How I Learned to Read and Think

I'm going to tell you a couple stories about random moments/things that are important to me and why. This will make sense in the end, I promise.

When I was four, my mom enrolled me in Head Start. I didn't know until I was much, much older that Head Start was a pre-school program specifically for lower-income families. That fact is still a bit confusing to me because for most of my life my family made just enough money that we didn't qualify for assistance programs and not enough to get most of the things that we would be wanting assistance for. I remember there was a summer program I wanted to attend when I was younger that I couldn't go to because we made just barely too much for me to qualify for a scholarship, but there was no way my parents could afford the tuition to send me.

Anyway, that's not the point of the story. The point is, that I have one very specific memory of Head Start, other than the vague memory of how much I loved my teacher. I was four years old, not yet really formally in school, and I remember reading a book on my own for the first time. It was a book about the color wheel, and my teacher actually let me keep it. I still have that book, because the fact that I'm a writer is owed partially to the fact that I'm a reader.

I am a reader partially because of Head Start. My parents and siblings of course also played a large role, but the simple fact is that Head Start is a program that worked for me. Reading a book on my own for the first time was a really big deal, and it happened at Head Start.

When I was a kid, I watched PBS obsessively. I adored Big Bird and the rest of Sesame Street. A few years ago, I went to see Jim Henson's Fantastic World at the Smithsonian. It was like my childhood put in a museum, everything I had loved was represented there.

But it was also eye-opening for me. I was watching the same sketches and videos I had seen on Sesame Street, but now realizing the lifelong associations those videos had given me. Those letters and numbers still lived in the world that Sesame Street had helped create for me, and that was how I remembered them even as I approached 30 years old.

I read about the underlying intentions that Henson had with his projects, how the producers of Sesame Street had realized that children could remember commercials better than they could anything else, and couldn't the same techniques used in those commercials be harnessed for good?

Mr. Rogers taught me different lessons, but he was a huge force in my life all the same. To this day I adore shows on TV that go into factories to show how things are made, and that started with him. But my real love was the land of Make-Believe. I live my life telling stories in one way or another, honing my imagination and trusting my own instincts for creativity. I got that from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

And we can't forget about Reading Rainbow. I mostly watched Reading Rainbow in school, but I can still sing the themesong now. I would go and find the books they talked about on the show in my school library and read them. When they would talk about a book I had already read, I would be as excited as if they were talking about me personally. I knew that book! That was a great book!

I learned Math from Square One Television, where I would be hooked to the storyline of Mathnet for the entire week, only to almost always end up missing the wrap-up episode on Friday. But I can't hear Fibonacci's Sequence without saying "1, 1, 2, 3, 5, EUREKA!" And whenever I see < and > I think of Mathman.

I learned geography from Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego (another theme song I can still sing). I watched Ghostwriter, 3-2-1 Contact, and Lambchop at various points in my life.

Now, as an adult, I'm a writer and a filmmaker. I try to incorporate science into a lot of my work, and I like being accurate about it. I think even education can entertain, and I try to do both as often as I can.

There is no doubt in my mind that I am the person I am today because of these early influences, both Head Start and PBS. I am smarter, more productive, more successful, and just a better member of society because I had them in my life.

Which is why I'm so upset that right now, in the name of supposedly HELPING the American public, the House of Representatives has voted to end funding for public broadcasting, and they are also attacking the funding for Head Start.

You know what I need my government to do for me right now? Help me find money to pay off the massive amount of student loans I had to undertake to get an education. I wouldn't mind an affordable health insurance plan so I wasn't paying for the ridiculous plan I get through school that doesn't actually cover anything so I'm not allowed to get sick. How about throwing some weight behind the Silver Line extension of the Metro so that I can start taking public transit? Not to mention that it would raise the property value of my house, which tanked right after I bought it. Have I mentioned we owe more than the house is "worth?"

But instead, congress is all twisted up in trying to take away two of the programs that have proven track records, that work beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't mind paying taxes when I can see the benefits of my tax dollars. Through PBS and Head Start I didn't just SEE the benefits, I am living proof of them.

170 Million Americans For Public Broadcasting
Stroll In For Head Start

The power of acknowledgement

Like most people in my industry, I have a day job that is not in the industry. I won't tell you anything about it, because that's not the point.

But what I will say is that today I noticed something that might seem really simple but is ridiculously important: everybody is always saying thank you. Today when I left I told one of the managers that I would see her in a couple days. She replied, "Thanks for all of your help today."

Two things occurred to me. First, that I can't remember a day when I've said goodbye to the managers there and NOT had them say thanks. Second, they always are genuine about it, this isn't just some rote thing they say because they're supposed to. They mean it.

