Category: School (page 1 of 3)

TTT: Summer reading and to-read

Top Ten TuesdayMost of my summer reading has been and will be made up by various Latin curricula and supplements, in preparation for next school year. I recently found an 1897 printing of De Bello Gallico, and I’ll be brushing up on it myself before I hope to use it with students. I’m also currently reading Greg Woolf’s Rome, an excellent, accessible history, and rereading Ruth Downie’s Semper Fidelis, which is probably my favorite of the Ruso series. To finish off, I have Pierce Brown’s Red Rising out from the library, and Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See waiting on Kindle.

The haps

Yikes—I haven’t updated this place since August (August)! An apology is in order, and with it the usual bevy of excuses: school, work, baseball playoffs, hockey season, laziness. Seriously though, school. This is my last semester, you guys! So, you know, I’ve felt obligated to try to be more involved on campus. It’s hard, being a commuter student; typically I drive to campus, go to classes or work, go home again. But this semester I’ve been to my first UWG football game; I’ve been to History Department panel discussions; I’ve been to Foreign Language Department film events. It’s been fun (and I kind of wish I’d been making this effort to get involved all along) but all the same I am so ready for it to be December already.

Of course that means thinking about afterward. You know—career stuff. What I’m going to do with my life. And right now an opportunity seems to have presented itself. Nothing is definite just yet, but there’s a slightly-more-than-slim chance I may get to go back to Japan starting in March of next year, taking up a teaching position in Sendai. (!) Of course I’m hoping it will work out, and would appreciate your thoughts and prayers in that direction. It’s not what I’d expected I’d be doing, but (at least right now) it really seems like what I’m meant to do.

You may have noticed that my WIP progress bars haven’t, well, progressed very much lately. For now most of my big writing projects have been shelved; I’ve just been too busy with other things to devote much time to them. I’m still hoping to do NaNoWriMo next month—in fact, my plan is to pound out a decent draft of the long-overdue sequel to His Own Good Sword. But Aquae has, for the moment, been put on hold.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing at all. I’ve actually just finished a new short story, which I’ve submitted to the War Stories military sci-fi anthology—fingers crossed! I’m excited about this anthology and doubly excited about the possibility of being included in it. My story is a sort-of cross between Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and—whether or not it gets accepted for publication—I look forward to sharing it with you in the near future.

That’s all for now. Hopefully future updates won’t be so few and far-between—but I know better, by now, than to make any promises.

Disconnect

I am—hopefully, finally—going to be graduating at the end of this year, and as graduation draws closer and closer I face the inevitable question more and more often: “So, what do you want to do afterward, career-wise?” Sometimes I manage to skirt around it; sometimes I throw out the safe old standby (“Oh, you know—teach”); very occasionally, when I decide to be honest, I admit that I’d like to write for a career—specifically, I’d like to write fiction.

Invariably this draws the same response: “What’s your major again?”

“History,” I say. “History major, political science minor.”

And, nearly as invariably, the follow-up question: “So why didn’t you major in English?”

It is, I suppose, a valid question. If I’m to spend the rest of my life writing novels, wrestling with plot structure and word choice, it makes sense I should have wanted the sort of foundation a major in English would give me. And of course I’ve always loved reading. I love nitpicking about grammar. I love etymology. (And in fact I did briefly consider English as a course of study when I first started looking at colleges.) But the simple truth of it is that I don’t enjoy English classes; I’ve never enjoyed English classes. History is truly where my academic passion lies.

The assumption that because I want to write for a living I should have majored in English is, I think, a troublesome one, and indicative of a wider problem. The ability to write, and to write well, shouldn’t be limited to one particular academic discipline; it should be an integral part of every discipline. The idea that good grammar and solid syntax (ha—alliteration!) should only matter to English majors has grave implications for every field of study, including (perhaps especially) history. English majors aren’t the only ones who need to communicate clearly.

I want to write historical fiction, so majoring in history has benefited my writing in countless ways. Majoring in English, on the other hand, may not have given me the necessary tools to engage history and incorporate it effectively into my writing. (I’m not saying one must major in history to write historical fiction, of course, but it’s certainly helped me, personally.) But a solid foundation in writing is vital to any discipline or field of study, not just English.

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