Item 1: Shout-outs
Now, there’s something on a staff meeting agenda which never failed to make me roll my eyes and swear softly… or not so softly if there weren’t any kids around. (Sometimes it was the sheer length of the agenda… like so many worker drones, I hated meetings, hated the waste of time with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, and when I ran my own department meetings, made sure I ran things crisply and quickly so we could finish and get down to the never-ending real --- and far more important --- work directly associated with teaching.)
I was a public-school teacher for 35 --- count ‘em, thirty-five --- years, but it wasn’t until the final five of those 35 that things really started to progress beyond ludicrous and it seemed we were, daily, guests of honour at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. (It’s the reason I retired, but that’s a story for another day.)
Shout-outs were one of the ridiculous things which sprouted like hideous mushrooms in those last five years, and since they’re related to the issue I (eventually) want to arrive at today, you get to hear my rant. For those of you living under a rock, shout-outs are, well, just that: congratulations, compliments, appreciation for jobs well done, that kind of thing. And I know what you’re thinking right now: you miserable old curmudgeon, how could you possibly object to giving people some positive feedback? Just who peed in yer cornflakes this morning? And my simple answers are: I don’t; and nobody. I have no objections whatsoever with giving people who have done a good job, or gone above and beyond, or simply demonstrated kindness in a very cold, unforgiving world, some ego boo and/or appreciation. Matter of fact, we could do with a helluva lot more of that in said bleak world, and a helluva lot less criticism… or just as bad, indifferent silence.
My issue with the shoutouts at our staff meetings was the blatant artificiality, the hearty, bluff, forced nature of it. Toxic positivity is just as bad as negativity. Let me explain with another example. I used to teach Orwell’s Animal Farm in my grade ten English classes as an excellent introduction to the concepts of authoritarianism and dystopian literature. (Though my kids still needed lots ‘n lots of context about Stalin’s Soviet Union to understand the allusions, to be sure. Which I didn’t at all mind providing --- seeing the proverbial light switch go on above student heads was one of the great joys of teaching.)
Anyway, late in the book, every week the inhabitants of Animal Farm have to hold what are officially termed Spontaneous Demonstrations. With masterful understatement, Orwell says no one is forced to participate, but animals who don’t have their rations cut by half. The big thing I drew to my kids’ attention was the idea of a planned demonstration which was supposed to be spontaneous. The irony, the ludicrous premise, was so thick you could cut it with a knife. That’s kind of what shout-outs were to me, because you can’t mandate morale (“the floggings will continue until morale improves”) or schedule a time for people to be nice to each other. Doing so just encourages artificial bleating from the flock, and people shouldn’t need or desire an audience when they’re being nice. To me, it was merely another example of well-meaning but clueless administrators drinking the educational Kool-Aid and trying to solve complex problems with trite, simplistic solutions. (Why, yes, as an introvert, I also hated playing staff icebreaker games at the beginning of the school year, too. How did you know?)
Now, you don’t have to agree with me. Some of you won’t. You’re entitled to your opinion… as am I. But if people are too afraid/reluctant/intimidated to voice appreciation spontaneously… then we need to create atmospheres where they do feel comfortable voicing support and positive messages. (And by the way, to be clear, there was a lot I loved about teaching… just not things like those I’ve mentioned above.) I really loathe the phoniness of artificial situations… which brings us to today’s point.
In writing scenes, things have to be natural and not artificial. Readers can smell contrived situations from chapters away. Real life is frequently chaotic, and cliches and tropes do exist. That’s why we can identify with them even as we sometimes roll our eyes at them. (Human beings are, for the most part, not nearly as clever or original as they quaintly think.) But when situations seem contrived, when the deus ex machina takes over… that’s when viewers turn off the TV and readers close the book, tossing it scornfully into a corner. Even carefully structured scenes need to have that sense of reality and randomness about them.
It’s the same thing with dialogue. One English project I used to do was to have students hypothetically invite famous historical figures to a dinner party. A major part of the project was simply called The Conversation, and the kids had to research the historical figures (I provided a lengthy list of figures from different fields of endeavor) to find out how they’d respond to questions and discuss issues during the dinner party. One of the big things we had to do quite a lot of work on was constructing believable dialogue. Given how many of their dinner party conversations resembled little more than stilted games of 20 Questions, you’d never know these were kids who never shut up in real life. I had to point out that when someone says something, if the other participants are actually paying attention, they respond based on what was actually said. One character’s comments spark analysis, discussion, promulgation of new ideas, etc. Dialogue is a tightly woven tapestry of interconnected strands… at least among participants whose entire communication history isn’t defined by texting on their phones.
So. Spontaneity is fine. Structure is fine. Natural is fine. Contrived isn’t. Doesn’t really seem like rocket science… though with many print and film writers nowadays, you’d never guess that.
But if I read a page, or watch a scene, and my immediate take on it is, “hey… wait a minute…” well then, we have a problem, Houston.
