Inception: A Blog within a Blog

It is Martin Luther King day, so I have the day off and I have been playing in the blogging realm for three hours. You might be thinking, "Miss Understood, can't you think of a more productive way to spend your free time?" At least, I was thinking that. Which got me to thinking about why I like blogging and reading blogs.

This blog is usually about teaching. I usually let my readers into my thoughts about teaching. It's kind of like level one of Inception. Today, we go into a blog within a blog. Level two, baby! Maybe I could go for really confusing and blog about my blog within my blog. No, that is way too dangerous. As an aside, Inception did come out when I was dating all of those guys and I may or may not have seen it three different times with three different guys. What? I really liked it and I didn't have the heart to tell any of them that I already saw it with another guy.

I have always believed that to be a balanced person you need inputs and outputs. You've got to put creative and brilliant things into your head and you have to have a release for creative thoughts. Some people are creative with paint and some people are creative with notes--all that I've ever had is words. The primary reason I like blogging is the word play.

I imagine it is a lot the way that an arist feels satisfied when he sees the paint recreate the world before his eyes. The things that I write about are true and they exist whether I write about them or not, but there is something satisfying about seeing the words form a picture.

New Years Time!

Boys and girls, my blog is really growing up. It turns three this year, and I couldn't be more proud. I am proud of my blog because it has always been honest and from my heart. My biggest inspiration as a writer are people who write because they have to. I used to think that everyone was a secret writer, but teaching really knocked that naive notion out of me. Now, I think writing is more like a language that some of us are more comfortable in than others. In fact, sometimes I think writing is like my first language and speaking is only a cheap substitute. Sometimes I need to write like other people need a cigarette. I write to make a decision. I write to understand. I write to laugh. I write to cry.

I remember one time in undergraduate school I had to write a paper about teaching writing. I said in the course of the paper that teaching writing was like teaching breathing. I didn't know how to do it because I don't know how not to be a writer.

Yet, when I look back at this blog (my primary writing outlet over the past two and a half years), I wrote almost exclusively on the theme of education and being an educator. Reading it, I would almost believe that I am a teacher the way I am a writer. I know that is not true, but over the past three years I lost myself a little in teaching. Yet, I found myself in my writing.

I wrote so much about teaching because that is what I needed to write about, but I am ready to explore different topics in my writing again.

All of this started to dawn on me on Christmas day. I picked up George "W"s autobiography (a gift to someone else not me), and read the first couple of chapters. He talked about how he spent his early twenties living without a lot of responsibilities and finding himself. I thought about how good for him that must have been later on because when he was president there is no room to be anything but president. Then, I thought about how I've spent my early twenties. The answer is that I've spent them lost in teaching. The truth is that I have given it too much--too much to sustain anyway. I have to find a way to be more balanced. Because of who I am, a big part of that is going to be writing about other themes. So, this blog is going to change in 2011. I'm still going to write about education sometimes because that is a big part of my life and what I do most days, but I am going to write more about theology and family and life and love. That is my New Year's Resolution this year.

Block

I can't find the words tonight. They're in my head all jumbled up, and I can't untangle them. The writer in me rebels. I commanded myself to be practical through and through. So, I have much to say but can't say it until I resolve my practical and creative natures.

The Selfish Reasons I Write

My head is really full right now. I don't know how else to explain my current situation. I have a hyperactive brain. It hardly even sleeps--I remember what I dream almost every night. Usually, I remember two or three dreams each night. I think about a lot of things at once. My brain is like my desk and like my closet gets when I don't pay careful attention. It is just full of messy piles. Only my brain is much worse than my desk or closet. Have you ever seen that show Hoarders? Sometimes I think I am like a hoarder of thoughts. I've already stored twenty-six thoughts and ideas about a given philosophy or story, but I still want to get some more.

Writing is therapeutic for me because it helps declutter my brain. Every night when I write I have to choose from all of the thoughts. It really is hard for me to choose. I listen to music and try to write what incorporates a lot of my random, uncontrollable thoughts. When I finish writing, I can sleep better. I know that my head will feel full again within twenty-four hours, but it eases the pressure.

Usually, I try to write about thoughts that will make my mind more settled and peaceful. I write about anything in my day's thinking that needs to be resolved.

Those are the selfish reasons that I write. I just want to clean up my inner world by dumping my thoughts on paper. That is blunt, but true.

In my life, though, I have more responsibility than to just sit around thinking. Like Plato, maybe I wish I was just a philosopher king who could think all day. There is so much purpose for me in my work as a teacher. That is why that is the primary theme of this blog.

I want to be a better teacher not because it makes my inner world more peaceful, but because it is an important contribution to the outer world. Lately, I am finding my progress as a teacher paralyzed because of my insecurities. For a long time now I have tried to put the past behind me. I did that because it was the only way I could survive in the profession. I just tried to focus outside of myself and forget my insecurities. It kind of worked, but my insecurities about myself as a teacher have been my constant companions for the last two years.

Why do I get so upset over a parent who is clearly being unreasonable? Why am I so stressed when one lesson doesn't go well? Why am I incapable of having a classroom observation without being exceedingly nervous? It is because somewhere inside me is the belief that I can't do it, I shouldn't do it, and I will never learn.

I don't like thinking about that voice. I don't particularly like writing about that voice, but I am going to attempt to settle my insecurities and find that confidence through writing in the same way that I settle my thoughts. There was a definite point in time where I became insecure. I want my confidence back.

