Writing With Abandon

Reflections and ramblings about life as an educator, writer, reader, knitter, and over-thinker. Trying to do the writing only I can do.

Category: Uncategorized

  • Commercials

    I never watch commercials anymore, as I haven’t had cable TV since moving out of my parents’ house. Only at doctor’s offices, like my dentist, playing episodes of Friends while the hygienist cleans my teeth, or like now, this tiny waiting room at the hospital while I wait for my annual physical and they have the History Channel on (a bit aggressive for 8:25am, no?).

    Anyway, maybe it’s because I never watch them that now when I do, I’m hyperaware of all the messaging they are throwing at us. The most common message? Buy this product to solve the problems that WE caused you!

    For example…

    A beautiful field, fruit trees glistening with dew-dropped berries, zooming out to reveal… the label of a multivitamin bottle! Because why not just get your nutrients from a capsule, rather than actual fruit and veggies?

    A weight loss smoothie, chocolate and vanilla flavored, a measuring tape tightening as the patient miraculously sheds so many pounds (and often doesn’t even look like the same person!). Because the food we sell is fattening, so here’s another product to buy to combat that! A vicious cycle!

    A small child drinking a similar smoothie, but this time to help them gain weight and height. “Is your child not growing like their peers? Drink X!” Again, because our food lacks the nutrients kids need to grow and stay healthy, so mask the nutrients in something they’re sure to find yummy!

    (This commercial came right after one for sugary cereal, by the way.)

    A woman sharing all the woes that befell her because she was a smoker. “Smoking gave me gum disease and made me lose all my teeth. Quit today,” she says. I’m not even gonna go into this one.

    The irony is not lost on me that these are playing at doctor’s and dentist’s offices…

    I don’t have anything wise to say. And my name was just called! So here ends slice number 4.

  • On Limited Time and Never-Ending To Do Lists

    I got off the phone with Kim and stepped into the kitchen. The oven was on.

    “I thought you were going to eat with me,” I said.

    “Sorry, love, I didn’t know how long you’d be on the phone,” Patrick replied sheepishly.

    “No, it’s okay,” I said, looking at the clock. 12:55. I swiped on my phone to see when the call had started: 12:22. “I didn’t think it would take that long either.”

    “I haven’t put anything in, I can still turn it off.”

    I groaned. And then proceeded to list off all the things I still needed to do — make lunch (which is a whole ordeal since I’m still in the early re-introduction phase of this elimination diet and need whatever I cook to yield leftovers for school lunches) and meal prep, do some copywriting, lesson plan, fold my clothes — and whine about how my neck still hurt from the whiplash I experienced when we went zip-lining last weekend.

    “Just take it one step at a time,” Patrick hugged me. “What can you do right now?”

    “Make lunch?” I mumbled against his chest.

    It’s laughable to me now, looking back at the moment with a fuller belly and a few more things ticked off on my “done list.”

    For the last 26 days I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Burkeman essentially starts this book of, not really meditations, but rather short chapters that are “food for thought,” from the reality that human life is finite and imperfect and evades our attempts to control it at every turn. Like we’re in a “little one-person kayak… at the mercy of the current” (11). He posits that if we can just accept this reality and let go, we’ll be able to actually spend our very limited time on this Earth doing what brings us real joy.

    My hangry outburst was the perfect example of my futile attempt to control my life and tackle my insurmountable to do list.

    Burkeman quotes Marie Curie: “One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done” (20).

    In my frustration at what remained to be done, I’d diminished the fact that I had already: repotted all of the plants in the apartment that had been infested with fungus gnats (gross) and cleaned the bathroom (which needed it) and washed my hair (which, if you’re a curly girl or have long, thick hair, you know is always a whole ordeal).

    But that’s what we do. Burkeman describes a “productivity debt,” where many people feel they must “return to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail — or worse, don’t even try — it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet. If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’” (20).

    I’m laughing again as I type this, remembering a text exchange with Ana yesterday. She was telling me how exhausted she was.

    “Did Elena sleep?” I asked.

    “She’ll nap at noon and I really want to sleep, but also the house is a MESS.”

    Her dilemma reminded me of another quote in Burkeman’s book, this time from Sheldon B. Kopp: “You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences” (14).

    We don’t really have to clean the house, or do the laundry, or lesson plan, or water the plants. We have the “freedom to examine the trade-offs — because there will always be trade-offs — and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like” (19).

    Ana ended up sleeping those 2 hours that Elena napped. And me? I’m taking it one step at a time, knowing that there will always be more things to do, because that’s the nature of the game.

