Category: teaching (Page 1 of 6)

I Like Essays!

January 19, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“Listen, we all hate reading essays. Nobody likes reading essays. Nobody likes writing essays either.”

This was spoken by an English teacher at a conference I attended earlier this week.

I knew what he meant. I think we all knew what he meant. I’m not trying to be obtuse by ignoring the context of his statement. But when he expressed his aversion to both reading and writing essays, I couldn’t help but shake my head.

Yes, I know he was talking about student essays (as far as the reading part goes), and he was primarily talking about the literary analysis-type essay. And I know that as far as the writing of essays comment, he was also talking about the essays he probably wrote in school, i.e.: the literary analysis-type essays.

Again, I’m not trying to be obtuse.

But behind the context, I think this teacher was expressing something all-too-common in our world, so utterly shaped by formal education as it is, and that is the idea that essays — both as a genre of writing and a genre of reading — are boring.

And yet, I read essays nearly every day — not student essays — and I read them for fun, of my own volition. And also, if that weren’t enough, I also write essays many times a week. I may call them “blog posts” or whatever, but they are nevertheless essays. They are non-fiction works of prose exploring an idea or topic. This, right here, that you are reading, is an essay!

Teachers and schools are the main culprits in this slandering of the essay. We’ve set up school and the way we teach writing to utterly suck all joy out of writing essays. And we hardly ever give students fun essays to READ (meaning essays with voice and opinion and about interesting topics), and even when we do occasionally give them such essays, we don’t encourage them to write something similar with just as much voice and opinion and interest. The best we do is give them the personal narrative essay assignment, but often enough, we don’t show them any personal narrative essays that are fun to read. If students are lucky, they’ll get to read some in an AP Lang class, but most students, unfortunately, do not take that class.

So they (and their teachers) are stuck with this notion that an essay must be this planned-out thing, with five paragraphs, intro/body/conclusion, all life and interest sucked out of it, and not worth anyone’s time.

I’m guilty of it too. Partly because the expectation from both parents and students is that “real” writing is learning how to write literary analysis; the only writing that matters is the kind of writing that college professors in the humanities will ask of students. But even college professors in the humanities don’t necessarily want these kinds of essays! But parents and students think they do.

And even more than that, the literary analysis essay can, in fact, be a wonderful thing to both write and read, once the writer lets go of this notion that it is a drudge, and the reader actually reads one worth reading.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my reading experience has been reading essays by folks like Susan Sontag or Roger Ebert or Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace. Whip-smart people with idiosyncratic opinions who can write in inimitable voices: What’s not to like?

My students are always astounded when we read some crazy essay from the pages of The Best Non-Required Reading series, and I point out that, yes, that thing you just read is an ESSAY. That brilliant piece of writing about Tonya and Nancy is an ESSAY. Essays are fun to read. They can be incredibly fun to write if you push aside the notion that they are some sort of school exercise but are instead the way people communicate their ideas, knowledge, and opinions to others through writing.

Half the stuff we watch on Youtube are “essays.” People talking to the camera their thoughts and opinions about a topic. If you were to take the spoken words and put them on paper, you’d pretty much have an essay. And there is absolutely nothing about the essay as a form that says you have to be objective or remove all personal voice or treat it like a lab report. Some essays might need to be written like that, but surely not all. The essay is one of the most flexible and versatile of non-fiction genres there are. To reject the essay is to say, “I don’t like reading about other people’s ideas or opinions.” What kind of dull, incurious person would you be if you said that?

Anyway, I’m still annoyed with this idea that essays are “boring.” And if we all know the type of essays that get assigned in school are boring to write and read, then why on earth do we keep assigning them? Why do we keep approaching the art of essay writing as if it’s some bland, cookie-cutter thing?

I’m all for teaching students about how to support their claims with evidence. I’m all for teaching students how to connect their ideas through a line of reasoning. I’m all for teaching students how to write a thesis. But NONE of these things are boring unless the ideas in the essay are boring. So maybe we can also help students realize that they have the power to write about interesting things. We simply have to stop demanding dullness and give them the freedom to write what they want.

Yes, yes, we need that essay on The Great Gatsby because we’re reading Gatsby and how else can we ensure the students read Gatsby unless we make them write an essay about Gatsby?

