A poem a day for 30 days, which also means I have read poem upon poem upon poem for 30 days. I’ve read poems to my students, poems written by my students, poems offered as invitations, poems written by others in this poem writing community. I’ve struggled with words, celebrated with words, thrown words at my notebook to see which stuck, deleted words from my digital pages (again and again and again), fallen in love with words, admired the words written by others, and amassed quite a number of words written. I’ve chuckled and giggled, gasped and wondered…and shed a few tears too. I feel like I know poets I have never met, connected with poets from other time zones and places, and learned to recognized poets by their style, their posting time, their poetic voice and the way they respond to my poems. My poet heart feels both empty and full at the same time, grateful for all the words and already missing the demand for still more words. Will I write tomorrow? I’m sure I will. Will it be a poem? Probably not. But then again, who knows? My email box offered up Georgia Heard’s May Poetry Calendar today along with explicit permission to write small. Who can resist that?
I’ve written scar stories, I’ve had my students write their own scar stories, but when Bryan’s scar prompt came up this morning at Verselove, I just kept thinking about my good fortune in this life.
Instead of my own scars, my mind immediately went to a student that I didn’t get to help this year. Time with me was too brief, attendance too sporadic, and eventually fear won and my student was gone. I can only imagine the resulting scars for this child and this family.
Both Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone and Margaret at Reflections on the Teche posted poems using a form they called a shadorma: a six-line poem that follows a 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable count. To keep myself focused and constrained, I used this structure for today’s poem.
On this 31st day of writing and posting, I’ve found a rhythm. Somehow, even when it seems that an idea for writing will elude me, something shows up. There is something about writing every day that brings forth writing every day.
On my most stuck days I do a couple of things.
Take a walk through my camera roll to find an image that sparks something: a memory, a metaphor, a story, a connection…
Read other people’s blog posts–either from fellow slicers at Two Writing Teachers or those I follow from other sources. Reading the writing of others might offer a structure I can adapt (13 ways, things worth sharing). I might remember a way to offer myself a lifeline when feeling overwhelmed and under-timed (6-word stories). Or I might more generally find a topic I relate to and allows at least a trickle of ideas to flow.
But what I love best about writing every day during the month of March is writing in community. The Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge brings together writers who are challenging themselves to write, even when writing feels hard. And, they are taking the time to read and respond to the writing of others. There is a spirit of generosity in this space that pushes writing forward–at least for me. These generous writers, most of whom I do not know, take the time to read and comment on the posts I publish. In a short period of time, they feel like friends. And these friends keep me accountable to myself, helping me trace a path through my brain in search of ideas that will set my writing loose.
Last night when I went to bed, I told myself I would get up and walk in the morning while my husband was at the gym. I wanted to get my daily walk done and out of my way on this first “real” day of spring break so the rest of the day could unfold without attention to a need for exercise. When I awoke this morning, everything was wet.
What? Rain in a place where it seldom rains? I consulted my weather app (as though the wet ground were not evidence enough), sure enough, precipitation expected for the next couple of hours. Hmmm–should I walk or not? I checked outside–drizzle seemed a good word to describe this event.
The raincoat with the hood up was a good idea. The damp began to layer and droplets started to trace a path off the edge of my hood, making its way onto the toes of my shoes, and into the recesses of my brain. Everywhere I looked pathways opened. I could see sap rising and feeding the greening trees. Closed flower buds waited, ready for the sun’s light to highlight a path for the bees to follow. But it was the snails that spoke to me.
I knelt low, camera in hand, noticing the paths traced on the wet sidewalk. Tiny snails smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger, others the size of my thumb slimed their way across the walking path. Where are they going? Where did they come from? If I didn’t know better, I would think they drop from the sky in the raindrops! Their zigzagging paths unloosed a path in my writing brain, as I traced the wonder, struggle, and yes, delight in the act of writing and posting every day. Will my ideas go back into some kind of hibernation (wherever snails go when the weather is dry) if I don’t keep up my writing practice?
Lucky for me, tomorrow marks the beginning of National Poetry Month and I have gotten in the habit over the last few years of writing and posting a poem each day in April. Many in the Two Writing Teachers community also find themselves posting to Verselove at Ethical ELA. Maybe I will see you there.
I did a bit of an archeological dig today. I found out that I started this blog a little less than eleven years ago (in July of 2013). When i started, I gave myself a 30-day challenge to try to establish a writing and posting habit. But I ended up writing and posting everyday for over a year (I missed one day that year when I was sick). I was afraid to stop, thinking I might never start again.
