writing in the open spaces

I tell my young writers, “Don’t focus on the product. Work through the process.” This is how we grow as writers.

And, yet, this morning, I can’t seem to follow my own advice.

Each Thursday, I participate in what Elizabeth calls “An Art Experience.” She offers a small group of us the chance to explore various media in whatever way we choose. She challenges us to let go and urges us to take risks. This is what I tell teachers I work with all the time. This should come easily, I think.

But it doesn’t.

As I mix my watercolor paints, trying to get the perfect ocean blue or pastel green, I feel my anxiety and frustration. “It’s not working,” I think, as I struggle to find the comfortable space between the sky and sea or tree and leaf. My house looks like a tent, and my chicken looks frozen in time, ready to be covered with yellow sugar and placed in an Easter basket. Not what I’d envisioned.

Elizabeth smiles. She knows that continued playing and putting brush to paper (or charcoal to canvas) will eventually allow me to find myself in my art, to create whatever it is I am striving for. She applauds when I pull out my colored pencils and draw on a background of watercolor and grins when I decide to dribble water on the charcoal “just to see what happens.”

Vygotsky says “children tend to create only for themselves, whereas adults create both for themselves and for the world in which they live.” I wonder if this is the block, the filter through which adults try to create. We fear judgment.

Elizabeth reassures me today, and I try again. I think she would agree with this quote from a Scottish education site:

Creativity is not just about special people doing special things. We all have the potential to be creative….a skill that needs to be developed.

 

So far, I am a failure. I managed 1000 or so words for NaNoWriMo, and then decided I hated my plot. I haven’t been able to get back on track, and it’s killing me.

As much as I loved the idea of writing a novel, I don’t know if I can. Or if I want to.

I think I may have to switch gears and write something about middle-schoolers, writing, learning, or thinking–and ways all of that can come together. But, as I’ve said so many times recently, failure isn’t all bad, is it? We can learn from our failures if we reflect on them.

At this point, I am still swirling around in the mud. As soon as I come up for air, I’ll see if I can regain my focus and figure out what my problem is.

 

Playing with my creative side. That’s the excuse I use when I change the theme of my blog.

It doesn’t matter though, really. This blog has lost any semblance of organization and consistency. It has become my place to collect, think, and dream. About what’s next.

Downtown Writing Studio. That may be the name I choose for what seems to be rolling around in my head as a potential way to do what I love to do. A place for middlers (ages 10 to 14?) to work on their writing. A place for those who think they can’t and those who know they have to. I’m envisioning small groups, reading clubs, day-long workshops? First around my dining room table and next in a comfy, warm space downtown. Maybe a nonprofit eventually?

 

Ok, last post for a while. I really like these three slides from this slide deck:

 

People who have been reading my blog for a while must be scratching their heads. She’s turned off comments, she’s not focusing on edtech, and she’s not writing regularly.

That’s all true.

But I am thinking, working, and positioning myself for what’s next. After reading for months about creativity and the brain, I decided I had to venture out, do more than sit in front of my computer all day.

And so I have. I’ve been meeting in an artists’ group with my friend Elizabeth. Don’t you love the sound of that? An artists’ group.

Each Thursday, we gather in Elizabeth’s studio to explore our creative side. One woman is working on miniature oil paintings. Another hauls in a bag of various textures to continue a collage that might help her envision life after retirement. And I, I started to draw.

Using a variety of pens, markers, and papers, I have been working on what it means to sketch. The drawings are rough, but I plug along. I’ve watched myself move from “I can’t do that” to “I’ll try”–and I think of my students.

For a change last week, I decided to switch to a different medium. Elizabeth introduced me to watercolor painting. She explained the difference between wet on dry and wet on wet, and helped me learn how water shapes and moves the paints around on the paper.

Glorious.

As I painted, I kept thinking about my grandmother, a wise woman who left school after eighth-grade. Yet she painted, wrote books, and fished off the Rhode Island coast with my grandfather in the coldest weather. Though she loved her family deeply, she kept a life of her own–a creative life that she shared with her grandchildren. I remember her in the plays we performed in her yard, the books we read on her couch, and the paths we followed in her well-tended garden, searching for treasures she purposely left for us to discover.

These days, I am pushing myself out of my comfort zone working on the Second Journey.

Oh, I’ve also decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, and I’m already behind. I’ve changed the plot line of my novel twice, and now I think I’m starting again–this time a nonfiction piece about letting go.  I’ll get there. No stress.

