Education: What constitutes high quality literacy teaching? - by Richard Lloyd Evans - Helium

Here is an article I wrote about literacy training.

Education: What constitutes high quality literacy teaching? - by Richard Lloyd Evans - Helium

New Article on Ecuador Holidays

Here is a link to an article I recently wrote on helium.com

Important holidays celebrated in Ecuador

Yemeni cleric advocates killing US civilians - Yahoo! News

This is the kind of news that makes people want to "Keep America for Americans" - a US born foreign national now a terrorist, using his US developed education to foment murder.

Yemeni cleric advocates killing US civilians - Yahoo! News

The thing is, he probably would have been the same whether he went to the States or not. He just gets so much more notoriety because of the accident of his birth.

Just Sitting Here Watching...

...the world pass by. It is Friday afternoon and school is out. I have a bag full of exams and papers to grade and at home I have two novels beckoning. Tonight I have a gathering of some expats who are celebrating one of them finally getting permission to marry here in Ecuador (a four month process). At home there is a wife and housefull of dogs and cats and who knows what. So I decided for a time out.

So here I am, sitting at a comfortable table at a "Sweet and Coffee" - Ecuador's version of Starbucks. A minute ago John Lennon was doing his "Just Sitting Here Watching..." which is the inspiration for the title to this little post. Right now the opening bars of "Eye of the Tiger" are picking up, and meanwhile I am sipping on a brandy expresso with whipped cream, watching the life of Guayaquil pass by..

Okay, now I remember. THIS IS WHY WE MOVED TO ECUADOR.

Teaching Candidates Aplenty, but the Jobs Are Few - NYTimes.com

Teaching as I am in Ecuador, I have been a bit insulated from the disruption in the job market in the States. The New York Times has an article which is pretty shocking to me:

Teaching Candidates Aplenty, but the Jobs Are Few - NYTimes.com

My wife and I were thinking of ending our overseas time and heading back to the USA since we are getting older and health care is an issue, but now we are thinking we might need to hang on another year or more.

Internet Book Tour

I love this technologically savvy world. i just ran across a cool sight - authors post their book tour events to promote their books, and readers can search for their favorite authors.

Here is the link:  Book Tour

A Little Bit of Texas Goes Everywhere

The local InterAmerican Academy held a fund raiser – Texas Days! There were Ecuadorian bands doing their best Country Rock, greased pig chases, petting zoos and a Texas Barbeque competition.

Normally, Saturday is a day for me – a time for writing, relaxing or whatever I want to let the stress of the week ease away. This Saturday was a different take – Texas Barbeque! Our school – Colegio Americano, cobbled a barbeque team together to compete. At the competition we gave out samples, and sold our homemade pulled pork and ribs along with hamburgers, all with a side of cole slaw. For competition we competed in one category of chicken and another for pork ribs. It made for a very long day. Aside from six weeks of meetings and several practice sessions, we sat up on Friday night, arrived at 7 a.m. to start Saturday morning and were working through 6 p.m. followed by cleanup. Tired puppies were we.

While we were cooking we thought we did well, and were especially confident in our chicken. We thought we had done a good job on the ribs, too, but we also knew there was going to be a lot of good competition in that category. Still, we thought another team would need to come up with some very good ribs to beat us.

In the end Miller’s Grillers (that’s us) took 1^st Place in Chicken and 2^nd Place in Ribs. We were delighted, but the one irksome fact was that the winners of the Rib competition were a team from the English Consulate. A squad of Limey’s won the Texas Barbeque Rib competition in Ecuador? Sacrilege on so many levels!

All had a good time, some important money was raised for InterAmerican Academy, and we managed to bring some trophies home. Of course, in typical Ecuadorian tradition, something had to be a fly in the ointment. Our 1^st Place trophy said we won the award in the “Chiken” category.

Dear Lucky Agent Contest

I've been following Chuck Sambuchino in his Guide to Literary Agents Blog for a bit, now. One thing he has been doing is a fairly regular "Dear Lucky Agent Contest." In this contest you email in the first 150-200 words of a book manuscript you have, to be judged by a guest literary Agent. The top three get a free critique of their first ten pages by the guest agent, as well as a year's free use of the Internet version of Writer's Market.

I decided to give it a whirl. While I am in the process of writing a new historical novel, some years ago I wrote a very bad Science Fiction novel. I pulled it out recently, noted the weaknesses but had some ideas on how to freshen it up. Actually it is a major overhaul and almost everything is changed, even the name of the hero. It is only a couple days from being completed, so for fun I've entered it into the contest. We'll see what happens. Wish me luck!

