The Finish Line is in Sight

It's the 28th November, two days of NaNoWriMo remaining. Three of our students have crossed the 50,000 word mark, so huge congratulations to Nick, Rachel and Kirsty. What's really impressed me about these three is the way that they started out at a normal pace and then just shot a head as they got more and more involved in their stories. Made me feel very proud and slightly teary!



We have an occasional day on Monday, so there's extra writing time for everyone who is still going, and then most of our Wrimos have been signed out of lessons on Tuesday (thank you, lovely and understanding teachers) so they'll be arriving in the morning armed with snacks and Thermos flasks full of tea. Keep writing everyone!

Passing the Halfway Point

NaNoWriMo continues to rattle along, with some students so frighteningly far ahead that I wonder if they're sleeping or eating.  Others have had to give into the pressures and either drop out (with a promise to try again next year from nearly every single one of them) or adjust their word counts to a more appropriate number, a luxury only afforded to those on the Young Writers' Program.  We celebrated the half way point on Monday, and recalculated possible targets, doubling the number of words already written and adding a couple of thousand to make sure that it's still a challenge.  This has helped many of those who were feeling disheartened to pick up their stories again with renewed energy.  We've also been having great fun at our Plot Clinics, deciding on horrible things to do to our characters if they were starting to bore us.  To Pippa's characters I can only apologise.  It was my idea to have you fall off the mountain.

Students in the KS3 Creative Writing group, led by Holly and Megan in Year 12, will soon be starting work on their entries for the Red House Young Writers' Yearbook competition.  We'll also be opening up the competition to GCSE English students, who may be able to double up and submit a piece of their GCSE coursework.  Good luck to all who enter!

The news for schools and budgets is horrifically doom and gloomy at the moment, and we're all being asked to make cut-backs wherever humanly (and sometimes inhumanly) possible.  Chances are we'll have less to spend on books next year, but we're already plotting ways to make sure that all our students get access to what they need, be it fiction, websites or good old-fashioned information printed on paper. Signing up to free book schemes and strengthening our connections with other local schools should mean that we can share our resources and make the most of what we've got.  The biggest risk is to our staffing and hours, which could have a huge and instantly detrimental impact on what we can do.  Though I know that there are people within the school who will fight for us, there are also staff (worryingly) who don't see why we need a library like the one we have.  Please keep your fingers crossed for us! With the local public libraries looking at a staffing hours cut of almost 40% and potentially disastrous spending budgets for next year, the role we play in providing our students with essential services is only going to increase in importance.  There will be no alternatives.

Promoting LGBT Literature

My read of last week was Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan.  It’s an absolutely wonderful, touching and at times painfully well observed tale of friendship and young love; I laughed so hard it hurt, and bawled my eyes out at the end. It also features two gay characters, one, Tiny Cooper, who is openly gay (and fabulously so, if he does say so himself) right from the start, and one of the Will Graysons, who comes out in the course of the novel.  And here in lies the conundrum.  This is a book that I know so many of my students would enjoy.  The writing styles and the way that the characters talk to each other is so perfectly tuned to the way that teenagers speak to each other that they’d laugh with recognition at it all the way through.  But if I pass this book to a male student and tell him that he might enjoy it, chances are he’ll jump to the conclusion that I think he’s gay. 

One of my first missions when I took over this job was to increase the number of LGBT books we stocked.  There was one.  A whole one.  And it wasn’t keyworded ‘gay’ on the system, because the previous librarian feared that this would attract the wrong sort of attention.  And the Stonewall guide to LBGT friendly employers was hidden in the office for the same reason.  This counter-intuitive approach to shielding LGBT teens from negative attention was clearly not the way I wanted this library to be.  We now stock many titles, both fiction and non-fiction, that are securely keyworded and clearly available.  So far only one of them has been taken out. 

On the face of it, this is a friendly, open school where we’ve had extensive work done in combating homosexual bullying.  The word ‘gay’ when used as an insult or with negative connotations, is treated as seriously as a term of racial abuse.  And yet there are very, very few openly gay students.  In fact, I think I could only name one and he left last year.  Statistically, we can estimate 1% of students in this school are gay or lesbian,  0.5% are bi, and 3% are unsure*.