I’ve been writing and posting for 60 consecutive days each March and April since 2018 as I participate in both the Slice of Life Challenge (thanks Two Writing Teachers) and then National Poetry Month where I have written and posted a poem everyday, most recently with the help of #verselove over at Ethical ELA.
And I write and post periodically at other times throughout the year, frequently about teaching and learning activities in my classroom.
But does any of this provide insight into why I write?
I consider myself to be a teacher-writer. Someone who writes what I ask my students to write, who composes in front of them to demonstrate both the challenges and the successes. And for similar reasons I blog and post to make my teaching processes visible, again sharing both challenges and successes. I could just write in a journal, writing for myself. But for me, it is the process of going “public”–even if no one reads my posts–that nudges me to clarify, for myself and others, why I do what I do. It also keeps me from complaining (which I am want to do in private writing) and forces me to find some kind of conclusion or resolution to each writing piece I do.
I love that writing gives me opportunity for reflection. When I am writing I find myself considering how I might do something in its next iteration. What should be done differently, what should remain essentially the same? I think about how I feel as a teacher–what is working, what makes my work hard, what makes my students’ learning easier and more fun. And I consider what brings joy…to me, to my students, to my family, maybe even my readers. (I actually wrote my teaching goal this year about joy–which my principal agreed was a great goal!)
I also write because I have community in these online spaces. I learn from the writing choices my online colleagues make, mentors in ways they likely don’t know. I appreciate each tap of the like button and every comment of encouragement that keeps me accountable and on track, even on those days that coming up with a topic feels impossible. The Two Writing Teachers/Slice of Life community is incredible–offering inspiration and support, encouragement and comfort, always seeming to know what I need and when I need it.
I write to understand myself and to understand the inner workings experienced as a writer. I’ve learned that writing is never easy and always worth it.
Hope to see you all in these online spaces even without a monthly challenge and maybe on some Tuesdays for the weekly SOL challenges. Until next year…
I love to take photos–and I take and post photos daily and have more more than 12 years. Some days and weeks I find myself in the doldrums where it seems like I have taken that same photo again and again. Sometimes the photo I see with my eyes just doesn’t come out of my camera no matter how hard I try.
What I love about photography is that it forces me to slow down and pay attention to the moment. I find myself paying attention to shadows, textures, colors, the interplay of light and dark…and then I notice sounds and smells and find myself wanting to run my fingers over a surface that looks bumpy or smooth or somehow different that I expect.
I came across this Mary Oliver poem the other day while scrolling my Instagram…and kept returning to it until finally I just took a screen shot so I could reread it over and over and over again.
Screenshot
In some ways this poem expresses how I feel about taking photos. Through my camera my aim is to be that rich lens of attention that allows me to take in the world, learning along the way. Breathing in and breathing out, slowing down, taking time, and looking with all my senses as I capture an aspect of my experience with a click of the shutter.
Writing everyday means looking for an idea for writing every day. I get a number of email newsletters about assorted topics that pique my interest. Today, it was the Art of Noticing newsletter that I was drawn to as I read the subject line, Objects Quarterly. To be honest I haven’t really read through it yet, just skimmed over the topics such as A History of Women in 101 Objects (which is book that I have not read). But as I skimmed that I started thinking about the role of objects in a teacher’s life.
I’m one of those teachers who still uses a traditional paper plan book. You know, the ones with plain brown or blue covers that has each week laid out with the spiral binding in the middle. For many years my plan books were just that, plain, unassuming…sometimes I wrote the year across the front (often once the year was over). Then at some point, my teaching partner and I started to put a sticker on each year that included the year, our names, and an image that indicated the overarching theme of our year. But recently, I started putting stickers on my plan book. Not just one here or there, but wall to wall stickers both front and back.
Where do I get these stickers, you might ask? And what significance do they have? Those are great questions. Some of the stickers are USvsHate stickers, student messaging about equity and inclusion. I’ve received them as a teacher who has submitted student messaging to the USvsHate contest. I’ve even had students whose messaging was selected as winning. And my son–the one who is an artist–designs and produces stickers as “swag” that he sends out with products he ships (he also sends his mom some stickers–and those are featured prominently). Now, I collect stickers from wherever I can. Sometimes the stickers are promotional, like the ones I got from the Rainbow sandals store. Some are from environmental organizations… The list goes on.
