In the fall of 1987, I took a writing class at the University of Kentucky called “Composition for Teachers.” I had no idea who the teacher, Wendell Berry, was. The class met on Tuesday afternoons in Miller Hall, built in 1898, one of the oldest buildings on campus.

On that first day, Berry walked in looking like every farmer I’d ever seen standing around a tobacco warehouse telling lies. He wore khakis, brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles, and a blue button-down shirt. His hair was gray on the sides, and his face was tan except for a circle of white on his forehead, the mark of a man who works under the sun and wears a brimmed hat. He didn’t look like an academic. He looked like my father – an austere and simple farmer, the grooves in his cheeks when he smiled like plowed rows.

In an interview published around this time in Our Other Voices, Berry was asked why he was returning to the University of Kentucky after quitting teaching a decade earlier in 1977. He replied that those who were concerned about education should do something about its demise.

Our first assignment was to write an essay on a topic of our choice. I can’t remember what topic I chose, but I’m sure I tossed it off with the same blind aplomb I wrote most required academic drivel. I was in my last semester of college, and I had never received anything less than an A in an English class.

When he returned the essays to the class, there was a large red F on the top of my paper. The University of Kentucky didn’t even allow F’s. They used E’s, but there it was, almost an inch tall, the first I’d ever received on a piece of writing in my life.

During those first few weeks, the class had been thick with schism. An off-balance theological argument occurred between Berry and some woman who thought Flannery O’Connor was a Baptist. Soon a pedagogical flap occurred when an earnest disciple of the latest College of Education writing method could not believe that Berry didn’t endorse the idea of prewriting through journaling, mapping, or bubbling. Berry didn’t suffer fools or process over product gladly.

I don’t want to leave the impression that the class was a crucible or that Berry was dour, judgmental, or embittered. Just the opposite. Even at his most didactic, his comments in class were less like sermons and more like a call to arms. His intensity came from love and belief in what he was doing, rather than severity.

Plus, Berry had a great sense of humor. His blue eyes crackled with mischief when he told us a good story, which was often, and sometimes he entertained us with sample cheers from his Port Royal athletic days (“Go back, go back, go back into the woods/Your team’s all farmers and your coach is no good”).

“He’s like Jesus with a plow,” my friend Dina said one day at lunch after we had gotten another set of essays back. This time we both received D’s. “And we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”

Before midterms, most of the class dropped out until only twelve of us remained. The apostle metaphor was not lost on us.

Because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal from us—and was frustrated by our inability to think for ourselves. Every day, he told us to think, to rise above ignorance. He warned that bad writing would bring “boredom, tears, and shame” in later life. A teacher’s job, he told us, was to arm children with tools against loneliness.

He read aloud to us—Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Divine Comedy—his sonorous voice rolling through that old room like the voice of God, past the high glass windows, the banging radiator, the worn wooden floors. He disdained the idea that these great works should be studied “as literature,” which he felt caused an unnecessary and sterile disconnect between the work and its instructive value.

“At some point, each of you will have to stand in front of someone,” he told us one dark November afternoon, “and tell them that you love them.” He considered those great works as instructions on how to do just that.

Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered. We didn’t read King Lear merely to know something about King Lear. We read it because we were trying to figure out how human beings should live with one another.

At some point, I wrote a pithy little essay about body image, and Mr. Berry returned the paper with a C+ on it and a note that read: “This is just good enough that I wish it were better.” It was the kind of comment that a young writer remembers forever. He was saying, “I can see what this could be. I can see what you’re trying to do.”

At that point in the semester, I cared less about getting a good grade and more about simply being a better human being. He wasn’t really teaching us composition as much as he was teaching us how to pay attention, think independently, live honestly, and take responsibility for our words and our lives.

I don’t remember learning a specific skill from him (other than “Omit needless words!” a lesson I still haven’t mastered), but he made more of an impression on me, as a teacher and a writer, than any other teacher I’d ever had. He witnessed to us the importance of honesty and practicing one’s own sermons.

I got a B in that class and probably didn’t deserve it. I came away from it knowing that I had been in the presence of a deliberate mind at work. And I came away knowing that I would never look at writing or the teaching of writing the same way.

Another Kentucky writer, Jesse Stuart, wrote that “….a teacher lives on and on through his students. Good teaching is forever, and the teacher is immortal.”

In 30 years of teaching, I’ve never forgotten those lessons I learned in 1987 from a man who looked like a farmer and spoke with the voice of God. I didn’t understand his approach to teaching, writing, or thinking then, but I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to walk it out.

Today the world says goodbye to a great poet, a great Kentuckian, a champion of rural agriculture and community, a man of letters. Today I say goodbye to my old teacher, Wendell Berry—forever in my heart, and forever in my classroom.

Several years ago, I wrote a short story about a young woman who travels back home for a family reunion. During this reunion, the character has several revelations about who she was as a child, who she is now, and what returning home means as an adult. The character was a warm, kind, intelligent woman who was estranged from her sister after a fight about their grandmother’s wedding ring.

I thought the story was about family dysfunction and reconciliation. I thought the character was sympathetic. Then I turned it over to my inquiry group. They thought she was a total bitch.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, and they laid out their case. Evidence after evidence from the text made me see a character that was evident to all of them, but not to me. The character I had envisioned was not the one I had given to the reader; she only existed in my mind.

This year I’m working with a group of twenty Kentucky teacher-writers. Earlier this summer, we met on Tuesday nights as a community of writers to understand from the inside out what we would be asking our students to do in the fall and spring of this year. We wrote, we read each other’s works, we laughed and cried and wrote some more. They have now created “inquiry groups” of three and four to give each other feedback as they write a capstone research project.

When writers get together to discuss a piece of writing and give feedback to the author, the exercise is often called a “writing workshop,” and the activity itself is called “workshopping” a piece. This activity might also be called a “writing critique” or “critiquing.”

As I wrote in my first book, Project Based Writing, my experience of writing workshops in graduate and undergraduate classes was a lot like a back-alley shakedown. “The writer under consideration is bound and gagged, while a small gang of other writers rifles through her short story to determine if there’s anything of value there.” (110) This process has always left me cold because it excluded the person who had conceived and created the work.

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Since becoming a teacher, I have discovered that a process based on multiple levels of inquiry works best for high school writers and really any writer. Creating inquiry groups instead of critique groups seems like a hairsplitting distinction, but it’s critical to how people see the work they are doing.

Inquiry requires a different stance than critique. With inquiry, a writer asks questions of himself, of his piece, and of his writing group, and the writing group asks questions too, and the writer can answer and ask other questions if necessary.

This week I was reading a reflection of this process from a teacher-writer about her inquiry group. She wrote: “We are all too nice and not critiquing much.” The subtext of this observation might be that when they get to know each other better, they’ll be able to rip each other’s writing to shreds! But what she’s really asking from her group is just honesty. Inquiry creates the condition for that kind of curiosity and honesty to emerge.

Unfortunately, “constructive feedback” has become such an overused word in education. But is feedback only useful if you tell someone how to improve? Is the goal of feedback to identify a problem and offer a solution for how to fix it? Descriptive feedback challenges the assumption that feedback’s job is to tell someone how to improve.

Growth happens in the solving of the problem, not in passively accepting someone else’s solutions. The goal of inquiry isn’t necessarily to offer constructive feedback. It’s to ask questions of the writer and to describe the experience of reading. Feedback is useful if you say “Here’s what I experience as a reader,” but becomes prescriptive when you say “…and here’s how I think you should fix it.”

Going back to my experience with the short story, I used the information my group gave me to clarify the actions and reactions of my character. My group didn’t tell me HOW to fix this problem, or offer up solutions, alternative scenes, or alternative dialogue. Sometimes those solutions are helpful, but most of the time they are contradictory, confusing, and useless.

Ultimately, it’s up to the writer to determine whether a comment or suggestion is constructive, as in whether it helps her construct the piece she’s attempting to write. It’s up to the writer to determine if the tone, mood, and action match the vision she had for the work. That’s why the descriptive feedback process is so crucial.

From a writer’s perspective, the goal of the feedback process is to get information about the piece of writing. That information is neither good nor bad; it just is. The writer determines whether or not that data can be used to lead the piece of writing into the space she wanted it to be in the first place. Feedback doesn’t have to be judgemental; it can simply be data for the writer.

