teaching – Molly Montgomery

Writing in Times of Transition

View of the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog — Times of transition can be a little foggy. (View from the Presidio Tunnel Tops Park in San Francisco which I visited while at a teacher training this summer)

Transitions, especially big life transitions, have always been hard for me. I am someone who thrives on routine and structure. I remember when I moved to France after college, even though I was excited to go live there, I ended up freaking out in the airport waiting to board my plane. I was overcoming an infection, a complication from having my wisdom teeth removed, so I was not in a great physical state, and I felt like there was a bottomless pit in my stomach, pulling me into a whirlpool of panic. But my move could not be delayed. I was going, whether I was ready or not. Before going through security, I remember telling my mom I wasn’t sure if going to France was the right idea, and she reassured me that as soon as I got there, I would be fine. She was right.

Now that I’m a teacher, each year I struggle with the jarring transition between the end of the school year and the summer. It’s disconcerting to go from having my days filled to the brim with work to having what seemes like an endless amount of time to fill during the summer. I always have plenty of things to do during summer break, but I have to use my willpower and organizational skills to make the best use of that time without any external authority telling me what I need to prioritize. Luckily, teaching equips me well for this type of challenge. In my role as a high school English teacher, I plan and implement the entirety of the curriculum I teach. Of course, I solicit feedback from my admin, colleagues, and students, on my lessons and units, but ultimately the decision for what to teach and how to teach is mine. I definitely feel lucky to have that much freedom, since I know many teachers do not have the same autonomy, but it can be overwhelming at times. The same thing can happen when I’m working on a long writing project, such as a novel or a complex freelance job. The best way to deal with a large daunting task is to break it up into a parts, and take things one step at a time.

This past summer I had a singular goal: to finish a draft of my novel. I was awarded a Jack Hazard Fellowship by the New Literary Project, a fellowship for creative writers who teach high school. I felt honored to be chosen as part of the their inaugural cohort of fellows, but as the summer approached I felt the same gut-twisting panic that I felt before I boarded my plane to France. What if I just couldn’t hack it? I wasn’t required to finish an entire draft of the novel by the end of the summer. I just had to submit something to show that I worked on the novel, but there wasn’t a specific number of pages I needed to write. Still, I wanted to finish the draft because I knew I would feel more accomplished if I did.

I knew I had to create some sort of structure for myself in order to finish the draft. I initially planned to adhere to a strict schedule. I would wake up at a certain time, and after eating breakast, I would write for 2 hours, then take a break for exercise, etc. I won’t bore you with the details, since I don’t think I followed this plan for a single day. Almost as soon as the summer started, I caught COVID. I wasn’t able to write for a few days, and then once I was better, my partner and I were moving into a new house. By the time we were done moving, it was mid-July, and practically a month of the summer had passed.

At that point, I threw my rigid plans out the window and just focused on making sure I wrote for 500 words a day. I kept a log of how much I wrote every single day, but even then I wasn’t completely consistent. Some days I wrote 454 words, others, I wrote 2000. Through fits and starts, by continuously pursuing my goal, even if it meant waiting until 10 PM to write and then hammering my keyboard for an hour, I managed to produce a completed rough draft. I know it needs a lot of revision, but I still was proud of myself for meeting my goal.

I also accomplished another goal this summer. I was hired for a freelance writing job in which I wrote a whole online course on an unfamiliar topic: personal finance. While I did have some background knowledge on this topic, I did not consider myself a subject matter expert before I wrote the course. I gained a lot of valuable experience learning how to research a topic and write a whole course from scratch. To do this, I also had to manage my time carefully since I was working on two writing projects at once. The course had a much clearer structure than the novel, so I was able to break it down into smaller chunks and write one section at a time. After I submitted my first draft of the course, I also received feedback from my client, and I then revised it in response to their feedback. It felt very satisfying to complete the entire writing process from beginning to end on the course, and it gave me the confidence to know that I can take on similar projects in the future.

