The Best of Writing Mindset in 2017
#yearofselfish = #yearofself-realization
Last year at New Years, my friends and I dubbed 2017 the #yearofselfish. What this meant was engage in more awareness when it came to self-care, workout, invest in personal opportunity, meditate, seek out a work to life balance, and try new things. I definitely tried new things. Writing Mindset was a leap out of nowhere that constantly challenged me on one end because I thought of it as a personal business move, but I also saw it as a way to reflect on teaching. Writing Mindset simply was a way to connect to my teaching and share my teaching with others. I set up my LLC, invested in a website hosting platform that I thought was aesthetically pleasing, and then tried to write a lot. Then, I realized that writing and working full-time were more difficult than I ever imagined.
What you see in this post is a journey of reflection and realization. I realized what would make me stop teaching and later I realized a shift in purpose for my blogging. At first, I wanted to share my writing teacher strategies with the world. Now, I am hoping to get smarter about those strategies and share these ideas with others so that we can build a community of teachers that invests in teaching as a long-term objective. Being a teacher has become temporary. Why wouldn't it? The long hours, the paperwork, the level of customer service, evaluations, expectations...Should I continue? With all of the demands placed on teachers, there has to be a way to figure it out and do this thing we call teaching, well, better. Better means in a way that we are not sacrificed for our mission in helping educate and inspire learning. I wanted to include a summative post to the year that archives my favorite and most viewed posts from 2017. It also demonstrates a clear transformation. These posts are the ones that really stand out. I started Writing Mindset this past year in February, and it is amazing how the purpose and mission of Writing Mindset have changed. I can't wait for 2018.
This started on a Saturday, the Saturday before the Monday when I had to hand back rough drafts to my students. I wanted no part of them. I wanted nothing to do with them. Glancing at my comfy blanket and cup of coffee, I was a human replica of the emoji "ugh." Not wanting to embrace my stack of papers, I started texting a fellow English teacher about her method of using rubric codes. She uses numbers to correspond with different points on a rubric that come up over and over. We have had this discussion before, yet, I was resistant because I had always wanted to follow "traditional" feedback routes. Things I love: ink over typeface, writing in the margins, and seeing a child's face go, "You spent alllll that time on my paper?" Yes, yes I did. I have had many conversations about the writing process lately because it seems as ELA teachers, we all tackle this beast differently. I am not willing to budge on giving feedback on rough drafts, even though some instructional models no longer call for this step in the process. Rubric codes never seemed to fit...until it did.