Sharing My Writing Vulnerabilities by Karon McGovern

Most students in any given classroom that involves having to write will feel vulnerable at some stage or other. This vulnerability may involve a fear of writing or simply fears as a whole brought on by daily struggles with life.

This past school year, when the dreaded ‘research paper’ descended upon us, I decided to address both elements of vulnerability: the fear of writing and aching life fears that many young students have to confront every day.  I did this by asking students to write a paper on an element of life they have survived or a situation they are surviving daily as we started to write and through this, I was to showcase my own vulnerabilities as a teacher.

I modeled an example, every step of the way, invoking my own voice and my own pain over the loss of a loved one.  I was scared, as my own feelings were still raw, but as I wrote, badly, with more spelling and grammar errors I would have wanted my students to see from their teacher, I kept asking the students how I could better express some of the feelings I was trying to capture, demonstrating that there are always questions and no one right way.   I posted my examples in the students’ Google Classroom (mistakes and all), as we pursued our first drafts.  For their own work, the personal voice students had been granted by me,  and the “reality” of the content about which they were writing, freed them from the confines of the “literary analysis” type writing.  Their vulnerabilities strengthened their writing.

Still, one student remained frozen in space, unable to write. I spent time discussing how my own vulnerabilities are expressed and exercised in my writing and asked the student how she liked to let her own feelings out  …. “By painting,” she told me.  Then, I said, paint me an essay.  She did.  I faced my vulnerability as a writing teacher of being unable to get this one student to write, and she countered with facing her own vulnerabilities by way of oil on canvas.

Karon McGovern is an English Teacher at New Fairfield High School, Connecticut.  While currently at the “back end” of her working life, she is starting only her 7th year as a teacher, having spent over 30 years in the corporate world.  Karon is from the United Kingdom; most of her life has been spent in England.  She has embraced writing for over 30 years, having been involved in writing training material and technical manuals.  She finally gave up on the corporate world to take her lifelong passion for writing into the classroom to help nurture those skills in those who pass through our education system. You can follow Karon on Twitter at @MrsKPMcG