Of course, just when I had figured out my summer routines and found strategies to improve my creativity and productivity, the summer ended, and I had an abrupt transition back to teaching. I always do some planning for the school year during the summer, but this year, the end of the summer crept up on me very quickly (probably because I was so busy with writing). I felt really off-balance at the beginning of the school year, especially since this year I am teaching 3 courses (2 sections of English 9, 2 sections of English 10, and 2 sections of Creative Writing- so 6 sections total). Even though I’m repeating some material for English 9 and 10, it has felt like I’m making everything from scratch because I tweak what I do every year to improve my teaching practices and to better meet the needs of my current students.

Now that we’ve reached the end of the first quarter, I finally feel like I have some breathing room to reflect on the challenges of writing under different time constraints— whether it’s writing furiously towards a deadline with little else to occupy my thoughts or trying to squeeze in writing when I’m working a full-time teaching job. As long as I’m a teacher, summers and breaks will always be where I’m able to do my deepest, most challenging work as a writer. During the year, the thought of adding more to my plate gives me anxiety, even when it’s work that I want to do. I have to focus on smaller tasks such as editing stories I’ve written here and there, similar to weeding a garden or pruning a hedge.

I also have figured out ways to integrate my freelance writing with my full-time job when possible. I was lucky enough to become a YR Media Curriculum Fellow this year, which involves writing a curriculum tool (basically a whole unit plan or series of lessons) using resources from YR Media. YR Media (originally Youth Radio) is a journalism nonprofit that publishes articles by youth journalists. I’ve been creating a curriculum tool using some of their articles and then implementing my own curriculum plan in the classroom. As a part of the fellowship, I attended a training this summer led by Dr. Cherise McBride about using youth media to empower students. I also have been given the opportunity to collaborate with other amazing educators from the Bay Area and from around the country.

To figure out how to best use my limited creative writing time, I’ve been seeking feedback on my work from writer friends, and I even joined a new writer’s group in the past few months. Being part of a writer’s group is really helpful for keeping me accountable during periods when I don’t have much motivation to write. I also have been inspired by reading my peers’ work.

Furthermore, I’ve also been using the exercises from my own Creative Writing class to hone my writing skills. Every time my creative writing students do a writing task, I try to do the same quickwrite so I can show my work as a model or so I can have the students practice critiquing it. Seeing my students light up while writing about their most memorable meal, illustrating a zine, or worldbuilding for a short story has also been fueling my soul.

Nevertheless, it is hard for me to imagine how I can find a sustainable teaching workload that would allow me to fulfill my writing goals. Every year, teaching does come a bit more easily, at least. Now that I’m in my 4th year, I definitely have gotten better about setting boundaries around work and sticking to those boundaries. I’m hoping that after I’ve taught all 3 of the classes I’m currently teaching for at least one year, it will start to get easier.

This past August, I turned 30. I’m in a period of transition in my life, from young adulthood to middle adulthood, and I have personal goals in mind that are not related to writing or teaching or work at all. I greatly admire the people I know who have been able to maintain a career, have a family, and pursue an artistic passion at the same time, but I know all of them have had to make sacrifices. At some point, I will have to decide what is most important to me and what I need to scale back on. I am glad that after several years in the classroom, I’ve been able to progess both in my career as a writer and as a teacher. I hope I can continue forging a path that allows me to do both while also finding personal fulfillment in other areas of my life.

When to say “No” (and “Yes”) to Opportunities: Finding Time for Creative Writing as a Teacher

FeaturedLeave a comment

Hiking on a recent vacation to Phoenix, Arizona while recovering from burnout

When I was in high school, I thought more was always better. More AP classes, more extracurriculars, more rigor. My overachieving may have helped me secure a spot at an elite college, but ultimately I had to unlearn the impulse to always say yes to opportunities. I might have looked successful on paper, but I remember times during high school where I felt so overwhelmed and anxious about all I had to do that I just kept my head down during class or during after school practice, for debate, Mock Trial, or any other number of activities I was signed up for. I was often short-tempered with people who cared about me, my friends and family, and took out my stress on them. I held it together though, in front of others, so I could keep up that immaculate image of effortless achievement.

