Hold On, Let Me Overthink This
The joy of trying to be a better teacher
It’s the day before I am to return to school for our August teacher meetings, and I’m sitting in my classroom staring at the mass of tables, chairs, and desks shoved to one side of my classroom.
How should I arrange the room this year?
I had come in to complete one concrete task to help motivate me to tackle my back-to-school list.
Oh great, I realize. I haven’t even made my list yet!
Over the previous week or so, I had been struggling to make decisions for this year’s classes. I had lots of new philosophies and ideas swirling, but each time I tried to develop a lesson, craft a slide, or create a document–something tangible I could use in the classroom — I hit a wall.
I look out again at my eclectic mix of classroom furniture. I notice the custodians have pushed the round table to the back right corner, where it’s never been before. I like that. But what about the other two tables? Should I place those at the back as well, and have the desks in front?
I needed a true break from school this summer, so the only professional development I kept sacred was a week for the Greater Madison Writing Project’s kick-off to its yearlong institute, the type of pd that fills your cup. While we met in mid-July, I selected a focus of improvement for the upcoming year: To help students trust themselves as writers. While I returned to my summer promise after that week, the ideas continued to swirl.
Does it matter? I question, my will for such a simple task fading quickly. Why am I obsessing about desks?
At the time I had framed the issue as fear vs trust, where fear held back student writing and trust helped it forward. I brainstormed further:
These words guided my preliminary research into the nature of trust and fear in hopes of empowering my students through writing.
Wait, should students arrange the seats? I mean, if I’m trying to be so student-centered and co-creating, who am I to dictate the placement of tables and desks?
I gathered a promising list of resources, some new and some tried and true:
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Creating Confident Writers by Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn
- The Essential Don Murray edited by Thomas Newkirk and Lisa C. Miller
- “Social Metacognition and Self-Trust” by Kourken Michaelian
- “Trust in the Brain” by Michael Kosfeld”
- The Confidence to Write by Liz Prather
- Embarrassment by Thomas Newkirk
I flipped through a few pages here and scrolled through a few more there and quickly identified two necessary adjustments to my focus:
- Our true intention will be to develop writerly confidence. To trust oneself is tightly woven into that, but shifting the focus to confidence refined our mission.
- We’ll need to find ways to leverage fear, not eradicate it.
After 30 minutes, I leave the classroom, the tables, chairs, and desks unmoved.
As I reflected more about writerly confidence, I found myself walking the same avenues of thought and strategy I usually do in August, searching for epiphanies. Like checking the same pockets and countertops a hundred times for a set of misplaced keys, confident they’re here somewhere, I kept walking, eyes wide open.
Overthinking: it’s what I do.
At times Overthinking comes off as the nerdy and demanding older sister of Reflection, who of course has too much of a life to overthink. For sure, Overthinking left unchecked can be an endless Snipe hunt. But as much as I’ve learned how to refine what’s worth my time, I’ve also learned I need to embrace who I am, which means I might spend a ridiculous amount of time creating beautiful slides for instruction because sometimes things like that feed my soul.
For me, overthinking isn’t about rigid plans and outcomes; it’s about being extra conscious about how my classroom decisions (what I say, do, ask, share, etc) impact my students so I can be calm, collected, and responsive during our time together. And this year, to be attuned to my students’ writing insecurities and possible paths toward writerly confidence.
I return the next day during a break between meetings and quickly arrange the seats: the three tables spaced across the back of the classroom, the 3 5-desk clusters in the front. Done.
As September approached, I brainstormed a list of activities to help students reflect on their writing experiences, to name and share their writing fears and insecurities, to gently insist we’re in this together, so we need each other. But I was nervous, unsure how to later mend the wounds these initial activities might open.
A student from my advisory class visits me during Open House the next evening. “Wait,” he says, scanning the room. “That table can’t go there.” He’s pointing to the largest table — usually the students’ favorite — which has always been front and center.
A perennial worry: What if I don’t have all the answers? Of course I didn’t have all the answers in late August, nor would I have them mid September. Not by early December either. Not ever. But the perennial truth is that my best teacher decisions emerge through working with my students and colleagues during the school year. It’s just so damn hard to wait.
“Why can’t that table go there?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Now that you mention it, I kind of agree. Will you help me move It?”
He nods, and in a couple minutes, we fix it.
“Totally better. See you on Friday, Mrs. C.” He’s right. Totally better.
On the first day of school, a bounty of overthinking having nested within my being, I greeted my new Creative Writing students. “I love your room arrangement,” a bubbly girl told me as she found her seat. I giggled inwardly. I displayed the writing prompt and smiled as they silently christened their new notebooks with their words. Some raced to keep up with their burgeoning ideas while others paused every so often, searched, wondered, then kept writing.
“I’m curious,” I suddenly heard myself saying, “raise your hand if you love what you wrote.”
No one moved, but their eyes flitted from classmate to classmate. Did they not love what they wrote? Were they afraid to admit they did? Were they afraid to write something they loved in the first place? I suppose on day one these were normal responses, but they were problematic because they were normal.
“I don’t love what I wrote either,” I said. “Don’t worry, though. We’ll get better.”