Now, there’s something on a staff meeting agenda which never failed to make me roll my eyes and swear softly… or not so softly if there weren’t any kids around. (Sometimes it was the sheer length of the agenda… like so many worker drones, I hated meetings, hated the waste of time with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, and when I ran my own department meetings, made sure I ran things crisply and quickly so we could finish and get down to the never-ending real --- and far more important --- work directly associated with teaching.)
I was a public-school teacher for 35 --- count ‘em, thirty-five --- years, but it wasn’t until the final five of those 35 that things really started to progress beyond ludicrous and it seemed we were, daily, guests of honour at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. (It’s the reason I retired, but that’s a story for another day.)
Shout-outs were one of the ridiculous things which sprouted like hideous mushrooms in those last five years, and since they’re related to the issue I (eventually) want to arrive at today, you get to hear my rant. For those of you living under a rock, shout-outs are, well, just that: congratulations, compliments, appreciation for jobs well done, that kind of thing. And I know what you’re thinking right now: you miserable old curmudgeon, how could you possibly object to giving people some positive feedback? Just who peed in yer cornflakes this morning? And my simple answers are: I don’t; and nobody. I have no objections whatsoever with giving people who have done a good job, or gone above and beyond, or simply demonstrated kindness in a very cold, unforgiving world, some ego boo and/or appreciation. Matter of fact, we could do with a helluva lot more of that in said bleak world, and a helluva lot less criticism… or just as bad, indifferent silence.
My issue with the shoutouts at our staff meetings was the blatant artificiality, the hearty, bluff, forced nature of it. Toxic positivity is just as bad as negativity. Let me explain with another example. I used to teach Orwell’s Animal Farm in my grade ten English classes as an excellent introduction to the concepts of authoritarianism and dystopian literature. (Though my kids still needed lots ‘n lots of context about Stalin’s Soviet Union to understand the allusions, to be sure. Which I didn’t at all mind providing --- seeing the proverbial light switch go on above student heads was one of the great joys of teaching.)
Anyway, late in the book, every week the inhabitants of Animal Farm have to hold what are officially termed Spontaneous Demonstrations. With masterful understatement, Orwell says no one is forced to participate, but animals who don’t have their rations cut by half. The big thing I drew to my kids’ attention was the idea of a planned demonstration which was supposed to be spontaneous. The irony, the ludicrous premise, was so thick you could cut it with a knife. That’s kind of what shout-outs were to me, because you can’t mandate morale (“the floggings will continue until morale improves”) or schedule a time for people to be nice to each other. Doing so just encourages artificial bleating from the flock, and people shouldn’t need or desire an audience when they’re being nice. To me, it was merely another example of well-meaning but clueless administrators drinking the educational Kool-Aid and trying to solve complex problems with trite, simplistic solutions. (Why, yes, as an introvert, I also hated playing staff icebreaker games at the beginning of the school year, too. How did you know?)
Now, you don’t have to agree with me. Some of you won’t. You’re entitled to your opinion… as am I. But if people are too afraid/reluctant/intimidated to voice appreciation spontaneously… then we need to create atmospheres where they do feel comfortable voicing support and positive messages. (And by the way, to be clear, there was a lot I loved about teaching… just not things like those I’ve mentioned above.) I really loathe the phoniness of artificial situations… which brings us to today’s point.
In writing scenes, things have to be natural and not artificial. Readers can smell contrived situations from chapters away. Real life is frequently chaotic, and cliches and tropes do exist. That’s why we can identify with them even as we sometimes roll our eyes at them. (Human beings are, for the most part, not nearly as clever or original as they quaintly think.) But when situations seem contrived, when the deus ex machina takes over… that’s when viewers turn off the TV and readers close the book, tossing it scornfully into a corner. Even carefully structured scenes need to have that sense of reality and randomness about them.
It’s the same thing with dialogue. One English project I used to do was to have students hypothetically invite famous historical figures to a dinner party. A major part of the project was simply called The Conversation, and the kids had to research the historical figures (I provided a lengthy list of figures from different fields of endeavor) to find out how they’d respond to questions and discuss issues during the dinner party. One of the big things we had to do quite a lot of work on was constructing believable dialogue. Given how many of their dinner party conversations resembled little more than stilted games of 20 Questions, you’d never know these were kids who never shut up in real life. I had to point out that when someone says something, if the other participants are actually paying attention, they respond based on what was actually said. One character’s comments spark analysis, discussion, promulgation of new ideas, etc. Dialogue is a tightly woven tapestry of interconnected strands… at least among participants whose entire communication history isn’t defined by texting on their phones.
So. Spontaneity is fine. Structure is fine. Natural is fine. Contrived isn’t. Doesn’t really seem like rocket science… though with many print and film writers nowadays, you’d never guess that.
But if I read a page, or watch a scene, and my immediate take on it is, “hey… wait a minute…” well then, we have a problem, Houston.
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