If descriptive feedback is what we want from students, we can’t simply tell them to “give each other feedback.” We have to teach them how to see, how to ask, and how to describe. That’s the work of my next Substack!

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A couple of weeks ago, a video showing a young girl dumping a bucket of baby sea turtles into the surf went viral. The original poster said she was giving the hatchlings “a head start.” Yet as numerous posters pointed out, her gesture was misguided and harmful. By “helping” the young turtles with a difficult crawl from their nest to the ocean, she was weakening their ability to survive adulthood. Without the crawl, their flippers don’t strengthen properly. Without that crawl, they wouldn’t be able to orient themselves in the world. It helps them align to the horizon, the moon, and the waves. And the most damning–that crawl stamps them with a mysterious magnetic GPS that allows them to find their way back to their home beach as adults.

This gesture looks compassionate. She seems like a good person. But she’s actually harming the turtles—not just for the 45 minutes it would have taken them to tumble down the dunes and flail into the ocean, but for the rest of their lives.

This kind of well-intentioned harm isn’t limited to sea turtles. The same thing happens in education. About fifteen years ago, I had an assistant principal who was a tough old salt. She would come into my room complaining about the do-gooder teacher down the hall who was “loving these kids stupid.”

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Her meaning was simple: kind, well-meaning teachers, in an effort to save time and struggle, often cut students out of the very kind of messy thinking that strengthens the higher-order cognition they need to be successful.

Every teacher I know has done this. I certainly have. Instead of removing barriers, we remove the struggle. I do not doubt that teachers do this out of care for the students, but in doing so, they deny students the struggle they’ll need to survive intellectually later in life.

Early in John Warner’s book Why They Can’t Write, he explains that training wheels prevent children from developing the very skill they’ll eventually need to ride a bike: balance. Warner writes: “When it comes to teaching writing, we’ve been doing something similar, giving students training wheels that actively work against their ability to learn how to write.” He cites the proliferation of the five-paragraph essay formula, which short-circuits the development of a key skill kids will need if they’re ever going to write anything: making choices for rhetorical effect.

Both my assistant principal and John Warner are pointing to the same truth: in our effort to help students, we sometimes remove the struggle that produces learning. Do I read the text out loud because kids just can’t keep up? I’m helping them along! Do I summarize all the difficult texts? I’ve got to get through this unit!

So how do we help students engage with the struggle instead of throwing them over our backs and shouldering them to the finish line? Here are some questions I’ve started to ask myself before jumping in to help a student.

Am I removing a barrier, or am I removing the struggle?

Are my scaffolds doing the students’ thinking for them?

Are my sentence stems actually helping students generate their own thoughts?

Are the questions I’m asking leading students to their own inquiry? Or better yet, why aren’t students making up their own questions?

Do my graphic organizers do the organizing for students?

Am I trying to get through the lesson, or am I making sure students are actually thinking and wrestling with the learning?

Is this support creating greater independence for them or greater dependence on me?

Confusion and struggle are often the byproducts of real learning, real wrestling with new content. In our efforts to “meet our students where they are” and “build a relationship,” we often offer them shortcuts that make their brains less likely to develop on the way to the sea. Remember the turtles: the crawl isn’t a design flaw; it’s the very reason the strong will survive.

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One of the central features of my third book, The Confidence to Write: A Guide for Overcoming Fear and Developing Identity as a Writer, is a series of MetaWrites, prompts that invite students and teachers to write about writing or about their identity as writers.

Each summer the Kentucky Writing Project hosts a week-long writing institute where teachers write and engage in teacher inquiry about their teaching practice. Before this year, we invited teachers to take the Kentucky state on-demand writing assessment for Grade 11 students. This was always a nerve-wracking, yet eye-opening experiment.

However, as our state writing assessment has been nixed in favor of more authentic writing assessments, we have changed this activity and invited this year’s participants to select a writing task they assign to their students and write it themselves.

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The activity asks teachers not only to compose a piece of writing for this assignment, but to keep a running record of their thoughts and feelings while they write–hence, a meta-write. What does the inner dialogue of experienced teachers sound like when they become novice writers again? A lot like their students.

We take one afternoon to do this activity. Before they start writing, I ask them to record how they feel and what they are thinking in anticipation of the writing. Then I stop them 15 minutes into writing and then again 45 minutes into writing, and then when they are finished writing, I ask them to reflect again on how they are feeling and what they are thinking. When they are finished, I collect the reflections and compile them (without names) in a handout we analyze the following day. Here are the trends:

Before

• anxious

• nervous

• excited

Pit Stop #1

• Where am I going?

• I need a structure.

• Am I doing this right?

Pit Stop #2

• My hand hurts.

• I have too much.

• This question isn’t working.

After

• exhausted.

• unsatisfied.

• ready to revise

There was one teacher whose reflections I thought were particularly revelatory. She asks her students to write a literary analysis that argues for which character in the novel they read changes the most over the course of the novel.

I am feeling a little overwhelmed and slightly regretting my choice of assignments. But I also know I can complete it. If I feel like this, how do my students feel when they have to complete the same task?

I wrote a FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY. I also kept trying to remember details and used some that were not important to the essay. My hand hurts.

OMG, I used too much info not relevant. Questioning my question. DID he change? Should I change this requirement? I wrote too fast and now I feel ridiculous.. My hand still hurts.

Awful. How can I change this to be more beneficial? Should it be a paper? Should it be a test? I want to let my hand sleep.

In the classroom, teachers often see writing as evaluators, but not as writers. This activity asks them to take that on. What surprised me wasn’t that teachers found the assignments difficult. What surprised me was how quickly their questions shifted from “Will I be able to do this?” to “How can I help my students do this?”

Before school starts back in August, choose one writing task you ask your students to do and sit down and write a model essay yourself. Give yourself the same parameters you offer your students and keep a running record of your thinking and feeling through the composition.

You will know when a prompt asks too much because you will be wrestling with it in real time. When you see the fatigue, the false starts, the overthinking, the impulse to quit in your students, you will remember those from your own experience.

This revelation is exactly the purpose of the activity. Not to make you doubt your choices, but so you can coach your students toward the writing from a position of experience, not authority. Completing our own assignments doesn’t make us better writers; it makes us better teachers.

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This week I’m working with a group of writing teachers in a writing institute. It’s only been one day, and we’ve already had great conversations about the joys and struggles of teaching writing and being writers ourselves. Throughout the week, I will be sharing some strategies I use in my own classroom to help students generate writing.

One strategy I frequently use with students is creating a timeline to generate writing ideas. For example, the Universal Timeline is a strategy featured in my second book, Story Matters, that helps students use narrative to support an argumentative or informational piece of writing.

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Today I shared an activity I often use to help students hone in on the deeper level of their narratives.

I’ve noticed some students have plenty of stories from their lives, but they think their stories aren’t weighty enough to write about. They struggle to discover what the events of their lives really mean—or even to pause long enough to interpret and analyze those experiences in search of meaning.

We know narrative writing is not simply remembering events; it’s also discovering significance and making meaning of those events. Two people can sit at a bus stop on the same afternoon, yet Person A writes an unforgettable vignette of a half dozen human dramas happening all around her, and Person B writes about the arrival and departure times of the buses. The difference isn’t what happened. It’s what Person A understood about what was happening.

Students often have a hard time gaining the kind of psychic distance from their own life stories to render their significance. Parsing out the meaning often takes a lifetime, but helping them winnow down a single event to the feelings and thoughts they have about that event is a start.

The activity is simple. You ask them to turn their writing notebook landscape orientation and draw a line across the center. Below the line, starting with the year they were born, they write the years they have lived in five- or ten-year increments below the line. Then they write down at least 12-15 events from their life on their timelines. They don’t have to be huge events, just events.

Then they select one event and draw another timeline. For example, a student might have written “My parents got divorced” on her first timeline. On this second timeline, they trace the moments within this event, including before the event began, the beginning of the event, the middle, the end, and what happened after the event.

Returning to our example, there isn’t really a moment when a divorce happens; there are thousands of small moments. The student might write about the night her parents told her they were going to get a divorce. This timeline then becomes the hour they are sitting at that dinner table. Already the narrative is better, clearer, more distinct.

Then they draw a third timeline. This third timeline asks them to break down one moment through the lens of thought and emotion. I invite them to select the moment that has the most energy. Most of the time it’s the climax of whatever event they’ve chosen to write about. I ask them to write what they were thinking and feeling before, during, immediately after, and now when they think back on this moment. Often the significance of the event emerges as they write this timeline.