I love these stickers on my plan book. When I open it each morning my eyes skim over the images and it makes me smile. When my student gave me (and all her classmates) stickers last week, I carefully found a place for them on my plan book. One of my students noticed the plan book cover and said–hey, where did you get that sticker book? And so I had to show off the covers. (They never see the cover since I keep it opened to the week on a table most days.)
There was a time when my plan book mostly stayed at school, but since the pandemic I find myself taking it back and forth with me from school to home each day. Honestly, it is more of a security blanket since there are many days when I change almost everything that is written in it. But maybe that is what objects are all about–symbols of thinking and planning and preparation with my stickers reminding me of the value of creativity, social justice, nature, and whimsy.
If you were to write about an object in your professional life, what would it be? What is its significance? How do you personalize it?
In a couple of spare moments between parent-teacher conferences today this email heading caught my eye: Significance of the Seemingly Ordinary. It was a Daily Good article, which always begin with a quote. Here was the one from today:
As I read through the teaser paragraph I became even more intrigued. It describes a movie where the character takes a photograph of the store across the street every morning at 8 o”clock. He has 4000 photos meticulously labeled and mounted in albums. Photos that are the same…and not the same. When he shows them to a blocked writer, the writer flips through the photos quickly, not knowing what to say, says, “They’re all the same.” The photographer replies to him, “You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.” You can read more of the story here.
I found myself connecting on two different levels. The photographer in me is intrigued. Why take the same photo every day? But then again, I do find myself taking the same photos over and over again. Maybe the light is different, or the angles…or even my mood. I frequently take photos of this iconic palm tree–here’s a small sampling of my many photos of this one tree.
“One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.”
The experience of taking the same photo over and over echoes what it means to be a teacher. Each day is filled with sameness. I greet the same faces, the same small humans for nearly a year. And yet, no two days are the same. At my best, I take hundreds of mental photos of my students every day as I strive to pay attention to the nuances of their individual learning processes. I need to know them–when the sun is shining, when the fog hides their features, in a tight close up, as the sun sets.
To be a teacher is to learn to appreciate the richness and difference of sameness. And as I navigate the sometimes groundhog’s day-ness of parent-teacher conferences I find myself thinking about sameness in a different way. During each conference I am taking stock of those thousands of mental images, knowing that supporting learners (and their parents) is in the small moments. It’s in the slowing down even when the world keeps urging us to speed up. When I got behind in my conference schedule today I was tempted to cut things short, to “catch up.” But the conversations were meaningful, adding new images to my store of mental photos of my students, their families, and their learning and I know I’ll be perusing them in the weeks to come.
And now I think I’ll be looking back over my photographs to see what else I can learn–from them and about myself.
A few years back I got annoyed at the way that Instagram selected my “best 9” photos of the year and created a practice for myself of selecting my own “best” photos of the year. This year I have continued this tradition of taking time to look through my daily photos (it’s a rare day when I don’t take a photo) in order to find a subset that I will call the “Best of 2023.” The forced choice of picking a best for each month pushes me to think about what makes a photo best. Is it the subject matter? The experience that accompanied the photo? The actual photo itself? Other’s reactions to the photo? I think the answer may be a combination of all of the above!
My January 2023 photo captures my wonder when watching pelicans. I marvel at how they get low and skim the waves, seemingly almost running their wings along the edge of the swell. In this photo I love the way the squadron of pelicans in formation demonstrates this “surfing” behavior while also capturing the energy and movement of the waves and the range of colors of the water as the sun does its magical work. If I could change anything about this photo I would want to get closer (that would require a stronger zoom lens)…and I think a sunset version would be magnificent.
There is something so compelling about this tiny lifeguard tower in Solana Beach that perches on the cliff, jutting out into the sea. I’ve taken many version of this photo–and this is my favorite direction to shoot from. I love the low tide exposure, showing the rocks that are oftentimes covered with the sea. This unfiltered photo shows the February light on an afterwork walk, capturing the ordinary beauty of this less-than-ordinary, but functional building. I’d love to know more about the history of the building, who decided it needed to be here, why this design…and even when the decision was made to make lifeguard towers less permanent and more portable.
March shows off the playful aspects of daily photos. I’m constantly trying to capture movement in still photos. This was a windy day and the palms were showing their flexibility. To make the photo more dramatic and interesting, I did some filter play, enhancing the colors and showing the interplay of sun, sky, clouds, and wind (through the movement of the trees). I go with the adage that the best camera is the one that you have with you…and you’ll notice that many of my photos are taken with my phone.
