The value of practice: What the teacher learned from the student

Note: I also shared this on my editing website, with a few changes, HERE. I wanted to share my experience with this extraordinary student with you, dear readers. But feel free to also check out my other website if you’d like.

Years ago when I was a graduate student, I taught mostly freshmen in writing classes at a state university in Ohio.

One semester I started a class of 112 writing, the top level. It was the last hurdle for the students. Unless their majors required other writing classes, that was the last one they had to take.

On that first day of class, after I had dismissed the students, a young woman stayed after to talk with me. Vickie told me she had taken 112 before but was choosing to take it again because she didn’t feel like she had learned enough or become strong enough of a writer.

Would I be willing to spend extra time with her between classes helping her with her writing?

So we began. Usually I assigned one essay a week, with classes built around both form and content. Every week, Vickie visited my office and brought me her draft essay, which I read and then discussed with her.

We talked about what her main idea really was and whether or not she was hiding it among the other ideas. We talked about different ways to organize her work. We talked about sentence structure and word choice.

I never told Vickie how to write the essay. But I gave her feedback and new ideas to consider.

She wasn’t getting special treatment from me. My door was open to all my students. But Vickie consistently took advantage of the help.

One day we were discussing some things going on in her life. She was a graphic arts major and was on the university swim team. I was never particularly artistic and definitely never athletic.

“I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” I said.

“I’ve always wanted to be a good student,” she said.

You are a good student, I told her. You work hard. You’re improving in your writing. You should be proud of yourself, I told her.

Vickie ended the class by getting a solid B. She was so pleased with herself. And I was so proud of her.

And I was so impressed with her willingness to practice to get better.

I’ve thought of Vickie often through the years, and when I was considering writing about her, I came up with these lessons she taught me about the importance of practice.

·         Make the decision to get better at something. I don’t believe you drift into a practice. You make a decision that you will begin a practice. Making a decision shows commitment. Vickie committed to taking a class she had already taken and wasn’t required to retake.

·         Put in the time. Practice takes time. Whether it is 15 minutes a day or an hour a week, working to become better takes time. Even with a busy schedule as a student-athlete, Vickie made time to work on her writing.

·         Put in the effort. Vickie had to make the effort to write a draft in time for me to review it with her before she revised it. She couldn’t blow off the assignment until right before it was due. She had to work on it, then work on it some more.

·         Don’t try to go it alone. Vickie enlisted help. That help in her writing endeavor was me. She didn’t have to struggle alone. I could offer not only technical assistance, but encouragement. We all need encouragement.

·         Persevere. I’m sure Vickie got tired of pouring so much time into writing essays that had nothing to do with her major classes. But she didn’t give up. She kept showing up in class and at my office door.

And here is what I’m sharing with you that I didn’t on my editing website.

It has been about 25 years since Vickie was my student. Some years after Vickie was my student, I read in an alumni magazine that she had passed away after a car accident.

Even though I had not seen or spoken with Vickie for about five years at that time, the news of her death hit me hard. It hurt to think that this talented, beautiful, kind young woman had lost her life so early.

So my memories of Vickie are very special to me. She taught me a lot that I want to share with others.

How important is practice to you when learning something new? Have you ever known a person who taught you lessons about the importance of practice?

5 facts and planning for a break

As you probably know if you are on Blogger, Google Reader is going to disappear on July 1, and I’ve heard that the Blogger reading list may go away, too.

So I’ve joined BlogLovin as a back-up. Please join me by clicking on the BlogLovin’ icon down on the right side of the page, right under the Facebook icon. Thank you!

I’m joining Nancy at A Rural Journal for Random 5 Friday. I didn’t do it last week, and I missed it!

If you’d like to join in, link up at A Rural Journal.

Dock at Leesville Lake.

One

When I first moved back to Virginia after grad school, I was an adjunct English instructor at some local colleges.

Recently, via Facebook, one of my former students from the community college where I taught got in touch with me. He wrote in part, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of your class or enjoyed your influence over the last 20 years or so. I wanted to let you know that your encouragement meant a great deal to me then and that I did in fact achieve a number of my educational and life goals afterwards.”

He made my day.

Have you ever received an encouraging message just when you needed one?

Two

I am afraid of snakes. All snakes. Deathly afraid. I think I have a definite phobia.

