Oh yes, I definitely love my job.
20 October 2009
So as I mentioned in my Sunday post, I spent yesterday at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School. I was particularly interested to visit because Skylar attends a (fictitious) Shawnee Mission school, and I haven’t been inside one since I took my SAT at SM East. Public speaking is so not my thing. Actually, anything that involves dragging me away from writing, reading, or spending time with McKenna usually isn’t my thing. (Meeting friends for coffee at Starbucks is an exception to this.) But even being my hypercritical, insecure self, I feel like yesterday went well.
A lot of this has to do with the students themselves. They were fun, bright, and asked lots of good questions. Here were some of my favorites:
1. “What kind of shampoo do you use? You have cool hair.”
2. “Do you like Twilight?” And when I answered yes, the girl asked, “Are you Camp Edward or Camp Jacob?” When I said “Camp Jacob,” and I was asked why, I said “I think Edward is too perfect.” One guy—who’d asked a lot of questions himself—said, “So you like ’em rough around the edges.” Which made me laugh too hard to respond intelligently. Thank goodness, because I’m not even sure how to respond to that.
3. “Do you see yourself having a trademark literary device, and if so, what is it?” I told him I’d been out of English class far too long to answer that question. The same guy later asked me what themes I saw in my books. I’m guessing this student writes some excellent English essays.
4. “I’m doing NaNoWriMo. Any tips?” I was totally blown away by this question. For those unfamiliar, November is National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo. Every November there’s a contest (is that the right word?) where writers commit to writing 50k of a new novel between the first and the thirtieth. If you write 50k, you win. If you don’t, you still made progress. I hear great things about it and keep debating if I want to take the plunge this year. It would be a no-brainer except I’ll be on vacation for about 7 days.
5. “Why is there no swearing in your books?” When I first started writing, I often found it difficult to write around swear words. Especially for characters like Skylar and her friends. But now I’ve been doing it so long that I’d forgotten how unique that is.
I think it’ll be a while before I 100% love school visits. Right now I find them 75% enjoyable and 25% insanely stressful. But they’re incredibly rewarding, and I always walk away thinking, “Yes, I still love teenagers. I still think I have the best job in the whole world.”
Comments
Even if you were nervous, you definately couldn’t tell! You did a great job! :D
Posted by M. on 20 October 2009
Oh, that’s SO sweet of you! You guys were all so nice that it was pretty easy to relax up there :)
Posted by Stephanie on 20 October 2009
You do have cool hair! LOL
Do NaNo!
Posted by Erica Vetsch on 20 October 2009