So, it’s pretty fair to say that while I love action-based adventures, I’m not much of a fighter.

But because I’m drawn toward action/adventure stories and action/adventure-friendly genres, I knew I’d eventually have to write fight scenes in my own stories. Before I’d realized why I was hating LARPing, I wrote my first NaNovel, an adventure parody that featured the following fight scene (I had forgotten about this little gem, my actual first fight scene written seven years ago):

A rustle in the vegetation behind him startled him. By the time he was on his feet and turned around, four large men had surrounded him. He recognized one of them from the Stewarts’ country manor, and could only assume the other three were also in the Brotherhood’s employ.

The one he recognized spoke gruffly, “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

John held his arms out to the side.

“Where is Miss Williams?”

“Not here,” John offered bluntly. He grunted slightly as a pistol butt quickly connected with his cheek.

“Where is she?”

Unable to stop himself, John’s eyes went to the obelisk, wishing he could warn Alex and allow her some time to conceal herself.

The pistol barrel was poked into his chest. He understood and turned slowly. He was going to be forced to march them right up to where his injured companion was waiting. Again, the pistol was pushed against his spine.

“You know, gentlemen. I’m far more cooperative when I’m not being threatened.”

Robbins laughed, a sound that could ruin a soufflé. “Yes, but you might decide to do something foolish, like run away or perhaps call out to Miss Williams.”

There was no denying that logic, but he couldn’t let these thugs reach the obelisk. Alex wouldn’t stand a chance in her current condition. As they approached the stairs, John stole a quick look at his watch. It was five minutes to one. If he could stall them long enough, Alex would be able to check the shadow and vanish into the temple’s shadows.

The first order of business would be to remove the pistol from the equation. The pistol was driven into his back like a cattle prod when they reached the base of the stairs.

“No funny stuff,” Robbins reminded him.

No funny stuff, indeed. Let’s see how funny you think this is. John suddenly drove the blade of his foot at Robbins’ knee, sending the giant man to the ground. The other three got over their shock at seeing their leader howling in pain and advanced on the man. John had no delusions of being able to take on all three at once. He ran to the far side of the staircase, drawing the nearest thug with him. A well-placed series of punches had this thug backing off, grasping his broken ribs as he fought for breath. The next nearest thug took one look at his two downed comrades and slowly started backing off.

John was feeling pretty confident, “If you don’t wish to end up like your friends, then you’ll stay back!” He walked over and picked up Robbins’ gun, using it to keep the thugs even further back. When he was sufficiently convinced they wouldn’t follow him, he turned and ran toward Alex.

A few paragraphs later, John fights off another goon just as vaguely.

I was proud of myself. I didn’t trust myself to write a fight scene, and I managed to get out something I wouldn’t read right past and that vaguely resembled a fight scene. But I came to realize that I’m not a big fan of fighting, and I moved on to different conflict-resolution methods.

A few years later, I started creating New Glory, opening with a short story about an assassin wrestling with an attack of conscience as a pair of reporters started piecing together what had happened. I deliberately started a story involving an assassin, not the most peaceful of occupations. And I was so entranced with the world that I started focusing more of my writing practice on building his world.

And that led to creating a group of monasteries, each focused on a different discipline, including the martial arts. It didn’t make sense to me to create a dystopian society that didn’t have some form of defensive arts, and so I created a group of warriors. I research the various warrior monk tropes, and how these tropes have played out historically. I even listened to episodes from my favorite podcast on various ways to approach fight scenes (especially if you aren’t a fighter yourself).

Really, I spent more time stalling out in research than I did in writing and editing, and given that it took me the better part of two months to write “Tiger Strike”, that’s saying something. But every time I sat down to work on the next fight scene, I had a meltdown. The obvious solution would have been to change the story so only one fight scene was necessary. But to me that seemed cowardly. I was introducing the warrior monks, and I really like my idea for how I wanted to introduce them. So, I pushed onward, painful fight scene by painful fight scene.