Each timeline zooms in another level. Students move from years, to events, to moments, to meaning. They begin by organizing memory, but they end by discovering significance.

Other Timelines To Generate Writing

The Regressive Timeline: Ask students where they were one day ago, then one week ago, then one year ago, then five years ago, then ten years ago.

The Identity Timeline: Ask students to track the development of their identity as a runner, flutist, rodeo clown, etc.

The Literacy Timeline: Ask students to trace their writing or reading or thinking or literacy identity from birth to the present. This shows they have had a lot of literacy experiences, enough to call themselves a “writer.” or “reader” or “thinker.”

The best timelines don’t just help students organize time; they help them remember and notice details. They slow students down long enough to unearth the meaning inside the memory.

As always, if you adapt this strategy in your own classroom, I'd love to hear how it evolves. I'm always interested in the different ways teachers adapt these ideas to fit their own students.

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One piece of advice I often give my writing students is this: The car that you drive to the party isn’t necessarily the party. I don’t know where I came up with this. I probably heard something similar in a workshop at some point and honed it into this pithy adage. But I’ve been using it for years to explain to students the difference between the inspiration that sparks the work and the work itself.

For example, you might be in a Social Studies class, and the teacher gives you a prompt that she hopes leads you to write an argument of policy. The prompt might be something like “Should voting be easier or more secure?” and you start by answering the question to determine whether voting ease or voting security should receive greater priority. However, along the way, you get off on a tangent about how balance is no longer valued in American politics. And that tangent gains speed, and you notice you keep circling a different idea, which is: why does every issue in American politics become an all-or-nothing argument? And what happened to compromise, and why do Americans have zero chill or nuance anymore? And you end up writing, not an argument for policy, but an essay about a civic phenomenon you’ve noticed, still technically an argument, but not the one your teacher wanted you to write. However, the essay is one that you are more passionately interested in. Ergo, the teacher’s prompt was the car to the party; your think piece is the party.

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Or you might be, like the twenty teachers who are in an online summer writing class I’m currently teaching, assigned both a topic and a genre in which to write. This week their assignment was to write their own Teacher-Leader Manifesto. After reading through all of their pieces, I uncovered a fascinating pattern. The class really produced three different genres: about a third wrote a manifesto (”Here is what I believe and why.”); another third wrote an informational essay (”Here is what teacher leadership is.”), and another third wrote a leadership plan or a checklist (”Here are the things I can or will do to become a leader.”)

Only the first is actually the genre I assigned, but all of them showcased solid writing and real thinking. The assignment supplied the topic (teacher leadership) and gave a genre (manifesto), but the writers discovered their ideas and the containers they wanted those ideas to occupy. My assignment was the car; their finished pieces were the party. As a writing teacher, I would ALWAYS rather read The Party, not be stuck in the stuffy old car of a prompt, or an assignment.

So, what happens in our classrooms to resolve this tension between the authority of the assignment and the agency of the student? Who gets to decide what the piece becomes - the teacher or the student writer? And ultimately, what do we really value when we assign writing? Compliance or thinking?

Our assignments almost always indicate a destination students should arrive at, but writers rarely travel there in a straight line. They notice something out the window. They make an unexpected turn. They discover a better question than the one they started with.

And that’s the kind of writing I want to read.

Sometimes the best writing in our classrooms is beyond the rubric designed to “grade” it. The irony is that we’re often so busy grading the car that we never notice the party our students have created. And how do we create a community in our classroom that supports that kind of choice?

That’s a Substack for another time.

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Today is the first day of school in the district where I live. I’m sitting on the patio of our local Starbucks writing, and in the last twenty minutes, about 15 girls have pulled up all wearing some iteration of a white eyelet blouse and vintage wash jeans. They are now posing for pictures with their Venti Iced Lattes, and yelling, “Seniors 2026!” They are adorable. Their smiles could generate electricity for a small village.

Then a young teacher pulls up. I know she’s a teacher because she was in a professional learning session earlier this month that I led. She already looks tired in her orthotic sandals, pointe knit pants, and wrinkle-resistant blouse. I want to hug her and buy her a triple shot of something more substantial than espresso.

Back to school is equal parts frenzied excitement (a new year!) and heartbreaking sadness (summer is over *weeping*) for both teachers and students. It takes a few days to get back into the routine of getting up with the sun and doing the work of school.

I’ve been thinking about what made those transitions easier for me each year, and I owe a lot to cultivating rituals. I wish someone had told me the value of ritual when I was a new teacher. It would have saved me a lot of manic hustling. (Maybe someone did, and I didn’t listen. Yes, probably that.)

The magic of rituals is that they shrink the mental load. And teachers - who make a conservative 513 micro-decisions every day – need anything that shrinks this heavy lifting. The big plans matter—your curriculum map, your opening unit, your parent contact list—but in the swirl of a new school year, it’s the small, repeatable rituals that can steady you and give your life balance. Balance, in teaching and life, is the goal. Think of these rituals as anchor weights in the whirlwind of a new year and for the rest of the year. Here are five that helped me the most.

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Get to School Early

I would arrive at my school one hour early, before the first sleepy-eyed child showed up. The benefits are myriad: better parking places, no line at the copier, and the halls aren’t jammed with sweaty bodies. Without the noise and bustle of students or last-minute demands, it’s easier to set up activities, review lesson plans, and troubleshoot technology before it shuts down a great day. That early start can also allow for connections with other adults in the building—checking in with colleagues, touching base with administrators, or simply sipping coffee in the lounge with team members—that help young teachers especially feel connected to the larger work of the school system.

Take Five Minutes for Yourself

Getting to school early also allows you some time for yourself. Grab a cup of tea and sit in silence before you turn on your computer. Meditate. Manifest. Muse. Grab your journal and jot down an intention for the day. If you are inclined, pray over your classroom or for students. Whatever you need to do. These centering, settling moments are short and immeasurably valuable. These moments can reduce stress, improve focus, and give you a sense of grounding that will last at least until lunch, when you can give yourself another opportunity to breathe, close your eyes, and feel the chair support you.

Organize Your Room for Efficiency

I am guilty of spending more time outfitting my classroom with matching bins, elaborate bulletin boards, and twinkle lights strung across the heavens than thinking about efficiency. But in the first chaotic weeks, you’ll thank yourself far more for knowing exactly where your attendance rosters are than whether your curtains match your chair cushion. Arrange your classroom so you and your students can find what you need without thinking—clear labels, logical flow, supplies within easy reach. A beautiful room can be a peaceful respite, but a functional one keeps the day running smoothly.

Consider Your Future Self

Before the first bell ever rings, take time to set up systems that will save you from scrambling later. Make extra copies of forms you know you’ll need—hall passes, parent contact logs, late work slips. Create a binder with emergency lesson plans, rosters, and a list of trusted students and teacher neighbors who can serve as guides in case you wake up sick. Stock a small stash of snacks for the days you miss lunch. The more you can automate now, the more brain space you’ll have for actual teaching once school is in full swing.

Leave School Within An Hour of the Last Bell

I’m aware that this ritual might conflict with considering your future self. Shouldn’t I stay at school for the next three hours, getting things ready for the rest of the week instead of leaving things undone (horrors!) on my desk? Well, yes and no. Leaving school within an hour of the last bell helps you protect that sacred boundary between your professional and personal life. This is a crucial balance that’s essential for long-term sustainability. You will die without it.

Here’s a secret: teaching is a job that will consume your life if you let it. It’s one of those professions that will expand endlessly and gobble up everything in its path. You will never be entirely caught up, you will never be completely prepared. Make peace with this early in your career. Setting a firm departure time encourages efficiency during the day and prioritization of tasks. Your relationships, your family, your friends, hobbies, and passions are the real joys of living. Your job is just one small part of that. Going home to cook a delicious and leisurely meal with your partner is not a luxury but a necessity. By stepping away promptly, you can return the next morning refreshed and renewed and with greater commitment to your students.

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I spent last week with thirteen teachers in a freezing cold room inside the KEDC building in Lexington, Kentucky. The teachers came from all over the Commonwealth, from Letcher County, in the far eastern part of our state, to Paducah, in the far western corner. A teacher with 27+ years under his belt and a teacher who had never taught a day in his life sat next to each other. They called themselves The Rookie and The Vet. A teacher who was getting married in 9 days. A teacher who had had a cancer diagnosis in May. A teacher who was moving with her military husband to Hawaii. A teacher who had moved to Kentucky from Chicago. A teacher who had just lost her mother.