Larry saw the first snake of the season this week, a long black snake. He said it was headed away from our yard, across the street.

I didn’t even like hearing that he had seen one. He reminded me that they are all around us. I know that. But I don’t like to think about it.

Are you afraid of snakes?

Three

Lately, I have been eating a little seafood and a bit of chicken. I thought that perhaps my body was missing some vitamins and minerals and that eating some fish might help my foot heal.

I have especially enjoyed eating salmon. I ate a piece on my birthday last week that melted in my mouth.

I am not completely comfortable with what I’m doing. I became a vegetarian because of my beliefs about animals.

I’m not ready to decide to keep eating seafood and poultry permanently. But for now I am mostly vegetarian, not completely.

I’m reading and pondering, taking it a step at a time.

Four

I go back to my orthopedic doctor about my fractured foot on June 14. I hope I can get rid of the boot for good. It is heavy and awkward. And I’ve had pain in my opposite hip, knee and foot, from too much pressure on them, I think.

I may have to wear a fracture shoe for a little while.

And then I’m so ready to wear two matching shoes and to take a long walk.

Five

I’m allergic to tree nuts. Today I attended a business luncheon. On the buffet were croissants stuffed with what I thought was tuna salad. When I picked it one to eat it, I realized it was chicken salad when I saw the large walnuts in it. I gave it away to a tablemate.

Back at the office in the afternoon, I was offered a chocolate chip cookie one of my co-workers had bought and left for the rest of us. I nibbled at the edges. Then my boss, who was also eating one, said, “Tina, I think this has nuts in it.” We looked closely and saw walnuts. So I gave the cookie to him.

Not a good food day, but at least I didn’t eat any of the nuts.

Are you allergic to any foods?

I’ve decided to take next week off from blogging. I will be very busy at work with my boss out of town.

And I am feeling the need for some downtime with the blog writing. I need some rejuvenation.

I will be reading your blogs as much as I can. And I’ll be back writing on Monday, June 17.

Hopefully, I’ll be inspired during my time off and come back full of ideas.

I’ll miss you and your comments! Take care, dear readers, until next time.

OCD, teaching and the fear of grading papers

It was one of the scariest days of my life.

It was my first day of teaching English. I was 22 years old, and I had a classroom full of 18-year-old college freshmen looking at me. I had to do something.

I followed the script I had carefully worked out before class. I could barely speak, but I managed to call out the names on my class roster. I made a pen mark beside each name.

But I was so nervous that I had to slide my arm along the desktop as I made the pen marks down the list. If I had lifted my arm, everyone would have seen how badly I was shaking.

As scary as that day was, the scarier times were soon to come, when I had to start grading papers.

I was in the first year of my master’s program in English at Bowling Green State University. I was teaching composition classes, where I reviewed the basics like sentence structure and paragraphing.

It stands to reason that if you’re teaching writing, the students have to practice it. And if they practice it, the teacher has to read it. And evaluate it.

That triggered my obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially my checking.

I was obsessed with fears of not reading each essay completely and fairly. I was afraid that I would miss something important or judge the paper unfairly.

So I compulsively read and reread each essay. I painstakingly wrote long comments explaining my critiques. I reread my comments and rewrote them when necessary, using liquid eraser fluid to cover the changes.

If I completed grading one 500-word essay in 30 minutes, I was making good progress. It took me hours to review and grade 20 to 25 papers.

This fear and this ritual continued as I taught English for four years while in school, and then for about two and a half years after I left school.

Even though during that time I started treatment for OCD in the form of medication, which tremendously helped my obsessions and compulsions, it could never wipe out the reading and checking OCD related to grading papers.

How this expression of OCD would have benefited from Exposure and Response Therapy.

I can just imagine how I could have “exposed” myself to a student essay, to read once, then again as I made comments. Then I would have worked to prevent my compulsion to do the whole thing over and over again. I would have worked at living with the anxiety of not checking each essay “just one more time.”

I enjoyed much about teaching: the interaction with the students, the joy of seeing them learn and practice new concepts and reach their goals. But memories of the joys of teaching are overshadowed by the memories of the fear I had of grading papers.

Have you ever had a job or volunteer task that caused you a lot of anxiety? What did you do about it?