    For now, I’ll ask myself, what else can I add to my “done list” for today? Perhaps taking our pup on a walk with my love? Sounds like a worthy use of my limited time on this planet.

  • Bilateral Beach

    For someone who has lived in the Sunshine State for almost 4 years, I don’t go to the beach nearly as much as one might expect. Nor to the pool, even though each of the three buildings I’ve lived in since moving here has one.

    But every other Saturday since late October, I’ve been driving the 45-60 minutes up to Hollywood Beach to see an EMDR therapist in her tiny house whose street leads to the beach. Whether before or after my sessions, I make sure to come sit and look out at the rolling waves, feel the salty air lick my face, and stick my feet in the sand.

    The hottest day can feel bearable when you’re at the beach, the respite of the cool water just steps away. Likewise, I enjoyed coming out here on cooler mornings this “winter” in a light sweater, hugging my knees close.

    EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – therapy works through bilateral stimulation, alternating beats or taps or a side-by-side visual. It helps people process traumatic memories, and it’s been far more effective for me than regular talk/cognitive behavioral therapy. I came here the first time amidst nonstop panic attacks, unable to eat or hold food down. Now, 4 months later, I have found a place of calm within me that hadn’t existed before. Or, perhaps it existed, but was buried beneath so much.

    I sit here, staring at the water, its blue and turquoise hues, and recognize my growth. I have only gratitude.

    There are big changes coming soon. I will leave the classroom after this year and see what’s next. There is fear, and excitement, and unease, and impatience.

    But like so many other transformative moments of my life, I will trust my gut, ride the wave, and come out the other side. I’ll step out onto a different shore, ready to greet what awaits me.

  • On Doing the Writing Only I Can Do

    I crack open the notebook I used for the Quoddy Writing Retreat this past August, led by Ralph Fletcher and Georgia Heard. The notebook I haven’t touched since landing back in Miami, even though I made promises — to myself, to my writing group — to set aside time to write. My streak of Tuesdays got away from me sometime in the early fall. Life happened, as they say.

    But Ralph told me that writing will always wait for you. If writing is important, it will come back to you. The muse will come knocking.

    I hope writing has been patient, as I’ve set her aside these past many months. I hope she doesn’t mind me picking her back up, dusting her off with the fabric at the bottom of my t-shirt.

    Because it’s the third Slice of Life challenge I’ll be participating in, and this time around, I have an even larger community doing it with me.

    I’m skimming these pages and gems are jumping out at me, quotes from Ralph and Georgia and other published writers. I’ll jot them here, in hopes I can return to them on the days when slicing just feels too hard. Reminding me that I’m in great company.

    ***

    Do the writing that only you can do.

    “Tell your stories. You own everything that happened to you.” – Anne Lamott

    Write with abandon.

    “It is, really, about heart; about a human being looking at life through her own lens and thinking and feeling it through and then making something – even something very simple – that says something new and truthful – something that reaches out to the reader in a spirit of commiseration.” – George Saunders

    “Be you. Be all in. Fall. Get up. Try again.” – Brené Brown

    “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.” – Richard Price

    Let the image do the work for you.

    Revision is like chiseling away at stone, at clay.

    “Revision is not a way to fix a broken piece. It’s a way to honor a great piece.” – Ralph Fletcher

    The notebook is a playground.

    “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion

    ***

    It’s with these writers at my back that I embark yet again on this challenge. I will write with abandon, “just have fun with it,” as my dad says. I’ll do the writing only I can do!

  • Test post for KLA slicers

    Practice commenting your post hyperlink below.

  • A Conversation Poem

    My sister sent me a few of my nephew’s poems this afternoon. He’s doing the 2nd grade poetry unit at school. I absolutely love this “conversation poem” about making a “caseadias” (quesadillas 🥹):

    What could I write a conversation poem about? The gossip in my classroom (students are dating, people!!!)? Going to the Apple store on a Tuesday evening?

    It’s 9:45pm but I told myself I would slice…

    So here goes:

    Phoebe’s Greeting

    You’re home? You’re home! Wait—let me bring you a toy!

    Aw, what have you got there? Your bone?

    Look at my bone!!!!!! Hear it squeak!

    Hi, girl. Come here.

    Butt rubs? 🥹😍🫠

    —

    Aaaaand goodnight.

  • A Friday Slice

    “Are you going to do the Slice of Life Challenge this year?” Ana asked me this morning as we passed each other in the halls. “Male and Angie are gonna do it, and Gi too.”

    “I don’t know…” I skirted. This year’s intention to slice every Tuesday started out strong and then waned in the fall as I dealt with some personal health issues. If I couldn’t commit to doing it weekly, how could I do it daily?

