Nashae Jones on Teaching and Writing

From Teaching to Writing

TeachingBooks asks each author or illustrator to reflect on their journey from teaching to writing. Enjoy the following from Nashae Jones.

Show, Don’t Tell

by Nashae Jones

Many people believe that teachers are magic. And there is a sort of logic to that. Teachers are not only connoisseurs of knowledge, they are many other vital things to students. And for some people, the teacher that stays up until midnight to grade essays before a deadline or who is up at six in the morning to put together an interactive lesson plan is made of something that defies logic. So, therefore magic. In a way, writers are considered to be wizards. It is easy to believe that writers sit down, write a manuscript, and court an agent and editor, and boom you’re published. On both accounts, though the end results might result in something similar to sorcery, magic is too simplistic and disingenuous a solution. Both teaching and writing are the result of hard work, perseverance, and a healthy will to never give up.  

Teaching writing used to be one of my least favorite things to do, and it wasn’t because of the curriculum or the overall pedagogy. It was the lack of buy-in that I got from the students. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get eleventh graders interested in the writing process. It was too arduous and too steeped in the necessary component of revision. My students didn’t understand the need for revising, because they erroneously believed like many people that writing was supposed to be magic. They wanted to be able to write their paper, and then immediately turn it in. When students in my class figured out that this wasn’t how writing worked, they instantly became disengaged. This is the age of instant gratification after all.  

So, I continued to teach writing to students who didn’t really want to write, and because of this it became my least favorite thing to teach. It wasn’t until I started writing my own book, Courtesy of Cupid, that I realized that my students weren’t the only ones who got frustrated with revisions. It was then that I realized that maybe my students needed to see that even teachers get stuck, and even though revisions can be painful they were necessary also. So, I decided to construct a lesson plan that integrated my own writing and revisions. Every Monday, I would project a piece of writing onto the board, and then I would walk the students through my revision goals.  Afterwards we would talk through the revisions I would make. Of course, I’d modeled the revision process before, but this time I decided to make the students active participants in a continuous process. The students were invested in the writing that we were revising together, and in turn they became excited about writing and revising their own pieces.  

I found that being honest and transparent with my own students about my own writing, had sparked their own interest and excitement with the writing process. And if that itself isn’t some type of magic, I don’t know what is.