So Similar - Yet so Different

School is over for the day, and I have a depressing stack of papers to grade. So it is another "Grade Date" with the wife, which is fine by me. For the moment, though, I have foregone the act of grading and instead I'm checking out the crowd. This is mostly forced on me since my laptop battery is low and the only table close to an available outlet is a wobbly thing that would make reading and marking papers to be pure torture.

I am sitting in the food court of "Mall del Sol" in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a modern mall that in many ways looks like something right out of the USA catalog. Down the way is a Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, Taco Bell and Burger King. Behind me is a McDonald's and an entrance to a Tony Roma's. Over by the corner I can see just a corner of the local theater's Cinemark sign. Thankfully, these altars to American fast food hegemony are surrounded by more local establishments like Comida Tipica Nacional and Pinguino.

There are other differences too. There is a massive widescreen monitor here that is showing the live soccer finale for the Europa League. The people are dressed very similarly to their Norteamericano cousins still have much different racial mixes - lots of Latinos and Mestizos but not a single African (too poor to come to a mall like this) for instance.

Great Day Writing

Wow. Had just a fantastic day writing.

I visited my wife for several hours in the hospital this afternoon.She's doing well physically, but is climbing the walls. With any luck she'll get released tomorrow.

Then I went home and pounded out eight pages on my novel in progress. So far I am extremely pleased with how it is going. I also sent out a couple of e-queries for some articles.

Tomorrow I hope to bail my wife out of the hospital, do a touch more writing, and get my lesson planning done for next week.

A Look at the Past - Part One

This week I turned the big FIVE-OH. Alas, I am now sliding down a short slope to senior citizenship. Please forgive me, then as I share a few thoughts about my writing journey thus far. Philosophers and historians say that you can never really know where you stand now unless you see the road you've traveled to get there. Here is a bit about my road.

I was always a scribbler, and ended up being the editor of my high school paper – that is Junction City High School back in Oregon in the ancient days of 1978. Somehow I parleyed that position into getting my first paid writing gig: being a high school sports stringer for a local newspaper. Before long I had a full time writing assignment covering local city government and doing business profiles for a local weekly newspaper. In no time I was writing feature pieces for some regional sports mags and a couple of local farming publications.

I thought I had reached a new level when I had a 1,200 essay published in Writers Digest, which I had sent in on spec way back in 1980. It was a new experience for me, breaking into a national publication. The experience was also telling. Jim Brohaugh was the editor, and we ended up doing several rewrites to the piece before he was satisfied with it. I was frustrated at times, not used to having to seriously rewrite anything I wrote. When I sent off the final version I nervously waited for a reply, having talked myself into thinking it wasn’t good enough. “I think it shines,” Jim wrote back. It was a $120 check I received, and I thought I had made it.

Well, I hadn’t made it. Life got into the way with the horrible economy of the early 80s and I found myself out of a newspaper job and with no prospects. Desperate to find a source of income to support my new family I joined the Army, and writing took a long detour.

But I learned many lessons in those early days. Perhaps the most important lesson was simply how to write under deadline. While interviewing someone, or attending a council meeting, I would already be thinking of parts of the story as pieces to a puzzle I could move about in my head. By the time I’d sit at my typewriter – in those pre-computer days – the story was already written. I simply needed to put on paper what was already in my buzzing in my brain.

Even today, I have an ability to find information and quickly organize it in my mind into a working structure. It is even faster with today’s software options. Better, now that I am starting a transition from strictly nonfiction to more fiction writing, I find the story, and the characters, are already well developed in my head, clamoring to get out.

Another lesson I learned is that it takes a lot of writing to become a better writer. When I was 17 on until I reached the age of 23 I wrote, a lot, everyday. I was paid by the inch of published copy. I needed a lot of copy to pay my bills. It had to be good copy, because the editor would cut anything that didn’t make the grade. Quality and quantity was the formula. I’d estimate that in those four years alone I wrote over one million words.

Now, I am not a great writer, I know this. I’ll never have the voice of a Faulkner. But the good news is that if you do anything often enough, diligently enough, you eventually get better at it. Business management theory says that it takes 3,000 hours of doing a job before you really become good at it. Those early years gave me the time to put in those hours, to write those words, so the process of writing is much cleaner and efficient now.

In my next post, I think I’ll talk about some of my experiences learning to grow into that new phenomena, the Internet.