Why My Words Matter

I've fallen off the blogging wagon.  This month I am participating in the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life blogging challenge. Each day during the month of March, participating students and teacher bloggers are sharing a slice of their daily life, writing a small moment to share with readers.  I have been so impressed reading the daily posts from educators and especially from students.  There are multiple classrooms - high school, middle school, even some elementary school students - who have written, posted, and responded to others every single day so far.



I have failed.

But here's the thing. I am okay with that.

There was a time when every misstep, every shortcoming, every time I fell short of my goal, I would spiral into an anxious little mess.  Self-deprecating comments easily came to my lips, and I would let the mantra of "good enough is not good enough" loop like an earworm through my brain.

Flickr image by Pierre Metivier

And then I started to see this type of thinking replicated in my high school students. Not all that long ago, I heard my six year old son call himself "stupid" under his breath when I corrected him on a math problem he was working on at home. I watch my young sons and my students fall into the same thinking traps that I do. I watch them let a missed answer, a missed grade, a missed honor snowball into a global sense of failure.

It took time for me to recognize how my own words and actions might be framing the thoughts and actions of the young people I work with.  How can I inspire and encourage resilience if I continue to be so critical of myself?

I had this same conversation with my student teacher just the other day.  She is an amazingly talented undergraduate who is working hard to take over my multiple preps and get to know my 150+ students. Having just finished our first unit in our honors tenth grade English classes, which she designed, she is in the midst of grading 57 elaborate multi-genre projects.  I hear her make fun of herself in front of the class when students ask if they are graded.  It is something that many of us do.  It is good not to take yourself to seriously.  However, I have learned that if you vocalize more self-critical comments than positive ones, it does impact how others interact with you.  We have talked about how to frame the instructions she gives in the classroom, how words really do matter.  Even in seemingly simply, seemingly benign situations, how we choose to use our words can frame how those around us interact with one another.

I have been accused of being overly enthusiastic, positive to the point of being Pollyanna-ish.  But here's the thing: I would rather my students, the world, view me as a positive force of good rather than a pessimistic, self-critical complainer.  If I want my students to view themselves as positive forces of change, then I need to view myself as one, too.  If I want my students to talk about themselves as strong, empowered, resilient learners, then I need to provide them opportunities to use language to reflect on how they have made changes and learned from mistakes.  If I want my students to succeed, I must be an example of how to make mistakes, acknowledge failure, and move on.


In January, I bought myself a gift, a bracelet engraved with a quote from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." I wear it every day as a reminder that I am resilient, that I am enough.

"I exist as I am. That is enough."

One of THOSE Days

It has been an incredible week so far. On Monday, environmental reporter from the Grand Rapids Press and MLive, Garret Ellison, joined my journalism class to discuss his writing and research process. We learned all about how he gathers information, interviews for a story, and about how state agencies and the general public interact with the pieces he has written.  Today, Darcy Meade from the Ionia Sentinel Standard shared with us her experiences in both television production as well as working as a newspaper education reporter.

It also happens to be our big poetry week.  Students brought in their favorite poems and lyrics which we posted in a hallway display. My public speaking students listened and responded to the American Academy of Poets "Dear Poet" program. Tomorrow we will chalk our favorite verses outside on the sidewalk of the school's main entrance and share our favorite poets for Poem in Your Pocket Day.

But today has also been one of those days.

Because despite how well I planned for these events, and how well some small pieces went, those things that went oh-so-wrong are overwhelming me.

It started small. Some of the students in my first period class didn't come prepared. I had asked students to bring in their favorite poem or lyrics to share. No big deal. This is to be expected.  I have Chromebooks in my room and a whole slew of poetry books, so students had the ability to look up their favorite verses if they forgot to bring them in.  "Ms. Ward, it can be a song, right?" Of course! Which lead to a short but great conversation about why song lyrics should be considered poetry. Students named off similar traits.  I asked students to list the title, author, and favorite stanza on an index card which we then taped to a hallway display for poetry month.

