The Reading Writing Project (teaching)

If you want to teach someone to read, you must be a reader. If you want to teach someone to write, you need to dedicate yourself to the craft of writing. This blog began as my experiment to see if I could incorporate writing in to my day. Now, the blog has become a featured player in my life. It is something I look forward to doing, something that has become a true hobby.

Today, I went to a workshop by the TC Reading Writing Project. As I was thinking about the process of writing during a workshop, two thoughts came to mind. There was a blogger who lived in my neighborhood who followed all the rules on successful blogging; she blogged on a regular basis, was interesting and funny. Then, she moved to Vermont. When she blogs now, it is about the hikes she has taken and food she has made. That's it. No daily update on things to do, musing about her environment. It seems to me that this blogger has become less focused on writing about her world and more focused on living in her world.

Then, I happened to come across another NYC blogger who described herself as an agoraphobe. Whether it was in jest or not, it made me think of the space I put between myself and the world. I have tried to make my apartment a haven from the surrounding world. I do believe that, sometimes, I am much too successful at that effort. I could not escape from the fact that maybe my place is causing me this distance. Maybe I'd be a very different me if I was someplace else.

Finally, the reading part of my title. I sat next to two women during the conference. One had taught for 30 years and the other had probably taught for a few years more. One in Bushwick and the other in the South Bronx. One loved teaching, her students, and seemed to have created a wonderful learning environment for her children. The other was overwhelmed. She did not seem able to incorporate or understand the new ideas she was being forced to use in her classroom. She did not like her students. And, she could not believe that anyone else was able to teach in these new ways. One could not wait to retire. The other was conflicted with the idea of not giving and getting love from her students.

What is it that makes one teacher so successful and the other so overwhelmed? What characteristics allow for someone to be open to ways to make their teaching more effective? What happens to make someone cling to their past? I wonder what kind of teacher I will become in a year, in a decade. I wish there was some way for me to mold myself in the model of the loving teacher I talked with today, become effective, poetry in motion. We will just have to wait and see.