After finishing the wonderful Every Day After by Laura Golden, my thoughts kept going back to Erin, the character who torments Lizzie relentlessly. She just wouldn't stop. She was so unlikable. I wanted to step in the story and give her a comeuppance of my own. Erin needed to not only to win at all cost but had to have everyone acknowledge her achievements.

Reading about Erin made me think about how some people require external validation. They, I m thinking of adults here, need the award, the high test score from students, the credit. Different perspectives are construed as a personal challenge. 

With such a fixed mindset, it is hard to bend. It is hard to let go. Erin reminded me that, sometimes, yielding is difficult.  It can be as hard as accepting yourself.

I know to teach writing you have to write. To teach writing well, you have to write. Yet. I stumble on this yet all the time. I make time to read the latest professional books on writing. I follow writing blogs. Yet my follow through is weak.

I carefully choose a writer's notebook--a journal that I want to write in.  We are good friends in the beginning. But then, I misplace it. Or somehow the spine breaks. Or I realize I can barely read my own scribbly handwriting. And then I get distracted by a new something. Did I mention I am incredibly slow, too? It can take hours to write a paragraph. A single paragraph.

It bothers me. I want to follow through. So, I am beginning again. Once more, I tell myself what I tell my students: readers and writers are brave. 

"Be bold, be bold and everywhere be bold"  Herbert Spencer
(as quoted in "Roxie and the Hooligans")