I love the opportunities to spend informal, conversational time with my students.  I often find that time on our walk to the garden.  It’s a longish walk and away from the classrooms, so some conversation doesn’t disturb anyone.  I made the walk with students four times today…twice going there and twice coming back (with my class split in half–the other half was in the classroom with my co-teacher).

On my final walk back to the classroom I was bringing up the rear with some second grade girls in my class.  As I listened in to their conversation, I noticed that they were talking about math and creating math stories that included elements of the garden.  When they noticed me listening they let me know that they were planning a “math playdate.”  A math playdate!  What an amazing idea!  They had made a case to their parents that they needed this playdate…with a math focus.  They had planned that the mom at the house they were going to would write up some math problems for them to solve and they would create their own math story problems (like the one I overheard).  We talked about whether they would include some of the other strategies we use in the classroom–like the way I pose problems, “If the answer is 15, what is the question?”

Honestly, this conversation surprised me.  These are not my confident, competitive math students (yes, I have a few of those!).  These are my pretty quiet, but definitely competent girls.  I work hard to make math fun in the classroom.  We play around with numbers and math concepts daily, with an emphasis on explaining thinking and problem solving.  We look for multiple approaches to solving problems and take time to learn from our mistakes.  Learning that these students see math as a fun way to spend their time together delights me!

I got to harvest more than pumpkins today!  As teachers, we never know when those seeds will germinate and grow and blossom.  What seeds did you plant to today?

“Children want to write.”  These words written by Donald Graves before I even began my teaching career echo in my head and push me to improve my teaching…and my own writing.  Each and every day.

Donald Graves also influenced my view of myself as a teacher researcher early in my career. Through his writing and conference presentations, I learned to view my teaching as a work in progress responsive to the needs of the students in front of me.  Through his work I learned to pay close attention to my students and to listen carefully.

Children will continually surprise us if we let them.  This is what happens when we slow down, listen, and let the children lead.  That is the joy of both research and teaching.” Donald Graves

Some days teaching writing is hard.  I have students who resist and say, “I don’t know what to write.”  And I know exactly how they feel.  Some days I don’t know what to say in my writing either.  But I strive to struggle through…and I ask them to do that too.  In the Writing Project we say that the best teacher of writing is a writer his/herself.  And I know this is true, because I know what makes writing hard because I write.  And I know that writing is the answer to that struggle to write.  Some days I have to write through the struggle just to find out what I have to say.

“Write yourself. Invite children to do something you’re already doing. If you’re not doing it, ‘Hey,’ the kids say, ‘I can’t wait to grow up and not have to write, like you.’ They know. And for the short term and the long term, you’ll be doing yourself a favor by writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we need to invite children to do what we’re doing. You can’t ask someone to sing a duet with you until you know the tune yourself.”

We all need mentors in our lives.  Donald Graves was one of mine, and his writing remains to continue to guide my thinking.  And those he mentored continue his work and provide guidance for the next generation of teachers and writers.  My students also mentor me.  They continually remind me to have high expectations and limitless patience.  And they prove Donald Graves right, “Children want to write.”

Who are your mentors?  How do you continue their work?

I teach symmetry to my young students each year.  As a math concept it’s about those lines, you know, the ones that if you fold a shape along lines of symmetry the shape will be the same on each side.  But in practice, in life, symmetry is more than that.

Here’s my collection of #symmetry photos for the first four days of August:

The pure mathematician might argue with the validity of my symmetry photos.  But what I love most about looking for symmetry is that I am also noticing other interesting design elements…and the places where symmetry falls apart, and the places where symmetry is intentionally absent.

Sometimes I think symmetry gets confused with balance.  You know, like the scales where you have to have equal weight on each side to make the buckets hang at exactly the same level. Sometimes I love symmetry…two sides that perfectly mirror one another.  And other times I love the impact of asymmetry, purposeful disruption of that mirror image.

Exploring symmetry makes me think about choices we make in our lives.  I think balance may be overrated.  Sometimes we simply need to go overboard–and follow our passions to the extreme.  That is where creativity lives, pushing the limits and following whims without regard to the rules of design or achieving balance.  And that’s the beauty of iteration, revision, or even failure…it gives us the opportunity to look again, try again, and see what we might do differently the next time around.  Learning is like that.

Time is one of those precious commodities that we never seem to have enough of.  There are so many demands on our time—work and family, the business of maintaining homes and cars and health and beauty.  And then there are all those things we want to do: play and make and explore and learn.

We’re often impatient, wanting to see the fruits of our labor immediately, especially as teachers.  We want to see our students grasp new concepts and show us they are learning.  We often forget that learning is not fast and often follows a zig-zaggy trajectory rather than that even slope of progression that seems to be the meme for learning.

Yesterday, Judy shared this short, eloquent piece from Ralph Fletcher in his book Mentor Author, Mentor Texts: Short Texts, Craft Notes, and Practical Classroom Uses, who writes about his experience spending a day with eighty-year-old doctor.

We worked together planting baby trees in New Hampshire.  The saplings were little bitty things, no more than six or eight inches tall.

“It’ll take twenty years before they’re even close to maturity,” he admitted with a wry smile.  “Guess I won’t be around to see it.”

I was struck by the quiet heroism of this act, planting trees that would never bring him shade.  As writing teachers, we do the same thing.  It won’t happen today.  It may not even happen this year, or next.  But you can count on it: one day our young writers will blossom, even if we’re not there when it happens.  Except I actually think we will be there, buried deep inside them.

I think this is true—when we are being the best teachers we can with student learning at the center of our practice—but I also think that some of our young writers “die on the vine” at school, from lack of water, sun, and nutrients necessary for growth.

And I’m also remembering my beautiful lavender plant from my front yard that got relegated to the wilds of the backyard during our early spring plumbing disaster—a place where “out of sight, out of mind” meant a lack of watering and near death.  And yet, we didn’t discard it, assume that it had died.  Instead…as we became more mindful and intentional about caring for it and nurturing it (and with strategic placement where it gets some water from the automatic lawn sprinklers), it is beginning to come back.

We can do that for our students too.  Instead of feeling bad for not being the best possible teacher for the students who came before, we can work to nurture the learners we have before us.  We can keep learning ourselves and share that learning with these young people in our care.  Time will always be a challenge…for fitting in our own learning and for uncovering evidence of our students’ learning.

And then I think of myself as a writer.  How often do the demands of work and life suck up time necessary for writing and thinking and dreaming…the lifeblood of composition.  I’m working to find ways to be more intentional about my writing life; creating strategic ways to find spaces for writing and thinking and dreaming.

What do you do to nurture the young writers in your life?  How do you nurture your own writerly life?