But I can now say I’ve survived writing fight scenes. I don’t know that I’ll make much effort to fold more of them into my storyworld, but I have learned that the professionals write fight scenes without resorting to the blow-by-blow and the resulting gore. There are emotions and senses involved in a fight, and it’s perfectly acceptable to build a fight scene around them. We’ll see how this plays out as I continue to work with New Glory.

But in the past couple of months, something odd has happened. A pair of students, a high schooler and a junior high student, who regularly work with me at the same time have realized that I’m giving them the same lectures because they have similar problems. (This realization may or may not have been preceded by a few rounds of me saying, “Did you hear what I just told the other student?”) Now, when one hears the other say something that sounds like he or she could have said it, he or she quotes the relevant lecture. More often than not, it’s the high schooler lecturing the junior high student, but he’s straightened her out on more than one occasion.

One day, the junior high student realized that he and the high schooler were lecturing each other more than I was lecturing either one. He expected me to be bothered by this, but I pointed out that I had noticed he reacted more positively when the lecture came from her instead of me. He wondered aloud why that was, and she explained that it was probably easier to hear it from someone just a couple of years older than him than from an adult. She’s right. Sometimes, especially when it feels like a kid is getting battered from all sides by adults, it’s easier to hear useful bits of wisdom from another kid going through similar struggles.

It’s not peer teaching in the strictest sense, but it’s helped form a positive bond between the two students. They know they can nag each other when one of them is struggling through a rough patch and help each other out, but they also know I’m still sitting right there and can (and will) step in if things get beyond a point where they can help each other. Where both have historically struggled to find their own confidence and motivation to keep pushing forward, they now have a support system that’s led to both of them showing more confidence and more independence.

And they’d both argue hotly with me if I pointed that out.

Disclaimer: This post was written with the knowledge and consent of both students as long as I kept their names out of it.

But I was becoming frustrated with the fact I was having to teach students skills they wouldn’t learn for another few lessons so they could pass the lesson I was teaching. And then many of the e-learning and instructional design blogs I was following got on this Beyond Bullet Points kick, and it occurred to me I could actually learn how to put together a resource the students could access at home while working on their homework and start exploring a better sequence for math skills. So I taught myself how to create a PowerPoint deck, how to record a script, and how to put all of it together into a mini-lesson (or a microlecture), and started making a plan of attack.

One of the reasons students wanted a mini-me clone was because I tend to teach the basic process and concepts around a skill, and then show them how they relate to and build on skills they already know. I keep it simple and straightforward. So it made sense when I started developing my microlecture series that each one focus on one skill’s process and concepts and do it simply. (I also had it somewhere in the back of my mind that by keeping the format clean and simple, I would be able to incorporate these lessons into other projects I develop in the future.)

One of the reasons the lessons were even necessary to begin with is because math, a tightly scaffolded discipline, isn’t always taught in the most logical order, or skills are taught so far apart in the sequence that connections aren’t always pointed out between new skills and old skills. Wanting to combat that with the order of my series, I spent a few weekends with index cards labeled with each skill and skills needed to be successful at the skill spread all over experimenting with different sequences until I found one that actually worked. (I’ve since learned that other math teachers have recognized many of the same sequencing issues I found.)

Last week, I migrated the videos to their own channel, and took the opportunity to really think about what I wanted the channel to be and how it would best serve visiting learners. The channel itself is now organized as a hyperlinked video textbook. Playlists group related skills together, and every skill that builds from another skill has its related skills linked in its description. But I still haven’t given up on being able to embed lessons in future projects. I want to be able to use my own videos as I need to, and students from around the world periodically contact me for permission to include a video in a school project they’re working on.

My focus all along has been pre-algebra and algebra skills, because that’s what I normally teach. But this year, I’m teaching geometry, and the students are complaining because I’m not looking to add on geometry skills any time soon. But apparently, I give them the same snarky reminders day after day…to the point where I don’t really have to say them any more because they’re quoting them to each other. But they’re asking for an iRebecca app to nag them when I and the other students aren’t around.