In college, I continued the same pattern, double majoring with a minor while running a tutoring program and working a part-time job. One semester, I took on one activity too many and completely neglected one of my obligations, a role as a editor of an undergraduate journal. When it came time to produce the article the writer and I were supposed to be working on, both of us didn’t have anything to show for it. It was really embarassing, and one of the only times I’ve felt like an abject failure. I learned from that experience not to over-commit to too many things at once.

However, when you’re a teacher it’s hard to not over-commit when your job alone takes up more time than you have in a given working day. My first year as a teacher, I didn’t sign up to do any extra duties, but I was getting to work at 7:30 AM and staying until 6 PM on a regular basis. Of course, the first year is always exceptionally difficult because you’re creating most of the materials you’re using from scratch while getting used to having a full workload of students, but I definitely pushed myself too hard. I wasn’t drinking enough water, and at one point, I had to take a day off of work because I had vertigo so bad I couldn’t get out bed.

This year, my third-year of teaching and my first year back in-person since the pandemic started, I was concerned the same thing was going to happen, so I was hesitant to say yes to any extra duties at work. I knew this year would be extra stressful due to the challenges of COVID teaching: wearing masks, helping students who were out sick for weeks, etc. However, I surprisingly found that work was a lot more manageable then I expected, at least at the start of the school year. So I thought it might be doable to say yes to a few more duties: first, being part of the College and Career Readiness Committee at work, second, participating in the Grading For Equity initiative in my district, and third, trying to continue freelance writing in my spare time so I can work on my professional writing skills. I was able to keep up all of the above for months, though I was starting to feel the signs of burnout developing. I was often anxious and irritable, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I felt this constant pressure to always be working. Ultimately, it was the freelance writing and COVID stress that finally tipped me over the edge.

Don’t get me wrong– I really enjoyed the freelance writing that I was doing. I was writing study guides of books for an educational company, and I felt proud of the guides I was writing. However, in order to meet the deadlines, I had to take most of the free time I had after work and use it for freelance writing. This was simply not sustainable and also meant that even when I had put my teaching work aside, I had other work weighing on my mind, preventing me from relaxing. Although I benefitted from the extra income of freelancing, I realized I needed to take a break from it.

The past month, I’ve had time to reflect on what is worth saying “yes” to and what isn’t. I justified the freelance writing to myself for months, telling myself that I was learning valuable skills from it. I wanted to keep up the freelance position for a year so I could put it on my resume, but when the Omicron wave hit and I had to use most of my preparation time at school to sub for my colleagues, I realized it just wasn’t worth it to keep burning myself out with a second job. I had to focus on my full-time job, teaching, to make sure I was doing my best to support my students. Also, since I started doing freelancing, I barely had any time for creative writing. That lack of creative time went unnoticed at first, but then it started eating away at me. Without time to create freely for myself, an overwhelming sense of dullness filled my life. The world felt colorless and my tasks became tedious because I was living to work, not working to live. I was losing my sense of purpose and feeling unsatisfied with the work I was doing.

A month ago, I paused my freelancing, hoping that all the time I was able to put into my freelance position, I would be able to devote to creative writing. However, it wasn’t that easy to transfer time from one activity to another. First of all, I needed to reclaim some of that time for myself, just to exist, without being productive at all, so I haven’t been able to write creatively every evening the same way I was plugging away at my freelance job under a deadline. Second of all, creative writing requires a greater amount of energy and headspace than writing something formulaic, and I can’t always muster that after working a full day of teaching. I’ve started to accept that I will have to find time to write here and there, schedule it into my calendar, and treat it like a second job if I want to make sure it happens, but it doesn’t always have to happen as quickly as possible. Taking a pause and moving through a project slowly also has its benefits.

It’s taking me a while to get back into my creative writing, but the last month of only focusing on my teaching job and my creative pursuits has left me feeling refreshed and energized. I was on break this past week, and it felt so good to actually be able to relax while I wasn’t teaching. I hadn’t felt that relief during Thanksgiving or Winter Break because I had freelancing deadlines hanging over me.

I recently found out that I will be receiving a fellowship for creative writing this summer, the Jack Hazard Fellowship for Creative Writers Teaching High School. I feel really honored by this opportunity because it means I will be able to focus on writing this summer instead of trying to make money from a second job. I also feel excited to have my creative writing taken seriously. I am going to be paid for it, so I will treat it like a job: I will create a schedule for my writing time this summer, create deadlines, and hold myself accountable for writing a certain amount each day.

