Yesterday was day 2 of the SDAWP Advanced Institute that I wrote about in March. On this second day, we moved our work to focus on revision mindsets and building confidence as writers with the help of Chris Hall’s The Writer’s Mindset and Liz Prather’s The Confidence to Write. An identity as writer for a teacher has an important impact on writing instruction. Teachers teach qualitatively differently when they understand their subject matter from the inside out. Teacher-writers have experienced all that makes writing hard. They know how it feels to face a blank page–and then write through uncertainty and fear. And they can support students to develop a writerly identity too.

This morning I awoke to Jessica’s “found annotations” prompt for #verselove over at Ethical ELA. My first reaction was, “Oh no!” I’m not really much into annotating–and it’s not something I do with first graders. I do annotate their observations of weekly poems and encourage them to respond to text, but we frequently depend on oral language for those annotations.

But then I thought about some of the reading we did yesterday and I grabbed my copy of The Confidence to Write, picked a section in the chapter on the fear of the blank page called Breathe Through It, and started annotating. I then went back and let my poet brain wander through the annotations and my thinking. Here’s my poem:

Complexities of Simplicity

Breathe in

one, two, three, four

Breathe out

one, two, three, four

Feel the rhythm

the beat

drum drumming

refilling air sacs

lung pillows

calming, slowing,

pushing pounds

immoveable objects

pushing stress

filling

refilling

slowing

Breathe in

one, two, three, four

Breathe out

one, two, three , four

Count each breath

like steps

walking

through the sand

hear the tide

pushing in and out

dancing to the beat

of your heart

study says

breathing deep

increases productivity

by 47-62 minutes

Breathe in

one, two, three, four

Breathe out

one, two, three, four

Dive in

swim through

tap the rhythms

find the beat

immersed

in salty life blood

in salty sea water

emerge

with confidence

and breathe

Breathe in

one, two, three, four

Breathe out

one, two, three, four

@kd0602