Teaching and Writing

So here I am, only on my second blog post and catching up on lost time…and not going to write anything about Sherman!  That’s alright; just imagine him here, sleeping away on the couch while I clack away at the table, wide awake after a post Thanksgiving dinner nap and thinking back on earlier this term. 

What I’m thinking about is being a practitioner.  This is the way a classmate describes his dedication to continuing to actually do what he is going on to teach.  It seems so simple, but there I was a few months ago, about to be eligible to teach English Language Arts and I realizing that I haven’t done much with writing in so long!  I was thinking this as I drove into town to watch Sandra Cisneros speak at Powell’s.

Now Sandra Cisneros, she is one of my all time favorites, and of all my all time favorites, she is the one I wish I could write like the most.  Her most well known book is probably The House on Mango Street, but I’m a big fan of Woman Hollering Creek and her poetry that I’ve read so far (Loose Woman, and a few from My Wicked, Wicked Ways).  She’s spicy womanhood, creative non-fiction, narrative vignettes, and Spanglish play all in one package, so of course when I heard she was going to be in Portland I got my first ever case of star fever.  Bad enough that when I finally got to get an autograph from her I was practically incoherent….and a friend told me I might as well have asked for a lock of hair.  So much for seeming calm and cool I guess, when the only thing I managed to squeak out is that I can’t wait to teach her stuff in my future classroom, and then hand her a book with someone else’s name in it's second hand cover. 

 

(Here I am getting books signed by Sandra Cisneros!)  

 

Anyway, the point of all this is the feeling that I walked away from that book reading and into the classroom the next day with.  What a change!  After weeks (er, months rather) of slogging my way through homework and class time, my own literary life was pretty dry.  I was able to read some Tony Hillerman to escape, and maybe some subtitles lazily thrown on the TV, but I hadn’t wanted to think and talk about writing the way I did leaving that bookstore in a long time. 

 And who wants that teacher?  The one that sloths around the classroom, tired and distracted by standards and surviving… who would want to learn from her?  It’s so easy to forget that one of the best things I can bring with me is a wild passion for what I want to teach, or rather, it’s so easy to forget what that passion feels like.

 Maybe it’s not even passion totally either, maybe it’s just that teaching is so much like writing in the fact that the more you live, the better you are at it.  With that in mind, I vow to be a practitioner.  I vow that I will keep loving my content area through distractions.  I vow that I will keep letting it heal me and teach me.  I vow that I will give my passion the permission it needs to enter the classroom with me every day to heal and teach others. 

I believe in reading and writing.  I also believe in reading aloud…and Sherman believes he is tired of hearing me read Woman Hollering Creek chapters to him as I make mock lesson plans and practice for reading to a class.  Yep, cool and calm are definitely out the window. 

 

Besos y abrazos,

Emma