In the two and half years I’ve been trying to pursue creative writing while working as a public school teacher, I’ve learned that it’s hard to not put professional opportunities first all the time, whether it’s opportunities to be a leader at your school or freelance writing gigs. Since I don’t make as much as a teacher as I would in another profession with my level of education, it’s tempting to always pursue extra income whenever possible. We live in a hustle culture that convinces us that working more and being more productive is always better. But it’s not better if it means you can’t have time to do the things that are important to you. I’m lucky to make enough as a teacher that I don’t actually need a second job; however, not all teachers have that luxury. I’m in a position right now financially that I can say “no” to things and give myself permission to have time for myself and my passions in my free time. I hope I can maintain that balance for years to come, although I know it won’t be easy. Finding balance between teaching and creative pursuits require you to contantly reflect on how you are using your time and find ways to carve out the space you need for yourself.

When I first started out teaching, I heard from veteran teachers that as I got more experience, the demanding hours of teaching would lessen as I was able to re-teach materials I already created or find more efficient ways of working. While I have found this to be true, I don’t think I’ll ever fully find that holy grail of work-life balance because there are always forces constantly tugging on me to do more at my job; meanwhile, I never am completely satisfied with the free time I do have. It never feels like enough. I’ve accepted that I’ll always be caught in this constant vortex, feeling pulled between different obligations. If I have children in the future, that will be another element pulling me in yet another direction. It feels daunting but not impossible to find a way to balance my time between the things that are important to me. I just have to accept that I will have to savor the bites of time for myself here and there that I do have and make the most from them.

My Summer Adventures in Freelance Writing

Featured1 Comment

After my last Zoom call with students ended past June, I checked out more than I have any prior summer while teaching. I was so fatigued from a year and a half of teaching online during a pandemic that I decided that this summer I wasn’t going to think about teaching at all. Of course, that’s not really how it works. If you are teacher, you know that as much as you can promise yourself to not think about teaching, it will inevitably sneak into your life. However, I was able to not think about the logistical aspects of teaching for a while, which was a nice break. Instead of attending a bunch of teacher professional development workshops during the summer, as I have done in past years, I decided to work on developing my own professional skills, specifically my writing skills.

I consider myself a decent writer who can adapt my writing to many different purposes and audiences. I write creatively to satisfy my own desire for storytelling and craft, I blog to share my experiences or to participate in the online literary community, and I journal for myself. The role of teacher, especially English teacher, also involves a fair amount of writing— lesson plans, lesson materials, emails to parents, emails to colleagues, etc. But I didn’t actively pursue much paid professional writing before this summer. If I got paid for a funny satirical article or a short story here or there, I was pleased that someone liked my work enough to pay me for it. However, this summer I realized that I have the skills needed to make some money on the side writing professionally.

First, I took a class on Coursera called The Strategy of Content Marketing, since as a UC Davis alum, it was free. While taking that course, I realized that a lot of what I know about teaching academic writing also applies to professional writing. You’re trying to hook an audience for a specific purpose, to convince them to become your customer or to buy the product of a company you are promoting. Content marketing and copywriting employ a lot of the same techniques as classic rhetoric— convincing an audience to trust you due to your credibility, appealing to the audience’s emotions, and using logic and examples to prove your product or company is valuable (in other words, ethos, pathos, and logos). I realized that whether or not I ended up writing content marketing articles for a client, I could use what I had learned about marketing in the classroom. The high school where I teach recently formed a committee on incorporating college and career readiness skills into the classroom, so in the back of my mind while I was taking the Coursera class, I was thinking of how perfect a writing unit on marketing or advertising would be for demonstrating to my students the value of writing in the “real world.”