So what’s the best way to promote LGBT literature without making it seem exclusive, and without potentially upsetting students? The English department are planning to use an LGBT text as a class reader at some point in the near future, which will open up the subject, and I’m going to be putting together a display of relevant books that will be out for a couple of weeks just to make it clear that we do have books that would appeal to anyone who is curious. 

I would really appreciate hearing how you or anyone else have handled this in your libraries, or if you’re a student here at RPS, what do you think would be a sensible and sensitive way of promoting these books?

*These statistics are based on adult respondents, so I’d expect our ‘unsure’ numbers to be higher.

Congratulations!

Two of our Year 8 Reading Group members, Louise and Ben, have been chosen to be part of the panel involved with the forthcoming Young Guardian Books site. 

Followed a small mention on the main Guardian Books site, both students submitted an email detailing why they'd like to be involved and what they'd want to see from the site.  Really looking forward to seeing what happens with this.

Edit: A third student has now also been accepted! Well done to Elle!

Frantic Scribbling

It's now Day 12 of NaNoWriMo and the target wordcount for the end of the day is 20,000.  We've had eleven days of hard-working, excited students hammering away at the keyboards, churning out words at a rate of knots.  The progress they've made has been absolutely stunning, with many of them putting in extra time at break, lunch and for an hour and a half after school.  It's the after school sessions that have been making the most significant difference, when they all gather in the computer area and we go for twenty and ten minute word sprints.  All you can hear is the clacking of keys, until the alarm goes and the sighs of relief, shrieks of frustration or pent up giggles escape.  They're making good use of our virtual classroom and have been posting discussions on the forum, sharing ideas and working collaboratively when they need to. 

I think it's starting to dawn on them quite how much hard work NaNoWriMo is.  They're starting to realise what writing is when it becomes a job and how very, very easy it is to get up and do something else.  A couple of them have developed the shakes and several are well on their way to yelling out seemingly irrelevant words in class as their novels start to take over their minds.  I feel slightly as though I'm creating an army of vaguely confused mini-mes.  Today, we'll celebrate the end of the second school NaNo week with plenty of snacks and some mammoth word sprints as they all get a head start at the weekend rush.  They're making excellent use of Write or Die.

For the first time ever, I'm ahead!  Having switched my home computer over to mac a while ago, I've been working this time using Scrivener, which is making a frightening amount of difference to how difficult the process of writing can seem.  Annoyingly, the things that it's doing that make it seem so much easier are things that I could quite easily have done myself before: proper outlining, breaking up the text into manageable chunks.  I don't know about you, but when I'm in the midst of trying to make a piece of writing sound the way I think it's supposed to, I utterly lose sight of such things as logic and organisation.  Scrivener puts the logic in front of you, pats you on the head and tells you that everything will be fine. 

They've just released the Windows version in Beta, so I'm trying that out on the office computer.  No hiccoughs yet, and my home file from the mac seems fully compatible.  Hoping that for next year we'll be able to consider buying it for the library machines, to return to our novelists the logic that seems to be fleeing from many of them, screaming.

It begins!

Day 1 of NaNoWriMo. At lunchtime, the novelling hoards should descend and start work on their masterpieces. Then they'll be here after school too, hammering away at their keyboards with me until half four.

Sadly the writing cafe is not to be - it seems that Health and Safety will not allow it. The big no-no, I'm told, is the possibility of students carrying hot drinks across the library. Drinking them is fine, spilling them on books and computers is not a concern, but clearly carrying is a risky business. The irritation here is that we're expecting these students to act as young adults, but we deny them the responsibilities of it and treat them like children. This doesn't make any sense. And no, apparently it is not enough to gather parental consent forms for tea carrying and offer special training. Nor is it relevant that they do this every week in food tech, and take hot dishes out of ovens with their bare hands*. But I'm allowing them to bring snacks and drinks, and, y'know, flasks. Of tea.  *subtle wink*

*This is not entirely true.