http://www.wellscribedwords.blogspot.com/ http://www.rindarealm.com/
I have a new job, starting in September, as a reading tutor with Washington Reading Corps!
The job will last for ten-and-a-half months; I will be working 40 hours and five days a week. I will be paid, not a lot, but I will be paid, and I will receive free training, paid health insurance, and some paid vacation and sick leave. At the end of the program, I will also be given money for further college education.
I’ll be working in a school not far from my home. I will tutor children from Pre-K through third grade, in small groups and individually; I will, as well, help to train volunteer reading tutors. I won’t be transcribing medical reports for healthcare providers. Yay! Yes, in ten-and-a-half months, I will never, never, never have to hear a medical word if I don’t want to hear one! I most certainly will not be typing any. I am so happy about this!
I have lots of experience with children of different ages in the classroom: When still in high school, I was hired as an aide in a newly-formed Head Start program one summer; the Head Start supervisor decided that I was wasted as kitchen help; I also did a lot of babysitting for my high school teachers at fifty cents an hour.
When I got out of college, after helping in schools for some of my classes there, I taught preschool for two years, full-time.
Then, I babysat on and off here and there for different people until I got out of business school when I taught in church children’s programs for several years in between doing school visits for my first book.
Finally, I moved here to Bremerton, and children in the streets, neighbor children, discovered me, and I then did a fair amount of putting on Band-Aids, giving drinks and snacks and words of wisdom and dealing with the powers that be who should have been caring for those children properly but were not. Along the way, I’ve learned how to do many arts and crafts activities with children.
I want, after this Washington Reading Corps program is over, to go on to graduate school and take a Master’s in reading and literacy and thus pull together my B.A. in sociology and my fifth year of undergraduate credits in early childhood education together with my life experiences and business training. I might consider a Master’s in special education; I’m sure it will be one or the other.
The one thing of which I am absolutely CERTAIN is that I do not want a Masters’s in writing for children and young adults!!!
I feel a cold, creeping sensation down my backbone even thinking about getting a Master’s in English or a Master’s in writing! I was told by an editor in children’s books that “it would ruin you.” And she wasn’t laughing when she said it. And she didn’t mean that I should quit my writing.
So, being a reading tutor and then pursuing a Master’s in reading and literacy does not mean that I will quit my writing.
I am CERTAIN that I will continue to write for children and middlegraders–as I have done in the past. I will also continue blogging and wiki building and web site building and songwriting and poetrymaking.
I can’t seem to stop doing those things; they make me happy; it’s just that now I am free to spend more time on something else that has made me happy for most of my adult life:
Teaching children how to read stories. Telling them stories. Reading them stories. Listening to stories with them. And learning from them.
I couldn’t be happier than I am right now about these changes in my life. I couldn’t be happier!
http://www.wa.gov/esd/wsc/program/readingcorp.htm
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August 11, 2008 at 12:00 am |
Congratulations on the new job. You will make a wonderful tutor! I would love to work on my Masters of Children’s Literature, but I don’t have a qualifying undergrad degree. And I don’t have $26,000 either. So I’ll have to make due with what I have.
Best of luck!
August 13, 2008 at 7:36 pm |
Oh, Don! You know what? I felt that most of my B.A. classes were just filling in the blanks and a few of them were really fun, but the degree in sociology got me nothing as far getting ahead in a real job. You know, $$$$$$. I had to take the business school classes to accomplish a good job.
I don’t think you need a Master’s in children literature to really fly high with your books, brotha. The publishers certainly are not going to care. They just care that you do beautiful work that sells and can relate to children well and can fulfill your contracts! A college degree means too that eventually you have a good chance of getting stuck in some small college somewhere teaching adults in college and not focusing on what you really love to do, create things. You’ll focus all your creative energy on the degree and not on your work, as you are now, and you will lose momentum in your own creative career.
Seriously, Don , I do feel that my degree isn’t going to help my platform” as a children’s book artist and writer. Donating to charities of books and literacies will. Doing beautiful work will. Putting emotion in my work will. Running my blog and website will. Sharing online will. Keeping my publicity efforts focused on me will. Wheeling and dealing directly with publishers and editors and agents will. But my degree or getting another one isn’t going to help me when it comes time to interest a restless child in my writing!
After all, there is a whole other world out there other than the world of children’s books who will read a good book! And readers are an independent lot. They don’t care about reviews. They care about what they like to read. So. It is the quailty of the work that matters. And WHO measures that quality. The readers or a bunch of college professors stuck in the backwater of all the real excitement going on these days in literacy in writing for chilhdren in publishing!
That feedback from your agents and publishers, Don, that’s the feedback that is the most important for your creative work, now and always. That’s what matters, not what some teacher in some college says about your work. The college can’t sell your work for you and make money for you. They take money. They don’t give it to you.
A college degree is not an Olympic medal. Getting one is not a sport endeaver. But life is. Hacking out your own creative path is. Some of the best and brightest and most successful people in the world do not have college degrees. And some of the most mediocre minds have graduate degrees. That’s why the editor told me that a college degree in writing would ruin me as a writer. It would kill the creativity. And she’d worked a while in the industry. So, I’m favoring her advice by not choosing a Master’s in children’s literature.
I think I might be useful in a good place, i.e., helping with the literacy problem in this country by getting a Master’s in reading and literacy. I privately laugh a bit at any degree I have or might get, as it really, REALLY is going to be filling in the blanks basically for me and doesn’t mean much to me socially other than getting a different type of job and interest in life besdies writing. It’s sad that money and time have hindered us both in getting these accomplishments of degrees.
But it really is money and time, not brains, not talent, that will get you a degree. And it’s silly, to me, that this kind of discrimination goes on in the educational world, a discrimination of wealth and power. I worked myself to exhaustion to get my B.A. And I’ve not been as physically strong as other people in my adult life. Other rich people didn’t have to work part-time during the school year and all summer to get their degrees, and I watched them play through college while I worked, worked, worked, for us both to get exactly the same thing.
I don’t want to just write. I care about children and the literacy problem in this country. I want to write good stories for them that they will love to read, but I also think I want to, once a while, sit down with a child and actually help them learn to read! And I’m a terrible cashier! And office work is stressing me out too much with my vision problems. And I don’t like to garden! And I hate publicity as I’m quite a private person. Sneakily, I really just want to have a good time and have a bit of an adventure and enjoy my own thing, and I know this job is going to be part of my path to that in life!
Oh, Don! You’re a wonderful guy, and listen, buddy, YOU’RE my star, and I’m going to be so excited to get to meet you some day, as I hope I will.
I
August 15, 2008 at 9:08 pm |
Thanks, Rinda. You are appreciated.