After I finished the Coursera class, I decided to try out my new skills by applying to freelance writing roles on Upwork, which is a platform where you can apply for all different types of freelance gigs. I soon realized that despite my previous experiences writing articles for some magazines, it was hard to stand out as a writer on that platform for general writing roles since there is so much competition. However, I noticed that there were some roles that specifically involved writing for education companies or writing educational materials. I started to apply for these positions and had some success. I also applied for some editing roles, too, because as an English teacher and as a graduate student, I’ve had a lot of experience editing other people’s writing.

Once I was able to land a few positions, I discovered that I really like writing professionally. Each gig came with its own rollercoaster of emotions, which gave me some insight into what it must be like for my students when I give them a challenging writing assignment. First, I felt elated whenever I was hired to do a particular task. Then when the client sent me the specific information on what they needed, I would start to second guess myself, feeling imposter syndrome. What if I couldn’t deliver what they wanted me to deliver? It felt scary to face the possibility of failure, even if failure only meant that I wasn’t going to be paid a relatively small amount of dollars.

I soon discovered that a lot of companies will ask for you to do a “trial” for them if you are writing content for their website so that they can see how you do with a short assignment. Then if they like your work, they will offer you chances to continue writing for them. This way, they can test out if you are a good fit for what they need, and you can also see if you like the type of writing they want you to do. I like this system because at least you get paid a little for trying out the work even if you end up not being hired for a long-term role. This also helped ease my imposter syndrome a lot since I felt less pressure if I knew it was a trial run.

I imagine that my students must also feel overwhelmed at first when they encounter a writing task that they don’t know how to do. I think I can empathize with them more now in this situation because I now know what is feels like to have anxiety when approaching a new writing task. I found that it helped to see models of what the client was looking for, such as a sample article. It also helped to break down the steps of a writing task into more manageable chunks, such as creating an outline and then filling in the outline over the course of a couple days. This sometimes meant that I spent way more time on a task than would be suggested by my hourly rate, since most of the tasks I completed this summer were fixed price projects. However, if I succeeded at doing one task, the next time it was a lot easier to do a similar task. One aspect I had not considered as much about freelancing was negotiating pay, and I am still trying to determine how much money a project needs to pay to be worth my time. Ideally, I would be able to charge a high rate for writing since I have a decent amount of experience as a writer, but in practice it seems like it’s hard to find writing roles that pay well.

Some types of professional writing and editing I tried out this summer included creating reading comprehension questions for short stories, editing transcripts of a professional development podcast and turning them into articles, editing someone’s creative writing and helping them find venues to submit their work, and writing study guide materials. I found myself drawn to jobs that involved creating or editing educational content because I have expertise in that area and because it was fun to take on a different role in education than the one I usually play.

While I don’t see myself making a living solely from writing any time soon (though who knows— maybe I could in the future), trying my hand at professional writing expanded my own understanding of what kind of writing skills are necessary in the workplace. As a writing teacher, it gave me a chance to dip my toes into the “real world” of writing and allowed me to gain experience that I can share with my students. If students ask me why they need to learn a particular writing skill, I now can answer them with confidence, explaining not just why it’s important for future academic courses but also how it could help them earn money in the future. If you teach writing but have not practiced it outside of an academic context, I highly recommend giving freelance writing a spin. It will help you see how academic writing skills can transfer to other contexts, and you will be able to prove to your students the utility of writing.

Finding a Work/ Life Balance as a Teacher/ Writer (During a Pandemic)

Featured1 Comment

A view from one of the many my many after-work runs that help me clear my head before writing

In the past year, I’ve had more time to develop my writing than I have ever had while working a full-time job. To be fair, I have only worked a full-time job for two prior years in my life, one as an Americorps literacy tutor and the other as a first-year teacher, and both were extremely mentally and physically demanding. So maybe this year I’ve just found breathing room that wasn’t present during those other two years. It also helps that I don’t have children to take care of, and I’ve been able to do my job remotely during this pandemic. It’s still been a difficult year, since I had to switch entirely to a different mode of teaching- distance learning- all the while coping with anxiety and grief over the toll of the pandemic. I recognize that these aren’t the best circumstances for creative output, and I am probably one of the few lucky people who has found the time and energy to produce more during this pandemic. For me, writing is an escape from the stress of my job and the difficulties of everyday life. I’ve used it as a coping mechanism, so it makes sense that I’ve leaned on it more during the pandemic.