Oh, boy.

Athletes and performers are well aware of this. They train for specific events, practicing or rehearsing to achieve muscle memory and to reduce the likelihood that they’ll forget something important when the big day comes, and then they start focusing on specific aspects that need more practice. This is known as deliberate practice, and it’s what sets the true masters apart from other practitioners.

When you engage in deliberate practice, you spend your practice time reflecting on your current development and focusing on those skills that need more practice to achieve mastery. Deliberate practice is reflective and it’s personal. It’s taking the time to record and reflect on practice sessions (even if they’re classes), identify weaker areas, and making specific plans to address those weaknesses. It’s taking the time to note when a weaker area has gained strength, and identifying a new area to work on. Because of its focused nature, deliberate practice actually requires less time than general practice, and it’s more beneficial because it is focusing on what really needs practicing.

It’s also important to note that those 10,000 hours to mastery people talk about need to include more deliberate practice than rote practice, or you’ll be stuck in noviceville for much longer because you are practicing without direction, and as a result aren’t growing. And honestly, what is the point of learning if you aren’t growing and becoming stronger at the skills you’re learning?

The standards affecting the youngest students, however, were not only not researched while they were under development, but they fly in the face of current research on cognitive development in early childhood. They call for a structured learning environment, robbing these young students of the play time that has proven to be a far more effective learning experience at that age. But structured learning experiences are easier to provide quantifiable assessment,

Having read only the math standards so far, I think there is potential within the approach Common Core has taken. While the skills are grouped under their respective disciplines, but there is nothing saying the standards have to be presented in their own discipline. There’s a lot of room and encouragement for extending these skills into other disciplines, which is great because these skills will be applied in a multidisciplinary way beyond the classroom…if students understand they can apply those skills in various ways. (Not to disparage kids, because a fair number of them start making those connections on their own. It just takes some of them a bit longer.) But math teachers trying to present standards-based lessons in a manner that would allow students to start seeing those multidisciplinary connections are being scolded for not engaging in quantifiable learning activities.

And then there are the informational reading standards. In a world where we have a ton of information at our fingertips, it makes sense to broaden young people’s exposure to how to process a wide variety of nonfiction. Some districts have wisely spread the informational reading standards between all of the disciplines, understanding that students will be confronted by content-specific information and will need to be able to process it in context. Others…have sacrificed content areas to extend English classes to accommodate all the new standards within that single class. Even worse, some have taken it as an excuse to exorcise literature from the curriculum. As much as I wish I could point the finger at this quest for keeping student assessment easily quantifiable, general ignorance seems to be the culprit here.

Do I think Common Core is just one more evil plan to create drones? No. There’s nothing to base any sort of judgement on. Do I think there are parts of the idea behind the Common Core that could potentially be polished up and built on in a direction that will actually strengthen our education system? Yes. There is potential. But it really comes down to analyzing what happens each school year and tweaking the standards in ways that will move us forward.

It’s not completely obvious, but I teach part-time in an after-school learning center, and most of my teaching time is spent helping kids understand geometry and the algebras. I also produce a math microlecture series in my free time. It kind of goes without saying that I’m an advocate for being well-grounded and respectful toward math. I spend a lot of time trying to get my students to stop echoing the adults in their lives, and my band, choir, and orchestra kids have a real love-hate relationship with me because I love pointing out that music is a beautiful form of applied math.

I posted about my decision on my own Facebook wall, and in the course of discussing this and getting my own rant somewhat out of my system, I managed to get out this gem (that really is true when you think about it, and I did think about it):

Math is a basic set of skills that we dig into on a daily basis without consciously thinking about it, and people have given themselves permission to be dumb because we’ve somehow or other ended up with this bizarre society fear. 

Maybe people will stop throwing rocks at math when they realize they don’t deliberately apply all of their literacy skills when reading. Could you imagine being our age and still working through the phonics skills we internalized as young children to read? Of course not. It’s the same way with math. We learn and internalize skills that we use daily, regardless of the class we learned it in.

