting on Facebook, tweeting, texting, studying for tests, checking tasks off their lists, and being graded that they’ve forgotten how to just be.  Be still.  Be alone with their thoughts without reality tv creeping in or feeling the urge to tweet.

I assign all of my students at least two hours of thinking homework each week.  I ask them to just be quiet.  Stare into space.  Think about stuff.  And stay awake to the world around them.  It’s often the hardest homework they have to do, even harder than writing 1,000, 2,000, or 7,000 words a day.

Being quiet and alert is a problem I never worried about as a child.  I spent hours in my tree-house, swinging on a tire swing, or hiding in the forest.  The thinking was the thing – being alone with my own thoughts has been a central and important part of my intellectual development.  And when I haven’t had enough alone time, I can feel my skin starting to crawl.  I feel like a radio antenna receiving too many signals at once and I have to run away, clear the clutter from my head, and find the quiet.  I usually do that by clicking the keys on my computer.  Or having a complete and total meltdown.  Both are physical releases, the purging of thoughts either by writing or by crying.

As I write this, my anxious newbie is outside, writing about the trees in the upper garden.  He’s working on another 20-minute challenge, and I’m hoping for another 20-minute escape from the anxiety for him.  And for the rest of the anxiety-riddled youth in this country, I wish I could find a way to lay a calming hand on their shoulders and say, “it is enough to just be.  Enough to just breathe.”  And maybe, if they have a pen handy, enough just to write.

Quit, Already!

Yesterday, a very concerned parent told me that her daughter was overwhelmed with the project, a common issue for any writer reaching 10,000 words in her manuscript.  She might not have spoken to me at all, except that I saw her lurking a little bit in the corner, and I asked if she was ok.  She said her daughter was overextended, overscheduled, and over-stressed. Her mother told me of a grueling weekend where the family wrestled with the thought of taking the student out of class.

In fact, there were divisions among the family.  Groups of people thought that the pressure of writing a novel quickly could break the girl, and other factions thought that if she wanted to write a novel, then this was her opportunity to do so, and she shouldn’t shy away from a challenge simply because it’s hard.

Anything worth doing is hard.

But what struck me wasn’t the conversation, the dialogue between family members, or even the fear in the young woman.  I was struck that at no point did any of the adults involved call me.  Or another student in class.  Or Beth, my co-teacher, who is incredibly approachable.

And it occurs to me that if a parent or student or invested family member cares enough about their young writer enough to argue about whether or not she should learn to express herself in a healthy way, they should reach out to those who are writers as well.

Writers know fear and anxiety and self-criticism better than any group on the planet.  Ok, so maybe I’m a bit biased on this front, but I believe that the introspection and empathy that fully-invested writing necessitates also results in, more often than not, a type-A personality in the writer.

I told the mother to give me two hours with her daughter in class.  If she wasn’t excited about her work and ready to dive back in, she was welcome to walk away.  But I feared a much more impactful consequence of deciding not to finish the task at hand.  I was afraid that her daughter would believe that she was a failure at being a writer, and that her perception would cloud her self-esteem for years to come.  So I did what any self-respecting (and fearful!) writer would do: I talked to her.

And do you know what I learned?  She’s just a teenager. 

There was no murky muck lurking in her brain.  She had no impossible fears to conquer.  She wasn’t racked with guilt or worry or anxiety.  In fact, she’d expressed a little worry after our last class, which sent her parents, family members, and interested parties into the debate of the century.  Am I surprised?  In a word, no.

So I ventured out on a limb at the beginning of class and told everyone to quit, already.

Their shocked faces stared at me in disbelief.  Mouths hung agape.  Brows furrowed.  Someone shook his head slowly.

I said, “This is too hard for you guys.  You’re just kids.  You shouldn’t be burdened with the pressure of writing a novel.  And you’d probably rather just be running around this summer, spending time at the pool, and relaxing.  So why don’t we all quit already.”

“Are you kidding?” one student asked, outraged.

“You need to talk to your doctor and get on some new medications,” one kid said, pointing his finger at me.

The whole class shook their heads, said “no way!”

When I told them that they’d just proven my point, that this project wasn’t too hard, and that they were doing exactly the right thing for their brains, for their hearts, for their minds, and for their dreams of becoming writers, they all cheered.

One boy sighed his relief and said, “oh my gosh, I’m so glad.  You scared me to death!”

Read that again.  I scared him to death.

Merely telling a young person that he couldn’t achieve a goal he’d held in his heart for himself was enough to raise his fear level, freak him out, and push his internal panic button.

He wasn’t scared or nervous before class.  He wasn’t unsure of himself.  None of them were!  And then I said they couldn’t do it.

As parents, we teach our children, even when we don’t think we’re teaching.  They overhear our conversations, they intuit our emotions, they soak up our fears and dreams for their lives.  And what my student’s very well-meaning and loving mother did was magnify an emotion in her daughter by discussing it, worrying about it, and projecting her own fears onto her daughter.