It also made me think about the fact that my co-workers are always saying thanks to each other, and that in general we're all just very grateful to each other when we're helping each other out.

This is a really important thing, because it's something I've noticed in every industry I've worked in, for every project I've worked on, and everything that I do. The simple act of saying thank you or acknowledging someone is one of the best and easiest ways to get good work from them. When I'm directing, I try to make sure that I say thank you to each individual crew member, at least once during the shoot. Of course, I also spent the entire month of December writing thirty one posts to say thank you to the people and businesses who supported my last film shoot.

It goes further than just saying thank you, but acknowledgement in general is something extremely powerful. Hearing that I did something well improves everything that I do. It helps me to improve the things that I'm good at, and I think it's good to address your strengths as well as your weaknesses. One of the best experiences I've had in grad school was a long talk with a professor where he laid out the things that he felt I was good at, so that I could work on strengthening those areas and making myself even better at them.

We have a tendency to always focus on what people need to improve and how they can get better. We have performance reviews and tell them what they need to work on. We are always just telling people what they've done wrong, without focusing on what they've done right. But when you take the time to tell somebody they've done something well, it doesn't just change their day but it always is just good management, and it's being a good human being.

So I say you should take today or tomorrow and make sure that if somebody does something that you like, you should say so. Take the time to acknowledge someone's strengths or the help that they've given you. Say thanks.

I promise, I'm not like this all the time. It just was a pretty good day, and I've had a really rough month.

Girls Play Games: Get Over It

I've been a gamer since before I could read, which I suppose some people will think a travesty, but I personally think is awesome.

We had an Atari, and I remember playing the E.T. game that now tops almost every list of "worst video game ever" along with Cosmic Ark, Demons to Diamonds, Frogger, and all the other classics. When I was four, my family got a computer and I became a PC gamer. I still might have gone towards consoles if my mom hadn't put her foot down around the same time and said, "We're not getting a Nintendo, you already have a computer to play games on."

So, PC games it was. Now, I've branched out since then and played some great console games. I actually have gone back and played some of those classic Nintendo games that I missed the first time around.

All in all, I have almost three decades of gaming to my name. Which is not neccesarily that impressive if you consider that most people my age grew up with gaming.

But the thing is, I'm a girl.

I hear you all gasping in shock now. Or maybe you're not, I certainly hope you aren't. Because for some reason, despite the fact that there are millions of us out there, girl gamers are still treated like some weird oddity. Like we're some rare species of bird that you'll only get a chance to see once in a lifetime. Oh my gosh, there she is! A girl with a level 85 in WoW! I hear she even RAIDS too! I can't believe I can mark this off my life list!

Where is this STILL coming from? Why are girl gamers like myself STILL fighting this fight not to be treated like an abnormality? And while I'm at it, what's so weird about the idea that girls are reading comics, and have been for our whole lives?

I thought maybe things were shifting a bit, don't ask me why. For some reason I thought maybe, just maybe people were starting to understand that girls like to pwn just as hard as boys do. Maybe it was because I started to see that we really were almost reaching an understanding in the science fiction fandoms that girls ARE ALREADY THERE so maybe they deserve some respect.

I got hit hardcore with a lesson when I went to a Major League Gaming event here in DC last October. I started keeping count of the number of women I saw, and I never got into double digits. The hotel had actually taken all of the women's bathrooms in that area and put signs over them switching them to men's, leaving the few female stragglers to go to the "family" restrooms.

I was there to watch the Starcraft 2 tournament. In general, I think I saw more girls in the crowd around the SC2 area than anywhere else. But we were still few and far between.

So what is that about, ladies? Is it because there are currently no female pro-gamers in the SC2 world?

I ran into a really nice girl who needed to borrow my cell phone charger (long story) and we sat and discussed the whole thing for a while. She told me if I wanted to spot the girls at a competitive gaming event, I should look for two people standing really close together, because the girls usually came with their boyfriends.

Turned out, she was right. I only saw two girls the whole weekend that didn't seem attached to one of the guys next to them*. What is that about?

Most women I know won't talk in vent during WoW raids or use a mike and reveal their gender, because they've been hit with rampant sexism from other gamers. But at the same time, in my WoW guild we probably are at least 1/3 women, if not more. So are we all hiding? Are women unwilling to go to competitive events because they're afraid of meeting the same sexism in person as they sometimes experience online?

Why aren't we out there? I know there's no way we're actually that slim a minority when it comes to game sales and actual play time.



*I have to admit here that I actually was there with my husband, so I'm coming across as a bit of a hypocrite. But I didn't go because he asked me to, I wanted to go because my favorite player was going to be there and my favorite casters were commentating on the games.