From where I sit, a big part of the reason why math anxiety persists is because we are still stuck in an education system that teaches disciplines separately in order to prepare young people to survive and succeed in a world that doesn’t separate them. If I read a book, I assume I’m using skills I learned somewhere in thirteen years of English classes. If I quickly glance at the clock, trying to figure out the latest I can leave and I still get to work on time, I’m just using common sense.

Except I’m not. I’m meshing together two different skills I learned somewhere in thirteen years of math classes.

I read a recipe. I calculate how to make just enough of that recipe to feed the number of people I have to feed. At no point in that process do I think, w-u-n k-u-p u-v fl-ow-r, nor do I think one divided by two is one half. I think, It’s only me tonight. Guess I only need half a cup of flour. So do all of you. I’m not using every single math skill I have learned every single day, but I’m also not using every single reading or writing skill I’ve learned on a daily basis either.

And neither are you. Get over it.

When we were kids, back when phones had to be connected to a jack in a wall to function, research consisted of spending a class period or two in the school library (and maybe a weekend in a local library). We looked for our topics in overstuffed card catalogs, and hoped no one else was grabbing the same books we needed. We used a Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine articles, and then poured pocketfuls of dimes into copying machines so we could take the articles back to the classroom. We highlighted. We marked up. It was relatively easy to decide what was worth checking out or copying.

Relatively.

I have recently become aware that a fair number of college students follow this blog (thank you), so you’re all probably looking at this post right now feeling very sorry for my generation. But it’s actually because of you guys and the classes coming up behind you that I’ve jumped back into this topic. Today, card catalogs are the basis for DIY/upcycled storage solutions found on Pinterest. Search engines, often accessed on smartphones, have replaced that function. The problem is: A card catalog represented only those books the library had decided to acquire. Each book was carefully selected by a librarian for its validity and its usefulness. A search engine…is stuck with everything that’s ever been posted to the internet. No one has vetted most of what’s out there. Someone using only a search engine is really taking their research into their own hands. To make matters worse, you could go to a card catalog with nothing more than a vague topic and generally manage to come up with something useful, even if that useful something was just a more refined search term thanks to cross-referencing. If you’re using a search engine…good luck with that.

As the saying goes, Google can bring you back hundreds of answers, but a librarian can bring you back the right answer.

Fortunately, research is a skill, and therefore can be taught. Really, it should be taught. As I said earlier, research is a fundamental part of learning a new skill. Research is about finding information sources, deciding whether or not those sources are valid, and then pulling out the specific information needed. This relies on some of the other transdisciplinary skills (because they’re all cool and play well together), like critical thinking and multiple literacies. Research training needs to start early in a student’s education. Google has even put together a series of lesson plans to help direct teaching students how to conduct research in this digital world.

There really is no excuse why a student at any grade level can’t conduct responsible research, even if they center their research activities on a search engine.

The character education movement over a decade ago tried to address the emotional development that seemed to be getting lost as standardized testing started gaining traction, trying to incorporate traits like leadership, compassion, and integrity into students’ lives through colorful posters placed throughout school hallways and cafeterias. It wasn’t as successful as people hoped. Despite its poor implementation, the motivation behind the character education movement was sound. We’ve become so focused on meeting academic benchmarks that everything else has become invisible. But it turns out that helping children develop empathy and self-awareness has some great side effects. When a child is armed with empathy and self-awareness, she is better able to stand up for herself and to withstand setbacks gracefully. She becomes more responsible for her own actions and reactions, and develops positive goals and relationships.

Newer character education programs like Responsive Classroom focus on giving students valuable coping skills through daily routines structured to help build rapport and foster communication between students. It turns out that helping children build these connections and learn how to talk things out with each other does two significant things: it reduces bullying because the students are more confident and working toward creating a safer environment for everyone in the classroom, and it produces more academically successful students…probably because they have that safer learning environment.

It’s really another one of those cases where we can’t expect children to acquire skills we aren’t teaching them. But with so much to gain, why aren’t we pushing these programs more?