And we discovered all of this without the use of icebreakers, because we were writing, sharing, reading, and talking to each other.

A lot.

One teacher told me, “I normally just fly under the radar during professional development, but apparently, the Kentucky Writing Project doesn’t let anyone fly under the radar.”

The best feedback of the week.

The deepening of relationships occurred over the five long days. Days that started at 9:00 a.m. and ended at 3:30 p.m. Days that were full of writing, writing, writing. The director of the project and I modeled a strategy every morning and another one after lunch. We wrote into the day, around the day, and through the day. Two 90-minute teaching demonstrations were presented by writing project teacher consultants, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Participants also read a professional book, two chapters a night, and participated in Harkness Circles in the afternoon, which were related to their book.

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By Wednesday, one teacher had been furrowing her brow all morning. My spidey sense told me I should sidle up to her and say, “How’s it going?” but for some reason, I was preoccupied with lunch being late, the copier not working, or some insignificant thing that I had decided was more pressing than a real human interaction.

Finally, during an activity where I asked them to identify craft moves—the writing choices that an author makes in the course of building a piece of writing—she finally gave expression to what she was feeling. Everything she thought about writing was being challenged. Everything was too abstract. She was a black-and-white thinker, and this was too loosey-goosey and opaque. How do you teach standards when you allow students total choice? How do you meet the learning targets if students are finding their own path? How do you not offer the 3.5 paragraph formula to students who have no idea how to organize their thoughts? And what the flip is a craft move anyway?

All of these are excellent questions.

All of these questions could have been anticipated if I had been attuned to my audience. All of these questions could have been addressed early in the week if I had conducted a pre-assessment, as I do in my classroom every year, for every single unit.

Classic teacher fail.

However, I spoke with her later about the “yes-and” principle. Students need both standards and choice. They need to know grammar rules and the freedom to break them. They need space to discover their ideas, but they also need to understand how to craft sentences. We had a great discussion, and she returned the next day, invested, engaged, maybe still a bit wary, but with less anxiety about what we seemed to be selling.

We finished the week with a Writing Walkabout, a staple of many National Writing Project summer institutes, modeled after the Writing Marathons created by Richard Louth of the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project. We started at the Lexington Writer’s Room with a reading from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Then we filtered out onto the steaming hot streets of downtown Lexington, moving toward murals, memorials, libraries, alleys, coffee shops, and green spaces. We wrote about monkeys and horses and bourbon and loss.

When we returned from the walkabout, each participant sent me a small chunk of writing that they had written during the day. As I received it, I dropped it into a poem. All the groovy muse lords of the universe were working overtime that day because the poem birthed itself, spitting out a beautiful ruminant piece about the journey of life and growing up.

I was so exhausted from the week, I didn’t move from the couch for most of Saturday. But it was a good kind of tired. The kind that comes from working at something of significance and lasting value —an investment in the lives of teachers, and subsequently in the lives of students, and ultimately in the world.

One afternoon after a discussion circle, The Vet and I commiserated about education. We had, in our 30 + years in education, seen trends come and go. Every ten years or so, it seems, the pendulum swung from declaring that rigor and The Basics, with their black and white rules, linear standards, and legalism, would save us all, back the other way, to the idea that creativity, choice, non-linear paths, reflection, and introspection would actually save us.

And maybe that’s the real lesson—that there is no final swing of the pendulum. There’s only the rhythm of the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between structure and freedom, rigor and grace. What matters most, I think, is not where we land, but how we meet each other in the in-between spaces.

Because last week, in that freezing cold room in Lexington, thirteen teachers didn’t just learn new strategies or read a book or log PD hours. They built a community. They wrote themselves and told their stories. And in doing so, they reminded me that this work, while hard and messy and full of unanswered questions, is deeply human and worth every ounce of effort.

We don’t need to be saved by systems. We need to be seen by each other. And that starts with writing, talking, listening—and not letting anyone fly under the radar.

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As I mentioned in my last missive, I visited with teachers completing their MAT program through the Ohio Writing Project a couple of weeks ago. As our time together on Zoom was winding down, one of the participants asked me a question I had never considered.

How has writing informed your teaching, and how has teaching informed your writing?

I have often been asked: are you a teacher who writes or a writer who teaches? I consider myself the latter. Teaching was a late-stage scramble to get adequate health insurance, but it has provided me with a remarkable career and a suitable schedule for writing three books about teaching writing.

However, I had never considered how the two pursuits supported one another, other than the most obvious connection that I write about what I teach, and I teach students how to write. I didn’t provide a very coherent answer to the question on Zoom, so I thought I would give it a deeper analysis here.

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Clarity is king.

In both writing and teaching, clarity is the essential ingredient: clarity of vision, clarity in transmission, clarity in organization. And in both, clarity requires effort. As the saying goes, easy reading is damn hard writing. And easy learning for the student can be damn hard teaching for the teacher.

Every time I sit down to write, I realize what is clear in my head rarely comes out clear on the page. Words stumble. Sentences meander. Meaning hides behind vague phrasing. And it takes intentional drilling down, coupled with ceaseless and ruthless tending.

Teacher clarity is just as important and arguably much harder to achieve. What are students expected to learn, how they will learn it, and how will you know they’ve learned it? When you look at a master teacher, this quality looks effortless because the work is below the surface. All an observer sees is the smooth operation of someone who has done the intentional work of craft, the intentional practice of instruction, and an endless reflection on how students learn. It’s harder to achieve because you aren’t just practicing in the privacy of a Word document at your desk by yourself; you are practicing with real humans, in real time, in the very public venue of a classroom.

Tone matters.

Much of the fiddling I do with my writing in the revision cycle is with tone - pulling words out and putting them in. Is “delirious” a better word here than “madness”? Should I bury the main idea in a sentence for a subtle effect or position it in a way that smacks the reader in the face? It’s all fiddling, tweaking, and massaging the diction and syntax to bring about the desired effect on my audience. Getting the tone right is hit or miss, but practice makes the results less ruinous.

I’ve found tone in teaching to be just as nuanced, just as hard to grasp, but just as important as it is in writing. When I address my students, what energy am I bringing? What words am I using? What impact do those words have on my audience? My feedback can feel like a cheering squad or a firing squad. A harsh critique can shut them down, but thoughtful, timely feedback—especially the kind that asks questions rather than handing down verdicts—makes my students better.

Tone is essential in writing responses to their work, a nice dovetail of both pursuits. Instead of slapping the red ink down on every awk or frag, I try to respond the way I hope an editor would respond to me: with curiosity and a little grace.

Patience is essential.

Writing has taught me patience. Nothing happens in an instant. Some drafts need to sit. Some ideas aren’t ready. Students are like that, too. Some learn fast. Others need more time. Sometimes a student will struggle for weeks with a concept, and then something clicks and they get it. Similarly, I’ll reread a paragraph over and over for weeks, trying to figure out why it doesn’t work, until one day I wake up and realize what I’m trying to say. You can’t rush the writing process; you can’t rush students, although we would desperately like to.

Writing forces me to slow down. Teaching demands the same.

This means I’ve had to learn to trust the process. As a writer, I know I can’t always force a breakthrough. I’ve learned to give myself room to revise. As a teacher, I’ve stopped expecting every student to master everything at once. I plant seeds. I wait. I revise my approach. I trust the long game.

Vulnerability is requisite.

Sometimes I’m just a teacher standing in front of her classroom, asking them to love her. Sometimes I’m just a writer standing in front of her novel, asking it to love me.

This raw, quaky quality of excitement and fear you get when creating art AND teaching teenagers is one of the most heady, thrilling pursuits in the human experience.

Every time I hit “publish,” I feel a flicker of fear: Will anyone care? Will anyone get it? I imagine that’s not too different from how new teachers think when they stand in front of their first class. Or their 736th class, if they are good teachers.

Writing reminds me what courage looks like. It’s not just about finding the right words—it’s about being willing to share them. I strive to create a classroom where that kind of courage is not only encouraged but also modeled. I tell students when I’m struggling. I share my own drafts, my own writing failures, even my rejection letters. They don’t need a perfect expert; they need a real human who’s still figuring things out.

