Teachers Write Reflections

Rather be reading... but I am writing this summer.

For the last three years, Kate Messner and a group of amazing authors have organized a free summer writing support group for teachers.  Every day they post mini-lessons, prompts, and provide support through comments and feedback.  For the last couple of years, I have lurked and made feeble attempts to participate.  This year I dive in.  I believe that to teach you have to do.  While the greats, Lucy, Donald, Regie, influenced my belief in the importance of living the writing life, Katie Wood Ray inspired me to attempt to use my writing experiences for curriculum.  In What You Know By Heart, Katie says. "Because we are teachers of writing, writing for us is more than just the experience of getting it done.  We have to have that experience, but because we teach, we also have to be able to explain that experience.  We have to be able to make sense of it, to see what it means so that the experience becomes something larger than the moment.  The experience becomes something we understand about writing.  It becomes curriculum.  You see, the students who wait for us in our workshops need us to help them understand how this writing thing happens" (7).  To that effect, I am planning on writing a series of posts on my reflections of my writing experiences during Teachers Write.  My hope is to not only experience writing but to make sense of it for my students.