While I usually rehearse my own writing and purposefully quick write to find inspiration, I have taken on a different role with my mentee this year. She is a talented teacher and writer; she reminds me a lot of myself when I was a first-year teacher. I remember influential teachers and mentors in my life who encouraged me to start presenting and publishing and so this past week I passed the torch. Today, she published her first blog for the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project (PAWLP) blog.
As we discussed her blog post last week, we rehearsed her writing piece, talking through how she might open her piece, organize it, present student examples, and wrap it up. I called to mind the various ideas she had been mentioning about distance learning since its onset. All along, I had been cataloging them and saving them for this moment. It was amazing to see how she developed those ideas and created a polished piece.
When we celebrated her publication today, she thanked me for the ideas, and I was able to reply back that they were all hers: I simply regurgitated them back to her.
In working with her, I was reminded at how important it is for me to record my thoughts, whether in a notebook, my phone, or a computer. So often thoughts pass me by like dreams. Unless I write them down, I can’t remember them in a few minutes let alone a few weeks. Keeping track of those inspirational tidbits helps me to have a bag of ideas when I need to return to them.