Okay, fine. Write about Gatsby. I have no issue with an essay about Gatsby. But let the student choose the purpose of the essay. Let them choose the audience and which voice is appropriate for that audience. And then let them write based on those choices.

A persuasive essay to the English teachers of America to stop making kids read The Great Gatsby.

A personal narrative about how you used Sparknotes and other internet sources to skip reading the novel and still fooled your teacher, and how this kind of thing is fairly common (and I bet even your English teacher has done this before in her time as a student), and why reading Sparknotes can be a good thing, actually, because at least you have some cultural knowledge about Gatsby even if you didn’t read it.

A character analysis where you compare Nick Caraway to the month of December. Or Daisy Buchanan to Las Vegas.

A profile on a modern-day Tom Buchanan, some rich asshole who gets away with everything, and in the process of said profile, you indict the entire American obsession with billionaires and the destruction it has wrought.

I don’t know: there are lots of ways to write an essay about Gatsby that aren’t just “What does the green light symbolize?”

Or, you know, don’t write about Gatsby at all and let the students write about something else. If you’re worried that they need to prove their knowledge of Gatsby, give them a test. Don’t slander the essay in your attempts to assess their reading.

And before we even get to these kinds of literary essays, we should be letting students experience the fun of writing about things that interest them, things they have opinions about, so they can learn that essays are not boring. We should encourage them to write with more voice and personality first before we show them how to tweak that voice to fit the purpose and audience of something intended to be more “academic.” The academic essay is only one type. Let’s get them comfortable with the others first before we move into the headier and more challenging ones.

Let them love essays the same way they might love writing stories or poems. Then they might come to love the literary analysis too. Tell them they’re writing the script for a Youtube video analyzing some random Easter egg in their favorite TV series. After they do it, tell them they wrote an analytical essay. Or have them write an essay analyzing the lyrics of one of their favorite songs. Then tell them that’s the same thing others do when they write about books or poems. That this writing is what we call “literary analysis.” But give them choice. Let them write from their interests. Let them see that the “essay” does not have to follow some made-up “format,” and that it doesn’t have to “be” any certain length. Let both the students and their essays be free from all this useless baggage.

I only learned this when I started blogging. I had kind of learned it in my own AP Lang class as a student, and thankfully it stuck with me through college and adulthood, where I learned that I could write college essays about things that interested me and in my own style as long as I was aware of what my professors expected and didn’t veer too off-course.

But once I started my own blog and wrote about topics that interested me in whichever way I pleased, that’s when I really began to see that essay writing was so much more than academic writing. The lessons of my AP Lang class resurfaced and I saw that this was “real-world” writing. I could do this for an audience. I could do it for money. I could do it simply because I had things to say and the essay was my avenue for saying them. And people — people I had never met before in my life — would read them. For fun.

I like essays. I like to read them, and I like to write them. And I feel bad for anyone who hasn’t had such freewheeling pleasures.

Typing Offline

January 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I really want to get a classroom set of word processing machines for my students to type up their drafts after working in their notebooks. Many of them struggle with writing legibly, and they like the comfort of the spell-check function (I know I do too!).

But I don’t want them accessing the internet, partly because it is distracting and takes them out of flow, but also, more immediately, because some (many?) students have decided to use ChatGPT (and equivalent) to “help” them do their work.

I’m so adamantly opposed to LLM (and other forms of generative “AI”) that I want to remove all temptation and access. If they want to use it in their non-school lives or as adults, I can’t stop them, and whatever, God speed, I guess. But in my classroom, where I value human work and the connection that comes from sharing our written thoughts and stories with others, I want an “AI”-free zone.

Also, I cannot believe more people aren’t talking about the environmental and energy-related issues that come from these AI companies. It’s staggering! All so we can have ChatGPT write fan letters for us? It’s insane. Talk about a solution in need of a problem.

If I was given a fan letter written by some LLM, I would not only be uninterested in it, I would be deeply saddened that someone even thought I would want to read what some language-predictor machine burbled up from its store of (copyright-protected, by the way, and nobody gave it permission to use those) words.