I started this blog three years ago positing the question of whether it was possible to be both a public school teacher and a writer. At that time, I hardly knew anyone who tried to pursue both. They seemed like worlds that did not often cross, except for when my students were reading and writing themselves. However, during the past year, I’ve discovered a whole community of other teachers who write or writers who teach on places like Twitter or WordPress or among teacher acquaintances I know from the Bay Area or UC Davis. There are a lot of people who are making it work, pursuing their passion for writing while also teaching, whether it’s K-12 public education or working at private schools or colleges. Being in touch with a writing community has really helped me stay motivated to continue writing despite the difficulty of finding the time to write and the challenges of developing good enough writing to be published.

In the past year, I’ve been published 3 times online, and I have another story forthcoming in a print literary journal soon. It’s nice to receive external validation from being published online, but more important than that validation is the excitement that comes from sharing my writing with other members of the writing community. I’ve found a lot of joy this past year in reading literary magazines, whether they are new online journals or print journals I’ve had sitting in my apartment for years. It makes me feel part of a greater literary community that is having conversations about important ideas, discussing racism, capitalism, language, and culture through literature. It doesn’t matter that these pieces, whether it’s poetry, short stories, or essays, are ephemeral and won’t be widely perused by the public. As long as there is a community of readers that care about them and writers who want to create them, literary journals are relevant and important.

As I approach the end of my year teaching via distance learning, I’m looking forward to the beneficial aspects of teaching in person such as building relationships with my students and being able to cultivate a culture of learning and creativity in my classroom. But I’m also worried that I will lose some of the work/life balance I’ve had to work so hard to develop during this past year. It may take a while to adjust back to the routine of in-person teaching, and during that time I don’t think it will be easy to write. I’m just hoping that I will be able to apply some of the lessons I’ve learned during this past year about maintaining boundaries between life and work to my teaching career going forward.

First of all, I’ve gotten better at creating mental boundaries between my life and my work. I no longer dwell too much on thoughts of teaching and replay scenes from my classes in my head during my free time. Of course, some reflection is positive and necessary, but I don’t let it occupy my mind as much as a I used to because I need that time to rest. In this case, rest means turning my attention to other things that I value.

Second of all, I have also gotten better at prioritizing what I need to do for work in order to complete tasks outside of classroom teaching such as grading, lesson planning, contacting parents, and filling out paperwork more efficiently. Reading the book Onward by Elena Aguilar really helped me figure out how to make the most of my contracted hours so that I can stop working relatively soon after the school day is technically over. Of course, I still have to work outside of my contracted hours. Otherwise, I would not be able to do the things I need to do to teach well. But I have minimized the time I work on weekends and after school. I used to let teaching take over both days of my weekend, but now I limit it to Sunday, even if it means Sunday is rather stressful and rushed. To me, having a rushed Sunday is worth being able to relax on Saturday. I know not everyone feels that way or has the same work rhythm, so teachers have to figure out their own ways to make things fit into the time they have.

It would help, of course, if we didn’t have as ridiculous of workloads as we do. However, I don’t let my endless to-do list of tasks rule over my time. If I complete everything I need to do to be prepared for the next day, and then some ongoing tasks, even if I have more I could do, I cut myself off. The problem with teaching is that you often feel that no matter how much you do, it’s not enough, but it’s also toxic to keep working when you need to rest. I’m getting better at stopping myself before I’m completely exhausted.

During my free time, I’ve developed routines for how to use my time after work so that I get to do the things that are important to me. I usually work out right after I finish working, then relax and help prep dinner (I’m lucky that my partner does most of the cooking). After dinner, I write. I don’t write every day, but I’ve figured out that this time is the optimal writing time for me to write on a regular basis. When I was first trying to fit writing into my schedule, I tried to block it out at 4 PM on a couple days a week on my calendar, but I just found that timing didn’t work for me. I can’t focus on writing right after I finish work. I need some time to decompress before I can turn to what is basically my second job. This is what works best for me, but everyone has their own preferences for when they feel most creative. I could never do creative work in the early morning, or even exercise early in the morning, so all of the “life” part of my work/life balance has to happen after work.

