Why I write: Breaking the surface after hiatus under water

I haven’t written more than a few sentences in draft form since the public school year started again. Understandable, and to be expected, to be sure. All part of my professional hybrid plan: write in the summer, teach a graduate course for the first eight weeks of the school year while working full-time in a public high school, and then back to writing when the teaching is done. Repeat second semester, then back to summer writing and research.

A lovely plan, and here I am, three weeks after my course is over, just picking up the blogging habit again. The itch to write has been seeping in for a few weeks now, and I feel pulled to write about why I need to write. What that itch is and how it makes me feel. And what this writing space means for me as a human, a professional educator, a public scholar, and however else I want to define myself.

Writing my mind clear

Yesterday, driving in a twilight-streaked fall landscape from childhood home to adult home, I told my daughter that I need to write because my mind feels like my body does after I’ve been lazing around on the couch for too long: bloated, slothful, sluggish, and a little sleepy. I need to write—in this form, typed, in paragraphs, for a quasi-public audience—like I need to go for walks and hikes and barre classes: to stretch my muscles, to keep myself active and alert, and to keep myself in good shape for the challenges to come. Without writing in a semi-polished, semi-public form, my ideas and questions and frustrations start to atrophy and become infected. The questions and challenges that come up in everyday life of working in schools start to fester, to become filled with bitterness and complicity, and to bog me down the way a few extra pounds and out-of-practice muscles bog me down on a long walk. Without writing, I start to sink; slowly at first, so I hardly notice it, but quickly, my head becomes fuzzy and I lose all sense of direction and the ability to change course.

I have been writing every day in my journal/notebook/whatever-it-is, but it’s not the same. I need it in a different way. I need my morning writing to settle my mind, to calm the vortex of things to do, everyday worries, and to settle the immediate stresses that pull at my attention. Morning writing helps me beat back the waves enough to move forward for the day; in ten to thirty minutes of writing by hand on paper that feels rich and warm, I can write myself into some deep breaths, purge the distractions and lists enough to get focused for the day, and embrace a few ideas that I need to sustain me for the next 24-48 hours.

But this kind of writing, this composing at a computer, ordering thoughts and coming to conclusions (however tentative), is more about long-term maintainance and thriving than on short-term survival. I can write every morning and keep going, but without these deeper dives into a sustained thought, the tides keep coming and I will eventually get overwhelmed, flooded by all the ideas, anxieties, discontents, possibilities, and urges to change.

Counter-complicity work & compass calibration

What might it look like to get flooded by the build-up of un-written, un-organized thinking? My biggest fear, I think, is that if I don’t keep writing, I will become just another complicit cog in the bureaucracy of public schools. Even if my daily interactions with teachers are centered on making humanizing choices for teachers and students, and even if I experience small shared wins with teachers in their pursuit of humanizing teaching and learning, I need to break through the surface and take a deep breath, synthesizing my thinking and clarifying my path forward.

That’s what this blog is for me: I’ve been holding my breath, swimming in the complex expansive waters of my particular educational context, doing the best I can do support vibrant life in our corner of the educational ocean, and then, finally, when I sit down to write about it, my head breaks through the surface and I can see clearly and breath again. I can see the world around me, course-correct as needed, and re-center myself for the next dive. I can pause, search, receive, and contemplate before the next deep round of work. I can make sure I can still recognize my surroundings, myself, and my goals and ensure that I have not become disorientated by other people’s goals and by the inexorable current of the school system.

To some extent, going with the systemic flow in schools is inevitable: the current is strong, and it’s impossible to swim completely upstream. But I want to make sure I’m always setting a course I choose in consultating with my theoretical and experiential compass, rather than accepting the pull of tradition and the current of systemic habit. As the dailiness of the school year sets in—another Monday, another Tuesday, another TGIF—it’s easy to give over to exhaustion and just let the sense of school as normal, school as inevitable, work as just the thing I do every day. In other words, it is easy to become simply complicit in systems and practices with which I fundamentally disagree.

When experience and expertise foster complicity

I’ve been feeling these moments of complicity this fall as I’ve started my second year in my current position. After learning the ropes last year and struggling to understand new systems, I’m no longer constantly shocked and stressed by things I’ve come to understand, like how certain grading practices are written and implemented, or how the transmission of learning targets seems to trump authentic assessments and inquiry-based learning. I still seek opportunities to disrupt these systemic constraints, but I have also been in the position of explaining these practices to new colleagues who have joined our staff this year. Part of my job this year has been \ to explain current practices to new-to-district staff so that they can collaborate with their new colleagues and understand the curriculum and materials they’re asked to use.

But since these are still practices I believe must be challenged, disrupted, and reformed in order to pursue more culturally sustaining pedagogies, I’m also constantly seeking ways to inform about current practice while creating sapce for change and challenge. I don’t want our new staff members to feel forced into problematic systems any more than I wanted to be assimilated last year, yet I also need to help them understand the waters they’re swimming in so that they can find their bearing. This contradiction between learning to swim in new waters while also challenging the current and seeking new directions is complicated. And without rising to the surface to write, reflect, and synethesize, I have been inching closer to becoming overwhelmed. I’m closer than I’d like to the “not waving but drowning” point that I need to avoid if I want to keep working in our essential but imperfect public schools: the point of burnout and demoralization that would mean I cocanuld no longer thrive while working for reform within the system.

A resolution

And so, I resolve to write.

And in mid-January when I teach again, I need to resolve to continue writing at least a little bit. What rhythm could help me maintain this? Maybe back to the monthly blog post rhythm that served me well in grad school: at least one post in January, February, and March, and again in August, September, and October. Those are the months when I am planning and teaching the most. And I can start as many drafts as possible, collecting ideas for when I have time to flesh them out with my head above water. And in between that time—April, May, June, July, November, December—I could aim for weekly posts. Yes, that feels feasible…and more importantly, it feels like the write/right amount of synthesizing bursts to keep my hybrid professional life in public schools and academic afloat. Without that writing, I suspect I may find myself sinking again sooner rather than later.

And so here I am imagining that I am in my stamina-building months, those months in which I build up my endurance, my breath capacity, my muscle strength so that when I need to take my deep-dive months of more sustained time under the school waters, I will have built up my capacity for clear-eyed swimming in the direction I want and need to go. I will fortify myself against the fuzzy-brained stupor that started to set in in late September and early October once the new-school-year adreneline started to fade away. And I will add these deep-breathing writing bursts to my current regimine of my more quotidien writing babbles.

Like my own special positively-charged myoglobin, want to be like a Curvier whale or elephant seal of the educational system, storing up positively-charged proteins for surviving long dives. My positive charges will come from my breaths of fresh air and synthesizing bursts into the clear air of writing. Here’s to the first of at least four bursts of writing air this month!