It’s all so meaningless. That’s what saddens me about students turning in “AI”-generated essays and creative writing. It’s a waste of my time. I don’t care about “perfect” grammar or sentences that “sound” good but are devoid of any real meaning or human feeling. I want to know what my students THINK — what THEY think — about their own ideas and experiences.

Of course, what hampers all of this and drives students to use ChatGPT is grading. Once a grade is involved, the pressure is on to get that A, so they will do whatever they need to in order to achieve it. When you try to de-center grading in the classroom, they don’t see the point in trying and don’t do any work. It’s the conundrum of modern schooling. The grade is all that matters; it’s the currency that allows students to get into college, and then once in college, it’s the currency that allows them to graduate and get a job.

Writing, for instance, often has little-to-no importance for students. They don’t see the point other than it’s another hoop to jump through. Sadly, I’ve seen students not even care when the writing piece is something personal or something they’ve chosen to write about. They still don’t see the value.

This is not every student, mind, not by a long shot, but it’s enough to be discouraging. And it’s also enough that it makes me want to get a classroom set of THESE so that students can still type their words, but they must type THEIR words and not the words of some machine.

Anyway, I need about $7000 for a classroom set of twenty. Not sure how to get a grant or donation to pay for that (I’m not even sure the company who makes the word processors has twenty of them waiting around for some random teacher to buy), but it’s a goal for me this year.

I want to emphasize the process of writing, the tactile quality of writing by hand, of communicating through words and pictures, comics, collage, letters written in one’s own hand, doodles, and yes, even typed stuff, but typed stuff that is typed on a keyboard and generated by a human mind and heart.

I want to center our humanity in the classroom this year. Learning is about more — so much more — that getting a grade, getting into college, getting a job. I want to help my students NOT surrender their humanity to a machine.

And I want to hear the clickety-clack of keys typing without any interference from the internet or the corporations who want us all to “embrace” a technology we didn’t ask for. That’s my rant for the new year. Now how can I find seven grand?

Ten Years Zine

January 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The way I got to this little project was via reading old newsletters from my inbox. I have a problem with not deleting emails, and also with not always reading things that I want to read. The never-ending stream of emails continues apace, and then the ones I want to read get lost in the cascade until eventually it’s been five years and I still have dozens upon dozens of unread newsletters that I really want to read.

So, the other day, I scrolled back half a decade and started catching up on old mail.

This one, from Austin Kleon, struck me as a fun challenge, so when I needed a break from grading papers, I decided to give it a go. I most definitely took more than 20 minutes to do it.

Turns out #1. I have a pretty terrible memory. I should have spent some time rereading old notebooks or at least looking at a calendar or something, because I really could not remember what happened circa 2015 or between 2018-2019. I remembered 2016 and 2017 only because I had my sons in those years.

And, of course, #2. The Year 2020.

I didn’t bother adding everything that happened that year. “COVID” and a few random words like, “Masks!” were enough to convey the memory. Because it’s all too much, and also too numb to be captured on a tiny zine page. Even now, five years later. It’s not that I particularly suffered all that much from the virus we know as “Covid-19,” (thank God, my family was lucky), but the world suffered, and since I live in the world, my world tilted as a result. I can’t even say exactly when it started tilting — maybe it was also in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 — but 2020 was when it tipped over. I fell over and flipped back up again, somehow different. Honestly, world-views were shattered. They’re still shattering. I went full-Idler.

Anyway, after the rupture of Covid, it’s like the years couldn’t contain everything that happened to me. The zine pages weren’t enough; I couldn’t fit myself in. Ink everywhere, everything at random, new memories popping up just as I thought I’d finished with the pages. No births, but some deaths, and even the biggest one, I couldn’t fit, or didn’t want to fit — it was beyond the format — and trying to catalog the rush of change and then reversion and then change and then–

I didn’t realize my decade could be divided so neatly between “ordinary” — ho-hum, having babies and raising them and work and whatever, to the point where I couldn’t recall the distinct days — and “momentous” — the rush and rumble of a boulder rolling downhill, of huge changes, bad changes, good changes, trials and errors (so many errors), (so many trials), and now I’m back where I seemingly started from in 2015: in the thick of teaching, raising my children, trying to write and publish, and wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of any of it.

But I’m definitely different. That much is true.