    *

    Later, when we met in my room, she mentioned it again.

    “I just sent an email to the second grade team. Darlyn is in!”

    “Maybe…” I smiled. We returned to the writing plans. I shared something funny a student had said about me moving the teacher’s desk.

    “That’s a slice!” Ana exclaimed.

    “Should I just write it and schedule it for March 1st?”

    “YES!”

    *

    At 3pm, while I was waiting to meet with Male, Ale left Ana’s office and Ana shouted, “Ale’s gonna slice, too!”

    “Okay, okay,” I laughed. With this many new slicers from our little school community, surely I could get motivated enough to slice again each day for the month of March. It was tough last year, but it was also fun and satisfying, connecting me not only with other slicers but with friends and family (hi, Mom!). Plus, I have a little time capsule now that captured a joyous month in my life when, among other things, I was falling in love.

    So, here it is. Today’s slice. Never mind that it’s a Friday:

    *

    This morning when I entered the classroom at 7:48am, I had visions of the documentation that would start to emerge on the bookshelves as I cleared them. But something wasn’t right. The table by the window always got in the way, and the chairs were all different sizes. There was all this dead space near the teacher table, too, and the math materials were blocked off and inaccessible to the students.

    So, I did what I always do when I realize the layout of the classroom doesn’t align with how we’re using it — I started rearranging.

    First order of business: moving some of the writing charts. Next? Swapping the teacher table with the long one at the window.

    The first students arrived at 8 to find me and all of our tables and chairs scattered.

    “Good morning!” I shouted.

    “Um, hi? What’s going on?” Two of the girls asked.

    “I’m rearranging the furniture. Help me!”

    “Okay!” They agreed. These two are always up to help with anything.

    “Is this table going to stay on the rug?” The other girl asked, skeptical.

    “No, no,” I assured her. “It’s just there while we get the rest sorted.”

    Then two of the boys arrived.

    “Happy birthday!” I said to one of them who turned eleven today. “Help us move these smaller chairs to the other room and grab all the big ones to bring in here?”

    They set off on their task as a few more students arrived.

    “We’re rearranging everything!” One of the first girls explained.

    “Why?” A student yawned.

    “I don’t know! For a change?”

    “Because Ms. Amy was doing it when we came in!”

    “But Ms. Amy, it’s so sunny over there! You’re going to fry like a grilled cheese!”

    “I liked it better before.”

    “Yeah, what about all the other teacher stuff that’s still over there? It’s so far away from your desk now!”

    Once everything was moved, and we were mostly satisfied with their placements, we gathered for Morning Meeting.

    I explained to the fifth graders that I got the rearranging “itch” from my dad. When I was growing up, he always moved around the furniture in our combined living room/kitchen/dining room. I’d wake up and come out to see things in different places. It would be a bit of a shock to the system, and then I’d get accustomed to it. Ever since, I have constantly rearranged my dorm rooms and apartments to whatever felt right. And I always found that rearranging gave me a refreshed feeling, a sense of starting anew.

    I’ve found that with classrooms, even the same one, once you see how the students of that year are using the space, it often becomes clear how best to arrange the furniture. (And it’s apparently good for their brains to have that change!) Sometimes you only need to rearrange once. Sometimes more! (Like last year, which one of our students hated, but Kim loved.)

    A half hour later, as we were teaching math, Sol came in and widened her eyes. She walked over to the desk.

    “I rearranged!” I said.

    “I see that,” she laughed. “Are you trying to slow cook us?” She asked as she shaded her eyes from the sun beaming in through the window.

    “Seriously, Ms. Amy,” M said. “Yesterday, this was you: ‘Oh my god, the window is so hot, we need to move things away from the window.’ This is you today: ‘I think I’ll put my desk by the window. Yeah, good idea…’”

    He’s not wrong, but I’ll give it a chance. I think it will work.

  • When Ralph Comes to Visit

    “Are you ready?” Betsy asked me in the morning as we readied the theater. It was thirty minutes before the second performance of our class’s theatrical adaptation of Flying Solo by Ralph Fletcher, and today, not only were the students’ parents coming, but so was Ralph, himself!

    “Ready! And nervous!” I spat out. We still needed the videographer to come to check the new prop placement, and he wasn’t replying to my texts.

    “Tranquila,” Betsy said. “Enjoy this!”

    And despite a little tech hiccup right before we let parents in, I did.

    I managed the changing of the digital backdrops and the sound effects, preparing to give cues if students needed, but mostly, I just enjoyed the show. Ralph and Ana sat to my right, and I kept warming at his audible reactions:

    “Wow, she’s good.”