And maybe that’s the biggest gift writing has given me: empathy. Writing makes me more curious about the lives of others, more attuned to when someone might be having a hard day. My students are all stories in progress.

In both writing and teaching, there’s no final product. Only drafts, revisions, small victories, and the hope that what we say or do might matter to someone. In the end, as John Berryman famously told W.S. Merwin, you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good. And similarly, if any lesson you taught made a difference.

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A couple of weeks ago, I visited with teachers attending a Summer Writing Institute sponsored by the Ohio Writing Project (OWP). OWP is a local site of the National Writing Project at Miami University, a network of K-12 teachers, university faculty, researchers, and writers working to advance writing and the teaching of writing.

Beth Rimer, the executive director of OWP, asked me to Zoom with teachers who had conducted a year-long teacher action research project and were graduating with their Master of Arts in Teaching. These teachers would be leaving the OWP program, but Beth didn’t want the program to leave them. Beth wrote to me in an email: “I want them to think about continuing to write as a teacher and making their practice public.”

What a great conversation to have.

What does it mean to write and to teach at the same time, and to also share your writing and teaching practice with the world?

We met via Zoom and discussed ways full-time teachers can honor the writer within, who sometimes is relegated to the back burner when school resumes and life gets hectic. One of the most essential gifts a writing teacher can give herself is time to write. But with our 36-hour obligations, how do we find it? Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way suggests writing three pages every morning as soon as you get out of bed. But if you have children to wrangle and buses to catch, this is impossible. I’ve always wanted to be one of those writers who could rise at 4 am and write for two hours before going to work. I did this for one semester, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I’m just not built for that schedule.

Here are some ways that have worked for me:

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Schedule a writing date with yourself.

Maya Angelou famously reserved a hotel room for her writing dates. Still, for you it might be one Saturday each month where you clear your calendar, let the kids be managed by someone else, and you go somewhere - a park, a library, a cabin in the woods - for some sustained writing time. Write about whatever you want - poetry, your pedagogy, a memoir that’s been dying inside of you to be written- and call it self-care and professional development.

Write in the edges of the day.

Before she obtained commercial success, Toni Morrison was raising children plus working long hours as a fiction editor for Random House. She famously said she wrote at “the edges of the day” (Greenfield-Sanders, 2019). Teachers can do what most writers whose day jobs consume their time have done throughout history: write in the edges, the cracks and crannies of their day. Twenty minutes before the students enter your room and twenty minutes at the end of the day will sustain you. The kind of writing I’m suggesting here may not be significant, publishable, outside writing; it’s most likely inside writing, personal and messy. However, this inside practice makes it possible to take one’s ideas and teaching practice outside. This kind of writing generates ideas and snippets, which can be developed into finished, publishable pieces if desired.

Make yourself accountable to someone close to you.

Starting in March, I have gotten out of bed at 6:30 am and hopped on a Zoom call from 7-8 am with a writing friend of mine (also a teacher) who lives in Oklahoma. We greet each other briefly, pledge allegiance to the muse, mute our audio, and start writing. There was something so profoundly grounding and so orderly about my days when I kept this commitment. Miraculously, we have managed to keep this meeting going for months. Knowing she would be waiting for me to write made it easier for me to commit to my work. This commitment is no different from finding an accountability buddy for the gym, meditation, or any other self-improvement practice you want to develop.

Make yourself accountable to someone you’ve never met.

Send out that query letter. Apply to present at conferences. Finish that book proposal, make twelve copies, and send it out to twelve publishing houses you feel might get what you’re selling. Contact an editor directly and send them your manuscript. Reach out to an agent if you’re writing fiction. See what putting yourself out there to someone you’ve never met does for your ability to put your nose to the grindstone.

Focus on the process, rather than the product.

I’m very much a product-oriented Enneagram 3 person. I like deadlines and finishing things, but this practice of writing while I’m simultaneously teaching full-time has helped me make peace with and enjoy the process. The constant tension of writing and teaching can feel exhausting. You’re never fully caught up in either. But that’s the point. Both practices resist perfection. Both require patience. And both invite you to be a person in process, rather than a finished product.

Writing while teaching has taught me to be less precious with my ideas and more circumspect with my time. It’s taught me to be okay with publishing Substacks that aren’t polished, because the conversation matters more than the performance.

And in the end, whether we’re sharing a lesson, an essay, or a quiet realization, we’re offering something of value to the world: an honest look at the reality of a classroom, the intersection of living and learning. The world needs the voice of teachers living at that intersection.

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One of the considerations your NaNo writers will need to weigh when launching their WriMo experience is the time it will take to tell the story they want to tell. I’m not talking about how long it will take them to write the story, but how long –in fictional days, years, eons–it will take for the story they want to tell to unspool on the page. 

Will the story unfold over a fictional summer? An academic year? The decade between the main character’s 20s and 30s? Or will it take place, like James Joyce’s 783-page Ulysses, during a single day? Or is it like Kate Chopin’s brief, but intense short story, “The Story of an Hour,” detailing how one’s fortune can change, then change again, then change again in just one hour? 

In Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction, she addresses how time not only frames a story but also dictates its meaning.  

Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible - the “complete quiet” (another translation of Kierkegaard calls this the “necessary resting place”) that allows for understanding, the angle of retrospect, which is the storyteller’s premise. A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means. 

By determining where the story begins and ends, an author’s choice of time creates meaning. A writer decides to drop a set of parentheses around a few events in the characters’ lives and not another set in the same time continuum that is the character’s fictional life story. There is life on either side of the parentheses that impacts what happens inside the parentheses. But it’s the choice of dropping the “Once upon a time…” and “The End” at those specific moments that constructs the meaning of the story we are reading. Silber writes, “All the dilemmas in organizing time are grounded in this first decision about how long it takes.”

A Few Categories of Time in Fiction

1. In classic time, the plot moves linearly across a natural span of time, such as a month, a season, or a year. Writers using classic time rely heavily on concrete scenes, economical and deft summaries, and dialogue that moves the plot, heightens the stakes, and flavors the characters. These three elements are patterned throughout the plot leading to a satisfactory ending. 

2. In long time, a writer is encompassing decades, centuries, lifetimes, sometimes in a very short package. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, for example,  traces the history of Ghana over three centuries, and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land plays with time-intertwining characters in stories that span centuries. By moving over vast periods, writers rely on narrating a lot of time punctuated with sharply drawn scenes and details that speak to the passing of time so that years must go by in one scene or one sentence. Summary that unfolds like scenes are best used to move the reader through years without the pacing either dragging or speeding away. 

3. In switchback time, the plot moves back and forth among points in the past of characters’ histories that seem to fuel the character’s present-time hopes, fears, and decisions. Silber suggests that a switchback story design “uses the shifts in an order that doesn’t give dominance to a particular time. Then and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome. Their separate roles are essential to the point the story is making; one isn’t a footnote to the other.” The key to using this frame is to always supply “markers” to the reader, so we know where we are. My suggestion to my students who are traveling along the track of two different plot lines:  Take the reader with you. 

Instructions

Invite student writers to ask the below series of questions about the framing of time in their novels and write the answers in their writing notebook. Share and discuss.

1. Where in time does the novel start? Why have you decided to start the novel at this place in the fictional life story of your main character or the world of your story?

2. When in time does the novel end? Why have you decided to end the novel at this place in the fictional life story of your main character or the world of your story?

3. What happens before the beginning of the story you are telling in your novel? 

4. What happens immediately after the ending of the story you are telling in your novel? 

5. What happens in the far distance after the ending of the story you are telling in your novel? 

6. What is the frame - classic, long, or switchback time- you are using in your novel?  Why have you chosen this frame?

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“Once upon a time…” is not only the most familiar opening line of hundreds of classic fairy tales but the oldest.  Since at least 1380, the phrase has been used in English storytelling and its oral history likely predates that. Often followed by an introduction to an equally unnamed place and some characters, the line is so efficient that the reader is immediately ready for the story to unfold.

However inviting and lean-into-able “once upon a time” is as an opener, it doesn’t tell the reader one thing: the actual time of the story. Instead, as Maria Konnikova writes, it creates distance and vagueness to drop us into fantasy: 

The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality.

While “once upon a time” is often the tag for fantasy, it can also be used as a broad introduction that sets the reader up for a much different kind of novel, such as Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups, which begins “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” 

Whether you use “once upon a time…” or not, opening a novel with time is a well-established element of fiction. Some of the greatest first lines of literature begin with time unfurling the plot from that specific moment. 

