I started this blog, Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life at the end of March 2016. At the time I was supporting elementary teachers with the implementation of writer’s workshop. In my own ongoing search for resources to share, I discovered the Two Writing Teachers site, a veritable treasure trove of ideas, recommendations, experiences, and, most of all, encouragement for teachers to first be writers themselves. This resonated deeply with me for several reasons, beginning with the logic of the thing: How can one teach writers without BEING a writer? Truth is, this been happening forever, so let me rephrase: How can one be an EFFECTIVE teacher of writers, without being a writer? Without walking the walk in real-writer shoes, wrestling with ideas, hammering out clunky sentences until these ideas shine, spawning new ideas even in the act (the wondrous alchemy of the true process)?

The answer’s pretty obvious.

Furthermore, most fellow teachers I encountered felt that they weren’t “good” at teaching writing (language matters; we would soon shift this concept to teaching writers) and that they weren’t “good” writers themselves. Dare I say this had more to do with the way we were/were not taught when we were in school, or how we were shaped by our educational experiences with writing, i.e., as an inescapable (odious?) chore, or the simple fact that no one ever modeled the real (vibrant and powerful) process for us?

Ok, I’ll say it: All of the above.

I will also say that teacher feedback can change the world, one child’s heart at a time.

I was nine, just starting the fifth grade. My class had created “All About Me” booklets. In that era, teachers still wrote in red ink on student work (!!!!) but in this instance, it wasn’t bloody slashes, deconstruction, destruction. I’d written about my struggle with asthma, how it kept me from fully participating in physical activities like running. I described the medication my parents gave me in those pre-inhaler days: liquid Benadryl, “clearish red, and it burns like fire when I swallow it.” Alongside this paragraph, my teacher wrote: “What wonderful detail! You’re a strong writer. Keep writing!”

It was the first time my writing had ever been praised…the first time I recall any praise given to me in my early school years (there are certainly stories to tell about the times I was shamed by teachers; perhaps I’ll dust off those memories and let them live again, or maybe I’ll just let those old bones lie where they are). My point here is that in the very moment I read my teacher’s response, my writer-soul quickened. Writing would be a Presence in my life ever after. Writing would always seem to pursue me, draw me, push me, pull me. It would grow me. It would deepen me, sharpen my senses…I would learn things about myself I did not know. I would realize my affinity with nature. Writing would lead me over and over to awe.

It would lead me, in a roundabout way, to becoming an educator after my children were born and in school. It would lead me to supporting other educators in unique ways. It would lead me to create a blog to “practice what I preach” and enable me to join online writing communities like Two Writing Teachers, where educators write a Slice of Life Story every Tuesday and commit to a monthlong writing challenge every day in March. For, again: How can one be an effective teacher of writing without first being a writer?

There’s so much more to say about sharing our writing in community without judgment, about our stories connecting us in ways greater than blood and sinew, about empathy knitting our heartstrings together not merely to survive but to live. To overcome. To celebrate, to rejoice. To grieve, to rage. There is more to say about students coming to realize the power of their own ideas and their own voices through writing, alongside teachers who are doing the same. There is more to say about the brokenness of systems—educational, governmental, societal, fill in the blank.

Here’s where I’ll stop this post, but not my writing…I may rest for a season or two, but I shall never stop writing, because it is, like prayer, the impetus of growth and change for the better.

Starting from within.

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with thanks and love to all at Two Writing Teachers, with the advent of the March Slice of Life Story Challenge this Friday. Join and prepare to share...find your writing, your teaching, your heart, your life, transformed.