    “Huh!”

    “That’s pretty clever.”

    When E as Mr. Peacock introduced him, and he stepped up to take his line (the line he wrote), the audience applauded loudly. Ralph! Here! A storyteller that inspires!

    The rest of the day was a whirlwind of professional learning sessions with him, organized by Ana. My brain buzzed with ideas, my pen moving rapidly to catch all of the wonderful things he had to say.

    One has stuck with me all afternoon into evening.

    Ralph says, many students think revision is to fix a piece of writing that’s broken. He sees revision as a way to honor a piece that’s good, a piece that means something to you.

    Flying Solo meant something to us. We went through more than seven revisions of the adapted script, honing it each time, whittling away, adding, molding, sculpting a dynamic play that could truly capture the magic we felt with the first read. And I think we honored that original magic today.

    I’m exhausted, and ready (in a way) to get back to our regular schedule without rehearsals. But mostly, I’m grateful.

    Thank you, Ralph. Thank you for writing this book and all the others. Thank you for giving us permission to adapt it into a play. And thank you for coming to see it, for meeting our students. The smiles on their faces meant so much.

  • Planning, Projecting, Pacing

    I have a rare gift of a late-start morning, thanks to a doctor’s appointment, so I figured I’d take the time I still have before I head over there to write my slice.

    We’re coming off of a long weekend, and I happily spent some time on Saturday planning this week and next’s reading lessons and pacing out unit 2 (nonfiction). The lessons were the first that I’ve planned independent of Ana — huge step! Wow! — and I felt confident finally in how I was writing them. I used all the tools that I’ve acquired thanks to her:

    • The recipe for the perfect teaching point (the what + the how)
    • The TC learning progression for narrative reading (which I’m kicking myself for not using until now)
    • Rubric creation for the final assessment
    • Our pacing and planning guide with titles of each session

    And once I was done with that, I took a look at the next unit, even though I had many other things to do, because I’m geeking out over teaching it.

    To give some background, our school has not had a consistent reading curriculum since I started teaching there, so this year I’m planning out all new units using our power standards and other curricular resources (Shifting the Balance, Jennifer Serravallo, TC units of study) so that they reflect a) what our students need and b) are more digestible for them. This means that much of what I’ll be (and have been) teaching them asks them to raise the level of their reading and interpreting to a point they’ve never been asked before. Which is really hard. But I know they’re capable.

    For the nonfiction reading unit, I’m keeping in mind the fact that Adam Fachler highlighted during the Thinking Maps Training of Trainers course I took with him so many years ago: you can’t learn new skills AND new content at the same time. It’s one or the other. So, I’m choosing new skills. Rather than requiring students to read about topics they don’t know much about, I’ll have them choose a topic they “sort of” know about (as Ana said, lol), or really: a topic they know well, but can still learn more about. The goal of the unit will be clear from the get-go: to prepare for a “knowledge fair” where they’ll teach younger students about the topics they’ve researched.

    The skills I’ll be focusing on this unit are:

    • Note-taking to capture, organize, and synthesize information, using text structure to guide
    • Summarizing by identifying main idea and important supporting details
    • Writing about reading to teach others

    I’m hopeful that this nonfiction unit goes better than nonfiction units I’ve tried in the past. If the projecting and pacing stage is any indication, it’s already going well.

  • The Magic Happening

    I missed my slice last week, and it’s already 9:28pm, but Ana sent me a text saying she wants to show up even if it’s just for four lines, so I figured I could do that too!

    The last couple weeks have felt nonstop, more so than in years past, and in spite of us having a fairly easy class behaviorally. When my nervous system gets disregulated due to outside factors, I often feel like I won’t be able to get it all done and just want to crawl into a hole and stay there for a while.

    Our head of schools gave me the advice of being present and focusing on the magic happening right in my classroom, so that’s what I’m going to try to do for this slice—think of four magic things that are happening.

    Here goes:

    1. A morning meeting activity: sentence types. A BrainPop image of the two presidential candidates. Students turning and talking and sharing smart and serious and funny sentences.
    2. All four committees of our Flying Solo play adaptation, fully engaged and working in tandem towards our November show. Their wonderful ideas. Quieter students speaking up.
    3. The way a few of our students take such care of our space—keeping stock of supplies, making labels for everything, organizing the pillows, color-coding the library shelves, folding the table rags, knowing who has what job when, following *most* of our routines.
    4. A reading conference with a student, starting her book together and helping her monitor and clarify, then watching as she made an un-prompted inference, and with guidance, found text evidence to support it. 🥹