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell, 1984

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.

David Lodge Changing Places

In the following lesson, students can find ways in which writers establish time in novels and apply that craft to their work:

INSTRUCTIONS: 

1. Introduce the below text set. You can do this using a cooperative learning strategy, such as jigsaw reading where you create groups of three and assign one article to each student or you can give every student all three articles to read, annotate, and discuss. Invite students to discuss an essential question: What are the attractions and distractions of starting a story with the classic “once upon a time”? 

Why So Many Stories Begin With ‘Once Upon a Time’ by Lorna Wallace |

The Power of Once Upon a Time : A Story to Tame The Wild Things by Maria Konnikova

Once Upon a Time” and Other Formulaic Folktale Flourishes by Anthony Madrid 

2. While students are discussing the above articles, pull 30-40 books from your classroom library and lay them face up on a table like a novel buffet. 

3. After they discuss the articles, invite groups or individuals to select 2-3 novels from the novel buffet. Open each novel and read the first page or two. Using a triple-entry journal format, ask students to list the title and author and answer the following question: 

   When does the author situate the reader in time? How soon does an actual time - year, day, season, epoch, hour – appear in the novel? 

Example A:

John Green, Looking for Alaska: The author situated the reader immediately. A subtitle before the first line reads: “one hundred thirty-six days before.” The first line reads: “The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party. 

Example B:

The timestamp in the first paragraph of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You is an arresting and efficient situating of the plot in the reader’s mind. Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. 

4. Have students return to their NaNoWriMo project and look at how they have established time in their novel either at the beginning or in a particular chapter. Ask them to choose one of the ways they discovered from the novel buffet that they can use in one of their chapters to establish time. 

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My dear friend, poet, and writer Melanie Plesh taught near the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in 2005. The last poem she and her students studied as Hurricane Katarina barrelled toward her city was “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid” by William Stafford. After the storm was over and the waters receded, someone snapped a picture of her school, which was destroyed. Behind several workers who were clearing debris was a wall that had collapsed, and behind that was her chalkboard still standing on which she had written this poem.

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will

find in the corner of your eye, in

the quick slip of your foot—air far

down, a snap that might have caught.

And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing

voice that finds its way by being

afraid. That country is there, for us,

carried as it is crossed. What you fear

will not go away: it will take you into

yourself and bless you and keep you.

That's the world, and we all live there.

Today many people are feeling fear. This election cycle has been long, divisive, and exhausting. Never in my lifetime do I remember businesses boarding up their storefronts and governors having the National Guard at the ready in case of election violence.

Here are some suggested Discussion Questions for Stafford’s poem:

• How does the poem characterize fear?

• How does fear lead to self-discovery?

• What does the imagery “a country to cross,” a “quick slip of your foot” and “air far down” symbolize to you?

• What does the “high, passing voice” represent as a kind of encouragement in the face of fear?

• How can embracing and acknowledging our fears lead us to become more resilient and empowered?

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Every year several of my students take the Young Writers National Novel Writing Month challenge, a youth edition of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. NaNoWriMo is an annual event that takes place each November, and the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel.

If you're under 18, you can sign up for the Young Writers Program at ywp.nanowrimo.org. If you're a teacher, you can create an online classroom for student participants, and YWP will provide you with a code, so your students can enter your classroom.

If you are just now hearing about this, you can still sign up even though it’s November 3. It’s not that kind of competition, as you are competing only with yourself. Therefore, you can start late for whatever reason.

In 2022, I did a series of posts related to pre-writing lessons my students were completing as prep for their participation in the challenge. I’ll link them here:

• Worldbuilding

• Character Development

• Naming Characters

• Writing the Final Scene

This year, I plan to write a series of craft lessons during November that may help students looking for fictional moves that will open up new avenues of their plot.

Starting this week, I’ll post a couple of craft lessons dealing with fictional Time.

Let’s go, NaNoWriMo!

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The central explorations in every writing class I lead are the questions: “Who am I?” followed by “Who did I used to be?” followed by “And why and how did I change?”  

I am fascinated by the fluxing identities of my high school students whose personalities wax and wane with the lunar phases. I have a front row seat as they enter wide-eyed and terrified into our giant school as tiny kidlets, then within months, are transformed into something entirely different- jaded, disaffected, desperate to be cool. Their second year, their third year, their senior year, they move through multiple stages of who-ness, trying on and casting off characteristics like outfits for every day of the year. 

Who they become is a shifting dune of biology and psychology. They discover life triggers development right into graduation and adult life. This instability unnerves most of us. We don’t like uncertainty; it’s a threat to the identity we think we’ve finally figured out.

Today I was listening to Dr. Maya Shankar’s podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which is built around the science of human behavior that helps us understand how our identities shift when we face big changes. She mentioned the concept of “identity foreclosure,” when someone settles on an identity prematurely without exploring any other possible identities.  I’ve met many students (and adults) who haven't engaged in any identity experimentation and adopt an identity based typically in their parents values and ambitions.

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Research suggests that instead of foreclosing on one identity, we're better off trying on a range of possible selves. My granddaughter Harper gamely has tried track & field, swimming, volleyball, and field hockey, and last weekend, she told me she was ice skating for the first time. While changing sports isn’t the same as changing identities, what we do often figures into who we are and how we see ourselves. In that respect, she has figured out how to avoid the rigidity we often cling to to counteract the fear of change: accept the inevitable identity shift and ride the dune. Try new things. Get curious about what life has presented to you. Remain unstuck and fluid. Practice joy. Ask lots of questions about the world and your place in it.

So how do we go about creating a more malleable sense of self? Shankar advises that instead of attaching ourselves to a static identity (I’m a good student, I’m a star athlete, I’m a piccolo player), students should consider and ascribe to an identity that actually represents the behaviors they want to cultivate. By embracing an identity that says I go with the flow, I look forward to change, I am curious about what’s to come, we position or prime ourselves to remain unstuck and avoid identity foreclosure.

One way I encourage students to remain fluid and accept changes as a blessing instead of a curse is to chart this path from “who was I?” to “who am I now?” by using a simple writing activity that invites them to mine their past for artifacts or talismans of their identity during a specific place and time. Asking students to concretely and specifically describe an item in their past leads them to remember who they were during that time in their lives. Asking them to look at these artifacts as identity indicators from a third person’s perspective allows them to analyze their identity from the vantage point of self-distance which gives them a greater degree of objectivity about who they were and who they are now.

What was your favorite food? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• What is your favorite food now in high school? ___________________________

• If someone only looked at your favorite foods over your life, how do you think they would describe the evolution of your identity?

What were your favorite shoes? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• What are your favorite shoes now in high school? ___________________________

• If someone only looked at your favorite shoes over your life, how do you think they would describe the evolution of your identity?

What was your favorite toy? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• What is your favorite “toy” now in high school? ___________________________

• If someone only looked at your favorite toy over your life, how do you think they would describe the evolution of your identity?

Who was your friend group? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• Who is your friend group now in high school? ___________________________

• If someone only looked at your friend group over your life, how do you think they would describe the evolution of your identity?

Where was your favorite place? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• What is your favorite place now in high school? ___________________________

• If someone only looked at your favorite places over your life, how do you think they would describe the evolution of your identity?

How would you describe your identity? 

• In preschool ________________________________

• In elementary school _________________________

• In middle school _____________________________

• In high school _______________________________

• How would you describe the change of your identity over your life time? _______

By ending on an open-ended identity question, this activity allows students to build up to the self-analysis necessary to assess who they are and how they’ve changed over time using artifacts from their life.

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One of the suggestions often given to young teachers is not to smile until Fall Break. Or Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or ever. 

Which is horrible advice. 

It was the advice I was given as a first year teacher. I ignored it because not smiling isn’t in my personality.  I was a quaky, shaky 23-year-old neophyte with lots to learn, yet ultimately optimistic. I thought I would just show up with my naturally ebullient self and convince students to join my circus. After all, I loved school. Wasn’t everyone just like me?

I managed to shuffle through that first year hell with body and soul barely intact. But I got wise, took the aforementioned advice, and started the year as a complete bitch. I brooked no dissent; I suffered no fools. Wonder of wonders, no one challenged my authority, but I also low key hated myself and my job. I hated frowning all day, for one thing. Eventually one of the counselors came to me and said several of my students were in her office in tears because they were so intimidated by me.

