When I read about people who have saved diaries and notebooks since they were twelve, I’m sad because I don’t  have these relics from my childhood. I did keep a diary when I was in 5th or 6th grade, but distinctly remember tearing it up directly into the garbage can in our garage, ashamed or embarrassed by something I’d written.

However, I did fill notebooks with drawings of floor plans for houses I dreamed of living in one day. At one point, I considered being an architect, but I abandoned this idea somewhere along the way.

Or did I? For isn’t a writer an architect of sorts? We take a blank piece of paper and design not just houses and buildings, but whole worlds. We’re not constrained by the laws of physics and don’t have to worry about the cost of our creations. We can inhabit our dream worlds to our heart’s content. (Within reason!)

And isn’t being a teacher also similar to being an architect? We design welcoming classrooms and environments that support and nurture learning. Classrooms where we help children acquire the tools they need to construct meaning from the books, articles, and websites they read. And most importantly, we help our students develop the skills they need to become the architects of their own lives. For me, that’s more fulfilling than designing houses could ever be.

 Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, Beth, Kathleen, and Deb for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday throughout the year and every day during the month of March. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

A familiar petulant look, downcast eyes and protruding lower lip, came over her face. She began pulling her hair over her forehead, trying to hide.

I sighed, trying to retain my patience. I’ve been working with this student since the fall when she was diagnosed with dyslexia. In an effort to expedite her progress, she has two intervention sessions on most days. She sees the special education teacher every day and I see her at least three times a week to practice and reinforce what she is learning in special ed. She reads poems and books on topics that interest her. She’s written poems and short paragraphs about  ballet, her passion. She’s been making nice progress.

Yesterday she was working on an acrostic poem for the word “ballet.” She didn’t have any trouble coming up with single words for each letter. But then I reminded her that poets use descriptive words to express their feelings and create images. “Let’s think of ways to describe the barre,” I suggested.

“I like it the way it is.”

I counted to ten. I knew I wouldn’t accomplish anything by engaging in a power struggle with this student, but one of our objectives is to help her learn to be more open-minded and persistent.

I tried one more time. “Let’s look at a poem in your folder and see how Irene Latham describes the “Farm Fresh Eggs.”

Tears began to well up in her eyes. That was my cue that we were finished. As I walked her back to her classroom, I was calm and said we’d take another look at the poem tomorrow. She shrugged, but said goodbye as she went back to her class.

She isn’t this uncooperative too often, but it has happened often enough to know that we might not achieve the goals we set for her at her PPT in October. Her parents and their advocate were insistent that we say what reading level she would achieve by her annual review next fall. We tried to explain that our goal was to have her catch up to grade level expectations as quickly as possible, but there were too many variables to make any kind of prediction about how long it would take to get her there. They were skeptical, but gave us the benefit of the doubt.

As a parent, I understand their worry and desire to have her performing at grade level sooner rather than later. But I also understand that pushing her too hard won’t help her reach this goal. It could undermine our efforts. Everyone is doing everything they can to support this student, providing her with appropriate instruction, modifications, and accommodations. We should be celebrating her every accomplishment, no matter how insignificant it may seem. She will get there in the end. It may just take a little longer for her. Things take the time they take.

Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, Beth, Kathleen, and Deb for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday throughout the year and every day during the month of March. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
Larry L. King

A year and a half ago, I started writing a middle grade novel, or maybe it’s an early chapter book. It hasn’t let me know which it wants to be yet. But I really started writing it more than ten years ago, when I wrote a picture book manuscript about a girl and her grandmother. That manuscript was much too long to be a picture book, so I rewrote it. I rewrote it so many times and cut so many details that I no longer recognized my story.

Or maybe I started writing that novel ten years before that when I began teaching third grade. Working with those young writers and reading books about writing inspired me pick up my own pen after too many years of not writing.

During those years of not writing I was reading. I was reading Shakespeare and Faulkner, poets and playwrights, E.B. White and Gary Paulsen, Barbara Kingsolver and Louise Erdrich. I soaked  up their words and the rhythms of their sentences like dry earth soaks up the spring rain.

Then again, that book might have started ten years before that when, after reading stack after stack of picture books to my children, I remembered an idea I’d had in high school about writing children’s books. Toddlers are very entertaining. To a young mother every silly thing they did was the stuff of the next Caldecott winner.

Maybe that story began when I was in fifth grade and wrote a story about aliens landing in a pond near my house. I remember this story only because my father liked it and told me it was good. High praise from a man of few words.

Who knows when that story really began. One of my earliest memories is of sitting at a little formica-topped table in my bedroom scribbling across a drawing pad, pretending I was writing. I knew then that I had a story to tell. I’ve been writing it ever since.

Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, Beth, Kathleen, and Deb for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.