Which is good. One should probably change after ten years.

“Rule 4: Consider Everything an Experiment”

December 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This is one of my favorite “rules.” When I’m struggling or in doubt, I remember to think of what I’m doing as an experiment.

Case in point: For the last novel I’m teaching in my British Literature class, I decided we needed reading quizzes to keep the students honest. Earlier in the semester, I could tell that they weren’t doing their reading for Beowulf, so I knew we needed reading quizzes for our study of Frankenstein, otherwise they’d blow it off too.

I could come up with reading questions, but the difficulty with any class in which there are multiple sections AND students have a tendency to be absent (in general) (and especially when they know there’s going to be a quiz) is that I need to make multiple quizzes to avoid the plague of cheating. This means coming up sometimes with an A, B, and C quiz (and even a D quiz at times). That’s a lot of reading questions!

I have done one-question quizzes in the past to solve this issue, and three-question quizzes, etc. But it still fell to me to make multiples and that meant more work, and I’m just not as interested in making more work for myself simply to stop students from sloughing off their work.

So I experimented.

This time around, for Frankenstein, I wanted a way to ensure they did the reading–and read carefully–while also not putting a burden on myself.

Enter the “word map” quizzes.

I pick a word or phrase that has relevance to the chapter and then students have to make one of those word map/mind map spider-webby, bubble-connected thingies with all the things from the chapter that relate to that word or phrase. For nearly every chapter or group of chapters, I can think of several words/phrases that have relevance, so that solves the “multiple quizzes” problem, and this form of quiz rewards students for careful reading: I let them use their books with their annotations to do the quiz. Instead of punishing students for not reading, I reward students FOR reading and taking careful notes.

It’s not even really a quiz in that sense, but a way for them to find one of the main ideas of the text and relate as much of the text as they can to that idea. It’s a good activity for preparing them to discuss the chapter, and it’s easy for me both to create (just pick a word/phrase that goes with the chapter) and to grade.

It was an experiment–one I wasn’t sure would work–and I tried it anyway. The worst that would happen was that it flopped and I had to try something new.

But it worked, and now we have a tool that helps all of us get more out of the text than we had previously.

Students are often surprised when I do different things year-to-year. But this is because I don’t want to my classes to become rote or stale. Yes, I keep certain lessons and texts because they continue to work, year after year, but I don’t keep everything the same. I add new writing experiences or new texts or new ways of presenting information or new activities. I try something, reflect on it, maybe try it again with some tweaks, and keep iterating until it either works or until I let it go and try something else.

What’s funny about all this is that I can experiment in the classroom–and not get too upset when an experiment falls flat–but when it comes to my creative work, I often get a bit more cautious. I want to experiment in my writing, but when it comes time to experiment, I worry. Maybe my creative work matters more (to me)? Maybe I’m worried about rejection? Maybe I’m not sure whether my experiments will work or not? (Which is kind of a stupid worry because it wouldn’t be an experiment if you KNEW it was going to work…)

When I experiment in the classroom, I get almost immediate feedback from the students. I can tell when something works, when it partially works, or when it fails. I can then adjust or try something new.

But with my writing, I don’t always get that immediate feedback. How do I know if an experiment was successful or not? How do I know if I’m banging my head against the wall or doing something that surprises and delights?

I tend to be overly critical of my creative work; I’m not always the best judge of my experiments. I suppose this is why writers like Dean Wesley Smith adhere so closely to Heinlein’s rules. Another “Rule 4” in fact: “You must put it on the market.”

We can’t judge whether our creative experiments work. So we must release them and let the audience decide.

Sr. Corita’s Rule 4 doesn’t say anything about judging your experiments. Even putting one’s work out into the world is an experiment if we take Rule 4 literally: “Consider EVERYTHING an experiment.” Sharing my work is an experiment. Making my work is an experiment. Doing something else, trying a new way or the old way but differently: all are experiments.

The Rule doesn’t care about success or failure. Experimentation is an action not an evaluation.

This week, in my writing time, I tried to experiment not just with what I was writing, but with the process itself. I decided to let my whims direct me. If I felt like working on my solo RPG campaign, I did. I made some NPCs and did a little world-building, and then I decided, purely by instinct and desire, to start a short story using the prompt from this Lunar Awards Prompt Quest. Then I let myself shift to jotting down a few stray ideas for my NCL novel. Then I worked on a blog post.