Write Like a Champion

Today we all (all the teachers) had to grade the baseline writing samples using a six trait rubric. The prompt for third grade was: "Write a letter to your teacher about a field trip you would like to go on." This prompted some of the most terrible third grade writing I've had to read. Here is a list of some on the gems I scored.

*I would like to go to the zoo to see the monkeys, lions, zebras, cheetahs, elephants, parrots... (this list went on long enough to fill the whole page).
*A magical story about a spaceship (what does this have to do with the prompt, you tell me).
*D Mt. _____, I go dragon ball Z. Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball Z.

I could go on, but why should I put my readers through the same pain I was subjected to? I was given a ridiculously long rubric with scores of 1-6 for six traits, but I made my own simple rubric that applies to all six traits as we went. See below.

6 - Never going to happen. Forget the possibility of scoring this writing as a six and spend your time reading about the other scores.
5- The writing was still a boring third grade paper, but it was long and grammatically correct without causing physical pain or suicidal thoughts in the reader. You wish the paper was shorter, so you wouldn't have to keep reading, but at least you can decipher the words.
4- This is the score to use when the brain of the evaluator has shut down. It is a cop out score to be used for writing that is not that good, but not as bad as some other third grade writing.
3- A 3 should be used for a paper that makes you want to quit teaching or maybe reading, but you would rather continue scoring than be fired.
2- A 2 is a good score for "compositions" that are three lines long, but take quite a while to read because they are sloppy and do not make sense. A good rule of thumb is to give a paper a 2 if the paper seems like it is written in another language when you first start scoring it. After a while, you agree that it is English, but you still don't know what it says.
1- This is my favorite score because it can be used for papers that are three words long except none of the words are actually words. 1 papers are easy to spot.

Please feel free to score my post using the rubric above. I would probably give myself a 4, but my brain shut off a long time ago.

Editor Extraodinaire??

I have a friend, really she is more like a sister to me, who is leaving her husband. It's a whole dramatic situation (which I won't say too much about), but she was writing the letter she plans to give him on the day she leaves. She wanted me to help her edit it. At first, I was like, "Ummm, I can't even balance my own dating life. I clearly don't know anything about marriage." Which is true, but as I edited it I realized that I don't need to know anything about marriage to edit. It was a simple skill of understanding what my friend was trying to communicate and helping her communicate it more clearly. That skill comes more naturally to me than any other skill. I've always been a go to person on my staff to edit touchy e-mails to parents, colleagues and administrators. In college, I "fixed" my share of papers. I was really born to be an editor much more than a writer.

My Fav's

I am going through a little bit of a withdrawal from not writing about education or teaching or anything. I am trying to take a mental vacation for a change. It has been really really good for me. I was thinking about what writing and particularly writing on this blog means to me. Writing is the one thing that I have been able to focus on even when I am at my most stressed out times in teaching. I love to look back at what I wrote because each thing I've written is like a snapshot of where I was at that time. If my blog were an album of snapshots, then these five posts were my favorites. They are my favorite posts not necessarily because they are the bests things I've written to be read, but because they are my favorite memories of writing. Some of them are happy and some of them are sad, but all of them were written with a lot of emotion.

5.) I've Got to Admit This post means a lot to me because it expresses the change in me in my third year and the healing that did take place.

4.) The PICU This moment in my life had been so impactful on me that this post means a lot to me. The feelings that I had were so strong that the words were just pouring out of me along with tears.

3.) What to Do? What to Do? I wrote this post when I was having a really hard time. Sometimes when I read my writing from when I was having a really big struggle I can't even hear my own voice. I don't think my quality of writing in this post was anything to write home about, but I like it because it reminds me that my voice as a writer and a teacher wasn't completely lost in those hard times. I would still agree with every word I wrote here.

2.) Close Encounters
I was proud of this post because it expresses the connection of my faith to my life and teaching. I felt this post when I wrote it.

1.) The Things No One Tells You I chose this post as my favorite piece of writing on this blog because I think it is my clearest expression of my struggle in teaching. I was just crying when I wrote this because I was so stressed out with the possibility of losing my job and with the way I was treated at my job in the previous year, but at the same time I didn't want to quit. Writing this was very therapeutic to me.

It Like Figures...

Teaching students to write more descriptively is a huge challenge (at least for me). I have had some success with using five senses graphic organizers, but practically speaking a lot of descriptive writing needs to be primarily visual what things feel like, smell like, and taste like are only important in limited contexts. I really believe that the key to helping kids write descriptively is the mastery of of using figurative language. Below is a lesson I've developed over the last three years to help kids experiment with the use of figurative language. It's really more of an exercise and I recommend doing it several times to make a lasting impact.



I introduce the lesson by showing the kids some detailed pictures from a picture book. (I use the book The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant because I use that story to teach personal narratives as well and my kids are familiar with it.) I show them pictures and each student writes similes or metaphors based on the pictures. For the first few, I give them the first half of a simile and let them fill in the blank (ie The realtives were as crowded as ______________________). For the final picture, I give them five minutes to write as many similes and metaphors as they can think of describing the picture.


Then I either give the students a topic sentence for a descriptive paragraph or I have the students write their own topic sentence (my instruction to them is "write a sentence that describes the whole picture"). Then I have the kids use at least three of the similes/metaphors they wrote and add a concluding sentence. I and the kids have been amazed at the level of writing this produces. After doing this activity a couple of times, I start to require the kids to put one simile or metaphor in assignments that I know that would be appropriate for.