Next year, when I’m back in person I’m going to have to adjust my routine by accounting for the time it takes me to commute to and from my job. I will also lose some of my precious evening time because I will have to go to bed earlier. No more staying up until 10 PM writing for two to three hours straight because I was struck by a good idea (well I might still do this every once in a while and then just go to work sleep deprived). I don’t know if the work/ life balanced I have now is truly sustainable. I just know that it’s working for now, so I will relish it while I still can. I am hoping that once I’m back into the classroom, after an adjustment period, I’ll find a new version of work/life balance. I just hope it doesn’t take too long to achieve it and doesn’t require me to give up too much.

Hitting the Reset Button on Your Writing or Teaching

Featured1 Comment

You may have noticed it’s been a couple months since my last post on this blog. As a high school teacher who also writes and blogs, I always bite off more than I can chew, and feel like I’m constantly caught in a cycle of falling behind on everything. However, I know that a lot of my students are currently trapped in cycle as well, a cycle of stress caused not by laziness but by disorientation.

Last semester I had a student who didn’t come to half the quarter of online classes, and when I finally got a hold of him, he confessed to me that he was just too afraid of how behind he had fallen to try to do any of the work. I made a plan with him to excuse him from a lot of the work he had missed so he could just jump into the class where we were instead of trying to play catch up. Ultimately, I ended up using this strategy for several students on distance learning, with mixed results. Some of them do become engaged in the class temporarily, only to fall behind and have the cycle start all over again, while others find that once they have a better idea of what is going on, they can mostly keep up. With distance learning, it’s hard to really know what is going on with the students that allows them to break out of the cycle of procrastination or keeps them trapped in it. But I’ve realized that I can at least figure out what works to help me move past it.

For me, the cycle of procrastination is like stepping into a chilly lake on a warm day. At first, it feels good to take baby steps into the water, and you enjoy the fresh feeling water on your toes and feet, but once the water reaches your ankles, and then your knees, the top half of your body feels strangely overheated while your bottom half starts to shiver and grow numb. You’re tempted to just leave the water altogether, or to ease yourself by slowing inching your way further into the lake. The best way to acclimate to the temperature of the water is just to dive in, but in the moment that feels like the last thing you want to do. Then, if you get the will to do it, you dunk your whole body into the water and find that after a few seconds, your whole body feels tingly. A few minutes later, you don’t even notice the chill of the water anymore.

I think a lot of people struggle with procrastination or with writer’s block reach the point of peak discomfort, where it seems like putting in the full effort to commit to some action will be more stressful than putting it off, so they just back away from the difficult situation rather than diving in. I’ve noticed that if I start to feel bad about not writing, instead of making a plan of attack, I will just preoccupy myself with other things to do while never letting go of that guilt that I’m not writing. I will be unfocused on what I’m actually doing while not making any of the progress I want to make. The best way to deal with this situation, I’ve found, is to try to find some sort of way to reset your swirling thoughts.

Taking a rest before diving back into the cold lake

“Resetting” might look different for you. If meditation works, I find that meditation can be useful to clear out your intrusive alarm bells in your mind pestering you about things you haven’t completed. If that doesn’t work, you could make the purposeful choice to do something else other than your writing or the work you’re supposed to do, something active or engrossing like working out, playing a sport, putting together a puzzle, or reading, and allow yourself to get sucked into it. While you might think this would not really help your procrastination, if you stop viewing it as procrastination and instead view it as resetting your brain so that you will be refreshed to try the hard thing that you need to do later, then you can let go of the guilt you are feeling and actually enjoy this activity.

Then once you feel refreshed, you can try again by plunging headfirst into whatever you need to work on. Of course, you might find that it’s difficult, that you need to step back for a moment and create a plan. But if you start to build some momentum by doing some of the harder cognitive work first, you might find it gets easier from there. I’ve heard from many self-help books and articles that if you are tackling an overwhelming list of things to do, you should do whatever is easiest and fastest first, so that you can feel like you’ve accomplished something. While there might be some merit to this, I usually only do this on days where I just don’t have the energy to tackle larger tasks. If you feel energized and refreshed, you should do whatever you’re dreading the most first so that you can at least chip away at it or realize that it’s not so bad after all and move beyond whatever is stymying your path.