Instead of trying to control my creative output, I let my Creative Voice go wherever it wanted. I found myself energized, excited, and strangely productive. I wrote a lot of words, felt connected to all my ideas and projects, and most importantly, had a lot of fun.

My experiment was to let go of what I thought I was “supposed” to do during my writing time, and instead did what felt good and was fun.

Could this be interpreted as being “undisciplined”? (I’m already looking ahead to the next Rule…)

Maybe.

But it felt less like lack of discipline and more like an embrace of the playful spirit. I let go of “shoulds” and focused instead on “wants.” It turns out, I WANT to make creative stuff and write lots of words when I abandon what I “should do” in favor of what feels fun in the moment. I didn’t waste time on the internet. I didn’t procrastinate. Instead, I followed my interests and created work in several different projects. And each of those projects fed into the other.

I allowed myself that same experimental freedom for this post too. I didn’t know I was going to write all this. Instead, I felt like now would be a good time to jot down some thoughts about Rule 4, and before I knew it, I had written 1,000-plus words. I let my inner creative desires guide me. I let the spirit of experimentation take charge. I didn’t know where this post was going to go (and maybe for the reader it’s a disorganized mess), but I let myself go there and see what would happen.

Goal Update: November 2024

November 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s been five months since I posted my ridiculously long list of goals, and I figured it was time to do an update. Mostly for my own reflection. Maybe this is the teacher side of me, but reflecting on my work helps me see where to go next. It’s a taking-stock process. Let’s me know what steps to take next.

I set a huge number of goals in the hopes of “failing to success,” figuring that if I kept working at a bunch of different things, I’d make more progress than if I limited myself to only a few. Does this make any sense? Who knows, but it makes sense in my own head. I tend to do better and feel better when I have lots of creative projects going on that I can toggle between and work on bit by bit. Sometimes a particular thing takes over and I obsess over it, but other times I flit back and forth like a butterfly.

So, how is my flitting these days?

Hm.

That’s the short answer. Here is the longer answer:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I am not finished but this is the goal I’ve probably made the most progress on. As of right now, I’m roughly 40k into the story (maybe 45k… not sure because I handwrote a bunch of it and am now typing it up). I’m a bit stalled, however, so I’ve decided to go back to the last moment in the story when I was still really excited and start redrafting from there. That means that my most recent three chapters will be entirely new material as I scrap the old and start again. I’m not too upset by this because it means I’m getting excited about the story again and seeing where it heads next. I’m still hopeful I can finish this before 2024 kicks it.

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Haven’t done anything with this one yet. I’m focused on finishing NCL. I have a bad habit of losing steam in the middle of a novel and jumping to other things, and I don’t want that to happen with NCL, so I’m holding off on another big project until that one is finished. NCL is where my energy and imagination are at the moment too. Not that I won’t get to Ysbaddaden in 2024, but it’s probable that 2025 will be the year of Merlin’s Last Magic.

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.

Publish my short story collection: Embarrassingly not yet. I have the cover art, I have the stories, I have them mostly copy edited, and now it’s just a matter of finishing layout and proofing. Getting those ISBNs assigned and uploading to markets.

Why have I stalled on this project? I think because when I have time for creative things, I tend to put my energies into writing and creating and not into the publishing. Publishing feels too much like “work,” and when I have free time, I don’t want to work, I want to play. This is good for my writing but bad (obviously) for my publishing. I should make a more concerted effort to get my writing out to readers, but in order to do so, I must steal time from my writing sessions, and I’m loathe to do that.

If there’s one goal on this list I really want to achieve before the year is out, it’s this one, so I MUST block time into my schedule and get this book out to market. I haven’t felt much urgency until now, but the pressure is starting to mount. Hopefully, I have a short story collection to announce in the coming weeks.

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Still focused on NCL and don’t want to switch to any other bigger projects.

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!): I am not blogging everyday… but I am trying to blog more and seeing some improvement on this measure.

