Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Writer's Block

I was having trouble coming up with something to write today, so I did what I always tell my students to do. I looked at the daily Sacred Writing Time slide. It's Alien Abduction day! Which is cool, but not something that feels very inspiring to me right now. Then, I did the second thing I tell my students to do, which is to use their bingo sheets. The bingo sheets are a 5 x 5 grid of writing prompts I hand out monthly. If students complete five of the prompts in a row, they can turn them in for candy or extra credit. The rows are designed to force students to experiment with five different genres of writing. I looked over some of the March topics: look up seven facts about a bird and paraphrase them, write a letter of gratitude to a custodian or bus driver, what's the first thing you would do if you had an army of minions, etc. All fun prompts that generate good responses from a lot of students, but nothing that appeals to me in this moment. 

I have a few other writing prompt books lying around, but there are tests to grade and people to call, so I skipped to the last thing I tell my students to do: just write what you are thinking. And here I am. Still writing. Hello, world!

Not every day will be your best writing. Some days, you will write something terrible, and that's okay. Sometimes, we write to clear space in our heads for better days, to find out what definitely does NOT work, and sometimes, just as we are about to give up, we come up with an idea worth writing about (like I just did as I was writing this sentence).

So now, the conundrum. Do I delete this post and write the new idea? Do I save the new idea for tomorrow and post this rambling stream of consciousness anyway? I think I do. And someday, when a student is struggling, I'll show them this post, and they'll see that sometimes even teacher writers have a hard time knowing what to say.



2 comments:

  1. I am glad you didn't delete this post. It will be good for students to know you struggle. I imagine that you might get some comments about how we all struggle. I was thrilled we had a fire drill yesterday. I am hopeful something exciting happens today, because I have no plan yet for tomorrow's post.

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  2. Also glad you didn't delete. I almost wrote a similar post today. 20 days in a row feels hard. But that must mean we are writers!

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