I teach 15 and 16 year old students. I know that they like to push boundaries. But we know each other. We've built a community of trust. I suppose I should have expected, but didn't, the couple of students who made the decision to write inappropriate lyrics. That question about whether they could use song lyrics wasn't about whether lyrics were poetry. The students were looking to push a boundary. And they did. Pulling up crude and profane lyrics, scrawling them quickly onto a note card, grabbing a piece of tape, and jumping to add their card high upon the hallway wall, far out of my reach.  I had pull a desk from my classroom and scramble on top of it to snatch the offensive verse from the display.

What irks me most is not that I didn't think students would try to push boundaries, they are tenth graders after all and that is what they do, but what irks me most is that the students didn't take into account our classroom community. I sought special permission from the principal to post this display in the hallway, to showcase our love of well-crafted lines, and a couple of students, students who have been in my class and built our learning community together since September, made the decision to disrespect our learning community.

If that was all that happened, I would be handling today better. I know that tomorrow we will have a class discussion about respect and community. And I know that it will be a good reminder for all of us about what we value and how we build our community. But this initial disruption was followed by a much larger one.

Part of my day is scheduled by the students and teachers. Students have 30 minutes each day to schedule time to work with a particular teacher, or a particular teacher can assign a student to "office hours" for more individualized help. It is a wonderful program. I had scheduled my struggling journalism students to my office hours today, hoping to get those who had fallen behind caught back up.  But one young woman wasn't having it. "Why do I have to be here?" she demanded. My room was filled with 30 students, many who needed extra help on specific assignments and others who were still signing into my office hours.  The room fell silent. When I explained, she threw her hands on her hips and stated that she didn't need my class to graduate so she was just planning to fail it. This breaks my heart.  To see someone so young, so angry, so checked out.  I responded something to the effect that I didn't want her to fail. She turned on heel and started to march out of the room.

"Making the choice to leave your assigned time will result in consequences," I called.

"F**k your consequences," she yelled back at me as she walked out the door.

She skipped our journalism class as well.

At the beginning of the year, I start my classes with an exercise. I ask students to fold an origami crane using these awful printed directions in two minutes time. They can't do it. I ask them why, and they tell me what they need to learn. We use this exercise to talk about failure. Failure gives us an opportunity to reassess and reflect, to figure out what went wrong and make adjustments. I tell students, if you aren't failing, then you aren't learning.

But what happens when the teacher fails.  I know this is my learning moment. This is the point where I need to reflect, to adjust what I did and how I respond. I know that there are reasons and personal stories that accompany both of these disruptions today. I know that in the scheme of things, they are not insurmountable issues. But I feel defeated today.

I love teaching poetry. It is sacred for me. It feels trampled.

I love working with students, and it is a point of pride that I do not respond to students with sarcasm or disrespect. I was so taken aback to be spoken to in such a way.

I just finished re-reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly, and in it she quotes Theodore Roosevelt,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” 

I know all of this. But there is a gap between knowing and feeling. I feel like I have failed. And while I may know that I have dared greatly, I still feel pretty lousy in this moment.

As Ye Sew, So Shall Ye Rip

My younger sister and I showing off our spring
4-H ribbons for sewing and ceramics, 1987.

I started in 4-H when I was eight-years-old. My mom became co-leader with the mother of one of my elementary school friends. Together they showed a group of 8-10 year old girls how to measure, cut, follow a pattern, and sew simple skirts and dresses.

However, as I crept along into my eighth, then ninth, and finally tenth year in 4-H as a high school student, I dreaded sewing. I'd ask my mom to show me how to make the tiny pin tucks required by the pattern, secretly hoping she would just sew it for me, and she would reply, "Oh, you know how to do it." I would huff an exasperated sigh and threaten to quit. She would simply reply, "I'm not fighting with you." So I would put my head down, bending close to the bobbing needle, and slowly feed the fabric underneath the sewing machine's foot. Dress after dress got finished. I sewed my prom dresses, my suit for student teaching, a quilt for my sister to take to college. Eventually, I helped my mom sew my wedding dress. Okay, I cut it out and got a few stitches in before handing it over to my mom.

