Anxiety Trigger: Lesson Planning

I don't know why planning my lessons is an anxiety trigger.  I don't even know if I'm alone in this, or if it's common among other teachers.  All I know is this: sitting down alone to plan my lessons is one of my least favorite times of the week.

It's not as if I can articulate why trying to plan out my lessons makes me anxious.  All I know is this: the more I try to plan, the more I feel as though I don't know what I'm doing, what I should be doing, what I need to be doing.  I become swamped with feelings of inadequacy.  Sure, I can look back at previous years' plans, and that gives me the outline of what I need to be doing now... but it doesn't take the anxiety away. 

In fact, it causes a chain reaction of anxiety.  I find myself thinking about future lessons I don't particularly want to teach.  The more I teach science, for example, the less I like doing it - especially the hands-on activities the kids prefer to the dry, boring, and often confusing book work.  Given my own feelings about the science text, you'd think I'd welcome the hands-on "experiments" - but I don't.  I find hands-on messy and chaotic, necessitating more time for planning and set-up than is balanced out in benefit of knowledge gained.  I hate it. 

But here's the thing.  Right now, I'm not TEACHING science.  I'm in my Social Studies segment of the Thematic Studies lessons.  I honestly enjoy teaching Social Studies, inasmuch as I enjoy teaching anything... meaning, it's not quite as painful as many other subjects to me. 

And this triggers more thoughts... if this is how I feel about planning and teaching, why am I doing it?  BIG anxiety trigger, that is.  I know I'd rather be doing something other than teaching, careerwise - I just don't know WHAT.  And I also know that most other work out there A) would not pay as much as teaching, and B) would likely require me to do other things I don't like, such as spend all day in a cubicle pushing papers around, jumping to the tune of some petty manager.  I never watched The Office, but I've seen enough clips to get the feeling that it wasn't so far off base from reality. 

Maybe it's not so much that I don't want to be teaching, but I want to be teaching only what I want to teach, the way I want to teach it, which isn't remotely possible or even within the bounds of reality.

This is what planning time looks like inside my head.  It's a mess, and so am I by the time I get the planning done.  If I was a drinking woman, I'd need a stiff one.  The joy of it is, I can look forward to the same thing all over again in approximately a week.  It never ends, nine months out of the year.  Even during the summer I find myself dreading the start of the next school year... the start of the planning time.  Sigh.

But at least it's done for THIS week.

Finding ____ to Write

It's not about finding time to write... at least, not for me.  Because my writing-supporting job is teaching, I have two months of free-and-clear writing time each summer where, if I chose to do so, I could write for full 8 hour days if I chose.

But I don't.

Why?  I don't really know.  Maybe it's the perfectionist in me.  Some people advise to write every day, even if what you're writing is horrible.  I can't stomach that.  Forcing myself to write because "it's time to write" is about as palatable as forcing myself to eat because "it's time to eat."  If I'm not hungry, I don't want to eat.  If the words aren't there, I don't want to write.

So how does one fill in that blank?  Finding that... something... to write?  Finding the spirit to write?  The story to write?  The words to write?  All of those seem reasonable to me.  Without them, writing is bland and colorless.  I wish I knew how other writers, prolific writers, do it - get their ideas, keep the words flowing.  I can't even keep my blog updated, for crying out loud!

So... does this make me less of a writer, knowing this?  I surely hope not.

Keeping It Short

According to an article I recently read, my blog posts are way too long.  Robert Lee Brewer in "30 Day Platform Challenge" writes, "WRITE SHORT.  Short sentences (fewer than 10 words).  Short paragraphs (fewer than 5 sentences).  Concision is precision in online composition."  Uh-oh.  Concision and I aren't terribly good friends.

I blame J.R.R. Tolkien, whose descriptions could take up full pages of text.  Okay, his description of the lives and habits of hobbits took up full pages - but that's what stuck with me.  I was eight and fell in love with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and my writing has been something less than brief ever since.  This is, needless to say, a problem for a picture book writer and blogger.

I suppose blogs need to be brief because of the conventional wisdom which holds that online, people's attention spans make those of gnats look positively meditative.  Online, if you don't keep things short, you won't keep your readers.  Got it.  Can't DO it, but I got it.

I'm not so sure about picture books.  My last editor told me that publishers are wanting picture books to run shorter and shorter in word count because modern children, raised on tablets and e-devices, simply don't have the attention span to sit still for the sorts of stories their parents did.  This is wrenching to me... I grew up loving Pussy Willow by Margaret Wise Brown, Christina Katerina and the Box by Patricia Lee Gauch, and many other dear old wordy picture books that would never sell in today's brief marketplace.

It also makes me wonder... aren't we, in shortening our picture books, contributing to the problem, rather than taking a stand against it?  Isn't it worth saying, "No, child, not everything is bite-sized - but sometimes, things that require you to sit still and pay attention are good"?  Aren't books supposed to teach as well as to entertain?  And isn't teaching patience something worthwhile?

It's something to ponder, anyway.