Sunday, January 2, 2011

Drama

There's a new trend in education suggesting that from middle school on, boys should be in a school with only boys and girls should be in a school with only girls.  It's a nice theory, but I don't think it'll work in practice.  The idea is to get the kids in a situation where they only consider their education, not the opposite gender.  Some one-gender-only schools are getting started, and I feel sorry for the teachers at the all-girls schools.

Yes, it's true that boys get more boisterous.  I've had years when the guys outnumbered the girls in my class 2:1, and class control was a challenge.  I'm sure that when you throw in a few extra years, that gets even more exciting, but problems between guys are generally more obvious.  They telegraph themselves an hour before they arrive and when things blow up, it looks like a whole lot of pushing and shoving and smacking things.  The problems are all out in the open and they're easier to defuse and deal with.

Girl problems are sneaky.  The drama is exponentially increased.  Things fester under the surface for days, weeks, months, even years before BOOM!  It all blows apart like Mt. Vesuvius.  Out of nowhere you get cat fights and name calling and general all purpose backbiting over stupid things like "she stepped on my shoelaces" or "she won't play with me" or "SHE is the friend of HER and WE don't like HER so SHE can't be our friend either."  Teachers end up spending 90% of their time putting out the fires after these explosions and dealing with ticked off parents who call and demand to know why the teacher hasn't dealt with a problem the teacher didn't even know about because it hadn't reached the explosive stage yet.

Argh.  Well, that'll have to work itself out while I try to stay neutral.

In the meantime, I'm still working on my writing adventures.

ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) is sponsoring a writing contest for those who haven't published anything in the last 7 years.  I'm going to enter it, so I've been working on my contest entries and pushing onward with Bird's Eye.  A critique partner just clued me in on some facts of military engagements that I knew nothing about.  Namely, when you take on an enemy in an entrenched position, expect casualty rates >80%.  O.o  Yikes.  I knew it was high ... but not that high.

That makes my current plot ideas unrealistic and unworkable, and that may take a significant rewrite of the ideas I had for the last half of the book.  O.o  Better to find these things now than before I spend a couple gazillion hours writing a draft I have to chunk the back half of.

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