What Hard Work Can Do

February 25, 2017

I believe that this has been one of the longest weeks of my life. Even though we didn't have school on Monday, there was so much else going on that I at times felt overwhelmed. Even after a reasonably restful day today, I still feel exhausted and behind.

My kids have just gone through a round of testing, and I admit that I wasn't very pleased with their results. I was talking with my co-workers trying to decide what I need to change to help my kids make progress in their learning when the results from a specific test blew me away.

I'll explain. One of the tests that they just took had two parts; a reading assessment and a writing assessment. The reading scores came back weeks ago, and those were the ones that I was stressing over. But then the writing scores came in and the growth that I saw blew me away.

One of my students grew 62 points!

I realized then that I had fallen into my old habit of making everything worse than it was. I'm a hard grader; I set high expectations for both the students and myself, and I get upset when they're not met. One of my coworkers said, "Think about it this way; you see their work every day, so it's harder for you to see the growth because it's subtle. But when you compare their writing from the first test to this one, it's easier to see the differences."

I have been working so hard with them on writing (it is, after all, what I plan to do with my life); we break down what is expected of them, define terms, create outlines, write summaries. It would seem that our hard work has created a difference.

This led me to think about my own writing. Even though I've encouraged my students to create outlines, I'd never done it for myself (unless you count my revising stage when I write down the events that have happened in order and correct names and other details). Spurred on from a talk with one of my best friends, I decided to try it on the book I'm working on. I started with the few events that I'd already written and started from there.

Half an hour later, I had a plot.

I literally tell my students that the purpose of writing an outline is so that you do the hard work on the front end, then shape the information into the proper form. Why wasn't I following that advice myself?

Now I have a clear view of subplots and character information to begin building in as I write. I always know a big picture and some of the big events in my stories, but the details usually come out in slow, painstaking fashion. The few chances that I've had to write this week have been insanely productive, and I'm so happy about it!

February is almost over. Though I only have 18 pages, I would hazard to say that it is some of my best and most coherent work that I've ever written at this stage in the process. Maybe I should listen to my friends (and myself, apparently!) more often when it comes to my writing!

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 
― George Orwell