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Ugh. This is the one that hurts. I just haven’t been able to get into a rhythm. Since I’m really trying to finish NCL, I don’t devote much time to other writing pursuits. It should be obvious, then, that the Substack will suffer. But I hate that it’s being neglected. I don’t want to neglect it, but non-fiction takes longer (at least the kind I do on Substack), partly because it takes me longer to generate ideas and evaluate whether they’d be good enough for a newsletter essay.

I can write shorter thoughts and musings, and those tend to go on the blog, but for my Substack readers, I feel like if I’m sending something to their inboxes, it needs to be more substantial. That desire for a more in-depth and lengthy piece of writing puts the pressure on, and I shut down when there’s too much pressure. My ideas dry up. My fears and critical voice rear their heads.

The answer, such as it is, is to devote more time during my writing sessions to working on the Substack: generating ideas, drafting, researching, etc. This is a process that requires a good chunk of time. If I don’t schedule that time, it ain’t happening.

But to block time for the Substack means to lessen time for my fiction. This is the Sophie’s Choice I’m loathe to make.

Anyway, the Substack goal is a conundrum. Not sure how this is going to go other than maybe reassessing my goals and making a few hard choices.

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: Have played more with the kids, but not where I’d like to be. We’ve played two sessions of Hero Kids RPG, but I’m itching to play more. The kids like it, but it’s hard for me to muster the energy some evenings, so we end up not finding time to play.

I need to block time for playing into my schedule (this is a recurring theme, isn’t it?). I want to try playing solo as well, and I’m currently reading the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from the old Basic D&D TSR stuff. I’m planning to use the rules for Cairn and run a little solo campaign to explore the setting and get my role-playing fix.

I’m not sure I’ll get to play more with family and friends. No one seems particularly interested; I’m by far the most enthusiastic of the group. So perhaps solo gaming is the way to go.

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.

Make other zines: Not yet.

(Zine-making still excites me, but like with my other pursuits, I feel like all my focus should be on finishing NCL and writing fiction. If I had all the time in the world, I would do more with these side projects, but when my time is limited, I feel like I have to make the choice to write fiction. Can I find more time in my day? Can I schedule more time for these pursuits? I suppose I can, but what will be sacrificed to get this time? My walking? My reading? Time spent with my kids?

Maybe I try to fold my zine-making into time spent with my kids… we can all make zines together. This is worth a try…

Of course, I’m doing this to myself by having so many flipping goals! I realize that there’s simply not enough time in the day to do all these things to their fullest. But the seed of desire is still there, so for the moment, I’m going to continue looking for ways to do all my goals.)

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes, a little. We are reading The Hobbit, and we’ll be starting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone soon.

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Not yet, but I’m going to try committing to doing this in the evenings. Christmas is coming up and winter too, so now is the time to get it done.

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): I did practice drawing cartoon owls (to turn into an Isabel-story zine…?), but that’s all. I have some drawing books for as sources, but despite identifying them around the house, I haven’t gathered them to use. As a family, we sometimes spend Saturday morning drawing, so maybe I can make that a more regular and deliberate thing.

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: I’ve started a long-form essay about decluttering to share with my students, but it’s in very rough draft form. I wrote a couple of models earlier this school year, but not nearly as many as I had planned. This goal sounds good in my head, but when it comes time to actually do it, I find that I resist. Just as my students resist assignments because they are assignments, I resist writing that feels like an obligation. I know I need to work on the mental attitude here and see these as fun and practice and a chance to try something new. But I’m still battling a lot of critical voice in my fiction and for-fun writing, so doing writing that’s more obligatory is an even harder hurdle to jump.

So much of writing is a mental challenge. Yes, craft matters, and learning how to do different techniques is important, but the real challenge (at least for me) is battling the ennui and the critical voice and the lack of confidence. I’m forever fighting the fear that I’ll make a mistake or write something bad.

My goal of writing more model texts for my students is no different. I’m afraid I’ll fail, so I resist doing it in the first place. After all, what if I’m trying to model a certain technique and I do a bad job of it? I’ll embarrass myself in front of my students. What if I set a goal to write a certain kind of essay and it turns out all wrong? The students will see I’m a fraud.

And on and on the negative thoughts spiral.

