It's About the Mindset by Mario Kersey

Since 2014, I have moved into August confident that my writing life will be less disrupted by the ineluctable school year. For years prior, my bright ideas and momentum disappeared like smoke in a hurricane, because I had to attend professional development or work on a new syllabus or arrange my room.  And that’s just the workdays before school officially started.  So, what did I change? The quick answer is: I changed my mindset.

Now, don’t worry, I won’t become Dweckian here.  In the past, I stopped writing during the workdays before school started.  My thought at that time was to commit fully to whatever new theme or agenda we were pushing for the upcoming school year.  I mean I ate and slept new school year like I was prepping for a marathon.

The novel act I performed to change this behavior was to write during this preparatory phase.  Wow!  Whenever the flare of an idea lit up my mind’s eyes during the workdays, I wrote it down on whatever I had at hand.  In other words, I wrote new lines of poetry, loglines, paragraphs, or dialogue in addition to the actual projects set in motion (I created a writer’s scrapbook to keep up.).  As a result, my overall mood changed to positive because I was constantly producing something. I felt a sense of accomplishment and a growing confidence that I could be productive and successful writing during the school year.  The bigger projects were also being completed despite the usual distractions a school year engenders.

Also, I made the decision to respect my writing time more and what it brings to my teaching. My writing makes me better prepared to deal with the struggles my students will experience when explicating a poem in an essay or writing a villanelle.  By respecting my craft—both of them—life became more harmonious.

So the moral here is to write as often as possible if you can’t write every day.  Furthermore, if the opportunity presents itself, share your “pain” with your students.  It demystifies writing to them and keeps writing.
 

Mario Kersey studies society through the classrooms of his English students. When not teaching writing, literature, and the sometimes frustrating quirkiness of the English language, he bakes cakes, pies, and biscuits. He’s shy until someone disparages the five-paragraph essay, then the claws come out.