Fits and starts

Writing is like that for me.. it comes, it goes.  It’s inconsistent.  My journal is the same. – Trouble?  I write a lot.  Not so much?  Then it’s a blank page.  And I start a lot of writing but don’t always have a conclusion or get further.  However, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write more. I was an Outward Bound instructor for a decade and it was a foundational building block of my instructorship – and truth be told – studentship.  Outward Bound’s motto is to serve, to strive and not to yield.  Thanks to Kurt Hahn, John Dewey and lots of great instructors turned friends I learned a lot about teaching, students, the environment, skills, etc.  One of the tenets of Outward Bound is clearly ‘to serve’.  It’s #1 in fact.  When I was instructing backpacking courses in Montana, we needed to find a service project to finalize our 28-day backpacking expedition.  We were directed toward a rancher who needed rocks plucked from his field.  My 10-person group of mostly 16-18 year old students ventured out for a day of rock plucking.  Pick up rocks, put them in a wheelbarrow, keep moving.  Easy for 10 minutes.  Still easy for 30-40 minutes.  After a few hours though, you see that the rocks get smaller, you are still doing the thing – plucking rocks, but they got harder to find and notice.  No matter.  The rancher wanted those to be removed too.  So it was harder.  But that’s the thing, getting to the details, trying to notice the soil from the rock, looking more deeply and see what is what.  Writing is like that – at first there are ideas, but after the initial look, it takes a deeper and more critical eye and you have to train yourself to find the smaller and more nuanced items.  Find the small nugget and work with it, massage it, get it out of the way or at least acknowledge it. You have to get beyond ‘the fits and starts’.  The blog gives me pause as I know that I have more to say than just in the ‘fits’ moments and need to continue many ‘starts’ – they need more refinement and editing but shouldn’t be abandoned.  It has been interesting to hear a bit more about developing and refining the what of instructing - from what people value and include in their ideas and what they see as an interesting thread to comment upon.  I do think we all can learn from each other  - whether we are blogging or not.  If we can do it in community, it is instructive and if that helps remind us that we teach and it’s not done in isolation.  It’s us, it's our students and it’s our community. To write that and SHARE that, comment on that, get feedback, is where we can hopefully find some collegial support and move from a start to a forward motion. So, the reflection is to have more writing, sharing, comments and connection.