Falling in love… slowly

Posted on Feb 24 2009 at 11:57 AM

Teaching (okay cramming) a month, a year, a lifetime’s worth of lessons on the art and technique of sentence fluency—the intricacies of structure and design, the sights and sounds, the creative style—into six ninety-minute classes… am I crazy? I admit it, yes, but that’s what happens when we fall head-over-heels in love. The crazy within us is let loose and runs wild. Patience, easing in gradually, one-step-at-a-time… these concepts cease to exist. Blindly, we dive in, expecting that the other person involved in the relationship (in my case, 26 6th graders) will be with us 100 percent of the way, holding on tight, fully trusting, as we embark on a new adventure together. And of course, we expect they too will share and reciprocate our passion.

Love-struck by the idea—the fantasy—of inspiring my students’ writing through the wondrous craft of sentence fluency, it is fair to say I got ahead of myself (ahead of my students), leaping gallantly when I needed to be taking smaller steps. For my 6th graders to keep up, I’ve realized I need to let them. Enter in gradually, so they can follow and become a part of the rich experience, not just bystanders watching me pour out my heart and soul, flying passionately through the lessons in hopes of whisking them off their feet. This may be my natural rhythm, for one who has already fallen in love with the magic, the gift of writing. But my students aren’t there yet; they’re still waiting for writing to grab hold of them, pour through them, guide them, free them, show them the way. It took me twenty years to truly discover this power of writing. My students deserve the same precious gift of time. There is no rush.

To truly give my students the chance to fall in love with language, I will have to remind myself every day to slooowwww down. They need room to grow into it, feel their way around, walk away, come back. It’s not always going to be easy, letting them find (or not find) this love for writing on their own time. I will worry: will I get to cover everything I want to teach, everything I desire for them to learn? No. I won’t. So I’ll take a minute, catch my breath—then let it go. Knowing that what I do teach will be much more meaningful because they will have the necessary time and space to fully enter in—experiment, fight, create, play—and this glimpse, I hope, may ignite a craving to seek more, to write more, to pursue the act of such a wondrous gift.

Funny that my lesson learned on moving too fast in love happened to find me during the month of February. Taking a step back, it seems obvious: we don’t have to experience everything at once to discover it, to deeply know it, to love it. In fact, we can only come to truly love and appreciate something by giving ourselves permission to proceed with caution, take baby steps, save unmarked territory to discover at a later date. In the heat and passion of the moment, this is harder to recognize. Yet we must give ourselves, and our students, permission to not fall in love at first sight. And rather, enter in, look around, and find love along the way.

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