April meant Spring Break, and in 2023 our break included a road trip to Zion National Park in Utah. In spite of that fact that it was “Spring” break, the weather was unseasonably cold…and while you’ll notice bright sun in this photo, we experienced snow, ice, wind, and rain on this trip. None of that kept us from hiking and taking photos. I love the contrast in this image of the white of the cliffs and the blue of the sky along with the long, sharp icicles hanging down. Angles and light and shadow keep drawing me back to this image…along with the brilliant blue of the April sky.
Lucky for me, I don’t have to go far from home to find interesting subjects to photograph. In May, a trip to the local lagoon brought me up close to this teeny tiny hummingbird. A colder than usual spring meant that the trees were still relatively bare, allowing a good view of this tiny gem against the steel gray sky.
But in June, I did travel a long way to find some different, interesting subjects to photograph. And inclement weather was a theme all year. With our school year ending earlier than usual (on June 2nd!), we hopped on a plane and headed to Maine to explore Acadia National Park. While it rained almost every day we were there, we didn’t let it dampen our adventurous spirits. We were lucky to get a short reprieve from stormy seas to head off on a boat to see puffins (which we did) and also get some spectacular views of lighthouses like this one. This composition reminds me of a postcard, filling the space both side to side and up and down. If only the light were illuminated! (Unfortunately, this was not a working lighthouse.)
Back in California, in July we took another roadtrip to explore the mountains in the middle of the state. Mammoth Mountain includes snowy peaks, gorgeous lakes and geologic phenomenon as well as interesting flora and fauna. While exploring Convict Lake I found myself mesmerized by the swallowtail butterflies fluttering, flitting, and feeding on the local flowers. They were everywhere and in constant motion. This time I was trying to capture the stillness of these pollinators rather than action!
In spite of the fact that school now begins in early August, this is truly the heart of the summer. I love to watch surfing competitions and lucky for me, there are often quite a few to choose from at our local beaches. This longboard contest also included something they called a paddle out relay where surfers organized themselves into teams that raced (with long surfboards under their arms) to the water, paddled out and around a designated buoy and then returned to shore to tag a teammate and continue the race. I love the way this photo captures the action, the length of the board, and even the muscle definition of the surfer.
UCSD is the home of the San Diego Area Writing Project and the end of September was the date of our annual Fall Conference. Early Saturday mornings on a college campus are quiet, offering opportunities for photos that do not feature students. I love to take photos of the iconic Geisel library…and in this shot you can see Fallen Star (a Stuart Collection art installation) perched on the engineering building in the distance. I love the light and clouds reflected in the many windows of the library. I definitely have fonder memories of photographing this library than studying in it!
No, this isn’t night photography. This is a photo of the partial solar eclipse we experienced in October. Using an app called Solar Snap and a special sun filter to protect my eyes, I was able to enjoy this not-too-common event and capture this image of the moon passing in front of the sun giving the illusion of a crescent moon when what you are actually seeing is the sun with the moon in front of it. This is one of those images where the experience was an interesting part of the photography process.
I don’t think I could do a “best of” set of photos without at least one of my favorite bird to photograph! I take many photos of snowy egrets, some better than others. I love this one from November where the reflection is so mirror-like. One of the benefits of the early dark after daylight saving time ends is that sunsets and my daily walk often coincide. My photos show the magic of the “golden hour,” where the light is perfect and photos have that magical quality that is otherwise so hard to obtain.
Somehow in December, between holiday celebrations and visits to and from family, we managed to squeeze in a trip to Yosemite. I’m not sure there is a bad day in this very special place. This late afternoon light was perfect for capturing the reflection of El Capitan and Bridalveil Falls in the Merced river.
Even as I write about these twelve photos as my “best of,” I find myself questioning my choices. There isn’t a single sunset photo featured although I have taken many. I didn’t include any of the many selfies we use to document adventures (for good reason!). I tried to pick photos that represented a range of subjects and maybe even some photography techniques. I notice how I often use rule of thirds to my advantage and how I am drawn to natural frames and reflection. I’ve been working hard to capture action and I think that shows in some of these selection too.
Do you have a favorite of these twelve? How do you select your own “best of” photos? What makes one photo better than another?
On a bittersweet day, a heading home day, a too long on the highways and byways day, the poetry prompt at #verselove was to write a Sijo. Please don’t count the syllables too closely!
Thinking Through My Lens 