This was not a victory. It hurt my heart. 

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By the time I hit my third year, I figured out the middle path - neither loosey-goosey nor evil crone. There was another way!

And lo and behold, it was as old as time: treat your students as you would like to be treated. With respect. With clear expectations. With a smile. With honor for who they are and where they’ve come from. If I wanted to cultivate a culture of civility in my classroom, it started with me modeling the kind of civility I wanted to see in them: engaged, curious, thoughtful, empathetic, kind.

Here are some ways to do that: 

1. Build Positive Relationships

When I’m approachable and caring, students are more likely to feel comfortable participating and engaging in class activities, specifically those activities, like writing, which require great risk. This sense of trust and connection can significantly impact their motivation and willingness to learn. The first few months of school are crucial for this. Learn how to pronounce their names. Reach out to their parents. Learn about their passions and pet projects. Showing genuine interest in the humans in the room establishes a positive rapport, which is essential for creating a supportive classroom atmosphere. 

2. Foster a Safe and Inclusive Environment

Harry Wong seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years (Wear a suit! Greet every child by name!) but he nailed the key to student success. What you do with the first five minutes of each class sets the tone, not your grimacing, yelling, frustrated, exasperated self. Instead, create routines and protocols like “Writing Into the Day” or silent independent reading time that students can depend on. Smiling and displaying positive body language contribute to an atmosphere where students feel safe and included. This is especially important for students who may be struggling with personal issues or who are new to the school. Your demeanor can make a significant difference in how they perceive their place in the community.

3. Model Engagement

Student engagement starts with teacher engagement.  If you hate your job, the students absolutely know it. If you aren’t gassed on the lesson you’re teaching, it’s dead in the water before you start. Students are more likely to be engaged and enthusiastic about their learning when they feel their teacher is invested in their success and actually likes being a teacher. A positive attitude from the teacher can be infectious, leading to a more dynamic and interactive classroom experience.

4. Model Positive Behavior

I want my students to be prompt, so I model punctuality. I want my students to be curious, so I model inquiry and wonder. I want my students to think critically, so I open the top of my head and show them around my frameworks for thinking through problems. When my students see me demonstrating kindness toward everyone, they are more likely to mirror these behaviors in their own interactions because it is the expectation of a culture you, the teacher, have created with your behavior:  In this classroom, we treat each other with respect and understanding.  

5. Give Clear Instructions

Practice giving clear, unambiguous instructions. I cannot stress enough how basic clarity can mitigate behavior issues that start with a student’s frustration about what he’s supposed to be doing. Outside of purposeful and scaffolded creative and productive struggles that are the gateway to building critical thinking, activities that promote student frustration or feel like a “gotcha” proposition instead of a “I get you” support are worthless and damaging. Practice speaking to students as adults, not as babies. They want to be taken seriously. They are having serious thoughts. Support them in this unfamiliar territory by taking them seriously.

In the end, I discovered that my warmth and positivity helped prevent behavioral issues by promoting mutual respect and understanding. When students feel valued and understood, they were more likely to adhere to classroom rules and expectations.

What I recognized is that “Not Smiling until Christmas” is  the management style of a person who doesn’t really believe in their own ability to control a classroom of students and has to lean into meanness to promote learning. Which is fear-based approach which is sure to kill any kind of collaboration, community or creativity.

(Also can you imagine working at a job where you couldn’t smile for five months because you were bluffing the people you worked with into thinking you were a severe, authoritarian disciplinarian when really you were just a goofy nerd who wanted to talk about literature and ideas and poetry and writing?)

I hope you have a kind, fun, thoughtful, and invigorating year!

There may not be any crying in baseball, but the Olympics are a different story. Have I teared up on my couch at least once every night since July 26?

You bet. 

Like when gymnast Brody Malone’s father read a letter to his son on air and couldn’t get through it. 

Or when the surging cheers inside La Defense Arena met Leon Marchand every time he broke the water, and then later when he stood on the awards podium and sang "La Marseillaise" with the crowd (and me at home channeling my inner Madeleine Lebeau). 

Or when Tik Tok icon Ilona Maher talked about being part of something bigger than her own efforts, about the legacy she wants to leave for young girls who may “pass through the jersey” on a professional rugby team

Or when Ukrainian fencing star Olga Kharlan won her country’s first medal in the women’s saber event and dedicated it to all the Ukrainian athletes “who couldn’t come here because they were killed by Russia.”

Or when Simone Biles dominated an event she pulled out of in Tokyo for her mental health. 

And, of course, when the squinting pommel horse dude pommel horses.

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Because these moments are not just about competition, these moments are human stories crafted to make us care. Reading an emotional letter might be outside the scope of aerial dismount commentary, but the letter doesn’t negate our investment in Malone’s event, it increases it. 

We aren’t just watching a gymnast on the rings;  we are watching a human through the lens of backstory - the loss of his mother to cancer, a catastrophic leg injury, three surgeries, learning to walk again.

I am cheering for him because—in a way not possible with a box score— I know him. The moments are television gold due to their great storytelling.

As Kyle Vanhemert wrote for Wired in 2016, NBC's Olympics broadcast “is a rigorously crafted product, one based on the counterintuitive idea that the Games is not a series of athletic contests, but a mosaic of deeply human stories.”

The brainchild of producer Dick Ebersol, NBC’s Olympics abandoned the traditional coverage loved by die-hard sports fans - the box scores and the play-by-play - and embraced a mode of storytelling that uses five “magnets” to draw people in night after night for events as obscure as race walking or marathon swimming. 

Here they are:

Magnet #1

The first magnet is “narrative momentum.” This element draws us to the Games because we are watching “a grand story, with individual contests comprising but a single thread.” In fiction, narrative momentum is the element of the story that keeps the reader turning the page, moving along the arc of the story. 

Magnet #2 

The second magnet attracting viewers is the fact that sports are unscripted, the best kind of live theater. The Games follow predictable rules, but anything can happen in any event to any competitor. The Miracle on Ice. Greg Louganis diving after striking his head on the springboard. Mary Decker grimacing on the ground as the 18-year-old South African Zola Budd ran barefoot ahead of her. 

Magnet #3

Suspense is the third magnet. People watch the Games for the delightful tension created by their unpredictability. Who will experience the thrill of victory? Who will experience the agony of defeat? Stories that underscore the stakes of these events, stories couched in a sense of foreboding keep us in our seats. 

Magnet #4

The fourth magnet that draws viewers is the spirit of the Games.  We value and idealize the nobility, the history, the international sense of goodwill that the Olympics promotes. From a fictional angle, this magnet might serve as the big universal theme of mutual understanding to help build a better, more peaceful world.

Magnet #5

The fifth magnet NBC uses in storytelling grounds the stories in the patriotism viewers feel for their country, and more expansively, the feelings viewers feel for all the competitors striving for the human race and the world. 

Consider introducing these magnets to students as a storytelling template. 

Magnet 1: Attach your scenes to an arc strong and large enough to create narrative momentum that propels the reader forward. 

Magnet 2: Write your fiction as if it’s not fiction and as if it’s not writing. Write fiction that feels like unscripted life, or as John Gardner said, “that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream.” 

Magnet 3: Build suspense by raising the stakes, embedding irony and foreshadowing. 

Magnet 4 and 5: Underpin your story with a large premise or a universal theme that provides depth and resonance to the decisions your characters make. 

And finally, be judicious about how you arrange the scenes in a piece of fiction. The framing of the Big Story of the Olympics represents a sort of puzzle, “each piece meticulously arranged to ensure maximum engagement.” NBC uses the concept of “linkage,” to interlock each story of heroism to other stories of redemption or defeat, which builds throughout the broadcast. 

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Last night while I watched Simone Biles roll out her calf injury at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a commercial for Google’s Gemini came on. Narrated by a proud father who is a former runner, the commercial features stills of his daughter running and training and searching hurdling techniques on Google. 

He’s delighted his daughter loves running and sees Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levore as a role model. Then the narration swerves a bit: “She wants to show Sydney some love and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right. So, Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.” 

Adorable. 

And it made me want to throw up. 

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If you don’t know, Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot designed to help humans do things that humans once got great joy out of doing - generating literature and art and movies and writing letters to our heroes. In addition to perpetuating the tired old chestnut that writing must be “just right” to be effective, the commercial also negates the real relationship at the heart of this exchange - a father and his daughter and the opportunity to bond over composing a letter to a celebrity athlete. 

