Starting, stopping, and starting again.

I began this week's reading by tackling the chapters in the Allyn & Bacon. I thought this would take a short period of time, but then I opened the book, took a quick skim, and realized that together, this was 77 pages of dense, informational, textbook reading. So, I sat on the couch, grabbed my favorite cat (yes, I have a favorite), and dove in. I wanted to read closely so that I'd know what to assign to my students from these chapters, and so two hours were gone fairly quickly. I wanted to stop, and I wanted to move on to something else, but I kept thinking that if I stopped, I'd forget what I was thinking or I wouldn't start again. So, I kept reading. I finished up, dusted myself off, and then began reading Boice's chapter titled "Stop."

Why didn't I read that first? I found it ironic that the entire chapter focuses on stopping writing/reading/teaching-preparation even when you're not done. Boice describes my experience of reading the Allyn&Bacon perfectly when he writes, "Impatience and its impulsivity reinforce feelings that we are doing something too important to cease and that stopping now will cause us to lose concentration, control, self-worth, and brilliance" (49). Now, I'm not saying that reading the Allyn&Bacon requires intense concentration or that it's super important (no offense Ramage, Bean, and Johnson), but what I am saying is that I've become the type of person who prefers to complete a task before moving on. For example, I can only read one book at a time--if I start a novel or a work of creative non-fiction, I have to finish it before I can move on. This proves problematic when I start something, hate it, and then don't want to finish. When I'm not in school, this can mean not reading for a month.

Basically, the act of reading the Allyn & Bacon, and then reading about effective and non-effective reading/writing/preparing strategies made me realize that I need to rethink how I do things. Changing habits can be really hard, but I bet with some work it could be possible. The biggest roadblock for me is that my current state of "finish it and then move on" has made it so that I always complete everything on time. If I switch things up, could that change? I guess we'll see...