For example, during my first year of teaching, I would put off grading longer essays as long as possible until I faced the prospect of grading several dozen essays in less than a week because grades were due. I no longer let grading pile up to that point during my second year. I try to start grading longer assignments soon after they are turned in so they feel much more manageable. It would be easier to start by grading warm ups which I just check off for completion, but I actually leave my warm ups to be graded later because they take so little effort.

In the past year, I’ve played a lot of rounds of golf. I already had a set of clubs from when I was in high school, and since golf has been once of the only available outdoor sports this past year, I’ve taken it up again. Relearning how to golf has reminded me that starting every decision fresh while letting go of the decisions you’ve taken before it is the key to having a growth mindset. It is what allows you to have a positive attitude despite failure. It might seem overly naïve to think that if you’re playing badly, as long as you really concentrate and focus on your next stroke, you’ll start to play better. But if you take this approach, you will find that you can more easily shrug off your mistakes and stay focused on each shot.

This approach applies to teaching and writing as well. Temporarily forgetting whatever went wrong the day before and trying again sometimes seems like the only way to stay sane when you’re a new teacher, or a teacher adapting to new circumstances such as distance learning. Your internet cuts out during a class? Fix it, and move on without dwelling on it. If you completely bomb a lesson, try to understand what went wrong, but don’t let it affect how you greet the next period of students. Of course it’s hard to do this. Being able to let go of your mistakes is also a skill you have to practice.

When I’m writing, I usually find the biggest mistake I have to let go of is the fact that I didn’t write as much or as often as I wanted to in the previous week or month. Procrastination is also a form of baggage. The more you dwell on your inability to get past it, the heavier it gets. While I do try to keep track of how many days in a row I meet my goals, whether they are writing, meditating, or eating well, I try not to beat myself up anymore for not doing “enough” of a certain thing. In the end it doesn’t matter if I haven’t picked up a pen in several days or opened a file of a story I’ve been working on. If I open it up today and work on it today, that is all I can control in this moment.

The hardest task I’ve taken on in the past year is attempting to write a novel, so naturally that is where I’ve struggled with the most procrastination. A year ago, at the start of the pandemic, I had not worked on my novel very much and only had about 30 pages written. Eventually, about a month into the lockdown, I realized that I was in a very privileged situation of having more time to write while still working. Of course, I wasn’t free from anxiety from the pandemic. I was lucky to be able to work from home, but I was still in constant fear of people I loved getting the virus. I completely understood why many people have declared that they don’t need to be productive during such a turbulent time, that surviving is enough. Still, I was able to use writing as a way to keep my mind off the pandemic, so I devoted myself to my novel.

At first, I dipped my toes into it by planning out the chapters, writing character backstories, doing research. Then I realized that I just needed to start writing, even if much of what I wrote would never make it into the final draft. I have taken this approach to writing before while doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I wasn’t satisfied with the results. Nevertheless, I tried to just let it out, because I believed in this story, and I knew I would not feel satisfied until it was on paper. I’m a major reviser, so I just have to keep telling myself that whatever I end up with on my first draft can be made better on the next.

My novel has come in fits and starts. I will go months without touching it, and then for several weeks I’ll find myself glued to my keyboard late into the night. Whenever I get stuck with writing it, I just try to make sure I take a break, reset, and then mentally brace myself for the challenge of writing it and push myself to do it. I accept that this doesn’t happen every day, and that it’s OK for me to work on only when I find the energy for it. It seems like an enormous task, but viewing every writing session as its own hurdle, I’ve managed to make a lot of progress.

This week, I reached 150 pages. I can’t vouch for the quality of what I’ve written, but I do feel like I have developed a better understanding of how to draft a novel from this experience. I’m not done with it yet. I am only halfway through the story I have in my head. Yet, I have confidence now that I will be able to keep at it until I reach its conclusion as long as I continue to do what I’ve been doing: keep diving into the cold water, swimming, and then taking a break to reset, again and again for however long it takes.