Sometime in the late 90s, I saw a similar commercial for Google itself. A grandfather and his granddaughter walking in the woods bird watching.The granddaughter wants to know more information about a bird they see, and the grandfather can’t deliver. The gist:  you don’t need Grandpa and his faulty memory any more. Just Google it. 

Let me say I’m a big fan of Google. It’s efficient and intuitive. I love the clean interface and its streamline toolbar.  I’ve used it as a learning management system as a teacher and have written three books with it. I track my daylily inventory with its sheets and gather data with its forms. However, its newest tool leaves me not only cold, but chilled to the bone, despite the 90-plus temps outside. 

One of the reasons I’m a writer is that I was given opportunities to write - to get my thoughts out of my head and onto the page, to fail at that, of course, but to gamely revise again and again until the letter delivered my aims.  My mother was a stickler for thank you notes written within a week of any gift. Both my grandmothers wrote me letters when I was little, and I wrote them back. These two wonderful women are gone, but I still have those letters. I have them because my mother, who valued education and the written word, kept them for me until I could keep them for myself. Those letters are a treasure map of my burgeoning personality, my quirks, my voice, my wobbly scrawls and my interests throughout my adolescence. 

In elementary school, our teachers invited us to write letters to Santa in December and to our mothers in May. We wrote letters to our governor and our president.  In 1976 as we celebrated the Bicentennial, I remember writing thank you letters to a Founding Father we saw as inspirational. In short, I wrote a lot of letters. 

And with every letter I wrote, my identity - as a thinker, as a communicator, as a processor of ideas and images - solidified and grew stronger and more resilient, more inviolable. By the time I got to middle school, I was writing essays and poetry and short stories, but it was those letters that served as the welcome mat into the house of my own mind. I learned to respect and lean into my own efforts. 

A letter is a perfect writing opportunity for a budding writer because it has all the necessary elements that make writing powerful - a need to communicate with an audience, typically a single person, with whom you have (or want to have) some kind of relationship. A letter to a hero is an especially potent invitation to write because you want to express and impress, you want to tell them exactly how they’ve inspired you, and exactly how much you admire them. A fan letter is your personality in microcosm. 

That we are giving up these opportunities to be fully human — to be in connection with other humans through our puny, wobbly efforts — is abominable. 

As a writing teacher and a writer, I understand AI is just a tool, and it can, as typewriters and computers once did, assist writers with getting started and getting organized. Yet, I can’t help but recall Wendell Berry’s 1988 essay, “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer.“ He writes, “....when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante's, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.” 

Clearly I am not as tech-adverse as Berry, but the letter commercial rattled me with its siren song of ease and perfection. Writing is hard, which is why it matters, which is why we must practice it, which is why we must do it for ourselves. But it is not the writing we are outsourcing to the machines - it’s our hearts, our beating, yearning, thinking hearts. And that is what writing ultimately is - our hearts and minds on the page. 

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While the focus of Writing As Healing has been largely centered on writing as healing for students, one of my guests, Shamari Reid, a Heinemann author and professor at NYU, speaks to us about the necessity of writing as healing for teachers. 

The essential question of Reid’s new book, Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice, and Liberation in Schools, is how can we center love in our work as teachers. And not just teachers as a monolithic label or as perpetrators of a system, but as humans who walk into classrooms and engage with our hearts and our humanity in order to engage with the hearts and humanity of our students. As humans who elect to teach, we must first take care of ourselves, understanding who we are in a process Reid calls “getting closer to yourself” with a dozen acts of radical self-care. 

One of those acts is writing our way into physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Reid suggests that teachers must elevate their personal writing voice and close their classroom door as an act of self love. Teachers are storytellers, and we need time and space to tell the story of how we love and how we engage with students. As we write and reflect on our own stories of love and teaching, we might ask:   in what ways does my teaching promote the physical, emotional, and spiritual growth of my students? 

How do I speak up about issues of marginalization and injustices? How do I center counternarratives in my curriculum?  How do I stay informed about the challenges my students and their communities face? How do I commit to my own unlearning of oppressive beliefs and actions? 

Be sure to tune in on May 2 for my conversation with Shamari. You can also listen to a Heinemann On the Podcast with Shamari as well as treat yourself to his Water for Teacher: Sips with Shamari Reid. 

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How Can I Practice Writing As Healing In My Classroom? 

Teachers, grab your writing journal, close your classroom door, and settle in to get close to yourself. Set a timer for 20 minutes, and for this time, suspend notifications, email checks, or student demands. Just give yourself the gift of time and space and writing. Choose one of the free writes below and write from your heart and your humanity.

Prompt 1

In his book Storytelling Animal, John Gottschall says, “A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down – where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity.” If, as John Gottschall says, our life stories are our identity, what do your life stories say about who you are?  What kinds of stories make up your life story? What stories make up your teaching life story?

Prompt 2

Anthropologists have found evidence of storytelling in every known culture. In fact, scientist believe humans have told stories for as long as they have had the ability to speak, making meaning of their lives for thousands of years before they learned to read or write.  Why do you think it is important for teachers to tell their stories? Why is the act of storytelling so important in the field of teaching?  How does the act of storytelling engage your students? 

Prompt 3

Jonathon Adler, an associate professor of psychology whose field of study is narrative psychology, says, “Life is incredibly complex, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it.  The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.”  Do you see your life as a “story?” Why or why not? How does structuring our lives into stories help us make meaning from it? Do you see your teaching life as a story? How would structuring your teaching life as a story help you make meaning from it?

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There was a moment every year where a community finally built itself inside my classroom. Sometimes it happened after fall break as we got to know each other. Sometimes it happened after we finished a big project, a shared goal that we all contributed to. But I noticed this community establishment often happened earlier in the year if I modeled the kinds of human moves - gratitude, vulnerability, kindness, trust, support in risk taking - that I wanted my students to exhibit toward each other. 

Creating the feeling of community in my classroom was the only way I knew to create a foundation where authentic writing and healing could take place, a place where both taking risk and healing was important. And it was the only culture where I could successfully run a project-based writing studio that invited students to write about topics and issues they were passionate about.

I first met David Rockower when my book Project-Based Writing brought us together to present at NCTE in Baltimore in 2017. David is a freelance writer, the author of The Power of Teaching Vulnerability,  and a Pennsylvania middle school teacher. At the heart of his pedagogy is this question: how does teacher vulnerability impact student learning?

My interview with David will be on the Heinemann Podcast on Thursday, April 11, and while we cover a lot of ground, the majority of our conversation centers around the necessity of modeling vulnerability as an effective teaching tool, that builds community, but also teaches students what writing and healing looks like. 

David says, “Teachers are always asking students to take risks in their learning. But how often are we as teachers modeling that? I think the big leap for me was being able to write in front of my students. Something I do on a regular basis is I'll put a Google Doc up on the screen, and I'll say, ‘Alright, throw out an emotion that you've experienced once in your life, and I'm going to tell you a story. And I have nothing planned because I don't know what emotion you're going to throw out.’ And they always want to know of a time when I'm afraid, right? Tell me a time when you had fear. So they'll see me compose, they'll see me misspell, delete, change. For about fifteen minutes I'll craft something and  I'll have the beginning of a mini personal essay or memoir on the screen. I was doing more than just building community because I was sharing part of myself, but I was also sharing what the writing process looks like. We do the brainstorming, and the outlining, and the planning, and then we do the revising, and the editing, but we don't often talk about what happens, what does it look like when you're writing.”

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How Can I Practice Writing As Healing In My Classroom? 

Using David’s strategy of modeling vulnerability, what are some ways you can create a culture of sharing and healing with students? How can you visually model the internal machinations of writing a first draft? In the early weeks of the year, chose one of the below dimensions of vulnerability each week to share with students. As you get to know them, equally important is that they get to know you. This mutual sharing will be beneficial for creating community, but also will bank goodwill and trust when students begin to write personal essays that will help them advocate, heal ,and speak their truth.

Personal: Personal stories that share a failure, joy, a memorable moment, examples of your own artistic work: writing, painting, etc…

Relational: Apologies: admitting fault in the classroom, verbal or written compliments.

Dialogic: Inviting crucial conversations into the classroom, even if these topics might create discomfort and tension.

David says, “When teachers are willing to go through the writing process authentically with students, everyone’s writing is likely to be more meaningful, engaging, and inspired.”

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