During class, this student had marvelous things to say.  I worked her into my lesson plan, using her name as an example character, and by the end of the first half-hour lecture, she was grinning, giggling, and ready to write.

I sent her mom an email after class and I took my own advice.  I told her how proud I was of her daughter for taking on the challenge, how proud I was of her for supporting her daughter, and how excited I was to be a part of this journey.

I’m happy to say that my student has gotten back into her novel-writing groove.  But I have learned an incredibly powerful lesson in this exchange.  Kindness is empowering.  Encouragement can conquer incredible fear.  And communication can both wreck and rebuild a writer’s confidence.

I am so thankful for that parent for helping me redouble my efforts to hug students, stick my hand out for high-fives, and tell them, genuinely, that I’m proud of their work.

Positivity breeds optimism, and optimism feeds our dreams.

YA Literature is The Catcher in the Rye

YA Literature: The Catcher in the Rye

“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

I’ve been struck lately by the debate that rages in the press about Young Adult Fiction and whether or not it is a detriment to youth, to literature, and to society in its entirety. The commentary has been thorough. But there’s an underlying theme that hasn’t been discussed thoroughly: the literary discourse between adults and young people.

I teach novel-writing classes to teenagers. I’m in a unique position to identify themes in books for young people written by young people themselves. What I find will not be surprising to any of us who consider ourselves avid readers.

Young people want to write about real human emotions. They are themselves in the throws of the most emotionally tumultuous periods of their lives and their writing reflects it. A full 80% of protagonists in my students’ work are orphans, isolated from their childhood homes, or stranded in an inhospitable terrain, searching for meaning. Crunching the numbers another way, nearly half of my students write about a protagonist who has a deformity, disability, or a secret and shameful power that she must guard from a harsh and judgmental world.

The writer in me finds these numbers fascinating. These kids are the audience for an exploding fiction market, and they’re writing the books they would want to read themselves. Regardless of which YA sub-genre they are exploring (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, family saga), they each want to see a kid, fraught with seemingly insurmountable challenges, clamber their way out of their fictional hell to a place that is even marginally better.

And here’s the kicker: almost none of my students write a separate hero character who saves their protagonist.

So what do these statistics mean to the mother and teacher in me? Kids write what they know. And if they know isolation, alienation, fear, and abandonment, then I see a teaching moment.

Lat month, when I read a snippet of a student’s novel that involved a young woman who was engaging in self-harm, I put down the paper, held open my arms, and hugged that girl. Her writing opened a door to a conversation about scary feelings, terrible choices, and the desperation that she herself was feeling in her life. I asked her during our conversation if she ever had these feelings herself, and she said she didn’t, but she knew plenty of people who did. And she herself had often thought about how to escape her own sadness and isolation.

So what’s the difference between my author, who didn’t cut herself, and her friends who did?

Reading. And writing.

She told me that books were a safe haven for her. She said that even in her darkest moments, she could find a character whose fictional life was worse off than hers, then follow that character as she struggled her way out of her problems and found a way to be better, to be stronger, to be braver because of her experiences.

And then she took her interest in books a step further and became a writer herself.

That young writer’s love affair with the written word might not save her life, but the dialogue it opened with responsible adults very well may.

Kids are looking for the instruction manual for their lives. That’s the overarching theme of adolescence and of literature written for young audiences. And while involved parents who have active, and sometimes difficult, conversations with their children might recoil at the thought, most kids do not share their deep, dark fears with anyone.

Technology doesn’t help their feelings of isolation. Too often, parents are plugged into one device or another instead of being plugged into their children. I want to say to parents who are actually considering censoring their kids that it’s not their job to keep the sadness of the world from ever reaching their children. In fact, sheltering them from the harsh realities of their friends, their neighbors, and even their own psyches will cripple them. Instead, I want parents to turn to their kids and actually talk to them.

When you see a kid reading a book that exhibits themes that make you uncomfortable, imagine a doorknob on the book jacket. Turn the handle and see what might be inside that kid’s mind. You’d be surprised at how many of a child’s insecurities can be tamed and even eliminated by turning an uncomfortable worry into a teaching moment.

My young author was worried about how to talk to her friends who were engaging in self-harm, or if she should bring it up at all. I told her that bad behavior is almost always covering up a fear. And if she could talk to her friends about what scares them, she’d be a wonderful confidant to them, and an even stronger person herself. I also told her that if her friends needed help, she should help them decide which adult in their lives to trust with their worries. And I told her how proud I was of her for using her own communication skills to shine some light in the dark places.

Holden Caulfield decides at the end of Catcher in the Rye that he can’t be the savior for all the little children who might point themselves in the direction of a cliff’s edge and run too hard and too fast toward a deadly fall. But by writing about those emotions, J.D. Salinger told millions of readers that they were not alone in their feelings of alienation, and that we are all capable of saving ourselves.