 

Cross-posted on the PLP blog

My contract with AT&T is up in a few days, and, because of all the dropped calls I seem to have in my house, I swore I would switch back to Verizon as soon as I could. (We don’t have a land line.) I figured I would purchase the Verizon iPhone and simply change services.

But I also recently bought an iPad and carry a monthly data charge for that. So I’ve been wondering…should I carry two devices with data charges? Yes, I know. The iPad is big. Who’s going to pull that out when a smaller phone will do the trick? And I need to be connected all the time, right?

I’m not so sure anymore.  My focus lately has been learning how to balance my time, be more in the moment, and less “on.” My tendency to click, click, click means I don’t pause to reflect as much as I should. And, even more, I don’t allow myself to be bored.

Standing in line at the grocery store, I check email. Waiting for the vet to come back into the office, I pop twitter up to read and respond to the latest. Riding along in the car to Richmond, I click on my iPhone Kindle app and read the next chapter in “The Social Animal” by David Brooks. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I am becoming conditioned to respond to the rewards of consuming information wherever and whenever I want it.

In a post on BNET by Laurie Tarkan, Genevieve Bell, the director of interaction and experience research at Intel, said engaging with mobile devices  “is the promise that you’ll never be bored again, you’ll never have to be anywhere without something to do.”

And, yet, there is a downside.

”Boredom is linked to creativity. You have your best thoughts in the shower, when driving, painting fences, and weeding the yard,” she says. Other researchers have stated that boredom is central to learning and creativity.

On the flip side, when you’re constantly consuming information via your devices, you stop processing the information and developing your own ideas. You have less time to think about what you’re consuming. To be effective in most jobs, you need to stop and reflect……

Tarkan lists several ways to be bored, and they make sense. For example, she says “stop being obsessed with doing,” and ”be bored with others.”

But, sadly,  I’m thinking I may need a more disciplined approach, and that may mean letting the iPhone go. It’s not that I don’t find value in all my curating and consuming. I do. But I’m wondering if spending less time with my face in a device will ultimately yield deeper, more reflective thinking and create sharpened connections to what I am learning.

Anticipating some sense of loss, I am trying to prepare for this. And then I think, “Geesh, it’s just a phone!”

Does any of this resonate? Do you allow yourself to be bored?

 

I went to my first meditation “class” the other night and learned how powerful a moment is. A moment can win a race, change an argument, burn a pie, or cause a tragedy. In our daily lives,  we so often look to the future or analyze the past without focusing on what is in front of us.

In our classrooms, we search for bigger meaning, attempting to shift our entire teaching practice, or achieve higher scores on a random, ineffective standardized test. The quest for rigidly following the curriculum and getting to the end of the day makes us move through life in anticipation of –what?

Instead, imagine what we could do with a moment:

• smile at an unruly child
• give a second chance
• write a positive affirmation on a struggling student’s essay
• take the class outside for a break on a gorgeous day
• share a personal recollection from your own childhood

I am learning to slow down and breathe deeply. The breathing allows me seconds more to focus on the moment and take it all in. The days will take care of themselves if the moments count. Be present.

What would you do in a moment?

image credit: By jesse.millan

 

And while we’re on the topic of fear, check out BrendaDee’s post that makes great points about teacher innovation vs tradition:

Once in practice, educators discover that preparing students to be design thinkers, tinkerers, creative problem solvers, leaders etc can be highly abstract and that many of today’s teachers are uncomfortable with the pedagogical changes needed to shift from traditional teaching practices to the education reform required to “make schools places that cultivate creativity” (Florida, 2004).

She also references Nancy Stuewe’s post on teaching and innovation. Powerful questions to ponder:

1. What opportunities do teachers have to make sense of their experiences with innovation and change?

2. We do not make it easy for students to be innovative by making it difficult for teachers to be innovative. Can we describe clearly what is standing in the way of teachers becoming both creative and innovative?

3. Technology changes quickly, teachers regularly come into contact with technology they have no experience with. How do we help them gain this experience and reduce their frustration?

4. To become an architect of learning requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught (we can not give what we do not have). How can we support teachers to build their own profession learning networks during working hours?

5. Given that People not technology will be the solutions to problems, how do we adjust the structure of the working environment to allow for the free flowing exchange of ideas to support their personalized learning?

 

I’ve been wondering about how to make these changes more feasible within the constraints of our working hours as well (though I recognize that traditional “working hours” will be another necessary change). This may be the heart of the matter:

…how do we shift a the system that once discouraged participation to now encourage teachers to engage in mindful, thoughtful interaction with why we have school?

 

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