I know that I need to treat every creative act as an experiment, but this requires a mental shift that I’m still working on making. To see everything as an experiment means to have a certain kind of fearlessness and courage that isn’t always readily available. To be okay with failure.

This is perhaps the overarching goal for everything: to break through mental fear and go into every enterprise with an attitude of experimentation. All my 2024 goals are really the same goal, then. To experiment freely. To cease hesitating and go for it.

Bonus achievement: I wrote a short story about walking and bird-watching that came out of nowhere. It wasn’t planned, but I got excited about it and rode the wave until it was done. So despite not making progress on planned short stories, I spontaneously wrote one anyway. This is a good example of “failing to success.” I ended up writing something even though I failed to write something else. Having lots of irons in the fire, so to speak, meant that I was ready for when a new, unexpected iron needed shaping.

“Rule 3: General Duties of a Teacher: Pull Everything Out of Your Students”

November 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s not that I don’t try. I just can’t achieve it.

I can’t pull everything out of my students. I can sometimes barely pull anything out of my students.

This is one of the anxieties I have always had about myself as a teacher: that I’m rubbish. I don’t think I’m a complacent or “going-through-the-motions” type, but despite my attempts, my enthusiasms, my professional development, I can’t fulfill Rule 3. I simply don’t know how or don’t have the ability.

I’ve been putting off writing about this Rule because doing so would mean admitting failure. (Perhaps I should glance down at Rule 6 for some perspective…)

If I wondered what Rule 2 means, I really struggle to understand what it takes to achieve Rule 3. How does one “pull”? Is it my style of teaching? Is it the work I assign? Is it the reading list, the pedagogy, the grading system, the relationships I try to form? What is it that pulls everything out?

It sounds coercive. It’s not “coaxing everything out,” it’s not “inviting everything out,” and it’s not just “some things,” it’s EVERYTHING. How does one person pull anything out of another person let alone everything?

I used to do this thing called “ungrading” or a grades-less classroom. I couldn’t completely abandon grades because our school still uses a GPA system and no other teachers joined me in the grades-less revolution, so at the end of the term, students still got grades. But we made the grades a collaborative thing where I sat down with each student and we talked about the work they did for the term, we looked over their portfolios, and they wrote reflections describing what they learned and what they could have done better.

When this system worked–when the students bought into it–it worked great. But most students did not buy into it. They saw it simply as a way to get an easy A. Sure, they did the work, but they still did the work as a means to an end, as a way to get a good grade. I didn’t pull anything new out of these students. And frankly, I don’t blame them for it. Why should they approach their education as anything other than a series of hoops to jump through to get a grade and move on to the next hoop-jumping season and the next grade and so on, until they get a job, I guess. We MADE this system for them, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they do their best to succeed in it.

So inviting students to learn for learning sake didn’t work, at least not when I tried it. Again, maybe that’s on me. I have anxiety about my ineffectual teaching skills. Maybe I just didn’t do a good job. Again, not able to “pull everything out.”

But when I went back to a traditional grading approach, I still couldn’t follow Rule 3. I still had no clue how to do this pulling and have it work. I could pull for them to work hard for good grades, but that didn’t feel like “pulling everything out.” That simply felt like getting them to go through the motions to achieve the external outcome they wanted.

I can pull hard work from the students, and maybe that’s enough–maybe my “hard” grading pushes them to strive for more–but it doesn’t feel like enough. I feel like there’s some secret here that I don’t understand, some qualities I don’t possess. I try to be enthusiastic. I absolutely love reading, writing, and communicating, and I believe these things are worth doing for their own sake; they make us more fully human. I try to communicate this love to my students. Is that what it means to “pull everything out”?

I give them space and opportunities to write and discover and read cool stuff. Is that what it means to “pull everything out”?

And even though I don’t do the “ungrading” thing anymore, I still try to impart a philosophy that says, “Grades aren’t the be-all, end-all. Learning and growth are the lasting rewards.” Is this “pulling everything out”?

I struggle with this Rule because I have no way to measure it. I have my efforts; I know what I’m trying to do. But do I do it? That’s what I don’t know. And that’s why I’ve struggled to write about Rule 3.

Perhaps the struggle to achieve the Rule is what fulfills the Rule. Perhaps this hope is the real duty of the teacher.

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