I am so grateful to my mom for teaching me how to sew. It is still something that I find to be one of my favorite creative outlets. And now decades later, I'm also appreciative of how she taught me to sew. Namely, I have come to appreciate her way of  making me figure it out on my own. She would help with those difficult corners and invisible zippers, but once I had sewn them once or twice, she was hands off. I had to persevere, become friends with my seam ripper. I have come to appreciate the tongue-in-cheek play on the Bible verse - "As ye sew, so shall ye rip."

Talking to my younger sister today on the phone, I told her that I wanted a couple of new infinity scarves. Rather than heading out the store, I jogged upstairs to the closet in my study where I have a couple bins of fabric and scraps of skirts that may be ruined by a small stain, but which I am incapable of throwing in the trash. There's still so much usable fabric there! I haven't bought a pattern in years. I am comfortable figuring out how to sew these simple projects on my own, as long as my seam ripper is handy. Infinity scarves, handbags and headbands, shorts for my boys, bibs for a niece's new baby - my mom's greatest gift was giving me confidence in my ability to figure it out. I'm going to mess up. But with my trusty seam ripper, I can take out those missed stitches and try again until it works.

This is what I hope to instill in my learners: a realization that first attempts can be corrected. As one of my favorite playwrights, George Bernard Shaw said, "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." My classroom should be a safe space for students to try and try again, to practice and perfect. Nothing worth doing can be done well the first time. We all need that seam ripper sometimes. Goodness knows (as do my mom and sister), I've used that seam ripper more times than I can possible count.     

Fortunate Failure

I'm taking up Jeremy Hyler's weekly NWP iAnthology prompt today:  "Share a lesson that failed, a student, a piece of writing, etc. Let's embrace failure this week." 

Flickr Creative Commons image by John Liu

With over a decade of teaching experience, I have a number of stories I could share. As I've heard other veteran teachers say, there are days when I wish that I could go back to those students I had my first few years of teaching and apologize. And, I have. I now call a couple of my former students colleagues. But so many of those students and those failures have shaped who I am in the classroom today. I wouldn't be where I am today without them.

In thinking about how a moment of failure shaped how I teach today, I remember Drew.  I had Drew in my honors tenth grade English class about seven years ago.  I was in my fifth year of teaching and had recently switched from teaching ninth grade English to tenth grade English. We were reading Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night when I asked students about how the memoir was applicable to modern times. Drew sighed and declared:

"What does it matter? Teenagers don't have power, anyway. We can't change anything."

In one of my very first blog posts, I reflected:

"I stood there gaping for a few moments, the class watching intently to see how I would respond. How could someone so young, just at the start of his journey, be so disenfranchised? How does someone at 16 years old lose all hope? What is it that this student and others in the class who agreed with him be so afraid of, be so demoralized by? Now I know in part that such a comment was meant to goad me; I’m obviously a teacher who believes that the individual can make a difference, can change the world; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a teacher. ...It is a sad day when our future leaders lose their idealism, a belief that they can make a difference, can change the world. What hope does that leave for any of us?"

I had failed Drew and his classmates. I was teaching a book to them. Students were not engaged in the content and ideas of our class because it was something I was doing to them. Learning was not in the hands of my students. It was not meaningful because I was not facilitating learning; I was dictating it. And along with many other failures that year, Drew's question helped to propel my teaching in new directions.

Just this past weekend, one of my friends and fellow Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project teachers Judy Jester shared a quote from her recent trip to Washington D.C. for the National Writing Project annual conference.  In reviewing the 40-year history of NWP, one of the sessions speakers made the distinction between directions and direction, which applies to my role as a writing teacher today: it is not our job to provide directions; instead, it is our role to provide direction.  Kylene Beers, former president of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), writes on a similar idea in her book Why Kids Can't Read, asking her readers to reflect on how much time we spend giving instructions rather than on effective instruction.  I first stumbled upon Beers' ideas not long after Drew posed his response to me. That initial failure lead to some critical reflection and revision on how I think about teaching and how I facilitate learning.

I needed that failure to reorient my thinking. In many ways, it was a rather fortunate failure.