Giving Myself Credit & Finding Balance

I have always struggled with the “final product” of writing, and therefore writing has always been a long process for me. As a person drawn to writing for most of my life as something not only that I enjoyed, but that was an essential way to express, descipher and communicate my thoughts, I never realized what a service my habits were to my writing and work. I am incapable of not outlining the powerpoint slides that I will make later for my class while listening to lecture in a class that I am taking. I usually come to my work with a thousand pieces of note-paper that make up what I will do. And then, of course, it is easy. It is merely a matter of producing the material result, as I have already done all of the preliminary brainstorming. Chapter 2/10 in Boice were an opportunity for me to be grateful that I already do a lot of this (and a nice recognition that what I have always believed was me being “slow” to produce the same things as my peers might have been a more developed process all along, hurrah!).

But---- one thing that I did struggle with was Chapter 2’s “deficits that teachers should look to avoid,” the “No Teacher” – stating that “students learn better from and give higher ratings to teachers who are moderately self-disclosure about how they live and work” (31). I feel like I put a lot of time into making sure I don’t just present the way that I do things to my students, as I have spent a lot of time listening to my husband say what he is grateful for in learning to write (and it is definitely different that what I needed, wanted, and responded to when first learning to write). I am also still (obviously) developing as a writer myself. I suppose in trying not to force my writing style/needs on my students, I am keeping that from them. This semester I have, for the first time, a student who is constantly asking how I do something. And when I tell him, the whole class seems very happy. I still need to find the balance, it appears, between showing them other options but still recognizing that what I do is an option, and it might be right for some (or a lot!) of them.