💥The Teacher's Mirror: Unpacking My Own Writing Journey💥

Tagline: How looking back at my own process is reshaping how I look forward at my students'.

For the first two weeks in LIT 102, as we began our course we’ve been doing something deceptively simple: looking inward. Our task was to reflect on our own personal writing what we write, why we write it, and the invisible toolkit of experiences we bring to the page.

And let me tell you, as a teacher for over a decade, this was a profound mirror to hold up to myself.

I started this exercise thinking I knew my own process. I write lesson plans, reports, emails to parents, whatsapp messages …  and you know the functional stuff. But when I dug deeper, I thought about the frantic journaling I did during my first year of teaching, the heartfelt letters I write to my students at the end of a school year, and even the silly, rhyming poems I craft for my own daughter at bedtime.

The "Why" Behind the Words
What struck me most was the why. The journaling was for survival a way to process the overwhelming flood of new experiences. The letters to my students were for connection, to cement a bond that went beyond the curriculum. The poems for my daughter was  purely for joy. I wasn't just "writing"; I was healing, connecting, and loving through writing.

This realization was my first lightning bolt. How often do I create space in my classroom for writing that serves these deeper human purposes? Or is most of the writing I assign for assessment, for correction, for a grade?

The Invisible Backpack of Pre-Requisites
Then we looked at the prerequisites the background knowledge we drag into every writing task. To write those lesson plans, I need pedagogical knowledge. To write those reports, I need data on each child. To write that journal, I needed the emotional memory of the day.

This got me thinking about my students. When I ask a child to write a "story about their weekend," what am I really asking for? I'm asking them to recall memories, sequence events, choose relevant details, understand narrative structure, and have the fine motor skills to get it on paper. That’s a heavy load! And what if their weekend was stressful or lonely? The emotional prerequisite alone can be a barrier.

This reflection has left me with a burning question: Am I just teaching writing, or am I nurturing writers? Is my classroom a place where writing is a mechanical exercise, or is it a workshop where we bring our whole selves our joys, our fears, our memories to the page?

The journey inward, it seems, is the first step toward transforming my practice outward.

References

Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press.

Graves, D. H. (1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Heinemann.

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2005). Writing better: Effective strategies for teaching students with learning difficulties. Brookes Publishing.